by J N Duncan
She cocked an eyebrow at Jackie. “How do you think?” Shelby unzipped the top and removed some clothes. “I took the liberty of grabbing a couple of things for you to wear, since the other stuff is covered in blood.”
“You knew I was going home tonight?”
“Hon, I’m surprised you made it this long.” She patted Jackie on the leg and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “Nick asked me to get you some things to wear a couple of hours ago.”
“Oh, OK. Thanks.” She turned and pushed herself up into a sitting position, head swimming around like it was free-floating atop her neck. After grabbing a T-shirt from the pile, Jackie reached back to undo the tie on her hospital gown, but found her fingers bogged down by the Percocet. They would not work properly.
Shelby slapped her hand away. “Stop. Here.” A moment later, the ties were lose and Shelby was assisting Jackie out of her hospital gown and into clothing: sweatpants, T-shirt, jacket, socks. It was like a mom getting her daughter ready for school in the morning.
“I could’ve done that, you know,” Jackie said.
Shelby’s fingers stopped in the middle of pulling up Jackie’s second sock. She looked up at Jackie for a second, those bright green eyes curved in sympathy. “Do you ever let anyone just do something for you?”
“Of course.”
“Without letting them know you were quite capable of doing it on your own?”
“I . . . what is that supposed to mean?”
“It means just say ‘Thanks, Shel.’ That’s it. No addendums or rationalizations. I don’t think less of you or think you’re weak or unfit or whatever it is. You don’t need to be independent every single moment of your life, Jackie girl.”
“I know that—”
“No.” Shelby shook her head and finished tying off her running shoes. “I don’t think you do. There. Good to go, babe. Let’s get you home and in a proper bed.”
Jackie looked down at the shoes she likely had not put on in two years. Laurel had bought them for her after a chase in her hiking boots had failed to catch the perp. “Thank you,” she said, overenunciating each word. “Did Laur head out?”
“She’s off to see if Rosa has gone back to her babe or not. We need to find out if she’s done.”
“And if she’s not?”
“Then we need to figure out a way to stop her and keep her over in Deadworld until she can move on.”
“Why do I really not like the sound of that?”
“Because we’ve no idea how to go about doing that other than crossing over and confronting her.”
“Screw that. I’m not going over there.” Jackie shuffled over to the bathroom to pee and caught the sight of her bathing cap of a bandage. “Oh, my God. I look like a fucking Q-Tip.”
Shelby snickered. “Notice how I politely said nothing about that.”
“I can’t go around with this thing on my head,” Jackie said. “Nobody will take me seriously.” She pointed out at Shelby. “Don’t say it, bitch. I know you were.”
“Did I say a word? I was only going to tell you that I will take it off when we get you home. Or Nick can, if you prefer.”
Jackie slammed the bathroom door closed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Thought so,” came the amused reply.
The doctor reluctantly let her sign out, warning her to rest and not do much for the next day or two. She got another prescription for the Percocet and they were home by eight-thirty. It was going to be a cold night, and Jackie felt all thirty-eight degrees of it biting into her as they hustled into her apartment. She was practically shivering by the time she got inside.
Jackie sniffed the air when she walked in, finding the faint whiff of blood and corpse still following her. Maybe it was the bandage and wound on her head she was smelling. Bickerstaff distracted her annoyance by running up and rubbing for food. “You a hungry boy, Bickers?”
Shelby waltzed into her bedroom to put the duffle away, and Nick stepped into the kitchen. “I’ll get a can out for him,” he said. “Just sit down and relax, Jackie. You want a coffee?”
She held the cat against her chest, rubbing at the soft fur. “What I want is peace and quiet actually. I’d like to be alone for a while.”
“You want that bandage off before we go, Jackie?” Shelby called from the bedroom.
“No, I can—” She dropped Bickerstaff when he reacted to the can being opened on the counter. “Thanks. That would be great if you could.”
Shelby gave her a big, cheesy grin. “Scissors?”
“Kitchen drawer.”
Jackie found herself sitting on the edge of her bed, looking into the mirror over her dresser as Shelby looked to be jabbing scissors into her head. The metal was cool against her scalp, and Shelby made quick work of snipping through enough of the gauze to peel it slowly off the side of her head.
“Well . . . it’s healing well,” Shelby said. “Have to get you a sock hat to wear though, because it’s—”
Jackie turned her head away from Shelby’s probing fingers and glanced sidelong into the mirror. Someone had taken a pair of sheep sheers and shaved a two inch wide strip off the left side of her head and painted a mottled pink strip down the middle of it. She sucked in her breath. Looks never ranked high on Jackie’s, but she knew she wasn’t ugly. Plain maybe, but this? This was horrible. “Ahhh, shit! What the hell? I’m the bride of Frankenstein.”
Nick stepped in to the doorway. “How’s it look?”
“It’s fine, Nick. Go away,” Shelby told him and took a step in front of Jackie. “You’ve seen one scar, you’ve seen them all, so shoo!”
“It’s just hair,” he said, but Jackie heard him walk away.
“He’s right, you know,” Shelby added. “Most of this will grow back. You’ll just have to wear it long enough to fall over that scar. Just think of the stories you’ll be able to tell your grandkids about—”
“Stop, Shelby,” Jackie said. She didn’t even want to look at the mirror. “It’s just hair and it’s also fucking hideous. I don’t need any interesting marks to show off to people.” She kicked off her shoes toward the closet, bouncing them off the door. “Plain ol’ Jackie doesn’t need a war wound or something for people to point at or wince at or do any fucking thing at. Just give me the goddamn Percocet and let me go to sleep.”
Shelby sighed heavily beside her. “OK, hon. I’ll get you a glass of water.”
Two minutes later, they were mercifully gone and the apartment was shrouded in blissful silence. Jackie flopped back on her bed, still clothed in sweats and T-shirt. The mutant, freaky scar-girl didn’t have the energy or willpower to undress herself. Her fingers wandered up and lightly touched the stitches along her scalp. The wound was a good six centimeters long, running from above her left temple clean across the side of her head.
Bickerstaff walked up from the end of the bed to sniff at her hand. “Scary shit, huh, Bickers?” He licked her finger and Jackie pulled it back down. They were starting to tremble.
Death had come and left her a little calling card. One measly centimeter and her brains would have been oozing out into the grass. Jackie pulled her cat in close and clung to his furry warmth. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hold back tears. The worst of it was, she couldn’t even take solace in knowing that all of this was over. Rosa could still be out there, planning to take over someone else to finish her deadly vengeance.
Bickers began to purr with contentment in her grasp and the gentle motor along with the creeping haze of drugs lulled her off into sleep, where the doorway to Deadworld yawned open and Rosa’s words pushed her along. “You’re broken. You’re broken.”
Chapter 24
A perk of being dead was that you never got tired. You could walk for hours and hours and not feel a thing. If you knew where you were going, it did not even require walking. All you needed was a reference point and you could will your spirit to that place. If one were so inclined. Most spirits had no such inclination. Why bother? There were no cr
osstown barbeques to attend. You could not go see a movie. Church services were not held. Dying had the tendency to sap all the fun out of life.
Laurel continued walking. It had been a couple of hours, she guessed. Telling time in Deadworld was difficult given that it did not seem to flow in the same manner as physical reality. She had an address, had looked at the map on Shelby’s phone, and shuffled off to find Rosa. She had wanted to stay with Jackie, be there when she woke up, and assure herself that she was recovering. When Shelby had informed her that Jackie had been shot, panic gripped her, sending her instantly to the hospital before Shelby could even tell her the room number.
But determining if Rosa was finished took precedence. If she wasn’t, then she would be looking to possess someone else in order to finish the job. When Shelby had told her Morgan was dead, her first thought had been to see if Jackie had become a victim of Rosa’s wrath, but her presence had been gone, only the lingering taint leftover from the fight with Morgan.
She continued to walk, up avenues of empty businesses and through silent neighborhoods, cloaked in the perpetual hanging fog that continually shifted to obscure and reveal the colorless landscape. Laurel made careful note of the places she went. Solid reference points would make traveling much easier in the future. A detailed knowledge of the city was what had allowed Nick’s friend Reggie to move almost unimpeded throughout Chicago. That ease of movement had saved Cynthia against Drake’s goons.
On occasion, she would find other spirits walking aimlessly through the streets, looking right through her most times, oblivious and lost in their own laments, but once in awhile someone would look at her and offer a nod of acknowledgment or stare at her with wide, hopeless eyes. Many, she expected, had been lingering here for so long that they had forgotten why they remained. The times she had made an effort to strike up a conversation had generally been met with stony silence. If they did speak, it was almost always plaintive requests if she’d seen someone. So many souls unable to let go of their lives.
It would have been easy to get depressed, but thank the Great Mother, Laurel had a purpose still. Jackie needed her—to help nudge her life in the right direction and keep her from spiraling down into ruin, where she continually teetered on the brink. As much as she wanted to, Laurel knew the decisions were not hers to make.
And then there was Shelby. What sort of relationship did they have? They could not be together in a physical way, other than the few blissful moments when she would pull Shelby across for a brief kiss goodnight. Even then, the contact was dulled, not quite there, and more often than not left her wanting. She would give almost anything to have a bit of real, physical time with her. Shelby had more life in her than a dozen living people. Funny, smart, giving, and a walking poster girl for sensuality, Shelby was a girl’s wet dream. Or dream anyway; the dead had no physical response to desire. She would take what she could get, having lost so much in her dogged love for a woman who would never feel the same for her.
But her only regret was in failing Jackie by not helping her face those things that continued to pull her down and keep happiness always at arm’s length. For that she would linger until Jackie was gone, if it came to that.
Rosa’s neighborhood was not unlike the previous miles Laurel had walked, an endless, gloomy tract of buildings, seeping into the mist, lifeless structures coming out of the featureless, stony ground. Laurel wondered why this world presented itself as it did, how there were buildings but no trees, as though someone’s architecture class had built models of everything in Chicago and failed to accessorize. Worst of all, perhaps, there was no sense of the Great Mother here, no vastness to the universe or feeling of greater power existing within and around all things. There was power in this place. It permeated everything, and Laurel could only guess that it was this power that formed the landscape in which she traveled, that gave her the energy she needed to travel to the living world.
It was then she realized she had no sense of anything at all in this area. No ghosts wandered these streets or lingered in the homes nearby. It was as though nobody had ever died in this neighborhood, as if they had all been well-adjusted souls who moved on, or for some reason had all left the area. It was a ghost town for ghosts. With a growing sense of unease, she continued on.
Laurel had street names and an address. It was all she needed to find Rosa’s home, but within a few blocks, Laurel realized an address would not have been needed at all. The keen of Rosa’s baby echoed through the fog, a ceaseless wail of fury and fear. Even the blanketing sky needed respite from the onslaught, drawing away from the power of the babe’s spirit to leave a clear, pristinely detailed group of houses centered around the glow of Rosa’s. The whole area had a light of its own, radiating from the core, a tiny sun in a dark sea of the dead. The empty neighborhood now made sense. Who would want to linger in the presence of this anguish and anger?
The baby’s spirit had the intensity of innocence and burned with the rage of having it stolen before it had even begun. She could not feel Rosa’s presence, though perhaps it was buried beneath the power of the babe’s. Laurel continued to approach, cutting between houses now, making a direct line for the source. The wail continued, fueled by spiritual strength not air, so that it sounded more like a never-ending siren. It reminded Laurel of a tornado warning.
There was no way to hide or disguise her approach. The babe would sense her, but there was no way to judge what his reaction would be. If Rosa was there, obscured by the power of her child, Laurel realized she might not know until she actually reached them. Would she be viewed as a threat? She would have to assume that was true until proven otherwise.
Three houses from her goal, Laurel began to sense another presence, but it was not Rosa’s. It had a different quality all together, a familiar taste upon her senses that she knew all too well. Laurel stopped in the middle of the street.
“Jackie?” How was that even possible? Jackie could not be here. “Jackie!” she yelled and began to run. There was only one reason she could be here. “Sweet Mother, no.”
Laurel willed herself to the front of the house and was instantly whisked over to the front door. It stood half open. Jackie’s presence was clear now, in sharp relief to the more diffuse, radiating energy of the baby. She pushed the door open.
“Jackie!”
From up above, a hesitant, confused voice answered. “Laur?”
And then she was gone. The cool rush of wind signaling the opening of the door to the living world blew through her and then Jackie’s presence abruptly vanished. In her place someone else had come.
Laurel paused at the foot of the stairs. This taint was familiar, too. Rosa had returned.
She stood frozen, hand clenched on the banister, staring up the stairs. It took Laurel a moment to let this turn of events sink in, to process the meaning of what had just happened. Jackie had been in Deadworld. She left at the same moment Rosa arrived. Had they somehow switched places? It did not make sense. Possession didn’t throw you into the other side, not as she understood it anyway, but then Jackie was different. Something had happened to her here, where no living soul should be able to come. She had been changed by the experience. Was it possible to possess someone by literally swapping out their spiritual energies? She had possessed Jackie to get her out of Deadworld before.
There was no other conclusion Laurel could find. Rosa had possessed Jackie and forced her spirit self to the other side. Rosa would have free, unfettered control of Jackie’s body. And now she was back. Had she felt Laurel’s presence approaching her babe?
Rosa’s frenzied, roaring voice answered her. “Stay away from my baby!”
“Rosa,” she called. “My name is Laurel Carpenter. I was—”
“Get away from my baby!”
Behind her, the door slammed shut, blown shut by the force of Rosa’s voice. Laurel decided she had better run. She knew that tone of voice. It was the voice of someone past the threshold of reasoning. Nobody was going to get near her
babe, whether good, bad, or indifferent. She was a threat, pure and simple, and Rosa would likely do whatever she could to neutralize that threat.
The door would not open. Laurel exerted more force of will upon it, but she could do little more than budge it. Laurel began to draw her will to go to Jackie. She needed to warn her, but the door to the living got closed before she could even try to open it. Too late, Laurel turned to face the charging whirlwind of Rosa Sanchez.
She barreled into Laurel, hands outstretched, with the speed of a rampaging bull. Laurel slammed into the door and blew it right off the hinges, sending her tumbling across the stony ground. Being dead, the blow itself did no harm to her body, but the blast of energy that coursed through her felt like she had stuck her finger in a light socket. For a few precious moments, Laurel lay on the ground stunned. Before she could get her bearings again, Rosa was on top of her, hands clasping for her throat.
“You leave my baby alone! You can’t have him!”
Laurel clamped her hands around Rosa’s wrists, but there was strength there beyond a single person. She was drawing from her babe. “Ro . . . sa. I . . . don’t . . . want . . .”
She could not get the words out. Rosa kept pounding her head against the ground, holding her throat in a viselike grip. Each blow sent drowning waves of energy through her body. Her soul was literally getting blown out of her body with each shock of her head against the ground.
I’ve got no chance against her, Laurel realized. It was the Drake situation all over again—pitted with a foe that completely outmatched her and at their utter whim. This time, however, there was no holding out for the cavalry. Nick and Shelby had no clue she was even in trouble. Her only hope lay in letting Rosa believe she had won, think that she was truly dead.
Laurel ceased fighting against her, let her body get beat against the ground over and over. She turned her focus inward, concentrating down to that small core of her being from which all of her spiritual energy sprang, pulling herself down, deeper and deeper. All of her remaining energy condensed down to a tiny, protected point, a hard shell of energy that, she prayed to the goddess, would remain impervious to Rosa’s rage.