Skeleton Crew. Cameron Haley
just worried it would involve us in the conflict, that it would escalate and pull us in. You were right.”
“Maybe,” Adan said. “And maybe next time I’ll be the one who fucks up. The truth is, I’ve been at this, what, ten weeks? Most of the time I’m just bluffing my way through and hoping no one notices. Neither one of us is my father, Domino. We need each other to do this thing.”
“I’ll try.”
“As will I, starting now. I’ll take care of Imperial Courts. You handle the hospitals.”
“Done,” I said. “Call me.”
“I will. Good luck.”
“You, too. And Adan?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks,” I said and hung up the phone.
“Honey,” I called. I’d thrown on some clothes and I was in the kitchen nuking a frozen snack. Honey flew in from the second bedroom she and her family had converted into the Enchanted Forest.
“Morning, Domino. What’s for breakfast?”
“Hot Pocket,” I said, and looked at the box. “Ham and Cheddar.”
“Ugh. I don’t see how you can eat that stuff.”
“I’m not in the mood for a burrito. Say, Honey, how do feel about killing zombies?”
Honey’s face brightened and her wings scattered orange pixie dust. “Did you get an Xbox?”
“No, I mean real ones.”
“Oh. I’ve never killed one. I bet it’s not as fun as it is in the games.”
“Probably not, but do you think you could handle some zombies?”
“Are they really slow, like in the movies?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only seen two of them. I think it depends on how long they’ve been dead and the condition of the body.”
“I think I can handle it. How many are there?”
“Maybe a hundred. Maybe more if we don’t move fast. They’re in the hospital.”
“Oh. I’ll probably need some help. I can bring my sisters.”
“Yeah, bring your whole family. I’m going, too, but it could get nasty and we need to clean it up fast.”
“Okay, sounds good. I don’t think we’ve been spending enough time together.”
“Thing is, it’s not just the zombie killing. There will be a lot of civilians at the hospital. We need to dust them so they don’t remember what happened.”
“Sure, that’s easy. We could do something even better. We don’t have to just make them forget—we could make them think something else happened.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe a weather balloon exploded and killed everyone.”
“We could just make them forget.”
“Gas pocket?”
“Nah.”
“Whatever you say. Are you ready to go now?”
“Yeah, we need to hurry. You round everyone up and I’ll finish my breakfast.”
“Cool,” Honey said, and she flew back into the bedroom.
Twenty-eight piskies, including Honey, piled into my Lincoln with room to spare. They huddled on the seats and dash, jostling for a favorable position. Honey perched on the steering wheel and pretended to help me drive. They were all invisible to human eyes so this was far less of a spectacle than it sounds.
All of the piskies were female. Along with Honey, there was a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, a few aunts, a handful of sisters and several nieces and cousins. I’d asked Honey about it and she’d said piskie families were always female. The males, apparently, left the nest when they reached puberty and only returned to the females to mate. When the female was pregnant, they left again. Actually, it worked a lot like the barrio where I grew up.
Most of the “survivors” from the fire at Imperial Courts had been taken to Centinela Medical Center in Inglewood, so that was our first stop. I used my changeling mojo to assume the appearance of a blonde doctor with enough curves to make surgical blues look good. I spun my parking spell and we took a spot reserved for ambulances. I dropped a ward on the building so no one would be able to leave, and then we all went in through the emergency room doors.
The situation at Centinela had already gone to hell. When the automatic doors closed behind us, we saw a young nurse run screaming from a treatment room to our right. A black male who looked to be in his sixties was chasing her, dragging a metal stand behind him from the IV line still planted in his arm. He had third-degree burns over most of his body and the remains of his clothes were deep-fried into his skin.
“I got this,” I said. “Spread out and clear the place, room by room. Make sure you only hit the dead ones. Some of the victims should still be alive.”
My weapon of choice was my ghost-binding spell. “At first cock-crow,” I chanted, “the ghosts must go, back to their quiet graves below.” My working theory was that the zombie was just a ghost trapped in its mortal remains. Sure enough, the spell pulled the man’s shade from its ravaged vessel and the barbecued corpse dropped limply to the tile.
The piskies used their glamour. I didn’t really want to know what they did to kill the zombies. They just flew up to the victims and dusted them, and the walking corpses fell over and stopped moving.
We moved methodically through the first floor of the hospital and the heaviest work was in the emergency department and triage wards. By the time my kills reached double digits, I’d turned my brain off and stopped registering what I was doing. I saw enough before that happened to realize some of the zombies weren’t victims of the fire. They were nurses, and doctors and candy stripers, and they’d died when their patients fed on them. Some of them were so badly ravaged they were barely recognizable as human. They were still moving, though, and they were still hungry. They dragged themselves along the white tile, leaving smeared blood trails behind them, and they reached for me eagerly before I tore their spirits free.
It took a little over three hours to reach the top floor of the hospital. When we were finished with the zombies, we started back down, floor by floor, glamouring the surviving employees and patients. None of them would remember what had happened and I felt like we were doing them a kindness.
It was a pretty thin cover-up and I knew there’d be an investigation. A lot of questions would be asked but none of them would have any real answers. There were going to be a lot of bodies but in the end it wouldn’t lead anywhere. No witnesses, no leads, no case.
When we arrived at Broadway Hospital for the second phase of the cleanup, Agents Lowell and Granato were standing outside by their black sedan.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “As if I don’t have enough to worry about without these fucking guys showing up. Honey, y’all hang back and let me handle this.”
Agent Lowell spoke as I walked up to them. “Ms. Riley, please tell me you didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“I’m not in the business of raising zombies,” I said. The fact they were here meant they already knew what was going on. No point in lying about it.
“And the project fire?” asked Granato. He always wanted to be the hard ass.
“Not guilty, but I know who did it. We’ll take care of it.”
“And do you know who’s responsible for the zombies?” Lowell asked.
“I was hoping you might know what’s going on. Before this, it was just a couple of gangsters.” Tony and Keshawn hadn’t really been gangsters, but it would