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  She raises a hand toward her face. "Oh."

  The node would take her to the Underworld, if it could. But I'm in control here. I wait until Lissa steps back, and then I reach over and settle my fingers on the rough stone, wincing at the electric shock that strikes my fingers on contact. My teeth clamp shut, and I taste blood.

  The cemetery is gone. I'm in Number Four. And it's not pleasant.

  The air is alive with exclamations: bullet hard. The last thoughts of the dying, before the mind and body scatter.

  There are other Pomps here. Not just Morrigan and Derek.

  The first thing I feel are their deaths.

  Each one smacks against me, and I try to hold onto them, and work through these errant memories. But it's no good. There's nothing there. Nothing of use anyway, merely pain, the unsuspecting howls of the executed. Jesus, I've been lucky to get even this far. For a moment I envy those gone, that it's over for them, that they're not left flailing in the dark. I concentrate, move through the muddy haze of dying minds and then: There are upturned desks, reams of paper scattered around them like the shattered stones of a stormed castle. Mainframes have toppled. And there's blood, every-fucking-where. My heart's doing 160 BPM easy. I almost drop out of the node then.

  There's a man bent over, hacking up blood onto his yellow tie. He's wheezing, "Fuck. Fuck. This is. Oh-"

  Blood crashes in my vision as a bullet makes a crater in his chest. He lifts his head, and there's a moment of recognition, just a moment. The bastard even manages a scowl.

  "Derek," I say. Poor old officious Derek.

  But he's dead; he falls almost gracefully onto the floor.

  There are no answers here. I have to get out.

  Then a head peers over the desk. Morrigan looks over at me, his eyes wide with terror. "Steven, what on earth?"

  "I needed to find out what was happening," I mumble.

  "Jesus, Steven, get away from the Hill!"

  "Who's doing this? Can I-"

  "There's nothing you can do. We're being slaughtered. They hit us hard, more people than we first thought, and at the same time as I called you." He pats his arm, there's a bloody wound there. Shrapnel scars his cheek. "Steven, you need to get moving. Get away from the Hill and keep away from Number Four."

  "I need to get moving? What about you? I can get you out."

  Morrigan scowls at me, the facial equivalent of the stone you'd throw at Lassie to get her to run away.

  "There's a Schism-maybe one of the other regions, wanting to muscle into our space. I don't know, but they're good." He fires a pistol over his desk. Someone fires back; woodchips explode from the table he's hiding behind. "I can't get to Mr. D. He's closed himself off. Don't trust anyone, Steven. Leave your phone on. I'll call you if I can."

  Still, I hesitate.

  "Steven, you will go now! GO!"

  I break contact with the tombstone and reality whoomphs around me. I shake my stinging fingers, my heart pounding in my chest, blood streaming from my nose. Everything's moving too quickly. I drop to my haunches, gulp in air, try and slow my breathing down.

  "Steven? Steven?" Lissa's voice pulls me out of it. I blink and look up at her.

  "We have to get out of here," I say. "Number Four's gone, or soon will be. Morrigan's wounded. He told me to run, that he'd try to get in touch with me. I can't see him making it. Lissa, there was blood everywhere." I peer around the tombstone, careful not to touch it again. There's nothing, just Lissa and her ghost light. "Morrigan thinks it might be one of the other regions trying to take over."

  Lissa glares at the tombstone, as though this was its idea. "That's unheard of. Why would anyone want to shut a region down, Steven? Because that's essentially what a take-over would do. Regional Managers can be ruthless, but that would be stupid, it's too much extra work for no gain. And what about the Stirrers?"

  "Maybe something's changed. Maybe the Stirrers are just taking advantage of the whole thing."

  "No, things don't change that much. You don't understand the system at all if you think otherwise. There's no advantage to a Regional Manager if they take another region. And then there's the increased Stirrer activity. That's been happening for weeks. They're in on it, somehow. Mr. D would know."

  I shake my head. "Morrigan's been trying hard to contact him. No luck. Maybe he's in the dark as much as we are."

  "Now you're scaring me," Lissa says.

  "I'm scaring both of us. We have to get out of here."

  Lissa nods.

  "And quietly," I say.

  "I'm dead." Lissa gives me a dark look. "I can't make any noise."

  "I was just trying to remind myself."

  We're as silent as a pair of ghosts as we come down the hill. Easy enough, I suppose, when half of the couple is a ghost. And we're moving pretty quickly, which is why I almost stumble upon them, and why they don't see me.

  And this is the first time my fear turns to something else. No fucking way!

  My parents are weaving around the tombstones ahead.

  Not my parents, just their flesh. They're not moving like Mom and Dad, and that's the oddest part of seeing them. Mom and Dad, my mom and dad, but they're all wrong. The creatures that inhabit them haven't got the hang of the real estate yet. Dad holds a rifle, Mom is speaking into a phone.

  "Stirrers," Lissa says and I roll my eyes at her. Of course they're Stirrers-zombies, I suppose, in the common vernacular. The second part of our jobs as Pomps, the things we're supposed to stop stirring. These aren't your "Grr, brains" zombies. Nah, that shit doesn't happen. These are more perambulatory vessels. My parents aren't infected or blood crazy; Stirrers inhabit them.

  It's the only way that Stirrers can exist in our world. They were long ago banished from the land of the living, but they want back in any way they can. I've heard that if they tip the balance-inhabit enough bodies, get more than a toehold-they might just be able to return in their real form, whatever that is. If that ever happens, we're all screwed.

  These aren't my parents. They're just the place of death. My parents have gone over into the Underworld.

  I'm taking it pretty well. My blood is only partially boiling, I'm only clenching my fists until they hurt, not until they draw blood. I groan as another soul passes through me, another Pomp. Real pain. Someone is hurling souls at me.

  Normally we're directed to a specific location to physically sight and sometimes touch a spirit. But now, maybe because there are so few Pomps left, or because most of the dead today have been Pomps, they're actually hitting me wherever I am. These are really violent deaths, and they're coming hard and fast.

  Those spider webs are starting to grow more hooks. It's like having a cold, and a constant need to blow your nose-at the start the tissues are soft, but by the end they're more like razors wrapped in sandpaper-except that the razor burn runs through my whole body.

  On top of that I can now sense the Stirrers. And if I can feel them…

  "Shit," Lissa says.

  I do a double-take. I look at Lissa-and then to Lissa. "That's-"

  "Somebody has to pay for this." She covers her face with her hands, but the rage and the hurt radiates from her.

  Stirrer Lissa strides down the hill, away from the tall white spire of the Mayne crypt, talking on a phone. And she's walking toward me.

  "The Hill is compromised," I say at last.

  "No shit, Sherlock," Lissa says, and I'm already backing away. There's a distant clattering sound, like someone hurling ball bearings at a concrete wall.

  Great, we're being shot at. It's my dad with that rifle. He fires again. I wait for the bullet to hit me, but it doesn't come. His aim is out, still not used to the body, I suppose. A tombstone a few meters away cracks, exhaling shards of dirty stone.

  "Run," Lissa yells, and once again, I'm sprinting.

  8

  Two blocks away from the cemetery, after a dash through suburbia-streets filled with jacarandas dripping with blooms, and with enough cars parked on th
e road that we have some cover-we come across a bus shelter.

  Miracle of miracles! There's a bus pulling in, on its way toward the city, but I don't care where it's going, I just need to be heading somewhere that isn't here. I'm on it. It's the first time in my life that a bus is exactly where and when I want it. With what little sense of mind I have left, I realize I still have my pass and I flash it at the driver. He looks at it disinterestedly, and then I'm walking to the back of the bus, past passengers all of whom assiduously avoid eye contact. Ah, the commuter eye-shuffle. I must look a little crazy. I certainly feel it.

  I'm breathing heavily. Sweat slicks my back, and is soaking through my jacket. It's only the middle of spring but the air's still and hot. For the first time in about an hour I'm aware of my body, and it's telling me I'm tired, and hung-over. The adrenaline's not potent enough to keep that from me forever. Sadly, I feel like I could do with a beer.

  Lissa looks as fresh as the first time I saw her, if you discount the bluish pallor. You're never fitter than when you're dead.

  Finally we've time to talk with no rifles firing.

  "So why are you back there? And how?" I ask beneath my breath, but it still comes out too loud. People turn and watch.

  "That's not me!" Lissa is furious, and I can understand. I wouldn't want someone wandering around in my body, either. But I'm also wondering why she's so worried. Worry's a living reaction; it's not like she needs that body. She is acting most unlike a dead person, but then she has from the start. "That's not me," she says again. "Don't you dare think of that as me."

  I raise my hands. We're tripping up on semantics here. "Your body… Why was your body back there?"

  Lissa looks out the window. "I–I don't know. Whoever's doing this is using Number Four and shipping Stirrer-possessed Pomps around via the upper offices. And they're using my body. Shit, shit, shit."

  I really want to hold her and tell her that this is going to be OK, but I can't do either, because I really don't believe it, and the Lissa I might possibly be able to hold without pomping is behind us somewhere, and she would kill me without hesitation.

  This relationship is complicated.

  "The upper offices? Can you really do that?" I think about Number Four, and those labyrinthine upper floors.

  "You can if you know what you're doing. It's dangerous if you're not an RM, but people do it from time to time-saves on airfares. I've heard that you can enter any one of Mortmax's offices through them. It's probably how the Stirrers got into the Brisbane office. They could have come from anywhere."

  "We'll work this out," I say.

  She glares at me. "How, Steve? Just how the hell are we going to work this out? I'm dead. My body's walking about the Hill, inhabited by a bloody Stirrer. It's not enough that I've been killed-whoever is doing this is rubbing my face in it. You were right, as much as I didn't like it, the Hill's the only place we had a chance of finding out what's going on."

  "Which was exactly why it was being guarded," I say. "They knew we had to get there. And my parents were there, too. This isn't just about you."

  Lissa shakes her head. "Who deals with Stirrers? It's freaking insane! You can't deal with Stirrers. They've nothing to offer but hatred and hunger."

  Apparently someone has, and quite successfully. I don't understand it any better than Lissa does. The idea chills me and I'm even more afraid about this whole thing. But at least it explains why Jim McKean was shooting at me. I couldn't work out how I might have pissed him off. There are others with whom it almost wouldn't have surprised me (Derek being one of them) but Jim hadn't made any sense.

  "We just need to keep moving," I say.

  "No point in running." The voice startles me, coming from behind. It's all rather too pleased with itself. I jerk my head around.

  There's a dead guy sitting on the rear seat. He looks at me, and then at Lissa. When he sees her the wind comes out of him. "Sorry, darl," he says, "they got me too, just out of Tenterfield."

  That's it. I'm dead. I don't see how I stand a chance.

  The guy with us is Eric "Flatty" Tremaine, state manager of the Melbourne office, which puts him almost as far up the ladder as Morrigan. He's a friend of Derek's-maybe his only friend-and another paid-up member of the Steven de Selby Hate Club.

  I notice the way he's looking at Lissa, and the way that she's looking back. There's definitely a history there. I catch myself; I'm not going to survive this if all I'm really thinking about is Lissa and her previous relationships. But it does no good. Jealousy, wearing Eric Tremaine's smarmy face, has brought matches and it's lighting them up inside of me.

  "So what's going on, Flatty?" I ask, and for the first time Eric seems truly aware of me, even though my presence must have drawn him here. He gives me a wide, almost manic grin, and slaps his knee.

  "Steven de Selby. Wonderful, so you've managed to stay alive. I wouldn't have put money on it. You never really struck me as the sharpest knife in the drawer."

  "Enough of that," Lissa says. "Play nice."

  "Who's behind this?" I demand. I don't have time for point scoring, even if I am still hunting for some sort of witty comeback.

  Eric shrugs. "I don't know. All I can say for sure is that they're very good at their jobs, and they know a lot about ours." He glances significantly at Lissa. "Why the fuck are you hanging with this loser?"

  "You tried to call Mr. D?" I ask, ignoring the insult. After all, he has just died.

  "Of course I have." Eric nodded. "Line was busy, which makes sense for a couple of reasons."

  "Yeah, everybody would be trying to call," I say. Though, to be honest, I really hadn't thought of it. Thinking about Mom and Dad had been occupying my mind more-that, and the running. Besides, Mr. D is… difficult. I take a deep breath. "Maybe I should try him. Can't be too many Pomps left."

  Tremaine makes an ineffectual grab at my arm-his hand passes through my flesh and he's nearly dragged through me with it. His face strains as he struggles to stay in this world, and part of me can't help laughing at such a basic mistake. I have to respect his strength of will, though, because he pushes against the pomp, his form solidifying.

  "No! You don't want to do that!" he says, once he's managed to stabilize his soul. "I tried to call him just out of Tenterfield. The buggers got me there on the New England Highway. They're obviously using the phones to find us. Please don't tell me you've got yours on."

  "Oh." The blood's draining from my face. I switch off my phone, and then slide it into my pocket.

  Eric gives Lissa an "I told you so" look. His gaze, when it returns to me, is condescension stirred with pity. He doesn't expect me to live much longer, either.

  "You're going to have to talk to Mr. D, but not now," he says. "I suspect he's out of the loop somewhat. He has to be, I can't believe that he'd let this happen."

  "Someone has," Lissa says.

  "Yes, and I have my theories, but they're just theories. Steve, you're going to have to talk to him face to face. Draw him out of wherever he's hiding, or being held."

  "You think he's being held?"

  "He's hardly on a fishing trip now, is he?" Tremaine says archly. "He's too intimately connected to all of us. Every death must be filling him with pain and anger. For something like this to succeed you'd need to remove the RM as quickly as possible, before you start trying to kill Pomps. You know how Mr. D is. He knows when one of us dies, and he's always there. Let me tell you, he wasn't there for me. This has to be an inside job."

  He lets that sink in.

  "Then how am I going to be able to talk to him?"

  "There are ways that can't be stopped. If you know what you're doing." He looks at me.

  I take a deep breath. Maybe I should just pomp the prick. I'm a little threatened by the thought of one-on-one time with Mr. D. I've only ever met him a few times, and they were with my dad.

  "Mr. D's not that bad, really," Lissa says, and I realize that she is almost touching my hand with her own. At the closest po
int her form is wavering. It must be uncomfortable for her, but she holds the position. I'm the one who pulls away in the end. Tremaine gives her a look, and I smile like the cat who got the cream.

  "If you say so. I've just never had much to do with him."

  "Regardless, you're going to-and soon," Tremaine says with all the nonchalance that a recently dead person can muster. "Maybe too soon." He points out the rear window.

  There's my dad's body, driving his red Toyota Echo, not too well, but well enough to be gaining on the bus. But this is the least of my worries because Mom's body is on the passenger side, and she's scowling in a most un-Mom like way and pointing a rifle at me.

  "Shit!" I drop to the floor behind the seat as the rear window explodes.

  9

  There is a carpet of gleaming glass before me. I'm sure I'm breathing the smaller fragments of it into my lungs. It doesn't help that I'm almost hyperventilating. Another shot blasts a hole in the back seat next to my head. I'm feeling like a cartoon character. I know the double-take I give that burning hole, stuffing everywhere, must look almost comical. I'm surprised I haven't shat myself, but of course there's still plenty of time for that…

  The bus driver brakes: all that commutery tonnage comes crashing to a halt and we've got a whole domino effect, of which I'm painfully a part, passengers tumbling and screaming. Then the red Echo slams into the back of the bus. I'm thrown forward onto the broken glass from the window. It's safety glass, but those little beads still hurt when you fall on them.

  Metal screams and I'm yelping as the back seat deforms inward. The rear side windows shatter. There's glass and seat stuffing everywhere.

  The Echo's horn is droning in an endless cycle like a wounded beast, and there's the sharp, stinging odor of fuel. I shake my head. I try to slow my crashing breaths. I want to rub my eyes, but there's no telling what I'd be grinding into them.

  I reckon I've got about thirty seconds, maybe a minute, before they're out of that car. It's going to take much more than a collision with a bus to stop them. There's bits of glass in my hands but no deep cuts; it hurts like a bastard, though, which is actually a good thing since it distracts me from the headache regrouping in my skull.