Mother sees her. Laughs. “Girl, you gonna dress yourself up with skulls and death, you ought to know what it really looks like.” The old woman snaps her fingers and lickety-split Mother Cougar is covered in cats – a whole coat of undead felines crawling up her arms and slinking around the hem of her gown, leaving it wet with a trail of moist decay. “Death ain’t romantic, girlie. It ain’t pretty. It ain’t fashionable. Go on. Get a face-full. Gawk like a tourist!” Another laugh.

It’s then that Skelly turns. Sees how all the other dead are staring. She stops walking as Mother pauses to play with her kitties. Mookie watches as Skelly stiffens. Her hand falls to her knife and rests on the silver skull of the Bowie’s hilt.

“Relax,” Mookie tells her.

“I don’t like being made to feel like a heel,” she whispers. “That old woman is cruisin’ for a bruisin’.”

“Cool it. You start shit here, you won’t find me protecting you. You’ll find me on the other side, hauling your ass out. These folks are dead.”

“Yeah, I got that part, genius.”

“I’m just saying, they got it hard enough as it is without you comin’ in here like one day you won’t be a body in a hole, too.”

That shuts her up. Her hand drifts away from the knife.

Mother shakes herself free of all the cats but one: a lanky black cat that looks healthy until you see the roving stitch-scar that winds across the animal’s body. Toward the belly, the scar is open, and a few bits of what look to be curls of dried potpourri come drifting out. Mookie catches a scent like death and cinnamon.

“These are my best friends,” Mother says. “My babies. I find them up top sometimes – hit by cars or beaten to death by shitty blood-pumper kids or just dyin’ because it’s their time to die. They come to me without me asking. I bring ’em here and they keep the rat population down something fierce. This one got her back end crushed up by a taxi. Smelled pretty bad for a while, but she’s good now. Ain’t that right, Midnight?” She strokes the black cat behind the ears. “Wooshy booshy kitty witty.” The cat purrs like a guttering chainsaw – a sound too big for such a tiny beast. “Anyway. There’s Burnsy’s house.”

Up ahead is an octagonal structure, the walls of which are wooden pallets woven together with heavy gauge chain and wire. The roof is slate – cracked, busted slate, but slate just the same. Mookie sees sudden movement atop the roof: a scuttling shape, a glistening light on a hardened carapace. A roach-rat. Half-roach, half-rat. Never in the same proportion. This one looks like it’s got a bug’s head and wings perched atop a fuzzy body with a long pink tail.