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The King of Crows raised his arms, and with it, his voice. “Can you hear our humble wagons rumbling across this great nation? I will call them forth—a Manifest Destiny of the Dead.”
The dust and clouds peeled back, forming a hole, as if the world itself were splitting open into a giant mouth ready to devour everything in its path. All they could see was a stretch of darkness, and inside a glimmering: an army of dead, thousands of them, coiled and ready.
A woman burrowed into her husband’s side. “What in the name of heaven…?”
“Hey. Hey, you promised to keep us safe,” the mayor said.
“I promised no such thing. I promised to take your dead from you. And I will. They will join my army. But first, they must feed. How about a little cheer to get us started, hmm?”
The King of Crows pounded his walking stick against the street. “Jamestown. Salem. Sand Creek. Omaha. Monticello. Andrew Jackson. Lorem Ipsum. Rah. Rah. Rah.”
He repeated it, beating the stick faster and faster in time with his words: “Jamestown.Salem.SandCreek.Omaha.Monticello.AndrewJackson.LoremIpsum.Rah.Rah.Rah.”
As a girl, Evie had once spun a shadow lamp faster and faster until the paper-cut images blurred against the light and became one undulating line of shadow. She thought of that now, watching the great wall of dead pouring out of the tear in the clouds. It was as if the dead had slipped off the lamp of the world and were moving with an awful quickness. Driven by an insatiable hunger, they hit the small town of Gideon like unleashed floodwater. They’d been emptied of any moral sense or shared humanity. There was only a burning need to consume and destroy. The ghosts moved with the force and power of a great machine, one consciousness ruling all.
Their noses twitched, or, where there were no noses, their mouths hung slightly open. They were breathing in life, sniffing for prey.
The King of Crows stood in the center of the street with lightning crackling all around him, a conductor directing a discordant symphony.
A man, half-devoured, twitched on the ground, his eyes beginning to lose focus. In horror, Evie watched as a charcoal veining crawled across his body, until he was a dried-out husk. She screamed, and what was left of the man caved in on itself and became a pile of dust. Already, a gray pall climbed up the sides of the houses with their pretty front porches. No one would sit there on a summer’s evening again. The ground cracked open. Broken. Dead. The flowers wilted on their stems. The dead sucked the life force from a mother who still clutched her little boy. But three more of the ghouls descended and ripped the crying child from his dying mother’s arms. Teeth sank into flesh, the sound like a seam ripped viciously apart. The victims screamed when the teeth bit in, when they still thought they had a chance, but once they realized the battle was useless, the shock of that violence—the utter hopelessness—turned their screams to a whimpering gurgle of resignation, and then a terrible empty silence.
“We have to get together!” Evie shouted from the library steps. “We have to fight back!”
“We can’t!” Ling said. “That’s what he wants—if we fight back, we’ll give them our power!”
“We can’t just let them destroy the town!” Sam said.
“Let’s try to form some sort of barrier, then. A shield!” Ling shouted.
> “That one! He has defied me long enough.” The King of Crows pointed a yellowed fingernail at Bill. Two ghouls rushed for him. Bill snaked a hand around the throat of one of them and it fell to dust. Jericho ripped a fence post from a yard and swung it with all the force of his serum-enhanced body. It came down on the soft head of a ghost of a girl, no more than twelve, and her bashed skull skittered across the road and came to rest at the base of a white picket fence. Jericho stared in bewildered horror. He had wanted to be a philosopher. A scholar. The dead girl’s body twitched. The ghostly hands reached up to find an empty neck, and then her atoms blasted apart.
More were coming. Again, he swung. Like a brute. And again. Was this all the world really understood? A creature opened its mouth. Rage. Hunger. A reflex even after death. Jericho hit the dead man until there was nothing left to hit.
“There’s too many of them! We’ll exhaust ourselves,” Evie said. She’d never felt so helpless. “What do we do?”
Theta wished she had salt in her pockets like Miss Addie, and then she wanted to laugh at the idea that salt could protect them from this.
“We have to try something!” Memphis shouted. “Get together!”
The Diviners linked hands and faced the Army of the Dead.
“What now?” Henry asked. “Ling?”
“I don’t know! Why are you asking me?”
“Because you’re the smart one!”
“Think… think of, um, think of, of, of a wave—push them back!” Ling yelled.
Their molecules fused together. Ling could feel their fear combining, too, making it difficult to concentrate. It was like a gas hose come loose, spraying fuel everywhere. They sent a wave of energy buckling fast down the street, bending the buildings inward as if they were made of water instead of brick. The first fifty ghouls flew backward and then apart. The filling station burst into flames.
“We can’t stop them without destroying the town,” Ling said.
“Go again,” Sam said, squeezing Henry’s and Evie’s hands. He pushed his energy down the line before everyone was ready.
“Ahhh!” Ling fell forward, breaking the chain. Radiation burns striped down her left arm. Their power felt unstable. Wrong. A row of houses to their right wobbled.
“We have to do it,” Sam said. “We have to take ’em out.”
