Dead Girl's Ashes (Dying Ashes Book 1) Read online

  Still dazed, trying to take things one trauma at a time, I pushed myself to a sitting position, rolling over and leaning against one of the brickwork alley walls. It was hard to shake the cobwebs from my mind, at first. All I initially remembered was a dark night, a rough grip, and a brief struggle wreathed in pain and ending in a fiery, dizzying flash that stole my last breath. Quickly, though, those obfuscating webs blazed and burned away, everything coming back to me in a rush of images and raw emotions that I couldn’t hold back. I could only clench my teeth and my fists, waiting for them to pass.

  What… What the hell happened to me? Am I really... Demanding answers from myself would get me nowhere; there were none to give. Not yet, anyway. I put a hand to the wall next to me and gripped the weathered brickwork. Standing was more of an ordeal than I’d expected. My muscles groaned with complaint, tight and wooden as if I’d been immobile for days.

  I powered through it and struggled stiffly to my feet anyway. Somewhere in the back of my head, a little voice was telling me to get up, now, and move. I ignored it. I’d never been particularly good at listening to good advice, even my own, though some part of me was convinced I was still in danger.

  Everything was dimly lit by the first touches of scattered rays from a dirty sunrise just beginning to hint at the horizon, leaving my surroundings couched in stretched, gray shadows. I winced. The early rays of dawn were startlingly harsh, almost painful to my eyes, even as indirect as they were. Have I really been here all night? Or longer? Averting my gaze from the multicolored, lightening skyline, a quick glance around found me still where my murderers had left me, still the same narrow, dirty, dark passage I’d...died in?

  A dumpster, another stained brick wall, a tangle of leaky, forgotten garbage bags, the ambient stink of something dead, and what appeared to be a greasy-looking smear of soot or ashes were the only remaining witnesses to last night’s happenings, and none of them were talking. Apparently, I’d been laying there in leaky, dubious garbage the whole time. Yay.

  Trying to stretch, I found I didn’t ache anywhere near as much as my patchwork recollections from the previous night said I should. I was pretty certain having my ass kicked should hurt a lot more than this. In actuality, I didn’t feel any pain whatsoever, just the persistent stiffness. I’d take that.

  Predictably, I was also drenched in blood from where the side of my throat had been torn out, splattered with far too much of my own red juice for any sane person’s comfort. My always-uncomfortable, faded black work shirt now clung wetly to me, the cracked white lettering, imploring readers to “ask about our new Gyros,” now rendered in an irreversible, horror-movie red.

  Nervously, I touched at my ribs and abdomen, prodding, seeking damage. The stain was wet, sticky, and still damp to the touch. Oh yeah. That’s blood, alright. Probably mine. I didn’t know whose else it could be, after all. My fingers came away tinted red, and I raised them to my face. The cloying, sickly sweet smell of old copper and iron lingered in my nostrils, and forced my stomach to tremble and churn.

  My neck itself was an even more visceral level of disturbing. To my probing touch, the feel of the torn and ravaged flesh was something out of a nightmare; it felt like I’d been mauled by an animal. Or a chainsaw. Hopefully my worries were exaggerating the damage, though, since I couldn’t actually see it. No blood came gushing or even seeping from the jagged laceration; maybe I didn’t have any left. Hell if I knew.

  I felt that urge to move again, stronger now than before, as the pressure behind it continued to mount. My gaze kept returning to the cloudy Birmingham skyline again and again, as the dull rays struggled stubbornly to pierce through the thick cloud cover and permanent haze. How long have I been out? I turned to my trusty, budget smartphone for answers, locating it several feet away where it had fallen from my hand the night before. I found its face sadly shattered, transformed sometime overnight into a ruined webwork of intersecting lines. I dropped it back into a sticky pocket with a frown; I guessed the poor thing hadn’t survived last night, either.

  Maybe Lori can loan me enough to get another one… My heart lurched, startling me as it gave single, potent thump in my chest at the thought of my girlfriend’s name. Lori. What if Cam-Kong had paid her some kind of visit last night, too? My fists curled into tight, angry balls. Was she okay? Was I okay? Was I crazy?

  Thump.

  Everything I was experiencing seemed real but hardly rational. My uncle had gone through PTSD, and he could tell stories of depersonalization that would make anybody cringe. Maybe I was going through something like that. Maybe I was delusional, imagining everything after a traumatic attack.

  Maybe, but I doubted it. I didn’t feel crazy. Would I? At the very least, I was pretty damn sure last night had really happened. I had the bleeding and bludgeoning to prove it, and every moment threatened me with those too-vivid memories of my “final moments” replaying themselves in my mind’s eye. I shuddered.

  Thump-thump.

  I needed answers, and probably help, but with my phone now deceased, I wasn’t going to find either just standing around here. Besides, there was no time to pull myself together; Lori might need me. The rest could come afterward.

  Thump-thump. A steady sound like a heartbeat heralded the man that turned the corner, intruding on and interrupting my thoughts.

  He was heavily tanned, probably in his thirties, sporting short-cropped dirty blond hair and a few long scars across his face, long healed. He was also impressively huge and strong looking, enough to make Cam-Kong look out of shape by comparison. Even so, I started to relax; like my uncle, his digital camo and heavy jacket loudly and proudly screamed “US Army,” so my first instinct was to ask him for help.

  His manner quickly disabused me of that notion.

  3

  Mortal combat

  The freakishly huge stranger took one quick look around, and his eyes locked onto me as if he recognized me. And if the way he stared me coldly down and strode toward me didn’t send chills down my possibly-dead spine, the long, fixed-blade combat knife he drew purposefully from a hip sheath certainly did.

  I’d been mugged before, and this wasn’t how I remembered it going. I backed away, tried to say something, to stammer a question, call for help, anything. But my damaged throat betrayed me, failing to summon anything more than a dry, hoarse croak. He closed the distance in a couple of long strides, matter-of-factly seizing me by the throat. Between my surprise and my stiff muscles, I reacted too slowly to do anything else before he slammed me heavily and bodily into the unforgiving wall, pinning me there with an arm thicker than my thigh. For the second time, I dangled from someone’s outstretched hand; for the second time, thick, strong fingers closed mightily around my throat. I clawed at his forearm with my nails in wide-eyed protest.

  Was this really happening, again?

  Maybe I was in shock. I’d been robbed, I’d been mugged, and as of last night, I’d been beaten to death. And back. Hell, being a small-framed lesbian in a Southern city, I was pretty nervous of guys trying to grab me in the first place. Especially after last night. So, having a pretty good handle on what my reaction should be, I expected to panic.

  I didn’t. No fear for my life showed up to wrest away control of my logical mind, no adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight response triggered. In its place, I felt one thing.

  Anger.

  I was tired of being the victim.

  My assailant didn’t say a word, face impassive and expressionless, lining his deadly-looking combat blade up with my chest with care. Something about the blade made my skin crawl. I raked savagely at his arm with my nails, bringing the sweet scent of blood to my nostrils, but he didn’t wince, didn’t glance at the wounds, didn’t even react.

  That is until a good foot and a half of rusted-looking metal burst from each and every one of my fingers, blood and flesh flying as they shredded his forearm like so much raw meat.

  As his arm lost its strength and his vice-like grip failed, I overc
ame my shock enough to kick off of the wall and plant both feet squarely in his massive chest, snarling defiantly.

  My jaw dropped as the force of my blow tore him off of me like the fist of a wrathful god, slamming him with audible force into the wall opposite me and cracking the old masonry facade. I dropped the few inches to the ground, so startled by the turn of events that I stumbled and almost fell down. I stared in horror at my hands, shards of razor sharp metal claw-things jutting from the ruptured ends of my fingers.

  Then that expression of horror slowly twisted into an unrestrainable, crazy smile. I didn’t know if I was Supergirl or Wolverine, and I wasn’t convinced I cared.

  The bad guy didn’t seem to care much either, though. Army-Frankenstein just picked himself up off the ground like nothing had happened, despite one arm dangling and streaming blood. Uh-oh. I took in the vacant sheen in his eyes, which were still fixated firmly on me, and began to get the feeling that something here was very, very wrong.

  “Um, unless you want a broken phone and a wad of hungry pocket lint, I don’t think this is going to get either of us very far.” I finally managed to get my voice to show itself, hoarse and rough as I quipped, but I didn’t really think he was after my wallet or my lucky charms. Meanwhile, that pounding rhythm of thump-thump-thump assailed me, faster and faster, and that insistent feeling in the back of my mind asserted that I was in growing danger—danger that didn’t seem connected to the mountain of a man in front of me.

  My mystery man gripped his knife tightly in his one working hand and lunged at me. Without thinking, I lurched right back at him with all of the grace of a zombie desperate for brains and shoved him as hard as I could. I don’t know what I expected; I was pretty graceless at the best of times, much less while suffering from rigor mortis or whatever. Anyone with military training should have been able to easily sidestep and dodge me or pull me off balance and send me face first to the floor. But he didn’t even try, and my grade-school takedown hit him squarely in the torso. Hard.

  I barely felt the impact in my own arms as my simple shove flung him through the air, despite the fact that my assailant was approximately seventy times my size. Frankenstein smacked into the masonry again with a gory crunch that probably involved breaking bones, bouncing off the uncaring brick and into the stoic dumpster that had stood its smelly vigil over me the previous night: a flat barrier of sturdy, rusted, impact-resistant metal that he left a significant dent in. With his face.

  But all of that was after he got close enough to slip the knife between my ribs.

  Now that previously-absent fear and fight-or-flight response kicked in; I reeled as the blade of the knife, stuck in my flesh to the hilt, burned my insides like molten lava. None of my rather impressive injuries from the previous night hurt at all, but damn, that little straight-bladed combat knife made up for it and then some. Its presence in my body set off a searing agony that ripped through me, rendering me barely able to think, causing my muscles to tense, and making me want to curl up around the pain.

  Instead of giving in, I growled in stubborn, angry defiance. Resting my back against the wall, I reached for the handle, though I nearly balked at the macabre sight of the plain, brown tactical handle jutting repulsively out of my upper ribs. With a snarl, I slapped my palm down onto it anyway.

  As soon as it touched my skin, the weapon began to burn my hand as if it were white-hot, though my eyes told me it obviously wasn’t. But regardless of what my eyes said, the sensation rippled through me all the same, torment setting my nerves ablaze, buzzing with pain. I could barely hold my grip on the weapon long enough to yank it out and sling it at my attacker.

  I missed, of course; fuckity-stiff, twitching muscles aren’t very useful for aiming. Instead of hitting him, the blade sailed several feet past his shoulder and off into the burning dawn, disappearing somewhere across the highway. I watched it go, my agony receding as the weapon left my flesh and my hand. Well, I thought, nobody's ever gonna see that again.

  Military Frankenstein got back up with a growl of his own.

  I squeaked, a hoarse chirp. I had kinda thought I’d killed him and wasn’t sure now whether I should be happier to be right or wrong about that. My eyes went wide. Regardless of where my new super-strength was coming from, normal people didn’t just shrug off impacts like that…did they? My eyes grew wider still as he turned toward me, and I saw his crunched-in face and smelled the rusty odor of the blood that streamed from his smashed nose, busted mouth, and ravaged arm.

  He staggered and lunged at me again, this time the motion all awkward and twisted. I managed to hop back out of his one-armed grasp, skirting the wall, and slipping past him before he could recover. As he pulled himself up to his full height once more, face contorting in a near-silent mask of inhuman, feral anger. As he towered over me, I panicked.

  I grabbed the bottom of the dumpster with both of my weirdly clawed hands and flipped it over onto him.

  I flipped out a little at the grisly crunch it made when it landed on his legs, audible even with the resounding racket of metal on concrete sandwiched between the alley walls echoing in every direction. Just not enough to wait around and see how intact or capable he still was.

  Instead, I ran.

  I left the dull, increasingly faint thump-thump sounds behind with the potent smell of blood and my mystery assailant, leaving them all to keep each other company back in the alley I’d been assaulted in, twice.

  Meanwhile, the skyline grew pregnant with barely restrained brightness, my vision blurring and burning as it did, with that foreign, feral panic becoming sharply more vocal with every passing moment.

  I took turn after blind turn, winding my way through alleys and across crosswalks at full speed and losing myself in Birmingham’s tangled innards in the hope that if I didn’t know where I was, my attacker wouldn’t either. I wanted desperately to figure out what was going on, why I’d been attacked by another relative stranger with an obvious intent to kill, why I had claws and could flip over a dumpster, but I couldn’t get my mind to focus over the rising sense of urgency. Not that I had shit-all for clues to go on anyway.

  Three people had tried to kill me since last night. I was increasingly certain that one at least had succeeded. I’d be a fool to assign all of that to coincidence, but first, there was someone I needed to check on.

  I staggered gracelessly out of the alley and into a sharp turn, making my way down the still-deserted early morning streets at a breakneck pace, struggling to keep to the barren sidewalk. Off in the distance to my right, the rays of the rising sun grew steadily brighter, shearing across the sky far above my head and keeping effortless pace with me. The brighter it grew, the more my anxiety evolved toward pure terror. After what had happened to me last night and so far today, I found it hard to imagine what greater peril I could possibly be in, but good luck telling my panic response that.

  So I stumbled. I shuffled. I ran. I heard the distant sound of my own feet hitting concrete and pavement as hard and as fast as they could. I was lost, but I didn’t have time to care; I could barely see. I just wanted to find some place that felt safe, then get to Lori and make certain—

  Tires screeched as something hit my legs with terrific force, blasting them out from under me. I thumped and rolled across a white sports car and kept right on running, ignoring the young woman with purple-dyed hair that stuck her head out of the window to yell “Hey!” at me.

  Maybe I’d get lucky and she’d call the police. They’d help, right? I could hope, but I had no idea what to tell them. Yeah, officer, this guy from my girlfriend’s work beat me to death, then a cheerleader ate my neck. Also, a military zombie tried to shank me this morning, but I threw a dumpster at him, so it’s okay. Unfortunately, knowing the people around here, they’d just stop listening at girlfriend, since I was also, you know, a girl.

  I chuckled hoarsely despite myself at my own imaginary scenario, but my mirth burned away as the sky brightened further. I could feel the heat
on my flesh, bearing down on me, even through my clothes. My muscles were stiffening more and more, forcing me to stagger and slow, my strength evaporating.

  I was suddenly so very tired. My joints creaked reluctantly as I made my faltering way haplessly forward. I clutched at whatever walls came into my reach. My blood-soaked clothes clung stubbornly to me, dragging at me, slowing me even further.

  Suddenly, out of my fading vision, the promise of safety appeared, or at least a place to hide and try to recover. A few dozen feet away was a dilapidated storefront, long, tall, sections of weather-worn plywood squares boarding over most of the side facing me. Through the gaps, I could glimpse the black of the interior: dark, cool, and inviting.

  I had to get there. Now.

  Forging ahead half blind, I staggered into a support along the side of the abandoned storefront, bouncing off of it unharmed and stumbling to a halt as I managed to keep my balance relatively intact. My eyes burned, and through my darkening vision I picked out the nearest section of plywood and surged toward it. I used my razor-sharp claws and what remained of my newfound strength to tear away the boards as dawn broke, and searing pain washed over me for the second time today.

  I threw my smoking body through the glass and into the dusty, abandoned storefront, shattering the window into a rain of reflective fragments in my wake.

  The shiny shards tinkled dully to the ground, and I crushed old debris and new shattered glass alike underfoot, tired and utterly drained like I’d never been before. I ventured further into the storefront as my vision struggled to adjust. I wanted to shake off that heavy, bone-dragging weariness. I knew I needed to keep going, that there was something important I needed to do, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

  The knife wound in my side flared and burned intermittently as I staggered to the nearby counter and bumped clumsily into it, a cracked and dusty cash register still crouching on its top like a forgotten idol of the past. I pulled myself carelessly over the barrier, hitting the floor behind the counter and pushing my back up against its solidity, collapsing at last. I lay there limply as the surges of inexplicable, frantic urgency and horror finally gave way to a swell of darkness deeper than any void I’d ever known, save one.