Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  “Do you know why he left me?” Henry’s voice broke in spite of himself. It had hurt so much to be abandoned. He hadn’t admitted that to anyone, not even Jane. He felt unworthy, stupid, small. He felt cast aside.

  She gave him a hard smile. “He didn’t care about his own daughters, and I doubt he ever cared about you. At best, you were a tool.”

  Henry didn’t want to believe that, but of course he hadn’t known Neilson better than his own daughter. He’d barely known the spirit at all. And the worst part of it—the accusation that his ghost would do what it wanted with no thought for anyone but itself—hadn’t Henry been guilty of the same?

  Henry and Dennis waited outside for the buses to pull around, packed in with a bunch of underclassmen. The younger kids stared at Dennis, but it was the older ones, the ones who didn’t look at Dennis but quietly talked about him, who worried Henry the most.

  “I heard someone say that your dad is cutting hours at the plant,” Henry said. “Is that true?”

  Dennis shrugged. “He just does what Corporate tells him to do. It’s not like he has any choice.”

  Bethany pushed through the crowd, her steps heavy and slow. She had cotton swabs taped to her arm where blood had been drawn. She handed Henry an envelope.

  “That was fast,” Henry said. “Maybe you should be at home getting some rest? Give your body a chance to recover?”

  Her face and shoulders were slick with sweat. “Most of my lab results won’t be back for a few days, but I had the doctor write down everything that seemed strange to her. We can start with that. I’m taking the bus to your place so we can keep working.”

  Henry put his hand to her forehead. Her skin was scorching hot, reminding him for a moment of his mother.

  “A hundred and five degrees,” Bethany said. “The doctor was surprised I could walk.”

  “Your immune system might be reacting to it like a virus,” Henry said. “Or it might even be waste heat. Just a by-product of all the energy the alien is using to fuse with your body.”

  Bethany noticed Dennis, the pig boy, glancing awkwardly between them, waiting to be introduced.

  “Who’s the pig?” she asked. “Did you mess up his life too?”

  Her tone was joking, but Henry winced.

  Dennis brushed his ears down self-consciously, as if they were bangs. “I’m Dennis. Actually, I think I have a lot to thank Henry for. Sorry I never said that.”

  Henry looked around, hoping no one had overheard.

  The buses pulled around. The three of them piled in the haunted old bus with no driver. They went to the back, each of them sitting sideways across an entire seat. The bus pulled onto the road, and Henry flipped through Bethany’s results. He didn’t know a lot about medicine and had to look up the values on his phone. There wasn’t anything that pointed to a clear problem. Everything was just slightly outside of the normal range.

  “You probably don’t have old medical records for comparison,” Henry said. “You’ve never been sick. For all we know, your numbers could just be weird because you’re you. It might have nothing to do with the alien.”

  Bethany nodded.

  Dennis listened, fascinated by aliens and contamination and things he’d only ever seen on TV. Fascinated too by Bethany, her sheer strength and presence, the closest thing to a mythic hero anyone would ever see. But then he looked to the front of the bus, and Henry saw his ears lift and face go pale.

  A group of young men stood up from behind the seatbacks. It was the same group of boys who’d threatened Dennis in the cafeteria, all of them seniors wearing their Pig City coveralls. Henry hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t noticed that the boys had followed them onto the bus. Grade school kids leaned over the seats and grinned, waiting to see what would happen next.

  The bus picked up speed, in between stops for a few minutes. Bethany moved in front of Henry and Dennis, gesturing toward the emergency exit. “As soon as the bus slows down, jump out the back.”

  The older boys stepped into the aisle and started walking toward them. “Sit down, Bethany,” one of them said. “We’re here for the pig and the pig lover. Try to stop us and you’ll get hurt.”

  They gave her knife-blade smiles. Henry didn’t need Jane to tell him what they were thinking. Most of them were taller than her. There were more of them. She looked sick and exhausted, her shirt heavy with sweat. Likely, none of them had ever been to one of her games before, had never seen the way she could move. They were thinking that, for all her reputation, she was only a girl. They were thinking that they might enjoy getting their hands on her.

  The first guy walked straight into her, putting his arm out like he would sweep her aside. The alien had made Bethany slow and heavy, but she was slow like a steamroller or the fist of a wrecking ball. She grabbed his arm and turned him around, palming his head in one wide hand like it was a basketball. She smashed his face against the bus window. He crumpled to the floor and she kicked him hard, folding him up. The windowpane dripped blood into the empty seat.

  The others swarmed forward, tripping over themselves in the narrow aisle or climbing over the seats. The younger kids screamed and cried and laughed. From the front of the bus came murky and overlapping voices shouting, the remains of past bus drivers yelling for everyone to sit down and behave. And then up from the floor came more ghosts, children who had suffered something horrible between those seats, rising to wail their displeasure and fear.

  Bethany struck out with her fists, breaking noses and smashing eyes, battering them back and away. The boys grabbed her arms and surrounded her, trying to pull her down, but it was like wrestling with steel. She dropped one after another, throwing her knees and elbows into them in the tight space. They spat blood and tried to stumble away, but the seats hemmed them in. Still, there were too many for Bethany to hold back. They shoved their friends into her and slipped past.

  One of the boys grabbed Dennis by his ear, ripping out some of his piercings and making him squeal. Another hit Henry in the face, cracking his glasses against his forehead. A knife appeared in one boy’s hand.

  Bethany jerked the emergency release and threw the back door open. She shoved Henry and Dennis out of the bus. Henry tumbled through the air, watching the asphalt rise to meet him. He hit the street, the ground punching the wind out of him and scraping his arms and face. They rolled over the blacktop, eventually washing up against the curb.

  Gasping, Henry looked up and saw the bus disappearing over a hill, Bethany’s silhouette still fighting in the aisle. The boys tried to push through her, but she blocked the door with her body, striking them down and leaving them bleeding and heaped on the floor.

  Dennis held his ear and limped to the sidewalk. “She’s going to get hurt. We have to help her.”

  Henry’s head rang. A bright flare of light cut through the center of his vision, sunlight catching in the crack of his glasses. By the time he’d caught his breath, Dennis was calling someone.

  “Hello?” His voice shook. “Is this the Swine Hill Police Department? I need to report a crime. Some guys from school got on our bus and tried to kill me. They wanted to hurt me because I’m a pig. It was bus number six.”

  He paused for a moment, listening.

  “This is Dennis Hogboss. Yes, Walter Hogboss is my father. Why?”

  The heart box in Henry’s pocket thumped faster and harder, distracting him, but there was something off about the conversation. Hadn’t Jane told him that a police officer had stopped her not long ago? She had been shaken up by it.

  “Where am I now?” Dennis looked around, searching for a street sign, though most had fallen down, rusted through, or been stolen.

  Henry grabbed the phone out of his hand and turned it off.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “The cops might be worse than the guys on the bus.”

  He led Dennis down a side street that ran parallel to the main road. Soon, they saw a police cruiser approaching. Henry pulled Dennis behind a
n abandoned house, and they huddled under the eaves of the back door, waiting for the squad car to pass.

  The hair stood up on the back of his neck. He wondered what he would say if the officer found them hiding here, crouched near a house that wasn’t theirs. Would any answer he gave the man be good enough?

  Someone had spray-painted a red X across the house’s doorway. Dennis turned the doorknob and found that it was unlocked. “Maybe we should wait inside?”

  The paint was still wet, dripping down the wood. It looked like a warning. “No,” Henry said. “There might be ghosts inside.”

  Dennis slumped against the side of the house, licking spots of blood off his snout. “Everything is so beautiful outside the plant. But some days, it feels like the whole world wants to hurt me. I didn’t think it would be this way.”

  Henry wondered what Dennis had expected, his first image of the outside world drawn by pharmaceutical commercials, nature documentaries, and cartoons. Around the broken neighborhood, a sea of waist-high grass grew right up to the doors, leafy vines reaching up to pull down the walls of abandoned houses. Henry tried to find the beauty in it, but all he could see was the dull boredom of empty streets, the danger of dark windows.

  “Just survive it,” Henry said. “When you get old enough, you can go somewhere else.” He hoped he wasn’t lying. He hoped the pig boy would have some say in his own future, that Hogboss and the plant would let him be what he wanted to be.

  After they were sure the police cruiser was gone, the two of them started walking back toward Henry’s house, since it was closer than Dennis’s. Henry texted Bethany but didn’t get an answer. He thought of the knife, the sheer number of them. Could even Bethany win against so many?

  They walked for about twenty minutes, the sun bright and hot. Henry took off his shirt. He’d tried texting Jane and his mother for a ride but had no luck. They were both working at the plant during the day now.

  There was a metallic rattle, and the two of them dropped behind a bush. Henry looked through the leaves, searching for the sound. A few houses down, a man dressed in rags and covered in burns stood on the porch of an abandoned house and shook a nearly empty can of spray paint. The heart in Henry’s pocket raced against his leg.

  “Stay here,” Henry said.

  Dennis ignored him and followed, not wanting to be left alone. The closer Henry got to his father and the old house—its shattered windows billowing with the shreds of curtains, the inside of it dark and damp like a mouth—the harder the heart box beat in his pocket. His father sprayed an X over the door and dropped the can, moving on.

  “I think he’s marking houses where the ghosts are dangerous,” Henry said. “He’s trying to protect people.”

  “Who is he?” Dennis asked. “Do you know him?”

  His father limped behind the houses and was gone again. Henry shook his head, burning with shame. “No, I don’t know him. Just some homeless guy.”

  They were almost back to their neighborhood when, across the overgrown yard and between the sagging houses, Henry caught sight of a person walking beside the main road. She was stooped over, struggling to walk. Her hair, long and black, blew across her face like smoke.

  “Bethany?”

  They ran to catch up with her, looking to see if she was injured. Unlike the two of them—bleeding and arms scraped raw from falling on the road—Bethany was unscratched. Her knuckles and fingers were red with blood, but Henry didn’t think it was hers.

  Dennis threw his arms around her and thanked her, over and over, crying softly into her shoulder.

  “You aren’t safe yet,” Bethany said. “They aren’t going to stop, and I may not be there next time. Henry, you have to do something.”

  Henry only looked at the ground, ashamed. Everything that had gone wrong led back to him. “There aren’t even that many pigs in town yet,” he said. “Hundreds more are coming. What are people going to do when the plant lays off everyone human?”

  “It’s not our fault,” Dennis said. “We didn’t ask to be made. And we don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “I don’t have my ghost,” Henry said. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Try harder,” Bethany said. “There’s more to you than your ghost.”

  He nodded, wanting to believe her but terrified it wasn’t true.

  * * *

  Henry took the two of them back to his house, hoping that someone would be home to give his friends a ride. Jane’s car was gone, still at work, but his mother’s car sat in the driveway.

  Henry paused before opening the door. “My mom is haunted pretty bad. It’s fine. I can’t remember a time when she didn’t have her ghost. Just don’t try to hug her or shake her hand or anything. If she comes close to you, keep your hands in your pockets.”

  His mother wasn’t downstairs. Henry thought he heard the shower running. He was soaked in sweat from the walk, and his legs burned. He limped into the kitchen and got them cold sodas from the fridge. When he came back, Dennis was bent over the robot.

  “What’s its name?” the pig boy asked.

  Henry shrugged. “It’s just the robot. I never named it.”

  Bethany checked her phone. “My parents are going to pick me up later. I would just jog back home, but I feel tired. And dizzy. Nothing looks the way it’s supposed to.”

  “You’re having trouble seeing?” Henry asked. “Did you get an eye exam?”

  “Everything is clear.” Bethany gestured to the window. “But it looks wrong. The colors are different. Sometimes I see buildings or streets that I don’t remember being there.”

  Not knowing what to do about this problem—hallucinations or memory issues—Henry went to the garage for his dad’s toolbox and some spare parts. While the other two watched, he opened the robot’s chest and replaced lengths of wire and damaged servos. He guessed where ghosts might have accumulated in its systems, rebooting it and restarting processes to flush them out. When he was done, the robot sat up straight and moved both arms. It still couldn’t walk, though. Its legs were badly damaged. It would take weeks of hard work to fix everything wrong there, if Henry was even capable of fixing it.

  Someone knocked on the door. Henry tensed, wondering if it was the police, an angry neighbor who saw him bring Dennis home, or the group of boys from the bus. Bethany pulled the door open, and there stood Hogboss.

  Rather than his usual Pig City work clothes, the pig man wore a pressed blue shirt tucked into black jeans. A tie, straining around his big neck, was looped into a tiny knot at the base of his throat.

  “Are you here to give me a ride?” Dennis asked.

  “Oh,” Hogboss said. “Did you need one?”

  Henry’s mother came downstairs wearing a black cocktail dress. She froze on the edge of the stairs, looking at the crowd of people in her living room.

  “Are you going out?” Henry asked. “Wait, what’s going on?”

  Bethany laughed, shaking her head. Henry didn’t understand until the robot scraped its long fingers over the couch and spit a blast of static.

  Since she could touch the pigs at work without hurting them, Henry wondered if she thought it would be safe to date Hogboss. He watched, waiting for his mother to touch the pig man’s shoulder or squeeze his hand, waiting for him to flinch in pain. Hogboss held the door for her, and she got in without laying a finger on him. The pig man drove her away in his work truck.

  “Should we be worried about this?” Dennis asked.

  The robot wheeled itself over to the table and picked up the bouquet of flowers wilting in their vase. Before Henry could ask what it was doing, the machine dashed them against the floor, sending broken glass and water splashing over their shoes.

  It had been a few days since Jane had taken Trigger’s ghost away. Every time she texted him, he was either at work or having endless and circular conversations with his father. Mason asked him, What happened to your brother? Why did he leave? Is he happy now? What are we supposed to do? When Jane as
ked how Trigger felt, he said, “Different.” She had hoped for more than that. He was supposed to be happy, to be moving past it. Hadn’t years of suffering been enough?

  She pulled into his driveway a couple of hours before she had to be at work at Pig City. Trigger and his father had just gotten home from their night shift. She’d texted, Don’t go to bed yet. I want to take you somewhere.

  Text me when you get here and I’ll come out, he said. At least it wasn’t a no.

  Jane got out of her car. The world was golden with early-morning sun, damp and cool and dew-touched. Her ghost stirred within her. Why doesn’t he want you to come inside? Did he go back for the music box? Is there something he doesn’t want you to see?

  “He wouldn’t do that.” Jane kicked at the gravel. Even so, there was no reason she should have to wait outside. She went to the door and knocked twice. When no one answered, she walked in.

  The house was transformed. Gone were the howling dark and frost-glazed trees. Gone were the dark-furred animals, the bloody leaves, the cold and gunpowder smell. The house was small and close. Stains and tears fissured the green carpet. There were spiderwebs in the corners, and the furniture was thick with dust.

  The two of them sat at the table eating eggs. Mason wiped his eyes, red and wet. Trigger gave her a look of irritation, gone so quick she might have imagined it. Still, it stung.

  They’re mourning, her ghost said. As bad as things were, they never felt like he was really dead before now.

  “Hi,” Jane said. She sat down in the living room and waited for them to finish eating.

  The two of them chewed, swallowed, and clicked their forks against their plates, but they didn’t talk with her there. Her ghost netted their thoughts. Trigger was annoyed with Jane for coming inside, but also grateful. He was worn out from talking to his father about this. Mason kept thinking of his dead son, pictured him still bleeding and cold, wondered where he had so suddenly gone after years of haunting. He barely thought of Jane at all, and that at least was a relief.