The Dead Road

by Seth Patrick

  Not well. He was shivering, and pale as a long-drowned corpse. He was staring ahead of him. Jonah thought his stare was aimed at Annabel to begin with, but his gaze didn’t follow her as she moved closer with the light. His breath was rapid, almost panting. His nose started to bleed, a single drop gliding down over his lips and onto his chest.

  When Jonah had dealt with the creature trying to attach itself to Kendrick, he’d not had the advantage of the sunlamp, but that creature hadn’t been able to draw on its host’s resources the way this one seemed to be doing. Before, the creature had shrivelled and perished without its host to thieve from, even in the darkness.

  He tried to take hold of the tether and squeeze it, hoping that might somehow stem the flow, but he might as well have tried squeezing string. Its struggles were slowing, however.

  ‘Stay there,’ he said to Annabel, and she stopped her advance with the lamp. Any closer and she might be in range of a sudden lurch from Never, if the creature still had much control over him while detached. The gentle thrum of the generator outside the shelter was reassuring, and he could see Petro’s anxious face peering in through the window in the entry door.

  It would drain Never until there was nothing left, he thought. There was only one thing he could think of to try. He could hold the creature easily now with just his right hand. He was aware of the insubstantial tether he’d swept up and wrapped around his left arm more than he was actually able to see it, but he gripped as best he could and tugged. With each pull, more seemed to emerge from Never, and Jonah turned his hand to gather it up. The creature was almost still, and he was keeping a close eye on it, in case it was faking its lethargic state.

  More tether came. More. Finally, he sensed resistance. He pulled gently, and Never cried out.

  He pulled harder. The slow drops of blood, which had been falling steadily from Never’s nose, became a sudden torrent.

  ‘God,’ said Annabel, and Jonah could feel that she was eager to step in and help somehow.

  ‘Stay back,’ he said. ‘Wait until I tell you it’s safe.’

  He pulled again, even harder. This time it brought a cry of such agony from Never that he almost recoiled at what he was doing. There was blood coming from Never’s right ear.

  He readied for another pull, but he found he didn’t have the strength to do it. His tears were flowing, blurring his vision.

  Then Never spoke, looking right at Jonah. His voice was impossibly weak. ‘It’s holding on,’ he said, gritting his teeth. ‘Pull the fucker out. Pull it out.’

  Jonah looked at the blood flowing from Never’s ear. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus, I can’t.’

  ‘Do it!’

  Jonah pulled.

  19

  The screaming started as soon as Jonah began to pull, but this time he didn’t stop. He strained and gave it all he could, and suddenly the tether came free; Never went silent and slumped in the chair.

  Jonah almost toppled back. The creature snapped out of its lethargy, squirming violently in his hands, but it was shrivelling in the lamp’s light. The flesh became like mist, boiling off the surface of the rancid skin. It had more fight left in it than he’d expected, and he had to use both hands to hold it firmly in the intense brightness. Within its flesh, harder masses midway between bone and gristle protruded. A thick ichor flowed from the places where the skin tore; it, too, turned to intangible mist within moments.

  He felt its life go, and within seconds he was holding nothing.

  He stood there for a moment, out of breath. He didn’t dare look at Never.

  ‘Is it gone?’ said Annabel, staring at where it had been.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jonah.

  She set the sunlamp down and rushed to Never. ‘He’s breathing,’ she said. ‘But it’s very shallow and he’s unconscious. Get Philip in here.’

  He went to the door and nodded to Petro.

  ‘We need Philip,’ said Jonah.

  Petro looked at him. ‘Is the thing dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jonah. Petro unlocked the door and opened it; he stared at Jonah’s hands, so Jonah looked too. The skin was pockmarked with fine lacerations. The bleeding had already stopped, though. Blood aside, his skin seemed clean of the remnants of the creature, but it felt tainted to him. He would wash and wash for days, he thought, however much it hurt.

  Petro gestured for Philip to go in. Cathy was there too, looking anxious.

  ‘Get something for the floor,’ called Annabel. ‘Mats, pillows, whatever he can lie on.’

  Jonah nodded and went with Petro to fetch some bedding. When they came back, Philip was still checking Never over.

  Soon enough, they had Never untied and out of the chair. With a mat on the floor, they laid him down with a blanket over him, and a saline drip getting some fluid into his system to counter shock. He was in good hands.

  Jonah felt a sudden need to get out of there, to wash the blood and the darkness from his skin. He made his way up to the house. In the upper basement, he looked in briefly on Sly, who still seemed asleep on the couch – Sara was keeping an eye on her.

  He went to the upstairs bathroom and ran a basin of cold water. He lathered up and started to scrub his hands, ignoring the sharp pain of it, ignoring the fact that he was making it bleed afresh. He was used to this kind of response. There was a tendency among revivers to develop a near obsession with cleanliness after revivals, especially the messier ones, or those dealing with corpses on the more decayed end of the spectrum. Bare hands had to be used for revival, and the corpse’s hand was often held for an hour or so.

  He realized he could smell the dying shadow on his flesh, a rancid and vinegary scent that seemed to have soaked into his skin. He emptied and refilled the basin, and began the process of scrubbing all over again.

  There was a knock on the bathroom door. It was Sly.

  She entered, looking drained. ‘Sara told me some of it,’ she said, staring at his injured hands. ‘She said that Never had something on him. Something from the trip to DC. She said he’d been taken down to the shelter, and you were going to deal with it. Is he . . . ?’

  ‘He’s alive,’ said Jonah. She was visibly relieved. ‘I got it off him, and he’s alive.’

  Sly nodded. She rubbed at her arm, where she’d been injected with the sedative. ‘Who jabbed me, by the way? I could’ve broken their neck, if I’d been compos mentis.’

  ‘It was Philip,’ said Jonah. ‘We had a crowd holding you down, and you hardly stirred anyway. In hindsight a sedative might have been overkill. You were so exhausted.’

  ‘Getting the thing off Never . . . was it the same as it was with Kendrick?’

  ‘Harder,’ said Jonah. ‘It was small, but it had forged a strong connection to Never. It was sucking the life out of him. We got the fucker, though.’ His tears started to pour. He dried his hands and brought a towel up to his face, wiping the tears away. ‘I need a rest,’ he said, and left. He went to his and Annabel’s bedroom and lay down. The room was spinning a little, but it subsided. He stared at the ceiling, remembering the feel of the creature in his hands, and he had to resist the urge to go back and wash again.

  After a while, Annabel found him.

  ‘Philip’s happy with his condition,’ she said. ‘His vitals are reasonable, but he’s still out cold.’

  ‘When I saw the blood coming from his ear . . .’

  ‘I know. There’s no clear sign of any brain injury, but all we can do is wait for him to regain consciousness.’ She lay next to him on the bed. ‘How are you? That was an experience I’d rather not repeat.’

  ‘Me too,’ he said. He held up his hands, which were still wet with the freshly drawn blood. He looked at the bed cover and saw that he’d left red handprints on it. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Annabel, deadpan. ‘That’s our most pressing problem. By the way, nobody wants to leave now. Petro’s basically turned us into legends.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. �
�He watched the whole thing. We kicked ass.’

  ‘For all the good it’ll do.’

  She snuggled up to him. ‘Don’t worry about your hands,’ she said. ‘Just hold me.’ She looked at the clock by the bed. ‘Not even midday, and we have ourselves a little victory.’

  Jonah stayed quiet.

  ‘Never’s going to be fine,’ she said.

  For how long, he wanted to say. In the daylight, it seemed easy for everyone to forget how dire the situation truly was. For them. For everyone.

  ‘Talk to me,’ said Annabel. ‘I can hear your mind working overtime. What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Pandora,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I had an image of Tess,’ said Jonah. ‘A vision, something. At the end of Grady’s revival. She was saying Pandora, over and over.’

  ‘A vision?’ said Annabel.

  ‘It was more than that. I think it means something, but I can’t figure it out.’

  ‘Pandora’s box,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I see how that fits.’

  ‘Andreas and his big dreams,’ said Jonah. ‘He certainly opened Pandora’s box with that.’

  ‘Andreas?’ said Annabel. ‘I was thinking more that Kendrick was Pandora.’

  Jonah sighed. Maybe that was more accurate. Kendrick had been the one who’d seen the possibility. He’d been the one who set the dominoes tumbling, all because he’d had one simple idea.

  In a revival, truth was guaranteed. Whatever branch of national security Kendrick worked for, the use of revival as a means to extract valuable information certainly hadn’t been overlooked, whatever the ethics. Killing those you wanted the truth from, just so you could have them interrogated by a specially trained reviver, had quickly become an option for the unscrupulous.

  It had taken Kendrick to go that step further: to ask the question, how dead was dead? Someone pulled from a frozen river could have been clinically dead for hours and still be resuscitated. Medically induced hypothermia had become a common tool for some forms of surgery. All brain activity could cease for an hour or longer, and still the person could be brought back to life.

  Could a person actually be revived in that time? Could they be questioned, with the truth absolutely guaranteed, and then resuscitated as if nothing had happened? The ethical issues would no longer apply. They wouldn’t have to kill someone to interrogate them.

  Kendrick had spent a year trying to test that out, to push revival to the limit, but it had only been when Jonah was brought into the project that any success had been achieved. Jonah’s involvement, indeed, had been the last throw of the dice for Kendrick’s experiment.

  It had been part of the Baseline research effort, the year before the FRS was brought into existence, and Jonah had been eighteen. As far as he’d been aware, the subject that he had been tasked with reviving was part of research into body-storage techniques, and was just like all the other subjects that Baseline had access to – a volunteer who’d been terminally ill, and who had given permission for their body to be used to further the understanding of revival.

  Jonah had succeeded where all of Kendrick’s usual stable of revivers had failed. Unknowing, he’d revived a subject who hadn’t died, as such – instead, she’d been put in a state of extreme hypothermia, and had had her heart stopped artificially.

  She’d been alive when he performed the revival.

  Jonah hadn’t known it at the time, but the experiment had been deemed a failure. The subject he’d revived had given bizarre answers, meaningless answers, which were thus useless for Kendrick’s purposes.

  In truth, it hadn’t been the subject of that experiment who had spoken to Jonah.

  Revival opened a door, and on the other side of that door was the soul of the person you had revived. If you opened it when the soul was still in the body, what would happen? The open door was an invitation, and something had answered it.

  Something long dead.

  When Kendrick’s work was canned by his superiors, Michael Andreas took over. It was through revivals of the living that the lost souls, the thirteen creators of the Beast’s prison, had been found and freed. It was through live revivals that, ultimately, the prison was dismantled and the Beast was unleashed.

  Now, holding Annabel, Jonah realized that Kendrick wasn’t really in the role of Pandora either.

  ‘It was me,’ he said. ‘I’m Pandora.’ He sat up, and so did Annabel. ‘I did the first live revival. I opened the box. You know the story, right?’

  ‘I guess,’ she said. ‘Pandora opened the box and all the evils in the world poured out, but hope was still there. She opened the box again and let hope out.’

  ‘Not in the original myths, but yeah. That was how I’d always heard it. Once the evils had been released, she opened it again and let hope out into the world.’

  He felt the blood drain from him. All the hours he’d agonized over what Tess’s message could mean, and he’d had no idea where to even begin.

  Now he thought he did know.

  And he didn’t like it at all.

  20

  Philip was shaking.

  Jonah had shown him the footage the camera had recorded of Never in the shelter, as the darkness dripped from him, becoming visible, a hideous leech-like monstrosity writhing on the floor, then growing, solidifying. Its inexorable movement towards Annabel. Its defeat.

  He’d had to show him. Even though Philip had seen the aftermath, even though he’d treated Never, he’d still been reluctant when Jonah had told him what needed to be done.

  Being told what they were up against was one thing. Seeing it was very different.

  ‘What you’re asking,’ said Philip, trying to regain his composure. ‘It’s too dangerous. If it was done in a hospital, with all the right equipment . . .’

  ‘We can’t go to a hospital,’ said Jonah. ‘There are others like Never, unknowingly infected. And there are others who are utterly lost to the Beast. We need to keep the lowest profile possible. It would just take one of those to see us, to know what we’re doing . . .’

  ‘It’s just too dangerous,’ said Philip. ‘I can’t condone something like that, let alone do it.’

  ‘Every time the Beast attacks it will grow stronger,’ said Jonah. ‘We have to do this, with or without your help. And you have experience.’

  ‘I have experience of DHCA,’ said Philip. ‘You’re asking for something very different.’

  DHCA. Deep Hypothermic Circulatory Arrest. It was a clinical method of lowering a patient’s core body temperature, to allow blood flow to be halted without causing brain damage.

  ‘People survive even when it happens accidentally,’ said Jonah. ‘They drown in a frozen lake, and they survive. This would be controlled.’

  ‘We don’t have the equipment.’ The reluctance was still there, even after what he’d seen on the video footage.

  ‘We have sedatives. We have a defibrillator. Whatever else we need, we can find a way to get it.’

  Philip closed his eyes. It was almost a full minute before he said anything else. ‘Putting somebody’s life at risk . . . It goes against everything I’ve spent my life doing, Jonah.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But what choice do we have?’

  *

  They’d left Never in the shelter rather than move him again, taking shifts to sit with him and monitor his condition. Jonah knocked before he opened the shelter door. Cathy was there now, and Never was awake. He’d been cleaned up, of course, but his face looked puffy and his eyes were bloodshot. Mercifully, there had been no indication that he’d suffered any kind of permanent damage.

  He gave Jonah a weak smile when he saw him.

  ‘Hey,’ said Never.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Cathy. ‘Make sure he sips water regularly; Philip was insistent.’

  ‘I will,’ said Jonah. He took her vacated seat and waited for the door to shut again. ‘Do you feel as shit as you look?’

  ‘Do I look like I was hit by a train? If
I do, then yes.’

  ‘Do you remember much?’

  The answer didn’t come right away; Never looked straight ahead for a while. ‘Too much,’ he said. ‘I remember seeing through its eyes. If it even had eyes. I remember realizing just how easily it had taken me, to make me do what it wanted, and then to forget I’d done it. We’re pretty fucking shallow animals, humans. A little threat, a little reward, and we’ll do whatever the fuck we’re told.’

  Jonah tried hard to smile. ‘You already knew that.’

  He smiled. ‘Thanks, man. You saved my life.’

  ‘You’d do the same for me, if you could.’ Jonah frowned.

  ‘What is it?’ said Never.

  ‘I worked out what Pandora means,’ said Jonah. ‘It wasn’t hard, really. Pandora is me. Opening the box was when I did the first live revival, and kicked the whole thing off.’

  ‘Uh, OK,’ said Never. He shook his head. ‘You’ll have to fill in the blanks for me. Intelligent thought is beyond me right now.’

  Jonah nodded. ‘After evil escaped from Pandora’s box, she found a way to release hope into the world. She opened the box again.’

  The penny took a while to drop, but when it did Never seemed to deflate. ‘Ah. You think Tess was telling us there’s something else out there. Something that can help us. And all it’ll take is another live revival . . .’

  ‘Exactly.’

  There was a moment of quiet, before Never sat up a little, jaw set. ‘Then I volunteer,’ he said. ‘I’d do the same for you, remember?’

  ‘No can do,’ said Jonah. ‘You’re a little bit fucked up right now. Besides, we have a volunteer already.’

  ‘Sly,’ said Never, nodding. ‘She’d always be the first with her hand up.’

  ‘Sly’s out on a quick road trip with Philip at the moment,’ said Jonah. ‘There are a few things we need before we can do it, and we didn’t want to risk stealing from a hospital. They headed to a veterinarian clinic they hope will be empty. Philip thinks it will have what’s required. As for volunteering . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Sly’s feeling a lot better, that’s true, and like you said she had her hand up in a flash. But she’s still recovering. She’s not ready for something like this.’