She’s seen them. At a distance. The Get-Em-Girls don’t fuck with the Underworld much. Sure, they’ve carved out a few hollows here and there. They use the secret tunnels carved out beneath the city, winding in and out of forgotten subway stations and access passages. Once in a while a lone gobo creeps through the dark or the girls find a pack of them scurrying down some dark alley, but she teaches her girls to stay away. To call in the Organization. Let guys like Mookie handle it.

But she knows what they are. What they like. What they do.

Mookie draws his cleaver.

She bites the inside of her cheek. It hurts. It wakes her up.

Skelly draws her Bowie.

They begin to move. Through the fleeing corpses. The rotten stink coming and going in waves. Burnsy says, “The gobbos have always had a thing for this place. A few sneak around the edges, try to steal us away, God knows why. But they been gettin’ ballsy recently. And coming in bigger and bigger groups.”

Somewhere ahead a gunshot sounds. A shriek. A jabbered, inhuman cry.

Corpse-bodies jostle past.

Through the crowd, fire streaks in a wide arc.

A pop of glass.

A bloom of orange.

“Molotovs,” Burnsy says. “They light the fence on fire. Keeps ’em back.”

They push to the edge of the crowd. The dead gather ahead, some with lit bottles, others with weapons. She sees two clad in old-school Vietnam-era flak jackets. One’s got a chestplate of armor made of soup and soda cans. Covering the arms are drainpipes and downspouts.

Past the houses, Skelly sees more bottles hit against the fence. Plumes of fire belch forth, sweep over the fence – the air warped around it, heat vapor shifting.

A few short, squat bodies clamber over the fence-top – on fire, burning, thrashing – and hit the ground and start running toward Daisypusher. Ten, twenty feet in, the bodies plop forward and stop moving. Still burning.

But then–

The fire starts going out. She hears the sizzle of flames. Something wet spattering.

From the edges in, the fire starts guttering. And failing.

Nearby, Skelly sees a dead woman swaddled in thick rags holding a rifle scope – just the scope, no rifle – to her eye. Mookie marches past and grabs it, takes a look down at the fenceline.

“Ah, shit.”

“What?” Skelly asks.

He hands her the scope.

She peers through – at first she can’t tell what she’s looking at. But then she finds the fire, the last of it – and sees the gobbos on the other side, past the wire, past the bones. They’re… doing something. She sees something dripping from the fence.

More climb on top. That’s when she sees what they’re doing.

They’re opening their mouths.

Something’s pouring out. Geysers of spit or vomit, she doesn’t know. Whatever it is, there’s a lot of it. And it’s putting out the fire.