Every time I thought about that question too deeply, it led to questions about the meaning of my own existence. If fate could so blithely steamroll ahead, unchanged down to the smallest detail regardless of my presence in the world . . .
Could there be any better definition of manifest meaninglessness? How could I conclude anything I did actually mattered?
Ivan presented a reality that was so much in opposition to that deeply-held fear that I couldn’t fully process the implications.
I didn’t have a chance to.
Talking with Ivan, I began to feel as if I was being watched, as if someone just out of sight was here, reaching for me. I turned around in the chair and saw no one just as I began to realize that it was the Mark.
I still felt Ivan’s presence with the Mark, but now there was something else. Ivan was a relaxed masculine hand resting against my shoulder blade. The something else was different—jerky, nervous, and somehow wrong—soft and slimy as if the unseen flesh was rotten.
I asked Ivan, “Do you feel anything?”
“What?”
Something’s coming . . .
I stood up, knocking over the coffee that sat on the floor. I reached for my gun and realized that the holster was still upstairs in my bedroom. “I’ll be back,” I told Ivan as I ran up the stairs.
The invisible hand kept groping for my Mark, as if death itself was reaching for me. My heart raced as I ran upstairs and retrieved the Beretta.
In my bedroom I held the gun in a ready position as I spun around, looking for anything sneaking up on me. Nothing.
But I shuddered as I felt long spastic fingers brush my Mark with the cold touch of something dead. I edged back down the stairs sideways, my back to the wall so I could keep an eye both upstairs and down. My house was unnaturally quiet, the only sounds the creak of the treads on the stairs as they took my weight. The whole downstairs was painted with muted sunlight streaming through the windows. Even the motes in the air seemed frozen, waiting for something to happen.
Then I heard Ivan yell something in Russian, and I ran.
FIFTEEN
I REACHED THE basement door as it swung slowly closed. I threw it open and ran down the steps. Someone was down here with Ivan. Halfway down the stairs, I heard Ivan’s stream of Russian invective cut short by a choked, gurgling sound.
I brought the Beretta up into firing position as I descended enough to get a view of the basement where Ivan was cuffed. A dark figure was bent over Ivan, arms extended, hands clutching his throat.
My finger left the side of the barrel and found the trigger as I yelled, “Police! Step away from him now!”
The figure made no move to stop strangling Ivan, so I stepped to the side, taking Ivan out of the line of fire. I repeated, “Let him go, now!”
It was as if I wasn’t even here. I had no choice, and I fired. I was trying for the center of mass, but the figure was crouched to throttle Ivan, and I had to aim higher than I wanted to keep Ivan out of the shot. The bullet struck the attacker in the left shoulder.
That got his attention. He let go of Ivan, leaving him gasping and choking. Ivan’s attacker turned around to face me, giving me my first good look at him.
He looked like his touch on my Mark felt, pale as a corpse. Somehow, up to now, I had been too focused to realize that the guy was naked to the waist.
“Oh, fuck,” I whispered.
The guy had a Mark, of a sort. It covered his torso in broad, violent curves that slashed deep into his flesh. The lines of the Mark were edged in ragged flesh as if the black lines were constricting, embedding themselves. The blackness seemed to writhe within the channels of the open wounds it had carved.
Whatever substance formed this man’s Mark seemed in the process of consuming him. His eyes looked at me with the same writhing blackness, and the wound I had put in his shoulder didn’t bleed, and in the bottom of that crater I saw more of the blackness oozing.
It charged at me, and I fired the Beretta again. The thing blurred as I fired, and I could feel the cadaverous hand plucking the threads of my Mark like a harp as it moved though the space between this world and the next. It flashed in and out of existence so fast that my eyes weren’t convinced it had ever gone, but my bullet had passed through the space where it had been, never touching it.
I fired two more times, quickly. It was close enough that both shots should have buried themselves in the creature’s chest. But it still blurred as it moved, and the bullets passed through it as if it was a ghost.
As it grabbed for me, I tried the same thing, stepping into a world where this thing wasn’t. I found myself in a darkened basement, a semi-mirror of my own, and a cold-fleshed hand grabbed the wrist on my gun hand.
It was here, too?
I could smell the wound I had put in its shoulder. It stank like rotting meat.
It was strong, too strong for me to overpower it. When I tried to free my gun hand, its response was to grab my neck with its other hand and slam me into a wall. Somehow, I managed to keep hold of my gun as my skull bounced off the cinderblock.
I dug the fingers of my left hand into its throat, trying to push the thing off me, but I couldn’t make it budge. It appeared to have the pain reaction of someone cranked up on PCP—and I was already feeling faint from the pressure it was putting on the blood supply to my brain.
Even if it can’t feel the bullet wound . . .
I took my free hand away from my ineffective attempt to strangle it back and concentrated all I had into an open hand strike at the wound in its left shoulder. Even though that arm still had an iron grip on my gun hand, when I hit it, I could feel the movement of bones the bullet had already broken.
This thing might have defective pain receptors, but that didn’t help maintain its mechanical integrity. I could feel the pressure ease on my wrist, and I gave another strike to its shoulder joint, and even though I didn’t have the best angle, I could feel the socket give way.
I yanked my gun hand loose and brought the barrel of my Beretta up under the thing’s chin.
I didn’t have to fire. When it blurred itself to avoid my shot, its hand left my throat, giving me the chance to dodge for the stairs.
I didn’t have to look behind me to know it followed me. I could feel the phantom cadaver hands of its Mark tugging at the threads of my own.
What was this thing?
Who? I forced myself to think. Whatever I faced was human. Single-mindedly murderous, but still human. It—he—was lucid enough to dodge bullets and try to disarm me.
I ran out of someone else’s living room, and he was still chasing me. I saw people on the sidewalk and pushed the Mark as I ran until the sky was midnight dark and the streets were empty. Whatever was happening, I didn’t want anyone else caught in the crossfire.
He still followed me, but he lagged. I had an advantage on a straight run, and I could probably lose him. But that would leave him to return his attention to Ivan.
I spun around and faced him. “Who are you? What do you want?”
It was a dim hope to engage this guy in dialogue. He had the same sort of disconnected expression that you see on the seriously schizophrenic and the seriously medicated, and it wasn’t just the solid black eyes. He might shift through worlds after me, but the reality he looked out at was not the same one I was living in.
I braced my gun at him as he ran down the center of the empty street toward me. I had gained a hundred yards on him, and he was rushing me. I yelled at him, “Stop!” but he paid no attention.
I risked a shot to try and stop his advance, but he blurred, and the shot passed though where he should have been. No reasoning with him, and he was going to close on me in moments.
How had I managed to shoot him in the shoulder?
He had been throttling Ivan, and he hadn’t been paying attention to my attack. He had a sing
le-minded focus on his target.
That gave me an idea, and I ran off to stay out of reach. I ran down the right lane of the empty street and an idea started brewing. A dangerous one.
If I had an accomplice, they could probably take this guy out while he was focused on me, blindsiding him the way I had while he was focused on Ivan. Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to any allies. Not intentional ones anyway.
Once I had a decent lead on him, I spun around, letting the Mark push me toward morning. Like before, he kept pace with me, and I felt cadaver hands hook into the pattern of my Mark as if I was dragging them along. Then I saw a blurred shadow of what I wanted, and I stopped moving through worlds.
Fifty feet in front of me, he stopped shifting as well—materializing directly in front of a UPS truck approaching from behind. The truck was so close to him already that I didn’t hear the brakes begin screeching until after it slammed into him.
The impact threw the guy forward, face into the asphalt and rolling. The UPS truck skidded to a stop just short of driving over the guy where he had rolled to a stop in the street.
I did not need to walk up and examine the mush the guy’s skull had become to know that he hadn’t survived the impact. I’d felt the dead hands leave my Mark the instant his head had kissed the pavement.
* * *
—
THERE was a strong impulse for me not to flee the scene of the accident. I had done a lot of extra-legal crap in neighboring universes, but never anything that got anyone killed. Even if the guy was psychotic and trying to kill me, what was left of the cop in me objected to me leaving the corpse without any explanation for the locals.
But I left.
This guy was dead, but Ivan was still chained up in my basement. And I had no idea if my late assailant was after me or him. When I returned home, I saw no sign of any more intruders. I descended into the basement, and I was relieved to see Ivan alive and moving, even if he appeared to be trying to work his hands free of the cuffs.
“What the hell was that?” I asked him.
He looked up. “Gde ten?”
“What?”
“Where is the Shadow?”
“Shadow? You mean the man who was attacking you?”
The shadows are coming . . .
“No man.” He shook his head. “No man.”
“He looked like a man to me.”
“No. It is an evil born out of the boiling Chaos—” Looking at him, I could see the strain of his effort to retain his composure. He muttered something else in Russian and quietly added, “I never thought I’d see one, have it touch me.” He looked up and asked, “They are supposed to be impossible to strike or evade. How did you escape from it?”
“I let him chase me in front of a truck. He’s dead. Now what was he? What does it mean, he was a Shadow?”
“Have you no legends of them?”
“I’ve been out of touch.”
“I don’t know how much of what I know is true. I just know the tales I’ve heard about them. That they aren’t quite alive anymore, that they exist more between the worlds than in them, that they cannot be felled by normal weapons, that they’re what is left of Walkers who wandered too far into the Chaos.” Ivan swallowed. “What I saw of that thing, I know that part about weapons is true. I saw you fire on it and saw the bullets pass through—”
“When he was focused on me,” I said. “A surprise attack could injure him. I shot his shoulder.”
“That is comforting,” Ivan said. “To know that this was not a ghost or some vengeful spirit.”
I didn’t know if I was ready to go that far. The past twelve hours had rapidly expanded my threshold for weirdness.
The shadows are coming . . .
“Another legend I know is true now,” Ivan said. “They give no warning. They move through worlds, and you cannot sense them. A normal Walker— I would have sensed them approach, like you. I knew as you left and as you returned. That thing, I felt nothing until its hand was on my throat.”
He was wrong, though. I had felt the Shadow touch my Mark before it had shown up. Ivan should have realized that, since I had run to retrieve my gun. He was probably thinking more of what the Shadow had done than what I had been doing.
I thought about correcting him, but as I started to talk, a more important question occurred to me. “Why did it attack you, Ivan?”
“Why? That is the nature of Shadows. They prey on those who walk between worlds, who stray too far into Chaos.”
“But if these things are from Chaos, what was it doing here? You said that we were not in the Chaos.”
“No. It isn’t . . .” Ivan looked even more disturbed. “It shouldn’t have been here, no more than they should wander the Empire.”
“And why would it come to attack you?” I frowned, not liking the thoughts I was having.
“These things prey on the Walkers they encounter; it’s their nature to feed on us, consume our flesh—”
“But why you? Why would the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing be right after you show up chasing one of my family?”
“My Lady, I know nothing of—”
“Bullshit!” I barely had control of my anger now. “There’s no way this is a coincidence. You brought that thing here intentionally, or it followed you.”
Ivan shook his head. “No, I didn’t . . .”
Something clicked in my brain. What if the Shadow wasn’t following Ivan? Who else could he have followed?
The Shadows are coming . . .
Plural.
I pulled out my cell phone and started dialing Jacob. “Tell me,” I asked Ivan, “do these Shadows care if their meal is dead?”
“I’ve heard stories of them desecrating graves.”
“Of course, you have—”
“Hello?” Jacob’s voice was staticky and curt, like I caught him in the middle of something.
“Jacob, it’s Dana! We may have a problem with John Doe’s body.”
More static and unidentifiable noises on the line.
“Jacob?”
“Sorry,” Jacob said. “bzzt—d connect—bzzt—an’t talk.”
“Jacob, this is imp—”
“—bzzt—ck later. Th—bzzt—stage situ—bzzt—morgue.”
The line went dead. I tried calling back, and I was dumped right into voice mail.
“Crap. Jacob, Ivan was attacked by something called a Shadow, they’re murderous and possibly cannibalistic. Think Dawn of the Dead. They might go after John Doe’s body. Keep away from them, whatever they’re doing, and keep—”
The mailbox ran out of time and beeped at me. Jacob was about to engage these Shadows; it would be a hard to believe coincidence that a sudden hostage situation at the morgue wouldn’t involve them converging on John Doe’s body. And I was the only one even marginally equipped to handle them.
I also couldn’t leave Ivan here to be picked off by any stragglers. I looked at him and said, “You’re coming with me.”
SIXTEEN
I WENT BEHIND Ivan to help him to his feet. Then I put him in an armlock before unlocking the cuff on his left wrist. He didn’t fight me. I was grateful. If there had been a choice between subduing him and catching up with Jacob when my partner was in trouble, I would have let Ivan escape.
And that would have truly pissed me off.
I stepped him away from the pillar and snapped the cuff back on his left wrist. He looked at me—hands cuffed behind him—and asked, “Is that truly necessary?”
“Call it an incentive to keep you near the key. Come on.”
I grabbed his bicep and walked him upstairs and to the garage. I felt his Mark whenever I touched him now, skin or clothes, a strong hand barely stroking my back. I think it had been there before, a subtle sensation that I was now hyperaware of after feeling the c
harge that had slammed me the two times I had directly touched his Mark.
In the garage, I shoved him into the passenger seat of my Charger and peeled out to race to the county morgue. Ivan was silent as I drove. I tried Jacob’s cell twice and twice I was dumped into voice mail.
I felt a mass of conflicting emotions, a knotted ball that was hard for me to distinguish between where the panic over Jacob’s situation ended and my anger at Ivan began. I had forgotten the anger for a time, even though I’d been carrying it ever since I’d pulled this guy out of his armor.
He was your kinsman, wasn’t he?
John Doe wasn’t just some cryptic link to my past. The more I thought about it, the more I felt convinced he was my family by blood, and he’d been slaughtered before I knew the most basic things about him.
Of all the feelings knotted up in my gut—grief, embarrassment, irritation, fear, anger—anger won. My knuckles whitened on the wheel, but before I could act on the building rage, I pulled up to the morgue.
I had other priorities now.
The scene at the county morgue was worse than I expected.
A dozen patrol cars, flashers going, crowded the parking lot. I could see police cars on the street along the other entrances and blocking off traffic on the cross streets. I saw two ambulances idling down the street, safe from any immediate crossfire.
“Shit,” I whispered.
I pulled the Charger into the lot, and a young uniformed cop waved me off frantically as he started approaching. I stopped, lowered the driver’s side window and had my badge out before he reached me.
The guy saw the badge and pointed me toward the row of patrol cars blocking the parking lot. Uniformed cops surrounded the building, guns drawn; as I parked, I could see a line of people race from one of the exits, escorted by more cops in riot gear.
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