Blood and sweat mingled to drip in a small river from his left eyebrow. It'd need stitches later.
He was taking the beating of his life. His jaw felt unhinged and one eye was swollen shut. Dempsey had gone where no other opponent had before. He'd gotten more licks on Clyde than all his other fights combined.
Dempsey's strikes were like blurred lightning.
Somebody shoved water at Clyde. He took a swig, swishing it around in his craw, spitting it out in the dented tin bucket that was swung below his mouth. The cut on his lip stung as he spit the mucous-filled blood.
If he'd not been a farmer, accustomed to the grueling endurance of plowing and other tedious, plodding and inexhaustible tasks he would never have lasted this many rounds.
It was small satisfaction that Dempsey had marks littered everywhere there was flesh exposed. Put there by Clyde's fists.
The bell rung, and Clyde bounced to his feet.
Dempsey's dark eyes fell on him with the glittering intensity of desperation.
Clyde felt a small shiver, goose walking over his grave, he thought errantly.
They met in the middle and knocked gloves.
The ring leader moved away and they fought.
Clyde heard everything, but most of all he heard Maggie.
He fought harder, like a bull with its horns caught.
*
Stay down, stay down, Clyde intoned, hopping from one nimble foot to the other. His exhaustion was a dragging nightmare of fatigue.
The money had almost not been worth the fight. Going all four rounds with this man had wreaked havoc on Clyde's body.
Lasting only minutes, it felt like he'd lived another lifetime in the ring. But Clyde had persevered, his constitution having won out in the end.
Simply put, he'd outlasted Dempsey. Clyde was not the better fighter, he was the better laster. He knew it, for self-delusion had never come naturally to Clyde.
The ring leader counted down. “One! Two! Three!” Then he swished plank-flat arms across each other in the age old, you're out, raising Clyde's arm as victor.
That's when Clyde felt it, a precognitive flash like a silvered coin flipped midair.
If he hadn't ducked he would have been dead.
The blow was glancing, delivered like a coward from behind. After the bell.
Delivered with precision.
Clyde tried to lean in avoidance but most of the punch landed where it had been intended.
For the first time in his life, Clyde was knocked out.
He came awake in a hospital, richer, but with swelling on the brain and orders to rest.
The doctors said it was a miracle he didn't have a broken jaw.
At least he'd had that.
When Clyde opened his eyes and saw his Maggie-girl gazing down at him, her hand covering her stomach protectively, he thought he had more than that.
Much more.
*
2015
Ali kissed the top of Caleb's head and he pushed her hand away from brushing the hair back off his forehead.
“I'm okay, Mommy!” he huffed for the third time. “It don't hurt!”
He glared at her in the cutest way as Ali answered, “It doesn't hurt?”
“Uh-huh,” Caleb answered. He was a Big Boy. They could stick him with needles all day long and it wasn't gonna matter. It didn't even hurt that much. It felt like that one time when Mommy had him cut the dead flowers off the stems of her plants and that bee bit him.
It hadn't hurt either.
“Well, I'm glad,” she ruffled his hair.
Caleb sighed. Mommies always had to Show Affection. Caleb's mind wandered to the view through the window. He was gonna play with the Js today. Mommy called it a “playdate.”
The doorbell rang and his two bestest friends ran in.
Caleb didn't like John's mom very much. She had a pointy nose and a scrunched up face like a prune.
She looked like a witch. Caleb knew he wasn't supposed to laugh at the way Adults looked but his mouth did a funny thing when he tried not to laugh.
Somehow, it always made it worse.
John's mom narrowed her eyes at Caleb and he began to giggle.
Mommy gave him The Look. It meant that he needed to Calm Down. Which made it harder to stop laughing.
“Humph!” John's mom grunted over the top of his giggling. “He's a precocious boy, Alicia. You need to take him in hand, like my John here.”
John gave Caleb a face that told him John didn't like being taken in hand.
“In my day, when a child laughed at an adult like that, they were given the rod.”
“Doesn't that sound like a CPS call waiting to happen,” Jonesy's Mom, Miss Helen, said in a voice that sounded bored. Caleb quieted up in a hurry.
Miss Helen was funny. She didn't talk like other adults.
“And you're the pillar of knowledge on the subject of child rearing, Helen?”
We all looked at Jonesy. He was digginʼ for gold in his nose. That's what Gramps called it.
“Nasty!” Helen said as Mommy handed a tissue to Jonesy, who held his prize like an obscene flag from the tip of his finger.
Joan recoiled in horror from the sight of Jonesy with a big booger on the tip of his finger and a self-satisfied grin on his face.
Caleb knew that if he'd been pickinʼ his nose Mommy would have ended the playdate.
Not so with Helen. “Don't be picking your schnoz now!” Helen said with a smile. “Go wash those skanky hands in the restroom, Jonesy.”
Helen turned back to Joan. “What did you say about columns?”
“Pillars,” Joan repeated quietly, having lost the scope of the conversation before the Digit Diving.
Helen waved her hand around. “Oh well, we're all just winging it! It's not like we have the parenting manual.” She shrugged and Caleb watched Mommy get the Funny Mouth too.
Joan sniffed and glanced at her watch. “I will return in three hours.” Her eyes flicked to Ali's. “Do you plan on a snack or lunch while John is here?”
“Yes, I thought they could have cookies and milk later.”
Joan sniffed again. “Very well, thank you for your hospitality.”
She pushed John forward and he came a few timid steps toward their group.
Caleb slung an arm around John, who was really skinny. He needed the most of Mommy's cookies. Caleb told him that.
John nodded, turning toward the door where his mommy had just departed. “Yes, thank you. I'd like to have a lot of Mrs. Hart's cookies.”
“Ali, John,” Mommy corrected John. Caleb didn't know why he had to use Mommy's second name all the time. He looked at the door that John's mom had just passed through. He had a feelinʼ it had something to do with her.
Caleb narrowed his eyes after her departing back.
Jonesy exited the bathroom and Helen grabbed his arm. “Let me smell your hands.” Jonesy stiffened as Helen ran a nose over the tops of his hands. “You get your rear back in there!” She said loudly, smacking his butt. “Don't be running water over the tops! Use soap.” She waggled her eyebrows at Mommy and she burst out laughing.
“Boys!” Helen said.
Mommy nodded.
“My mommy would have been really mad about the nose picking,” John said with utter conviction.
Helen nodded her head. “Uh-huh, that's why you have to do it in secret.”
John looked at Jonesy's mom solemnly, finally nodding his head. “Yes, ma'am.”
Ali and Helen laughed. “Where's the coffee, Ali? I could use a cup,” her eyes flew to Mommy's, mirth held in check by a thread, “or ten—after that fiasco.”
“He's consistent, Helen.”
Jonesy walked out of the bathroom as his Mommy looked at him with affection.
“Yes, that he is.”
*
2025
Parker felt the focus of his power come online and directed it at the feet of the corpse with a precision that flowed from the tip of its tagged toe to the hair on i
ts head.
Jeffrey knew the drill, it was easy. Raising a corpse like this was as automatic as breathing.
One as newly dead as this—was nothing.
The corpse rose as if pulled by invisible strings, the morgue sheet falling away in a silken rustle.
“He looks dead, Parker,” McKenzie said, his skin littered with goosebumps. He swore he'd stop doing this damn zombie detail with Parker, but he'd been with him for over a decade now. Hard to give it up. But a zombie raising was always the same.
Creepy.
“Maître,” the prime minister of France whispered, a flap of gray skin hanging down over one eye.
McKenzie backed up, a small teardrop-shaped flame dancing at the tip of his pulse-thrower. The artificial air being pumped through the morgue's central heating system causing bluish-orange flag of hot light to waver.
Roiling chicken flesh built higher on McKenzie's skin and he held his feet in their locked position with difficulty.
His colleagues weren't so stoic. They were as far back as they could be without leaving the room. They'd seen what Parker could do, and it was always bigtime flesh crawl.
Every. Time.
“What's it sayinʼ?”
Jeffrey turned to McKenzie—one of the many Jeffrey would use when the time came, a destroyer of his life—and answered, “Master.”
Jeffrey pumped more life into the zombie and watched as if an oil painting had come painstakingly to life before them. Jeffrey watched his power infuse cheeks gone sallow with death. They began to fill in with the rich color of life, an approximation so real no one would have known he was the walking dead.
“Not too much,” Smoker said. “Don't make him look too good, Parker. Rumor had it he liked his cigs and cognac.” He chuckled.
Parker's emotional reaction tipped over into the zombie.
Its gaze slid to Smoker, filling with contemplation, knowledge and lastly—intelligence.
Smoker stayed where he was.
Jeffrey smiled. The zombie knew Smoker now, knew him as intimately as Jeffrey did.
“Put a leash on your zombie, Parker, or I'll have McKenzie clean things up.”
“No, you won't,” Jeffrey said in a voice honed by hard experience. “You need this, Chimney.”
Smoker clenched his fists. He'd begun liking whenever he could beat the snot out of this zombie puppeteer. Of course, now Parker was hands off. That directive had come from the top. Parker was a stubborn cuss. Slow learner.
He needed to learn some respect. Smoker had been hell-bent on giving him advanced lessons until he got the word.
Smoker thought about the next assignment with the new AFTD and smiled. Parker would be in charge of that new brat. Perfect. A smile grew on Smoker's face, revealing teeth like stained Chiclets in a mouth that rivaled Parker's zombies.
Jeffrey didn't like the satisfied smirk on Chimney's face as he lit up another cigarette with the last. The sight struck Parker for perhaps the millionth time—how appropriate the nickname Chimney was for this prick.
As an added bonus, the abbreviated name rustled his Jimmies. Parker grinned at the thought, and the French Prime Minister grinned back, his mouth a sea of rot.
Hmm... that wouldn't do. Jeffrey dampened the beautiful glow he'd given his zombie, and deflected some of it to the mouth.
Jeffrey frowned. The mouths always gave him trouble.
When he was ready the naked zombie stood next to him, his slight paunch a small bowling ball above his limp genitalia.
The suits moved out of the way like a sea parting before a mighty ship.
McKenzie gulped. He hated Parker's creepers, loathed them. He wiped the beaded sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, his Adam's apple bobbing like a nut about to get cracked.
“What would you have of me?” the Minister asked.
“We need you to sign the papers assigning a successor to replace you,” Jeffrey replied in perfect French.
Chimney leaned forward, the smoke wafting and curling around Parker and his zombie.
The Minister hissed, snapping his newly formed teeth next to Smoker's ear with an ominous click.
The dead Minister hadn't missed, but been held back from a rightful chewing by Parker.
“Don't get cute, Parker,” Smoker said through the wall of smoke.
Jeffrey shrugged.
They left, and as they did a man joined them in the hall, carrying France's dead leader's clothes over his arm.
Walking to the balcony that overlooked the masses of people who waited to hear Parker's zombie proclaim his successor, they dressed him robotically.
Parker would never know what made him look up suddenly, just as they were on the verge of Frenchie executing the manipulation of the decade.
When he did he saw a form hover near the ceiling, a hazy image as if cast by an old-fashioned movie projector.
McKenzie needed no urging, his gun automatically going to the image above their heads, his nerves frayed by the zombie detail: he pointed his silencer at the ceiling, emptying the entire catalog through the apparition.
But it wasn't a ghost.
It had been a teenage girl, her form shattering like soft mist when the bullets burst through.
Parker didn't know who she was or why those bullets passed harmlessly through her. Hell, were even now embedded in the antique plaster that adorned the ceiling.
He looked at Chimney, the zombie standing perfectly still, waiting for Jeffrey's next command, absolutely oblivious to what had just happened.
If it didn't involve the necromancer, it was of no consequence.
“What the blue hell was that?” McKenzie asked in a voice that was squeezed with contained terror. “Ghost?”
Parker smiled—McKenzie was such a mundane. Jeffrey would have felt a ghost a kilometer away, so to speak.
“Astral Projectionist,” Smoker answered calmly.
“Does this change our plans here today?” McKenzie asked as the other men gave uneasy glances at every corner of the room, six pairs of eyes now looking above them.
No one ever looks up.
Smoker cocked an eyebrow. “Our plans? No. Her plans—absolutely.” He made a circling motion in the air like, get a move on. “Parker tell him this.” He thrust papers into Jeffrey's hands and he told his zombie what to say.
“Yes,” it said, drawing out the syllable with a hiss and Jeffrey released his hold on the zombie. Its fluidity as it strode outside onto the balcony wasn't compromised in the slightest when the Minister raised his hand in a natural salute to the French people who had gathered to hear his succession speech.
As Parker listened to the monotone speech of his zombie he got itchy. Finally, when he couldn't stand it anymore, he asked, “Who's the girl?”
Chimney shrugged. “Don't know. Doesn't matter. We have five-point APs. They'll read her sig, nail her region. She'll get cleaned.” Smoke drifted out of the slit of his mouth.
They stared at each other and Jeffrey forced a casual look of indifference on his face.
But inside, where no one knew him, a tiny grain of concern began for the girl.
Jeffrey couldn't help but notice she was around the same age he'd been when he was torn from his old life.
Now, because of a fluke of circumstance, she may never live hers.
*
The French leader was “assassinated” later that day by mysterious circumstances.
Dead again.
After conveniently having laid the groundwork for the leader that the United States wanted as lackey.
Their sock puppet was in place, the first of many more to come. With a Cadaver Manipulator, many things were possible. The potential was limitless.
Jeffrey didn't think they really knew how much.
Someday they would.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Parker had been made aware of his next assignment. There was a new five-point AFTD.
The scientist's kid. Caleb Hart.
He watched him now witho
ut Caleb knowing. The father had given him a concealing concoction to dampen his ability. But his superiors had their sources. They knew exactly what the Hart family had cooked up to camouflage the boy's skills.
They had the standard issue pulse gadgetry in place but mainly, it was the Precog. She had seen what he was. She may be psychotic (and she really was) but she was always on target.
Dead on. Jeffrey smiled at his internal pun.
He could feel the kid's power from here and it was surreal. It matched his own seamlessly. Parker turned that over in his sharp mind. Was it because he was a five-point? Or—was there something he was missing? An epiphany lay just out of reach.
But the realization was shattered, of course.
“Looks like the father,” Chimney commented.
Parker grunted a response, he was feeling magnanimous.
“Likes that girl there,” Smoker said, indicating a petite girl that fluttered around Caleb like a pink butterfly. “But how much does he like her?” Smoker asked rhetorically.
“Why?” Parker asked through his teeth, his pleasant feelings for the day being carried off by an unseen wind.
Chimney shrugged, his cigarette hardly moving from its perch inside his mouth. “Handy, is all. If he cared about her, we could use that.”
Yes, Jeffrey knew how that worked. Instead he asked, “When?”
“Soon. Our intel says they're planning some kind of,” he waved his smoking hand around, lazy spirals of noxious menthol seeped under Jeffrey's nose.
He'd love it when this guy was dead.
Really dead.
“... soiree at the old cemetery.”
“Clemens?” Jeffrey asked, curious despite his irritation.
“Don't know,” Chimney brought his pulse up, jabbing his thumb into the reading dock, “got the GPS coordinates in here, name doesn't matter.”
“I know where it is,” Jeffrey said in a low voice.
“You do, do you?” Smoker said, nearly hairless eyebrow hiked.
“Of course,” Jeffrey looked into his flat eyes, jaundiced because of his habit, and tapped his temple. “The GPS is here, Chimney.”
Smoker frowned at the nickname, their stalemate relationship contrary to them both, but as necessary as breathing.
The Death Series, Books 1-3 (Dark Dystopian Paranormal Romance): Death Whispers, Death Speaks, and Death Inception Page 65
