by Dan Wells
Nate looked uncomfortable. “This isn’t really what I meant for you to talk about.”
“But it’s what you asked,” I said. “And this is the answer. You asked who I was, and who people are is never simple. I don’t think I ever understood my family or myself or anyone, and I probably still don’t, and I guarantee that you don’t, and it’s because we don’t want to look at the bad stuff.”
“I know this goes against the point you’re trying to make,” said Al!sha, “but you just described Nate more accurately than I have ever heard anyone describe him.” I didn’t even realize she was listening.
“Fonda Rodolfo,” said a waiter, holding a tray full of pizza slices. Nate raised his hand, and the waiter set a plate in front of him. “Caballo Cebolla?” Al!sha. “Rico Suave?” Me. “Chupacadobada?”
“That’s Jasmyn’s,” said Nate.
“Parker’s not even back yet,” said Shelby.
“I’ll go get her,” I said, and slid out of the booth. I walked outside and breathed deep. The sky was still bright and hot, with wavy lines of heat mirage floating up from the scorching asphalt of the parking lot. But it was real in a way that the air-conditioned restaurant wasn’t, and I closed my eyes and reveled in the slow, warm eddies buried within the harsh, oppressive air.
I was more shaken by my conversation with Nate than I should have been. Or I guess more shaken than I wanted to be.
Jasmyn was leaning her forearms on a metal parking barrier by the side of the brick building, perched against the wall in a slim sliver of shade. She seemed lost in her thoughts, and I took a moment to clear my own before walking over to her. I hesitated in the fringes of her peripheral vision, trying to phrase the summons to dinner in way that was friendly or charming or at least not stupid. But after a moment I shook my head and slipped into the shade next to her and leaned on the same bar. It had once been painted red, but most of the paint had flaked off.
“I needed some air, too,” I said.
“That group can be … a lot,” she said.
“Food’s here.”
“Cool.”
Neither of us moved. Cars sped past on the road; the tar in the cracks had grown soft in the heat and smeared in long lines as the tires ran over it.
“I lied to you this morning,” said Jasmyn.
I shrugged. “Most people do.”
“I didn’t meet Margo at a funeral.” She paused, and I waited. “I met her at a support group.” She paused again. “For rape survivors.”
She had left the restaurant when Al!sha was talking about sex. Pieces clicked together in my head.
She didn’t want to go back to Ohio.
“I don’t like talking about it,” she said. “Obviously. But I need to. And it’s more … I don’t know. It’s easier when I’m talking to people who know what it’s like. And I think you do.”
“I don’t know exactly,” I said, and paused. “But I guess I can guess. I don’t know rape but I know … trauma.”
“I thought so,” she said.
We watched the road, and I counted the cars in my head and wondered where they were going, and why, and if they even wanted to go there or if they were just swept along by the road itself, like a river. Roads don’t flow with water, they flow with momentum; once you get on one, it’s hard to get off.
“My mother killed herself,” I said. I don’t know why I said it—I guess describing Mom to Nate had put me in a different state of mind. “It wasn’t a normal suicide, like she hated her life or whatever. Someone attacked us, and they were trying to kill me, and she killed herself to save me.”
“So she sacrificed herself,” said Jasmyn. “That’s different than killing herself.”
I picked at the flecks of paint still clinging to the old metal bar. “It’s complicated.”
Another car drove by, the tires thudding across the cracks and spreading the tar just a tiny bit farther.
“Do you hate him?” she asked. “The man who attacked you?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t a man, it was Nobody. Whom I’d lived with for over a year since the attack, and gotten to know, and even pretended to be. “And no. I guess that’s complicated, too.”
“It always is,” said Jasmyn.
I thought about Nobody, and Assu, and Elijah, and Crowley and all the others I’d met, and all the things they’d given up just to be who they’d become. To survive. Assu had said it was fun in the beginning, but that by the end it was just survival—momentum carrying him forward until he couldn’t do anything else. And then “anything else” turned out to be suicide.
Had Assu started like this, like I was right now? Leaning on a fence somewhere, talking about his trauma, trying to find some way to get past it? He hadn’t set out to become a monster: Rain had given him the chance to give his pain away, and he’d done it. He wasn’t just ending at survival, he’d started there. All of them had.
“Would you give it up?” I asked Jasmyn. “If you could … lose your rape, like literally take it out of your life so it had never happened, would you do it?”
Jasmyn thought for a moment, but shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a part of who I am now. If it had never happened, I wouldn’t be me. I’d be a version of me who’d never been attacked—and never hated herself, and never OD’d on sleeping pills, and never ran away from home. And never healed. And maybe that version of me would be happier, or simpler, or something, but she wouldn’t be better. She wouldn’t be worth any more than I am now. It took a long time for me to love myself, but now I do, so why would I give that self away?” She flicked a piece of peeled red paint into the parking lot. “That’s what they tell us in the support group: that everybody’s worth saving. Even me.” She scratched another flake of paint with her fingernail. “Even him.”
“Do you believe it?”
Another fleck of paint. “No,” she said at last. “But I’m trying to.”
“Yo, lovebirds,” said Parker. We turned, and saw him hanging out of the front door of the restaurant. “Your disgusting vegetarian pizza’s getting cold.”
“Let’s go,” said Jasmyn.
“Hey Parker,” I said, straightening up. I needed to do what Jasmyn had done that morning and just come right out and ask my question. “I’m kind of creeped out living in the mortuary, do you have a couch I could crash on for a week or two?”
“Sure,” said Parker. “Just no drugs, okay? My landlord already hates me.”
CHAPTER 8
The mortuary had two main entrances, plus the garage and the receiving door where the bodies came and went in hearses and coroner transport vehicles. Plus my room, which technically wasn’t my room anymore, so I couldn’t control the door. That meant five entrances I had to watch if I was going to spend any more time in the funeral home. If an agent of the FBI came to one of them, I needed to know about it, and I needed time to escape out one of the other ones.
My old room was the easiest. As long as Margo didn’t rent it out to anyone, it would stay locked and empty. I worried that maybe someone would open it casually, trying to get a breeze or something, but this was an Arizona summer: everything was sealed shut tighter than a space station, and the air conditioning ran full blast. Just to be sure, during my lunch break the next day, I loosened the screws in the door latch, making it stick when someone tried to open it. So that was one door taken care of.
The others were harder. The mortuary didn’t have any security cameras, as I’d learned when I first considered breaking in, but they did have a motion sensor connected to an alarm, which in turn connected to an antitheft call center somewhere. Could I mess with that at all? Probably not, without alerting the call center that something was up. Preventing people from tampering with their equipment was practically their whole job. I’d need something else. The ideal solution, of course, was some kind of camera system, so I could know when someone was coming and then immediately see if they were a threat. That was probably out of
my price range.
The burnt corpse of Luke Minaker never showed up—the autopsy was more problematic than they were expecting—so I went to the hardware store after work and looked for motion-sensing lights, like the kind you’d put in your driveway. Most of them were around seventy or eighty bucks apiece, but I found a cheap-looking brand on sale for sixty. The roll of bills I’d taken from Assu’s car contained $200, minus the $4.95 I’d spent on Mexican pizza, and with my own meager savings, I managed to raise my grand total to $286.18. Four lights was $240. I put them in my cart and went to the doorbell section, but the cheapest wireless doorbell I could find was thirty dollars—that was way beyond my limit. I looked again, wondering if I’d missed something, but I couldn’t find anything cheaper.
I flagged down one of the sales people. “Do you have any cheaper doorbells? The wireless ones?”
“Not in the store, but we do have some online.”
“I need to buy them today,” I said, “is there any way you could give me the online price?”
“It’s not an item we carry here, just at the central warehouse. You have to order online.”
“Okay,” I said. “How about these driveway lights?”
“I’m afraid that if you want the motion sensor, what you’ve got in the cart is already the best we can do.”
“But I need something cheaper. Is there any way you can make me a deal?”
“You’re buying motion sensors and wireless receivers,” the man said. “That’s the most expensive option in both categories. Is there a way you could alter your project with a standard light fixture, or maybe a standard doorbell?”
If only he knew what my project was. “No, it’s got to be these.”
“Four sets of each. Is this for an apartment complex?”
“Exactly,” I said. “I’ll let my boss know this is the best I can do. Thanks.”
“No problem. Let me know if you need anything else.” He smiled and walked away, and I stared at my cart full of boxes. I could afford three sets. Which door of the mortuary could I risk not watching? None of them. Maybe I could shoplift the fourth set? I looked around, wondering where the cameras were, but decided that it was too risky regardless. Shoplifting was not on my resume, and three sets was better than nothing. I put the fourth one back, paid at the register, and spent another twenty bucks on batteries. I walked home with the bag over my shoulder and my other hand up under my T-shirt, clutched tight around the handle of a small steak knife I’d borrowed from Parker’s kitchen. No one followed me or tried to drown me. I got back to Parker’s place, returned the knife to its drawer, and dumped out my boxes on the floor. He wouldn’t be back from his date for another few hours, so I had time to work unimpeded.
A motion-sensor light was really two devices: a motion sensor and a light. When the former detected movement in its field of view, it sent a signal along a little wire and turned on the latter. The doorbells were the same: push the button and a signal goes through a wire to a little wireless beacon, which sent another signal through the air to a chime box. All I had to do was get the trigger from the first one to talk to the second one. I opened the packages, pried apart the devices, and basically just fiddled around with wires and knives and screwdrivers until I somehow made it work. Trigger the motion sensor, and it rang the doorbell. I rigged the other two sensors to work the same way, loaded them up with fresh new batteries, and stashed them in my backpack. I took the lights and all the rest of the parts and packaging outside to the communal Dumpster and threw it all in. When Parker came home I was already lying on the couch, pretending to be asleep.
The next morning I got to work early and walked all around the building, trying to decide which door least needed an alarm. Obviously the front door needed one; I placed a motion sensor in the garden nearby, aimed it at the walkway, and used rocks to hide it and secure it in place. I turned it on, walked up the door, and the chime box in my backpack rang out a classic ding-dong. I went around to the back and did the same, covering the rear door people would use if they approached from the parking lot. I tested it, and the second chime box made the same ding-dong sound. It was great that they both worked, but if one of them rang and I had seconds to get away, I’d need to know which door someone had used. They claimed to have sixteen different tones, so I opened the chime box and puzzled for a minute over which settings to use. Most of them were just variations of the same basic tones, and I needed something instantly recognizable. “Auld Lang Syne”? Beethoven’s Fifth? I set the back door to “Happy Birthday,” and the final chime to “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” The front could stay as it was.
But which of the last two doors should I alarm? The garage door and the receiving door were far enough apart that I didn’t think I could cover them both with a single sensor. I hemmed and hawed for a bit, trying to work out the best of two bad choices, and settled on the receiving door: it went practically straight into the embalming room, which is where I’d spend most of my time, so if anyone came to that I needed to know ASAP. I put the alarm at the base of a bush, tucked in just under the leaves, and angled it to catch both the door and as much of the path leading up to it as I could. I tested it, and the chime box in my backpack sang a cheerful Christmas carol. It worked.
Barely half a second later my backpack sang again: ding-dong. Someone was coming in the front door, probably Margo. I anchored the last sensor with a couple more rocks and zipped my backpack closed. I counted to twenty and walked around to the front. My backpack ding-donged again as I went in.
Margo was in her office. “Good morning, Robert.”
“Morning.”
“We’re getting the Minaker body today. You ready?”
“Disturbingly ready,” I said. Margo raised her eyebrow, and I smiled. “I’ll go prep the room.”
The body of Lucas Minaker arrived at 10 A.M., and we laid him out on the table and unzipped the body bag. Jasmyn grimaced and looked away. He was burned from head to toe, hairless and earless and in many places skinless; what skin was left was scorched in an intricate, semirandom pattern of yellow and brown and black, stretched tight over his bones and well-cooked muscles. He looked like a bratwurst.
“Give yourself a minute,” said Margo. “Your first burn-body is always hard.”
Jasmyn sat down, breathing shallowly, and Margo gently pushed the girl’s head down toward her knees. I started as we always started, by examining the body in careful detail, making sure nothing was wrong or out of the ordinary before we got to work. The first part of this process was, technically, making sure the body was dead, but in this case it was obvious—not only was it burned, but the autopsy had opened his chest in a giant Y-shaped cut: shoulder to sternum, shoulder to sternum, and sternum to waist. They had cracked his ribs and opened him up like a suitcase, removing the internal organs and examining them, and then putting them in a plastic bag and storing them back in the chest cavity. I could see a corner of this bag poking out of the gap in the Y incision.
“Been a while since we had an autopsy,” said Margo. “Kathy didn’t get one.”
“Most people don’t,” I said. “Surprising she didn’t, though. Didn’t anyone suspect foul play?”
“You’d think,” said Margo. “Just an accident, though. Drinking a glass of water or something.”
At home, in my mom’s mortuary, her twin sister Margaret would have called organs by now—an autopsy embalming was done in two parts: one for the circulatory system and one for the removed organs. The latter was easier. “Jasmyn,” I said. “Have you done an organ embalming?”
“Yes.”
“Then take these,” I said, opening the chest and pulling out the bag. “We’ll set you up on the other table, and you can face away from us and just deal with these. The heat that burned him didn’t get this deep, so they’re pretty much just normal organs. It’ll be simple and familiar.”
“I can do the body.” She took a deep breath, long and slow and controlled, and then stood up. After a moment she r
aised her eyes and looked at the burned body. “I can do this.”
“Just do the organs,” said Margo.
“Don’t coddle me,” said Jasmyn.
“It’s not coddling, it’s business,” said Margo. “I know you can do an arterial embalm, now I want to see how the new guy handles it.”
“Fine,” said Jasmyn. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the body yet. She stared a moment longer, her teeth clenched, and then turned away abruptly to the other table. Like she’d been holding her breath underwater and now it was time to pull out. I gave her the bag and she got to work, carefully mixing an embalming formula of germicide, anticoagulant, perfume, and glutaraldehyde—a knockoff of formaldehyde that a lot of mortuaries were using these days. It wasn’t as toxic, but it wasn’t as effective, either. Normally you’d mix a dye in there as well, but the organs didn’t need that. I thought about the poison chemicals and looked up at the ceiling, where our old embalming room had had a big metal ventilator hood to suck out the fumes.
“Let’s hope this fan doesn’t give out on us,” I said.
“There’s four of them and they’re brand new,” said Margo. “Had them put in last winter.”
“Just a thing I like to say,” I said. That had been my aunt Margaret’s thing, too.
The inside of the body wasn’t as cooked as the outside, and the blood vessels were still in pretty good condition. We’d be able to do a full arterial embalming, but first we had to finish the inspection. I zipped the body bag the rest of the way down, exposing his lower half—his groin area was horrifying—and Margo and I pulled the now-empty bag out from under him. Moving the bag exposed his arms, and Margo and I stared at them in surprise.