Mortal Remains

by Mary Ann Fraser

  I turned back down the alley. Whoever was behind the wheel of the Rent-a-Wreck was going to be disappointed if they thought I would take them to Adam.

  I knew a shortcut.

  RULE #36

  THE CLOTHES MAKE THE CORPSE.

  The only way through was over.

  I stripped off my work shoes, hitched up my skirt, and scaled the chain-link fencing circling the decrepit old elementary school. I cut straight through the yard and to the other side, again scaling the fence to exit the property. This time, though, the hem of my skirt snagged. That was my best skirt, too. Oh well. If I couldn’t stop the sale of the mortuary, I wouldn’t be needing it anyway.

  My slow limp across the parking lot brought me to Sluice Street a little after nine. After walking a couple more blocks, I faced Sal Zmira’s house. My shortcut had taken me much longer than I’d planned, but to my relief the Rent-a-Wreck was nowhere in sight.

  Adam said he’d promised to trim the front hedges, but there was no sound of clippers or voices, only a thin ribbon of cigarette smoke rising from behind the overgrown shrubs. Sal Zmira. So where was Adam? There was no way the Rent-a-Wreck could have beat me here. Maybe I was overreacting.

  I started across the street, the tingling and itching already racing up my arms.

  The yapping mop dog blazed out from behind the hedge and circled my feet, snapping and foaming at the mouth.

  “Mr. Puddles, you goddamn mutt, get back here,” ordered Zmira. A stream of profanity befitting a trucker followed, but he cut short when he caught sight of me. “Oh, Lily, it’s you. I thought Puddles was after that white cat, the one that marks my mailbox post.”

  Specter was the only white cat in the neighborhood, but now didn’t seem the time to bring that up. “Hello, Mr. Zmira. Have you seen—”

  The mop dog caught hold of my dangling hem and started to tug at it. I tried to twist away, but that only made him snarl louder and pull with more determination. Zmira clamped the butt of his smoldering cigarette between his teeth and swiped at Mr. Puddles, but the mop dog was too fast for him. He sprang out of reach. There was a ripping noise, and a piece of my skirt, now slathered in doggy drool, hung from Mr. Puddles’s mouth. The mop dog vaulted over the curb and raced through the open side gate.

  Zmira started making a fuss. “It’s all right,” I insisted. “It was already torn. By the way, have you seen—”

  “No, no, no. I need to pay you for that. Come on inside.” He ground out his cigarette on the side of his mailbox and led me in through the front door. “Oh, and I’ve got something for Jo I want to give you. I meant to run it by this morning but didn’t get the chance.”

  I hovered in the entry. “My Nana Jo?”

  “Is there another Jo?”

  There was a loud bang from outside. I leaped half out of my skin. “Was that a gunshot?”

  “Nothin’ but a car backfiring.” He squinted at me in that way teachers do when they think you’re hiding something. “You sure are jumpy tonight. You and that boy in some kind of trouble or something?”

  “No, no, everything’s fine,” I lied.

  “Right.” Zmira set two twenties on his dining-room table. “That should be enough to cover the cost of your skirt. Now, where’d I set that flyer?”

  “Mr. Zmira, I need to find—”

  He disappeared down the hall. I could hear him rummaging around in one of the back rooms, and then mop dog wanted out to do his business. Zmira spent another five minutes trying to wrangle the mutt back into the house before resuming his search for the flyer. My patience was wearing thin and the dread lodged in the pit of my stomach was mounting. I had a terrible feeling I knew where Adam was.

  “Oh, here it is!” Zmira announced from the kitchen. He appeared a moment later and placed a piece of paper firmly into my hand. “The convention center is hosting the Scottish Highland Games next weekend. Lots of dancing, traditional sporting events, and exhibits. I thought Jo might like to go with me.”

  “Are you asking my nana out?”

  “S’pose I am. It was Adam’s idea.” He laughed, then noticed I didn’t. “That a problem?”

  “No, no, it’s great. So Adam was here?”

  “Nope. To be honest, I’m disappointed in that boy. He said he would trim the front hedges for me today.”

  “He wasn’t feeling well. He’s supposed to be resting,” I said, imagining the worst. “I gotta go.”

  “Wait, you forgot your money—”

  “Keep it,” I shouted, slamming the door behind me.

  It took a minute for my eyes to adjust. There were no streetlights in this part of town—no lights at all, in fact, except for two. One was the light shining through Zmira’s kitchen window. The other? A distant glow emanating from a hole in the ground next door.

  RULE #37

  GRAVES—WHEN IN DOUBT, DIG DEEPER.

  As usual, I was late to the party. The Rent-a-Wreck was parked at the end of the Lassiter driveway with no one in sight. It must have snuck by me when I was inside Zmira’s house. Not good. I suspected where I’d find Adam and the occupants of the car—at the source of the light.

  I crept across the broken ground toward where the fallout shelter’s gaping hatch emitted a dull glow from between two mounds of dirt. A rust-tinted smear glistened on the rim of the open hatch. “Dammit, Adam,” I hissed through gritted teeth. There could be only one reason he would risk going back into the shelter: to retrieve Neil Lassiter’s research, with the intention to either sell it or destroy it. And from the look of things, he had company.

  I peered into the hole. The single bulb still shone from the sagging ceiling, which was riddled with fresh fissures. The slightest tremor could collapse the shelter, but Adam’s life, my future, and, perhaps, evidence of the true origins of life on Earth were all at stake.

  I loosened the terror that gripped me and took that first dreadful step down into the narrow stairwell. My ears strained to pick up a voice, a footfall, anything that might hint at what waited below. I heard only the rattle of the loose railing beneath my hand.

  At last the stairs leveled out into near-total darkness. Why the lights in this part of the tunnel were turned off, I could only guess, but I didn’t dare turn them on for fear of alerting whoever was down here. So I groped my way along the passage, hand over hand, until my shoulder grazed the cold steel door of the small utility room—the halfway point. Inside, the feeble generator clanked and wheezed, sounding as if it would give up and die at any moment. I considered calling Evan, but realized in my rush I’d left my phone at home and there was no time to retrieve it. I needed to warn Adam, assuming I wasn’t already too late.

  I turned the next corner and froze. A weak light shone through the entrance to the lab, allowing me to make out the faint outline of two men sitting on the ground at either side of the entrance, each with chin to chest. If they were supposed to be on watch, they were doing a lousy job. They were both asleep—or so I thought until I caught a whiff of a familiar metallic odor.

  I approached cautiously. Still no movement. On tiptoes, I jiggled the bulb overhead. It flickered, and a brief halo of light illuminated the end of the corridor before the bulb blinked out. But that brief flash of light was enough to confirm my suspicion. The two ex-feds from the train, the same two who attacked Adam at the beach, were slumped against the walls, a bloodied brick on the ground between them. Judging from the dark smears on the walls and their vacant stares, there was no question: they were dead. To be absolutely sure, I checked each man’s wrist for a pulse. Zilch.

  I turned away. It was like something out of those golem tales. But this was real. Bracing myself against the wall, I wretched.

  Christ, Adam, what have you done? When has revenge ever been the answer?

  From the far side of the shelter came the squeal of a heavy door resisting its hinges, then a thud, followed by what sounded like something or someone being dragged across the gritty floor. “At last,” exclaimed a grating voice.

&nb
sp; Miles Devlin. I was supposed to meet him near the old post office on Fifth in about twenty minutes. Had Adam changed the plans?

  I forced myself to look at the men at my feet. Only a monster could have done such a thing, but who was the monster? Devlin? Or Adam? They each had their reasons. I recalled the golem of Prague and its murderous rampage. I feared I had my answer and knew it was up to me to stop Adam. The Seed of Life Project had already cost too many lives—Neil, possibly his fellow researcher, and now these two in the hall.

  Stepping carefully over the dead men’s sprawled legs, I snuck toward the partly open door and peered into the lab. The star charts had been ripped back from the wall to expose what appeared to be an open vault the size of a large storage closet. Inside the walls were flanked by floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with binders, all stamped on their spines with the Seed of Life symbol. Stacks of boxes crowded the floor, but it was the two or three large, plastic zipper bags—body bags by the look of them—that lay neatly folded on a crate that stole away my breath.

  Just inside the vault door Devlin cradled a thick binder in his hands. He was examining it as though it were some lost relic. Not five feet away, Adam lurked behind the copper behemoth, a spade from our garden shed tightly gripped in his hands.

  Adam raised the spade over his head and silently stalked closer to his target. Before I could holler a warning, he brought down the blade as if to split Devlin’s skull in two. At the last possible second, Devlin turned. Adam twisted and struck a stack of binders, missing Devlin’s head by a fraction of an inch. Papers flew up like a flock of frightened doves.

  “What the hell are you doing?” shouted Devlin, leaping to the right of the door.

  Adam had him trapped. He raised the spade again and held it like a battle-ax. “You killed Neil and those two men in the hall. Are you planning to kill me, too? Then what?” Adam gestured with the spade toward the stacked boxes and binders lining the vault. “Sell all of this to the highest bidder? Sell me to the highest bidder?”

  “You’re the one who called me to change the time and place. When I got here, the hatch was open and they were already dead,” shouted Devlin. “And I’m not the one holding the shovel or the vault key.”

  One of Adam’s hands drifted to his pants pocket, an unconscious reaction to Miles’s words. I’d thought the key in the lockbox was a spare, but was it actually the key to this vault? To his father’s research? Was that why he’d been so desperate to find the lockbox? Good god am I stupid.

  “If what you say is true, if you really came here intending to keep your word, then prove it. I want to see the money.”

  Devlin snorted. “I’m not fool enough to have it on me. Not that it matters—as soon as you have what you want, you plan to kill me. Isn’t that right?”

  “It’s what you deserve. You—killed—Neil—Lassiter! You left him for dead, then leveled our home to cover up your crime.”

  “It was an accident, I swear,” insisted Devlin, but shame was written all over his weathered face.

  “Istum mendacium est! That is a lie! I read your letter to Veronica. She warned Neil that you were coming for him.” Adam’s voice thundered through the chamber, causing flakes of ceiling to drift down all around us. He hardly seemed to notice.

  “It’s true,” admitted Devlin. “I did confront Neil. The fool left out his pistol, and I threatened to kill him with it if he didn’t turn over the research. He grabbed for the gun, and it went off. I never meant to kill him, and I had nothing to do with the explosion.”

  Then who did?

  Devlin shook his head and sighed. “Every minute of every day I’ve had to live with what I did, so go ahead and kill me. You’d be doing me a favor, but it won’t change anything, and you’ll just end up ruining your own life like I ruined mine.”

  Adam swayed. He was growing weaker by the minute, but Devlin showed no signs of noticing. Even if Devlin had, he was probably too ill himself to take him. “Adam. We want the same thing, don’t you see?”

  “Don’t you dare compare us. You can’t possibly know what I want.”

  “Maybe you are like your father after all. I could never make Neil understand that some knowledge is dangerous and should never be sold—not for any price. He called me a man of little vision and said only he appreciated the full value of what we discovered. He had a prototype to prove it.”

  “Prototype?” Adam made a face like the word left a bad taste in his mouth.

  “Neil boasted that he created life from clay. It was unimaginable.”

  “Well, meet the unimaginable.” Adam lifted his hoodie and T-shirt and ripped the blood-soaked bandages from his chest, exposing the characters etched into his flesh. Emet. Truth.

  Devlin went pale and shifted away from Adam and out of view. “I don’t believe it!” I heard him exclaim. “We actually did it. After all those years of testing, all the failures—and yet here you are, living, breathing proof that life from clay is possible.”

  Adam reached for the door jam, the slender handle of the spade no longer enough to support him. His body was failing him. I saw it. Adam knew it. But Devlin had yet to realize that the very life he and Neil created was draining before his eyes.

  I leaned farther into the chamber from the doorway. From behind me I heard the quick scrabble of heavy feet. Evan must have followed me. Damn him. Before I could turn to give him a piece of my mind, I felt cold, hard steel press against the back of my head—a gun.

  “Make a sound,” threatened a voice beside my ear, “and you’ll be joining those two on the floor.”

  RULE #38

  DON’T FEAR THE DEAD.

  FEAR THE LIVING.

  “Move,” the man behind me ordered, and he shoved me through the lab door, prodding my back with the barrel of his pistol. He must have been hiding in the utility room, watching and waiting for the right moment to catch me unaware.

  I inched forward, attempting to stall as I searched for a way to warn Devlin and Adam, who had disappeared into the vault. My brain could only focus on one problem at time, though, and most pressing was the bullet a trigger pull away. As I angled sideways to fit between two tables, my elbow knocked a pair of forceps into a beaker. Clink. Bless my clumsy nature.

  Adam emerged from the vault, the spade still clutched in his grip. “Lily, how did you—?”

  The man behind my back stepped into view. “Hello, Adam.”

  “Neil?” Adam faltered. “Is . . . is that really you?”

  Rewind. Did he say Neil? It couldn’t be. Neil Lassiter was dead. They found his body in the ashes.

  “That’s far enough, son. Drop it.” The gun’s muzzle shifted to my temple. Adam hesitated, then let the spade slip from his hand. “Miles, you come out, too.”

  Devlin stepped into view. “Hello, Neil.”

  I twisted my head slightly, only now catching up to speed. “You killed those two men in the passageway.”

  “Those double-crossing sons of bitches left me no choice,” said Neil, his scarred fingers adjusting their hold on the pistol. “Adam, I’m sorry, but I had to protect you from them, and from him.” He tipped his head at Devlin.

  “Protect me?” Adam glared. “The same way you protected me by leaving me trapped down here to die?”

  “I always intended to come back for you, but by the time it was safe, you were gone. At first I thought you were dead.”

  “I nearly was, no thanks to you.”

  I inched away from Neil. “Don’t even think about it,” he hissed, leveling the gun at my back.

  “So how’d you pull it off, Neil?” goaded Devlin. “I saw you drop to the floor, saw the blood.”

  “All an illusion, my friend. Kevlar vest and stage blood. The explosion sealed the deal. I figured if you thought you killed me, you’d leave the country to avoid going to prison on an involuntary manslaughter charge.”

  “I should have known you’d find a way to cheat death. You’ve cheated in every other way.”

  “You’re
just bitter that Veronica chose me over you.”

  “I’d have given her a good life. What did you ever give her?”

  The corner of Neil’s mouth curled. “A son.”

  Adam had stopped blinking altogether. “What about the body? All this time I thought it was you.”

  “It was manufactured as part of an earlier experiment,” explained Neil.

  Adam flinched at the word manufactured. “You stole it from the morgue, didn’t you?”

  “I could hardly allow it to be autopsied.”

  Maybe that’s what I saw Neil Lassiter hauling to the shed that day so long ago. No wonder he reacted the way he did. “Were there others?”

  “Three, to be exact. Of all of them, Adam, you’ve survived the longest. You see, Miles, I was right. The secret to prolonged reanimation of clay is the incorporation of human remains—the dust of ash and bone.”

  Human ash and bone? I got a sick feeling in my gut as I flashed back to Adam’s memories of us in the orchard, of his mother, of the day I fell. I didn’t want to accept what it might mean. “Where did you get the cremains? From the cemetery?”

  Neil lifted his chin as though offended by the very notion. “I’m no grave robber. What kind of monster do you think I am?”

  The most horrific kind, I wanted to say. From the look on Devlin’s face, he agreed. Adam appeared dumbstruck.

  “Eternal Memorial provided what I needed,” Neil clarified.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “EMS sold you cremains?”

  “They were indigents. Eternal Memorial has a contract with the county.”

  “That doesn’t make it right!” I argued. “They’re people, too!”

  “Not anymore,” said Neil, like it was the cleverest joke ever.

  My hands balled into fists, my nails digging into my palms. Forget the gun. I’m gonna—

  “Lily, don’t,” warned Adam.

  The muzzle of the pistol pressed more firmly into my flesh, a forceful reminder that I needed to calm down or face the consequences.