by Dan Wells
She didn’t ask which boy, she simply looked past him to the hall and studied me, like a buyer in a museum. The only other morticians I’d ever really known had been my parents, and neither had held anything like this woman’s quiet authority. My mother had been a bundle of nerves, always stumbling on the edge of fearing she’d done too much or not enough; my father had been loud and gregarious, earning trust not through his presence but through his voice, in a never-ending stream of patter and charm. Margo didn’t talk or scurry or try, she simply was. It was easy to see, just from standing in the hallway and being looked at, why Harold so easily left the running of the business to her.
“Why don’t you two give Robert and I the room,” she said at last, and without argument, Jasmyn and Harold walked out, and I walked in. “Go ahead and close that door,” said Margo, so I did, and the whole situation felt so subservient I couldn’t help but chafe against it. I scanned the room in a second, identified the chair that would be most awkward for her to look at, and sat down without waiting for an invitation. In Margo’s presence, it felt like an act of brazen rebellion.
Margo looked at me, silent for a moment, then swiveled her chair toward me and leaned back heavily. “You did a good job on Kathy,” she said. “She was a good friend of mine, and I thank you for that.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Thank you for the opportunity. It’s kind of been a while.”
Margo nodded. “Family business, you told me earlier?”
“I did indeed.”
“There’s a lot of that in this industry,” said Margo, and she leaned forward to shuffle some papers around her desk. “Something about the spiritual nature of it, I suspect. If your daddy’s an accountant or a plumber you might still grow up to be anything else, but when your daddy’s a mortician, you grow up to be a mortician.”
“Is that how you got into it?” I asked. “One of the Ottessen sisters?”
“The Ottessen daughter-in-law,” said Margo. “So I suppose I married into it, but it’s become my life just as much as anyone else’s. That’s why I’m still here going on twenty years after Jonathan’s passing.”
“Did you get to embalm him?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked, it just came out. Sometimes small talk reveals a lot more about you than you want it to.
Margo stopped moving papers and looked up. “Nobody lets me do anything,” she said. “I do what I please.” She considered me for a moment before looking back at her papers, sliding a series of yellow forms into a neat stack. “Who did you not get to embalm? Your father?”
“Neither one,” I said, though the topic made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like talking about my family much, now that they were mostly gone. “My father’s still alive, though, as far as I know, so I suppose there’s always hope.”
“Small-town mortuary,” said Margo. She slid the yellow stack into a worn brown folder, then pulled another folder from a drawer behind her desk. “Embalming all your neighbors and your friends’ grandparents. People you know. And then your parents go away, and you don’t have anything left, so you start, what, walking the Earth? Thumbing rides through back roads and farmland?”
I cocked my head to the side, looking at her. How had she guessed so much? And what was she thinking about it? Was she accusing me or deciphering me?
“Ma’am, I’d like to ask for a job.”
Margo sighed and tapped her folder on the desk. “I know. And I’m trying to figure out what kind of a young man would show up at a funeral home for someone he doesn’t know and then expect a job out of it.”
I froze. How had she guessed that so easily?
“I saw you sitting at the bus stop for an hour and a half,” said Margo, as if she were reading my mind, “waving past all four buses that stopped to pick you up.” She handed me the folder. “I saw the way you looked in that viewing room, all lost and come home at the same time. And I guess you could say I saw the way Jasmyn showed up here last year, just as lost and looking for someplace to stay and something to do. I never had any children of my own, but I know a wayward duckling when I see one.”
I opened the folder to find a job application inside, printed with Ottessen Brothers Funeral Home in bold letters at the top. I scanned the page quickly, looking at all the empty fields it wanted me to fill in: name, birthplace, social security number, current address and phone number. I closed the folder, but I didn’t give it back.
“I can’t give you most of this information.”
“Drifters rarely can.”
“I’d … very much like this job, though.”
“Just put down what you can, and we’ll fill in the rest as time goes by.”
“As time goes by.” So this wasn’t a job application; this sounded like she was hiring me outright, and I was just providing data for her records. I opened the folder again, took a pen from the desk, and wrote Robert at the top of the page. I hadn’t thought of a last name yet, so I hesitated just a moment before writing down the first fake one I could think of: Jensen. Marci’s last name. I stared at the form for a minute, then handed it to Margo.
She raised her eyebrow in surprise. “Just a name and that’s it?”
“We can fill in the rest as time goes by.”
She stared at me a moment, then shrugged and took the folder. “The things I do for wayward ducklings. You have a place to stay?”
“I do not.”
“You can have Jasmyn’s old room—she lived in the spare room off the side until about five, six weeks ago when she got her own place. ‘Asserting her independence.’ I’ll expect you to do the same sooner or later.”
“If you tell me to do it, how independent can it really be?”
She stared at me again, then a slow smile crept across her face. “I think I’m going to like you, Robert. You don’t happen to be good with books, too?”
“Like, reading?”
“Like adding,” she said, and tapped a ledger on the corner of the desk. “Accounting. Our books are sloppy, and we need someone to clean them up, make sure everything’s square.”
“I’m definitely not the guy for that.”
“That’s fine, I guess. I’ve got a friend who can do it. Hoping I wouldn’t have to pay his rates, though.” She sighed. “Let me go find Harold, see if we can get your room squared away.” She heaved herself to her feet, and I pointed quickly toward the computer on the side of the desk.
“Do you mind if I use that real quick? I need to look something up online.”
“No porn,” she said, and opened the door. “Password is Norman’s last name.”
She stayed there, watching me, and I realized that the password was a final test: if I was really the mortician’s son I said I was, I’d know exactly which Norman she was talking about, and what his last name was. I walked around to the keyboard, shook the mouse to wake it up, and typed Greenbaum. Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” was the most requested song at funerals in America, and most morticians knew it by heart. The login screen disappeared and the desktop opened, and Margo smiled. She turned and walked away down the hall. I opened the browser.
I’d originally read about Kathy Schrenk’s mysterious death on a Reddit thread for weird news, and I wanted to see if they’d added more information. It turned out Margo had blocked Reddit on her machine, though, so I did a general web search for “Kathy Schrenk Lewisville” and got a few hits. A few new articles but no new info. I searched “Run From Rain,” but I’d searched that a thousand times already and there was never anything useful. I searched a few more strings that I thought might lead to more info about the drowning but nothing turned up. I stared at the computer for a full minute before finally typing in a new search:
“Brooke Watson.”
The first two results were for Facebook pages of women I’d never met, but the third was a news article about my friend and her family moving away from Clayton County. An undisclosed location, in protective custody after her “kidnapping.” I couldn’t really argue with the
term. She’d insisted on coming with me after the others were killed, and she’d cried and screamed when I’d finally brought her back, saying she never wanted to leave me, but … Well, I don’t want to say that she wasn’t fit to make her own decisions, but it’s hard to argue that she was. The article said she was going into a new therapy facility, and I hoped it worked. She’d been through too much, and mostly because of me.
I was about to click off the page when a little blue word at the bottom caught my eye: my own name, John Cleaver. I clicked the link and found a related story about my sister, begging me to come home. There was even a video, but I didn’t watch it; the transcript was enough. “Lauren Cleaver released an official statement today asking her brother John, a wanted fugitive, to turn himself in. ‘Please John, we love you. We miss you. We’re so thrilled and grateful that you brought Brooke home, but please, we want you back too.’” I didn’t read the rest. I closed the page, cleared the browser history, and stood up just as Margo and Jasmyn came bustling back into the room.
“Out of the way, Robert,” said Margo, barely pausing before barreling past me to the desk. I moved to the corner, out of the way, and Margo plopped down heavily while Jasmyn started rifling through a filing cabinet on the far wall. “Do you have those forms?”
“Right here,” said Jasmyn. She flipped through a few more files while Margo clicked anxiously on the computer screen.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You’re getting your baptism by fire,” said Margo, though she and Jasmyn immediately cringed. “Dammit, I didn’t mean to say it that way.”
“Here,” said Jasmyn, pulling two different-colored forms out of the cabinet. “Regular and cremation.”
Aha. “We’re going to cremate somebody?”
“If we do we’ll be finishing what somebody already started,” said Margo. “Just got a call from Cecily, my girl down at the coroner’s office. They’ve got a body burnt half to a crisp; figure we’ll be getting it by this weekend.” She stopped her clicking and looked up at me. “If the family wants an open casket, have you done makeup on third-degree burns before?”
“Once,” I said. In truth I’d only seen it done, as my mom and Margaret worked on a boy who’d been trapped in a house fire. I’d read a lot about it, though, and I figured I knew enough to make it work. All-consuming obsessions have their perks.
“I just don’t get it,” said Jasmyn. “First Kathy and now this.”
I stepped closer, looking over Margo’s shoulder at a breaking news report. “Someone you know?”
“Not really,” said Margo. “Luke Minaker. Kind of a wayward boy; I know the family.”
Harold stepped in from the hall. “It’s a crying shame.”
“It’s not the person,” said Jasmyn, “it’s the way it happened. Kathy drowned without any water anywhere nearby, and now this guy burns to death without anything around him getting so much as a scorch mark. Almost like he burned himself from the inside out.”
My jaw dropped, but I think I closed it again before anyone noticed.
Margo glanced at me, then looked back at her computer. “Spontaneous combustion.”
“It was murder,” said Harold. “Obviously somebody doused him in gas and lit him up. Only way it could happen.”
“The police will do an autopsy,” I said. The pictures on the website didn’t show much, but the general feel was decidedly gruesome.
“I hope they catch the guy that did it and send him straight to hell,” said Harold, staring over my shoulder as I stared over Margo’s. “He deserves to burn his own self after something like this.”
“You don’t even know if it was murder,” said Jasmyn. “Maybe it was an accident?”
“You ever accidentally burned somebody to death?” asked Harold.
Jasmyn rolled her eyes. “Are you implying that all burn-related deaths are malicious? Come on, Harold, you’re killing me. Pun intended.”
I let them argue, and sank into my own thoughts. Schrenk’s death was suspicious, even before the homeless girl’s cryptic warning, but now another death, so similar and yet so mechanically different, in the same town in the same week? They had to be connected. The odds were ridiculous otherwise. Both deaths were unexplained; both deaths were elemental. Could Rain burn people, too? Maybe she didn’t just control water, she controlled … I don’t know, weather? Temperature? But that didn’t track with the rest of the Withered I’d met—they weren’t X-Men, they were victims of a trade-off: they gave up one thing and lost their humanity, but in its place they gained something else. Lose your body but gain the ability to steal people’s bodies. Lose your emotions but gain the ability to feel them in others. What had someone given up, deep in the dawn of history, to gain control over water and fire?
Or …
Was it two different Withered?
Rack the Demon King had been raising an army, trying to fight back against our campaign of genocide. Five of them had gathered in Fort Bruce, and the death toll was catastrophic—the news still talked about it, over a year later, though of course they skipped or ignored the supernatural connection. “One of history’s most devastating terrorist attacks on American soil.” What if Rain was raising her own army? What if Lewisville was hiding a whole host of Withered, ready to pour out vengeance on the frail little humans who had dared to fight back?
“Damn this all to hell,” I said.
“Now you’re doing it, too,” said Jasmyn. “I’m so done with you both.”
“What?” I looked up to see Jasmyn fuming and Harold shaking his head. “What did I do?”
“You agreed with me,” said Harold. “Jazz hates it when I’m right.”
“I hate it when you think you’re right,” said Jasmyn. “Which is a statistically unlikely amount of the time. You don’t know who did this, or if anyone did it at all. You can’t pass judgment before you know the facts.”
“I think we know enough,” I said. “If this was deliberate”—and I knew that it must have been—“then whoever did it is evil. They need to be stopped.”
“Men,” said Jasmyn. “Stop thinking with your concealed carry permits. Not everyone is evil.”
“That doesn’t mean everyone’s good,” I said.
“Obviously not,” she said. “But it does mean that everyone’s worth saving.”
“That I’ll agree with,” I said, and looked back at the news article. Saving people was the whole reason I was here.
But it looked like I had to save them from a far bigger problem than I’d realized.
CHAPTER 3
Margo and Harold got me situated in the side room, which turned out to be a tiny little ten-by-ten closet off the side of the parking lot. It had a bed on one wall and a dresser on the other, and barely room to turn around in other than that. But it was clean, and it had a roof and two doors that locked, and it was mine. I hadn’t had my own place to sleep since Fort Bruce, now more than a year ago.
I locked the doors, sat on the bed, closed my eyes, and listened to the silence.
It was getting dark, but I needed my things so I went back out and sat by the bus stop, reading the little sign and hoping they had nighttime service. It looked like they did. After about ten minutes the bus picked me up. I fed my dollar into the machine and sat by the window, watching as the sun sank over the low hills outside of town, turning the sky pink and yellow and orange and red. It looked like a painting, and then it was gone. The sun disappeared, and the reds turned blue, and I got off at the bus station and pulled my backpack out of my locker. It was dusty from so many rides in the back of so many trucks, and I wondered how long it would be before I ended up in another one, leaving Lewisville behind like I left everything.
Maybe this would be the last one. Maybe Rain and her army were the last Withered left, and I could kill them all and then … what? Where would I go next? Not back to Clayton, despite what my sister wanted. That would just mean going back to the FBI, and they’d already tried to arrest me once. I needed
to start a new life somewhere.
All I did was start new lives. Over and over.
I found a bus schedule and looked for the seven line back to Ottessen Brothers, but on my way to the bench to wait I saw an electric board that listed seven service as discontinued for the night. Something about a delay or a mechanical failure. I took a breath and rubbed my eyes. The mortuary was five miles away.
Oh well. I’d walked farther than that before and probably would again.
Lewisville felt big to me, though I knew that it wasn’t. It wasn’t even as big as Fort Bruce. But I’d grown up in Clayton, which was so small we only had one elementary school—plenty of places only have one high school, but when you only have one elementary, you’re tiny. Lewisville had about twenty-nine thousand people, according to the population sign I’d seen when I rode into town, which wasn’t enough to put it on anyone’s radar, but was big enough. They had a regional airport and a junior college, and they were near enough to some desert canyons to make it at least semipopular as a destination for hikers and mountain bikers. Even with the sun down, the roads were still busy—cars and vans and every kind of pickup truck all gliding through the neon reflections of storefronts and restaurants and old motels. I retraced my steps along the route the bus had taken, which probably wasn’t the most direct route back to the mortuary, but at least I knew it well enough to not get lost.
It was only after the first mile or so that I started to wonder if I was being followed.
The biggest city I’d ever been in was Dallas, and in a crowd like that it was impossible to tell if that guy a few blocks behind you was the same guy who’d been there a few minutes ago. Here it was more obvious: other people came and went in brief spurts, crossing the street or walking to or from their cars, but the guy behind me was a constant for most of a mile. I stopped at a streetlight and looked behind me, trying to get a good look as he moved through pools of light: tall, middle-aged, and balding, with a light brown coat that looked like a prop from a truck commercial. Who wore a coat in Arizona in the summer? My light turned green, and I crossed the street quickly. Was I just being paranoid? No one even knew I was in town, or who I was, or why I mattered. He hadn’t been at the viewing. But that homeless woman had, and she’d known me, or at least she’d known about me. Somebody, somehow, was aware of my mission. Which meant this guy, if he wasn’t just some random guy, was a Withered.