Dead Mann Walking

by Stefan Petrucha

  “Hess?”

  “Misty.”

  She bobbed her head. “Fine. Sure.”

  “Shut off the lights on your way out?”

  “Okay.”

  She scooped up the remains of the collar and headed out, pausing at the door. The curves of the peeling paint almost matched the shape of her unkempt hair. It’d been a long day for her, too. She looked drained, ready to collapse. She narrowed her tired eyes at me.

  “You didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Semantics.”

  “Are you going to be okay? You’re not going to be in here for more than, like, a half a day, right?”

  Chakz, she knew, could get so depressed they’d go into a torpor for a week or so before finally going feral. I waved my fingers at her and pushed the recliner back.

  “I’ve just got to think it through. At least I know who to look for, right?”

  She didn’t believe me, but she knew me well enough to realize I had to be alone. She closed the door.

  It was one of those times I wished I could still use alcohol for something other than killing germs. I lay down, leaned back, and tried to think of something that didn’t hurt. It didn’t work. It was no coincidence Turgeon had hired me to find Boyle. I was on his list. It was a way to set me up, too. I told myself that if I didn’t pull out of the funk, he’d get me, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

  I tried to sleep but couldn’t, not really. I drifted in and out, but my head continued to buzz. The blood on the phone probably belonged to Grandpa or Watt. Maybe it was cherry syrup.

  I went through some motions. The heads, what did they mean to Turgeon? There are all kinds of people, but four kinds of serial killer. There’s the visionary, where the killer has psychotic breaks and imagines himself on a mission from God or the devil. Mission-oriented, where they believe they’re cleansing the world of some evil, like children or women. Hedonistic, which doesn’t necessarily mean they kill for the pure sicko pleasure, though it includes that, but their motive could also be money or comfort, like your Bluebeards or Black Widows. And number four, power, where the killer wants control over something. Most number fours were abused as children. They play the same game from the other side, thinking they’ve won something.

  I didn’t know enough to guess which Turgeon fit. It wasn’t a chak thing. The victims were all spouse killers. Was he avenging a parent, or trying to kill the other one? Did he want to rid the world of them because they were evil, because it was fun, because he wanted control, or just because? Spinning wheels got to go ’round.

  Useless, fucking useless.

  I let it go, but that was a mistake. When I did, I had that drifting feeling again, like I wasn’t holding on to anything, floating away from my body and up into space. It sneaks up on you like that. I grabbed at the train of thought but couldn’t hold it. The old noggin only worked in spurts at best. Now, as it sputtered, something insectlike crawled into the gaps—bikers with chain saws, Boyle talking about the future, Ashby’s hand rising from the vat.

  Lenore.

  Back when I was alive and had trouble sleeping, there was a trick I used. I’d stop trying to think in words and let the pictures take over. One image leads to another, and the next thing you know you’re snoozing. This was the opposite. I tried to cling to the words, the things that worked in straight lines, but pictures kept poking in—bony hands, talking heads, laughing skulls.

  Lenore again.

  So much time passed I wondered why Turgeon hadn’t come for me. Misty checked in now and again, but couldn’t shake me out of it. She’d come back I don’t know how often, hour after hour, talking, yelling, but no change.

  I thought I heard howls and gunshots. I didn’t know if it was from the Bones, or my ears were remembering Bedland. At some point, I wanted to get up, but the office had vanished and the floor was opening up. Below, there was a sickly green liquid. I struggled, but then gave up. They say once you’ve already said fuck it, it gets easier the second time. It certainly felt easier.

  I was more than halfway gone, and nothing was pulling me back.

  19

  I didn’t know how long I’d been there when the door clicked open and the rotten, stinking world rushed back into place. Misty stepped in, face wrapped in worry.

  “Hess? Can you talk? You’ve got to get up. You have to.”

  It was dark out, so I pretended I’d been asleep. “Huh? Whazzat?”

  “Jonesey’s here. He’s pretty upset.”

  Before I could say a word, Jonesey was halfway inside, pushing past Misty like she was a set of drapes. Things still felt arm’s-length distant, but some habit told me I should keep up appearances in front of a guest. I managed to turn on the lamp. The light hit him under the chin. His head was bouncing like a doggy decorating the back of somebody’s car.

  “You look natural,” he said. I think it was a compliment.

  “And you look like you’ve seen a . . .” I caught myself. “Never mind. What’s up?”

  “Everything.” He took to pacing, and talking too fast for me to follow. “It’s gotten bad out there, right? Big cop presence? But I keep working on the rally, one pamphlet at a time, one chak at a time. It’s happening, too. Really, really happening. I’ve got commitments. One chak talks to another, and those chakz talk to more. It’s like a virus of positive energy . . . and then . . . and then . . .”

  I was grateful for the pause. “Is there a point in there somewhere?”

  “I managed to get the police to back off a little. The police. To. Back. Off. It was a miracle, a light from the sky, the dove from above. When they saw me in action, defusing tension, getting chakz to cooperate peacefully, I earned their respect.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. “Yeah. And now you’ll be the first chak elected president.”

  Making fun made me feel better, but Jonesey wasn’t in the mood.

  “Shut up. Don’t talk like that, Hessius. I don’t think I could take it right now.”

  “Since when do you call me Hessius? What the hell is going on? Sit down and take it slow, for Pete’s sake.”

  He sat down. The change in the angle of the lamp did nothing for his looks.

  “Boom, everything goes to confusion. Boom. Out of nowhere, fucking nowhere, like out of the darkness before the world began, this . . . this . . . skeleton shows up and starts tearing things apart.”

  At long last, something got my attention. I clenched my jaw. “Tearing things, or people?”

  “Both, if he gets the chance. He’s worse than feral, and he’s strong. He puts his fist through a windshield, tries to grab the driver. The cops freak, the chakz freak, and everybody’s running like crazy back to square one.”

  “Enough about the political climate. Focus. The skeleton, where is it now?”

  Jonesey couldn’t sit still. He jumped up and started acting the story out. I have to admit, it helped. “The cops go after him, guns blazing, but they miss, miss, miss, and he ducks into an alley. Then they lose him, ten of them, probably because they’re so weirded out. So am I; so’s everybody. Two chakz moan just because they were watching. But I don’t panic. I stay in control, Mann, and I look, look, look and spot his freaky ass. I follow, figuring I can, you know, try to talk him down or something, but it’s like he can’t see or hear me, like I’m the same as any other thing in his way. I stand in front of him and he nearly tears me apart. And all the while keeps making this sound, like . . . like . . .”

  “Heh-heh?”

  Jonesey snapped his fingers. “That’s the one.” He twisted his head and stared. “You know him. You know him?”

  “I know who it was.”

  He shook his head. “He, Mann. He.”

  That was Jonesey. He’d call a lamppost he or she. Part of his philosophy. Treat something as if it’s a person and it’s more likely to act like one. I somehow didn’t think it applied to a bunch of bones—me, either, for that matter. I was barely back from the brink, and the only thing holding me the
re was the thought that I could prevent some damage if I put a stop to it.

  But hope springs eternal. Jonesey even thought I might have some answers. “How does he even talk? How does he walk? There’s no muscle.”

  I shook my head. “I said I knew who it was, not that I know what it is. All I can tell you is that it’s what’s left of a chak after an acid bath, and its name used to be Ashby.”

  He blinked. “Acid bath? You mean like a bath with acid in it?”

  “Yeah. Long story. Right now we’ve got to find it before the police do, or before it gets its hands on another liveblood.”

  Jonesey’s mouth opened so quick his jawbone cracked. “No, no, no. Another?”

  I nodded. “Already killed two. Arguably self-defense . . . after the fact. Where’d you see it last?”

  “Collin Hills.”

  He might as well have said Disneyland. Collin Hills was a McMansion neighborhood separated from the Bones by General Buell Park. A definite no-no for any chak.

  “Collin Hills? Fuck . . . how . . . ?”

  Jonesey went back into his pantomime thing, swooping his arms to imitate the skeleton’s movements. “He headed into the park, over the fence, then over the freaking electrified wall!” Finished, he slapped himself in the head. “If he gets into one of those houses you know what that’ll mean. . . .”

  I did. The LBs were already on pins and needles. If it so much as tromped on the landscaping in a gated community, it’d be like what they did with the Japanese-Americans during WWII, without the food and water. I already had enough to feel guilty about.

  For the first time in ages, I got to my feet. “What day is it?”

  Jonesey gave me a look like he remembered having this conversation from the other side. “Check your watch,” he said.

  “Right.”

  Three days. Good enough for Jesus and vampires, good enough for me.

  I’d need something serious to deal with this. Ashby’d saved my ass twice—first by coming out of the vat, now by giving me a reason to get up. In exchange, I’d have to put him out of his misery.

  It. I’d have to put it out of its misery.

  I’d given my gun to that freak Turgeon, but I doubted it’d do any good here. I reached for a crowbar I kept at the side of the desk.

  Jonesey looked at the iron the same way he’d just looked at me. “You said you knew him. Can’t you talk to him?”

  I tapped the bar into my palm. “Already tried. And don’t ask me about it again until later. Much later.”

  I thought I’d have to talk Misty out of coming with us, but as we headed for the door she didn’t say a word. And she looked as bad as I felt.

  “You been eating?” I asked her.

  No answer. She didn’t look high, so I guessed she’d been worried about me, keeping vigil. I told Jonesey to wait outside a minute.

  I said, “Three days, Misty. I’m lucky Turgeon didn’t come for me. Uh . . . he didn’t, did he?”

  “No,” she said. “Maybe he was just as freaked out as you were by . . . you know. . . .”

  Ashby. I shivered. There but for fortune.

  “How long would you have waited on me, Mist?”

  “Until the end, until you changed.”

  “Then what? Would you have done like I asked?”

  She sighed and nodded. “I’ve got a sledgehammer under my cot.”

  I gave her a hug. “Thanks.”

  She grimaced. “Fuck you, Hess.”

  I headed out.

  Putting a bunch of McMansions on the far side of General Buell Park, so close to the Bones, sounded like real bad planning, but they were here before we were. Not before the street people, but Collin Hills was intended to reclaim the area from them. When chakz started stumbling around in the abandoned buildings here, sales dropped to nothing. To keep the current homeowners from bolting, the developer installed a big stone wall, topped with an electric fence and a twenty-four/seven security system.

  In practice, up until now, it worked. Chakz never went past the park. We’re not interested in making that kind of trouble anyway, and the police made it real clear what the consequences would be if we did.

  So of course that’s where Jonesey and I were headed.

  We passed a few patrol cars cruising the neighborhood. They used to be as rare as UFOs. Things had changed. Otherwise, the Bones looked empty as usual. Not Buell Park. Flashlight beams flitted along the overgrown bushes like morbidly obese fireflies. The police were looking for the thing.

  As we neared the park entrance, I caught a thick whiff of kerosene. Roundabout the knees of the bronze statue of Buell that stood in the center of the park, I caught a fiery flash. It wasn’t a flashlight. The boys in blue had a new toy, a flamethrower. Great. It might not work on the skeleton, but it sure would work on me and Jonesey.

  Back when I was alive, I sucked so badly at staying hidden it was a joke in the neighborhood. It was one of the few parts of my skill set that being dead had improved. If I wasn’t stupid about it, and no one was staring right at me, I could get around pretty well without being seen. Jonesey would consider it politically incorrect to say so, but it had to do with being more a thing than a person. LBs don’t realize it, but they’re wired to sense other living things. Unless you had a dog’s nose, or we had some rot, there’s nothing to sense here. It’s one of the reasons it’s so easy for a chak to sneak up on a liveblood.

  Some moans to the south got the cops all excited. When they raced off to follow, it gave us a break. We crouched like crazy just the same, avoiding the paths, plodding through a rat’s nest of hedge and tree.

  “There been a lot of moaners lately?” I asked.

  Jonesey gave me that look again. “A couple every day now. Like I said, I got most of the cops to go home before your friend showed up; now it’s . . . Where have you been?”

  “I said we’d talk later.”

  Another moan, forlorn as a lonely loon crying in the middle of nowhere. I saw a powerful blast of flame, heard the creaking rush of burning wood, and a few seconds later felt some heat in the air.

  Jonesey shook his head. “At least they could’ve made sure whoever it was had gone feral first.”

  “Come on; we’ve got business.”

  The twisted mass of branch and leaf ended in an eight-foot black iron fence. As we sneaked up, I could see lights on in a few of the Collin Hills houses. There was a second blast from the flamethrower, more distant. Another moaner gone. Before the glow vanished, we were over the park fence and across the well-lit street.

  We hit our knees behind a row of parked cars. I didn’t like it here, not at all. Unlike the Bones, everything worked, especially the streetlamps. It was so bright I felt naked as a dead jaybird.

  The Collin Hills wall was behind us, a big stucco sucker tipped with barbed wire. The wire was the good stuff, thin black strips that fit right in with the decor of the terra-cotta rooftops beyond. To add insult to injury, it was electrified. A small sign warned about the voltage. That level of electricity wouldn’t destroy a chak, but our flesh would sear and stick to the wire. We’d end up doing major damage trying to pull free.

  “Where’d it climb over? You see it happen?” I asked.

  Jonesey muttered some mnemonic to himself, then pointed to a spot down the block half-hidden by an oak. “There.”

  We crept closer. Thanks to the great lighting it was easy to see that the stucco covering had been chipped, revealing the less dainty color of the concrete beneath. The broken patches made a line, more or less, that headed up to a spot where the wire looked slightly bent.

  “So it climbed? I didn’t think it could see.”

  “He didn’t. Not exactly.” Jonesey went into another weird little pantomime. “He runs up like this, hits the wall like he doesn’t see it, then feels it with his hands. He reaches up, but the wall’s too high. So he gets angry. He punches. He scratches. When he stops, he fingers the holes he made; then he uses them to pull himself up a little. He still
can’t reach the top, so he does it again and again, until he lobs himself over, nothing but a spark and a gzt from the wire. I expected alarms, but there was nothing. I’ve seen some freaky shit, but I’m telling you, that was freaky.”

  “Chakz never come here. Maybe the alarm broke and the owner didn’t bother to repair it.” I eyed the wall and the tree. “Bottom line, it can do it; we can do it.”

  Jonesey gave the handholds a shot while I shimmied up the oak. By the time I’d made my way across an overhanging branch, he’d gone up as far as he could without touching the wire. Flat against the branch, I reached down, grabbed his hands, and swung him over.

  It was close. The soles of his shoes cleared by an inch. Once he landed, I squirmed along the branch as far as I could, then jumped. I hit the ground on a patch of wood chips. Some splinters, but no big damage so far.

  The lights of the security gate glowed beyond the neatly trimmed hedges. I could see the rent-a-cop in his little house, guarding the main entrance. He was awake, listening to some iThing. Good. The skeleton hadn’t attracted attention here yet.

  With no trail to follow, we skirted the edges of the properties. I was hoping it might still stink of acid, but the whole place was thick with the smell of chemicals, fertilizer and chlorine from the pools.

  On the one hand, we hoped we’d bump into it; on the other, we were so terrified we would that we were startled by every cricket chirp. We really jumped when we heard the dog. A big one, it barked three times, then let loose with a final, pained yelp.

  Not good for us or the doggy. It sounded like it was nearby, right in the next yard. With a quick glance at each other, we gave up on crouching and ran toward the sound.

  When I saw how the pretty little picket gate was mangled, I half knew what to expect. I didn’t expect something heavy to fly through the air and land at my feet with a warm, wet thud. Jonesey clamped his hand over his mouth. I had to bend down to make sure. It was a rottweiler, head twisted around so it had a nice view of its own tail. The heart-shaped collar said the dog’s name was Annie.