Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  The robot opened Henry’s email, attached the virus to a new message, and sent it to every corporate manager at Pig City. They knew his name. They remembered how much money he had made them the last time he sent them something. There was no chance they wouldn’t open that file to see what new wonder he’d created.

  The haunted lines of code would burn hungry through their databases, blacken their drives, consume every piece of information they had. When it was done, their corrupted files would be only a pile of bones, the viral ghost lounging atop them like a wolf. It might escape Pig City, Henry knew, might find its way into other corporate systems. It would eat and eat, unstoppable, until it became so lost in the digital wilderness that it finally faded away, taking his failings along with it.

  Henry’s operating system crashed, ragged error messages multiplying over the screen. The hard drive whined and spun. From somewhere within the computer came a dead smell. The robot backed away, afraid for its own systems.

  There wasn’t much left now. Henry had helped his mother and the pigs. Now he would find a way to help the town. He tried to imagine what he would do after that, but nothing came. The limits of his imagination were starting to worry him. Beyond the walls of his room, the hungry dark waited.

  Why would Jane say that he was dead? If he was, wouldn’t he know it?

  Hogboss finally came back from supervising the pigs, finding Jane and her mother taking shelter in his house. With the world falling apart around them and her burning ghost gone, Hogboss and Jane’s mother spent an entire day in his bed. They drank wine out of a bottle and wept, kissing sloppy and drunk.

  “What are you doing?” Jane wanted to scream. “When will we leave?” The town grew more haunted and dangerous by the day. But Hogboss and her mother didn’t want to do anything but hold each other and grieve their lost children. The pig man said that Corporate would send word when it was time for them to move. Until then, he and the other pigs would wait.

  After everything her mother had been through, she deserved some comfort. But Jane hated having to be around them, hated the way they seemed to hear or see only each other. She felt like a ghost in the house, the past more real to her than the present, grasping for things she had already lost.

  Jane could feel Trigger’s ghost outside, circling in the dark. It hovered against the sky, daring her to come out and look up, to see it framed against the stars. She was afraid to leave the house, to look up and see a white hazmat suit. She didn’t want to meet Trigger’s familiar, defeated eyes. To have his ghost ask why she had abandoned him and not know what to say. Most of all, she was afraid of what he wanted from her.

  Swine Hill hardly existed anymore. Power was out most places. Anyone who had a working car had already escaped. Those left were entwined with decades of bitter ghosts. Hogboss’s neighborhood had been mostly spared. The pigs had done enough renovation while they were here, had thrown out enough of the old things and put up enough new paint, that the ghosts had trouble entering their houses. It was too different, too new, all wrong. The ghosts didn’t like it.

  But nothing would stop another mob from breaking the windows and climbing inside. Nothing would keep back the bleeding man when he decided to come for them. Jane couldn’t sleep, waiting for a brick to come through the window again, for men with shining eyes to tear down the door, for Trigger’s ghost to fall over her shoulders and cover her like a shroud.

  Jane lay in Dennis’s twin bed, her feet hanging off the end of it. The light was off. Her ghost darted through the walls and back, bringing her flashes of joy from her mother and sudden spikes of rage from the ghosts passing by outside.

  I can hear Bethany, her ghost said.

  “Here? She came back?”

  Jane pulled open the curtains of Dennis’s old room. Outside, a trio of pig men leaned under the hood of a truck, trying to get it running. In the darkness beyond them, the air was phosphorescent with spirits.

  She’s drowning in light, her ghost said. She is trying not to fall.

  It showed her Bethany caught between sheer cliff walls, clinging with bloody fingers to bare rock, pushing herself up and up through a sea of black. A golden light coated her skin like mercury, heavy and filling her throat. Bethany struggled to breathe around it, struggled not to let the alien light sweep away the person she was.

  “Where is she?”

  Where ghosts go when they can’t hold on anymore.

  Jane imagined Henry being pulled into that crushing dark. She shuddered. “What’s going to happen to her?”

  Bethany is watching. She can see everything from where she is. She’s trying to climb back, but she’s fallen very deep. No one ever comes back from that place. Eventually, she’ll fade too.

  Her mother laughed somewhere in the house, cutting into the small space of Dennis’s bedroom. Jane turned on Dennis’s stereo. His spooky-sad music swelled to fill the room. Eerie wings of electronic sound floated up the walls. The singer’s voice skittered and crawled. A song like this would have been armor for the pig boy, assurance that no matter how frightening the world, he could be strange enough to beat it.

  Jane pulled the box Henry had given her out of her pocket. Her father’s heart throbbed slowly, so slowly. Why had her brother given it to her? Not her brother, she insisted. Only a ghost. Only a thing.

  Am I just a thing to you?

  She didn’t bother to answer, lying back on the bed and letting grief batter her again. Worse than not having Henry at all was knowing that his ghost haunted the town. It looked like him and acted like him. It was almost her brother, but only part of what he had been. She would never cook dinner with him again. She would never tease him about needing a haircut or give him advice about girls. His ghost couldn’t grow or change. When Jane left, it wouldn’t come with her. What did her brother’s ghost think she would do with an old heart? How was it supposed to make any of this better?

  The bed trembled. She wiped her eyes and looked down at the little box. The heart inside flexed and beat faster. Did that mean her father was close? Jane went to the window again, but it was so dark out that she couldn’t see anything. The ghosts would be strong now. It would be stupid for her to go.

  “Is Trigger out there?”

  He’s not far. He’s angry, Jane. Don’t let him find you.

  If Trigger wasn’t able to haunt her, would he be pulled into the same crushing dark that held Bethany? Or would he spend forever amidst the crumbling wreck of his father’s house? Jane didn’t know which was worse. She wanted something better for him, but not enough to let him possess her. She didn’t want to live his pain.

  Afraid her mother might try to stop her, Jane quietly opened the window and dropped to the grass outside. The heart held before her like a compass, she followed its frantic beats, hoping her dad wasn’t too far away.

  He’s never going to be what you remember.

  The ghost pulled something out of her memory, a time before hauntings. The house had flooded. Jane sat on the floor as a girl, the water lapping against her legs, holding her baby brother in her arms. Her father had stopped his work, bringing her a boat made of folded paper. He set it on the rippling skin of water, the jade tile underneath like a sea. He got down on his hands and knees in the water and blew hard into the paper sail, gliding the boat across the room.

  You’ll never have that again. Even if your father remembers who he is, that time is gone. He can’t be that person. It’s the same as Henry’s ghost. Nothing you do will bring him back.

  Jane felt something in her swell and drop. She didn’t have an answer. The ghost was right that everything was different now. Her family was broken, scattered, changed. But she would hold the pieces as tight to herself as she could. She would save what was left. Even if it felt like her bones were being pulled out of her, she had to walk away from Henry. She had to abandon Trigger to his vicious hate. She would leave the town of the dead with all its memory and pain behind, but she would take her father with her. She had failed her broth
er. She wouldn’t fail their father, too.

  The ghost swirled within her, its heavy ball of fear making Jane feel unsteady and sick. It knew that if she could give up Henry and Trigger, that meant she could cast it aside too.

  * * *

  Jane left the safety of the pig neighborhood and followed the heartbeat into the ghost-dark. Fragments of spirits swarmed through the air, glowing and whispering over her skin. They had lost their anchor to the world, were looking for something to hold on to. She focused on her need to leave, her rejection of Swine Hill, not wanting to give any of them a door to haunt her.

  The heart beat faster as she moved across downtown, in the direction of the school. Her ghost listened for the heavy, psychic tread of spirits and told Jane when to turn away from the dark doorway of a house, when to duck into a lightless alley between old buildings, when to keep still until something hungry had passed. It was desperate to prove how much she needed it.

  Jane had a hard time trying to follow the heart and letting her ghost guide her at the same time. The beating slowed. She lost ground, her father slipping invisibly through the empty city. She felt something watching her. The night was warm and humid, but a crawling cold touched the back of her neck. Something slipped along behind her in the sky. Jane was afraid to turn and look at it, afraid that if she did it would fall onto her.

  The buildings around her were dark. Loose teeth of glass hung in window frames and flared with light as she passed. But there was sound. Over her head, the night sky murmured and groaned, the lost voices overlapping in a song of grief. The old brick buildings of downtown were a riot of noise and motion. The ghosts seemed frantic, boisterous as drunks, shouting and shoving one another through the walls. The stores shuddered with their hundreds of feather-light touches, exhaling plumes of dust.

  The end of the street swam with red and blue light. A police cruiser turned the corner, scarred and pale as an old shark. Jane stepped into an alley and pressed against the wall. The car’s pulsing lights caught the cracks of windows, spills of bottle glass, and broken metal, making the street glisten and grin. Finally it passed.

  In her pocket, the heart jumped. She followed it.

  The haunted men are close, her ghost said. They’re still looking for you.

  Eyes shined far off in the dark. A crowd of people came from both ends of the street and would stumble across her soon. They weren’t so much haunted as they were hollow. Ghosts had reduced these people to smoking embers of themselves, just hate and resentment driven forward by the needs of the past. She thought of Mason, eaten through with spirits, barely a person anymore. She hadn’t known ghosts could so completely erase someone.

  They invited the spirits inside. They made themselves exactly who the ghosts needed them to be.

  The hollow men dragged metal chains and lengths of pipe. Several voices poured from each mouth, the dead shouting over one another to speak. They remembered decades of violence long forgotten, thought of themselves as heroes for bringing it back. They would kill Jane and the pigs, tear down their houses, bring Swine Hill to rubble. They would burn down the world to show that it belonged to them.

  With nowhere else to go, Jane stepped into an abandoned warehouse, pressing the door closed behind her. She waited for a moment, feeling the heavy press of ghosts move deep within the building.

  They saw you. They’re coming.

  Jane ran into the dark of the building, throwing herself among its ghosts. She crashed into old worktables and pillars in the dark, overturned carts of wood scraps and fallen insulation. She tripped over chains and hulks of metal, falling to the floor and scraping her shins. The noise of her flight was covered by the shouts of spirits, lifting and dropping tools, tearing into the walls, still doing work that hadn’t mattered for decades.

  She found a closet with a heavy door and hid inside. Spirits trickled down on her like spores, too weak and thoughtless for her ghost to know what they wanted. They seared into her skin. Jane covered her mouth to keep from crying out, feeling bee stings lance into her arms and legs. Ghosts twisted down into her muscles and bones, tightening into knots, rising as bruises, making her arms and legs ache. Every part of her hurt. She raised a shaky arm to open the door and flee.

  If you go now, they’ll find you, her ghost said.

  Her arm spasmed, making a chopping motion like it held a cleaver. Her feet twitched and pressed the floor as if she was pedaling a treadle sewing machine. The ghosts moved through her, making her body ripple with pain, begging for the old work motions that would remind them of their sad, hard lives.

  Finally her ghost told her that the hollow men had moved on. But the heart box lay still in her pocket now, her father out of range. Jane moved through the warehouse, careful to stay back from the angry spirits her ghost warned her about. She felt frantic and afraid, hunted. But she found her way out via the back of the warehouse and saw she was in front of the high school.

  Henry is inside.

  Jane crossed the street and pushed open the chain-link fence, her body heavy and burning with its weight of spirits. The ghosts at the school were tamer. As long as the buildings stood, they had what they needed. She wondered what Henry was doing here. She wanted to see him again, as much as seeing him would hurt.

  From the sky, a tattered shape fell to the ground and slipped into the building behind her. Jane looked straight ahead, feeling dead eyes on her back. She thought of all the mistakes she had made, the ways that she had failed her family. She tried to forgive herself as if her life depended on it.

  Jane found her brother and the love-drunk robot in the yearbook room. The machine had opened boxes of old photos and spread them across the floor. Henry walked between them, staring down into the town’s past.

  In the images, Jane saw the death of the city center, the flight of people and industry, the way grass and eventually trees covered over the crumbling edges of the town. But no matter when the photos were taken, no matter what blow struck Swine Hill, the meatpacking plant always stood on the horizon, beating life into the town like an iron heart. It had taken Henry to finally destroy that.

  Jane watched him for a while, lost in his work. Was he so different from when he’d been alive? She wished she knew what to say. She was sorry he had died, sorry that he was never going to experience a thousand wonderful things about being alive, that he would never find friends and love and a better home somewhere else. She felt guilty for wanting to leave him, but she couldn’t stay. The town would kill her, too. Why had she come? What would it do but hurt?

  Jane touched a grainy photo showing wagons spilling over with peaches. SWAIN HILL FARMS was painted on their sides. “Where’s Swain Hill?” she asked.

  “We’re in it,” Henry said. “People only started calling this Swine Hill when everything but the pig plant shut down.”

  Jane sighed. “What are you looking for, Henry? How are these pictures supposed to help you?”

  “Why would you say that to me?” he asked. “Why would you tell me that I’m dead?”

  “Because you are. You should know why this is so hard for me and Mom.”

  The robot held up a large framed photo showing acres of orchards and barns, workers with ladders deep in the trees, a place that was only a memory of ghosts now. Her brother leaned close to it, like it was a window into another world.

  “It doesn’t change anything for me,” Henry said. “So I’m dead. I still have work to do.”

  “You don’t have to do anything. Just let go and move on.”

  “It’s not fair. I’m still here.” He seemed to shrink, his edges as wispy as fog.

  “I know.” Jane’s throat was tight. She couldn’t look at him. “I’m sorry I told you. Maybe that was selfish of me. I wanted you to understand how I feel.”

  “I don’t blame you. I don’t want to think about it, though. I just want to fix everything that’s wrong. When that’s done, maybe I’ll move on. Maybe then I’ll feel like a dead boy.”

  “This isn�
�t like a broken machine where you just switch out a part. Some things can’t be put back together.”

  But the robot sat right in front of her, trails of ghost-light showing through its joints and cracks, illuminating it from within. Her mother’s ravenous spirit had been transformed through union with the machine. Now it only burned with love for the metal arms that held it. Maybe Jane was wrong to tell Henry what he couldn’t fix.

  “Everything is going to be fine,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  Henry had thought a lot of himself when he was alive, but he’d also been full of doubt. He felt bad about the problems the strange spirit haunting him had caused. He worried and didn’t know what to do. This dead version of Henry might hurt like him, might have the same obsessions, but her brother never had this unreasonable, mechanical certainty. She had never been afraid of her brother, but she was afraid of this ghost. Whatever it was going to do, there would be no way to stop it.

  Trigger is in the school. You can’t outrun him.

  “A ghost is following me,” Jane said. “Trigger. I’m afraid.”

  “Do you know what he wants?”

  “Me.”

  Henry frowned. “He can’t haunt you unless he sees some of himself in you.”

  A few weeks ago, she wouldn’t have thought she was anything like Trigger. She’d never understood his need to carry so much blame on his shoulders. But after her brother’s nose had been cut off, she couldn’t stop wondering why she hadn’t left town that day, taken Henry out of Swine Hill immediately. Wasn’t he dead because of her? Even before then, hadn’t she known that something was wrong? Henry had texted her about the boys jumping him on the bus. She’d seen every frustration and fear he’d carried for years. If only she had been braver. If only she had taken responsibility for him. If only.