Page 30 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Is she sure this was the same group of people?”

“They didn’t see the ones who attacked the tent,” said Jane. “Everyone was inside when that happened. Looks like another missile. But when they evacuated to try to get out before they got burnt to death, they ran into more of that group. And they had guns. Six people got shot before they managed to scatter, and then the person with the missile launcher hit the Ferris wheel. That seemed more like a warning.”

Annie squeaked, sounding dismayed, and broke away from the woman she’d been talking to. She hurried toward us, Sam bounding over to join us, so that they reached our little cluster at the same time. “Robin says—never mind what Robin says. We need to get out of here,now. Mary, can you get to Rose? Maybe the routewitches will send another car, or hell, maybe we can steal a plane or something. I don’t care. We just can’t stay here.”

“What?” demanded Alice and Jane, in a unison that would probably make them both unhappy when they stopped to realize what they’d done.

“Why?” continued Alice.

“Because according to Robin, after the attacks stopped, the Covenant team that launched them came to talk to her,” she said.

“Why her, and not Clarissa?” asked Jane.

“Clarissa stepped down two years ago,” said Antimony, impatiently. “She’s old enough not to want to deal with the day-to-day logistics of keeping the carnival going. If I can continue?”

“Sorry,” said Jane, who didn’t sound sorry. If anything, she sounded offended, like nothing should have been allowed to happen without the queen of gossip’s approval. She also looked oddly shaken—if she’d missed this, what else had she missed?

“They wanted to tell the survivors to stay where they were,” said Antimony. “They allowed them to gather their fallen and move them to the big tent, but they weren’t allowed to leave the carnival, not even to go into the boneyard. They had to stay here.”

“Why?” asked Sam.

“Bait,” said Alice, utterly horrified. “They were bait, for us.”

Antimony nodded. “Unnecessary bait, since we would have come anyway, but yeah. Bait. This was an attempt to flush us out.”

The dark, muttering atmosphere of the tent suddenly felt much more oppressive. I tensed, looking around. They weren’t likely to have ghost traps, but it wasn’t impossible, and even if they didn’t, I don’t like seeing my family in danger.

“But after that initial strike, no one called us or tried to contact us in any way...” said Sam, slowly. “How did it help to order them to stay here? What did that change?”

“The hit knocked out the carnival’s local internet, and the cell signal in this field is crap,” said Annie. “It’s part of why they made getting their own Wi-Fi a priority. The box they used to supply the carnival was also a cell booster. So they couldn’t get a call out if they wanted to. If they’d been allowed to leave...”

“They could have called us from the city, told us not to come,” concluded Jane. “Keeping them all penned in here meant we’d have to come in person if we wanted to find out whether they were alive or dead. It’s a clumsy plan, but it’s not a bad one.”

“And now here we are,” said Alice. “Do your friends know how many bodies the Covenant has?”

“Sounds like about a dozen,” said Antimony, voice tight. “Enough that I don’t really want to go picking a fight with them.”

“No,” said a new voice, from the tent opening. “That probably wouldn’t be a very pleasant activity. For any of us, really.”

As one, silent, we turned.

• • •

The man standing in the tent’s entry was tall and slim, with sandy brown hair and a pointed chin. His accent was pure upper-class English, the vowels polished until they shone, and he was dressed far too formally for a field by the side of the road in Idaho. He looked like the kind of man my father used to point at when we’d see them in line at the bank, the kind who had never picked up a hoe or worked a factory line.

“You’re going to marry a fancy boy like that, Mary, you wait and see,” he’d say, and if there was a mercy to him having died when he did, it was that I’d never been forced to sit down and explain that I wasn’t going to be getting married, to anyone. The dead, as a rule, do not marry.

Not that this man looked like he was in the market for a wedding. Incongruous white shirt and tan trousers aside, he was carrying a large pistol, and his expression as he looked at us was that of someone who had smelled something particularly unpleasant.

Sam glowered at him, lips drawing back from his teeth in a simian snarl. Apes have much larger teeth than humans. It normally wasn’t that noticeable when Sam spoke, good-natured as he was, but looking at him now, I couldn’t help but think about how much damage those teeth could do to someone’s throat.

“Really, Annie,” said the man, sounding disgusted. “If you must continue to dally with monsters, can’t you learn how to keep them under control? I’ve studied furi biology since we last met, young Samuel. If I shoot you, I assure you, it won’t end as well for you as it did the first time.”

Annie put a hand on Sam’s arm, narrowing her eyes. “What the hell do you want, Leonard?”

“You,” he said, as simply as if it were obvious. “The same as I always have. Eventually, you’ll have to tire of playing traitor. You’ll come to your senses and come home to Penton Hall, where we’ll welcome you with open arms. There is no hero so adored as the redeemed.”

She took her hand off Sam’s arm, balling it into a fist a bare second before both her hands burst into flame. It was red-orange, the color of a cozy bonfire. That was probably a good sign. If she was burning, she was upset, but if she was burning at a low temperature, we weren’t inthatmuch danger.

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