Josh lowered his weapon and looked down the hallway. His hands were shaking and he was breathing heavily and he could feel the adrenaline pumping through his system. It felt good. “Are you all right, boss?”
“What the hell is going on here?” Parker demanded, rolling onto his hands and knees and looking up at Josh, waiting for an answer. His sandy blond hair hung in his eyes and he looked more angry than afraid.
And before he had a chance to explain, before he could tell Parker about the door slamming open and the crazy fuck bursting in, swaying on his feet and jibbering about looking for Brett Parker in his drugged-up, spooky voice, before he could say any of that, the intruder, the guy crumpled in the corner who by all rights should be dead, the guy who had taken a 9mm hollow point right in his drugged-up chest and been blasted five feet backward, that guy, began to rise.
The stranger pushed himself up on his hands and knees slowly, until he was in virtually the same position as Parker. Then he lurched to his feet, his hands exploring the hole that had appeared in his chest when the slug punched through his body, a look of annoyance mixing with wonder on his face.
Josh stared, mouth agape, too stunned to move. This guy could not possibly stand after being shot in the chest—Josh would bet a week’s paycheck he had hit the man right in the heart—at practically point-blank range. It was inconceivable. The druggie’s shirt, already dirty and threadbare, was now shredded and torn where the bullet pierced it on its way into the man’s body.
Josh could see a ragged hole in the man’s chest around the fluttering remnants of that shirt. The hole seemed much larger than it should have been, even considering the damage his round could do. But the most unbelievable part, the part that had Josh staring in wonder when he should have been preparing to defend himself and his employer, was the utter lack of blood.
The man’s chest should have been gushing; blood should have been pumping out of him with the force of a small fire hose, spurting out with every beat of his heart, leaking and flowing and soaking his shirt as the life ebbed out of him. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t gushing or pumping or flowing or doing anything else; it simply wasn’t there. There was no blood.
The crazy-ass stranger who was hopped up on drugs and didn’t seem to know how to bleed began shuffling forward across the floor, moving toward Josh, shambling like some kind of fucking zombie out of a two a.m. horror movie on cable. Except it wasn’t two a.m. and this wasn’t some stupid zombie horror movie. Incredibly, the guy still hadn’t taken note of Brett Parker, but Josh wasn’t thinking much about Parker or anything else at the moment. All he could think was this is not freaking possible.
The stranger spoke again as he shambled toward Josh, demanding for the third time, “Where is Brett Parker?” His voice now sounded ten times worse even than before. Because now Josh could now hear his words coming out of the hole in his chest as well as out of his mouth.
This is not freaking possible.
Finally Josh thought to raise his gun and train it on this weird intruder who didn’t seem to be able to die or even to bleed. He brought it to chest level and fired just as the guy clamped one impossibly strong hand around his neck and tossed him effortlessly across the room. Josh heard the sound of the gun discharging and felt it buck like something alive in his hand. He caught the flash of fire as it flew from the barrel, saw it in his peripheral vision as he felt himself flying through the air, not with the greatest of ease or even any small amount of grace.
Josh slammed into the granite fireplace and the last two things he thought before his world went black were, 1) He must have blasted that motherfucker to hell this time, and, 2) Parker was going to be really pissed when he had to clean all of Josh’s blood off his brand new chimney.
He wavered for a moment, lost somewhere in that fuzzy grey expanse between alert and unconscious, thinking of nothing besides what a relief it would be when his body finally shut down. Somewhere outside of himself he heard a long moment of complete silence. Then the screaming started.
Parker hadn’t screamed before, but now he did, he made up for his lack of expression earlier by shouting out a symphony of terror, screaming until he went hoarse, screaming for mercy and for his mother and for nothing in particular besides a sane moment in a suddenly insane world.
And then Josh Parmalee’s world disappeared, going up in a puff of smoke as his brain shut itself down.
17
Earl grabbed the guy who had shot him and tossed him effortlessly across the room as the man fired his gun again. This time the bullet missed Earl and the shooter’s body smashed into the fireplace with a thud and crumpled onto the polished granite hearth. His strength surprised him. He wasn’t especially tall and had always been scrawny and that was even truer now that he was dead, but he lifted the much heavier gunman with no trouble at all and threw him like a pitcher firing strike one across home plate.
Getting shot had been a trip—the bullet broadsided him right smack in the chest with the force of a speeding freight train, slamming him backward into the wall, but there had been no pain, just a momentary sense of intense, imploding pressure. Then he stumbled clumsily to his feet and continued on as if he had simply tripped and fallen.
His chest was a mess. The bullet blasted through the empty cavity where his heart had been, punching a hole the approximate size of a dime in the middle of his sternum. Earl could feel a jagged, baseball-sized canyon where the slug had exited out his back, rocketing into the wall behind him.
But all-in-all, Earl felt pretty damned good about the situation. He had been shot but was still standing and wasn’t even bleeding. He knew Parker was here and although this house was about the biggest damned thing he had ever stepped foot inside that wasn’t called a mall, it was only a matter of time before he hunted down his target and accomplished his goal.
He looked away from the unmoving body of the dude who had shot him and spotted what he had come for. He smiled, the left side of his misshapen face beaming while the right barely moved. Earl had discovered it wasn’t easy coordinating all of the various movements of your body when you were dead and his concentration wavered when he turned, because rising slowly and quietly to his feet, clearly doing his best to will himself invisible, was a man. A man who had to be the elusive Brett Parker.
Earl stumbled forward, closing the distance between the two of them quickly despite his difficulty walking. It was obvious Parker was in shock, his brain trying to process what he had just seen, and thus the man wasn’t moving anywhere near as quickly or as efficiently as he should have been able to. Not that it would have made a damn bit of difference.
The bizarre little dance continued as the pair moved down the hallway, Earl advancing, Parker retreating. The software magnate still hadn’t said a word, but his eyes grew steadily larger as he took in the ruined figure stalking him. Earl couldn’t decide whether to be offended or pleased. He decided that didn’t make a damn bit of difference, either.
Finally Parker ran out of real estate, bumping into the closet door which formed the end of the hallway and trying without any measurable level of success to push his way through it. Earl attempted another smile and that was when the billionaire started screaming. He yelled loudly and enthusiastically, sometimes calling for help, sometimes demanding Earl leave and promising him he could have whatever he wanted if he did, but mostly hollering panicked words and half-phrases that didn’t seem to have any meaning at all.
Earl waited patiently. He had nowhere to go and no pressing business awaiting him beyond his current assignment, and he certainly wasn’t going to get tired—he could stand all day now that he was dead. Eventually Parker reached the inevitable conclusion that yelling for help was pointless in a place where the nearest neighbor was located almost four miles away, across a nearly impenetrable forest, and he shut his mouth.
Parker looked up in fear, cringing in the corner of the hallway, still pushing futilely against the closet door. It was as if his brain had forgotten to tell his feet that backing throu
gh the end of the house was impossible. Earl could sympathize. He was getting used to dealing with a certain amount of mental confusion himself.
“Where is it?” Earl asked, and Parker gasped in terror but surprisingly did not begin screaming again.
“Where is what?” he whispered back, eyes still huge, goggling at Earl like he had never seen a reanimated dead guy before.
“Don’t play stupid,” Earl said, falling back on the script he had been forced to memorize by his god, The Fucking Devil Max Acton. “What is it that everyone from the biggest software corporations in the world to the smallest startups would kill to get their hands on?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“BULLSHIT,” Earl rumbled, leaning down and screaming in Parker’s face, giving the man a whiff of the smell of death, a corruption that no amount of Navajo mysticism and no magic stone could completely erase. Parker whimpered, breathing heavily, and tried to fold his body up into itself but still said nothing.
“I’m talking about The Codebreaker,” Earl explained, speaking softly now. “The hush-hush software you developed for the U.S. Department of Defense that’s supposed to be some big secret but that everyone knows about, the software that will crack any encryption known to man within seconds, military or civilian. That’s what I’m talking about. The Codebreaker”
Parker sighed; a long, shuddering sound that Earl took as resignation. “I won’t continue to pretend I don’t know what you mean. You’re holding all the cards and I’m holding none. And I want to live. But I don’t have The Codebreaker here, it’s not with me, it’s back in Seattle under lock and key,” Parker stammered, exactly as Max Acton had said he would.
“Bullshit,” Earl replied again, reaching out and grasping Parker by the throat. His fingers began to close like a pair of vice grips, slowly cutting off the man’s air supply. “I know you always keep a copy of the software with you on a thumb drive to protect yourself in the event something were to happen to the master copy. I want it and you’re going to give it to me and if you don’t you’re going to end up just like your gun-toting friend out there.”
By now Earl’s hand was practically closed. Parker could no longer talk but nodded violently, his hair falling down his sweaty forehead and into his eyes. Earl released his grip and waited while the man choked and gagged, a high-pitched whistling sound accompanying his desperate lung-fulls of air. Earl wondered momentarily if he had done permanent damage to the man’s windpipe before realizing he didn’t care. At least the guy was still alive; that was more than Earl could say.
Finally the man seemed to have regained his breath, more or less, and sat with his head bowed between his upraised knees. Earl rumbled, “Thumb drive,” the creepy sound emanating from his ruined chest as well as his mouth, and Parker nodded.
“Okay,” the billionaire whispered. He reached into the right front pocket of his cargo shorts and Earl wasn’t even concerned that he would withdraw a weapon. What was the guy going to do, kill him? It was way too late for that.
Parker pulled out a small portable hard drive, tiny, no bigger in size than a pack of gum. Earl shook his head. Could it really be this easy? Did this software big shot really carry a copy of his precious breakthrough, the thing everyone in the world was after, in his pants pocket?
Apparently he did. Parker held it up for Earl’s inspection with a trembling hand. “This is it,” he whispered.
Earl shrugged. “How am I supposed to know?” He grabbed the tiny hard drive out of Parker’s hand and shoved it deep inside his own pocket, wondering how much of the activity inside this cabin Max Acton was able to discern back at his house through their strange, mystical connection.
As he did so, the seed of an idea began germinating inside his scrambled brain and he instinctively pushed it away, not wanting his god, the man who held his very existence in his hands, to catch even a whiff of it.
“That’s the software, I swear,” Parker said, and Earl looked at him and smiled.
“I believe you,” he said. “Now let’s go.”
“Go? Go where? Where are we going? I gave you what you came for, now just leave!”
“That’s not part of the plan,” Earl told him with genuine reluctance in his voice. “And I couldn’t change the plan even if I wanted to.”
“But what do you need me for? You have the software, you don’t need me!”
“You say I’m holding the software and I actually believe you. But what if you’re lying? What if this is nothing but a decoy, a phony hard drive with no purpose other than to hand to anyone managing to make it past your armed guard? What if this thumb drive contains nothing but a list of your favorite rock songs, or the names and phone numbers of all your mistresses, not that that wouldn’t be totally cool, too. What then?
“Besides,” he continued, “I can’t very well leave you here to your own devices. As soon as I walked out that door you would be on the phone to what passes for the local law around here. I can’t very well have that, can I?”
“You could cut the phone lines,” Parker argued, desperately looking for a way to make the nightmare go away. “And cell coverage here is pretty much nonexistent, so I couldn’t contact anyone, at least not for several hours, and by that time you could be three hundred miles away in any direction.”
Earl reached for Parker’s throat and the man shrank back against the closet door. The conversation was getting repetitive and was irrelevant to begin with. He had to do what Max Acton had instructed him to do; he literally had no choice, and Acton had told him to bring Parker and the software back to the house. So that was what he would do. Period. It was the end of the story, even if Parker didn’t understand that fact.
Closing his hand around Parker’s throat one more time—he didn’t know where this superhuman strength had come from, he supposed it must be part of the whole revenant vibe but was thankful for it in any event; it certainly made dealing with reluctant assholes a hell of a lot easier—Earl lifted the man with one arm and plopped him back down on the hardwood floor of the hallway.
Immediately Parker began gagging and choking again but seemed to get the message. He raised his hands in surrender and lurched painfully to his feet. He began stumbling toward the front door.
Together the odd-looking pair crossed the devastation of the living room and meandered their way into the front yard, Parker moving shakily thanks to mortal terror and his injured throat, Earl moving shakily because he was dead. Earl noted with satisfaction that the guy who had used him for target practice was still lying in a heap in front of the fireplace where he had fallen, not moving, not moaning or groaning, not giving any indication of being alive at all.
Earl knew how the guy felt.
18
Max swung the ancient Dodge Caravan around in the middle of Route 24, then coasted to a stop on the gravel shoulder and left the vehicle idling as he waited for Earl and their new guest to come stumbling out of the forest. He very much missed the compact power and sheer penile masculinity of the Porsche, but had reluctantly decided to leave it at home in favor of the nearly invisible minivan with the blacked-out windows.
For one thing, there would be too many people riding back to the house to fit inside the little sports car. Plus, that flashy rocket would be far too memorable to continue driving in this hick burg now, where almost everyone owned either a four wheel drive pickup or a four wheel drive SUV. Better to be inconspicuous. The Porsche would have to be retired for a while.
It had not been an easy decision, though. Max had grown up with less than nothing, scrabbling on the streets of Boston with his crack-addicted mother, never knowing when his next meal was coming or where it was coming from, and had quickly grown accustomed to the finer things in life after developing the co-op scam out in the Arizona desert. It was still incomprehensible to Max how much stuff people would give you if they viewed you as their hero, their savior, their . . . well, their god.
He thought about the co-op and smiled,
his mind twenty-five hundred miles away, reliving what had—until meeting Raven and learning of the existence of the mystical Navajo stone—been his greatest triumph. The “co-op” had started out as nothing more than a dusty little commune constructed around the remains of an old abandoned mining camp where members eked out a living making and selling trinkets to tourists while they “simplified their lives” by signing over their most valuable possessions to their leader, Max Acton.
It was all so easy. People wanted to believe in something larger and more important than themselves and their empty lives, and yet so many had no use for organized religion. Max had started with a handful of followers, most of them street people, bums so down on their luck they had almost nothing to give, but Max didn’t care. Nothing worthwhile comes without effort, and he knew that once the word started getting around about the little slice of Nirvana he was running out in the desert, people would begin flocking to him.
And he was right on target. He was more on target than even he had anticipated. Before long the little ramshackle village had been demolished, torn down and replaced by a brand-new barracks constructed for the followers, and a majestic, soaring home for the leader, complete with vaulted ceilings and Italian terrazzo floors and marble countertops and sinks with gold fixtures and old-fashioned solid-brass fittings.
And then Raven Tahoma had come to him. A young girl from the reservation who had abandoned her home and her heritage search of something else. A young girl so strikingly beautiful and yet so completely lost that he had no trouble convincing her she belonged with him.
One night, cuddling in bed after screwing his brains out, Raven had told him an unbelievable story, a story of an ornate wooden box containing a mystical stone being held in a safe by Don Running Bear, grandson of the last great Navajo mystic. According to Raven, the stone contained powers that were terrifying in their magnitude, powers enabling the possessor of the stone to bring the dead back to life, to reanimate them, and even more terrifying, to compel the reanimated subject—the revenant—to perform any task the possessor of the box commanded.
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