Shallow Graves

by Kali Wallace

  Not in the dark. Not in the mountains. Maybe in the morning, with the sun burning hot in the blue Colorado sky, miles away from the mine, maybe then I would explain, if he still wanted to know. Not here.

  He wasn’t going to leave it alone. “But you went with her. Why?”

  “Figure it out, Einstein.”

  It seemed so stupid now, that I had ever thought I could ask anything of the woman in the mine. That I could walk in there and leave behind only the parts of me I didn’t want anymore, these powers and this darkness, and keep everything else. She would take exactly what she wanted, nothing more and nothing less, from everybody who stepped into her prison.

  “It didn’t work out the way you wanted?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “You still smell kind of dead,” Zeke said.

  “Aw, I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “Shut up. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Well, I’m still an undead monster who rose from the grave, but at least I’m not a drooling, brain-dead monster who rose from the grave. I’m great. Awesome. Couldn’t be better.”

  Zeke kicked at the low fence rail and looked up at the stars. “Whatever. Next time you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, call somebody else.”

  I didn’t remind him that I had nobody else to call. He knew it; he was here. “I got you dinner. That’s got to be worth at least a tank of gas.”

  He glanced at me. “You killed a guy and called me to get rid of the evidence.”

  “I know. Worst first date ever.”

  He laughed a little. “You are seriously the most annoying undead person I’ve ever met.”

  “He was a really bad man,” I said, after a minute or two of silence. I hadn’t told him much, but Zeke knew Rain’s story, and he had seen Brian Kerr’s house. He knew what they had been doing. I asked, “Do evil people taste evil?”

  “Uh, no,” Zeke said, like he wasn’t sure it was a serious question. “They all mostly taste the same.”

  “Huh. Okay.” It didn’t seem right. There should be something rotten inside somebody who did things like that, something that made them taste like sulfur and decay and maggots. Something that made them different. “That would have been interesting to know when I did that report on the Donner Party in fifth grade. Why did nobody dig me up?”

  “What?”

  “When I was buried. Before I woke up.”

  My thoughts were racing, my legs jiggling on the fence. I hated sitting there at the edge of the woods waiting for the first sign of headlights in the dark. It was taking too long. We shouldn’t have let Jake go by himself.

  “I was there for a year. If you can smell a body well enough to find it in the woods, why didn’t anybody figure out I was stuck in the ground in somebody’s backyard?”

  “You don’t smell that bad. It’s not like you’re rotting or anything.”

  “You said you can—”

  “I can tell you’re not completely alive,” Zeke said.

  “You mean it’s a magic thing, not a smell thing? Like how I can tell when somebody is a killer?”

  “I guess. Sort of. It’s both. There aren’t any ghouls in Chicago,” he added, like that was an important detail. “Too many magicians.”

  “But somebody did find me. When I first woke up.”

  “The birds weren’t exactly subtle.”

  “Yeah, my magical bird flu epidemic was big news. I didn’t do that on purpose. Would that be enough? For somebody to find me?”

  “If he knew what he was looking for, maybe.” Zeke shook his head. “Probably? I don’t know. Ask a magician.”

  Thinking about the man by my grave only reminded me of his hands on my face and his excitement. You’re beautiful, you’re perfect, as though he had known exactly what he was going to find. And his memories. Especially his memories. I didn’t want him in my head.

  “Mr. Willow . . .” I stumbled on his name. “His whole deal was telling people they were evil whether they did anything evil or not, and promising to fix them.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Zeke said.

  “He convinced a lot of people it did.” I thought of Violet with her glowing eyes and her hands clamped over her mouth. “And when he couldn’t convince them, he didn’t give them a choice.”

  Zeke shrugged. “That’s what humans always do.”

  “You don’t like humans very much, do you?”

  “I would like them more if they weren’t always trying to kill us.”

  I couldn’t argue with logic like that. “Thank you for helping me in spite of your prejudices.”

  “You’re not human anymore,” Zeke said.

  “I’m thanking you anyway.”

  “Uh, yeah. Okay. It’s no big deal.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, tilted my head back, and when I looked again the stars were still there.

  “You know Challenger? The space shuttle that exploded back in the eighties?”

  Zeke gave me a quick, confused look. “Yeah. I think so. We learned about it in school.”

  That threw me for a second. “You go to school?”

  He made a face and kicked the fence again. “Jake makes me.”

  “You’re a man-eating corpse-stealing creature of the night and your big brother makes you go to school.” For some reason that felt like the most bizarre thing I had heard in a long time. “Does he check your homework too? Go to teacher conferences? Sign field trip permission slips?”

  “Yes,” Zeke said. And after a beat: “The conferences never go very well. He picks fights with the teachers.”

  I laughed. Something dense and tangled in my chest began to ease.

  “What about it? The space thing?” Zeke said.

  “Challenger. The space shuttle. I was just thinking about—there’s a transcript of everything that happened when it exploded. And right before it happened, everything—everything was fine. They thought it was fine. The shuttle was taking off and everything was perfect, right up until it wasn’t. The last voice picked up by the flight cabin recorder was the pilot.”

  I scrubbed my palms on my knees; my jeans felt grimy and gross. I was so tired of being dirty and hurt and bloody all the time.

  “Michael Smith. He was the pilot. He said, ‘Uh-oh.’ Then it exploded. They all died. Seven people. They think some of them might have survived the explosion and they were still alive for—for the fall. Back to Earth.” I swallowed; my throat was dry. “But the last thing mission control heard from them was just that. ‘Uh-oh.’”

  Zeke didn’t say anything. He was waiting for me to go on.

  “My best friend Melanie tells me—used to tell me—it was morbid that I knew things like that. She said it was creepy and stupid to think about tragedies all the time. But I always thought . . . I only thought it was sad. They didn’t even make it into space. They just died.”

  I took a deep breath. My heart wasn’t racing anymore. My hands weren’t shaking.

  “I was lying when I said I couldn’t remember who killed me.”

  “I know,” Zeke said softly.

  “I thought I was lying better than that,” I said.

  “No, I mean . . .” Zeke trailed off. He bounced his leg nervously, shrugged his thin shoulders. He wasn’t looking at me. “I think if you keep trying to tell yourself and everybody else that you don’t remember something because it was . . . I think that mostly means you remember it really well, and wish you didn’t.”

  I looked at him, at his profile in the darkness. “Yeah. It’s like that.”

  I thought he would ask. I waited for the inevitable question, tense and uncomfortable, but he didn’t.

  “The person you killed,” I said. “Who was he?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t know. No. Sorry.”

  “He was a really bad man,” Zeke said, a mocking echo, but he meant it.

  “What did he do?”

  He was trying to decide what to tell me. In th
e end, he only said, “He hurt Jake.”

  “What does it feel like?” I asked. “When you kill someone. What does that feel like?”

  Zeke was quiet for so long I didn’t think he was going to answer.

  “Nothing,” he said finally. “It doesn’t feel like anything.”

  He was lying, lying, lying. I let him. It was an unfair question anyway.

  “I didn’t think I could be scared anymore,” I said. “I’ve been imagining that worms or something got into my brain while I was buried and ate away the amygdala. That’s the part of the brain that feels fear. I forgot what it felt like, to be scared. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t even feel the same for me anymore. Now it’s like—”

  “Like what?” Zeke said, when I didn’t go on.

  Like being lost in a haunted house. Like throwing up on a carnival ride. Like kicking toward the shimmering light above when you’re turned around under water, like digging your feet through the hot outer surface of sand to the cool damp layer beneath, like skimming your fingers over a boy’s bare chest and feeling his heart stutter. Like riding a skateboard on the smoothest road you can imagine, faster than you’ve ever dared, wind in your hair and on your face, sun baking the asphalt below you, grass and trees and barbed wire passing so quickly they smear into a blur of color.

  “It feels like being alive,” I said.

  FORTY-ONE

  WHEN JAKE RETURNED he didn’t say anything except, “Get in.”

  Several minutes passed before he spoke again. He drove with one hand tight on the wheel, the other on the gear shift. I was sitting in the middle; I could feel how tense he was. The dirt road took us down off the ridge and into a canyon. The windows were down and night air flowed in from both sides, cool and crisp, smelling of pines.

  “Did you do that to him?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t have claws.” I didn’t need to tear out a man’s insides to end his life. My rage didn’t look anything like that. “Did you go to the mine?”

  “No,” he said. “But I could feel it.”

  “Her. You could feel her. She’s not an it.”

  “What is she?”

  Hooves, eyes, handmade claws. She was ancient and terrible and angry. I could feel her laughter underneath my skin. I wondered how long she would laugh before she realized nobody was coming to feed her anymore.

  “I don’t know. I don’t—I don’t have any idea. He thought she was the only one.”

  “Can she get out?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Jake glanced at me.

  “No. She can’t.”

  The dirt road led to a paved road that spilled us out of the canyon and onto Boulder’s quiet early morning streets. Dawn was approaching as a faint light in the east, shades of yellow and pink climbing into dark blue. There were a few cars on the road, joggers and cyclists out for their morning exercise. I listened with every turn, but I didn’t hear anything heavy rolling in the back of the truck.

  It was still dark when we pulled up to their house. Jake backed the truck into the driveway, and Zeke got out to open the garage. They had done this before. I looked away and tried not to think about what they were unloading. When they went inside I followed because I didn’t know what else to do. They carried the body into the bathroom. He was wrapped in plastic, his face hidden. He didn’t look like a person at all.

  “You do that in the same place where you shower?” I said.

  Jake looked at me over his shoulder. “You have a better idea?”

  I didn’t know how people normally went about butchering bodies in the privacy of their own homes, and the moment I started thinking about it, I couldn’t stop.

  They were going to eat him. He had been a person yesterday, and now he was a piece of meat. A dead thing. A meal. I had killed him, with Lyle, and now he was food. There were going to be knives and freezer bags and teeth and a lot of blood. They weren’t taking their time. They were impatient. They were hungry.

  Knowing what they were was one thing. Seeing it was different.

  Jake took pity on me. “Come back in an hour or two,” he said.

  I grabbed my skateboard and slammed the door behind me.

  FORTY-TWO

  JAKE GAVE ME some money before I left Boulder.

  “Take a bus,” he said. “Less chance of getting kidnapped by a crazy human.”

  “And one hundred percent more chance of getting propositioned by a fifty-year-old recent parolee. No thanks.” I waved the cash away. They didn’t have a lot. They needed it more than I did.

  Jake rolled his eyes and tucked the folded bills into the front of my backpack.

  “Are you going home?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Not like that. Not to stay. Not to see my family. Not to watch my sisters through their bedroom windows like a creep in the yard. Not to see Mom pull the car out of the driveway in the morning, Dad clutching his travel mug of coffee in the passenger seat. Mom always joked that Dad was just as likely to fall asleep during his morning lectures as his students.

  I wasn’t going back to hide where they might see me and tell myself it was up to them whether they looked or not. To let them decide for themselves if their daughter still existed.

  “What could I even say?” I said. “‘Hi, Mom and Dad, I got murdered but I’m better now and I kill people but only the bad ones and I kind of like it’? I can’t—I can’t do that to them.”

  Jake leaned against the counter and looked at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. The bathroom door was closed and he had changed his shirt. There was no blood, no mess, no sign of what they had been doing—no sign except the basement door, standing open just wide enough for me to see a single dark eye through the gap. Steve was waiting to get to work on the bathroom with its toothbrush and bleach.

  Jake started to say something, changed his mind and stopped.

  “What?” I said.

  “It won’t matter what you say to them,” he said. “They won’t care.”

  I closed my backpack and played with the zipper. I didn’t look at him.

  “They won’t, Breezy. You could tell them anything and they’ll just be happy to have—”

  “Really? I can tell them what I am now? You think they won’t care about that? You think they’ll be happy?”

  “They—”

  “Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I hooked the backpack straps over my shoulders and picked up my skateboard. “You’ve never been human.”

  I meant it as an insult, but Jake didn’t take it that way. “No. You’re right. I haven’t. Okay. Don’t do anything stupid.” He smiled crookedly when he said it, like it was something he said a lot but never expected anybody to listen. Then he said “See you later” instead of good-bye.

  Zeke was waiting outside. He walked with me to the end of the driveway.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” I said. It was a lie, but I didn’t care if he believed me. “I’m not going on a murderous rampage like Ingrid said I would. I promise.”

  Zeke nodded. He was looking down the street, not at me. “Yeah, well. That’s probably smart.”

  I dropped the skateboard to the ground, put one foot on, but I didn’t kick away yet. “I remembered it wrong, what I told you last night. About Challenger.”

  “Okay?”

  “I mean, not about Challenger itself. That was right. But I remembered the wrong person. Maybe there are worms in the memory part of my brain too. It was my sister Meadow who made fun of me for knowing that about their last words. And she didn’t tell me it was morbid, she just told me I was a giant nerd and she was embarrassed to be related to me. But there was this other time, I don’t know, a while ago. I was sleeping over at my best friend’s house.”

  For a few years we did that every week: me at Melanie’s house, or her at mine, a routine our parents accepted and encouraged. Melanie’s parents planned their date nights a
round it; my parents referred to our air mattress and spare comforter as Melanie’s bed.

  “I had just read about Apollo 1 for the first time,” I said. “Most space books for kids kind of gloss over Apollo 1. I guess it’s not kid friendly to say, ‘And then they all died horribly in a fire right there on the launch pad.’ But I read about it, the real story, and I looked it up, and there’s a recording of it. An audio recording. I don’t know if it’s real.” I rolled the skateboard back and forth a few times. “The astronauts, they’re—one of them is complaining about how the radios aren’t working, saying they’ll never get to the moon if they can’t even make things work on the ground, and then another one starts shouting about fire in the cabin. And that’s it. They’re dead. I made Melanie listen to it. She wanted to watch a movie or call our friends, and I made her listen to people dying in a fire. That’s when she told me I was morbid. It was one of our vocabulary words from school. She was using it all the time.”

  “She was right,” Zeke said. I couldn’t tell if he was teasing or serious. They looked pretty much the same on him.

  “I know. I’d never heard anybody die before. I’d never thought about how awful it would be to die like that.”

  I tucked my thumbs into the straps of my backpack. There was no fire on the list in my NASA notebook. I had considered it, tried to work out the logistics. There was too much risk of hurting somebody else. It wouldn’t work anyway.

  “It wasn’t even a real launch, that day of the fire,” I said. “It was a practice countdown. They went to work that morning, thinking they were running a test. Is that how it always is? When people die?”

  “Most people aren’t around afterward to think about it.”

  “Lucky me. I’m the one who gets to stay.”

  “You’d rather be gone?” he asked. His tone was flat, but the question was earnest.

  What I wanted was to go back to the night I died and change it. Don’t go to the party. Don’t fight with Melanie. Don’t leave by myself. I hadn’t done anything wrong, not one single thing, but still I wanted to do it all differently. I wanted to not die that night. I wanted to not wake up a year later and stagger home to an empty house and an unfamiliar world. Not become something else, something strange and monstrous, but still human enough to fall for a dangerous promise and impossible hope.