Vial Things (A Resurrectionist Novel Book 1)

by Leah Clifford

  There are several other things I don’t want noticed about me. One is the knife strapped to my waist, hidden by my baggy top. The other is a blade above my left ankle, another on my right. On my wrist is a bracelet made of paracord that unravels into seven feet of rope. You never know when you might need to hogtie someone.

  The only thing I won’t have anything to do with is guns. If I lose a knife in a fight, I know how to block against someone using it on me. At the very least, I can arc my body and minimize damage.

  I can’t dodge bullets.

  I tuck a twenty dollar bill in my pocket, grab my keys and head out into the sunshine. Once I latch the gate behind me and start down the street, my hands find their way to my back pockets. I don’t know where to go or what to do until Sarah calls. She’s half an hour’s drive away. If I need to get to her, I can always take the bus.

  The sidewalks teem with tourists. I hook left on Credence Avenue and follow the winding sidewalk that parallels Merciback Stream. Potted flowers hang from tall iron hooks rising off the metal fencing that keeps people from getting too close to the edge. The benches are occupied by overweight middle-aged couples drinking Blood Slurpies—nothing more sinister than extremely overpriced cherry vodka slushies in collectible plastic cups—shaded by hundred-year-old trees.

  I’m suspicious of everyone I pass. My eyes linger over each person, note how normal or out of place they look, gauge whether their I survived the Fissure’s Whipp Ghost Tour t-shirt is over the top acting or if they’re actually pathetic enough to wear it. Sweat runs from the bottom of my hairline, down my neck, slowly slides between my shoulder blades. I’m being paranoid, I know that, but I don’t care.

  Twenty minutes later, I climb the steps to the library. I can’t do much, but I can research. Details like missing organs don’t go unreported. Brandon might not be the only dead resurrectionist and the deaths will have made the papers.

  A blast of air-conditioning hits me in the face, chills my sweat-dampened skin. The librarian glances up from her desk and smiles. I return it as the wooden door thumps quietly shut behind me.

  The place is mostly empty. A row of computers sits unoccupied, but I go first for a newspaper abandoned on a table, the sports section scattered across the chair beside it. I check the date to be sure it’s today’s paper and start scanning the headlines. The front page is world drama: an oil spill, a war raging between two far off countries. I read on, looking for deaths, murders, eviscerated bodies. One would think these sort of things would claim a prominent spot. Instead, all I find about Ploy’s friend is a vague reference to a body found in an abandoned boxcar. There’s no mention his guts went AWOL.

  This is going to be harder than I thought.

  I start over, scouring until I hit the last page. Not even the obituaries hint at any strange deaths. In lieu of flowers, send information, I think bitterly. It’s time to widen my scope.

  I saddle up to a computer carousel and sit. When I open my email, there’s a new one from Talia. It’s been a month since I’ve heard from her, and even then, only to congratulate me on the new apartment and promise we’d hang out. I’d wanted her to be my roommate. I hadn’t been prepared for her to say no and things had been weird ever since. My finger hovers over the mouse. I click the email.

  My shoulders slump. It’s two paragraphs long, mundane catch up and a vague invite for coffee ‘sometime soon.’ I don’t know why it makes me sad. Still, she’s the closest thing to a best friend I have, so I tell her about the weird job last night and my aunt’s concerns. I leave out everything about Ploy. I end the email with ‘call me when you can’. Part of me half hopes my phone will ring, but after a few minutes, I go back to work.

  Opening the search page, I realize I have no idea where to start. I figure it’s best to cover my bases. Fissure’s Whipp deaths, I type first. The results are a jumble of useless information, everything from old ghost stories to domestic violence. I clear the search bar and try again. Fissure’s Whipp body missing organs leads to urban legends about kidney thieves and then an article I almost think might be promising until I realize it’s some sort of conspiracy board. The article is hours old. Are the dead walking among us? the headline proclaims in bold letters.

  I start reading, expecting some sort of zombie tie-in. Instead, it’s an interview with a woman who saw her grandson killed in an ATV accident. She describes seeing him impaled by a tree branch through the chest. I perk up, leaning closer to the screen. She claims the next day her son, the boy’s father, acted as if nothing more than a small collision had occurred. There’s no way he could have lived through what she saw, she’s quoted as saying. I scan the rest of the article, already knowing the boy was saved by a resurrectionist. There’s no other explanation, unless the woman’s insane, which, according to her family, she is. She says she won’t speak to them. That they’re harboring a demon.

  “Idiot,” I murmur. As a whole, we try not to bring religion into what we can do. It’s genetics, not a gift from some benevolent god.

  Oddly, the most accurate information consistently comes from the conspiracy blogs. Once or twice, they pop up featuring towns I’ve heard of in passing, where families with the blood have lived for decades and formed whispered reputations.

  At some point, I wander over to a snack machine and shovel in the change I’d gotten from the librarian for my twenty dollars. A bag of stale animal crackers and a Coke later, I refocus. I click link after link. I devour obituaries, cross check accidents and violent ends. Nothing. My fingers pause on the keys.

  I type in my own last name. I’m not sure why I do it. I know what will come up.

  I type in the word ‘found’, the word ‘dead’.

  Home Invasion Takes Tragic Toll

  My parents stare at me from the screen, smiling faces from a photograph most likely now tucked away in my aunt’s basement. I never asked Sarah what she did with the contents of the rest of my house. I meant to, but at first it’d been too sad and then weeks led to months and months to years. Maybe she’s waiting for me to ask for them. She hadn’t mentioned anything when I’d moved into the apartment. All the furniture came from a series of thrift shop runs.

  It’s been three years and two months. Memories blend into each other as I stare at the grainy picture. Bent knees and dirty hands as my mother worked in the garden and the way her fingers had curled into her palm that night. The blur of my father’s shirt as he danced me around the living room and the pool of blood leeching into my sneakers when I found him. Hollowed out pumpkins and hollowed out chest cavities. My mother’s laugh.

  I hadn’t been there to hear her screams. While she and my father had been dying, I’d been in a dark theatre, eating popcorn with Talia.

  Sarah had given me the barest of details once she and the leaders of the other clusters had pieced together what had happened. My mother had done what she’d always been taught to do. Used the blood to take what we could from people too desperate to turn us down. They could have come up with a payment plan, or talked it through—Christ, we bring people back from the dead, we’re obviously not killers—but when the time had come to pay off whatever debt they’d owed her, they’d panicked. They’d gutted my father first, then my mother, and left them on the living room floor for me to find.

  Because it wasn’t a hunter, Sarah had neutralized the threat and the rest of the resurrectionists in the area had breathed a sigh of relief and gone on with their lives.

  I stare down at the paper. I’m not in the photo. There’s no mention of me in the article, no mention of any surviving relatives or family. I wonder who Sarah had to pay off to keep those details quiet. Favors, no doubt, had been promised.

  A tap on my shoulder rips me out of the memory. I jerk hard, frantically closing the article while pawing at my damp cheeks with the other hand.

  “I’m sorry,” the librarian says from behind me. “We try to limit patrons to an hour. You’ve been on for two.” There’s a teenager standing behind her, arms cr
ossed and hip popped, glaring at me.

  “Oh, my fault totally,” I say, stumbling up. “I lost track.”

  The librarian gives me a polite nod.

  I grab my messenger bag and head for the door, take the stairs down to the sidewalk and then stop, uncertain. Sarah had told me not to stay in the apartment by myself.

  While the sun’s shining, the city’s spookiness fades until there’s nothing left but baking cobblestones and shops full of tchotchkes. Nothing looks even remotely appealing enough to hold my attention. Standing on the sidewalk, I desperately try to think of somewhere else to go.

  Chapter 7

  PLOY

  I don’t bother trying to con spare change from tourists. I’ve got too much on my mind to do anything but walk the streets. Without my pack, I wind through the people, lost in thought. Brandon occupies a chunk of my brain. Allie more. She’d seemed almost relieved to have me ask to stay with her this morning. It unnerves me.

  Ahead, I spot one of the kids from the camp as he raises a hand in my direction. It’s too late to pretend I didn’t see him. Giving in, I cross the street and head over. Jutting my chin at him as a hello, he nods back, his fingers tapping out a complicated rhythm on the edge of the bongo drum clenched in his lap. He doesn’t miss a beat when he glances up at me.

  “Brand?” he says and I know he can tell by my face I’ve already heard. His frown deepens. “Sucks, man.”

  There’s really nothing else to say about it.

  “You need a place, I’m squatting down near the river. House no one bothers.”

  “Thanks, but I’m good,” I say. We both watch as a small girl comes up to him with a handful of change given to her by a parent. He shoots her a toothy grin as she drops it in the cup and doubles his rhythm. Eyes widening, she flees to her dad. One of the faces in the crowd behind them jumps out at me.

  Jamison.

  I give a subtle nod and he returns it before stepping back into the throng of tourists. Anger twists through me, makes me want to forget it all and just start walking in the opposite direction. Get out of this while I still can. But it’s already too late. I know that. Jamison must too, because he’s not even waiting for me, so sure I’ll follow.

  “Gotta go,” I mumble to the kid on the bongos.

  Jamison’s a block down before I draw up to his side and pace him. When he speaks, his condolences come slow and syrupy, tinged with a Southern accent. “Sorry about Brandon.”

  Vicious words rise up my throat, but I swallow them as I glance his way from the corner of my eye. He’s rubbing a hand across his shaved head. It’s a tick. He knows I’m mad. “Look,” he says. “You weren’t going to get anything out of him.”

  “I was working on it,” I say. “I needed a little more time.”

  He shrugs. “You ran out.”

  “That’s one way of putting it. Another is you left chunks of him where I slept.”

  The corner of his mouth twitches. “Yeah, well, he didn’t give up his secrets with a knife through his stomach, so a little extra time wouldn’t have gotten you any better.”

  It would have kept Brandon alive, I think. We’d known going in that we might need to use a little muscle, but now someone’s dead.

  I give Jamison an uncertain look but he only clomps his open palm against my back, his tone jovial. “You’re not beating yourself up over this are you?”

  He knows me well. He should. We’ve been best friends for six years now. So I don’t need to look at him to know the scowl he’ll be wearing. “Hey!” he says. His mouth hangs open a bit as he shakes his head. “It had to be done!”

  “No, it didn’t.” I reach up to tighten backpack straps that aren’t there and end up with my fingers gripping my shoulders. “If Brandon didn’t tell us how to do it, I could have moved on to someone else.”

  “You did,” Jamison says. “You moved on to Allie.”

  “No one had to get hurt.”

  “This sends a message,” he says, the words flat and cold. We stare at each other, him blank faced, me in a mix of horror and not-quite-acceptance he’s actually said what he just said. He sighs. “They’ll be afraid. Scared people talk. Eventually, one of those scared people will talk to you.”

  I don’t like the way he talks as if the ones with the power we’re after aren’t people anymore. Because once we have it too, what will that make us? Uncertainty wriggles down my spine like a water droplet, easy to brush away and undeniable just the same. I want to tell myself it’s Jamison’s way, getting overexcited, taking things too far. It’s always been my job to make him see the line he’s crossed and scale him back.

  “We’re not doing it that way,” I say carefully.

  It’s as if a switch flips and he suddenly remembers he’s a person, with a moral compass and a sense of right and wrong. His face falls. “You’re right,” he says, tucking his hands behind him, into the waistband of his jeans. “I shouldn’t have done that to Brandon.”

  I heave a breath, spare him the lecture on how it’s too late. Sorrys won’t help Brand. Jamison bumps into my shoulder as we walk. When I look up at him, he locks eyes with me. “I messed up bad on that one, okay?” he says. “But it wasn’t for nothing.”

  Given time, Jamison has a habit of twisting even the worst things he’s done into sense.

  “You’ve been working on this Allie girl for a couple months now, right?” he asks when I don’t take the bait.

  I work hard to keep any trace of emotion from my face. She’s just a girl. I don’t care what happens to her. I nod.

  “And how’s that going? Is she scared?”

  I think of the fear in her eyes when I’d told her about Brandon. As soon as she’d heard he was gutted, she’d figured it out, why he was killed, that whoever did it knew what he was. Just like Jamison is suggesting, it’d rattled her. “You’ve got to trust me to work this right,” I say. “She spooks easy. I’ve gotta let her come to me, and that takes time,” I tell him. “But it’s going good. I’m in at her place for a week. Maybe more.”

  “You know why you’re in?” he asks.

  I know. I wouldn’t have pushed to stay with Allie if Brandon had still been alive. If I thought it had half a chance of working, I’d tell Jamison she’s a dead end, too. But now I know what Jamison does with dead ends. My shoulders sag. “No,” I say. “I get it.”

  Worse, he’s right. Jamison’s talking but I tune him out, focus on the excited way his hands move. It’s always the same when he talks about the power. Nothing’s changed since one of them brought back his mom when he was fifteen.

  It’d been his mother who’d, with her dying breath, told him a number to call. The unknown friend of hers had banished him and his father to other parts of the house. Half an hour later, Jamison’s smiling, raised from the dead mother had hugged him tight.

  Even being best friends, it’d taken a full year before he told me what he’d seen these people do. How the powers they’d given his mother left her able to heal. How she’d gotten her son to help her test the boundaries. A hot curling iron to the wrist. Broken glass through her foot. How at some point, everything went wrong and he’d had to call that number again when the wound didn’t knit itself together. That time, his mother had still been alive when she’d been treated. The third time the woman had come, they hadn’t called at all. She had calmly killed and then cut open his mother, taken the heart with her when she’d left. She’d told Jamison to forget what he’d seen. Warned him that if he didn’t, she’d come for him next.

  The threat hadn’t stopped him.

  In Jamison’s mom, the ability to heal had faded. We want more than that. Permanence, like Brandon and Allie have, like the woman who fixed Jamison’s mom. Once we have the power, instead of hiding in the shadows, we’ll go public. People will pay big money to be able to feel immortal. And then in a month, when it fades away, they’ll pay big money again.

  We’ll be gods, he’d said. If we can make them tell us how bringing people back to life w
orks, we’ll be practically invincible. When we’d grown a little older and gotten a little more rational he’d pointed to my fresh black eye, a gift from my father. My embarrassment had kept me from looking at him. You could heal that, he’d said, tipping my head to see the shiner.

  Jamison had been the one to convince me to get the hell out of there, shown up and packed me a bag when I’d wavered. When my father had tried to stop me, it’d been Jamison who’d taken care of things. I owe him. It’s the only thing keeping me next to him on this sidewalk.

  Now, he takes in the torn jeans I wear, washed in a shower. The stained t-shirt. His eyes drift to my sneakers, the tip of the left one wrapped in fresh duct tape. “We’ll be famous. Rich. Just like I promised you.”

  I wiggle my toe. “Rich enough to get me some decent shoes?” I say and he scoffs.

  “Come on, you can afford to dream a little bigger.” He’s joking. The words cut anyway. Jamison’s busy dreaming up mansions and fast cars and I just want a room of my own and dry feet.

  I smirk at him. “Two pairs then, asshole,” I say and throw a punch at his shoulder.

  “Two pairs,” he echoes. “This will all be worth it. Everything.” His tone is off. Not sad but almost...regretful? “I think you’re on the right track with this girl. We need to move things forward though, like we did with Brandon. Sacrifices for the greater good. Do you get where I’m coming from?”

  My muscles tense. It’s almost involuntary. The same way I used to know my dad had polished off a bottle of Wild Turkey the second I stepped through the door. Bad things in the air.

  For the first time in a while I look up. We’re not in the crowds anymore. In fact, we’ve taken a side street or two, closer now to Allie’s place. There’s no one around.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. “You’re not going to kill her?” I fight off the panic threatening to overwhelm me and force a laugh. “If you keep killing them, there won’t be any left.” We don’t know exactly what they are, and only a bit about the power they have. Mostly that we want it, too.