Valentine felt a shove in the back, and he and Mona sprawled on the other side of the wall. Valentine came up to a crouch. The Quislings began to close the gate.
"I might be pregnant. You don't want to lose the baby!" Mona said, clinging to the bars.
A rifle butt came through and struck her in the stomach. She jack-knifed, gasping.
Valentine helped her to her feet. "Let's go".
He looked back at the wall. A pair of heads watched them from the other side.
Valentine picked up a rock and sent it whizzing at the heads, but missed.
"Your buddy's already a quarter of the way to them lights!" someone shouted helpfully.
Valentine pulled Mona down the path. It opened up on what he guessed was another parking lot. The grasses and brush had been cleared here, and Valentine saw buildings on the other side.
"Oh my God", Mona said flatly.
Four figures in a line greeted them, like odd, plasticized mannequins with their skin removed, feet fixed in concrete. Elaborate layers of muscle made their faces a hideous salmon-colored patchwork. Valentine stepped up to one, realized it was a real corpse, covered in some kind of thick, clear plastic. The first one pointed, Uncle Sam-style.
don't be choosy, read a sign cradled in his arm.
The next one was scratching her head. Her sign was on a sandwich board.
PICK A WAY.
GUESS WRONGLY, said the third, its hands on its hips like an exasperated parent.
The fourth pointed to a little empty cement platform next to the others, right here you'll stay.
The parking lot trailed away to a path to the left. In the middle were the buildings, and to the right was another path heading at a ninety-degree angle away from the twin lights, paralleling the wall.
The left path or the buildings both led more directly to the goalposts.
The buildings would be the most dangerous, but there might be something he could use as a weapon there. Valentine tried to sense the Reaper or Reapers, but he was cold and his knee hurt and Mona was pulling him back toward the gate. "I don't like this game. I'm going to throw rocks at them till they shoot me".
"C'mon", Valentine said, pulling her toward the buildings.
"Let go, you bastard!" she cried, falling to her knees. "You're just bringing me so you can throw me into its arms when you see it, so you can get away".
"Suit yourself", Valentine said, letting go. She ran back to the gate.
He smelted the air, searched the buildings with his ears, heard only a clattering wind-chime noise.
Valentine passed wide around a boarded-up building facing the parking lot and into a courtyard. Doors were welded shut or barred with heavy padlocks. Other closed-off buildings, one marked cafe, surrounded what had once been a nice little garden.
While passing through Wisconsin on his way to Lake Michigan, Valentine and his two fellow Wolves had skirted a big old still-occupied farmhouse where the owner liked to make decorations for his yard. Animals, gnomes, old ladies bending over and showing bright-painted polka-dot underwear,
geese with wings that spun in the wind, even old Packer football helmets bobbing on counterweights as the breeze pushed them ...
The courtyard between the buildings reminded him of that farmer's land.
Somewhere or other Valentine had heard the phrase "bone garden". If there was such a thing in reality rather than a metaphor for a cemetery, this was it.
The wind chimes Valentine heard rattling were human skulls, hollowed out with tibiae suspended within to add to the rattle. Wheels within wheels of plasticized human hands, some holding fans, others carefully cupped to catch the air, spun in the November breeze. Skeletons sat on benches admiring winter-dead flowers; at least here the gardens showed some signs of being maintained. Around a table outside the cafe, four skeletons held forks and spoons over fresh, reeking piles of entrails.
Part of Valentine was horrified, another taken by the intricacy of the wiring, another grimly followed a mental train of thought about what effect the Kurians were trying to achieve. He'd heard auras could be "flavored" by the emotional state of the victim. Prolonged terror might add some kind of seasoning to the psychic palate.
The tableau even showed a grim sense of humor. A skeleton stood in the classic Hamlet pose, wearing puffy breeches and a nailed-on feathered cap, holding a fresh-looking human head - it certainly stank like a three-day-old remnant.