Desolation. Derek Landy

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СКАЧАТЬ I couldn’t leave. I didn’t exist beyond its borders. The Shining Demon will, ah, broaden my remit. I’ll be able to travel. Kill people in new places. And this is just a taster of that. Look at me – Elias Mauk – killing in Canada. I’m gonna take my show on the road.”

      “I … I read about you.”

      “I’m flattered.”

      “You’re dead.”

      “That too.”

      “You were executed.”

      “Fried,” he said, whipping off his cap. A thick band of still-sizzling flesh wrapped around his head where the electricity had been focused. Amber could smell the burning skin from where she stood.

      Mauk put his cap back on, and grinned. “They said I murdered twenty-two people. It was more like forty, but that was back when I was alive. Ever since the chair, my body count has grown. And after this? It’s gonna skyrocket.”

      He took a step forward and she took a step back, holding up her hands.

      “I don’t want to fight you,” she said.

      “Oh, Amber, don’t you dare disappoint me now. Killing a room full of people is distressingly easy for someone like me. You gotta put up some resistance, at least.”

      “You’re not the first serial killer I’ve faced,” Amber said. “You’re not even the first returned-from-the-grave serial killer I’ve faced. I killed Dacre Shanks.”

      “Shanks ain’t got nothing on me.”

      “Not anymore he doesn’t,” she said. “He came after me and I killed him. Now he’s dead and it’s the kind of dead that you don’t come back from. I’ll kill you, too.”

      “I am liking this confidence,” said Mauk. “You’re definitely making the butterflies flutter, I’m not gonna lie to you. But Shanks was nothing. Take his precious little key away from him, and what did he have to offer? Tell me if this is true – when you found him, was he stuck inside one of his own dollhouses? I’ve heard he was stuck inside one of his own dollhouses. That’s funny. How’d you kill him? You step on him? Hell, you’re heavy enough.”

      “Oh, I wasn’t like this when I killed him,” said Amber.

      “No?”

      “No,” she said, and she shifted.

      Her bones lengthened and realigned and she grew taller. Her excess weight spread throughout her body and she became slimmer. Her brown hair turned black and her flushed skin turned red and two ebony horns blossomed from her forehead and curled back.

      “There you are,” breathed Mauk. “Oh, you are magnificent.”

      Amber didn’t bother agreeing as she grabbed him. She knew she was magnificent. He swung the hammer, but she ripped it out of his hand and tossed it aside. She picked him up, her newly formed muscles not even straining with the effort, and hurled him across a table. She caught a glimpse of her reflection as she stalked after him, and her sudden beauty was almost enough to make her pause. She still wasn’t used to it. A slight reconfiguration of her features was all it took to turn her from ugly human to mesmerising demon.

      Ugly. There was a word she’d never used about herself before. Plenty of others had, in their crueller moments, but never her. She didn’t stop to wonder what it meant, as she watched Mauk take a steak knife from a dead patron, and it didn’t bother her. Precious little did when she was a demon.

      Incredibly, Mauk was smiling as he came forward. Her skin tightened and black scales formed, and the knife skimmed across her armour without drawing blood. He tried stabbing at her again, but she was much too fast. She gripped his wrist and twisted. The knife fell and she hit him twice and he wobbled, and she took hold of the back of his head and sent him sprawling across the floor.

      “Told you you should have walked away,” she said, and her fingers grew to claws.

      Mauk groaned, turned over, and looked at her. He was still smiling. She didn’t like that. She was used to people dismissing her when she was herself, when she was ordinary old human Amber, but not when she was like this. When she was like this, she demanded respect.

      “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Mauk, “you think you’re winning this little exchange? There’s a lot more to beating me than hitting me a coupla times.” He got to his feet. “See, when I kill, I like to … play. And my playmates, well … they just do whatever I tell ’em. Ain’t that right, my friends?”

      The corpses stirred, and all the dead people in the rest stop slid out of their booths and stood, and Amber heard some distant part of herself scream.

      

      ALL HEADS TURNED and dead eyes opened. Amber backed off as the patrons came at her, their faces blank and splattered with their own blood.

      “Stay back,” Amber warned, shoving the waitress. “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare—”

      They grabbed her and she cursed, struggled. She didn’t want to hit them, didn’t want to hurt them, but they were dead, they were already dead, and it was too late for them so she started slashing with her claws, punching, headbutting, and they kept coming, and now her arms were pinned and one of them had her by the throat and they pushed her back, this solid mass of corpses working as one, and they forced her into a booth and started crawling on top of her until she could barely breathe.

      “Get them off me!” she screamed. “Get them off!”

      Through the tangle of limbs, she watched as Mauk put the claw hammer on the table. Then he stepped back, taking a small pouch from inside his boiler suit. He dipped his fingers in, drew out a handful of black powder, and crouched. Amber lost sight of him, but she knew what he was doing. He was making a circle.

      “We’re gonna be taking a trip,” he said.

      “I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

      He stuck his head up into her line of sight. “Hey, you be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you. The Shining Demon only told me to bring you to him alive. Now there’s alive, and there’s barely alive – I don’t much care which one it ends up being.” Then he ducked down again.

      She listened to the soft hiss of the powder. There were six or seven people lying on top of her, but they were still. They didn’t even breathe. Her eyes settled on the claw hammer. She tried to reach for it.

      Mauk stood, put the pouch back into his boiler suit, and slid into the seat opposite. He pulled the hammer a little closer to him.

      “Your parents were after you, ain’t that right?” he asked. “Yeah, I heard all about your folks and their friends. They actually wanted to eat you? That’s messed up – and I should know. But you evaded them – you, a sixteen-year-old kid, evaded a bunch of demons a hundred and something years old. Not only that, you killed the representative, smushed that overrated pile of crap Shanks, СКАЧАТЬ