The robot smashed someone hard in the chest, and the man dropped. The robot wheeled forward, arms up and threatening anyone to come within reach. Wind and rain blew over it, the machine glinting in the storm light. For a moment, Henry thought the robot would drive the mob away. But water seeped into its damaged legs, and arcs of electricity snapped across its chest. The machine already struggled with the colony of spirits chewing their way through its metal hull—water flooding its delicate electronics was too much. Its arms drooped. It lost its balance and tipped over in its chair.
The men grabbed bricks from the garden and fell on the robot, smashing in its bucket-like head and denting its metal body. It shuddered and raised its arms, trying to fight them off. It turned its head to look back through the door at Henry, and the light inside of it died.
The plant workers came marching into the house, rainwater pebbling on their beards and sluicing down their faces. They reached out with scarred hands, ready to take out their anger and helplessness on anyone they could catch.
Bethany herded everyone back, shoving Henry, Jane, and their mother toward the kitchen door. “Get to your car,” she said.
Henry wanted to argue with her or find some better plan, but the mob was coming for him. He fell back to the kitchen door, dragged by his sister’s tight hand around his arm and his mother’s scorching palm on the back of his neck. As they ran into the dark and rain of the backyard, Bethany stood in the doorway, trying to keep the men from following.
Through water beading on his facemask, Henry watched Bethany fight. She dipped low, lunging like a boxer, spinning—untouchable. But her face was blank with shock, like she’d just tumbled off a ledge and found she couldn’t fly. She sank inch by inch through the floor tiles.
A woman swung at her face. Bethany grabbed her arm and punched out, knocking the woman down. For a second, Henry saw Bethany’s shoe sink through the floor, out of this reality, but she balanced on her other leg and concentrated, pulling her foot back up.
“If we can’t butcher pigs, we’ll butcher pig lovers,” one of the men shouted. He wasn’t haunted, his face merely human in its thrill to hurt. The man raised a cleaver, its blade catching the storm light, and chopped down at Bethany’s shoulder.
She stepped inside his reach, the knife cutting only air, and grabbed him under his arms. Bending her legs, Bethany jumped up and twisted to the side, throwing the man toward the wall. Instead of smashing against the paneling, she shoved him through a seam in reality, his heavy body vanishing into the air. She almost went with him, her upper body disappearing for a moment before she pulled herself back into the world.
The haunted and unhaunted alike fell on Bethany en masse, battering her face and clawing at her arms, trying to drag her to the floor. She shoulder-checked them, swept their legs, knocked them off the thin beam of this world while trying to keep her own balance. They dropped into oblivion with their cargo of ghosts as if they had never existed. As she fought them, her foot would slip below for a moment, then her whole leg, then her body up to her hips. She jumped back up, struggling to stay afloat. The more she moved, the deeper she fell.
In the yard, Henry pulled away from his mother, the back of his neck bubbling up from her burning hand. A few people made it past Bethany and ran for him, separating him from his family. Jane ran around the side of the house with their mother and Henry sprinted the other way, his feet slipping in the mud.
The man chasing Henry spoke through his teeth, his strange words giving voice to the dead within him: “We still have hands to give. Our flesh was made for cutting. Where will our sons bleed now?”
Henry got around the man and ran to the front yard. His sister and mother were already in the car. There were too many people between them, though. He looked to the open doorway, past the wreck of the robot, and saw Bethany still struggling inside. She threw another person through reality, her face bruised and flushed from the fight. Maybe she could win even when the world was dissolving under her feet. Maybe she was as unstoppable as she had always believed.
Three people rushed Bethany. Her feet went out from under her. She stuck an arm out to catch herself, but her hand passed through the floor. Her eyes met Henry’s for just a moment, and then she fell through the world—
And was gone.
The ghost-eyed mob came for Henry then, knives clutched in their hands. His mask fogged, making it hard to see, and Henry ran through the rain, looking for someone who could help. Blue and red lights cut through the dark. Henry turned and ran toward a police car. Jane honked her horn and yelled something out her window, but he couldn’t hear what she said. He opened the cop’s passenger door and fell inside, slamming it behind him.
The cop, blood running from his eyes and ears and trickling from the corners of his mouth, threw out a startled arm in the dark.
“I’ve got you,” the officer shouted. “I’ve got you.”
The same thing Henry’s father had once said when Henry had climbed into a tree as a boy, one of his few clear memories of the man. Jump into my arms. I’ve got you.
Henry reached for him in the dark, ghosts gathering around them, and waited to be saved.
Part III
Jane shouted for her brother from the window of her car, her voice swallowed in the storm. Henry ran toward a parked police cruiser, its spinning lights soaking the front of their house in oceanic blues. She could feel the bleeding man sitting inside, his violent pleasure unrolling warm and wet and full with itself.
The men closed around Jane’s car, blocking her view. Some were driven by bitter ghosts, but just as many were possessed only by their own hate and anger. In the passenger seat, her mother begged her to drive away. Jane was right inside Henry’s mind, could feel him become scared and small, like a child again. He threw himself forward, crying out to be saved.
And then, he was gone like a light switching off, his mind too far away for her to hear him anymore.
Had Henry gotten away? Run too far for her ghost to hear him? Or had he been knocked unconscious? She asked her ghost where Henry was, but it was quiet, swollen with something it didn’t want to say.
“No,” Jane said. “You don’t know that.”
She hesitated for a moment, her foot holding down the brake. The crowd pressed against her car, their hands covering the windows and reaching across the windshield. Jane could hear their raucous thoughts, the voices of the living mixing with the dead. She couldn’t see anything through their interlocking fingers. It was like the town had come to bury them under its weight.
A fist smashed into her window, cracking the glass.
Jane let her foot off the brake, and the car lurched forward across the front lawn, shrugging off the weight of the mob. She drove through the backyard, scraped over the curb, and came out onto the street on the other side.
She drove fast in the rain, her car exploding through potholes and sliding around curves, circling the neighborhood for any sign of her brother. But she couldn’t feel Henry’s mind. There was no sign of the police cruiser, either, the bleeding man gone like an eel into the dark.
Jane, her ghost pleaded. What if Henry isn’t here to find? I don’t want you to get hurt trying to save what can’t be saved.
The ghost was only doing what it always did. Digging into her insecurities. Finding some fear to feed itself on. It had no idea if Henry was alive or not. But it wanted Jane to feel alone, needed her to need it.
You do need me, it said. Now more than ever.
Jane ignored it, focusing on her brother. She had already let him get hurt once. That she might have failed him again, failed him completely and unforgivably, was too much for her to process. She turned her high beams on and watched for the silhouette of a boy running between the houses.
Her mother sobbed in the seat beside her, thinking about all that she had already lost.
Jane checked her rearview mirror, but none of the haunted plant workers followed them. They’d swarmed over the spot where Bethany had vanishe
d, tearing apart the floor to try to find her. Jane wondered what had happened to the girl, if she was alive or dead or something worse.
At the memory of Bethany falling out of the world, the ghost pressed deeply into Jane’s muscles and bones, sending pain shooting through her limbs. Whatever waited outside this world, the spirit was terrified of it.
They drove around for over an hour. Finally her mother said, “Go to Walter’s house. He’ll help us.”
She was like a furnace next to Jane, the seats tacky and plastic from heat. Did her mom really think the pig man’s house was safe? Or did she only want to be comforted, to let out her fire on someone?
Why shouldn’t she be comforted? What else is left?
“Hogboss is the reason those people came,” Jane said. “What if they come for him next?”
But she turned the car around, threading through the empty neighborhoods to where most of the pigs lived. She didn’t know where else to go.
* * *
The pig man lived on the other side of downtown, under the ridge where Pig City stood. Jane skirted the outer edges of the haunted middle of Swine Hill, but they were close enough to hear the wails of ghosts breaking glass and howling in the dark. Decades’ worth of hate and need lay beneath brick and concrete, deep as the sea.
The pig man’s work truck wasn’t in his driveway. Jane’s mother took out her keys and opened the door, waving her inside. She had a key. Jane wasn’t sure why that made her so angry, but it did. The house was small with old paneling, scuffed linoleum, and sagging furniture. At the funeral, Hogboss had told Henry that nothing the pigs had was theirs. Standing in Hogboss’s living room was as good as standing in the plant itself. Pig City owned him.
Evidence of Jane’s mother was everywhere: hairbrushes, lip balm, and bar coasters were scattered over the tables. A pair of her jeans, some shirts, a stray bra lying on the floor. Burn marks on the countertops. On the carpet and back of the couch. On the posts of his bed.
“We’ll stay here tonight,” her mother said. “Tomorrow, I’ll call the police station. Walter will go down there and clear this up for us. Ghosts don’t usually bother the pigs. We’ll tell them that Henry didn’t have anything to do with those people damaging property and breaking into houses.”
Jane didn’t know what to say to her. How could her mother not understand? The bleeding man hadn’t come to stop the violence; he’d come as part of it. Jane watched her go into Hogboss’s kitchen and pour herself a drink. Her mother trembled, full of fear. But she wasn’t worried that Henry was in pain, wasn’t worried that he might already be dead. Her mother worried that Hogboss would leave the town and abandon her with it, that Jane didn’t really love her, that if something did happen to Henry, she could end up alone. Jane knew it was the ghost burning through her, that it kindled her mother’s worst fears and obsessions, but Jane needed more from her right now. She’d been carrying all of them for years.
Exhausted and needing a place to be alone, Jane walked into Dennis’s room. Unlike the rest of the house, the pig boy’s bedroom was a riot of color and mess. Posters covered his walls, a mix of emo and goth rock musicians, but also drag queens, ballet dancers in costume, Cirque du Soleil performers. He had been fascinated with painted faces, pomp and style, transformations of any kind. She wondered what he had wanted to make himself into.
Past his tangled bedding, there was a desk in the corner with a letter on it from Pig City’s corporate offices. It was a notice that Dennis was being sent to oversee a plant out west. Management had decided that he would follow in the footsteps of his father.
Jane took a pair of headphones and an MP3 player off his desk, filling herself up with Dennis’s music. She had never spoken to the pig boy, but she had come to know him through the memories within the townspeople, through Henry’s needling worry for him, and now through his room and what he had left behind.
It made her think of Henry’s room, the broken machine parts covering the floor, his notebooks filled with diagrams and smeared calculations. If only she hadn’t made the CD that stole his ghost, or if only she had kept him closer, or if she had found a way to get him out of town years ago, how might things have been different?
Jane numbly watched the clock, her mind circling the question she couldn’t answer. She listened for the sound of trucks outside, afraid that the haunted men would break through the door and grab her in their rough hands, that they would carve her apart like they had Dennis.
Hogboss still wasn’t home. Outside, she could hear the roar of diesel engines and the beep of machines from up the ridge at Pig City. Through the window, the plant’s lights blazed down. Jane left her mother on the couch and got in her car. She didn’t know what she would say to Hogboss, but she needed to say something.
With Dennis’s music shrieking in her ears, she drove up to the plant. The song was whispery and crawling, alternating from ear to ear in the headphones. It was sad and strange, raising the hair on the back of her neck. She focused on the road ahead of her, the ghost lying silent and heavy in her head.
* * *
The road was choked with spirits staggering up to their jobs. Their faces stretched across her windshield, silently screaming and full of fear. Whatever the pigs were doing, the ghosts didn’t like it. Normally the plant spirits were so content in their haunting that they were airy, little more than wind. But now Jane felt them knock and jostle her car, clattering against the doors like hail. She slowly nosed through them, approaching the wall of light ahead.
They’re about to lose everything, and they know it.
The gates of the plant were chained shut, but pig people and their trucks swarmed through the parking lot. Jane pulled up to the gate and got out to stand on the hood of her car, holding on to the chain-link fence. Rising above the fog of ghosts and shouts of pig people, the long neck of a crane pierced the sky. It was already moving, the pigs falling back to the fence or taking cover in Pig City trucks. Jane watched the arm swing forward, bringing an iron ball to crash through the side of the main slaughterhouse. The sound shook the world, sending vibrations through the steel of Jane’s car and shivering the trees in the dark. Hunks of concrete and steel bounced down the slope and opened a hollow in the forest below.
The pigs cheered, and Jane’s ghost brought her their ragged, desperate thoughts. This was bigger than Dennis, bigger than just their need to punish the town for the heartache it had brought them. Pig City owned them, would send them across the country and scatter their families. It controlled where they lived, when they got up and went to bed, what they were allowed to buy in the grocery store. Tearing down the old factory was a small rebellion against Pig City too, the only one they might have before they were sent off to train more pig people, to go back to processing pigs, and to one day lie down and be slaughtered themselves.
She wished that Henry was here to see this, to help her understand what he had done. What would her brother think of the pigs he created tearing down the decades-old heart of the town? Jane couldn’t blame them. She felt a guilty satisfaction watching the pigs tear it apart, knowing this meant the end of Swine Hill.
The dead howled noiselessly and chased broken chunks of concrete spinning across the parking lot, trying to gather their world back together in their gossamer hands. Jane stared without pity.
Her own ghost was quiet, not wanting to draw her anger. But Jane knew it stung. It never liked when she got angry at spirits. It was afraid she would blame it, too, that she might want to pull it out of her like a tick, crush it, and cast it away. But she couldn’t comfort it now. She felt shredded, torn up with worry for her brother.
She watched into the early morning as the wrecking ball brought the plant buildings down to a hill of rubble. In the distance, Hogboss climbed into the seat of a bulldozer and pushed the remaining pieces of the factory off the side of the cliff. Columns of dust rose from the edge of the plateau. Someone cut an electrical line, and the lights around the factory died. The pigs turned on the lights
of their trucks and kept going, scraping the surface of the ridge clean, as if the factory had never been.
Jane shouted to the closest pig. “I need to talk to Hogboss!”
The pigs ignored her, loading everything that had been worth taking from the empty plant into semi trucks to be shipped off to other meatpacking facilities.
“Please,” she said. “Henry is missing.”
They can’t hear you over the machines. And even if they could, they wouldn’t care. They have their own heartbreak to deal with.
From the edge of the plateau where Hogboss had pushed away the wreckage of the plant, spirits whipped through the air and swarmed like hornets. The ghosts around Jane were taking on substance and form. Their outlines became more solid, and they struggled to untangle their wispy limbs from one another. They were changing, becoming like the brutal ghosts of downtown who had lost everything. Jane got back in her car.
Hurry, her ghost said. They’ll be looking for some reminder of what they’ve lost.
Jane headed back to Hogboss’s house, but a tide of spirits flowed down from the destroyed plant and swept over the surrounding neighborhoods. Lights in the houses around her went dark, the electronics saturated with spirits. She turned around and drove away from it, trying to find a way back to her mother, to a bed where she could sleep and forget for a few hours everything that had happened.
Your mother will be safe. The ghosts don’t like the pig neighborhoods. Not enough memories for them there.
Jane’s ghost guided her away, keeping always a street between her and them. She felt the ghosts fall on sleeping families and burrow into them like worms. People awoke to five or six warring ghosts within them, demanding they get up and work, desperate to finish all that they’d left undone. When a ghost didn’t have enough in common with someone to haunt them, it burrowed into their joints or organs, doubling them up with pain. Objects inside flew around and crashed into walls. So many years of pain, so many crises and lost causes, all erupted at once.
Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones Page 21