Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  She switched off the penlight and used her cane to haul herself back to her feet.

  “They definitely seem to be no longer among the living, but at the same time, they don’t appear to be entirely deceased.” Joyce paused for a moment, and then shrugged. “I have no idea how that’s possible, or what it means.”

  “And the blots moving around like that?” Izzie said, still a little shaken. The sense of nausea in her gut seemed to be growing stronger. “Like they’re alive?”

  “Honestly?” Joyce shook her head. “That’s even harder to explain. If they really were some kind of parasite, maybe, but then we’d possible see … But no, even then it wouldn’t be manifesting these kinds of symptoms. We’re seeing subcutaneous bruising of some kind where those ‘blots’ appear, and it’s not like bruises can move. Not like that, anyway. So even if there were something in there that was causing the bruising that was capable of moving, it would be leaving some kind of trail, right?”

  “Izzie?” Daphne was standing right beside her, a mixture of confusion, fear, and annoyance on her face. “What the hell is going on? Is this the kind of ‘complication’ you were talking about?”

  Joyce glanced to Daphne, and then looked to Izzie. “She doesn’t know? About the other stuff?”

  Daphne’s expression grew harder. “What other stuff?”

  “The dead man who attacked Izzie the other day,” Joyce said, matter-of-factly. “The corpses with the holes in their brains. The connection between the Reaper murders and the Ink trade, whatever it turns out to be. That kind of stuff.”

  “Lieutenant Tevake?” Carlson was standing in the open doorway. “What the heck is she talking about?”

  Joyce turned to Patrick, who had a sour expression on his face. “I guess he didn’t know, either?” she said, apologetically.

  “Don’t worry about it, Carlson,” Patrick said, glancing over towards the doorway. “I’ll explain everything later. You keep watch in the hall and let me know the second you hear anyone coming.” He licked his lips again, which seemed to be a nervous tic. “We don’t know if Fayed’s ‘friends’ are planning to drop by again tonight, and I don’t want to get caught with our pants down.”

  Carlson nodded, clearly dissatisfied with the answer, but not in any hurry to spend more time in the room with the bodies than he absolutely had to.

  When the officer had stepped back out into the hall, Patrick turned back to Joyce. “No,” he said, his voice lowered, “I’ve been keeping this on a need-to-know basis, and so far only you, me, and Agent Lefevre really needed to know.” He glanced over at Daphne. “And now you’re in the loop too, I guess.”

  “Riiight,” Daphne said, stretching out the word for effect. “So nice to be clued in. You’ve been a big help.” She shook her head and turned back to Izzie. “Look, whatever is going on here … it’s crazy. You realize that, right?”

  “It’s …” Izzie began, then trailed off. “It’s complicated?” She couldn’t seem to find the right place to begin to explain.

  Daphne did not relent, but stepped over to the nearest of the bodies. “Who did this to these people? And what are they doing to them?” She turned, and pointed at the black plastic pump that all of the tubes seemed to be feeding into. “What is that stuff that’s being pumped out of them?!”

  “That’s one of my most pressing questions, too,” Joyce said, walking over to where the pump squatted on the concrete like a malevolent toad. She knelt down. “This isn’t medical equipment. More like something from a chem lab, or an industrial site.” She leaned her head down to get a better look at the jar that the pump was sitting on top of. “Huh. That almost looks like …”

  She straightened up.

  “Patrick, have you taken a good look at this jar?” she asked.

  Patrick shook his head, still clearly more than a little disoriented. Izzie couldn’t help feeling that she was beginning to lose her bearings as well.

  “Well, do so,” Joyce said. “And tell me that doesn’t look like Ink.”

  Patrick’s eyes widened a little, and he crossed the floor to where Joyce knelt.

  “I’m feeling a little …” Izzie began, then after a pause continued. “A little light-headed.”

  She glanced over at Daphne, who had a hand over her stomach, and a queasy expression on her face. “Is there some kind of gas leak down here?” Daphne asked.

  Izzie sniffed the air. The strange aroma, the odd taste on her tongue, the watering eyes … could it all be due to a gas leak?

  Or was something else leaking in?

  “I’ll be damned,” Patrick said, bending down and looking at the jar. “I’ve only seen Ink in liquid form a couple of times, but that does look just like it.” He straightened up, his eyes tracing the path from the pump back to the bodies. “But how is that even possible?”

  Izzie walked over to the metal rolling tool chest that stood along the far wall. She took a tissue out of her jacket pocket, and used it to grab on to the handle of the top drawer without interfering with any fingerprints that might be there. Then she tugged the drawer open. Inside she found several unused syringes and a box of surgical gloves. She shoved the drawer shut, and pulled out the next one down.

  The second drawer was filled with auto-injector pens like the ones they’d found in Malcolm Price’s kitchen. She picked one of them up with the tissue.

  “Patrick?” She glanced across the room. “Take a look at this.”

  The auto-injector seemed to shift in her grip, as if its center of gravity was rolling from one end to the other.

  Patrick came over and took the auto-injector pen from her, holding it between his blue-gloved thumb and forefinger.

  “Yeah, this is an Ink injector all right. And it seems to be fully charged.” He glanced over at the jar filled with viscous black liquid that Joyce was studying, and the tubes leading to the bodies on the massage tables. “So they’re extracting Ink from these people and then putting it in these injector pens? That doesn’t make any sense. Unless …”

  He was interrupted by a noise from out in the hallway, and from somewhere in the walls or ceiling overhead the sound of hydraulic motors could be heard hissing and grinding.

  “Lieutenant?” Carlson stuck his head in the open doorway, a worried tone in his voice. “Someone’s coming down the elevator.”

  Patrick scowled as he tossed the injector pen back into the drawer, and then drew his pistol in one hand, and pulled his radio out of a jacket pocket with the other. “Damn. The unmarked cars on patrol should have spotted something.” He pressed a button on the side of the radio and spoke. “Chavez, Tevake here. We’ve got unknowns entering the facility, and I need backup down here.” He paused, letting his finger off the button, but got only static in response. He pressed the button and tried again. “Chavez? Can you hear me?”

  Izzie stepped away from the tool chest, unholstered her own pistol, and did her best to shake off whatever it was that had disoriented her. Now was not the time.

  “Izzie?” Daphne appeared at her side, a pistol in her hand. “Did you hear that?”

  She glanced in Daphne’s direction. “Yeah. Someone’s coming.”

  “No,” Daphne said, shaking her head and turning away from the door. She gestured with the barrel of her pistol. “That.”

  Izzie turned to look behind her.

  The bodies on the tables might have been mostly dead, but that wasn’t stopping them from moving. One of them was raising its head, while another was turning on its side.

  “Izzie?!” Daphne raised her voice as her eyebrows shot up. “What the hell?!”

  “Patrick,” Izzie said, turning her head slowly to look at the massage tables that surrounded them. “We’ve got a problem …”

  All of the bodies were getting up off the tables and onto their feet, trailing the plastic tubes behind them, like marionettes that no longer needed a puppeteer to guide them. Their eyes were wide and sightless, their mouths moving but without a sound to be heard.
r />   And on their skin the inky blots swirled and swelled as they began to shamble forwards.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Patrick?” Izzie kept her pistol trained on the nearest of the shamblers with one hand, gently taking hold of Daphne’s elbow with the other, pulling her back away from them.

  “Chavez? Harrison? Dispatch, do you read?” Patrick lowered the radio, his eyes still on the door. “I’m not getting through to anyone.”

  “Patrick, you might want to turn around,” Joyce said, standing near the pump.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, and his eyes widened. “Christ!”

  Izzie and Daphne had backed up almost all the way to where Joyce was standing. “I tried to tell you,” Izzie said.

  “Carlson! What are we looking at out there?” Patrick called towards the door.

  They could hear the elevator clanking to a halt at the sub-basement level.

  “Somebody’s getting off …” They could just see Carlson in the hallway beyond the door. He drew his service revolver, and stepped out of view, towards the elevator shaft down the hall. “You there! Stay where you are, don’t come any closer.” There was a pause. “What are you … ?”

  Carlson stepped back into view, glancing uneasily through the door at Patrick and the others. “Sir? I’m not sure …”

  Suddenly hands grabbed at Carlson from just out of view, and pulled him away from the doorway.

  “What?!” They heard Carlson shout, quickly followed by, “Nooooo!”

  Patrick raced for the doorway, with Izzie following close behind. But before they reached it a figure stepped into view, blocking their way.

  It was a man, his head titled forward, arms at his sides, wearing only what seemed to be a bedsheet draped over his shoulder and bound at the waist. There seemed to be something wrapped crisscross around the crown of his shaved head, but Izzie couldn’t quite make out what it was. Wire, maybe? Or perhaps it was some kind of tattoo?

  Patrick raised his pistol, aiming it at the man. “Recondito Police,” he said, with as much authority as he could muster.

  The bedsheet-clad man ignored him, but took a shambling step forward, entering the room.

  “I really think we need to address that,” Joyce said, nodding towards the six mostly-dead bodies who were standing in a semicircle facing them.

  “Guys?” Daphne said. “What the hell is going on here?”

  Izzie turned from the door to the six bodies standing behind them, and back again. “Patrick?”

  “Hang on,” he told her, and then raised his voice to call out, “Carlson? You okay out there?”

  The bedsheet-clad man raised his head. His mouth hung open and his eyes were rolled up in their sockets.

  His face was instantly familiar, but it took Izzie a moment to place it.

  “Tyler Campbell,” Joyce said, in a voice that was scarcely above a whisper.

  “The drug dealer?” Izzie said, and then remembered where she’d seen that face before—on a body lying under a sheet in the morgue the night she’d arrived in town. The lines on his head weren’t wire or tattoos, but were instead stitches, showing where Joyce had cut his scalp, cracked open his skull to remove the brain, and then sewed him up again afterwards.

  “It’s impossible. He was dead.” Joyce’s eyes were wide, her mouth hanging open. “I removed his brain.”

  “Campbell?” Patrick said, keeping his tone level. “Is there anything of you left in there?”

  As if in response, the dead drug dealer took another step forward, and raised both his arms, hands out and grasping.

  Behind them, the six mostly-dead bodies took a step forward and raised their arms, too, their movements so precisely timed and in sync that they might have been choreographed.

  “Okay, I am seriously done with this,” Daphne said, hands clenching the handle of her pistol even tighter. “Whatever the hell this is.”

  “I promise I’ll explain everything as soon as we get out of here,” Izzie said. She didn’t feel it necessary to qualify that with an “if.” That much went unspoken.

  “Patrick?” Joyce said. “Any ideas?”

  “I’m thinking,” he said quietly, sounding harried. “I’m thinking.”

  They were being hemmed in by seven bodies that reason would dictate shouldn’t be able to move at all.

  But reason had left the building some time before.

  Daphne was the first to be attacked. The nearest of the mostly-dead things swiped at her, hands grasping. “Stay back!” Daphne shouted, but the thing kept coming. Daphne fired two rounds from her pistol, hitting the body squarely in the chest, but it barely flinched. She danced back out of reach just before its hands were able to close around her neck.

  “What the hell is this?” she shouted.

  Joyce clocked another with her cane, but even a solid hit to the side of its head was not enough to slow it down.

  They were being surrounded, and their weapons were proving useless.

  “We need to get out of here,” Izzie said, lowering her pistol. She thought back to what she had read in Aguilar’s journals. What deterred these things? Salt, fire, running water, and …

  “Joyce,” she said, turning to the medical examiner. “You’ve got to have some kind of horrible music on your phone, right? Something loud?”

  Joyce blinked absently for a moment, but reached into the pocket of her leather jacket, and took out a phone in a rhinestone-studded case. “I haven’t transferred my music library over for a while. I keep most of it on my desktop at work, or in the cloud. I’m sure there’s something on here but …”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Izzie answered, “as long as it’s loud.”

  “What have you got in mind?” Patrick asked.

  “Bullets aren’t going to work,” she answered. “Not unless you’ve got silver bullets on you.” She ignored their bewildered looks and pressed on. “Look, I’ll explain later, but for the moment, we need to distract or disorient these things long enough for us to get out of here. Loud discordant sounds might do the trick.”

  Joyce was tabbing through the music library on her phone’s screen. “I thought I had Nitzer Ebb or Kraftwerk on here, but I can’t find them. Joy Division, maybe? Or …”

  “Just play something!” Patrick snapped.

  “Okay, okay,” Joyce shot back. She slid the volume bar to the highest level, and stabbed a finger at the screen.

  “I’VE BEEN CHEATED BY YOU SINCE I DON’T KNOW WHEN

  “SO I MADE UP MY MIND, IT MUST COME TO AN END …”

  The music blaring from the phone’s small speaker was surprisingly loud, especially as it echoed off the low ceiling and bare concrete floor of the room.

  “How it this supposed to be helping, exactly?” Daphne said, wincing at the sound.

  “I’ll explain later,” Izzie said. “Let’s just hope that it is.” She grabbed Daphne’s free hand, and dragged her towards the door. “Come on, Patrick, we’re leaving.”

  “What about him?” Joyce said, as she and Patrick edged around the dead drug dealer who was standing a few steps in from the doorway.

  “Your phone.” Izzie nodded to Joyce, then to the drug dealer. “Put it between you and him.”

  Joyce did, and Izzie could see that the dead man was clearly affected by the sound. He swayed a little uneasily on his feet, head moving from side to side, as if he were trying to find something in the dark and couldn’t quite see it. The other six dead people on the other side of the room were similarly affected, their movements more disorganized, less in sync.

  “I guess nobody likes AB—” Patrick began, before Joyce slugged him in the shoulder with her free hand, silencing him.

  “Is this really the time?” Joyce asked, exasperated.

  Izzie was already stepping out into the hall. She could see Officer Carlson on the concrete floor, his head twisted at an unnatural angle. But he was showing no signs of getting up and moving around, unlike all of the other dead people today, it seem
ed.

  Daphne was still holding onto Izzie’s free hand, and didn’t seem eager to let go. “Where …? Where are we going?” She managed, then took a deep breath, centering herself. Between one eyeblink and the next, she went from frightened and confused to being the highly trained and efficient Bureau agent that Izzie knew that she was.

  Patrick and Joyce had followed them out into the hallway.

  “Which way?” Daphne asked again, releasing her hold on Izzie’s hand. She seemed more composed by the second, more in command of herself.

  Izzie felt the disorientation that she’d experienced in the room begin to subside as well, and the sense of nausea faded somewhat, still present, but pushed back, less in the forefront.

  “The elevator,” she said, with more confidence in her voice than she felt.

  “You go ahead, check if it’s clear,” Patrick said. He turned to Joyce, and held out his hand. “Here, give me your phone, you’re going with them.”

  Joyce blinked at him for a moment, working through what he’d said. “But what about you?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m right behind you,” Patrick said, easing the phone out of her grasp. “But I don’t want these … these whatever they are following us too closely.”

  He faced back the way they’d come, and held the phone up in one hand, speaker forward, and his pistol in the other.

  “Go,” he said.

  The thing that had in life been Tyler Campbell was shuffling out the door into the hallway, and the other six were following close behind him.

  “Go!” Patrick repeated.

  “Come on.” Izzie turned and started down the hallway towards the elevator shaft, watching for any signs of movement in the shadows ahead. Daphne followed close behind, her pistol held close to her side, ready for whatever might come.

  “Might want to move a little faster,” Patrick called from the rear. “It’s like they know we’re here but can’t quite find us.”

  There were seven dead people jostling in the hallway now, hands out and grasping, as if feeling their way through a darkened room.

  “Almost there,” Izzie answered without looking back. “Just let me …”