“I thought you died,” I said to her, still smiling.
Heather looked so powerful then.
Like something that could only exist in a dream.
“We should have died, both of us,” she said, and her voice was steady and wise. “But apparently I never knew how to give up the ghost. That’s what the doctor said anyway. I thought it was pretty funny, actually.”
“Wanna see something funnier?”
“Why not?”
I reached over to the rollaway table next to the bed and pulled a tiny metal artifact from where it had been sitting for days. Held it up for her to see.
“Know what this is?”
She shrugged. “Looks like a key.”
“It’s worth almost half a million dollars. I swallowed it a while back. They found the damn thing in my guts when they operated on me to get the bullet out. Said it saved my life. Blocked a major artery.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“I would have bled to death right alongside you, Heather. How did you make it?”
“I just held on. It was important to come back from there.”
I looked at her face carefully when she said that, and I thought I saw my wife there, for just a moment. I wondered if it really was her, then I crushed the thought.
She saw the thought and she smiled sadly.
“I’m sorry about your wife. I’m sorry I had to . . .”
“Yeah, I know. You did what you had to do.”
“And your father . . .”
“He did what he had to do, too.”
“You’ve lost a lot.”
“Maybe not. Maybe it was just a way of going back to zero. Whoever gets a second chance at anything? A real second chance, I mean.”
“Do you think he would have wanted it that way?”
“He only ever wanted us to live happily ever after. I guess that’s what this is, in some way. I spent a lot of years waiting for him to be my father while he decomposed in a jail cell. All that time, learning to be what Toni wanted me to be. What they wanted me to be. I was never my own man, not really. Always living for some other person’s guilt, some other person’s ideals.”
“Some other person’s plan.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty strange to think about.”
“So you try not to?”
“No . . . I think about it a lot. But it doesn’t hurt so much now. I’m back to zero, after all. People are strong. Like you said.”
“Where will you go when you get out of here?”
“The money first. I’ll need it to start over. I could give you some of it. I owe you a couple, after all.”
“I don’t need money. But I wouldn’t mind starting over.”
She looked at me with longing eyes when she said that. Asking me. She bit her lower lip softly, shivering at the edge of everything.
Not like my wife at all.
That’s what I told myself.
Toni was dead and Heather had killed her.
I guess some part of me should have been really mad about that, but I couldn’t make any part of myself regret Toni’s death. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to mourn her. And not because it was her or me down there—not because Toni would have killed my ass deader than hell to protect Jenison’s new world.
All of those feelings were replaced by something else.
And I wasn’t quite sure what it was at the time.
None of it was Heather’s fault, not really.
Then again, maybe it was a big lie I told myself back then, just to get through it all. Maybe someday I would hate Heather for what she had done—what she had to do. Was it a miracle that either of us made it back at all? I decided right then that it probably wasn’t. And maybe we weren’t even lucky. Maybe we should have followed those other parts of ourselves into oblivion. Maybe those parts of us were truly lost forever.
Maybe.
We talked for hours that day, about everything. About new life and new paths. About the things we hoped to avenge in our futures. We made plans and cast them away, laughing. I was speaking to the strongest woman I had ever met. For real this time.
I didn’t see her again until the day I left the hospital, a month later.
She was scheduled to be released three weeks after me.
We both stood at the front entrance, she on her crutches, me in my walking shoes, leaning on my cane.
And this is what she said to me: “We all go down in the dark, Elroy. Only a few of us make it back. I’d like to know I wasn’t alone.”
You aren’t alone, Heather.
You’ll never be alone.
We kissed each other then, and the kiss was good. Full of things you remember. Like love and the promise of love. The end of old lives and the beginning of new ones. Something that could stay, after all. I realized in that moment that I’d never kissed any other woman besides my wife. And that I didn’t even know this woman standing in front of me. Or maybe I did. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe I’d be back for her.
Maybe.
She bit her lower lip softly, like only Heather would do it, the ghost of my wife looming bitterly over our shoulders.
The ghost of my father smiling like the sun.
I turned and left her there, walking away from it with my bum leg cocked and crooked, the stick clicking on the ground, thinking about the future.
And what I would do when I got there.
• • •
I’m sitting in the comfy chair, as Jenison enters my living room.
Three days ago, it was the one-year anniversary of my wife’s death.
I haven’t thought about her in a long time, but today’s the day.
As usual, the lady in black hasn’t left anything to chance. She has twenty men with her, armed with shotguns. Guess she caught onto me when I was doing my snoop job at Cryton Electronics, the new front company she established six months ago to shield her movements. She’s into all kinds of dirty business now, above and below the radar. She’s more hands-on than ever. But she doesn’t call herself Jayne Jenison anymore, and she’s more careful about who she recruits. She started up with it again, late last year. Has a hundred wireheads working for her now. Double-blind thieves and criminals, all networked together, like it always was. A machine that can never really die. The CIA knows all about it. The colonel and his people are still playing chess with them. Ghosts sniping at ghosts. I’ve been following them all for months—me and my new partner. It’s been an interesting year. Very, very interesting.
Jenison’s had my house staked out for weeks, but she’s just now making her move. She walks over to the chair and I hear her calm voice:
“Hello, Mister Coffin.”
She says something else that I don’t quite understand. It doesn’t come through. Something about her daughter. Something about revenge. I think I know what she means. I smile as she turns the chair around. And sees that I’m not in it.
Instead there’s an iPad on the seat.
I speak to her from a mile away:
“Dead game, lady.”
I see Jenison’s face drain white on my screen, and she almost swears out loud.
I look over at Heather, who is smiling wickedly at me.
And I put my finger on the detonator switch.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The locations, organizations, and protocols described herein are partially fictitious, altered as needed for dramatic license, because this is a novel. And like many novels, this one faced a long, long road in order to find its way into your hands. The key figures in this are the people to whom I’ve dedicated the book. What follows now is a short list of shout-outs to a few additional select folks, who either helped in some way with my career or the inspiration/creation/publication of Resurrection Express. I would also like to thank you, dear reader, for buying the book and (hopefully) telling a friend. If you were moved in any way by our humble endeavor, I am moved also. Please feel free to stick around for the sequel. You can visit me for all the updates on this an
d other matters at: stephenromanoshockfestival.com. There’s some fun stuff over there.
My thanks to:
Scott Hiles, Tom Piccirilli, Wiley Hudgins, Billy Spence, David J. Schow (still yodeling down the big porcelain megaphone), Andrew Vachss, Joe R. Lansdale, William Kotzwinkle, Chuck Palahniuk, Don Coscarelli, David Hartman (the real one), Stephanie Crawford (a superior creature), Shawn Lewis (a depraved creature), Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, Leif Jonker, Briana, Jennii and Matt at Rough Ride Creations (who make my website look good), Grindhouse Releasing, Ellen Leach, Richard Pine and the crack squad of badasses at Inkwell Management.
Extra special thanks to:
Jennifer Bergstrom and Louise Burke at Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, who believed in a guy named Elroy.
To my mother:
I love you and I live on.
STEPHEN ROMANO is an award-winning author, illustrator, designer, and screenwriter. His acclaimed projects include an adaptation for Showtime’s Emmy Award–winning Masters of Horror series, the illustrated work Shock Festival (hailed by Fangoria magazine as “one of the greatest homages to B cinema ever undertaken”), and cowriting the original novel Black Light with Saw franchise screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan. He lives in Austin, Texas. Catch him at:
www.stephenromanoshockfestival.com
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Stephen Romano
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First Gallery Books hardcover edition September 2012
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Designed by Akasha Archer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Romano, Stephen.
Resurrection Express / Stephen Romano.—1st Gallery Books hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Deception—Fiction. 2. Dystopias—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.O585R47 2012
813’.6—dc22
2012015053
ISBN 978–1–4516–6864–3
ISBN 978–1–4516–6866–7 (ebook)
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Five Percent
Chapter 2: A Pistol for Ringo
Chapter 3: The Getaway
Chapter 4: Full Disclosure
Chapter 5: Coffin Run
Chapter 6: Into the Future
Chapter 7: The Face of God
Chapter 8: Go to Zero
Chapter 9: Men and Boys
Chapter 10: Dead Game
Chapter 11: The Enemy of my Enemy’s Enemy
Chapter 12: Garbage Men
Chapter 13: Maniacs Like Us
Chapter 14: Mayhem and Death Ray
Chapter 15: Dreams in the Dollhouse
Chapter 16: Just One More Thing
Chapter 17: Unbreakable
Chapter 18: The Two Tonis
Chapter 19: Damage Control
Chapter 20: Living Through
Chapter 21: The Man Who Sold the World
Chapter 22: The Dark
Chapter 23: The Last Perfect Day
Chapter 24: Resurrection
Chapter 25: After the Apocalypse
Acknowledgments
About Stephen Romano
Resurrection Express Page 39