by M. R. Forbes
Seven years had passed, and the things had evolved the way all technology did, even though the market for them was still shaky. There wasn't as much interest in recording your life as the makers had assumed, probably because most people weren't billionaires who could do exciting things whenever they wanted to. For some of us, our lives were living hells that we'd never want anyone to have to suffer through.
Even so, the glasses were common enough for the Houses to parse their jobs on. They could preload any info the ghost might need and give them quick and easy access to schematics, dossiers, schedules, and whatever other intel they had gathered on the target. Even better, there was no more speaking involved. They could essentially read your mind.
"MMmmmrrrfffrrrmmm."
I looked at my watch. It was a classic Rolex, a heavy lump of metal with a mechanical movement and softly ticking hands. My mentor had given it to me the day I'd finished my residency. "You're right. Let me just take care of the body and we'll go."
It wouldn't do to leave Gucci laying there, his flesh rotting and covered in gangrene. It would be too obvious how he had died, and the last thing I wanted was obvious. It was a good thing I kept the right kind of equipment for this situation.
I reached into a pocket and pulled out a stainless steel flask. I uncapped it and took a whiff of the kerosene, and then spread it across Gucci's body. Once it was good and wet, and the flask was empty, I took out a match. It wouldn't do much more than burn off the clothes and toast the flesh, but it didn't need to. The odds were good that they'd believe a pyro had done the dirty work. Like the man had said, necros were rare.
"Mmmmrrrfffmmm."
"I'm coming."
I lit the match and tossed it onto the corpse, waiting a few seconds to make sure it caught. Satisfied, I followed her to the window. Gucci would have had a monitor implanted near his heart that would tell someone in Mr. Black's chain the moment he ceased to be alive. While I wasn't too concerned that they would know I was the one who ended him, I was concerned about that information being discovered so soon. It was better to do the job and call it in, and let them learn about me that way. If the job was important enough, and for two million up front it sure seemed like it was, this particular sin would be forgiven.
We descended the fire escape that Caroline had been waiting on for the last sixteen hours, out of view of the window. The dead were perfect for stakeouts, or for anything that required waiting extreme amounts of time without a twitch. That's why it twisted me that she couldn't wait an extra ten seconds. That's why I knew it had to be intentional. Even so, it was going to be a shame to have to retire her before I went home. She had been a good night's digging, a fortunate gem in a pile of trash. Too many people didn't die pretty, and were too damaged to work with, their bodies desecrated in any number of ways. I'd needed someone who could walk out into a crowd, and in the end I had come to enjoy her company.
That was the thing about animating the dead. They weren't like zombies in the movies, or the people who got cursed with the Rot. They weren't mindless bodies following some programmed command to eat brains. When you brought a corpse back to life, you were pulling their soul from wherever it was souls went and forcing it to re-inhabit the flesh, no matter what condition that flesh was in. You were putting the person back in there, albeit with a reduced ability to express their own free will. Reduced, not gone, and it was the strength of the summoner's will, and the will of the soul, that determined how much control you actually had. Caroline was a stubborn one, and while my will was strong enough to get her to do what I wanted, it wasn't strong enough to keep her from bitching about it.
Anyway, she looked like any other corpse now. Bodies like that were a dime a dozen, and despite my attachment she was too unreliable to be worth keeping around. She'd need to be replaced at some point.
Not tonight. I was too tired tonight.
We reached the alley, and I told her to wait while I walked across the street to the public lot where I had left my van. It was a large, white delivery van, an old thing with rust eaten corners and 'Flowers by Jack' in large, faded blue script along the sides. It got me where I needed to be and had plenty of room in the back for a couple of big coolers.
That was the other thing about the dead. Bringing them back didn't change the chemistry of a rotting corpse. If the day had been warm and sunny, Gucci would have smelled Caroline long before she had gone through the window.
I hopped in the van and closed the door, pausing once to cough my lungs up before I started it up and drove over to the alley. I checked the mirrors a few times for onlookers before backing it in, climbing to the rear, and opening the receiving end.
"Come on." I extended my hand, and Caroline took it, her flesh cold in my grip. I pulled her up, and then leaned out to swing the doors closed behind her.
"MMmmmffffff."
She had lifted the lid of one of the coolers, and was standing at the edge.
"Not tonight, Caroline," I said. "If you had come in on time, maybe you wouldn't have gotten your jaw blown off."
Or maybe that was the point. I didn't know if the souls I called back liked being back. They didn't seem to be capable of answering that question. Sometimes I wondered if it just depended on where their soul was otherwise. Other times, I just wondered where otherwise was. The only thing I knew for sure about the beyond is that when whatever lived in the dice claimed its prize, there was nothing I could do to get a refund.
That was one of the things that drove me to stay alive. Fear, the great motivator. I knew some of the secrets of death. It didn't make it easier to accept. It made it harder. I didn't want to be ping-ponged back and forth between otherwise and my wretched corpse, or eaten by whatever evil thing had been spelled into the bone dice. I didn't want to think that there was no final resting place, no comfortable end to existence. Yes, I was aware of my hypocrisy, but knowledge and fear had moved me from Jeckyll to Hyde.
Caroline tried to sit shotgun, and I had to urge her out of sight. I could only imagine how the police would react to seeing a woman with half a face. I was playing with corpses. I had no desire to show off that skill set. She settled for the floor right behind my seat, her stream of satisfied mumbles doing their best to reach through my deadened heart and make me feel guilty for both keeping her around, and for planning to bury her again.
I coughed long and hard enough to leave myself gasping. Touching Gucci had been a risky proposition all the way around, and now I would need another hit of meds much sooner than I had noted in my calendar. It was going to cost me half the haul from Grey's payment.
I rolled the van out of the alley at the same time I leaned over and opened the glove box, pulling out a thin sliver of clear substrate with a small bit of aluminum at the bottom. I slid my finger up along the surface, and it turned into an opaque screen.
"Call Danelle."
The phone began to ring, and I placed it on the dash and hit the speaker button. A moment later, she answered.
"How'd it go?"
"No pleasantries? No, 'how are you feeling', or 'hey, it's good to hear from you'?"
"Cut the shit. Did you finish the job?"
Danelle was my agent, my business partner. She handled the negotiations. She was also my alter ego, the person who the Houses thought they were hiring when they called in about getting an assassin or a thief.
She had been one, once upon a time. She had taught me everything I knew about this life, introducing me to this career back when I was nothing but a lost soul trying to escape the pain of what I had been forced to do, and making every effort to forget that I was dying.
Then a pyro had toasted her legs and left her in a wheelchair.
"Call it in," I said. "Two dead ogres, one dead fixer."
"The dice?"
I sighed. She had a strange fascination with the dice that she refused to let go of. "Happy. I can't say the same for myself. I had to touch the fixer."
A pause at the other end. "You need more meds?"
"Christ! By the time I cover everything else we'll be lucky to eat this week."
I let out a weak, fake laugh. "If it's any consolation, I don't eat that much. Especially after the meds."
She didn't laugh with me. "Give me an hour, and then go meet Dalton at the shop."
An hour was good. I had another stop I needed to make in the meantime. "I do have a bit of good news for you. I'll give it to you when I get home."
"Can I eat it?"
I hung up.
It took me about ten minutes to make the drive over to Graceland, and another five to get back to the plot where I had dug Caroline up. I'd been real careful with how I'd moved the earth, in preparation for this very event. This time I had a helper with a second shovel, and we reached the coffin within a quarter of an hour.
"Thanks for everything."
She was in the pit, standing in the base of the open casket.
"Mmmmmffffff."
It sounded like a goodbye.
"Just close the lid behind you, and I'll let you go. I won't be calling on you again."
She paused a moment, and her hand lifted up in a curt wave.
I returned the gesture. "I hope wherever you're going, it's a good place for you to be."
Caroline laid down in the box, and then reached up and pulled the lid down. As soon as it was closed I let go of the tie that was controlling her, feeling the specter of her soul float free of my grip. Internally, it was like I had been holding air in my esophagus for too long and had just belched it out.
I succumbed to a bit of coughing then, putting the back of my hand to my mouth and taking a moment to stare at the blood when I moved it away. I needed to cover her up and get my ass over to Dalton. The touch had left me in worse shape than I thought. Maybe he'd been a user after all.
Magic. It had been mother nature's best kept secret, hidden in the form of not-exactly-magnetic fields that wrapped around and through the earth. According to people who knew better than me, it had always been there. It was just that us humans couldn't feel it, or see it.
Then the Earth's polarity had shifted.
It was called geomagnetic reversal, and it hadn't happened in about forty-one thousand years. For whatever reason, this shift did something to the not-exactly-magnetic fields, powering them up to the point that they began to have strange effects on us surface dwellers.
Some of us became what we called sensitives. We could feel these fields emanating around us, and in some cases we could even hear them as a constant thrumming and pulsing in the ears that we just couldn't shake.
That was me, five years ago. That was me, before I got sick and started the quick downward spiral towards death. I had always been able to hear the buzzing and thrumming. I had always known I was sensitive. In this world being sensitive meant learning to live with the noise, and knowing there was a power out there that others had access to but you didn't. It was like being first in line at the most exclusive nightclub on the planet and having the bouncer tell you to fuck off.
It was the medicine that had brought me across the line, from sensitive to user. It was black market, experimental, and illegal. I didn't know who made it, what it was made of, or where it came from. I hadn't even known there was a whole underground of remedies to all sorts of nasty things out there until I had gotten one of those nasty things, and been lucky enough to hook up with Danelle.
At first, I didn't understand that I'd finally gotten into the club. I began to feel the fields. I was able to bring the energy into me. I was also getting sicker and sicker. My hair fell out, my skin turned a gnarly grey, and no amount of sexual attention of any kind could get me aroused. I was sure I was close to death.
Only, I didn't die.
The things I touched did.
I'd been rightfully terrified, but Danelle had kept a level head about it, and once again become my guide. She was maybe a little too excited to find herself with a necro sleeping on her couch, but she saw the potential, and began to teach me everything she knew. She had more experience with magic than any sensitive had a right to, because she was supposed to be a user. She'd been bred for it, and when it didn't happen her father had disowned her for her 'failure'.
I set about the task of closing the grave, down one partner to help me shovel. It was tough going, as weak as I was, and I had to stop more than once for a fit of heavy coughing. By the time I finished leveling the dirt I was dead tired. Too tired to even make my way back to the van.
I sat down against Caroline's headstone, a plain slate of beveled marble with her name, dates, and a simple epitaph:
'Beloved daughter. God is blessed to have you in His Kingdom.'
I felt the familiar twang of guilt, and I wiped a wayward tear from my eye. I'd never asked for power over death and the dead, but when you were in my situation you needed every advantage you could get.
I didn't want to wind up like Caroline, with a small bit of stone and a sentimental phrase to send me off into the great beyond.
I wasn't ready to die.
CHAPTER THREE
Is this medically necessary?
"You look like shit, pardner," Dalton said when I stumbled through the door to his pawn shop.
It was eleven at night, a little early for peak in the dusty old storefront, where a mint guitar hung in the bullet-proof glass window, claiming to have been owned by Elvis Presley. Nobody but Dalton actually believed that it had.
I winced in pain, holding back another cough. "When have I ever come to you and not looked like shit?"
His sharp smile was annoying. So was the life in his dark, almond shaped eyes. "Gina!"
A few beats later she joined us in the center of the shop. The King's greatest hits were radiating through the hidden speakers above me, and to either side rested shelves covered in mounds of crap I couldn't believe he had given money for, or that anyone would ever buy. They probably wouldn't, but what did it matter? Was there any pawn shop around that wasn't a front for something?
She was a total counter to her cowboy-obsessed husband. Where he wore flannel and high leather boots with faux spurs, she wore tight black leather and fishnets. His head was covered by a fedora, her hair was dyed green and pink. Either way, both styles looked warped on the pair of Chinatown refugees.
"Hey, Conor. You look like shit, man."
I gave her the same unpleasant look I had given her husband.
Dalton smiled at her, leaned in, and kissed her cheek. "He's in a bad mood today."
"When is he not in a bad mood?"
"Did Danelle send the payment over?" I could feel my stomach knotting up, and my lungs complaining as their seizing accelerated. There was this notion among the ignorant that magic meant crazy power with no consequences. It would have been great if I could wield it like Gandalf and smoke a pipe after, but it just didn't work like that; at least not for me. Touching someone meant accelerating my own illness. I'd almost killed myself in my decision to keep the secret.
"Of course. She sounded pissed about it though, bro."
I expected as much. It wasn't the cost of the medication that made her angry - the meds were keeping me alive way past my use-by date. It was the other expenditure she hated, that we had fought about tooth and nail for weeks, and would still be fighting about if she hadn't lost her legs and become dependent on me to keep a roof over her head.
"She'll get over it. She always does. You have everything set up?"
"Yeah, come on down. You're the next contestant."
It was Karen, and Molly, that gave her fits. My ex, and our daughter, who was two years, one week when I was diagnosed, and two years, one week when I had abandoned them in a fit of self-loathing and with the bright idea that they'd be better off without the burden of my slow burnout. Once that stupid decision had been made, I'd been too much of a coward to go back, and so I sent them money instead. Maybe they knew it was me, but probably not. I'd paid to have myself declared dead three years ago so they could collect the l
ife insurance.
I looked around. "I'm the only contestant. How many people take these meds, anyway?"
"Come on, pardner. You know I can't tell you. HIPAA and all that."
That statement got me to laugh, despite the pain.
We made our way behind the counter, into a back storeroom that was even more cluttered with worthless garbage. Trays filled with wedding bands, tree-like wooden dowels buried in necklaces, and a whole wine barrel filled to the top with firearms.
"It amazes me every time I come back here," I said.
"You know what I like about this front? It's the stories, Conor. Every pathetic dude who comes in here has some kind of pathetic story, and if you can sort through the alcohol induced shit, you can be entertained for a while. Then, when I'm hanging with my buds, or maybe going down to Chinatown to see my mom, I've got plenty of stuff to talk about to make them feel better about their own situation."
There was an old rug laying across the floor, and he knelt down and folded it back, revealing a trap door. He dug his fingers in the corner and lifted it out of the way.
"Do you have a story to make me feel better?"
He looked at me, his left lip curled in an Elvis smile. "You? Fuck, no."
We climbed a simple wooden ladder ten feet down into a small hallway that adjoined the operating room. You'd never know from all the mess and crap up top that anyone would be able to maintain a perfectly sterile environment below it, never mind one that was used for all kinds of sewing, sticking, and cutting of live people.
"You know the drill." Dalton rolled up his sleeves and went over to the sink, starting his scrubbing.
I took off my trench coat, then the black hoodie beneath it, and then the white tee beneath that. A few minutes later I had removed my black pants, swat boots, and boxer briefs, and had washed away the bacteria in a hot spray of water from a nozzle next to the operating room door. I grabbed a freshly laundered towel and wiped myself dry, trying to ignore the mirror.