by J. C. Nelson
“Brynner Carson. I let you in the cemetery to pay respects, since I carry the backhoe keys with me these days, but you aren’t welcome here.”
Mr. Parker might be one of the few fathers in town who didn’t want me hurt for breaking his daughter’s heart. “How’s Emily?” Emily was the only girl in school who not only escaped my charms but who seemed completely immune to them.
“Moved to New York eight years ago. Married herself a nice wife; they’ve got a grandson on the way. Now get the hell off my property.” He hefted the shotgun for emphasis. “This ain’t rock salt.”
“I’m not here to break in this time. I need to talk to you. Official BSI business.” A lie, but not like he’d know. The badge didn’t speak up and say I quit.
He lowered the shotgun. “I do my bodies right. All of them. Tendons cut at each joint, jaws pinned. You got a problem with the dead, you know they weren’t buried in Happy Hills. I have a log with the serial number of everyone I’ve processed for the last five decades, and my cousin works the computer to put them in the BSI national registry. Mine don’t come back.”
Of course not. The man took pride in his work, making sure the bodies were both prepared to go in the ground and fixed so they’d stay that way. That gave me an idea. “If I got you some serial numbers from the thigh tattoo on a corpse, could you tell me where they were processed?”
He walked up to me, easily a foot and a half shorter, but a man confident he had the power. “I could. But first I need to hear you say it.”
I’d known this was coming all along and had rehearsed my answer. “I’m sorry I broke in. I’m sorry I stole your backhoe, and I promise, Mr. Parker. I won’t dig up my mother’s coffin again.”
Fifteen
GRACE
After thirty minutes of translating, I realized I didn’t need Brynner. I needed his aunt. The woman was a walking catalogue of Brynner’s life, without the risk I might kiss her.
Regular hieroglyphics could be deciphered with ease. Later glyphs often spelled out the meaning of earlier glyphs. Co-orginfluenced hieroglyphics, on the other hand, combined all three sets of characters in a manner similar to Japanese. Early glyphs completely altered the entire meaning and tone of ones that came afterward. With no punctuation, the only way to make sense of it was to start at the beginning.
The other question that came to mind was, How did Henrich Carson learn these? So I laid out the journals one by one, asking questions of Emelia as often as I could to help me pin down the order when I thought I’d ferreted out a passage.
And her patience had limits. On my twenty-first trip to the kitchen, Emelia finally put down her paper and stared at me. “You really ought to ask Brynner.”
“I tried.”
“Ask nicer. Boy dotes on you something awful. Pass the sugar, sweetie.”
I handed it to her, shaking my head. “Sure he does.”
“Grace Roberts.” She dropped her paper enough to look at me. “Was that sarcasm?”
I closed my eyes before I could roll them. “No, ma’am.”
“I didn’t think so. Not in this house.”
Taking my laptop, I went out to the porch swing and downloaded my current mail. My connection, even with a satellite card, was so slow I could practically fly back to Seattle faster. When it finally downloaded, I opened the activity data Dr. Thomas promised me. Red dots pinpointed each co-org confirmed and killed.
The sheer amount of activity left me horrified.
Shamblers everywhere. Co-orgs popping up in places that made no sense, like the one trapped on a sandbar. How had it even gotten there? It wasn’t like it could do the backstroke.
And the seaports, where co-orgs avoided moving water like the destruction it was. What were they doing along the water?
I flicked back through weeks of data.
Three weeks ago, reasonable, normal activities. The hiker grabbed here, the family dog turning up mutilated there.
Two weeks ago, and the first contact along the Atlantic coast. I rotated the Earth model and flicked back. Data from Egypt was, at best, sketchy. Those bastards in Grave Services didn’t share information with us, though our best situation analysts figured they had far worse problems than we did.
As I played the data forward, an image kept forming.
When I was a little girl, my dad took me out to skip stones along the lake, as if that would make up for screaming at me the night before. The memory remained crisp in my mind, and the pattern of red on my map, more than anything, reminded me of a stone skipping across the water. One ripple leading to another.
Where had Brynner said he found the drawing? Greece. What if it wasn’t a ripple? I called Dr. Thomas again, waiting for it to roll through to voice mail. Instead, after ringing over and over, he answered, his voice thick.
“This is Grace Roberts. Do you have a moment?”
“Now that I’m not sleeping? Today was my day off. You do know we’re two hours behind you, right?”
I explained my theory about the ripples. “We talk about the Re-Animus like a single entity. But what if it’s a pack of creatures? These don’t look like a disease spreading, because they aren’t. They’re prey movement. Or predator movement.”
Dr. Thomas waited. “Let’s say this intriguing theory has merit. According to the records, Heinrich Carson was only able to kill two Re-Animus. I don’t know of anyone else succeeding, ever. What would threaten a Re-Animus enough to make it flee?”
Brynner, if you asked me, would most definitely threaten one. But there was another answer, a simpler one. “A bigger Re-Animus. Stronger. More powerful. Something upsetting the normal progression and distribution. So they’re all on the move. Fighting with one another. Fleeing something else.”
“Hmmm. You have no proof, but a theory consistent with the data.”
“Yes, sir.” I swallowed, wondering how far out-there he thought I was.
Dr. Thomas sighed. “I think it’s worth presenting to the director.”
BRYNNER
I always did like funeral homes. In funeral homes, the bodies tended to stay put on the tables or coffins. Standard prep work involved cutting every major tendon in two places, and in high-activity areas, screwing the jaws closed. Most folks took the public safety tax credit for cremating relatives.
Mr. Parker and I drove out to the Hughes’s place and gathered up what was left of the other corpses. Of course, one of them didn’t have a number, since he hadn’t been dead long enough to get one. We left him for the medical examiner.
Once we got back to the home, Mr. Parker started with a standard examination. “See there? That’s sloppy work,” he said, pointing to the ankle of one Grace had shot. “There’s a cut here, but they didn’t take the time to make sure the Achilles tendon was severed.” With a digital camera he documented each foot.
He slid open a refrigerated tray, revealing an elderly woman. “I take the foot off and sew it back.” He lifted a toe, showing how the flesh sagged.
“Now, let’s see those numbers.” With a scanner, he read off the bar code. And frowned. “Done in Louisiana. Chain home, probably minimum-wage workers. I’ll report these. Could you sign off on the processing report?”
He’d claim the cash credits for handling someone else’s mess, too. I shook my head. “I’d love to, but I’m not here on official business. Those four showed up at the Hughes farm looking to make friends. There’s a woman staying at the Big 8, Grace Roberts. Official BSI agent. She can sign, and they’ll honor the credits.”
He smiled at me for the first time in ten years. “Thank you, sir. According to the accident report filed with the body records, all three are victims of a carbon monoxide accident. Weren’t found for a week.”
Three bodies sitting around, just calling to Re-Animus like crap to flies. “Okay. That explains the color and the condition of the bodies.”
“Sure, but it doesn’t explain the location. See, those corpses were processed in New Orleans yesterday. I doubt they bought
a train ticket straight here.” He got up and grabbed a shearing pruner from the wall. “If you don’t mind, I don’t like letting them lie there intact.”
With a quick clip, he severed the tendons on each leg, then at each elbow. “There we go. Now we can put them in the incinerator without getting killed.”
I helped him load the first body into the crematorium, then shook his hand. “Thank you for helping me. If there’s ever anything I can do to return the favor, you call me.”
Mr. Parker wiped the sweat off his forehead. “There’s one thing. Explain to me exactly what went through your head that day.”
What was I supposed to say? I’m sorry I stole your backhoe? “I was a kid. I wasn’t thinking.”
He crossed his arms. “You were seventeen. Old enough to know what you were doing. You didn’t knock down a single stone with the hoe.”
“I didn’t disturb a body. That was the point.” Something I’d never been able to get across to Dad. Not while he wasn’t around. Not while he was.
“No, but you disturbed a grave.” His eyes gleamed as he spoke. “Something sacred. Special. You need to learn respect for the dead.”
What happened that day had more to do with the living than the dead, but I didn’t want to explain. “I’ll try, sir.” We shook again, and I let myself out.
I drove home. Home. A word I hadn’t used for nearly a decade, so it felt foreign to think it, let alone say it. Lost in thought, I found my way up the porch and through the screen door.
And found Grace, sitting at the kitchen table. In one hand, she held a glass of sun tea. She poured another from the pitcher, and pushed it across the table to me. “Your aunt is out shopping. Said she ran out of Spam, and there wouldn’t be any breakfast tomorrow without it. Sit.”
So tempting. The woman, not the tea, though I longed to drink deeply of both. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Then don’t. Please sit.” She brushed her hair back and looked at me with what I wished were “Come with me” eyes.
I sat.
“I made progress today, but your aunt is tired of answering questions about your life, and I’m tired of bothering her. Would it kill you to take a chair in there, sit with me, and relax?” Grace wouldn’t meet my gaze.
I took my offered drink, rubbing cold sweat from the cup. “No. I mean, I don’t think it would kill me. But can I ask you something?”
“You just did.”
I couldn’t stop asking myself the question I had to ask her. “Do you like me?”
Her eyes went wide, her mouth open. But she recovered. “Sure. You’re a good field operative, and I suspect that you care about people more than you let on.”
“That’s not what I meant. Grace, do you like me? Forget money and journals and jobs, and just answer the question. Because the other day, I was thinking—”
“Don’t.” She shook her head. “I can’t. I won’t.”
Instincts honed from dozens of nights in hotel bars said she felt different. Why wouldn’t she just answer? “Is it because of the director? I don’t work for her anymore. ‘No work women’ doesn’t apply at the Hughes farm.” I glanced around. “Or the Homer house.”
“Just stop. It’s not the director, and it’s not you. It’s me.”
In my experience, “It’s not you, it’s me,” meant it was totally me. Just like “Nothing personal” usually involved something deeply personal.
She looked up at me. “I’m in a relationship.”
I kept the “Oh” in my mouth but not off my face. I was so certain I knew what her response would be. I’d never considered any other possibility. I nodded in acceptance. There was no reason to pine for someone I couldn’t have. Except that I wanted to pine. I wanted to pine a lot.
Grace sagged like a flat tire. “Is this the part where you storm out?”
“Will it change anything?”
“No.”
I’d done enough leaving. “Will it make you like me?”
She bit her lip, her eyes crinkled up, and then shook her head.
“Okay.” So this was rejection. I’d heard about it from Rory. But from the time my chest hairs turned curly, I’d found women the sweetest drug on earth, and usually so available. Except when they weren’t. Like now. “Can I ask who the lucky guy is?”
Grace looked like I’d just stabbed her in the hand. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She took her tea and left me there at the table, savoring the bitter taste of failure that no honey could wash away.
So I went to the room where my aunt kept all the journals. How did she fit on the floor in that small a space? I picked up one book and opened it. Eyeball duck reeds. Which meant . . . I worked to remember Dad’s lessons, drilling me over and over.
It meant I hadn’t done hieroglyphics in ages.
I started over again, reading them as phonetics. After a good thirty minutes, I finally connected the dots, letting me pronounce the glyph. “Rsya.”
“Reysha. ‘Dawn.’ Could mean ‘early,’ or ‘hope,’ or ‘tired.’ Could mean a lot of things, depending on what was said around it.” Grace stood in the doorway, her eyes red and swollen. “That’s a later one. Maybe one of the last, but I was wrong.”
I was used to seeing women cry around me, but not after turning me down. “Wrong about what?”
“I have to start with the early ones so I understand how he used constructs. The last ones I can’t make heads or tails from. Your father had developed his own slang, his own meanings at that point. So I can read the words but not make sense out of them.” She reached down, taking the book from my hand. Her fingertips grazed my palm, making me tingle all over.
“Resha k’ta svar eyone. That’s the easy part. He starts in midsentence most times, carrying on from whatever came before.” She handed me the book back. “And they often end in gibberish as well.”
She pushed a set of boxes aside and sat beside me, flipping through pages. She pointed to a string of symbols. “See this? This means ‘son of me.’ I think it’s his name for you. It’s everywhere in these.” She pointed to several stacks. “And less in these. Not at all in these.”
Talking about Dad wasn’t something I wanted to do, but if it would keep Grace Roberts talking to me, I’d talk about my last medical exam. “Divide them. Those with my name and those without.”
She worked through the stacks, quickly moving from book to book, eventually winding up with three piles. The smallest on her left, a medium set in the middle, and a stack three times the others on the right. “These, I’m sure, are from when you were small.” She pointed to the center. “These have your name every so often, but pages and pages between them. The rest of those don’t have your name at all.”
I quelled my anger. It had nothing to do with Grace. “The smallest pile is before Mom died. The medium one is after her death. Everything on the right is after he left me here and ran off.”
She took out a set of sticky notes, labeling each journal by color. “I know you don’t want to talk about it. So answer me this, and I promise I won’t ask again. Why did he leave?”
If anyone but Grace had asked me that, I wouldn’t have answered. Even then, forcing out the words felt like ripping fishhooks from my skin. “He was searching for Mom.”
Sixteen
GRACE
Brynner excused himself on the pretense of needing to use the restroom. I let him go because I couldn’t breathe with him that close. Without a doubt there was more to his story, and for certain I could drag the truth out of him.
But what I wanted was for him to tell me. Willingly. Openly. Of course, I didn’t deserve that after lying to him. Why did he ask me if I liked him? I couldn’t like him. Or at least I wouldn’t admit it.
But he hadn’t run out when he should have. Instead, he’d sat in that dusty room, proving his skills in flirting were a thousand times more effective than his translation abilities.
With the journals divided, I could make progress by brute force if necessar
y. Friday was payday, and my chance to put to rest the demons calling me by name and cell phone each day.
I took one of the books and started at the beginning. “Nfr saw tks.” Easy enough. The phonic representations n, s, and t didn’t match any concept. While Nfr might mean “sweet” or “pleasant,” the subsequent glyphs didn’t match in count or gender. “Thems goes blue” would be the closest English to this disaster of combinations.
The end of the book was no better. I grabbed another. “Shm wd nfr” made no more sense than the start. Either Heinrich Carson was horrible at writing hieroglyphics, in which case I might never decode them, or he was a genius. In which case I might never decode them.
I looked up to find Brynner watching me. “How long have you been there?”
He shrugged. “I was thinking about something.”
“In the bathroom.”
“Yes.”
I waited for him to catch the awkward drift. “While you were using the bathroom.”
“Yes. I was thinking about you.”
If this was the smooth-talking man who waltzed women through his bed like a drive-through, the world’s women were in worse shape than I thought. “Go on.”
He sat down. “I was thinking maybe I would help you with the translation. I’ll answer your questions and help you put things together.”
“What do you want from me?”
He picked up a book. “Lessons. Dad taught me by writing the combination to our pantry lock in hieroglyphics. I’m hoping you have better teaching skills.”
It stank of a trap. The question was, Who was trapping whom? “You’re sure that’s what you want to ask me for?”
“Certain. Dad and I weren’t on speaking terms when he died. These are all I have left of him.” He flipped to a page at random.
I wanted to tell him that part of his father sat right beside me, living and breathing. I knew he might be playing me. Using this just as a reason to be near me. Still, I understood as well as anyone the need to remember people I loved. My parents left us a trust fund, but I’d have traded every dollar for a letter from my mom, or her diaries.