Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  One of the African violets in the window, like time-lapse photography, wilted and died.

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  He blinked. “I know who I am.” He sounded angry. The knuckles on his hands turned white from clenching them so hard. “I was born here. I grew up here. I graduated from Maquoketa High. I went to Iowa State. I met Lily. I—” He stood up and crossed to the sink.

  “Yeah,” Hallie said after a moment. “I bet it all makes sense if you just don’t think about it. But, you know what? It’s wrong. And somewhere in that head of yours, you know it.”

  Silence.

  Boyd rose from the table, walked to the kitchen sink, and looked out at the barn and near fields. Finally, he turned and leaned against the counter. He looked remote. And confused. Which Hallie figured was progress.

  He wore a long-sleeved gray T-shirt with a short-sleeved red T-shirt over the top, both of them old and faded but clean. Weird to see him in T-shirts, though, when she’d only ever seen him in button-down shirts. It made him look even younger, which hardly seemed possible. He rubbed a hand across his chin, and Hallie noticed that he hadn’t shaved.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  And suddenly Hallie didn’t know how to answer that. Because it was all tied up with Martin, with Lorie’s death, with seeing ghosts, with magic and blood sacrifice. It took her a minute to realize all she had to say was “I’m Hallie Michaels. I’m from South Dakota.”

  “I—,” he began, then stopped, like he had no idea where to go from here.

  “You live in South Dakota,” Hallie said helpfully. “You’re a deputy sheriff there. You’ve lived there a year and a half. Before that, you lived in Des Moines. You haven’t lived on this farm since you graduated from college, except for a week or two at harvest, maybe. You have dreams.”

  Boyd looked startled. He said. “Everyone has dreams.”

  “Not like yours.”

  “I don’t—” He shook his head. “Everyone has dreams,” he said again, as if repeating it, it would become the truth. But she could tell—because she still knew him no matter what he knew. He had dreams, his kind of dreams, and she was willing to bet that in his head, in what he remembered right now, he didn’t think he’d ever told anyone.

  “Dreams,” she said, almost patient. “About things that haven’t happened. About things that will.”

  Breath whispered out of him like a sigh. “Yeah,” he said. Just … yeah.

  Hallie was hot and tired and really, really thirsty. And she knew that they needed a plan. Thinking about that kind of thing seemed infinitely difficult, like her mind was full of cotton candy and spiderwebs. More than anything right now, maybe more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life, she wanted Boyd back in the game, wanted him to know her, to know what they’d been through together, to know that he was a deputy sheriff and smart and—she wanted help was what she wanted.

  30

  “I don’t know what they mean,” Boyd said, “the dreams. But yes,” like he was admitting to his deepest secret, “I have them.”

  A long minute passed; Hallie waited. Right now this was all on him, on what he decided. When he finally spoke, it wasn’t about anything she’d said, wasn’t about dreams or memory or Hallie. Like he couldn’t figure out what to say about it, but hadn’t yet worked himself around to dismissing it. And that was her hope, every moment he listened, every bit that he accepted. “I have to do chores,” he said, like he could still fit this all into “normal” if he just worked at it a little harder.

  Hallie blinked. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, that this wasn’t a real farm, there weren’t real cows. But he had to agree to leave with her. She had to convince him. For him, right now, those cows were real.

  “I’ll help,” she said. She was tired and thirsty and the cut on her arm had gone from pinpricks to full-blown throbbing, like it might fall off at any moment, but this was the only game in town, and she was playing it to the end.

  “It’s fine,” Boyd said. “I don’t need your help.”

  “Look,” Hallie told him. “I’ll milk cows or pitch hay or clean gutters or whatever it is you need to do right now. And while we do that, I’ll tell you who you are. Who I know you are.” He was difficult to read at the best of times, but now—she both knew him and didn’t know him, could see the guy he’d been yesterday back in South Dakota. And she could see the difference in him too. “If I do that, if I lay it all out, will you listen? Will you hear what I’m saying?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He crossed the kitchen, grabbed a pair of work gloves from a basket near the door, and retrieved the baseball cap he’d been wearing earlier. He spent what seemed to Hallie a long moment settling the cap on his head. Then he turned away from the door back to her. The brim of the cap curved across his forehead so his eyes were shadowed.

  “I got up this morning and I almost knew who I was,” he said. “I grew up here. With my parents and my brother. I know this place like the back of my hand. I know this stuff. But I don’t—” He paused. “—I don’t actually remember one specific thing I did three weeks ago. Or last year. And I haven’t been worried about that. Which is … wrong. It’s just wrong.

  “So, you have something to tell me? Great. I will listen to every single word you say. Because something’s not right. I look at this”—he indicated the room they were standing in—“and it feels solid and real and right. I look at you and even though I know I’ve never seen you before, I look at you and everything else—this—feels wrong.”

  Before Hallie could reply to this, there was a low rumble followed by the shriek of wood tearing loose from its moorings. Boyd ran into the hall. Hallie grabbed her backpack and shotgun and followed him. Dust filtered through the gray air, thick and dense near the floor, thinner higher up, casting everything in pervasive gloom. The front wall of the house twisted away from its framing, as if something huge had just wrenched it open like an old-fashioned tin can. Hallie grabbed Boyd’s arm. “This place is held together by your memories!” she shouted. “The more you question, the more it comes apart.”

  Outside, desperate barking pierced the air.

  Maker.

  Hallie dropped Boyd’s arm, turned back to the kitchen, and ran outside and toward the road. She heard Boyd behind her. “Hey. Hey!”

  At the edge of the lawn, she saw Maker. Three unmakers chased him. “Here!” Hallie shouted to Maker, who had turned and was backing slowly away, its scruff raised and its tail rigid.

  “Can’t,” it said without looking at her.

  Oh. Right. The barrier.

  Hallie fired at the lead unmaker, pumped the slide, and fired again. The unmaker disappeared. The two remaining creatures stopped. They turned their heads in perfect unison to look at her with eyeless faces.

  Hallie heard pounding footsteps. “What the hell is going on?” Boyd asked as he reached her. “What are you shooting at?”

  “Jesus, you seriously can’t see that?” Hallie said. Her shotgun was trained steadily on the two remaining unmakers. “I can hold them off,” she said to Maker. “Go!”

  Boyd started to step in front of Hallie, as if the problem was that she couldn’t see him. She shifted her foot and blocked him with her body. He grabbed her arm just above the wrist, like he was going to pull her away.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  Hallie took a half step sideways to look at him and still see the unmakers, but he was already gone, running toward the house. She felt like she was falling, like her heart had dropped from her chest. Because Boyd didn’t run. Even if he didn’t remember her. Even if he thought she was crazy. Even if he had no idea what was going on. He stood. That was what he did. That was who he was.

  Right?

  Apparently not.

  She faced the unmakers squarely. She’d handled lots of other things on her own. If she had to, she’d handle this too.

  “Why are you not already gone?” she asked Maker, who appeared to be backed right
up against the invisible barrier.

  Lily—and Hallie’d been wondering where she was—trotted out of the trees along the driveway and joined Maker on the road. “I’ve been thinking,” she said to Hallie. “I think it would be nicer if he stayed.”

  Jesus, really? Like another country heard from. And no matter how sorry she felt for Lily, who’d died too young and hadn’t asked for any of it, Boyd staying was not an option. “He’s not staying,” Hallie said. “He’s not dead.”

  Lily watched the unmakers, an edge in her gaze, as if she hadn’t planned on them. “He has to want to leave,” Lily reminded her.

  “He will,” Hallie said.

  “He doesn’t remember you, does he?”

  “He will.” Hallie repeated the words through gritted teeth.

  She heard running footsteps behind her and Boyd was there again, standing beside her with a pistol in his hand. Hallie’s breath caught. He’d gone for weapons. To help. Not running from, but toward. Even if he couldn’t remember South Dakota or deputy sheriffs or Hallie. He was still Boyd.

  And that was something.

  He grabbed Hallie’s arm. “I can see them when I touch you,” he said. “It’s crazy, but I see them. What are they?”

  “It’s … difficult to explain,” Hallie said—understatement of the decade.

  “I called the police,” Boyd said. “Or tried to. There was no dial tone.”

  “Yeah, this isn’t actually Iowa,” Hallie said. And really, even if they were in Iowa, even if there were police, what would they do against unmakers of the undead?

  Boyd took a deep breath, as if he had to remind himself that he, at least, was real. He pulled the clip from his pistol, presumably to load it.

  “Regular bullets won’t work,” Hallie said. “It has to be steel—the bullets—and sacrament and dead man’s blood, all three.” But she recognized his gun. It was his gun, his own gun from back in the world. He’d had it on him when Hollowell pulled him away. “Can I see your bullets?”

  He removed his hand from her arm and reached into his pocket.

  Oh, yeah. Hallie almost laughed. The bullets she’d given him—steel and dead man’s blood and sacrament. “Those will work fine,” she said. “Just fine.”

  She realized that in the few seconds she’d been talking to Boyd, the unmakers had moved—without seeming to move at all—closer to Maker and Lily.

  “Look,” Hallie said to Boyd, her voice urgent in a way she hoped he would accept without asking questions. “You have to shoot them twice before they disappear. But they will disappear.

  Lily had been quiet since Boyd returned, but now she said, “You can shoot them?”

  Boyd looked up. “Lily?” He took three quick steps forward and would have gone straight across the barrier into the road if Hallie hadn’t grabbed him.

  Lily looked at the unmakers with an intent expression. Boyd wrenched out of Hallie’s grasp and reached Lily in three quick strides. He grabbed her arm. “Trust me,” he said to her, his voice low, like he was trying not to panic her. “We have to get out of here now.”

  “Give me your gun,” she said. “Please?”

  Boyd looked at Hallie, like nothing was the way it was supposed to be and he didn’t understand how to fix it. Hallie almost laughed a second time, because this was the one thing he was right about—nothing was the way it was supposed to be and she didn’t know how to fix it either. “Here.” She handed her shotgun to Lily and pulled the prybar she’d used yesterday on Hollowell from her backpack—had it only been yesterday?

  Lily hefted the shotgun in her small hands, lifted it to her shoulder, and fired it at the nearest unmaker. It staggered back and she ratcheted the slide and fired again. It disappeared. “Goddamn!” she said, ratcheted the slide and fired again; then she fired a fourth time and the last unmaker popped out of existence.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said as Hallie took the shotgun back and proceeded to reload it. “I’ve wanted to do that for years.”

  “You can see them?” Boyd said. “Those things? You can see those things?” Hallie could watch him trying to fit this new piece of information with the Lily he knew or thought he knew.

  Lily put her hand on his coat sleeve. “You’re not in Iowa,” she said.

  “He doesn’t remember anything after college,” Hallie said.

  “Wow,” Lily said.

  Hallie handed the prybar to Lily. “This will work too,” she said. “Like the bullets.”

  “Awesome,” Lily said. She smacked the prybar into her open hand.

  “What the hell is going on?” Boyd asked, like there would be an answer that would satisfy a guy who thought he was a farmer living in eastern Iowa.

  31

  Hallie was tired—exhausted—not to mention still really, really thirsty. Black flickered at the edges of her vision too, but she ignored that. Her watch didn’t work. Time itself didn’t actually seem to work here. An hour was meaningless; half a day was meaningless. Except it wasn’t. For her, it wasn’t. If she didn’t get out of here—get herself and Boyd out of here—she’d be gone forever. More dead than Lily. More dead than Dell.

  “Will they be back?” Boyd asked.

  “What?”

  “Those … things. Are there more of them? Will they be coming?”

  “There are always more,” Maker said as it came up beside them. Down the road, Lily stood just this side of the curve. She turned and looked back at them.

  Hallie rubbed a hand across her eyes. She didn’t want to be in charge of this. Or in charge of anything, for that matter. She was good at getting things done, seeing a goal and accomplishing it. She was good with space and patterns and knowing things by looking that other people would need to measure and tote up with a pencil and paper. She could tell how much wire was needed to mend a fence line, what the enclosed acreage was, how many cattle could be grazed for how long. She could calculate gas mileage in her head, the fuel mix for a small tractor, the number of cattle that could be fed on a stack of big round hay bales, and the distance to target and likelihood of hitting said target with whatever gun was at hand. In Afghanistan, she’d been a good squad leader—get a goal, achieve a goal, bring everyone with you and back.

  But that wasn’t being in charge. She had no ambition to be a general or president or the ruler of hell, just to get things done. Getting things done was simple.

  This was not.

  Right then, everything—the front lawn, the trees lining the driveway, the tulips and daffodils in the flower beds beside the front door—died, like a frost had descended while they were standing in the road and killed everything. The house had already collapsed half in on itself. Only the garage and the barn still stood, though they looked older than they had earlier, neglected. “Huh,” Hallie said. This place had been built from Boyd’s memories. And now it was falling apart.

  “We need to go,” she said to Boyd. “I need you to come with me.”

  “Go?” he said, his voice rising. “Go where? How?”

  Boyd looked at the pistol in his hands, pulled the clip, looked at that, then shoved it back in the pistol. He watched Lily as she walked back up the road toward them, looked at her hard, like something must be real out of all of this, because there was Lily right there and he knew her, had known her, remembered her. He wiped a hand down his sleeve, like smoothing out the fabric, then turned back to Hallie. After a while, he said, “Who are you?” Like this time when she told him, it would make sense.

  Hallie didn’t look at him as she said, “I died in Afghanistan and I can see ghosts.” She’d said those words to him once before. He was the only person she’d ever said them to. Saying them now felt like a punch to the gut, because this was wrong, all wrong. Wrong for him to stand there and not know her. Wrong for them to be here at all. Just wrong.

  She continued. “I can see other things too. Things that people—other people—can’t. I’m not sure why, not really, but I see things that are dead or that have never been alive. Black
dogs. Those creatures—the unmakers—reapers.”

  “Am I dead?” Boyd asked her.

  “What?” Hallie turned involuntarily and looked at him.

  Lily, who had by this time reached them again, said, “No, you’re just in hell.”

  “I think it’s more like purgatory,” Hallie said. She added, “Travis Hollowell, who you remember, right? Well, he died seven years ago. Lily died with him. Because she was trying to save you. Now he—Hollowell is a reaper. And he’s doing the same thing to Lily’s sister that he tried to do to Lily.” Told too fast and not enough detail, but she didn’t have detail in her right now.

  “Beth? He’s after Beth?” Lily’s voice rose and cracked on Beth’s name. She grabbed Hallie by the shirtsleeve. “You have to stop him!”

  “I’m—we’re—working on it,” Hallie said. Jesus, that was the whole point of the exercise. “But we need to leave here. We need to leave this whole place.”

  Boyd shook himself, not like a dog out of water, but like something ice cold had just brushed the back of his neck.

  “None of this makes sense,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “What do you want me to do about it?” Maybe they should just forget the past, forget she ever knew him or he knew her or any of that. She took the last bottle of water from her pack and drank half of it, then reluctantly capped the remaining half and put it back in her pack.

  “Are you all right?” Boyd asked.

  And that? That right there? Sounded so familiar, so much like Boyd that Hallie, completely and totally uncharacteristically, wanted to cry. “No,” she said. “I’m not.” She wiped a hand across her face. Her injured arm felt hot and heavy and she felt like she could drink enough water to turn the world to desert.

  “There’s something else you should know,” Lily said. She looked at Boyd, talked directly to him, like Hallie wasn’t even there. “There’s this guy, right? This guy with a cane? He calls himself Death. Like, the Death. The guy who’s supposed to be in charge of all this. That guy?