Dead Mann Walking

19

I didn’t know how long I’d been there when the door clicked open and the rotten, stinking world rushed back into place. Misty stepped in, face wrapped in worry.

“Hess? Can you talk? You’ve got to get up. You have to.”

It was dark out, so I pretended I’d been asleep. “Huh? Whazzat?”

“Jonesey’s here. He’s pretty upset.”

Before I could say a word, Jonesey was halfway inside, pushing past Misty like she was a set of drapes. Things still felt arm’s-length distant, but some habit told me I should keep up appearances in front of a guest. I managed to turn on the lamp. The light hit him under the chin. His head was bouncing like a doggy decorating the back of somebody’s car.

“You look natural,” he said. I think it was a compliment.

“And you look like you’ve seen a . . .” I caught myself. “Never mind. What’s up?”

“Everything.” He took to pacing, and talking too fast for me to follow. “It’s gotten bad out there, right? Big cop presence? But I keep working on the rally, one pamphlet at a time, one chak at a time. It’s happening, too. Really, really happening. I’ve got commitments. One chak talks to another, and those chakz talk to more. It’s like a virus of positive energy . . . and then . . . and then . . .”

I was grateful for the pause. “Is there a point in there somewhere?”

“I managed to get the police to back off a little. The police. To. Back. Off. It was a miracle, a light from the sky, the dove from above. When they saw me in action, defusing tension, getting chakz to cooperate peacefully, I earned their respect.”

I tried not to roll my eyes. “Yeah. And now you’ll be the first chak elected president.”

Making fun made me feel better, but Jonesey wasn’t in the mood.

“Shut up. Don’t talk like that, Hessius. I don’t think I could take it right now.”

“Since when do you call me Hessius? What the hell is going on? Sit down and take it slow, for Pete’s sake.”

He sat down. The change in the angle of the lamp did nothing for his looks.

“Boom, everything goes to confusion. Boom. Out of nowhere, fucking nowhere, like out of the darkness before the world began, this . . . this . . . skeleton shows up and starts tearing things apart.”

At long last, something got my attention. I clenched my jaw. “Tearing things, or people?”

“Both, if he gets the chance. He’s worse than feral, and he’s strong. He puts his fist through a windshield, tries to grab the driver. The cops freak, the chakz freak, and everybody’s running like crazy back to square one.”

“Enough about the political climate. Focus. The skeleton, where is it now?”

Jonesey couldn’t sit still. He jumped up and started acting the story out. I have to admit, it helped. “The cops go after him, guns blazing, but they miss, miss, miss, and he ducks into an alley. Then they lose him, ten of them, probably because they’re so weirded out. So am I; so’s everybody. Two chakz moan just because they were watching. But I don’t panic. I stay in control, Mann, and I look, look, look and spot his freaky ass. I follow, figuring I can, you know, try to talk him down or something, but it’s like he can’t see or hear me, like I’m the same as any other thing in his way. I stand in front of him and he nearly tears me apart. And all the while keeps making this sound, like . . . like . . .”

“Heh-heh?”

Jonesey snapped his fingers. “That’s the one.” He twisted his head and stared. “You know him. You know him?”

“I know who it was.”

He shook his head. “He, Mann. He.”

That was Jonesey. He’d call a lamppost he or she. Part of his philosophy. Treat something as if it’s a person and it’s more likely to act like one. I somehow didn’t think it applied to a bunch of bones—me, either, for that matter. I was barely back from the brink, and the only thing holding me there was the thought that I could prevent some damage if I put a stop to it.

But hope springs eternal. Jonesey even thought I might have some answers. “How does he even talk? How does he walk? There’s no muscle.”

I shook my head. “I said I knew who it was, not that I know what it is. All I can tell you is that it’s what’s left of a chak after an acid bath, and its name used to be Ashby.”

He blinked. “Acid bath? You mean like a bath with acid in it?”

“Yeah. Long story. Right now we’ve got to find it before the police do, or before it gets its hands on another liveblood.”

Jonesey’s mouth opened so quick his jawbone cracked. “No, no, no. Another?”

I nodded. “Already killed two. Arguably self-defense . . . after the fact. Where’d you see it last?”

“Collin Hills.”

He might as well have said Disneyland. Collin Hills was a McMansion neighborhood separated from the Bones by General Buell Park. A definite no-no for any chak.

“Collin Hills? Fuck . . . how . . . ?”

Jonesey went back into his pantomime thing, swooping his arms to imitate the skeleton’s movements. “He headed into the park, over the fence, then over the freaking electrified wall!” Finished, he slapped himself in the head. “If he gets into one of those houses you know what that’ll mean. . . .”

I did. The LBs were already on pins and needles. If it so much as tromped on the landscaping in a gated community, it’d be like what they did with the Japanese-Americans during WWII, without the food and water. I already had enough to feel guilty about.

For the first time in ages, I got to my feet. “What day is it?”

Jonesey gave me a look like he remembered having this conversation from the other side. “Check your watch,” he said.

“Right.”

Three days. Good enough for Jesus and vampires, good enough for me.

I’d need something serious to deal with this. Ashby’d saved my ass twice—first by coming out of the vat, now by giving me a reason to get up. In exchange, I’d have to put him out of his misery.

It. I’d have to put it out of its misery.

I’d given my gun to that freak Turgeon, but I doubted it’d do any good here. I reached for a crowbar I kept at the side of the desk.

Jonesey looked at the iron the same way he’d just looked at me. “You said you knew him. Can’t you talk to him?”

I tapped the bar into my palm. “Already tried. And don’t ask me about it again until later. Much later.”

I thought I’d have to talk Misty out of coming with us, but as we headed for the door she didn’t say a word. And she looked as bad as I felt.

“You been eating?” I asked her.

No answer. She didn’t look high, so I guessed she’d been worried about me, keeping vigil. I told Jonesey to wait outside a minute.

I said, “Three days, Misty. I’m lucky Turgeon didn’t come for me. Uh . . . he didn’t, did he?”

“No,” she said. “Maybe he was just as freaked out as you were by . . . you know. . . .”

Ashby. I shivered. There but for fortune.

“How long would you have waited on me, Mist?”

“Until the end, until you changed.”

“Then what? Would you have done like I asked?”

She sighed and nodded. “I’ve got a sledgehammer under my cot.”

I gave her a hug. “Thanks.”

She grimaced. “Fuck you, Hess.”

I headed out.

Putting a bunch of McMansions on the far side of General Buell Park, so close to the Bones, sounded like real bad planning, but they were here before we were. Not before the street people, but Collin Hills was intended to reclaim the area from them. When chakz started stumbling around in the abandoned buildings here, sales dropped to nothing. To keep the current homeowners from bolting, the developer installed a big stone wall, topped with an electric fence and a twenty-four/seven security system.

In practice, up until now, it worked. Chakz never went past the park. We’re not interested in making that kind of trouble anyway, and the police made it real clear what the consequences would be if we did.

So of course that’s where Jonesey and I were headed.

We passed a few patrol cars cruising the neighborhood. They used to be as rare as UFOs. Things had changed. Otherwise, the Bones looked empty as usual. Not Buell Park. Flashlight beams flitted along the overgrown bushes like morbidly obese fireflies. The police were looking for the thing.

As we neared the park entrance, I caught a thick whiff of kerosene. Roundabout the knees of the bronze statue of Buell that stood in the center of the park, I caught a fiery flash. It wasn’t a flashlight. The boys in blue had a new toy, a flamethrower. Great. It might not work on the skeleton, but it sure would work on me and Jonesey.

Back when I was alive, I sucked so badly at staying hidden it was a joke in the neighborhood. It was one of the few parts of my skill set that being dead had improved. If I wasn’t stupid about it, and no one was staring right at me, I could get around pretty well without being seen. Jonesey would consider it politically incorrect to say so, but it had to do with being more a thing than a person. LBs don’t realize it, but they’re wired to sense other living things. Unless you had a dog’s nose, or we had some rot, there’s nothing to sense here. It’s one of the reasons it’s so easy for a chak to sneak up on a liveblood.

Some moans to the south got the cops all excited. When they raced off to follow, it gave us a break. We crouched like crazy just the same, avoiding the paths, plodding through a rat’s nest of hedge and tree.

“There been a lot of moaners lately?” I asked.

Jonesey gave me that look again. “A couple every day now. Like I said, I got most of the cops to go home before your friend showed up; now it’s . . . Where have you been?”

“I said we’d talk later.”

Another moan, forlorn as a lonely loon crying in the middle of nowhere. I saw a powerful blast of flame, heard the creaking rush of burning wood, and a few seconds later felt some heat in the air.

Jonesey shook his head. “At least they could’ve made sure whoever it was had gone feral first.”

“Come on; we’ve got business.”

The twisted mass of branch and leaf ended in an eight-foot black iron fence. As we sneaked up, I could see lights on in a few of the Collin Hills houses. There was a second blast from the flamethrower, more distant. Another moaner gone. Before the glow vanished, we were over the park fence and across the well-lit street.

We hit our knees behind a row of parked cars. I didn’t like it here, not at all. Unlike the Bones, everything worked, especially the streetlamps. It was so bright I felt naked as a dead jaybird.

The Collin Hills wall was behind us, a big stucco sucker tipped with barbed wire. The wire was the good stuff, thin black strips that fit right in with the decor of the terra-cotta rooftops beyond. To add insult to injury, it was electrified. A small sign warned about the voltage. That level of electricity wouldn’t destroy a chak, but our flesh would sear and stick to the wire. We’d end up doing major damage trying to pull free.

“Where’d it climb over? You see it happen?” I asked.

Jonesey muttered some mnemonic to himself, then pointed to a spot down the block half-hidden by an oak. “There.”

We crept closer. Thanks to the great lighting it was easy to see that the stucco covering had been chipped, revealing the less dainty color of the concrete beneath. The broken patches made a line, more or less, that headed up to a spot where the wire looked slightly bent.

“So it climbed? I didn’t think it could see.”

“He didn’t. Not exactly.” Jonesey went into another weird little pantomime. “He runs up like this, hits the wall like he doesn’t see it, then feels it with his hands. He reaches up, but the wall’s too high. So he gets angry. He punches. He scratches. When he stops, he fingers the holes he made; then he uses them to pull himself up a little. He still can’t reach the top, so he does it again and again, until he lobs himself over, nothing but a spark and a gzt from the wire. I expected alarms, but there was nothing. I’ve seen some freaky shit, but I’m telling you, that was freaky.”

“Chakz never come here. Maybe the alarm broke and the owner didn’t bother to repair it.” I eyed the wall and the tree. “Bottom line, it can do it; we can do it.”

Jonesey gave the handholds a shot while I shimmied up the oak. By the time I’d made my way across an overhanging branch, he’d gone up as far as he could without touching the wire. Flat against the branch, I reached down, grabbed his hands, and swung him over.

It was close. The soles of his shoes cleared by an inch. Once he landed, I squirmed along the branch as far as I could, then jumped. I hit the ground on a patch of wood chips. Some splinters, but no big damage so far.

The lights of the security gate glowed beyond the neatly trimmed hedges. I could see the rent-a-cop in his little house, guarding the main entrance. He was awake, listening to some iThing. Good. The skeleton hadn’t attracted attention here yet.

With no trail to follow, we skirted the edges of the properties. I was hoping it might still stink of acid, but the whole place was thick with the smell of chemicals, fertilizer and chlorine from the pools.

On the one hand, we hoped we’d bump into it; on the other, we were so terrified we would that we were startled by every cricket chirp. We really jumped when we heard the dog. A big one, it barked three times, then let loose with a final, pained yelp.

Not good for us or the doggy. It sounded like it was nearby, right in the next yard. With a quick glance at each other, we gave up on crouching and ran toward the sound.

When I saw how the pretty little picket gate was mangled, I half knew what to expect. I didn’t expect something heavy to fly through the air and land at my feet with a warm, wet thud. Jonesey clamped his hand over his mouth. I had to bend down to make sure. It was a rottweiler, head twisted around so it had a nice view of its own tail. The heart-shaped collar said the dog’s name was Annie.

“Heh-heh.”

Beyond the gate, I saw it. The moonlight and streetlamps gave it a kind of perfect, white metal sheen. The color fit. It was bouncing around the fenced yard like a silver pinball: hitting a wall, changing direction, hitting a fence, changing direction again. Sometimes, out of frustration, I think, it lashed out at whatever was nearest, like a lawn mower. Something like that must’ve happened to the dog. Either Annie had been stepped on, or she got wide-eyed at all those yummy bones and attacked.

“Heh-heh.”

As for the skeleton, left on its own, eventually it’d either fall into the pool or find the exit and wander out. We didn’t have time to see which, because the house lights came on. We didn’t have time at all.

Moving fast, I grabbed the longest thing lying around, a pool net, and whacked the skull with it to get its attention. Jaw slack, it turned, laughed, and headed toward me.

Careful to stay out of its reach, with a few more well-placed whacks I managed to steer it out the gate, all the way across the next yard, and then into a little patch of trees near the security wall.

So far so good, and I knew what had to happen next. But with all of Misty’s soul talk and Jonesey insisting on calling it he, I was having trouble. I had to wonder if Ashby might still be in there. It was the fucking heads all over again, theme and variation.

Was he still thinking, still feeling?

If I played it long enough, the guessing game would drive me feral all by itself. I had to tell myself it didn’t matter. It just didn’t matter. It couldn’t. It, it, it.

I gave Jonesey the pole, told him to keep whacking the skull and backing up. I took out the crowbar. The skeleton moved past me, blind, oblivious. I came up behind it.

In case it was an issue, I wanted it to be quick, merciful. There was survival involved, too. I had to make sure the first blow immobilized it, so I wouldn’t wind up clawed to pieces. So did I hit the neck or the hips first?

I swallowed hard and swung at the neck for all I was worth. The bones were strong. The first blow only staggered it. It took another swing, so strong it nearly yanked my arm out of the socket. It sent the skull flying. The body crumpled. The skull careened into the stucco, bounced off, and fell where I couldn’t see. It was only quiet for a beat.

“Heh-heh.”

Damn. It was still talking. I didn’t want to think about it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Behind us, a door was opening.

“Annie? Where are you, girl?”

They’d find the dog. Even if the alarms didn’t work, there’d be lots of screaming.

I stepped toward the bushes where the skull had landed.

“Jonesey, grab those bones,” I whispered.

“What’re you going to do?”

“Finish it.”

I saw a clump of white and poked it with the crowbar. A stone. A big white stone. I had to wait until I heard the laugh again. It only took seconds.

“Heh-heh.”

The sound was waist-level. It hadn’t hit the ground. There it was, held by a web of branches, wedged in the bush. I stuck the crowbar in and lifted it by the eye socket. The jaws kept moving. Alas, poor Ashby.

“Heh-heh.”

Trying to act dead, like an it myself, I laid it sideways on the stone, pulled back, aimed, and swung. I didn’t just swing once; I did it again and again. I cracked the skull, snapped the jaws, and kept swinging. It—fine, maybe he—had saved my neck, or to be accurate, everything below my neck, and here I was pummeling his remains.

Misty’s words echoed in my ears: It could have been worse.

When I was finished, the stone was covered with white dust and a few pieces no bigger than a marble. But I swear—I’m telling you, I swear—that even the white flakes looked like they were still moving, curling, twitching.

I backed away, scaring the shit out of myself when I bumped into Jonesey.

We both stared at the shivering pieces a while before they finally stopped.

“How the hell was he moving at all?” I whispered. “No muscle, no ligature. Nothing.”

I was thinking out loud, but Jonesey answered. “A luz.”

“A what?”

He shook his head apologetically, like he was sorry he hadn’t thought of it sooner. “It popped into my head just now. It’s from the midrash. A luz is a bone in the human body that’s completely indestructible. They believed it contained the soul. Maybe after everything else was burned away, your friend was one big luz.”

“The midrash? You Jewish, Jonesey?”

“I . . . I don’t remember.”