Long Dark Night

by Janci Patterson

  The car, as it turned out, was a minivan. “I guess that’s what you get when you don’t have a reservation,” Jack said.

  “If it gets us to Baker, I don’t care.” We got in the car and pulled onto the road. I still hadn’t sensed any corpses, but I made Jack drive through the city streets to the next freeway exit south, just in case.

  Once we were on the road, I relaxed a little.

  “This car is on my credit record, now,” Jack said. “So if the police start looking for me—for the murder or on Vance’s word—they’ll be looking for it.”

  “We’ll have to get it off the road as soon as possible, once we get where we’re going.”

  “Where are we going, anyway?” Jack asked. “Who’s in Baker?”

  I carefully slipped Zeke’s soaking note out of my pocket, easing it open so the paper wouldn’t tear. Give the money to Thorpe, it said. “Zeke knew a guy there who could get us out of the country.”

  “Why didn’t you go before now?”

  It was a good question. Zeke said we’d go, but I’d had the impression he was waiting on something. “I don’t know. I always thought he was getting the money together, but it turns out he’d given it to you already.”

  “Maybe it’s only enough for one person,” Jack said.

  He was probably right. “We’ll have to see when we get there. If he needs more, can you get it?”

  “I could probably pull out a cash advance on my credit card,” Jack said. “But it’d be dangerous to leave more of a trail.”

  I nodded. “We won’t do that unless we have to.”

  As we crossed over the Nevada border, I closed my eyes, reaching out behind us, searching for corpses. I felt the glimpse of one throwing dice inside a casino, but he slipped away behind us. All around me was emptiness.

  I still couldn’t sense Jack. I looked over at him. As we drove out past the casino lights, he flipped on his high beams. His eyes were glued to the road.

  “Do you hate me yet?” I asked. “For doing this to you?”

  Jack didn’t even pause. “No. Besides, it was Zeke who told you to find me, right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “It was Zeke who gave me the letter and the money. I imagine he thought that you would be safe with me, and you are.”

  “He shouldn’t have done that to you, either.”

  “What would you have done, if he hadn’t?”

  I thought about that. I would have had nowhere to go after I escaped—no car, nothing. I could have tried to get out of town, but I’d probably have failed.

  “You should be pissed, anyway,” I said.

  “Oh, I am,” Jack said. “I’m pissed that no one’s taken this psychopath down. But not at you, April. None of this is your fault.”

  I leaned my head back. Out the passenger window, I could see stars stretching across the sky. The farther we got from the city lights, the more of them blinked into existence.

  Jack seemed set on protecting me, even now, after what I’d done to him. I could talk him out of it, but where would that leave us?

  Jack shifted his hands on the wheel. “You don’t really know what we’re going to find in Baker, do you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Someone named Thorpe. Maybe he’ll help.”

  “Well, Zeke sent you to me, and I helped you. So I guess he had good judgment.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “We’ll see.”

  If not, we were about to drag yet another innocent person into this hell.

  Twelve

  We rolled into Baker around ten o’clock. The town lined the highway and backed up to a ledge of sandstone cliff. The dotted streetlights dimmed the stars. Just off the freeway, a huge, lighted display towered above the flat, low buildings. Baker, California, a billboard boasted, Home of the World’s Tallest Thermometer.

  Jack pulled off the freeway and toward an all-night gas station, then pulled out his cell phone. “You have an address for this Thorpe?”

  I pulled out Zeke’s note and read him the address from the soft, worn paper, and Jack plugged it into his phone. I watched as instead of a residential address, the GPS pulled up a matching address for Starnes Mortuary.

  “A mortuary in the middle of nowhere,” Jack said. “That sounds like the kind of place a corpse would live.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Vance likes to keep us packed together in urban areas where we can blend. Living by yourself in a small town would make it hard to avoid rumors. Plus, the mortuary is a cliché.”

  “We’re two states away. You think Vance doesn’t know about this guy?”

  “Maybe he isn’t a corpse.”

  Jack shook his head. “I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

  As we drove along the frontage road, I pressed out with my senses, looking for corpses. I didn’t feel any—which was starting to mean less and less to me, after Jack and our run-in with that girl in Vegas.

  I sensed the corpses a mile or so from the mortuary. There were two of them—a guy and a girl—and they were a dozen yards above our elevation, which meant they were either uphill or in the upper floors of a building. The girl was small—probably about my size, and the guy was built like a football player. I hoped we didn’t have to have any kind of violent run-in with him.

  “We should only have another mile to go,” I said to Jack. “But there are definitely corpses.”

  “We’re doing this?”

  I hesitated. If not this, then what? “Yes,” I said. “We are.”

  Jack nodded resolutely, and soon we rounded a bend, and the mortuary appeared up ahead.

  We couldn’t have missed it, even without my senses. The white building had four Grecian columns in front, and a large parking lot. It had windows on two levels, and bushes lining the front walkway. Jack pulled the car right up to the front doors. The corpses were still above us. I felt them moving toward the windows in the top floor of the mortuary. As far as I could tell, all the lights were out.

  “What do we do now?” Jack asked.

  I shrugged. The corpses were up, anyway. “Knock, I guess.”

  We both climbed out of the car and walked up the front steps. I knocked once. No answer, though the corpses above us had reached the windows. Twice. Still no answer. I tried the door handle. It turned, so I pushed the door open and peered in.

  The door opened onto a long entryway, lined with framed paintings and uncomfortable-looking loveseats.

  A man knelt behind a barricade at the far end of the hallway, with a rifle pointed directly at me. He braced the gun against his shoulder, holding it with both hands. His head cocked to the side, staring at my chest down the barrel. A little red light appeared on my chest, just below my heart.

  I took an involuntary step sideways, but the man’s laser sight followed me, hovering over my chest, slightly off center. A bullet to the heart—or bizarre gland, I guessed—would kill me dead as fast as a stake, and this guy knew where to shoot.

  And damn if that red light didn’t look a lot more terrifying in real life than it did on a screen.

  I shoved Jack back, stumbling to the side to get out of the doorway and away from the gun. I stepped around the corner, outside the door.

  “Wait!” I yelled in. “We’re not here to hurt you!”

  “Sure,” the man shouted from within. “Next you’ll tell me Vance didn’t send you.”

  Jack grabbed me by the shoulders and hauled me away from the door frame. “Get away from the wall,” he said. “A bullet could go right through it.” He dragged me off the front porch and behind some bushes.

  I didn’t hear the man coming after us, but I wasn’t going to step up to the doorway again, either. Instead, I yelled toward the door, hoping he could hear me. “We’re running from Vance. Zeke sent me. He said Thorpe could get me to Paris.”

  There was a long silence. Jack’s eyes jerked upward, and I followed his gaze to an upstairs window. The curtains fluttered, but all the lights were out. I couldn’t see her, b
ut I could feel one of the two corpses crouching on the other side of the window, hands now braced in a position not unlike the man with the rifle. Ten feet or so to her right, the male corpse crouched in a similar position, behind a second window.

  I hugged tighter to the bushes. “They have guns up there, too,” I said.

  “Your friend was wrong,” the man inside finally shouted. “I don’t do that anymore. Go back to Vance and tell him he won, all right? I won’t funnel his people out of the country, and he’ll leave me the hell alone. Got it?”

  So this was Thorpe? I wondered if Zeke had known what kind of welcome I’d receive. He might have had good taste sending me to Jack, but I was questioning his judgment now.

  Jack stepped farther into the bushes alongside me. Neither of our chests was exposed to the windows, so they shouldn’t be able to kill us. If they wanted to scare us, though, they could put the bullets through our heads.

  “Is he a corpse, or a human?” Jack asked me.

  I thought about that. I couldn’t sense him, but I also hadn’t smelled dinner the moment I opened the door.

  “Corpse,” I said. Another one I couldn’t keep track of. I wished he was a beater.

  “We’re really not with Vance,” I shouted. “Please call your people off.”

  “My people?”

  “Upstairs. Look, you’re obviously very well defended here. If Vance was going to send people after you, don’t you think there would be more of us?”

  “Well defended,” Thorpe shouted back. “I like that. Be sure to include that in your report.”

  I swore and turned to Jack. “You got any ideas?”

  Jack smiled.

  Before I could stop him, he stood from behind the bushes and strode toward the doorway.

  “You are not Wolverine,” I hissed at him. “Get back here.”

  Jack just held up a hand for me to wait. He crouched on the steps, making a shot at his heart nearly impossible. “I’m going to stand up,” he shouted. “And I’d very much like for you not to shoot me. But I understand that you’re the one with the power here, so I’m just going to let you make that choice, okay?”

  “Don’t do this,” I whispered at Jack. “We can figure something else out.”

  “Trust me,” Jack whispered back. “I’m used to talking people off ledges.” But he had a dangerous look in his eye, like someone who thought he was immortal.

  Our bodies might not decay, but we were far from that.

  I moved a step closer to him. “You usually talk people down over the phone, right? Or at least, not when they have a gun pointed at you?”

  Jack ignored me. He walked up the front steps slowly and deliberately. “I’m stepping up to the door, now,” he said.

  “You’re going to let me shoot you?”

  “Go ahead. We came here looking for help, but if you’re going to send us back to Vance, you might as well shoot us right now.”

  “My pleasure!” Thorpe responded.

  Another silence followed. I could feel the girl upstairs lowering her gun and moving away from the window. She walked toward the back of the building and then approached where the male corpse still crouched. He turned around to look at her.

  Jack picked up one of the wrought-iron chairs from the veranda and held it over his chest. He took the final steps up to the front door. A tiny red light flickered over the chair for the briefest moment.

  Then Thorpe shot him in the leg. I jumped at the sound. Jack’s bone snapped from beneath him and he fell. He took cover behind the stairs, leaning over his knee, watching it heal through the tear in his pants.

  “Awesome,” Jack said.

  The male corpse upstairs lowered his gun as well and stood, following the girl. Together they descended a set of stairs, legs pumping back and forth as they switchbacked.

  “There’s two more coming,” I whispered to Jack.

  “Okay!” Jack shouted. “Let’s try this again.” He crawled toward the door, dragging the chair along with him.

  “You’re really going to do that?” I hissed. “He shot you.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “But I’m still here. You have any better ideas?”

  I didn’t, and I also couldn’t let him do this alone. It took all my willpower to drag myself out of the bushes and stand next to him, but I did it.

  My hands shook as I stepped up next to Jack. Ahead, I could see Thorpe hiding behind his barricade—formed from an overturned table—the barrel of his very large rifle pointed at us.

  Thorpe couldn’t shoot us both simultaneously, but help was coming, so we wouldn’t outnumber him for long.

  “Dude, seriously,” Jack said. “All we want to do is talk. And maybe pay you for your services.”

  Thorpe scoffed. “Only services I perform are for dead people,” he said. “And you two sure as hell don’t count.”

  Semantics aside, if we didn’t get in here, we were going to have to find a different place to stay before sun up, and a source of blood, probably for both of us. I’d left the bottle of Jack’s behind.

  And then, even if we succeeded at that, we’d be left with no plan.

  “You shipped a friend of my brother’s out of the country,” I said. “We can pay.”

  The other two corpses reached the bottom of the stairs, and the corpse girl stepped out of the stairwell behind Thorpe. Her long, black hair swished around her waist. I wished I’d had that kind of hair, when I was turned.

  “Thorpe,” she said. “If they want to talk, let’s talk.”

  “They want to talk,” Thorpe said. “I want to dust them.”

  “And I don’t want to sweep out the entryway again,” the girl said, putting a hand on her hip. “Put it away. You can always shoot them later, but you can’t shoot first and then talk to them.”

  The male corpse spoke from the hallway. “Unless you miss.”

  I only hoped that Thorpe didn’t have particularly good aim, though the laser sight suggested otherwise.

  The man at the end of the hallway hesitated, then lowered his gun. “Fine,” he said. “But I’ve got a handgun here at my side. I can shoot you at close range just as easily.”

  If we’d come all this way to be gunned down, at least it wasn’t by Vance.

  Thirteen

  As Thorpe climbed out from behind the table, the girl with the shiny black hair waved at us. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Alicia.”

  I wanted to be wary of her—she had just told Thorpe he could shoot us later—but her smile looked open and friendly, as if she expected we’d be friends.

  I didn’t have any friends, unless Jack counted.

  “I’m April,” I said. “This is Jack.”

  I indicated toward him and found Jack bent over his knee, inspecting the flesh. He looked up at me with a grin on his face. “That’s incredible. It never gets old.”

  “I beg to differ,” I said.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Alicia asked.

  Thorpe rolled his eyes at Alicia. “Don’t get too friendly. They’re not staying.”

  I blinked at her.

  Did she mean blood? In Vance’s territory, everyone ate their own. Nobody shared. We were given only what we needed to avoid bloodlust.

  “You just—hand those out?” I asked finally.

  Thorpe snorted. “See? They’ve been here two minutes and they’re already looking for a handout.”

  Alicia gave him a withering look. “I offered,” she said. “You tried to shoot them.”

  The other man came down the stairs behind her, and I stared at him. His hair was buzzed close to the scalp. His line-backer build was familiar, now. It had been months since I’d seen him, and I hadn’t expected to find him here.

  He was supposed to be in Paris. “Drew,” I said.

  Even Thorpe took his eyes off us for a split-second to look at Drew.

  “You know her?” the girl asked him.

  And though I was afraid he wouldn’t remember me, Drew smiled. “Hey, April.�
�

  I shook my head at him. “Zeke said you left the country.”

  “I tried,” Drew said. “This is as far as I got.”

  I stood still. If Drew hadn’t really gone to Paris—if Thorpe was really done shipping people over—then we’d come all this way for nothing.

  “This is Thorpe,” Alicia said, putting a hand on his shoulder and nodding at the rifle. “Now that we know they’re friends of Drew’s, you can put that away, right?”

  Thorpe leaned over the butt of his gun. “Friends from his days under Vance, right? They aren’t welcome.”

  Drew wisely didn’t answer the question. “You came looking for a ticket out?”

  I nodded and pulled the envelope out of my pocket and held up the bills. “See? I wasn’t lying. We can pay.” But if Drew was here, it didn’t matter. Once the plane is out of the gate it doesn’t matter what you’re willing to pay for a ticket.

  “Sorry, girl,” Thorpe said. “Vance won. I don’t transport stiffs anymore. Just the bodies of the actual dead. You can see that your friend is still here. I didn’t send him off, and I won’t send you either, so you can just run back to Vance and tell him Thorpe is behaving himself and he doesn’t need to send out an army.”

  I swore. This was a dead end, but even if Drew hadn’t made it out of the country, he was standing right in front of me. Alive.

  “We can’t go back to Vance,” I said. “Can you help us?”

  I looked over at Jack, but he was too busy bending his fingers entirely back against his hand and listening to the bones crack and then twist back together.

  He was bound and determined to believe he was a super hero. And I guessed after jumping off an overpass and being shot in the leg, there was little I could do to convince him otherwise.

  Thorpe opened his mouth to say something, but Alicia talked right over him. “Of course,” she said. “Come sit down in the parlor.”

  We followed Alicia into a large, empty room which I assumed was used for funeral receptions. Chairs lined the walls in neat little stacks. Collapsed tables leaned along the wall where we came in. Alicia and Drew pulled down some chairs and set them up for us.

  Thorpe grabbed his own chair and settled into a corner, with his rifle ready in front of him. Alicia turned her back to him and rolled her eyes so I could see. “Sorry,” she mouthed.