This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2022 by Tamsyn Muir

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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ISBN-13: 9781662509452 (digital)

Cover design by Will Staehle

Cover image: © Everett Collection / Shutterstock

THE WIDOWER

She dressed up finely for the interview. Not a stitch of it was hers. She wore the button-up shirt with big tortoiseshell buttons, a tan cap, and a jacket to match. The boots had been polished until they looked sore. Everything fit perfectly. She topped the outfit off with calfskin gloves that came up to the elbow. Once she slicked her hair flat and beheld her raw, honest face in the scrap of mirror, she liked the effect. Not a swell, but anxious to please; giving the lady in question everything she was due.

She took the cap off when they showed her into the Widower’s study. The room was dark and elegant and smelled like good cologne and bad tobacco. The sides were lined with leather-bound books that looked like they never had to worry about being taken off the shelves, and the room itself was as chilly as money could make it. The Widower, despite the moniker, was a woman, and so she called her “ma’am.” She was shaking the Widower’s hand and walking out of the interview with her inside thirty minutes. It was early in the evening. Outside the study, the heat draining up from the desert just about toasted her.

“How about we run along and have you meet her,” said the Widower confidingly. “How would that be, Starr?”

She indicated to the Widower that she thought it would be just fine.

“Then let’s go and have a drink,” said the Widower. It was unclear how the two things tracked, but she wasn’t in a hurry to say so to her new employer. She was sweating so hard it felt like it was coming right through her gloves. “Let’s get below with the boys. We’ll start off with ice water, Starr. You hydrate first in this damned climate. You rinse out your mouth until four o’clock, don’t swallow a drop, but start drinking ice water once the sun goes down. It’s got to be cold.”

Teacherly, but not paternal. Yes, confiding. The whole outfit was calculated to invite. She was aware that she was a handbreadth away from one of the most dangerous gangsters in the whole hemisphere. The Widower dressed up her mooks in steel-shod boots and gave every single one of them a rat rifle and hat so that they looked like legionnaires. There had been two at either one of her elbows on the way in, and two followed them down the gangway now, pulling their collars up against the wind. Yet the Widower wore a soft gray suit dandified with a bit of orange carnation in her pocket. Her hair was short, pomaded, very dark. From the stories she’d expected a loud jacket, flashy jewelry maybe. The most notorious murderer she’d ever got near looked like a doctor dressed up for a wedding.

“I’ve pretty well made up my mind, Starr,” said the Widower. The goons opened up big double doors in the deck to let them through, and she was grateful to get out of the worst of the heat, grateful to get away from the sand-smelling, grease-smelling wind that came up from the ground far below. Inside wasn’t much better. The air was still and offensive, like being trapped inside a jar of dog’s breath. But the thick mineral wool on the sides of each expensive corridor muffled some of the noise of the town’s caterpillar treads. The Widower was saying: “Yes, in my line of work, I make up my mind. But you’ll know that from working with Danny Keith. Nice letter I had from Keith, about you. Didn’t mention that, hey?”

The corridor swerved sharply left. Clouds of dust obscured the night outside the portholes, the desert tumbling swiftly away beyond. The Widower moved fast, at a stride it was hard to match without either overshooting or falling behind, and was nearly a head shorter than her—which combined to make her feel tall and awkward by comparison. She said, “No, ma’am.”

The Widower didn’t say another thing until they passed through another set of double doors into a big gaudy vestibule. Someone had decorated the place in blues and yellow golds, with huge sleazy portraits of gushing waterfalls and flaunting sunflowers. Offensively fertile verdure. The Widower noticed her looking and said, “You like ’em?”

She didn’t know what to say.

“Very fancy,” she said. “Not my style.”

“My late wife. I think it’s scummy. Can’t get rid of it, though; I used to be sentimental. Through here, Starr.”

A private bar in a low-ceilinged room, lights off. For backroom deals. The furniture was shadows and the rows of bottles just suggestive glints. Another door was opened by another goon with a rat gun, and she was taken into what was suddenly the club—what must’ve been the club; she’d seen the frontage on the streets of Tarleton yesterday, trying to get her bearings. Before her, the room dropped away a full twenty feet.

The club looked like a repurposed warehouse: all concrete, though tiled with more of those fake marble tiles. She was looking down on it from what must’ve been a private balcony, the Widower’s private booth. There was a great view of the bar and the stage from here. Bar to the left, most of the lights on. She squinted. A blob of white shirt moving in the low-set lights polished glass specks beneath them. A few waitresses were laying out crisp blue tablecloths over wire-frame tables fused to the floor. The stage itself, a high dais before a huge brace of bunchy black curtains, was dark.

The Widower sat herself down in a plush chair. “Ice water, boys: look alive,” she said. Then the Widower winked at her, to invite her inside the joke. She didn’t smile back. The sweat was beading on the back of her neck. The Widower said, gently accusing, “You didn’t mention Danny Keith.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Why not? He said you looked after seven men of his once they’d turned—turned and badly, so the letter says. Euthanized them, too, he said. Thought the first thing you were going to say to me was ‘Danny Keith sent me.’—How is that old miser, anyway?—Now, why didn’t you mention Danny Keith?”

She wondered which of these questions she was meant to answer. She hesitated. She said:

“Well, I didn’t know if he’d write, ma’am.”

“Why would you say that? When he wrote very well of you.”

One of the goons came back promptly with the bartender, escorting him like it was a conjugal visit. The bartender swiftly laid down two frosted glasses of ice water and then, with routine magnificence, two heavy-bottomed tumblers with nothing in them. Then a huge, weighted carafe of brown liquid. He said, “Madame,” and the Widower said, “This is Starr, Ted—Miz Amy Starr; looks like she might be our newest hire,” and Ted, the bartender, inclined his head without a further interested glance at Miz Amy Starr, until the Widower added, “She’s agreed to be the bodyguard, Ted.”

Now Ted the bartender looked at Miz Amy Starr. She saw his eyes dart over her, at the tortoiseshell buttons and every big, rawboned, innocent inch of her. She could see that Ted the bartender wanted no part of her at all now, not now and not ever, and he inclined his head again. He said, “Of course, madame.” It was only good manners and fear gluing his feet to the floor. When the Widower waved him off, his feet moved a fraction before her hand did.

“Miz Amy Starr” watched Ted the bartender leave, his shirt flapping as he took the double doors with his armed escort. The guys with guns were uneasy. They kept looking at the stage.

The Widower picked up her ice water and drank. She followed suit. It was good and cold, but she didn’t want it and was glad to put it down again. The Widower said briskly, “Tell me about Danny Keith.”

“There was some—unpleasantness, ma’am.”

“What kind of unpleasantness, Starr? Don’t be coy.”

How to say it? “Unpleasantness with—with his girl, ma’am.” She felt the need to add: “I’m not a troublemaker. You can trust me on that.”

The Widower started laughing. Not one of the goons cracked a smile. She saw the Widower glance down at her shirt with the tortoiseshell buttons and the overpolished boots, at the gloves she still hadn’t peeled off and the cap she’d laid awkwardly in her lap. The Widower looked up, straight into her sunburned face, and she said amenably: “My mind’s nearly settled. Tarleton’s a town for the young. Yes, I always intended it to be a town for the young. You won’t get yourself in trouble lovergirling here, Starr . . . You won’t have the time.”

The waitresses were gathered in a colorful knot around an alpha waitress who was giving orders. They each took a position in front of the stage, working some unseen mechanism out of its housing. She watched them, and didn’t correct the Widower as to the nature of the unpleasantness, but flushed at lovergirling—feeling more for the Widower than for herself. Even in the club it was hot as hell. She was itching as well as sweating.

The Widower knocked back most of her ice water. The soft, worn column of her throat worked. When the ice water was all gone, she took a handkerchief out of her pocket and dabbed at her mouth fastidiously. She suddenly said, “Those men of Keith’s. How far gone were they? What were they eating?”

It seemed like so long ago. She said, “Pretty far gone, ma’am.”

“Specificity, Starr. I like specificity. What were they eating?”

She hesitated again. The Widower said gently, “If Keith sent you to me, there’s no point in secret-keeping. I don’t judge Danny, and he knows that.”

As though it was judgment that anyone would fear from the Widower. “It wasn’t good, ma’am,” she said, slowly. She felt herself flushing again. The Widower looked at her with keen eyes—very keen, very gray. She moistened her lips with her tongue and said, “The raw stuff—mortuary slurry. They were that badly off, ma’am. They were the dry type—bones coming out. That’s why Mr. Keith wanted me to keep them alive, ma’am. Families had to identify them alive. That kind don’t leave a corpse. But they were pretty well feeding three times a day on old human meat.”

The Widower sucked a breath through her teeth. They were both watching the waitresses heave together, pulling a lever clear. The stage was now ringed with a line of metal stakes.

The Widower said, “It’s a hellish business, Starr.”

She didn’t answer. The Widower said, “What did you use on them, in the end?”

“Hunting knife,” she said, and the Widower said, “No guns? No silver bullets?”

“Only for wetwork, ma’am. Silver bullets don’t work on the dry ones.” She looked at the Widower’s face and was startled into saying—“Oh—you’re kidding me.”

“Just a little,” said the Widower. “I know my onions. Hunting knife, huh? Well, well. Hellish business, Starr.”

A record had started up from somewhere deep in the curtain pit. The Widower gestured to a waitress down below. Starr could see her frightened face like a pinpoint. It was always easier to see faces when they were frightened. The music was deep, ritzy honky-tonk stuff—idiot music, the type of thing you got a dancer to take their clothes off to. Rehearsal time in the club, she figured. She didn’t know what she was looking at when the wire frame emerged from the end of the stage—thick, gauzy steel-link mesh; fine enough to bend, strong enough to probably stop any bullet fired from any rat gun of any goon there.

A spotlight in hot pink boomed to life directly overhead. All the fine dust particles swam in it like a bait ball. She watched it form a livid cerise circle on the stage, shining through the mesh. The waitresses moved away from the stage like repelled magnets. Ted the bartender stopped polishing whatever he was polishing. They all gazed at the stage—waitresses, Ted, the Widower, the goons, herself—like they were watching a hypnosis show. A panel slid away from the stage floor, leaving a dark black square in the center of the pink light.

A girl slithered up from the black square and climbed bodily out onto the stage. She struck a pose. Most of her face, whited out in the light, was just a pair of lips painted raspberry. She had cocooned herself thickly in a spangled white wrap, but the shape of the body beneath was lovely. It was beauty of the sharp, slender, hungry kind, and it was good for what it was, especially when she started moving to the music. She moved weirdly, unselfconsciously, almost like she was drunk or doped, shoulders lolling, head drooping, unwrapping herself from the spangled cloth.

Then the cloth started coming off for real, the girl spinning through those unhurried, doped-up pirouettes. The revealed body was even prettier uncovered—what there was of it. There were moth-eaten holes in the abdomen and the neck, and one knee and one hip were fully defleshed. The raspberry lips parted to reveal the dancer’s teeth.

She hadn’t realized that she had gotten halfway up from her chair until she felt one of the goons push her back down to sit. The Widower was saying softly, “Sit tight, Starr,” so she sat tight. The music lurched on, and so did the dancer, jerking here and there like a puppet, one beat behind the tune at all times. Like a marionette, her hindbrain suggested. There was flapping movement from the side of the bunchy curtains. Another pink spotlight cracked overhead. A frilled desert lizard emerged into its halo, stumping out onstage, blue tongue flicking.

It was one of the big, juicy, fearless lizards, with a mean lipless mouth and mean eyes, the kind with the jaw that unhinged to swallow whatever it meant to swallow. It was as big as a small pony. The dancer stopped, swaying a little.

What happened next was a massacre. One of the waitresses turned away and gave a little scream when the lizard jumped at the dancer at the same moment as the dancer jumped on the lizard. The lizard had an unhinging jaw, but so did the dancer—and the lizard’s teeth and claws stayed where God had first put them, whereas claws came out of the dancer’s fingers and toes and a great many parts where claws weren’t ever meant to be. The dancer flung herself at that lizard like a fatal burr, and she watched—sweating, horrified, fascinated—as the lizard ripped itself to shreds: as the dancer made her meal right there on the stage in a mess of blood and guts and saliva and God only knew what. She found herself thinking, Wet type, absolutely wet.

Afterward the dancer just lay down like a discontented cat. She was bulging like a python. The music kept going. She yowled, annoyed.

The Widower poured herself a glass of the brown liquid.

“It’s a hellish world, Starr,” she said.

She found her voice and said levelly: “You’re taking an awful risk, ma’am.”

“I rather think that’s where you come in.”

“You want me to—keep her alive . . . ?”

Her voice died away at the Widower’s expression. The eyes were perfectly gray and perfectly empty.

“You’re to look after her and to be answerable for her,” said the Widower. “She needs to be entertained—don’t gape at me, girl, she gets bored—she needs to be fed and watered, and most of all she needs someone to keep her handled. She’s put down five handlers already. You cut your teeth on Danny Keith’s dead boys: you think you can get a grip on this? If you do good by her, I’ll make sure you retire wealthier than any woman in your line of business has ever retired. By God, you’ll be rich.”

She had to moisten her lips again. “Danny Keith’s boys had a shelf life, ma’am,” she said. “And they weren’t . . .”

“Say it.”

“Ghouls, ma’am.”

“I still don’t know exactly what a ghoul is,” remarked the Widower. “Enlighten me.”

“It’s—it’s a catchall, ma’am. Anything wet. I mean a wet brain, anything with a body that still generates fluid. The eaters.” She felt the need to add: “Some of them don’t eat, of course. Or they eat for strange reasons. But they’re our big predators. Throat-biters, skull-crackers . . .” She hesitated, unsure how much of what she knew was smart to talk about. “Skin-wearers. Just—ghouls.”

“Nice word for it, I don’t think. Well, this one has a shelf life, I’m not denying it—she gets cunninger by the year. When the time comes to put her down, you’ll put her down, no harm, no foul. But if you shoot her before I’ve got my money’s worth, then I’ll take her price out your hide. What’re you going to say? Are you worried about the cops?”

If there had ever been natural light in the Widower’s eyes, it wasn’t there now. She found herself saying—

“Not in my line of business, ma’am—not particularly worried, no. But you’re different. You’ve got a lot to lose.”

“Starr,” said the Widower, “the first thing you must learn about me is that I don’t particularly care about the cops. Never did, never will, won’t start now. I’ve got a good party piece out there—she sends my signal to the cops and to anyone else who thinks they’d like to topple me off this sandcastle.”

“But, ma’am—”

“But what?”

She groped for how to say it.

“She’s tracking, ma’am—the way she moves, the way she’s eating—you say she gets bored; you’re saying she’s clever,” she said. She found herself wringing her hat, like a late coal boy standing in front of the foreman. “She’s clever,” she repeated.

The Widower rose. Her men rose with her. She looked down the barrel of those gray glass eyes.

“Oh, Starr,” she said wearily, “they all are. What do you say? Are you going to sign on the dotted line? Or—what?”

She wondered what the what was. It probably wasn’t a pat on the back, her papers returned, and a clear passage off Tarleton for whatever other job she might have lined up.

“I want to meet her,” she said. “I want to meet her up close.”

The Widower’s eyebrows looked liable to rear-end her hairline. Then she smiled. Color came back into those gray eyes, but only a drop of it, like food coloring dispersing into cake batter.

“Let’s get you up close tomorrow. Just hang around tonight. The daytime dancers are fine, real fine. And they’ll come out and dance their hearts out once the stage gets bleached.” She spared a glance for the stage, almost affectionately. Its current occupant was lying on her side like a beached whale, looking heavy and full of lizard. Looking about as alive as yesterday’s newspaper, more to the point. “She’ll be dead to the world for the next three hours. No, Starr, come back tomorrow. Let’s call that your first day on the clock.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She wondered if there was any way she could get off Tarleton that night.

“No more ‘ma’am’ for you.” The Widower shook a reproachful finger. The carnation in her buttonhole waggled. “From now on, I’m ‘boss.’ You do right by me, Starr, and the Widower will do everything right by you.”

THE DETECTIVE

That night she refused to be put up in the Widower’s quarters. Agreed to move in tomorrow with her box of tricks. She knew that there’d be guys out front making sure she didn’t skip town or throw herself over the side of Tarleton’s retaining wall to splat the full two kilometers to the ground below, but they wouldn’t haunt her doorway.

The first thing she did was take her gloves off and run her hands under the tap for as long as she dared. She didn’t put the gloves back on either: it had been that kind of day. She crammed herself into the bathroom closet and banked up the door with towels, blankets, pillow slips. She took out the toilet bag and unwrapped a single desiccated human hand. Then she worked open the base of the shaving lamp with a screwdriver and retrieved her radio. She touched the sensitive pad of the radio base to the hand until the whole menagerie sparked to life.

It blew white noise for ten seconds. Then a tinny voice said, “Line’s clear. Give me your status.”

“Copy that. I’m unburned. Confirm Amy Starr. Can you get me the Super?”

“Roger that. Good job. Connecting.”

A man’s voice in no time flat. He must have been waiting. He was the type to work late, she’d learned. “Starr. Is she real?”

“She’s real, sir.”

He swore down the line. Then he said, “Give me your report, Detective.”

“I met the Widower. She took my receipts fine. Job’s mine if I want it. She wouldn’t show me the thing in action—but I eyeballed it from across the room.” She found it difficult to say the next part: “It’s got full movement, sir. Eating live food. And it’s wet.”

“No smoke and mirrors, Starr? You say you were across the room? The Widower could be putting it on.”

“Maybe. I want to look at it close up.” But she was forced to admit: “If it’s real, sir, it’s Tier 3, easy. Might be Tier 4. The Widower talked like she was sentient.”

For a moment she thought the line had died until she heard him say “God—damn—it.” And: “No. This can’t be the case. Likely she’s bullshitting you, Starr.”

“Yes, but—” Again, how to put it? “She danced” was all she found to say.

There was a silence on the line. Supe didn’t sound as if he knew what to say to that. Instead he said, “Any sign of our old installations?”

She had to prevaricate.

“What do you mean, Supe?”

“You know damn well what I mean. Any signs pointing to West.”

She decided to say, “Not yet, sir.”

Even with the poor-quality receiver signal, she could hear him sucking a cigarette loud and clear. “Okay, hotshot. The moment you get any eyeball evidence for that thing being a Tier 4, you ring the bell and wait for assistance. I know you worked a miracle getting this cover story from Daniel Keith, but we don’t need much to mobilize. I can get every billy club between Tarleton and the base for a Tier 4, and the Widower the hottest final seat of her life. The moment it’s solid, phone in and get clear.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not losing another officer to the Widower. Do you get me? Is this getting personal for you, Starr?”

She didn’t want to ask what he meant by getting personal.

“No, sir.”

“Try giving me a lie with more panache,” sighed the radio. “You’re losing your touch. Tech’s telling me to kill the line. Your next check-in’s at seventy-four hours. I hope for your sake that you’re wrong.”

The two-way went dead.

THE GHOUL

She showed up at work the next morning bright and early, 10:00 a.m., a full hour before the Widower had told her to. Some of the rat-rifle goons showed her down deep into the bowels of Widower-owned Tarleton, all service corridors. The Widower didn’t waste gilt down here. She kept getting distracted by the big boom, boom, boom of all the guys who kept Tarleton moving through the dunes like a coal-fed tortoise. A leather-faced minion took her down in a lift. He combed the whole thing over before he pulled the handle. She watched him check every corner, looking up into the carriage and at the cables in case anything was there. She thought that anything he was looking for would have to be clinging on to the cables like a bat.

The walls down here were inlaid flannel and mineral wool again. Her whole soul itched.

“Boss said you have the run of the place,” said Leather-Face.

“Sure. Can I smoke down here?” she asked the guy.

“You want to asphyxiate, you asphyxiate.”

“You teetotal?”

“No. We keep this place low on oxygen. Makes it sluggish.”

She took note of it and said, “You think?”

“Guess you’re the expert, pal.”

After a moment she tried him on:

“Bad business.”

“Your business now, freshie,” said the leather-faced guy. “Once you’re in situ, they’re letting me have a gig on the skyline. I’m getting as far away from this as it gets.”

“I wouldn’t want to be up high on Tarleton in a thunderstorm,” she said.

He said, “I wouldn’t want to be down here in any weather at all.”

In front of a big iron door, the kind you got in nuclear bunkers, he made her unsnap her shoulder harness and shake out her pistols onto a tray. Her knives he let her keep. He offered her a tranquilizer gun and didn’t like it when she refused.

She said, “Her blood’s not circulating quick enough for this. She wouldn’t drop for half an hour.”

“Won’t save you, sure. Might slow her up enough that some of us get away.”

She said, “Keep it. I’m not a humanitarian.”

“Nobody in your business is,” said the leather-faced guy.

He spun open a lever. The jumbo metal door yawned open unwillingly. She crossed the threshold as it was still opening and found herself in a wire cage. Beyond the wire cage was nothing more and nothing less than a woman’s dressing room.

A woman’s dressing room that had gotten in a scrap with an abattoir, true. Wallpaper with lilac clocks peeled off sweating concrete walls. The carpet looked like a car-size cat had gone to town clawing it up. Bleachy brown stains on an overturned settee, a wicker chair gone to splinters, a wardrobe with the door hanging off like a punched front tooth. In one corner a half-collapsed futon groaned under the weight of half a dozen coverlets in ice cream colors: pale strawberry, pale chocolate, pale pistachio. These were heaped up in a pile as high as an eight-year-old girl.

The door was groaning shut behind her. She spun around. She crouched to the rapidly closing gap and called out, “What’s the deal, bud?”

Leather-Face said, “Cage door don’t open until this one squeezes shut.”

“How do I let you know I want out again?”

“Latch the cage door. Do ‘Shave and a Haircut.’ Wait.”

The bunker door screeched shut. Her eyes dazzled at the morass before her of sweat and bloodied frills. Inside her gloves her hands felt like molten lava. She longed to give them just one good scratch.

Her eyes flashed over the wardrobe and the gnawed wicker chair. It smelled like a charnel house and a whorehouse mixed. She cleared her throat.

“Here, pussycat,” she whispered. “Here, kitty, kitty.”

Something rustled within the termite hive of blankets. Beads of sweat dripped from her underarms and pooled around the elbow buttons of her gloves.

The ghoul emerged from the bed like a hornet. She caught a flash of black—white—raspberry as the thing shot behind the tumbled-over settee. An old ivory-backed hairbrush tumbled off a beat-up dressing table. A hoarse giggle echoed from somewhere near the shadows of the wardrobe.

She said, “That’s fast.”

Something hit the cage mesh like the hammer of God. Like two towns back-ending. The mesh groaned as the ghoul’s shadow fell over her—claws deforming the chain links inward as it clung there, whole body scrabbling. Her life flashed before her eyes as she wondered if the mesh would hold. In that moment her eyes met the ghoul’s.

Once upon a time the dancer had been a good-looking brunette—before early decomp and the rigors of undeath had hit. Now she was only parts of a good-looking brunette. The face that peered at her through the mesh was a wild-eyed, idiot, predator’s face. There was something uncomfortably baby doll about it. Heart shaped. The big dull eyes bluish and glassy without much difference between pupil and white. Like you could pop them out and put new ones back in. Right now the mouth was a pursed little parody of a dolly mouth. Some sick individual had painted it raspberry red with a child’s hand, leaving waxy streaks right up to each nostril.

The ghoul hissed at her. No dancing dress now. Her piebald body was wrapped in scraps of an old nightie. She judged that about two-fifths of that body would have them breaking up the tables at the local strip club. The other three-fifths would have them drawing chalk outlines.

The dancer moaned and scrabbled at the cage mesh. She made guttural honks of frustration and excitement. The raspberry mouth opened to reveal the long black tongue and pointed pink teeth. It was a lot of noise and fuss, but nothing especially frightening. Nothing new, right up until the ghoul’s cold pupils fixed on her—fixed, then suddenly transfigured. No mindless hunger. The badly painted lips peeled off those sharp pink teeth.

“Amy,” the ghoul panted. “Amy, I still dream about you.”

Her hand hurt from slamming seven times against the door. In her fright, “two bits” inflated all the way to a dollar. As the wheel went up, she found herself crawling out from underneath the door like a grunt, all elbows. When she raised herself to stand, the Widower was there—holding a sweating glass, bracketed by her heavies.

“Rinse. Don’t swallow,” said the Widower.

The door was squeaking shut again. The ghoul’s long, doglike howl was cut off abruptly by five solid inches of steel. She took a blistering mouthful—swept it around in her mouth—spat it out into a grate.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. Her lips felt numb. The Widower said—

“She talked to you, didn’t she?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good sign,” said the Widower. “She’s a shy little lassie, that one. You must’ve made an impression.”

For a moment she was overcome with the desire to haul off and swing—just put four knuckles in that calm professorial face and send the Widower flying. But there’d be twenty bullets in her before the carnation petals fluttered to the floor.

“If word gets out, every cop from here to the city limits is going to get a warrant with your name on it,” she said.

“Starr,” said the Widower, “I told you. I don’t give a damn about the cops. This is the second time I’ve said it, and I don’t want to say it a third.”

She had the absurd feeling that the Widower would threaten to keep her inside during recess next.

“This can’t be hushed up forever,” she said. “People talk.”

“Sure they do,” said the Widower amiably. “People talk, talk, talk—they love stories. And this is all it is to most of them, Starr—a story. They don’t want to believe it. And those who get close enough to believe it, why—they’re already in pretty deep, aren’t they?”

“This is a hell of a lot to get mixed up in,” she said.

The Widower said, “It’s a shame that once you’re mixed up in something, that’s that—you’re mixed.”

She looked at the Widower. The Widower looked at her. Today the carnation was peppermint colors: white hearted, red edged.

“Go or stay, Starr?” she said softly. “Now you’ve seen what you’ve seen, and now you know what you know.”

She found herself wiping the back of her mouth again. It was dry.

The dancer wasn’t Tier 3. The dancer wasn’t even Tier 4. That was a Tier 6 ghoul that these gangsters had. It danced; it ate; it talked; it thought. One word from her and Tarleton was scorched earth. They’d call a strike before the soles of her boots had landed on the sand. They’d be talking about it for the next hundred years and be scared to say it three times in a mirror.

“I’m on deck, boss,” she said.

“Good girl, Starr,” said the Widower. “By the way—her name’s Lucille.”

THE HANDLER

None of the Widower’s boys wanted to get especially close to her, either that first week or any time else. She instituted new rules: new feed—new hours—new security measures. Much of the Widower’s gang took her for a fresh-faced idiot and treated her that way. But the Widower let her have her head. Every time she came cap in hand to explain herself, the Widower waved her off and said, “I don’t need a science lesson, Starr. Just do what you do.”

The only thing that the Widower refused to do was stop Lucille dancing. She wanted Lucille to dance, and therefore the ghoul danced. The Widower was immovable on that point. She came to understand that for the Widower, her ghoul dancer was 25 percent vaudeville and 50 percent head on a stick: a living—or unliving—warning. Problem was, there was 25 percent of something else, too, and it was hard to decide exactly what that something else constituted.

She hated it, Lucille dancing. It overexcited Lucille. And at the end of the day, it was just—low.

Talker? Lucille wasn’t a talker. She was a full-fledged chatterbox. The first time Lucille had her food mixed up for her according to the new receipt, she went mad. She wouldn’t touch it. She was like a cat being moved on to kibble after tuna. She said, clearly: “I want the good stuff.”

Just saying a full sentence like that would’ve got her the good stuff from the cops. One between the eyes and two more in the chest. She told Lucille, “I’m not giving you live food.”

For which Lucille refused to speak to her for days. That was fine by her. The Amy business had rattled her guts. The ghoul refused to eat the horsemeat or the cracked bones right up until she got sluggish. Lucille didn’t like getting sluggish. Wet ones were more tuned in to their bodies than dry. The ghoul took the bones into her blankets to sulk over. Then she got chatty again.

Lucille said to her, “Want to see me dance?”

She said, “I saw you dance once. I didn’t like it.”

The ghoul chuckled wickedly to herself. Then she said: “Come in here.”

Which was more ghoulish. Plenty of ghouls could say phrases like that. They hid in empty rooms and called out, “Come in here,” or “I’m lonely,” in voices like children. Put a ghoul in a room with another ghoul and they’d learn all each other’s parrot phrases. Though if you put a ghoul in a room with another ghoul, you got what you deserved.

“No, thank you, Lucille,” she said.

“You big, pretty brute,” said the ghoul. “Big, pretty lug.”

Lucille could dress herself in a fashion, and did. When you fed her, she could wipe lipstick over her face and brush her own hair. When you added what she called “the good stuff” into the mix, which was whatever was delivered cold from the mortuary, the lipstick went on the mouth in more or less the right configuration. That was enough right there all by itself to get Lucille a Tier 4 ticket to a squad of the boys in blue. Gets smarter on human meat. Replicates old behavior with intent.

At the end of the first fortnight after she’d seen Lucille’s trick with the lipstick, they stopped Tarleton for its Sunday rest, let the engines cool. In the killing cold of the night, she trekked out into the sand dunes with her radio and the hand. It took a while to fingerprint the radio online. This was her third check-in since arrival, and every time she called, the Supe sounded a little bit more relieved to hear her.

“You keeping your head above water, Starr?”

“For now,” she said. “We’re heading north.” She gave him the coordinates.

“It sounds like the Widower’s about to put the wax on the Charlies. You hear anything about that?”

“She doesn’t tell me gang stuff, sir. I’m just in charge of the dancer.”

“You got any solid evidence for me? A visual will do, Detective.”

She thought about the lipstick. She thought about the way Lucille had leaned forward to see herself better in the cracked mirror. Lucille carefully wiping red wax off her sharp pink shark’s teeth.

“Not yet,” she said. She cut off the call.

Lucille loved that little mirror. On those smart days she sat herself in front of her dressing table like a fashion queen and played with bits of old jewelry. The ghoul had a long row of creamy pearl beads that she liked to wrap around her throat. It wasn’t like no ghoul had ever dressed up before. But when she watched Lucille fussing with those pearl beads, she felt her palms itch like fury. Lucille also had a gold ring that she would slip on and off. Lucille didn’t have all her fingers anymore. Plenty of her fingers were too moth-eaten to hold the ring on anyway. It really only settled on her thumb.

The Widower forgot all about her. Maybe the sauce on her and the Charlies was real and something big was going down. Then all of a sudden she was summoned up to the boss’s office. “You drinking ice water?” the Widower demanded.

“Yes, boss.”

“Remember that it’s rinse and spit during the day. How’s she behaving?”

“I think she’s responding better to the new food. Less . . . energetic.”

“Pity,” said the Widower. “I like her energetic. But you know best, Starr. How’d you get into this damned business, anyway? How’d you get into the desert from—wherever it was you came from?”

“Hitchhiked,” she said, truthfully. “I guess in my own way, I’m hitchhiking right now.”

“Hitchhiked, huh? Where to?”

She had to think about that.

“I think the fun in hitchhiking’s not knowing where you’re going.”

“You’re a drifter. Well, we’re all of us drifters, I suppose. You like the desert?”

“Not particularly. But there are worse places.”

“Exactly what I say, Starr. Now, me, I think the desert’s a crock of shit. It dries you out; it’s too hot; it’s too cold. I want bright lights, not sand. But it’ll be worse over the mountains, don’t you think? I sometimes think about that big dark ocean of forest up there, and I catch my breath. You think it’s true what they say, that these creatures all crawled out the forest?”

She didn’t think the Widower cared about what she thought. But when she said, “It’s a good story,” the Widower insisted—

“But is it true?”

“They had to come from somewhere, I guess.”

At that the Widower fell silent. The Widower was silent for so long, professorial head propped in her hand, that she felt the need to prompt—

“Was there anything you wanted, ma’am?”

“Just to check in on you, Starr, really just to check in on you. You fitting in with the crew? I know you’re not dining with them.”

She said, “I play craps with some of them.”

“That’s good. No lovergirling, eh?”

“Too busy for that, boss.”

The Widower laughed and laughed. She said, “Enjoy your payday, my girl. You just keep working hard and playing craps and looking after Lucille. She likes you—she’s taken to you.”

When the Widower turned away in the chair, she took it as dismissal. She got up and put her cap back on and turned away. One of the rat-rifle boys had opened the door for her when she heard the Widower say suddenly—

“I forgot. I’ve got sad news for you, Starr.”

She turned around to look at the Widower. Today’s carnation was a white so white that it was almost green.

“Danny Keith got hit,” said the Widower. “Someone took him out—him and his crew. Whacked his whole two-horse town. It smashed into the foothills, and nobody found ’em for weeks. The bodies were . . . well, it wasn’t nice.”

Her hands prickled. She looked at the Widower. She took the cap off her head and wrung it against her chest between her gloves. The Widower was looking at her carefully.

“The ways those bodies were, it probably wasn’t a human hit,” said the Widower. “There are mean sons of bitches, Starr, and then there are . . . monsters. I don’t mean to be blunt.”

She looked at the Widower. She looked at the desk. She found herself swallowing. Her eyes fixed on the brass nameplate screwed into a low-slung wooden prism. The name was picked out in fancy gold letters: CAROL L. P. WIDDENER. Anyone who looked less like a carol she’d be hard-pressed to name. The Widower didn’t even look like a dirge.

The Widower was saying, “Give her some air.” She hadn’t realized she had swayed on her feet. One of the rat-rifle goons was even fanning her with his hand. She said thickly, “I’m fine, ma’am.”

“Those seven who turned, Starr . . .”

“No. No. They were dry when I euthanized them,” she said. “They were due for the oven afterward. Unless they let the families dispose of them at home. Sometimes you can attract other ones if you leave them. But they were traveling . . . I epoxied their legs together and said they had to be burned. Danny Keith knew they had to be burned, boss.”

“This was a massacre, Starr. This couldn’t have been your fault,” said the Widower impatiently. “I just hope Danny Keith listened to you, that’s all. I thought you ought to know. Poor bastard should have extended your contract.”

“Danny Keith was good to me,” she said.

“He was a good man. It’s a damn shame,” said the Widower. “We’ll have a drink for Danny together, sometime—drink for him and his girl. That’s a comfort. A guy should always go out with his girl. Starr . . .”

They stared at each other.

“You need some lotion for those hands, you get some lotion. We can afford it in this outfit,” said the Widower.

She said, “Thank you, boss.”

“I’m sorry about Danny.”

“Thank you, boss.”

Back downstairs Lucille was in a mood. In the corner of the mesh cage separating them, she sat down on a chair and put her legs up on another. The guys thought she was crazy spending so much time in the pen. It wasn’t much of a wonder that they didn’t want to break bread. In many ways, that was an advantage.

She thought about Danny Keith.

“I’m hungry,” Lucille whined.

“I know. I know you’re always hungry,” she said. “I understand.”

“I’m hungry, Amy. I’m hungry, Amy.”

She thought it wasn’t good to respond to Amy. She didn’t want to encourage her. She turned away and stared at the door, turned her back on her. But that just put a bee squarely in Lucille’s bonnet. She kept saying Amy, Amy in a high-pitched voice. Like a stuck record. Same tenor every time. That breathy Amy—Amy like she’d just popped the question.

The ghoul snarled. There was a rattle of movement that made her go for both her knives. A small metallic ping hit the door hard as a bullet, straight through the holes in the mesh. She reached over to pick up the missile.

It was the gold ring Lucille loved to play with. Reflexively she rubbed off some of the old brown blood. There was script on the inside. She read the inscription out loud.

“‘Lucy & Lesley,’” she read. “‘Love endures.’”

Lucille cackled.

THE GANGSTER

She regretted not listening to the Supe’s warning about the Charlies. Tarleton docked with Fort Nassau one evening. For that whole evening everyone wandered around in the lights of the big city in twos or threes like it was a spring holiday. People set up booths. They sold old watches and leatherwork and bought fresh flowers and popcorn. No sign from the Charlies. No sign from the Widower. The rat-rifle goons were tense. That was all.

Then the smell happened. She caught a whiff of it a couple of minutes before Lucille kicked off. There was nothing she could’ve done. Lucille went from zero to a hundred in seconds. She carried on like a bucket of cats. She bounced around her cell until she left Lucille-size indentations on the walls. Her recognition failed totally. She wouldn’t be comforted; she scrabbled at the walls and moaned. Then she hid under her bed and did her best log impression. It was always a bad sign when that old instinct kicked in. What was responsible? The groaning men and women carried back within the Widower’s walls, bleeding like stuck pigs from bullet holes that needed spackling. A smart ghoul like Lucille could smell blood from the bottom of Tarleton.

This eye-blacking carried on for a week. The Charlies had the men, the Widower had the money. You could fork the bullets that the Charlies were shooting out of one of the Widower’s guys and they’d be back in the field the next day, if you gave them a hundred bucks and four fingers of rye. The type of bullets the Widowers shot put a Charlie out of commission for good. The Widowers bled; the Charlies died. She hadn’t thought the Widower was so eager for a rumble.

This playground scrap meant that Lucille was a huge pain in the ass, and not much else. Then the Widower suffered pangs of graciousness. Some of the craps boys told her that the Widower wanted a ceasefire. She didn’t care two bits about it right up until the Widower called her into the office.

“Charleston Taggart’s coming round with his boys tonight—I let him bring a solid hundred of ’em,” said the Widower. “Nice of me, I think.”

She didn’t really know what to say, so she held her tongue. The Widower said, “This is the third time Taggart’s bloodied my nose. Over the last twenty years, sure, but you’re allowed to keep a tally in this business. He and I were always going to scrap. Here’s what I’m going to do, Starr. I’m going to give him a slap-up dinner, then take him round to the club.” The bomb: “Lucille’s going to dance.”

“Ma’am, she can’t.”

The Widower continued like she hadn’t said a word. “Hate that it comes to this, Starr, but Taggart needs the fear of God put into him.”

Her hands were itching like fury. “Lucille’s crazy with the blood. She’s off her food. She’s not in her right mind.”

“She never was,” said the Widower. “You’re up to bat, my girl.”

Beneath the stage there was a steel service elevator that went right down to Lucille’s pen. They literally took it out of the housing when they weren’t using it and plugged up both ends, so it was a business and a half to get it up and running each time. Its last stop put Lucille right beneath the stage hole. Lucille put on her glad rags—which weren’t glad anymore, and would have needed a bottle of whiskey and a holiday just to approach cheerful—but only got into the elevator after a full hour’s coaxing with live rats. That gave her the hope that Lucille wasn’t going to play ball.

She couldn’t join Lucille on the way up. She waited backstage and checked on the dune snake she’d gotten for Lucille to eat. It was fat as a man’s thigh and had a rattle. The Widower had signed off on that reluctantly. Herself, she’d figured that it might distract Lucille to go after a predator. The club was packed. The atmosphere was ambiguous. Like guys with paid tickets to the circus, not knowing if they were going to enjoy the clowns or not. They clapped and whistled at the human dancers in their little outfits. They liked them well enough. Ted was keeping the drinks flowing. Everything smelled like cigarettes, raspberry liquor, and old blood. When someone tapped her on the shoulder, she nearly drew her gat.

“Starr,” someone was saying. “The boss wants you.”

“I’ve got to be here for the dancer.”

The Widower had said otherwise, so she was escorted up to the balcony where the Widower was holding court with Charleston Taggart. Charleston was a mean little skinny man about the Widower’s age. He had dark hair and a crooked mustache, and he looked tough as guts. When she came in, the Widower said, “There you are, Starr. Latest in my organization—this is Mr. Taggart, Starr.”

She mumbled her greeting to Mr. Taggart. Charleston said, “Your latest piece, Carol?”

“Enough of your smut, Charles,” said the Widower, tolerantly. “Starr’s a nice child. And you know full well I hate ‘Carol.’”

On stage, a good-looking duo were tap-dancing in their hot pants. Very cute. She made like she was looking at the stage and not paying much attention to the talk. Her eyes kept falling to the trapdoor spot where, less than six feet away, there was a ghoul in old sequins who hadn’t fed properly in a week.

“It was a joke, friend. Be nice. I was around back when you had a wife. Now, don’t freeze me again. You met my wife when I had a wife. I’m one of the last guys standing who can say that. We go way back, you and me.”

“I liked the late Mrs. Taggart just fine,” said the Widower.

“There’s been two Mrs. Taggarts since then.”

“I wasn’t keeping track.”

“Who would? They were little nothings. Not like the late Mrs. Widdener. They don’t make girls like that anymore. Legs like a lightning conductor. Started out as a chorus girl of yours, right? Boy, she was game. Was she ever game.”

“Yes. Not cautious,” said the Widower. “Not sensible. But certainly game.”

The tap dancers went off. A jazz band started up. Trembling waitresses came forward to the stage. They started messing with the machinery. Taggart didn’t seem to notice. More drinks were being circulated to the crowd.

“That’s ancient history, Charles,” said the Widower.

“Call me a historian.”

“You and I have seen a hell of a lot happen over the years,” said the Widower. “The cops haven’t got us, though God knows they tried. I endured them, and you threw them out. I admired you for that, you know.”

“Call us a mutual appreciation society. You and I shouldn’t fight, Carol. You should just turn around and head straight back where you came from, and I’ll keep sending you birthday cards.”

“Nothing out there but sand and the mountains,” said the Widower. “From there, the forest. It’s a hard life. But let’s leave that for after the entertainment.”

The steel-link mesh rose over the dais. The band kept playing. The waitresses left—she watched the head waitress count them out in twos and threes, leaving Ted to fend for himself. There were more Charlies in that audience now than there were Widowers. The Widowers knew to get to the back.

“I’ll give you this, you’ve got the old-world manners. You know how to take your lumps,” said Taggart. “Carol, these new gangland sons of mothers would cut your throat on a Sunday.”

“It’s a hellish world,” said the Widower.

The pink spotlight burst to life like a lanced boil. It wavered stage right, far away from the trapdoor. The band struck up a tune. She squeezed her left hand under her armpit to pretend like that was as good as scratching it. Then the other. She blushed when she caught the Widower watching. The Widower winked.

The trapdoor opened in the darkness. She held her breath. At first nothing happened, and she let herself hope. But then Lucille emerged, arms first. She hauled herself up to stand. She teetered on the stage as a barefoot silhouette, hair and lipstick. Just a shape.

Without the spotlight on her, the Charlies didn’t know what they were looking at. They were too sozzled to see anything but bad taste. When Lucille bobbed to the music, a couple of them jeered.

“What’s this one?” said Charleston. “Talent show?”

“Nix to that,” said the Widower. “Just watch. This is my favorite act.”

The spotlight wandered drunkenly around the stage. Then it found Lucille and froze on her: a creature in trembling sequins all blaring like emergency lights. The orchestra played an uncertain rill. She bared her teeth. The Charlies realized, as a body, that nothing they were seeing was greasepaint and makeup.

She danced—worse than usual. Lucille danced like only the very drunk can dance. She lurched through her own charade listlessly while the Widower held up a finger to someone white-faced and stageside. The Charlies in the Widower’s box had gone very still, and Charleston was the stillest of the lot. She thought that the Widower was gesturing for someone to bring out the blood sport early—to release the sand snake—but that wasn’t the case at all. The mesh chain Lucille was dancing before was trembling.

Charleston said softly, “This some kind of message?”

“What kind of message would I want to send, Charles?”

“You’ve lost your goddamn mind,” said Charleston. His goons had all drawn their cheap pistols. Then he said, “I know that face.”

“Interesting,” said the Widower. “I wondered if you might.”

Charleston flicked his own gun from his pocket like a striking cobra. She found her own—slid it from the holster and, from her position next to the Widower, pointed its blunt snout right between Charleston Taggart’s eyes. Ten more bristled in her direction, all from Charlies. She wondered for the first time why there were none of the Widower’s men in the balcony. The Widower said, in tones of deep approval: “Well played, Starr.”

Charleston’s voice rose to a deep whine.

“What do you want from me, Carol?”

“I want you to watch,” said the Widower.

The chain-link mesh retracted. Lucille was climbing it like a shot. In one sequined blur she climbed up ten feet of steel and vaulted over the top like two-fifths of an avenging angel. She landed heavy on the floor, welcomed by the frightened applause of cheap bullets. The Charlies were yelling. The Widowers were gone. Charleston had brought too many men for them to be able to get out without a crush, and now the Charlies had found that the doors were locked. Bullets and pounding and screams rose from below. Then Lucille started her dirty work.

She looked away after a couple of seconds. The smell of fresh blood and the sight of a six-foot guy being ripped apart like a sausage link made her dizzy. Lucille could feed on the go—unhinge that jaw, throw in scraps like a garbage compactor. Or like a chipmunk storing nuts. One of Charleston Taggart’s boys had crossed to the balcony edge and was firing down into the crowd. Charleston was watching the goings-on with the air of a man whose three-to-five horse had busted its leg coming out of the box.

“Carol,” he said, “you make me believe in hell.”

“It’s a hellish world, Charles.”

“Between you and the ghouls, give me the ghouls,” said Charles.

One of his boys was banging on the balcony door, having found it locked and barred like the rest. The Widower said, “Don’t bother. I’m the only one who can get us out of here.”

She said urgently: “Boss?”

“Hold steady, Starr,” said the Widower.

She spared a glance for Lucille. One ghoul versus a hundred men with guns was no contest. It was like a shark going through bait. You could barely see her. You could see where she’d been a heartbeat before—a cloud of red mist—you could see where she was going, when a man suddenly exploded outward. It took every ounce of control she’d ever possessed to stand there, gun drawn, unmoving. Her hands burned. Her mouth was slobbering. She kept having to angle up one shoulder to wipe her lips like a bib.

Charleston gabbled, “Twenty thousand and peace if every guy in here walks free with me.”

“Let me think about it,” said the Widower.

“God damn you, Carol, if I go down, you’re coming with me, and I’ll probably get into heaven for it.”

Charleston slapped her gun away from his face. She hadn’t ever intended on using it against him anyway, not really. She was so surprised that she let him do it, but she cried out in warning. The Widower was up on her feet and had drawn a big black semiautomatic pistol from somewhere. It was too late. Lucille had heard the cry: from that seething mass of human prey, she bounded up in a single effortless leap into the balcony box. The ghoul was red all over: hair, skin, teeth, sequins.

She thought that was the end of it—of anyone human in the box, anyway: but Lucille went for Charleston. There was a muzzle flash and a strong smell of cordite. Then he was ripped to meaty shreds—mustache, hard face, gun, and all, spraying blood all over the box. One of his braver guys was cracking off shots at random. The rest were throwing themselves out of the box like men from a burning building—screaming down into the bloody, meat-strewn darkness of the club.

She tried to get between Lucille and the Widower. The Widower roughly shoved her aside. Lucille squatted down and fed for a while. When she looked up, redly, from her meal, her dull eyes were keen and shining. She was bulging with human meat. Fresh human blood dripped like lipstick from her mouth. It would already be digesting inside her.

“Fabulous work, honey,” said the Widower.

“Oh, go fuck yourself,” snapped Lucille. Then she dipped her head back to feed.

THE WIFE

There was no way Lucille could leave the club once the doors were barred. The men who unlocked the door for the Widower and herself were paid a grand on the spot and given a month’s holiday. One of them threw up. The Widower took her directly to her study without bothering to get either of them hosed down. The Widower poured them each a brandy without asking, then sat down at her desk chair. She sat, too, and knocked back the brandy in one hit. She needed the blood out of her mouth.

“You did well by me back there, Starr. Don’t you worry. She’ll try to eat too much—eyes bigger than her stomach. Forty minutes to an hour and she won’t even be able to move,” said the Widower.

She said—

“And then I . . . euthanize her, ma’am?”

The Widower’s eyebrows went right up.

“Pardon?”

Her hands burned like liquid fire inside her gloves. She tried to sound reasonable.

“She’s drunk human blood. She’s eaten human meat. All fresh, all live, her own kills.”

“Sure she did—the only reason you and I got out alive, my girl,” said the Widower. “She was in full control by the time she got to you and me. I banked on it. She never did like Charleston Taggart. He’s right; she was a chorus girl when he met her . . . or that’s what he took her for, anyway. Patronized her senseless. I gambled that she’d want him dead first. But she likes you . . . and she’s got a soft spot for me. Push that glass over and I’ll give you a refill. This is good brandy.”

She pushed the glass toward the Widower. It gleamed next to the brass nameplate. CAROL L. P. WIDDENER.

“The L is for Lesley,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“And the P’s for Petronella,” said the Widower. “Damn stupid if you ask me . . . three whole names and only one I ever liked to hear.”

“‘Lucy and Lesley,’” she quoted. “‘Love endures.’”

“Or so I thought—at the time,” said the Widower. “Oh, something endures, but love doesn’t.”

“That meal’s not going to leave her system in a hurry. I can put her down cleanly now she’s overfed.”

“I’m paying you good money to get Lucille through this, Starr,” the Widower said, “so get her through it. I’m not ready to give her up yet. The Charlies will be telling this story for the next hundred years.”

She said, “You left some of your own inside that club. The orchestra. The backstage crew.”

“If they didn’t get out, they didn’t get out. They were a rotten orchestra anyway.”

The Widower knocked back her brandy. Then she said: “You’re wondering what type of woman keeps her own wife around as a ghoul. I do. Like I said, I’m not ready to give her up yet . . . I’m not finished with her yet.”

She said, “Are you still sentimental?”

The Widower swirled the liquid around in her glass. “Not so much anymore. The clean rules are always the best rules, Starr. Someone smacks you in the puss, you smack them in the puss. Someone hurts you and gets away with it, you write down their name, you keep that list . . . you let ’em know that you never forget an injury—or a favor. The guys like that kind of law. They know where they stand. I’m not capricious. No, Lucy . . . Lucille . . . she’ll stay with me until I get my pound of flesh back. Now she gets to eat lizards all day and doesn’t know her left tit from her right tit.”

The Widower knocked back the second measure of brandy. So did she. It was impossible to make her mouth taste clean. And the blood was on her clothes—the Widower’s clothes.

She said, “What did she do?”

“Broke my trust. That’s all you need to know, Starr. I don’t trust too easily . . . so it hurts when I’m hurt.”

Silence blanketed the study. She felt sick. The Widower looked at her sympathetically and said, “I need you on deck for when Lucille goes belly up, Starr. Go get a shower and a cot, take half an hour. I’ll send one of the boys to rouse you when she gluts. You showed grit this evening. But you’re not going to send my best dancer to the knacker’s yard just yet. Get out of here.”

She stood up, mostly on automatic. The shower would be good. The hot water would be good. She pushed her chair in, and then before she got to the door, she stopped. She watched the Widower pour herself another drink.

She said, “Why did you make her a ghoul?”

The Widower stared at her in very real amazement. She set down the brandy glass.

“I didn’t make her a ghoul, Starr,” she said. “She went out and got infected herself.”

“Nobody would infect themselves.”

“She did. True as I live. Got dirty blood, injected it right into the base of her spine. Always knew she was clever—didn’t know she was that clever. Or that crazy. Lucy lived through the fever, began the change after a week.” The Widower stared into the glass. “Believe me or not, Starr. I wouldn’t have infected Lucy. It wasn’t my way. Sometimes I think I’d let her go if she just told me what she’d been thinking.”

THE PARTNER

She took the shower that was on offer. Not the nap, though. Instead she asked for one of the zip-up coal-shoveler’s suits, the kind with a gas mask. They gave it to her. They would’ve given her anything so long as she agreed to be the one who went in there. She suited up and went in.

It was hell on earth. Dead men had been left where they fell. Some of them were half-eaten. Some of them were untouched. She did her damndest not to look. The alcohol had taken a little bit of the edge off, but not enough. Two bottles wouldn’t have been enough. She found Lucille stretched out under a table, looking like a python who’d swallowed an antelope. She picked her up by her feet and dragged. Lucille didn’t object. She dragged her all the way back up onstage in a bloody red streak, then manhandled the trapdoor until it opened again. This time, she got down into the narrow elevator with Lucille, pulled the trapdoor shut, and set it to go.

The ghoul was still unconscious or digesting by the time they got all the way down. Or playing possum. She didn’t care. It was far enough away from that bloodbath that she felt she could peel off the gas mask. At the bottom she rolled Lucille’s distended body to the steel grating where her live food was meant to go. A hose-down surface. She bound Lucille’s ankles together with steel cord—that would stop her for a good minute or so. This was going to be the worst part of the job. She stared at Lucille’s middle.

She had her knives. This would be easy and merciful. She withdrew one and tested the blade.

“Amy,” said Lucille. Her eyes were still closed. She sounded dazed. “Oh, Amy. You took your sweet time in bailing me out . . . and now you’re too late.”

She let her knife fall.

“Go to sleep, Lucille. You’ve done enough.”

“Cleaning up after Lesley. Always cleaning up after Lesley. I didn’t mean to do any sweeping for Lesley . . . now look at me.”

Human meat. At the end of the day, it was always the human meat that did it. If the Widower thought she’d have this ghoul to hold or bind within a month, she was kidding herself.

“You overate,” she said. “If you were really smart, you would have eaten just enough to find a way out of there. But your kind eat . . . and eat . . . and eat.”

“I always bit off more than I could chew, Amy.” Her eyes still weren’t open. “I can’t help it anymore. I never get the good stuff . . . Amy . . . Amy. How long’s it been now?”

How to answer?

“You tell me.”

“I can barely count most of the time. Feels like a day since I lost it all . . . feels like a thousand years.” Lucille coughed. Then she gagged. “I couldn’t give you numbers.”

“The Widower said you did this to yourself.”

A long silence. Then the ghoul said, “Lesley lies like a two-dollar watch.”

“Is she lying about this?”

“No.” Another wet cough. “Amy . . . when you’ve been around these people as long as I was . . . when you go this deep . . . you stop thinking we can make a difference. You start to realize that we’re nothing . . . that the Widowers of this world come out on top and nobody can stop them. Look at this place.” Another deep, racking cough. “Look at the money. Look at the guns. Look at me . . . it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to take care of little old me. Oh, Amy . . . this is just a game of cops and robbers . . . and the cops always lose. You know that, don’t you? Cops always lose. That’s the secret . . . robbers win . . . cops lose.”

A cold trickle went up and down her spine like a funfair ride.

“In my short experience, they’ve got a lot of the power on their side,” she said.

“I know you think that. I know you’ve got to think that. But you don’t, Amy. You have diddly-squat. I bet you’ve been sent in to call the strike team. That’s what I’ve been waiting for. Go ahead . . . call the strike team on Tarleton. Lesley will send them back in five hundred little blue boxes.” An anxious groan. Lucille’s hands flew protectively around her middle. “That’s fine. I’ve been waiting on that. I can gamble too. That’s how I got Lesley. I gambled . . .”

“You married her.”

“Anything for the job, Amy. That’s what you used to say. ‘Anything for the job.’ Yes, I married her . . . she wanted to marry me. I fooled her. Well—guess I didn’t, in the end. Oh, Lesley hates cops . . . I fooled Lesley . . . now for the rest of the unit. Now, my backup. Curtain rise. Five, six, seven, eight.”

She said, “Lucy. Why are you waiting on the cops? What are you gambling on?”

A frown rippled over Lucille’s bloodied face. She groaned again, more fretfully. She said, “That’s wrong. Why can’t I remember? Need to digest this stuff . . . why can’t I remember? That’s wrong.”

She squatted down to the floor. She kept her knife in her hand.

“Lucy,” she said. “Tell me about the gamble. Tell me about the cops and the robbers.”

“It’s wrong . . . it’s wrong . . . only do so much,” said the ghoul. “Too many rules. We never learn. Just break it if it looks too hard. Have to wait until the right moment . . . what can we do, against crooks like Lesley? Nothing . . . only human . . . that’s my manifesto, Amy . . . cops lose because . . . we’re only human. That’s why . . . I want all the feet you have . . . every squaddie . . . every copper . . . changed. Made stronger. It would give us a fighting chance . . . this is the next stage, Amy. We keep up . . . or we’re left behind.”

“You were undercover,” she said. “You were undercover too.”

The ghoul didn’t have anything to say to that. She just massaged her belly and grimaced.

“Lucy,” she said. “Lucy, you’re wrong. Just let them be. Let them be human. Who the hell would they eat, if you pulled that off? You’re crazy. You’ve been cooped up in here too long.”

“That’s it,” Lucille murmured. “That’s what’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong? Clear your brain. Think. What’s wrong?”

“You,” said Lucille. “You never call me ‘Lucy.’ You always called me ‘Luce.’ Amy and Luce . . . Detective Amy Starr . . . Detective Luce West.”

Those bright eyes snapped open. The pupils tracked swiftly, like the snake’s. Even in cuffs Lucille was fast. An arm curled out around the back of her knee, before she could step clear, and the ghoul said: “But you smell like her. You smell like her and something else. It’s coming from your—”

She kicked Lucille back out of the way. Lucille sailed like a football and bounced off the wall like one too. At the moment she was damn near the right shape for it. The ghoul squealed with indignation, not pain: probably nobody had kicked Lucille like that since she had stopped being Detective Luce West. Lucille lay in a struck heap. She crossed over to her, squatted down, and took a breath. This would be the hardest part.

The best way to do it would be to not focus on it. She thought about ice clinking in glasses of water as she made the first incision. Lucille gurgled with mirth; she apparently found the knife in her gut cute. Then the ghoul joined the dots—a smart girl, after all—and shrieked, and reached out to swipe with those long, long claws. She caught the ghoul’s wrist with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife. It took a great deal of strength to hold off that grip—Lucille could rip through steel the way she was now—but she didn’t need to hold it for long. It was already too late. She tossed the knife and went in glove first.

On a human being you could use syrup of ipecac. On a ghoul, you had to use your hands. She focused on the glasses of water, on the ice clinking, on anything other than the sight and the smell of Lucille’s previous meal. It came out fine—it wanted to come out: Lucille’s distended stomach was coping, but a lot of it was solid matter and undigested bone that hadn’t busted apart all the way in her pulverizer of a maw. Lucille was as angry as a kicked beehive and as impotent as a bottled spider. She pinched the slit in the ghoul’s stomach closed—it would seam up by itself, especially as Lucille had gotten to digest a whole inch of the good stuff—and didn’t bother with the slit in the belly. Instead, she kicked the ghoul away and got the hose.

That was what foxed Lucille in the end. The ghoul watched her with those dead, calculating, detective’s eyes, the same sort that stared back from her own scrap of mirror every morning. Lucille watched in aghast disbelief as she hosed all the meat, all the slurry, all the bones down the big garbage grate all the usual trash went down.

“You dummy,” she slurred. “You dummy. Why? You dummy.”

“What do I look like—a baby bird? I don’t want it,” she told Lucille.

Lucille whined, “Why? You dummy. You dummy. It’s the good stuff. It was mine.” And: “You look like Amy.”

She hosed the soup of part-digested Charlies down carefully into the grate, then hosed it down again. There couldn’t be one smear of blood—one particle of bone—one gelid blob of organ. She stood over the grate and held her thumb over the hose so that it sprayed what was in the grate all the way down, away from scent or reach. Then she shut off the water and turned around.

Lucille was watching her carefully. More cop in her eyes than predator—a cop in this world was a poor kind of predator at the end of the day—but in a couple of days, she would burn through the human meat and get stupid again. More stupid, in fact, due to all the overeating. If you ate too much, your system got overexcited—opened all your pathways ready to soak in the rich nutrients of human food. Lucille didn’t know enough to starve herself just enough to make use of what she was given.

How could she ever? She was just a shark in a birdcage.

“Call the cavalry,” said Lucille. “Call them all, Amy. Bring them in.”

She crossed to the cage. She fished a key out of her pocket and let herself through—barred the door carefully behind her. Lucille said, “Call them on Lesley. Someone call them on Lesley . . .”

“You know what I got told when I came here?” she said. “‘Don’t make it personal.’”

Lucille didn’t answer; just looked at her through filmy eyes.

“You made it personal,” she told Lucille. “It’s a very human thing. I don’t think you make a good ghoul.”

The ghoul before her chuckled wickedly. There was nobody on the other side to pull the lever on the barricade door, so she had to inch it up herself with bare hands, just enough so that she could wriggle out beneath, the ghoul behind her chuckling the whole time. As the door slid closed again, the chuckles damped down to hisses, and the hisses into whimpers of “Amy . . . Amy . . . don’t let the bastards get you down, Amy . . .”

Away from the meal and away from the mess of Charlies and Lucille, she let herself collapse down in the steel corridor and press her face to the studded metal until all the animal feelings passed. Then, because she felt she ought to, she went to see what had come of that goddamn snake.

Cleanup was going well in the club. She hadn’t been obliged to take part. The Widower shed money like water, paying the cleanup crew a hundred an hour, and there were people marching in and out with plastic sacks of body parts trying to think as hard as they could about those hundreds of dollars. Nobody paid any attention to what she did. The snake she located in a corner backstage, looking sullen and ill at ease with itself, as all snakes did.

The Widower called her into her office the following evening. She seemed satisfied with herself and the world. She poured each of them a brandy and bemoaned the cost of new carpets for the club. “Because the old ones aren’t worth the name now,” she said. “All right, Starr—make a wish, and I’ll see if I can’t grant it. I reward loyalty every time I see it, and I see it in you. I hate traitors, but I love loyalty an equal amount. What’ll it be?”

She didn’t have to think about it. “A night off.”

“Take two. But that’s peanuts, my girl. Come on—a big house? There’s beautiful rooms in my wing that I’d be happy to give you. Hot and cold running water, lounge, two bedrooms, a bathroom you could play football in. The late Mrs. Widdener did the deco, so it’s hideous. But for you I’ll even say yes to new paint and all her gimcrack out the door.”

“I’d like to ask you a question,” she said.

The Widower took a long swallow of brandy. Today’s carnation was the color of sugared orange peel. “Sounds expensive,” she said.

“Did you know Lucy was an undercover cop before you married her?”

The Widower set the glass of brandy down. She folded her arms. She leaned over them. Her eyes were colder than ice and paler than water.

“No,” she said coolly. “I thought she was a dancer. I knew she had secrets. But I would never—ever—marry a cop, not knowingly. Do you know what the law is, Starr?” The Widower did not wait for a definition. “The law is an impotent bitch. She’s no use in this world, but she won’t retire gracefully. Now she just throws her weight around . . . tantrums . . . rips things to shreds when she can’t get her own way . . . The law’s a ghoul. And cops make me sick. They make me crazy in my head. Imagine if I found you were a cop, Starr . . . you, who pulled a gun for me last night . . . you, who I have taken into my house and fed and watered. Well, I would have a right to feel sore, wouldn’t I?”

“I’m not a cop, ma’am,” she said.

“You have an honest face, Amy Starr,” said the Widower.

“I know,” she said—and the Widower laughed, shortly, abruptly. The laugh of a woman who took no more pleasure in jokes.

She said to the Widower: “I want you to let me put down Lucille.”

“No,” said the Widower.

“I’m pleading with you,” she said. “It’s not right. Please, ma’am.”

“Keep your secrets, Starr,” said the Widower. “Keep your gloves and your troubled eyes and your long knives. I can see why Danny Keith’s moll lovergirled over you. Oh, if I’d been thirty with your sweet, tortured face, I’d have never made it in this business—I’d still be beating off women with a stick. But take a night off—take a house—and I’m keeping Lucille. You’re dismissed.”

The Widower turned away from her. So she stood up, and put her hat back on her head, and walked away from the bitter old gangster with her sweet-orange carnation. At the doorway, though, she stopped.

“Danny Keith’s girl didn’t lovergirl me,” she said. “She told Danny to let me go. Said I terrified her. Said I was creepy—something was off.”

The Widower looked up.

“Now, why do you think she thought that, Starr?”

“Saw my hands,” she said. “I’m sorry you won’t reconsider Lucille, boss. Good day.”

That made up her mind. The next thing on the agenda was calling police headquarters. The call to the Supe didn’t take long. She didn’t even bother to go out into the desert or make any excuses. She simply prised up the floorboards, got out the radio, took out the mummified hand, and worked the fingerprint. This time would be the last time.

“Tier 6,” she said into the mouthpiece.

That was all the code she needed to use to get hold of the Supe. He asked her a few questions, and she answered them. The last one he asked was:

“How quick can you get off Tarleton, Starr?”

“Sixty minutes. But you’re going to need to wait until we undock from Fort Nassau. Or you’re going to hit Nassau.”

“We’ll only be in position in three hours. Two and a half, maybe, if the red tape cuts as quickly as I think it will. A Tier 6 will get them moving.” A labored sigh. “A bad business start to finish, Starr. Any sign of . . .”

She thought she knew the answer this time.

“Detective West?”

“Thought you’d never say her name. Well?”

“Burned, sir. Got in too deep with the Widower. Blew her cover. She went in as the Widower’s squeeze, and then the Widower found out—don’t know how.”

“Oh, goddamn it, West! What a waste! Talk about flying too close to the sun. I suppose she’s dead?”

“Yes,” she said, truthfully.

“Don’t worry, Starr. We’re going to burn that piece of shit to the ground. Get out of there as soon as you can—I don’t need you on the ground. Then come back to HQ. The higher-ups are going to want to put you through the wringer. I’m sorry about that too. But at least you’ll be home.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me a bell when you’re clear.”

“Yes, sir.” Some electrical impulse deep within her prompted her to ask—

“Did we seem close, sir? Me and Luce West?”

He sounded puzzled. “Sure. That’s why I’ve let you run around without a partner. Didn’t want to saddle you with a replacement. God, that I lived long enough to see Luce West laid low by some two-bit crook like Carol Widdener . . . ! It’s a rotten world, Starr.”

“People keep telling me that,” she said.

She put the receiver down—for the last time. She stuffed it back under the floorboards. But the hand she kept.

She told some of the guys to prep the snake, to get the service rig ready so that she could catch a lift down to the dunes and set it free. That was the one thing she was looking forward to, setting that snake free. She thought about getting to watch it slither off into the sand dunes and get well shot of Tarleton. It seemed a shame to keep a thing like that in a cage. Not when it could just as well survive outside.

Then she got her traps together and went down to see Lucille. There were two guys in the corridor, watching her uneasily. She was sorry that she had put the wind up the Widower.

“It’s your night off, Starr. Boss says go enjoy yourself,” one said.

“Show your heels, Starr,” said the other.

She was sorry—genuinely sorry. But it was convenient, when all was said and done. She got rid of the two rat-rifle goons with no fuss, no mess, and she went to work on them with her knife. She was aware of the clock ticking. She removed a good hunk off one of them, then hesitated. She was too tired. She found herself cramming the red-hot chunk of flesh into her mouth, swallowing without bothering to chew. If she had been one of the stupid ones, she would have kept going. It tasted like what she thought a long, cool drink of water must taste like to a parched man: sweet and wonderful. But you only rinsed your mouth until sundown. She wiped her chin on one of the other guys’ jackets, then went inside with another hunk cut for Lucille.

Lucille was sulking in front of her dresser. She wasn’t playing around with lipstick or sequins: she was just sighing at her face in the mirror. She rose just like a normal human woman when she got barged in on. The ghoul stared at her as she unlocked the mesh door. She threw the dripping chunk of human meat, slow and underarm. Lucille caught it in midair. A morsel like that she made two mouthfuls of, even after her earlier binge. Lucille didn’t know any better than a cat.

“Why?” she said thickly, talking with her mouth full. “Why, Amy, why? Why Amy? Why was it Amy? Why did you pick Amy? Why?”

She decided to answer the first question, not any of the others.

“I wanted you to have a decent last meal,” she said.

Then she hit Lucille as hard as she could on the back of the head.

THE SNAKE

She went down in the service rig with the cage and her knives, nothing else. The guys on deck looked at the snake and the heavy bundle in the snake cage and decided not to look any further—the snake was awake, and annoyed. She held on to the edge of the cage and waited as they lowered her down—down—down the huge metal bulk of Tarleton’s sides, down past those caterpillar treads standing as tall as a five-story building. The reek of oil and hot machinery hit her like the smell of the ocean. It was overpowering. You breathed in the fug of the town like air.

She lit a cigarette and smoked it, without inhaling, all the way down. She didn’t like to inhale—didn’t need to—but she liked the smell of burning tobacco more than she liked the loud smell of wheel oil. At the bottom she crushed it beneath her boot and went about getting the snake cage free.

The snake cage she dragged into the dunes. Not far from Tarleton, but far enough. Time was beginning to weigh on her. She kept looking up to the sky. She knew cops now; she doubted they would wait for Tarleton to decouple from Fort Nassau. Nobody waited when they were scared. She was a little sorry, but more than sorry she was sick of the whole damn thing. The only relief she got was opening the snake cage. The snake cringed away from her at first but then peeked out of its cage, tongue flicking, and tasted freedom. It slid off hastily into the dunes.

She watched it go. Then she took the blanket-wrapped bundle out of the snake cage and put it over her shoulder. She headed off after the snake—snakes had good instincts—and walked, pacing herself. She kept pausing to look up at the calm blue sky. There was no sense being in the area when the missiles hit.

“Amy,” said the bundle over her shoulder. “Amy.”

She stopped, stooped, and let the bundle fall. It unwrapped like a present to reveal Lucille—looking stupid in the sand with her ripped-up bit of dress and old makeup smears. Her dark hair was falling in thick tendrils over her face. If you squinted, you might think she was just a woman.

“End of the road, Lucille,” she told her. “Tarleton’s about to go up like the Fourth of July.”

Lucille just stared at her.

“Did you hear me? Scat,” she said brutally.

“I don’t understand you,” said Lucille eventually. “I thought I understood . . . what I was. But I don’t understand you, Amy . . . no, you’re not Amy. You look like Amy, but you’re not Amy. You smell like Amy, but you’re not Amy. I don’t know what you are . . .”

She didn’t bother to answer. She shrugged herself out of her coat instead, and she tossed it to Lucille. “You need to learn how to survive,” she said. “Don’t just eat human meat all you want. You’re never going to have a steady diet of it—not for long, anyway. Eat a little when you can. If you have to make a kill, just make a kill and go. Learn how starvation feels. You’ll get smarter when your digestion stops going up and down like a yo-yo. And forget this mass-infection idea. It’s a crock.”

Lucille stared at her.

“Why did you kill Amy Starr?” she asked her in an almost-normal voice.

“That’s a secret.”

“Why? Why keep secrets now?”

“Why keep secrets at all?” she said. “It’s a habit. Not just a human habit, either.”

Something in Lucille’s face made her think of the woman she’d never met—of Luce West, not a dancer-turned-gangster-turned-wife-turned-ghoul.

“I got hungry,” she admitted. “I needed a new face and a new body. It wasn’t personal. I didn’t know she had this much . . . baggage.” Lucille remained silent. She found herself saying, “I roll with the punches. It’s what I do. I come down into the cities. I stop the things like us from taking it too far. I stop everyone from taking it too far. It’s not a mission of mercy. It’s just what I do. I hoped Amy Starr would carry me where I needed to go.” The ghoul was still silent. Thinking. Even more stupidly, she said: “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Lucille said, “You make me sick.”

“You were undercover. I’m undercover.” She found herself saying: “It’s a hellish world.”

“She was a good cop,” said Lucille—Luce—distantly. “I don’t think she’d have screwed up if she’d been in my shoes. Amy . . . Amy. Good cop . . . good woman. I wished you were Amy . . . hoped you were Amy.”

She looked at Lucille and rummaged around in her knapsack. She took out the preserved hand and tossed it to her. The ghoul picked it up and stared at it.

“Kept it to work the radio,” she said. “I never get to have their hands—damn things never fit me.”

To illustrate, she peeled her dirty gloves off. They stung in the dry desert air. She watched Lucille take in the mottled skin—the glitter of the claws. She watched as Lucille held the dry old hand of Amy Starr to her cheek, like a little girl with a comfort blanket.

“Learn to survive in the wild, or die,” she told Lucille. “You hear me? You wanted a chance, so here’s your chance.”

Lucille’s voice rose to a panicked whine.

“Where will I go? What should I do?”

“Your call. You picked this—you can live with it. Just get out of here,” she said. “I’m sick of people, and I’m sick of you.”

“Anything for the job, Amy?” said Lucille. She sounded faintly mocking.

“I’m not Amy.”

“You are what you eat,” said Lucille.

“Oh, cute,” she said. “Very cute.” She turned away from the ghoul. She shaded her eyes against the sun and looked up at the horizon.

Were there faint glowing pinpricks off to the south? Or was it just sunlight off a cloud—or birds?

“After this, I think it’s time to retire,” she said.

If she kept walking, she’d hit the mountains eventually. It would be a ticking clock then to see if she could scale the mountains on what food she’d find there. Slim pickings, probably. But there was a chunk of human meat in her stomach to keep her going for a while. She knew how far just a chunk could get a body. Eating at Danny Keith’s had got her all the way to Tarleton. Beyond the mountains, the plateau. And beyond the plateau, the woods . . .

She started walking.

After about fifty paces, she heard someone following along behind.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Vicki Bailey of VHBPhotography

Tamsyn Muir is the New York Times bestselling author of the Locked Tomb series. Her first book, Gideon the Ninth, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and the Crawford Award, and her work has also been shortlisted for the Nebula Award and multiple Hugo Awards.