Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(30)

“Jesus, Tabitha, what is this? Mad Max?”

“In some places, pretty much. Hurry up, we’re almost there.”

Wherever we’re going we better get there fast because the people chasing us are almost on us. I look over my shoulder and see five vehicles that can only be called cars from the fact that they’ve got wheels and move fast. They burst through the trees, scattering the trunks like tenpins.

The cars look handmade. Sheets of stitched together skin lashed over bone struts. Wheels made out of, shit, I don’t know what the hell they’re made out of, but it’s sure as hell not rubber. Black smoke belches out the back. The cars are bone and sinew like everything else in this nightmare land. And for all that they’re terrifying, there’s an absurdity to them I just can’t wrap my mind around. These things are more Flintstones than they are V8 Interceptor.

“You know, if they’re looking for us,” I yell over the noise of the engines, “the only hole that’s visible for miles might be one of the first places they look.” The engines are getting louder. What the hell do they use for fuel?

“It’s an entrance,” she yells. “To the shortcut. They won’t be able to go in there.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re not us.” She ducks into the hole and the blackness swallows her up. Behind me the cars are speeding closer, throwing up a wake of shattered bone behind them, the engines a deafening roar.

I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know I don’t want to deal with a bunch of post-Apocalyptic cosplayers with war wagons. I jump after her, but a line shoots out from one of the cars and wraps around my ankle, biting deep into the skin, pulling taut. I hit the ground about a foot short of the entrance and get yanked back as the car fishtails into a U-turn.

More trees go over, the car dragging me along and back onto the road. I pull together a small fire spell that I hope won’t cost me too much power and tip me over the edge. A pinpoint of the line holding me begins to smolder.

It’s hard to concentrate when you’re being dragged across a field of broken bones by a car that looks like it should be driven by a nightmare Barney Rubble, but I make do. The spot begins to glow, then flame. As the line burns I can smell cooking meat. Of course. This stuff is made out of flesh.

The car fishtails again, whipping me around just as the flame burns through the line, severing it. Momentum shoots me across the ground, and I skip over the skull landscape like a rock across a pond. Where my skin hasn’t turned to jade it’s getting the mother of all road rashes.

I hit one of the trees hard, fight back the dizziness and pain. I pull myself up onto my knees, hope to Christ I haven’t broken any bones. Blood seeps into my eyes, the skin on the back of my left hand is shredded. I grasp for the shotgun over my shoulder, but it’s gone. I look around wildly for it as the cars circle me, closing in like sharks. I might not be able to kill them with it, but I bet I can make their day suck.

I find it about five feet away from me and leap for it, but one of the cars peels off from the pack toward me to cut me off. I try to move out of the way but I’m too slow and maybe even a little concussed.

It veers off at the last moment, missing me by inches and knocking over a tree. For a brief second I think maybe I’ll get out of this okay. But then somebody in the passenger seat reaches out and swings a massive bone club at me and clocks me over the head. The blow throws me backward hard into the ground and everything goes dark.





When my friend Alex, whom I’d known since he was a kid using magic to run penny-ante scams on normals, had his soul consumed and replaced by the same man who’d killed my parents, I put a bullet in his brain.

I told myself he was already gone. That this wasn’t my friend. This was some monster using his face. I didn’t believe it.

When I saw him again months later I thought I was going insane. He couldn’t be a ghost. Ghosts are remnants of souls, leftovers, images. His had been eaten. No soul, no ghost.

It turned out that it was Mictlantecuhtli choosing his face to get to me, his dark power running through my veins. I kicked him out, blocked him from my thoughts, from contacting me, from even knowing where I was. I pushed until I couldn’t hear him anymore, and then I locked him out with more spells inked into my skin.

I didn’t push hard enough.

“You look like hell,” Alex says from the driver’s seat of my Cadillac. It’s night in Mictlan. I can smell the dry, desiccated air, feel the strange heat, the smell of flesh and ash and bone blasted by searing winds.

There is no moon in Mictlan and so the only light is from the Caddy’s headlights casting strange shadows along the bone-paved road to who knows where. This has happened before, me being in the car with him like this. Not quite a dream, not quite reality.

Of course, it’s not Alex. And it shouldn’t even be Mictlantecuhtli.

“I kicked you out,” I say. “And barred the door. Why are you here?”

“What, no hello? No, hey buddy, how ya doin’? I’m hurt. Come on, man. It’s been months.”

“It’s the power I have from you, isn’t it? And being here in Mictlan. That triggered something.”

“And they said you were stupid,” he says.

“Why are you here?”

“Why are any of us here, really?”