Page 109 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

CRISPY-FRIED PRIEST

Molly had come prepared, and within minutes, Joe, though he fought valiantly, found himself strapped immobile to an enormous statue of the virgin Mary. His back was pressed against hers, and where she looked out over one half of the cemetery, hands clasped in prayer, his own were tied painfully tight behind him, his last vision of the earth to be a sea of death.

Tareq and Waleed didn’t have much to do now they’d delivered him to his fate. The pyre had been set in advance. The rope that was wrapped around his chest had awaited him. All the long walk to and through the graveyard, his short talk with Molly, all of it had been a meandering, easy, casual line with which she had reeled him in to die.

And how simple he’d made it. Not a thought for himself. Not a thought for anything but Percy.

“It hurts,” Molly called up, careless of his struggles against the unforgiving binds. “A lot. You think you can imagine what it is to burn to death, but you have no idea. When was the last time you maybe… burned the tip of a finger?”

“Let me go. Please. I’m not like them.” To this plea, he added the billionth desperate shout of, “Percy!”

“It’s so painful that all at once, you go a little bit mad. You almost leave your body, in a way. But you don’t. You feel it all, but you feel nothing else. There is nothing but pain. Nothing but the madness of unrelenting, burning horror.”

“Molly, please,” he tried, struggling against the rope. “I can help you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what they did to you. But I didn’t do that. You can’t?—”

“Fire!” she shouted, her voice echoing all throughout the cemetery, bouncing off every stone surface in the vicinity and back into Joe’s ears like a metal skewer.

“Molly, stop! Percy!” The graveyard became a blur, swimming in his panicked vision as he scanned the darkness desperately, tried the blank faces of his captors, couldn’t even capture the attention of Molly, busy rifling through Tareq’s pockets like he was another of Cleo’s expensive handbags. Until she found what she was after…

It was a match. One small match. One tiny movement, one tiny spark, and one tiny flame. But the sticks at his feet were dry and crisp and thirsty.

Molly enjoyed the fear, the way Joe’s eyes latched onto that little match. She took her time. She lit a cigarette with it, took a deep drag, and let the match burn almost all the way to her fingertips. She tilted the small stick, so the flame was just as long and strong as the speck of kindling could make it, then she dropped it.

The flame took hold with terrifying speed, growing bigger with every meagre breath of night air. The tendrils of fire licked Joe’s legs, the soles of his shoes burning molten against his feet within seconds.

“How does it feel, priest?” she yelled, the black of his religious garb glowing orange in the light of the flames, bright in those hazelnut eyes as he refused to look away, even as the fire burned up all but his last shred of hope: that Percy was outthere somewhere. That he had escaped from whatever trap she’d put him in. That Joe, who had done everything exactly right this time, had at least been a distraction for long enough. That he hadn’t let him down, and doomed him to an empty half life, living as a mindless zombie.

His head fell back against the statue in defeat, in desperation. The rubber of his shoes melted and bubbled. He could feel the leather warp beneath his feet, pain searing at his ankles, up his calves, as his clothes began to catch. “Percy,” he whispered. “Oh, god, please.”

Molly leaned her head back in cool amusement, took another drag and puffed out a long plume into the night, mingling with the smoke of Joe’s pyre. “God?” She laughed. “Look around, priest. Does it look like anyone’s coming for you?” Molly tapped a tip of ash to the ground, and with a cruel smile and dead eyes asked, “Where’s your Saviour now?”

The glowing tip of that cigarette drifted silently into the air, then extinguished itself into nothing, having been hewn sharply with a soft whistle of movement that was so fast, it was imperceptible to the eye in the semi-darkness. The movement kept on, a ruffle on the wind and nothing more until the rope that held Joe to the virgin Mary snapped, and Percy’s bejewelled dagger clattered to the ground. Joe dropped, shoving off the statue just in time to save himself from falling into the fire, landing instead on the cool stone of a grave, his eyes finding Percy’s, sharp, determined, and more murderous than he’d ever seen them before. “There he is.”

A long rib bone slid into Waleed’s gut and ripped from the base all the way up and across, letting his intestines spill to the ground before he was shoved down onto them. Tareq got it in the throat the second he went for him. The side of his neck gashed open with a ribbon of blood that splashed across Molly’s unmoved face. Molly watched the lot, head high, horribly sure ofher body’s place in Percy’s mind. That he wouldn’t raise a hand to her, despite the glint of pure violence that still terrified Joe somewhere deep inside.

Percy never paused. Red-handed, jagged hunk of bone dripping with the blood of her zombies, he was within striking distance in half a second. Joe’s stomach coiled like a snake, and all the venom of it—the still-hot soles of his shoes and the crackling sticks on the ground by his grave—almost stopped him, almost stole that thread of humanity that, in Joe, was irrepressible. But it wasn’t Molly he was thinking about.

The weapon shone white and cruel as Percy raised it, and “Percy, stop!” Joe screamed.

But it was already too late.

The shard sank, so deftly, straight into her chest. Through the skin, blood easing its procession, it pierced her heart all the way through, until that once-pale tip of Degas’s rib burst out the other side.

And then Joe saw what he knew was coming. The deed done, Percy’s hand let go of the makeshift dagger with a tremble. All the malice gone, he stared, horrified, into the eyes of his friend. He said nothing, for what could he say? She was all shock, pain, hurt clearly written in every line of her face. And perhaps it was that. The way Percy could see the crushed expectation there. The sense of betrayal. As though she was actually Cleo.

Scarlet ran full and voluminous over her chest, soaking the black dress, dripping to the ground in a pool that glittered in the moonlight. She stumbled back, one step, two, three and four in quick succession, then caught herself with an unsteady wobble. Her eyes dropped from Percy to the bone still sticking out of her chest. She returned them to him, shocked, but now with a modicum of offence. “Ouch!”

Percy’s face cleared a touch at the unexpected response, taking on a shade of bafflement amongst the horror.

Breathing hard, for the blade was true and did not pierce her lungs, Molly wrapped her hand around the bone and pulled. Her body twitched and trembled with the effort, the pain she must have felt, but she didn’t shed a single tear.

Both Percy and Joe stared in stupefied silence. Now, indeed, would be the time to attack again, but the backs of their minds were alight with the questions—what was this thing? If that didn’t stop her, what on earth would? Exactly how fucked were they both? But at the front, that usually conscious part of both minds simply watched.

Long was the bone she drew forth. Long and curved and scarlet. She tripped a few steps further back with the volition of release, then she raised the rib up, examining its sharp tip.

She dropped it, the crack of the bone hitting the ground finally breaking Percy’s and Joe’s stunned trances.

All three looked at the rib sitting there, then her eyes drew Percy’s back, and she said, “I really didn’t think you’d go through with it. And to think… I didn’t have the heart to kill you myself.”

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