The Reburialists

by J. C. Nelson

  I could help Brynner understand everything he had left of his father.

  I opened the Universal Weighted index files and pushed the laptop toward him. “If you want to learn to read them right, you’d need to put in a few months’ study on these. When you knew them by sight, we’d be ready to move to the first stage. Logograms. The duck. The crocodile. The gull. All of those mean what they look like. Then you’d learn to write them by name and know them by number.”

  “Number?” Brynner rubbed his chin. “Dad never mentioned numbers.”

  I nodded. “Universal Weight is a numbering system for glyphs. Pick a number between one and two thousand.”

  He watched me like I was about to perform a magic trick. “Sixteen.”

  “Ayine, a double loop, opening to the left. Transliterated as an air gap in the work. Th’ok.” I smiled at his amazement. “How about b’sa, a closed n, indicating ‘clay.’ Universal Weight of thirty.”

  Brynner reached into a middle pile and took out a journal. He glanced back and forth between it and the screen. “Nuswut. An antenna, a barbecue, and a Jewish prayer hat. That’s number three.”

  I almost choked, laughing so hard. “Wheat, knut, and d’sar. It means ‘king.’ But yes, its Universal Weight is three.”

  He flipped to the back, his frustration visible.

  “You have to understand I spent years studying this. You spent years learning to kill things.” I reached out and patted him on the shoulder.

  “There’s a barbecue king at the end, too.” He tossed the journal aside and picked up another one. “Goldfish getting eaten by a camel.” He looked up at the laugh I worked so hard to stifle. “I lost a lot of weight the first year Dad taught me.”

  If I were as bad at shooting as Brynner was at translating, I’d kill sixteen of the wrong people with every bullet. “That’s nwa, the fish and the pack mule. Weight of seven, implies fortune, usually good.”

  He didn’t respond, flipping to the back of the journal. “There’s a goldfish here.”

  I grabbed the book from him, confirmed his brain damage didn’t include basic pattern matching, then chose another book at random. “Amun, weight of sixteen.” And on the back page, I found another Amun glyph. “Hand me them one at a time.”

  And one by one, I laid them out, matching colors and weights. Midway through them, I found it. Number one. I opened it, skipping the first ideoglyph. My mind picked apart the glyphs, discarding the conceptual meanings—those were a jumbled disaster. The logograms, too, didn’t match.

  My breath caught in my throat. With one hand, I reached out to grab him by the cheek, pulling him closer to look at the symbols with me. “Look. It’s phonetic. He’s writing phonetically. On the eighth—eighteenth of d-december, I decided that I would hua.” I stopped. Hua. Hua what? The symbol, the open cup. “‘Master.’ It’s a proper glyph. I would master the— form. Language. I would master the language of the old ones.”

  English. Phonetic English, mixed with ideoglyphs, demarked with numbers so he could keep them organized. I picked up the last journal, skipping over the weight, two hundred eighteen.

  “What does it say? Does it say where the heart is?” Brynner hadn’t moved, his face still next to mine.

  I tried to read, and failed, both because of the jumbled mess on the pages and the one Brynner made inside me when he was that close. “I can’t read this yet. This isn’t phonetic; it’s completely conceptual, and it’s using all three character sets.” I pointed to the early ones. “He’s learning the language, and quickly. By here”—I pointed to the middle set—“he’s creating constructs to represent ideas, and by the end, it might as well be a private language.”

  “So it’s useless.”

  “No, it’s not.” I patted him on the shoulder. I’d hit statues less firm. “I think your aunt would say, ‘Have some faith.’”

  He caught the joke, smiling at me. “Always.”

  “I can start at the beginning and work my way forward. I’ll be able to fill in the ideographs from context, and by the time we hit the last ones, there will be two people who speak his language. And one of us will still be alive.”

  I’d be able to translate the journals. Find the heart, and with the money I’d make, be able to stop worrying day and night. Brynner could read his dad’s writing and maybe make peace with the demons that haunted him.

  In that instant, I became aware of how close he still was, as he spoke, his breath tickling me. “You did good, Grace.”

  I turned my head and kissed him, holding on for a moment while his shock dissolved, letting go when he stopped pulling away. Then his lips pressed against mine, softly first, then firmer. Hungrier. With one hand, I pulled him toward me, with the other, I supported myself.

  He brushed my face, running his fingers along my cheek, causing me to gasp. A burning sensation lanced through my hand, and I fell back, breaking our kiss. A strangled cry of pain burst through my lips.

  “What?” Brynner grabbed my hand, even though I tried to clench it into a fist.

  A white dot surrounded by angry red marked my palm.

  Brynner moved a box and cursed, smashing something with his fist. “I’m sorry. Brown scorpion. That’s going to sting.”

  I gasped, clenching my fist, rocking. My fingers already puffed out, and my lips tingled. “I need my purse.”

  “I’ll get you some baking soda to put on it. I know, it hurts like hell.” Brynner moved away, and I caught him by the hair.

  I gasped to spit out the words. “EpiPen. Allergic.”

  BRYNNER

  That’s exactly why I’d learned to expect something bad when good things happened to me. I ran to the living room and found her purse. Inside lay an EpiPen in a clear plastic tube. More than anything, it resembled a thick ballpoint pen that ended in a needle. I didn’t stop, didn’t flinch as I drove the needle into her thigh.

  Her body arched, then relaxed as the epi hit her. I gathered her in my arms and carried her through the house, kicked the front door open, and nearly flattened Aunt Emelia.

  “Boy, what happened?” She dropped the bag of groceries on the porch, sending tomatoes bouncing down the steps and into the yard.

  “Brown scorpion. She’s allergic. I used the EpiPen.” Grace lay in my arms, gasping for air.

  Aunt Emelia ran for her kit and came back with a needle.

  “She’s in anaphylactic shock. Her heart will stop if it goes on.” With practiced fingers, she drew a needle and plunged it into Grace’s arm, slowly drawing it out. “Get to County right now. Drive as fast as you can without killing you both. I’ll call the ER and let them know.”

  “Come with me. If she stops breathing, you could put in a tracheotomy.” I nodded to the car.

  She barked at me like a drill sergeant. “Boy, you’ve been watching too much TV. Drive like you did as a teen, and stop arguing. Get her to the hospital before that shot wears off.”

  I opened the passenger door of the rental car and gently put her in. “I thought the epi would fix it.”

  “That attack could go on for days, depending on how sensitive she is. That dose will last thirty minutes. Maybe. If she isn’t in the hospital on a drip by then, you’d need to cut down to her lungs to do any good.” Aunt Emelia ran up the porch, and I tore out, driving like a tornado on wheels down the side roads and redlining the engine as I burned the miles to County.

  Thirty minutes. Forty-five miles. I’d make it. I had to. I flew through Thurston so fast the cop running his speed trap didn’t see me coming. Didn’t stand a chance of catching me by the time he threw down his sandwich, buckled up, and pulled onto the road.

  It wasn’t until County Hospital loomed on the horizon that I dropped down to ninety miles per hour, then fifty, and skidded into the ambulance bay of the ER, parking signs be damned. Grace’s lips had a blue tint to them that couldn’t be good, and she gurgled as her chest shook.

  A mob of doctors and nurses waited at the door. God only knew what Aunt Emeli
a told them. I followed, giving her name, her age based on the driver’s license, and the BSI medical card I dug from her purse. They pushed me out. To the hallway. To the waiting room.

  And I waited.

  Hell isn’t being attacked by dead things. Hell is hospital waiting rooms, where the clock gets dipped in cold motor oil. Each second ticked by and ticked again, and again. In the background, a newscaster showed clips of BSI field teams firing weapons, and lines of dead meat-skins.

  I couldn’t have cared less.

  I don’t know when Uncle Bran and Aunt Emelia arrived. It might have been two hundred years after they took Grace in, or maybe just an hour. Emelia wore her doctor’s ID and signed in, disappearing into the warren of hallways.

  I watched other cases come in. The drunk who challenged a telephone pole and lost, the cook who filleted a finger.

  After hours, the door swung open, and a nurse came out to me. She strode over in comfortable sneakers and purple scrubs. “Dr. Homer says you’re the fiancé.”

  I froze. Grace was so very private. She could kick me out later, when she wasn’t in danger of dying. “Yes? Yes.”

  I followed her back through the ER to hospital rooms that smelled of bleach and death. There, Grace lay in a bed, covered by a thin sheet. An IV hung from her arm, and the machines surrounding her beeped in rhythm with her heart. Her face, her lips, every part of her had swelled, distorting her beauty but not hiding it.

  I took her hand and sat in the folding chair beside her bed.

  A doctor knocked, a young man who must have been fresh out of medical school. He sported an orange beard and a stained coat. “I’m Dr. MacArthur, attending today.”

  I shook his hand and waited.

  “Your fiancée is extremely fortunate. Her heart stopped twice. She was stone-cold dead for almost fifteen seconds before we got her going again.” He looked at her chart and adjusted one of the machines.

  I enveloped one of her slim hands in my own. Even her fingers had swelled like tiny bratwurst. “What happens now?”

  He held out his hands, palms up. “Now we wait. We monitor her breathing. We get her allergic reaction under control. When I’m sure she won’t drop dead on the ride home, I’ll let you take her.”

  Aunt Emelia came in behind him. “I’ll take it from here, Jim.”

  When he left, she took out another chair and joined me. “I’ve seen this before. She’ll be fine.”

  I nodded.

  “Brynner, what’s wrong?”

  I looked back at Grace’s still form. “Can she hear?”

  “No.” Aunt Emelia looked at the chart on Grace’s bed. “Unless she’s astral projecting, which she doesn’t believe in, no.” Aunt Emelia put one hand on my knee. “Has this one gotten to you?”

  “No.” I listened to the churn of emotion inside me. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  She nodded. “You’ve had other . . . friends before. What’s different about her?”

  I searched for a lie but couldn’t find one I could stand to tell. “I don’t know. When I’m with her, I want to be better than I am.” There, the truth that frightened me.

  Aunt Emelia rose and hugged me, squeezing my head to her like she did when I was ten. “I’ve seen this, too. You’ll be fine, boy. Just fine.”

  She rose to leave, and called back to me, “You need to notify her field commander. He’ll want to know, and he’ll make sure her kin know.” After a moment, she returned and tagged a purple band onto my arm. “That says you are family, so you can get back in.”

  She left me.

  I paced the room, checking every few minutes to make sure Grace was still breathing. When I could put it off no longer, I rummaged through her purse to find her phone. I’d left my phone, my wallet, everything but my keys back at the house and honestly didn’t remember bringing Grace’s purse or her messenger bag from the rental car. Maybe Aunt Emelia had the good sense to fetch them, since I left the car parked in the ambulance bay.

  Her wallet weighed nothing. A driver’s license. Ten different credit cards, all with a black X in marker on them. A packet of birth control pills meticulously punched, and a smashed packet of saltine crackers, which I devoured.

  At the bottom of her purse I found her phone. I took it out, and then followed the hospital signs to the designated cell area.

  Dale’s number came to mind, my fingers reflexively dialing, only to cancel it and dial BSI Medical. I waited for the prompts, then dialed, 9, 1, 1. A man picked up the phone within seconds. “Emergency Medical Services.”

  “This is Brynner Carson. Field Operative Grace Roberts is hospitalized. County Hospital, New Mexico.” I swallowed, my throat as dry as a dead cactus.

  “It’s an honor to speak to you, sir.”

  I hung up on him and dialed another number, one I hated calling. When the voice mail answered, I spoke. “Maggie, it’s Brynner. I need you to find me Grace’s emergency contact.” After leaving the cell phone number, I hung up and began to pace.

  Moments later, the phone rang. I fumbled with the touch screen to answer. “Carson speaking.”

  “Brynner,” said the director, “what have you done?”

  Seventeen

  BRYNNER

  The urge to scream in frustration melted like a snow cone in the desert as I thought of Grace. Her defenselessness called to me like a beacon. Instead, I explained to Director Bismuth about the scorpion. About the EpiPen, and the drive, and waiting.

  And after a moment, Director Bismuth spoke. “I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. I assumed when I heard you, that you had led her—”

  “To my bed? Into another fight? I know. I don’t care. I don’t work for you anymore, and all I want you to do is let me call her emergency contact and let them know what happened. I owe them that much. She has a boyfriend, I think, and a daughter.”

  “I refused to accept your resignation.”

  I didn’t call to fight, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t. “That’s because I didn’t resign, I quit. You don’t get a say in that. It’s like saying I didn’t tell you about a surprise party. Surprise.”

  “Brynner, we need you. I take it Ms. Roberts didn’t inform you of our conversation.”

  “You need my father. Grace will get back to translating when she’s better. My aunt will say when that is, not you. Can I call you Maggie now that we don’t work together?”

  “No.” Her tone said she’d like to strangle me over the phone. “Ms. Roberts has a trust company listed as the benefactor on her insurance, but no emergency contact for the last four years.”

  The trust fund I got, but no emergency contact? That made no sense. “You sure?”

  “Please, Brynner. Of course I’m sure. When she came to work, she listed a brother, but given that her file shows bereavement time for his funeral, and we have a copy of his cremation certificate, I doubt he’ll be accepting our call.”

  So I was it for now. At least until Grace could give me the number herself. “Take care, Maggie. The TV says it’s crazy out there.”

  “We’re finding those spells everywhere now, Brynner, and not just in wells or pits or abandoned warehouses. Two days ago we found one in a cargo barge in Louisiana. A barge not even docked.”

  The air temperature dropped about thirty degrees in the space of six seconds, according to the goose bumps on my arms. What was it about water? About boats? “You have pictures of it?”

  “Of course. I’d send them to your BSI account, but as I understand, you wish to terminate your employment.” The pure pleasure in her voice infuriated me. “Am I mistaken?”

  I paced the cellular area, knowing she had me pinned. “Don’t—Don’t do anything rash.”

  She left me hanging on the phone, agonizing, for several seconds. “This is certainly a reversal of circumstance. That would normally be the advice I give you, and normally, you would ignore it.”

  Grace’s cell phone chirped, dying. Just as well, since I was fighting the urge to say some things that I could a
ctually write in hieroglyphics. “Nothing seems normal anymore.”

  I hung up and returned to Grace’s room.

  In Grace’s messenger bag, I found her laptop. Using the hospital network, I logged in to the BSI network. Thirty-five critical alerts, two hundred sit-reps, and half a dozen pleas for help littered my inbox. And one set of files I was waiting for. Downloading them took nearly an hour, but my reward was highly detailed photographs of every single inch of the inscription.

  Written in blood like the others, it almost glowed against the blue cargo container walls. Why the sudden interest in water, something that would most certainly kill a co-org? Why the obsession with these inscriptions?

  Drawings like that hadn’t been seen for nearly twenty years. Now here they were, showing up everywhere like graffiti. But it couldn’t be coincidence that a set of corpses in Louisiana took a jet-pack ride to Bentonville, and the same day a field team found this.

  I believed in almost any god that would offer me an edge against the Re-Animus, and in my experience, random chances didn’t usually turn out to be random.

  The Re-Animus I’d driven out at the Hughes farm was the same one I’d met in Greece, despite them seeming to be territorial. So the question was, Did it come after me for revenge, or something else? Was it already in Greece when I showed up, or sent there to deliver a message to me like it claimed?

  The BSI’s translators couldn’t keep up with all the writing our field teams found.

  The one that Director Bismuth sent me didn’t even have a translation. In a creaky plastic hospital chair, I hunched through the night, puzzling out words. The hours passed in shifts. Nurses changing. Doctors watching. I dozed from time to time, once Aunt Emelia went home for the night.

  After the doctors came through on morning round, I returned to my efforts. The memories locked in my brain returned, of lessons forced on me in ancient Greek and Egyptian. The symbols became both familiar and foreign, haunting me with meanings I could almost remember. “Snake-barbecueantenna, urinal-prayerhat-antenna.” I paged through the listings, looking for the right glyph.