The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion Read online

  Barricades of lumber, brick, and trash blocked the street at every bend, with only small gaps still open to let through the vehicles of those who sought escape. Lengths of rebar thrust forth from anchors long ago embedded in the concrete. Freedom, Iowa, had been preparing for this night since its first day. There was a fire in the air, a certain spark that’s only found in the otherworldly calm of conflict.

  But it was all wrong. It was all a distraction. The cops weren’t coming. I was sure of it. I ran downhill, my feet slapping on the pavement. I ran past anxious people, excited people, terrified people. I wasn’t any of those things. I was furious.

  The largest mass of lights and people was by the bridge, the most logical choke point. Probably, people there were getting ready to delay the police long enough for Doomsday’s ritual and for everyone else to escape through the woods. That’s how I would have planned it.

  I reached the block with Doomsday’s house, but the place was unlit. It looked abandoned.

  No, not abandoned. A hooded figure crouched over in the side yard. The ward stone. Whoever it was, they were pulling up the ward stone.

  My fast-beating heart, my ragged breath, and the rhythm of my feet were all I could hear. My legs burned and ached. I could feel my pulse in my wounded hand. My lungs had long since given up complaint. Anger alone fueled my body.

  “Hey!” I shouted, which was all I could get out between my failing breaths. “Hey!”

  The figure stood up just as I started up the embankment. They turned toward me, a crowbar in one hand. You shouldn’t fuck with someone who has a crowbar. I launched myself toward them, a desperate tackle.

  The crowbar struck my left shoulder. I was lucky, I suppose, since likely as not they’d aimed for my head. The claw of it split my skin and sent blood into the air. My antagonist went down, me on top. I spun around behind them, got their neck in the crook of my right arm, and applied pressure. A sleeper hold, choking off the blood to their brain. Useful self-defense for someone as small as me. They fell unconscious.

  It wasn’t Eric. It was Kestrel.

  The white ward stone lay cracked, open to a black geode. The house was no longer protected.

  “Shit.” I stood up. He wouldn’t be out for long, just ten seconds or so. I needed something to tie him up with.

  The world exploded. Sort of. It felt like it at the time. It was a gunshot, really, but it was louder than noises have any right to be, and the bullet crashed into the wall of the house not two feet from my head.

  “Get down!” I heard. I didn’t register the command, though, so I didn’t follow it.

  Another shot, this time from behind me. Gunshots are kind of like a nonverbal way of communicating “get down,” and after that second shot, I listened. I dropped down next to Kestrel. If he was conscious, he wasn’t showing it.

  I might have killed him.

  I’d never killed anyone before.

  It turned out that I didn’t very much like the thought of having killed someone. It bothered me more than I’d expected.

  Then a rapid back-and-forth of bullets, and I saw the squat figure of Thursday on the porch, calmly firing in a two-handed grip. A figure ran off toward the tree line. A tall figure. An Eric Tall-As-Fuck figure, more accurately, his punk-rock spikes gleaming in the muzzle flash as he fired wildly behind himself.

  I staggered to my feet to go after him. Then my brain turned itself back on, and I dropped to the ground again because there might be bullets up there and because I’d just taken the pointy end of a crowbar to my central mass, so what the fuck did my body know about still working?

  “Uliksi is the revolution.” It was Kestrel talking, his mouth right next to my head. “Uliksi is the lamb that will slaughter the lion. Doomsday is going to end it. Doomsday is going to end the revolution.”

  At least I hadn’t killed him.

  I was going to add it to my bucket list. Right next to “Visit Antarctica” and “Torch something evil” was going to be “Make it through the whole of my life without killing anyone.”

  “You’re a fucking wannabe,” he whispered conspiratorially, like he was imparting the wisdom of ages. “You act like you’re a revolutionary, but you’re a fucking poser.”

  On the other hand, maybe it would have been okay if I’d killed him. It wasn’t like I was probably going to make it to Antarctica, either.

  I staggered to my feet, then almost fell back over when the report of a pistol exploded in my ear. Thursday was next to me, his arm around my back, supporting me. “Get inside,” Thursday said. “Jesus, Danielle, get the fuck in the house.”

  Kestrel was gone. I saw him running after Eric. What kind of asshole calls someone a poser?

  * * *

  “No one’s answering,” Doomsday said. All of her composure had been stripped away by days of stress and fear. Her hair was a wild tangle, and she clutched her phone in a shaking fist. She hadn’t taken it well when I’d told her what Kestrel had done to the ward stone. She’d taken it even worse when I told her what had happened to Rebecca.

  I sat on the edge of the bathtub, in my sports bra, while Thursday cleaned the wound on my shoulder.

  “They’re mixing and pouring cement,” Thursday said. “Would you answer your phone while you’re mixing and pouring cement?”

  “Yes,” Doomsday snapped. “I’d answer my goddammed phone.”

  “This is pretty bad, Dani,” Thursday said, trying to mop at the blood that dribbled down my chest.

  “Danielle,” I said. “For fuck’s sake my name is Danielle.”

  “Like, I can clean it out, and if you want I’ve got a sewing needle. I’ve never given no one stitches. Never even read a book about it. The basic idea seems kind of simple, right?”

  Clay could stitch a wound.

  “I mean, you’re not, like, bleeding out or something. I think. I’m at least as worried about the blunt trauma as the cut.”

  “Your confidence is really inspiring,” I said.

  “Yeah, never signed up to be a doctor. I’m just doing what needs doing, okay?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Your hand alright?”

  I still had the bandanna tied tight around my right hand. The pain was a dull throb, but nothing compared to how bad my left shoulder hurt.

  “It’s fine.”

  “Come on, come on,” Doomsday said, praying to the room with her phone to her ear.

  “You ever read The Man Who Was Thursday?” Thursday asked.

  “What?”

  “I’m trying this bedside manner thing. You’re looking pretty pale, even for you. I’m trying to keep you thinking about something else.”

  “No, I’ve never read it.”

  “It’s where I got my name,” Thursday said. “It was written about anarchists, like a hundred years ago. There are these seven anarchist leaders, each named after a day of the week. And Thursday, well, the first Thursday, he’s the only one of them who, as it turns out, wasn’t a cop the whole time. You know how the first Thursday gets it in the end? Well, actually, the beginning?”

  “How?” I asked.

  “He’s so committed to his ideals of anti-oppression that he refuses to drink milk. But since he’s, you know, British, he has to drink something white I guess in his tea or whatever, so he drinks powdered chalk all the time, and one day it kills him.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “No, seriously, it’s hilarious. That shit was making fun of vegans before vegan was a word.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Anyway, Doomsday named me after that book. She told me I was the only person in the world she knew wasn’t a cop. Undercovers, right, they’re lying anyway, so they’ll swear up and down that they’re God’s gift to revolutionary politics. Me, I was really set on this ‘no politics’ thing for a long-ass time. Now I’m a damn third-generation Central American leftist, and I didn’t even want to be a leftist at all. Guess my dad would be proud.”


  “Alright.”

  “Hey, look at that, the bleeding stopped,” he said.

  I smiled.

  “No, now it’s started again. Shit. Don’t smile.”

  The bathtub was slowly filling with bloody toilet paper.

  “God. God. God fucking . . .” Doomsday put her phone down carefully on the porcelain sink, barely containing her rage. “Clay’s dead. Anchor’s dead. Rebecca’s dead.”

  “You’re not dead, and you’re not going to be dead,” Thursday said.

  “The wards are down. I don’t know how to dismiss Uliksi. And now? Now the fucking cops are coming.”

  “The cops aren’t coming,” I said. “Eric, he just said that to stir up the town. You’ve been here for two years. The cops aren’t coming tonight. If they were evicting us, you’d have heard about it before tonight. Probably been warned to clear out. Not unless the cops were serving a warrant for something serious.”

  Thursday and Doomsday looked at one another.

  “Someone’s got a warrant,” I said.

  “Kestrel knew,” Doomsday said.

  “Yeah, Kestrel would have known,” Thursday agreed.

  “Knew what?”

  “The cops are coming for Doomsday,” Thursday said.

  “What?”

  “I used to live in Alaska,” Doomsday said. “I was married for fifteen years. It was good for a while. But I couldn’t get pregnant, and my husband got worse and worse. I shot him. He deserved it. It wasn’t self-defense, not in the immediate sense, not in the way I could have proved in court.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Doomsday took a deep breath. “Neighbors heard the shots, I guess. Sheriffs showed up. I tried to talk to them. Tried to make them understand. They didn’t understand.”

  “Damn,” I said. “You shot them too.”

  “I wasn’t going to prison,” Doomsday said. “Not for that motherfucker.”

  “Okay, so maybe cops are coming,” I said.

  “Kestrel must have snitched me out. I never would have thought.”

  “Fucking hell,” Thursday said. “It’s almost like you can’t summon otherworldly beings into existence, let them loose on your enemies, and set up a culture of worship around them without people getting all crazy.”

  “You were in favor of summoning him,” Doomsday said.

  “I know,” Thursday said. “Hell, I’m still glad we did it. It was worth a shot.”

  “I’ve got until dawn to figure out how to unsummon him,” Doomsday said.

  “‘What hand dare seize the fire?’” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  I told them what I’d learned from Clay’s notebook, which wasn’t much.

  Doomsday put her hands to her temples. “I think you read the signs right, Clay’s misquoted poetry and Rebecca’s figurines. Solstice to solstice. But how? How do we dismiss him? And with the police there, as likely as not.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, “the cops. If Uliksi is around cops . . .”

  “He’ll slaughter them,” Doomsday said. “And everyone who’s ever lived here will wind up running or in prison.”

  “I don’t want to be on the run,” I said.

  “No one does,” Doomsday said.

  “Then what’s the plan?” I asked.

  “We somehow get everyone out before the cops show up, somehow unsummon Uliksi before the river runs red, and somehow evade the remaining police.”

  “Somehow,” Thursday added.

  “All the while avoiding Eric and Kestrel.”

  “I would go with stop more than avoid,” Thursday said. “But yeah.”

  “What was the line?” Doomsday asked suddenly. “‘What hand dare seize the fire?’”

  I nodded.

  Doomsday got a glint in her eye I’d never seen before. It was frightening. “Maybe Uliksi took down Anchor for the same reason I took down those sheriffs. Self-defense. Maybe we summoners can control him. Maybe I can turn him on Eric. Hell, after that . . . when we summoned him in the first place, we named these hills, this river, as his territory. If I can renew the summoning, I can name a whole lot more than that. I can name the world.”

  “‘The only way out is through’?” Thursday asked.

  “‘What hand dare seize the fire,’” Doomsday agreed.

  “No,” I said. I didn’t want to fight with them. I just wanted to go home. If only I had a home.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been through way too much shit for you to switch sides on me now,” I said. “And I know what the other side looks like. Eric, Kestrel, all of them. They say they want to make the world better, but they’re just supplanting one authority for another and they’ll fucking murder anyone who tries to stop them, because that’s what power does to people. I believe in a messy, imperfect world where we just, collectively or individually, figure things out. So no, I’m not going to let you switch sides.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “I don’t fucking know,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.”

  Brynn and Vulture came in, slamming the door behind them and startling all of us. Brynn took the gun from Thursday, knelt with one knee on the dining room chair, and started reloading the mag.

  “How many bullets do you think Eric shot?” I asked. “Four in Rebecca, and it had to be at least three more outside the house. How many can its mag hold?”

  “Can’t think like that,” Brynn said. “Bullet counting is some next-level shit. You see someone with a gun, it’s loaded. Same as you treat your own gun like it’s loaded even when it’s not.”

  “Still,” I said.

  “Still nothing, Danielle. You see a gun, it’s got a bullet in it ready to shoot.”

  Vulture, for his part, took over treating my shoulder. “You want stitches?” he asked.

  “What are my options?”

  “I can stitch you up, and I’ll probably do a decent job but not a great job. I can not stitch you up, maybe hit it with butterfly bandages and splint your shoulder to keep you from moving it and reopening the wound. Or you do what you should do, which is get someone to take you out of here, get you to an emergency room.”

  “What would you do?” I asked.

  He bit his lip. “If I were you, just come to town chasing after your old friend’s ghost? I’d use the excuse to cut out. You’re not in any shape to stand behind a barricade, you’re not in any shape to go to jail. There’s no shame in leaving now.”

  He was right, of course. I was a liability. Still, just leaving? After all of that?

  “But what I’d do if I were me,” Vulture continued, “is stick around and see what goes down.”

  I watched Brynn through the open bathroom door as she loaded an extra mag. Dozens of cops were en route. A demon slept nearby. I’d seen two corpses already, and the wards were down. I’d already been bitten by an undead goat, crowbarred by a fanatic, and shot at by an asshole.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “I’ll go down fighting.”

  Vulture put his fingers to his lips and hopped with joy. Then he took out his phone, took a photo of my wound.

  “I’ve always wanted to stitch someone up,” he said. “I’ll do a before and after for Instagram.”

  * * *

  It turned out he’d done it plenty of times on dogs, as part of an animal rescue operation in New Orleans. I was long past the point of nervousness, regardless, but he did a fine job.

  “You alright about Kestrel?” I asked, as he was fussing with the last stitch.

  “Well, I thought I loved him. But I don’t anymore.”

  “As easy as that?”

  “As simple as that. Not easy.”

  He didn’t want to talk about it, and I realized I shouldn’t risk upsetting a man who was in the process of reassembling my body with needle and thread. When he was done with my shoulder, he unwrapped the bandanna around my bitten hand. I don’t know what I’d expected—maybe blood, maybe open wounds or teeth marks. Instead, my skin was whole, alrea
dy healed. But my hand was mottled with the pale gray of overcooked steak, not the white of scar or the pink of new skin. It hurt like it was still healing, though, and I had the sudden fear that the pain would never stop.

  Then I remembered the rest of my situation, and honestly my hand didn’t seem like the worst of my problems.

  Vulture tied a spare T-shirt around my arm as a sling and chastised me not to move my arm, and I stood up. As a group, we made our way out the front door, heading for the bridge and the relative safety of the crowd.

  The moon hung heavy and low on the horizon, and I focused on my breathing. Reminded myself just how tough I was. How not close to panic I was.

  We hadn’t made it halfway down the block when cop cars poured out of the woods in a cacophony of red and blue light. The crowd on the bridge overturned a school bus, and it began.

  EIGHT

  Police raids are always at like 4 a.m. or some shit. Always after the witching hour, when they think everyone’s not only asleep but going to be groggy as hell when they wake up. It’s honestly pretty smart. There were a couple hours of night left, but only a couple hours. None of us were sleeping.

  We’d had enough warning that most of the town had cleared out. The fifteen or so who remained were there for the same purpose we were: to keep Doomsday safe long enough for her ritual, whatever it was going to be. Safe from the police, safe from Eric.

  Most of us were veterans of riots and demonstrations across the country. It wasn’t going to be a morning of civil disobedience, however. The police were there in force to arrest a cop killer, and we had no way of knowing if they’d come in with less-lethal weapons like pepper spray or just come in guns drawn.

  The police were massed up on the far side of the bridge. Dozens of cruisers, four vans, two SWAT Humvees, and a prison bus. It wouldn’t have been enough to handcuff and drag off everyone in town, but it was more than enough to mass arrest those of us who remained. Their preparedness to arrest us was, bizarrely, comforting.

  They were stopped in their tracks, though, by the overturned school bus. You can block a hell of a lot of road with fifteen tons of yellow steel, and there was something beautiful about watching the military-style police vehicles emasculated by something designed to get kids to school.