Wrong Side of Dead by Meding Kelly

Author:Meding, Kelly [Meding, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780345525802
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

8:15 A.M.

The city’s entire population of gremlins used to inhabit a defunct potato chip factory on the outskirts of Mercy’s Lot, surrounded by other factories both functioning and abandoned. For several square city blocks, you could travel through a veritable boneyard of the industrial age. We even had an old ironworks-turned-fancy restaurant on the Black River, where iron and steel were once shipped south during a very different time period.

Almost two months ago, Gina Kismet had convinced the gremlins to move to a new factory, and then promptly tried to blow me up in the old one. I survived (barely), and the gremlins had brand-new digs near the docks to nest in and fill up with vats of their alcohol-like piss. Why they saved it, instead of just peeing on the ground, was way beyond me. The new factory was larger than the old one—longer and narrower, about four stories with lots of papered-over windows, and a tall chain-link fence surrounding it, complete with razor wire on top.

Baylor parked alongside the fence, on the factory’s river side, near what had once been a gate and guard hut. He climbed out and walked into the hut. With his van door still open, I could hear him say “Ballengee be blessed” to someone. It was a familiar greeting.

The gate buzzed, then hummed with electricity. It rolled sideways along a track I hadn’t noticed, giving us entrance.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. It seemed the gremlins had learned to use technology to their advantage rather than simply destroying it in service of chaos.

We drove across a narrow strip of parking lot. A garage door opened in the side of the factory, and Baylor took us right inside the building. The interior was dim, lit only by the natural light filtered through the covered windows. The majority of the open factory stretched out to our right, blocked by a wall of … well, stuff. Boxes and metal siding and old tables all stuck together like the world’s most bizarre honeycomb.

“Everyone but Evy stay inside the van,” Baylor said.

I got out first, and was struck by the familiar and nauseatingly gross odor of gremlin piss. It smelled like too-sweet liquor left to warm in the sun—or in the baking factory, in this case. Maybe gremlins liked heat, I don’t know, but summertime and the lack of working air-conditioning combined to make sweat break out across my face and neck.

The noise came last. Thousands of scurrying feet and raspy, high-pitched voices speaking a foreign language of their own design. It was raucous, and it echoed in the cavern that was their new home. I wanted out—now!—but held my ground.

Baylor and I unloaded six boxes from the back of the van—four cheesecakes and two boxes of jelly-filled do-nuts. Gremlins lived on an entirely sugar-based diet, and providing sweets was the best way to curry a favor. We placed the boxes in a row near the three-foot hole that tunneled through the city-dump wall. It had to be their front door.

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