by Dan Wells
At the mortuary Harold handed me a black suit, used, but clean and my size. “Margo said you needed this.”
“Thanks. That was fast.”
“I live to serve.” He tipped an imaginary hat, and we cleaned up the chapel again.
* * *
I went back to the bar where my rescuers had taken me the night before, but without their company or any ID, the bartender wouldn’t let me in. I told him I wanted to reward the men for saving my life, which he thought was a nice gesture. Since it was still too early for any real crowd, he stood in the doorway and answered my questions. He could remember most of the men, as they were regulars, but one in particular was new. I focused on that one.
“Do you know the man’s name?”
The bartender shook his head. “Nope.”
“What do you call him, then?”
He tucked his shaggy hair behind his ears. “I just call everyone ‘boss,’ then I don’t have to know their names.”
“Okay. Do you know how long he’s been in town?”
“Three, four days at the most. He’s probably coming back tonight if you want to leave him a message.”
“Do you mind if I just hang out here in front and wait for him? For all of them?”
The bartender shrugged. “Long as you don’t do drugs or anything that’ll get me in trouble.”
“Scout’s honor.”
“Thank you, boss. Good luck.”
He shook my hand and went back inside. I sat on the bench by the front door for a few minutes, waiting, then decided to walk back down the road a bit to the place where the visionary killer had tried to drown me. I couldn’t find it. I’d thought maybe I might be able to identify the spot by some damage to the fence, or to the weeds on the slope, but it all looked the same in the light. I walked back to the bar and waited, and as each man came to the door I thanked him and shook his hand, and asked if he could remember anything about the man who’d attacked me. None of them could recall his face, though they all remembered the coat pretty clearly. One of them identified it by make and style—it was a popular choice among local ranchers, apparently—but that was the best they could do.
Around eight o’clock, as the sky was just darkening to twilight, the last man arrived at the bar. The out-of-towner. He was about as tall as I was, but stocky and hairy, with a long black beard and a head of long hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a black T-shirt with what I assume was a band logo, but I didn’t recognize it. I stood up and shook his hand, introducing myself as the kid from last night.
“Oh, hey,” he said, and shook my hand vigorously. His hand was warm, and I felt a sense of sudden terror that I would burst into flames at his touch. “How you doin’?”
“I’m fine,” I said, “thank you. I wanted to say thank you again for helping me out.”
“It’s no problem,” he said, and gestured toward the door. “You want a drink?”
“No thank you,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
He looked longingly at the door, but shrugged. “I guess not. What can I do for you?”
I had a handful of methods I could try, hoping to get information from him, but I decided to start with the simple one first: “Did you see the guy who attacked me? His face, I mean?”
The man leaned against the wall and puffed out his cheeks as he talked. “Not really. Balding, but not all the way—he had some hair back there. Blond, mostly, but darkish blond. Not Swedish blond or anything, you know? Kind of stubbly beard, too, but I think that might have been coming in red, like they do sometimes—one color up top, different color on the face.”
That was more detail than anyone else had given me. “What about his coat?”
“Yeah, I think he had a coat on.”
I nodded, wondering what his vastly different recollections of the event might mean. If anything. “What else can you remember?”
“Why do you ask? You’re not going to go looking for him, are you?”
That was also strange—the other men had assumed I had come to my senses and was getting ready to approach the police, and so I was trying to put together a mental image to give a good description. This guy thought I was taking matters into my own hands. Did that mean anything? Did any of it?
I tried a new tactic. “I, um, want to give you guys a reward. Not something fancy, because I can’t afford much, but still a little something, just like a … thing. Is it way creepy of me to ask for your address, so I have somewhere to take it once I get it?”
“Probably,” he said, laughing. “But I don’t have an address. I don’t live here, I’m really just passing through.”
“Me too,” I said. “Hitchhiking?”
“No,” he said, “I’ve got a car; I just don’t really have much of anything else.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “What brings you through Lewisville, then? I’m only here because I couldn’t get a ride anywhere else.”
“Got a friend in town.”
That had to be Rain. “What’s that address?” I asked. “I could bring the thing there.”
“You can just bring it here,” he said. “That’s fine.” He straightened up from his slump against the wall. “I’m glad I could help you, man, but I’m gonna head inside.”
Crap. I had to pull out the big guns. “What’s your name?”
He opened the door. “Saul.”
“I mean your real name,” I said, and then I threw all caution to the wind. “The one Rain used when she called you.”
He stopped, turned, and looked at me.
I looked back, trying to be brave. Nothing I’d ever seen suggested that the Withered could sense each other’s presence.
“Rain?” he asked.
“That’s the only name I know her by,” I said. “I assume she used to have a different one, because we all did, but … I honestly can’t even remember mine.”
He studied me for a moment and then spoke softly. “Meshara?”
That was Elijah’s name—a Withered with no memory. I shook my head. “No, he died in Fort Bruce.”
“That’s what I figured,” the man murmured.
There was only one Withered I could reasonably fake. “I’m Nobody,” I said. I’d hunted her for weeks and lived with her, through Brooke, for over a year. I swallowed and watched the man’s reaction, hoping he’d believe me.
“Been a while since you took a boy,” he said at last.
I nodded, trying not to show my relief that he believed me. “I know.” I hadn’t actually known that Nobody had ever taken a male body, but it was a safe guess. Ten thousand years is a very long time.
He looked at me a while, then nodded, as if satisfying some mental checklist that I was indeed an ageless, bodiless monster. “I’m Assu. The God of the Sun. Let’s go inside and get a beer.”
CHAPTER 5
“I’ve mostly been bumming around,” said Assu. He sipped beer from his brown-glass bottle, and when he set it back down on the coaster he carefully positioned it precisely on top of the moisture ring where it had sat before. “Shoveling coal,” he said, “back when that was a thing. Smelting ore, off and on, but I never liked doing that much. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you enjoy it, right?”
“You know me,” I said, trying to say what Nobody would say. “I never enjoy anything.”
“Not for long, anyway.” He took another sip. “Sure you don’t want one?”
“This body doesn’t drink.”
Assu raised an eyebrow. “And you care what your body does and doesn’t do? How long are you even going to keep this one?”
Nobody had committed suicide so many times she’d lost track. Thousands and thousands. I wondered, then, if Brooke had been Nobody longer than anybody else had ever been. Unless that homeless girl from the viewing had been Nobody? I still didn’t know, and I didn’t even know how to find her. Assu was the only lead I had, so I had to keep him talking. “I guess I’ll keep this one as long as I can.�
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“Well, good luck to you,” he said. “How about a burger?”
“Vegetarian.”
Assu laughed. “What is this, method acting?”
I was acting too much like myself, and he was getting suspicious. I thought of a defense that could maybe explain it. “Do you switch bodies?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said. “This is the only one I’ve got.”
“Then you wouldn’t understand,” I said, as if that explained the issue. More important, though, was his admission: if Assu didn’t body-swap, then I could kill this one and he’d die forever … once I’d figured out how, of course. And once I’d gotten what I needed from him. I turned the conversation back to the information I was trying to learn. “Have you been to see Rain yet?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I figure she knows I’m here, after that body I left her a few days ago. Luke Minaker.” He took another sip. “Let her stew for a while; I don’t need her drama.”
“It’s the end of the world,” I said. “Or our world, at least. Some drama seems justified.”
“I guess it is,” he said. “Probably time, though, don’t you think?”
“For drama?” This was more introspective than most of the Withered I’d met had ever gotten.
He shook his head. “For endings.”
I thought about this for a moment, trying to think of a response. Once again, I had to think like Nobody to come up with a good one. “Endings aren’t as great as you think they are,” I said. “I’ve done it plenty of times.”
“That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? Your endings don’t count because your endings never stick. You keep ending them, and never yourself. To hear Rain tell it now, the whole human race is all coming out of the woodwork trying to end us. Which is the exact opposite of your regular situation, so you don’t have much of a leg to stand on.” He took another pull on his beer and flagged down the waitress to order a ham sandwich with onion rings. “So you can have some veggies,” he told me, watching the girl’s butt as she walked away. “You ever … You ever been a waitress?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever hear any pickup lines that totally worked on you?”
I raised my eyebrow. “Ten thousand years old and you need help picking up a small-town waitress?”
“Bah,” he said, and drained his beer. He clunked it down solidly on the tabletop. “I know being hypercritical is your whole thing, but can you keep it to yourself? I don’t need it right now.”
“Fine,” I said, and looked around the bar. “You think they have a jukebox here?”
“Every crappy bar has a jukebox,” he said. “And they all have crappy songs.”
“Probably,” I said. “I didn’t want to listen to one anyway. Just making small talk.”
“You suck at it.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Assu leaned back in his chair, resting his arm on the back of the chair next to him. “What were you the god of? Goddess, whatever.”
“I’ve been both,” I said. “I assume.”
“You don’t remember?”
“You’ve lived ten thousand years,” I said. All the Withered had. “I’ve lived ten thousand lives, at least. Maybe a hundred thousand. And every one of them comes with its own memories. There’s so much backstory bouncing around in this head it’s a wonder I can even tie my own shoes in the morning.”
“Makes sense,” he said, and then chuckled. “You remember that? When they invented shoes?”
“Shoes are one of the oldest inventions of human civilization,” I said.
“I know, I know” he said. “But I’m talking about modern shoes—like, when they started making them comfortable, instead of just leather sandals and junk like that. The first time you ever put on sneakers and felt that cushy sole, tied those nylon laces, and it all just fits perfectly, for the first time in your whole long life.”
What a weird thing to remember. I shook my head. “Everybody I’ve taken either never had good shoes or always had them. I guess I missed that particular experience.”
“It’s never really been your feet anyway,” he said. “Has it?”
“Not really.”
“Does that bother you?”
I saw him looking at me, just out of the corner of his eye, trying to look like he wasn’t paying attention but still somehow concerned about the answer. I took the cue and considered my answer carefully.
What would Nobody have said? Did it bother her not to have her own body? Probably; sooner or later everything bothered Nobody, which is why she’d kept killing herself and moving on. But the bodies she’d killed, like he said, had never really been hers. They’d been clothing that she picked up and discarded, without ever really thinking about the realities of their lives.
But no, that wasn’t true. Nobody, like Elijah, was filled with human memory; she’d seen us differently than the other Withered because she’d lived as us instead of simply among us. She knew our dreams because they’d been hers, and she knew our realities because she’d never been able to face them. A girl always looked beautiful from a distance, like a doll or a marble statue: a thing we admire without ever getting to know. Until you get to know her. Get up close and she’s as real as anyone else. Girls have flaws and hang-ups and odors and every other problem that everyone has ever had. That was what had bothered Nobody, I think: truth. The world’s stubborn refusal to be a fairy tale, or a girl to be a fairy princess.
“I had feet once,” I said.
“You sound like a backwards Little Mermaid,” said Assu.
A fairy tale. Because of course.
“Maybe I was,” I said. Nobody had only ever wanted the things she couldn’t have, and she’d made a devil’s bargain to get them. “I had feet, and a body, and everything.” I pointed at the other patrons in the bar. “Anything any of them ever had. But then we gave it all up and I lost them, and I think…” I paused. What would Nobody say? What did she think about the body she’d given up? “I think the body I had was the only one I could have ever been happy in.”
“But you hated it.”
“I did,” I said. “And now here I am.”
Assu looked around the bar, his eyes solemn. “Not exactly the life we’d imagined, is it?”
“No, it’s not,” I said, and it was as true for me as for Nobody.
The waitress came back, setting down the sandwich and rings and a fresh beer. The cap sat on the top, half on and bent in the middle; the mouth of the bottle smoked gently as the cold moisture condensed in the hot belly of the bar.
“Here you go, boys,” she said, and Assu smiled.
“Thank you,” he said. “Hey, um, what was your name?”
“Lara, honey. You need something?”
“Lara,” said Assu, “do you have a…? I mean, what time do you get off work?”
“I’m sorry, hon,” she said. “We’re not allowed to date the customers. Can I get you anything else?”
Assu looked defeated, and his voice was hollow. “Just some ice.”
“Sure thing.” She walked away, and he stared at his sandwich.
I didn’t know what to say, so I simply sat and watched him.
“Do you remember wonder?” he asked.
“Wonder?”
“Awe,” he said. “Joy. Surprise.” He poked at his sandwich but didn’t pick it up. “Do you remember the last time you saw something for the first time? The first time you saw the ocean, or ate a spicy pepper, or kissed someone? The first time you heard a wolf pack howling in the dark, the whole group of them just howling and howling, calling and answering, and the sound going up and out and disappearing? Maybe an echo, maybe not. Ten thousand years—and maybe two, three hundred years of it had wonder, and then eventually you’d seen it all, or felt it all, or done it all. And then you had fun for a few thousand more just doing it all again—finding that one delicious food that you couldn’t get enough of, and eating it and eating it in all its different forms. And then, eventually, you
’ve done everything. And you’ve done it a thousand times. And what’s the point of doing it again? I know what this ham sandwich is going to taste like because I’ve eaten more ham sandwiches than one man can ever possibly appreciate. It’s just fuel, now, stoking the fire and keeping me alive. And why?”
I watched him as he stared into the past; watched the beer bottle as the smoky condensation rose up from the crooked cap. “You’ve had ham,” I said, “but you’ve never had this ham.”
“What’s the difference?” he asked. “This ham, this bar, this waitress. Are they really going to be new in any meaningful way?”
“Not the ham,” I admitted. “The people, though. I mean, that’s what they say, right? That we’re all little snowflakes, perfectly individual and unique.”
“And yet every snowstorm looks the same,” he said. “Every single time.”
The waitress came back with a glass full of ice, set it on the table with a wink, and walked away. Assu picked up the glass, and the ice cubes started melting at his touch, slowly trickling down into the bottom of the glass. He dumped them into his other hand, and they disappeared in midair, dissolving into liquid and mist bare millimeters before touching his skin. Water ran on the floor, and steam rose up from his hand, and he stared at it with ancient eyes.
There was only one thing to say. “You gave up cold.”
His voice was a whisper: “It’s the only thing in the world I can’t feel.”
He watched the steam rise from his hand, until it was completely dry. Then he spoke again in a voice so soft I had to lean in close to hear him. “When I was a boy,” he said, “out on the foothills out where we lived, by the old village—do you remember it?”
“I don’t.”
“It was beautiful,” he said. “But it was harsh. I think that’s why we did so well, or why our parents did so well. And their parents and their parents and all the way back: they couldn’t just coast, in a place like that, so they built and they created and they did. They herded sheep—for all I know they invented herding sheep—and one day, when I was a boy, the winter came early, and I was caught in a storm on the slopes of the mountain in the high grazing ranges. I was dressed for the cold—it wasn’t that sudden—but not for a storm like that, and I tried to bring the sheep home, but the snow blocked the passes and hid the trails, and I was trapped. I built a hut, and I built a fire, but it just kept snowing and snowing and snowing, and the food ran out and the water froze solid, and my blankets froze with it, and I huddled in the middle of the sheep for warmth. I guess it was enough because I didn’t die, but only barely. And I swore that I would never be cold again, and I lived in the desert, and I cursed the night sky and the winds that came down off the mountain. And then when Rain came to us, and Rack told us of his plan, I gave up all cold, and all cold feelings. In return I gained more heat and flame than any other body could hold: the power to scorch the sands and wither the plants and to shine like the sun itself.” He put his hand on the empty glass, which began to glow yellow in his grip. “I lived as a god—of the sun and the forge, and of bronze, and iron, and steel.” The yellow glow turned red, and the glass began to droop, and he squeezed it in his hand like a film of shining clay, squeezing it into a tight, dense rope the width of his fist, and it grew hotter and brighter until it poured down across his hand, and dripped on the table, singeing the wood. It all ran down, and the table smoked and burned, and he opened his hand for the last few drops to fall away. The pool of glass glowed red, cooling slowly. A couple of the other bar patrons were staring at us, wondering where that bitter scent of scorched wood had come from.