Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  Izzie and Patrick followed the detective inside, stepping over the splintered wood of the shattered door.

  The living room was about what Izzie would have expected the home of a guy with shady connections who paid his rent in cash would look like. Giant flat-screen TV mounted to the wall, wired to game consoles and media players. Leather couch. Recliner. Glass table. All of it expensive and garish. But also piles of empty pizza boxes and Chinese takeout containers, full ashtrays and beer bottles. Takeout menus and auto magazines.

  “We found them through here,” Chavez said, continuing down a narrow hallway to the kitchen.

  Harrison was in the kitchen with one of the uniformed officers, Mirandizing a man and woman who were kneeling on the floor, their hands cuffed behind them. “Do you understand each of these rights I have explained to you?”

  The room had a strange smell to it that Izzie couldn’t quite place, and she couldn’t quite decide if it was foul or appealing. It called to mind the ozone tang of electric motors and summer rains, the peppery scent of a body that hadn’t bathed in weeks, fresh flowers and rotting meat, all mixed together. There was an unpleasant taste on her tongue that she couldn’t identify, and a swelling sense of nausea in her gut.

  “What’s all this?” Izzie looked down at the kitchen table.

  On the surface of the table were scattered piles of what Izzie at first took to be ballpoint pens, but on closer inspection were auto-injectors, like EpiPens carried by those with potentially fatal allergies. These didn’t carry any kind of labels or branding, though, and were instead jet black. There were also a couple of syringes, a box of disposable medical gloves, and a few empty IV bags.

  “Ink,” Patrick said, nudging one of the auto-injectors with the tip of a pencil he’d pulled from his pocket. “That’s how they sell it. One dose per pen. Looks like these are empty, though.”

  “Empty as in they’ve already been used?” Izzie asked. “Or as in they haven’t been filled up yet?”

  Patrick lifted the edge of one of the clear plastic IV bags. “I’m guessing the latter. Maybe they were using this place as a lab to cook the stuff, or however it’s made?” He looked around. “But if that’s the case, then where’s the stuff? This is all fixings and gear, but I’m not seeing any Ink.”

  “What does it look like, anyway?”

  Patrick met her gaze and shrugged. “Like ink. You know, fountain pens, writing with quills, that kind of thing? But with a thicker consistency, more like motor oil.”

  “Not going to talk, huh?” Harrison was still addressing the man and woman, who hadn’t said a word, but just glared at him in silence.

  “We’ll take them back to the station house and book them,” Chavez said, nodding to a uniformed officer to take them away.

  “Sir?” another officer called from the hallway. “You might want to check this out.”

  Harrison and Chavez left the kitchen, and Izzie and Patrick trailed after.

  Izzie could see into the living room at the end of the hallway. The ambulance had arrived and EMTs were entering the house as Sergeant Jefferson was being helped down the stairs by one of the other officers. They’d improvised a compress to stanch the flow of blood from the wound in his neck, but he was looking pretty wan and pale.

  “Guy freaking bit me …” the sergeant was saying as the EMTs rushed to assist, but Izzie’s attention was called back to where Harrison and Chavez were standing.

  “It’s locked, sir,” a uniformed officer was explaining, indicating a wooden door on one side of the hallway. It had a keyed entry knob on it, such as an exterior door might have.

  Patrick looked down one end of the hall and then the other, considering. “Probably leads to the basement,” he guessed.

  “Why lock an interior door with a key?” Chavez said.

  “To keep somebody out?” Harrison deadpanned, stroking his mustache.

  “Or keep something in,” Izzie said, in a low voice.

  Harrison turned to the others. “Where’s the ram?”

  Chavez glanced at Izzie before answering. “Forensics may want it in its current condition. Maybe we call for another one?”

  “No need.” Patrick stepped past them to more closely inspect the door, running his fingertips along the doorjamb, rapping the door itself with a knuckle. “It’s an entry doorknob, but it’s just set in a hollow-core interior door. Hinges are on the other side, so …”

  He motioned for the others to step back. Then he turned to one side, bending his right leg and bringing his foot up almost to waist level, using his arms to counterbalance his weight. Then he kicked the door as hard as he could right beside the doorknob …

  And his foot punched right through the material of the door.

  “Aw, crap!” Patrick moaned, his leg stuck in the door, pin-wheeling his arms to try to stay upright.

  Izzie and Chavez rushed to his side to help steady him, while Harrison held back, chuckling.

  “Smooth move, Tevake,” he said, stroking his mustache.

  “Shut up, Harrison,” Chavez shot back, as Patrick awkwardly yanked his foot back out of the door.

  While Izzie helped Patrick right himself, Chavez leaned down and inspected the hole in the door.

  “The knob didn’t budge, but …” He stuck his hand through the door, looked up at the ceiling as he felt around blindly on the other side, and then grinned as he heard a click. He pulled his hand back through, and then turned the knob with a flourish, opening the door. “That did the trick. Nice work, Tevake.”

  Patrick was bending down to massage his bruised ankle, smirking. “Be sure to say flattering things in your report.”

  Chavez leaned his head through the open door, and felt along the inside wall with his hand. “I don’t see a light switch.” He pulled a small flashlight from a nylon patch velcroed to his vest, clicked it on, then shined the beam down the dark steps. He turned to the others. “Harrison, get with Jefferson, find out just what the hell happened upstairs. I’m going to go down and check this out.”

  Harrison shrugged, and headed towards the front room.

  “We’re coming with,” Patrick said, glancing back at Izzie to follow.

  “Good god!” Chavez recoiled after he’d taken two steps down.

  The stench hit Izzie as she passed through the door, and she covered her nose and mouth with her hand while trying not to gag.

  “We’ve got a body down here,” Chavez said, slowly descending the steps.

  Patrick had snapped on a flashlight of his own. “More than one.”

  Izzie reached the bottom of the stairs just after the others, and spotted a cord hanging from a bare lightbulb on the rafters above. She pulled the string, and a stark white light flooded the basement.

  “Oh, Christ,” Chavez said.

  There were canvas army cots stretched over folding wooden frames lining the back wall of the space. On three of them were bodies that were stripped naked, lying facedown on the cots, with their arms hanging down and touching the dirt floor.

  Patrick leaned in for a closer look, pinching his nose shut. “They’ve been dead a while, that’s for sure.”

  There was a rolling surgical stand to one side, on top of which were coils of clear plastic tubing and bits of metal that Izzie couldn’t identify.

  “I’m guessing this is going to clear up a couple of missing persons cases,” Chavez said as he flicked off his flashlight and put it away. “But what the hell are they doing down here? Was this some kind of shooting alley or something?”

  “Maybe.” Patrick straightened up, shaking his head. “If it were, though, and these people OD’ed down here, why leave the bodies?”

  Izzie was looking around. “No way. Why come down here to get high when there are couches and stuff upstairs? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “And why was the door locked?” Patrick asked.

  Chavez scowled. “We’ll have CSI see what they can find out. And we’ll call the M.E., let her know she’s got her work cut
out for her.”

  “I’m sure Joyce’ll love that.” Patrick looked down at the putrefying corpses. “But you know, having said that … she actually might enjoy this. Could be a challenge for her.”

  “I think our friend that went out the window will be more than enough challenge for one day,” Chavez said, heading for the steps. “Come on, I want to hear what Jefferson has to say.”

  As they climbed the steps back to the ground floor, Izzie glanced over her shoulder at the three bodies at the back of the basement. Notions and half-formed theories were beginning to orbit each other in her thoughts, slowly coming into alignment.

  An EMT was bandaging Sergeant Jefferson’s neck when Izzie and the others returned to the living room. Jefferson was seated on the leather couch, head titled far to one side while the bandage was applied.

  “The antibiotics should stave off infection, but this will just be temporary until we can get you to Recondito General.” The EMT finished taping the bandage into place. “You’re going to need stitches.”

  “Great,” the sergeant said with a sneer. “My wife’s going to love that.”

  “So what happened?” Chavez looked from the sergeant to Harrison and back again.

  “Dewey, Ramirez, and I proceeded to the second floor to look for the suspect,” the sergeant answered. “We cleared two bedrooms and a bathroom, finding nothing. There was a stairway leading to the attic, so we ascended. Found the suspect sitting in the middle of the floor. Like he was meditating or something like that. Room was totally empty, otherwise.”

  “Meditating?” Patrick asked.

  The sergeant began to shrug reflexively, then winced in pain from his injured neck. He blinked hard. “Yeah, you know, legs crossed, like yoga shit.” He raised his head, laying a hand tenderly against his bandaged neck. “I told him to lay facedown on the floor, so I could cuff him, and he jumped to his feet and came right at me.”

  The other two officers, Dewey and Ramirez, were standing a few feet away, stricken looks on their faces.

  “I told him to stand down, that I didn’t want to shoot, but then he was just … on me, you know? Nutjob got his teeth on my neck. Dewey managed to pull him off of me, and then Ramirez put three in his chest. Thought that’d put him down, but he just shrugged it off like they were bee stings. Turned around and started running. He was headfirst through the window before we could stop him.”

  “Crazy, right?” Harrison said, but Izzie noticed that both Patrick and Chavez ignored him. They were too focused on what the sergeant had said.

  “I’m telling you,” Chavez repeated, “jacked up on something, feeling no pain.”

  Patrick glanced in Izzie’s direction, and a look passed between them. “Yeah,” Patrick said, “it was probably something like that.” She could see that he didn’t believe it any more than she did.

  Chavez turned to Harrison. “Do we have an ID on the man and woman we found in the kitchen?”

  Harrison opened up a notepad. “Ibrahim Fayed and Marissa Keizer. At least that’s what their employee badges say. Neither one of them had any kind of other ID on them.”

  “Employee badges?” Patrick echoed.

  Harrison nodded. “Card keys for the Pinnacle Tower.”

  “So maybe the suspect did work there?” Chavez rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Or used to, anyway. Could be a connection there.”

  “We’ll know more once we interrogate them back at the station house,” Harrison said, sounding eager to get to it. Izzie got the impression that he was a guy who enjoyed playing the “bad cop” in interrogation rooms.

  “Anything else of note upstairs?” Chavez asked, glancing at the sergeant and the two other officers who had accompanied him.

  “Not much,” the sergeant answered. “One bedroom with a single bed, dirty laundry, other signs of habitation. The other bedroom was filled with stolen goods, from the looks of it.”

  Chavez arched an eyebrow. “That a fact?”

  The sergeant nodded fractionally, mostly with his eyelids. “Smartphones still in the box, shrink-wrapped. Laptops. Boxes of software. Office equipment. That kind of thing.” He snorted slightly. “Cases of printer paper, even.”

  “Sounds more like a tech startup than a drug operation,” Izzie suggested.

  “Makes sense, though.” Patrick glanced in her direction. “If they had access to an office building after hours, anyway. That kind of stuff is easy to transport, and easy to unload. So long as no one has tracked the serial numbers, you could make good money—fast cash—turning around that kind of stuff.” He shrugged. “Or maybe the guy was just planning on going into business for himself.”

  Chavez shook his head. “Nah, this was a middleman, at best. Somebody at the top of the food chain wouldn’t live like this.” He looked around the room at the empty pizza boxes and beer bottles, the overflowing ashtrays and trash. “This guy was rank and file, taking orders from someone higher up.”

  “But there doesn’t seem to be any Ink on the premises,” Patrick objected. “Just gear and fixings.”

  “Maybe they were waiting on a delivery?” Chavez sounded unconvinced even as he said it.

  “I say we head back to the station house already,” Harrison said. “Let CSI and the M.E. deal with this mess.”

  Chavez nodded slowly. “Okay, okay. We’ll see if we can get those two to give us something useful.”

  Harrison grinned, which Izzie couldn’t help but find unsettling. The mustache wasn’t helping.

  Patrick’s car was parked on a side street off Prospect Avenue a few blocks away. It was well past sunset now, and a chill was settling into the air.

  “I’m heading back to the station house to help Chavez with the paperwork,” he said as he slid behind the driver’s wheel. “You want me to drop you somewhere or … ?” He let the question trail off, leaving it to her to provide alternatives.

  “I should check in at the Resident Agency. Fill them in on our progress, do some paperwork of my own.”

  Patrick nodded as he steered the car out into traffic. “Sounds good.”

  They rode in silence for a few blocks, Izzie staring idly out the passenger window, Patrick with his eyes fixed on the road ahead, neither of them saying a word.

  It was Patrick who broke the silence.

  “That guy was totally dead when he got up from the pavement and came at you,” he said, not taking his eyes off the road.

  “Yep,” Izzie answered without turning, still staring out the window. “Totally.”

  Another moment stretched out silently between them.

  “How the hell did that happen?” Patrick finally said. “A dead guy getting up and running around?”

  Izzie didn’t answer immediately.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, her voice low. Then she turned and glanced over at Patrick. “But I’m not sure I want to find out, either.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Yeeeah,” he said, drawing out the word until it tapered off into silence.

  They passed another block in silence.

  “Maybe Joyce will have something for us tomorrow,” he finally added.

  Izzie nodded, without much enthusiasm. Maybe she would.

  They rode the rest of the way to the building that housed the Resident Agency, and it wasn’t until Patrick pulled the car to a stop at the curb that he spoke again.

  “You know as well as I do that the stuff going on here …” he said as she put her hand on the latch to open the car door. “It’s not natural.”

  She didn’t turn around, but didn’t open the door. “It’s supernatural, Izzie. That’s why I called you in on this.” She closed her eyes and took a long slow breath in through her nostrils.

  “These guys—Chavez, Harrison, the rest of them—they see a guy take three shots to the chest, fall twenty-five feet to the pavement, get up, get shot again, get up again, and only go down when you bash his head in with a battering ram … They see that, and they can convince themselves that it’s because
he was ‘jacked up’ on something.”

  Izzie lowered her hand and turned back around in her seat to face him.

  “Maybe it’s because of how we were raised,” he went on, “I don’t know. Maybe we’re just more open to the possibility. But tonight proved that what’s going on in this town is way beyond natural.”

  She chewed at her lower lip before answering.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “Yes. You’re right. Goddamn it, you’re right.”

  She sighed wearily.

  “It was possible that it was just a coincidence that there weren’t any reported Ink cases in the neighborhood your great-uncle protected, and it was entirely probable that all of the evidence from Fuller’s apartment was just proof that he was a manic obsessive who’d had a psychotic break. But clearly, there’s no rational explanation for how Malcolm Price was still up and moving after all that. And his mouth moving, too, without saying a word …”

  She shuddered.

  “Like the head of Francis Zhao that night in the lighthouse,” Patrick said.

  Izzie nodded slowly. “Exactly like that.”

  Patrick searched her expression.

  “And what about the dead bodies in the basement?” he asked. “What was Price doing in that house?”

  “I’m not sure,” she answered. “But I heard stories when I was a little girl.” She paused, taking a deep breath, mustering the courage for what she was about to say. “Stories about zombies.”

  Patrick drew back, head cocked to one side, a disbelieving smirk on his face. “What? Like Night of the Living Dead, George Romero kind of stuff?”

  “No, of course not.” A hint of annoyance crept into Izzie’s voice. “Like old-school Haitian Vodou. The bodies of the dead brought back as slaves by a bokor—a sorcerer of the left hand. No memory of their former lives, no personalities, just bodies that move around and do whatever their masters tell them to do.”