Long Dark Night

by Janci Patterson

“No, no,” Alicia said. “I wish we were together, but Drew has all these hang-ups.” She sighed. “It’s my body. I’m more than half a century older than him, but I still look like I’m sixteen. He says he can’t look at me without seeing a little girl.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Ugh. It doesn’t. Age isn’t the same as appearance—not when you’re dead. When you live like us, you just have to get over it.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But it’s still probably a good thing he’s not attracted to young girls.”

  Alicia rolled her eyes. “That’s the problem. It’s a symptom of what a nice guy he is. And if he weren’t a nice guy, I wouldn’t like him, but—”

  “It’s also the reason you can’t be together.”

  “Such is the tragedy of doomed romance.” She flopped back, her hair spreading among the pillows.

  “At least you had a good haircut,” I said.

  Alicia lifted a pillow in one hand and threw it at me. “Touché. So what do you miss most about being alive?”

  The question startled me. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Oh, come on. You can tell a lot about a person by what they miss.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sleep.”

  “Sleep is a good one,” Alicia said. “That probably means you think too much. Can’t turn the brain off, right?”

  “I guess so.” I didn’t know how anyone could be so casual about their undeath. “What do you miss most?”

  “Babies,” Alicia said. “The hope of having them, the ones I would have had. When I was a kid all I could envision myself doing was getting married and having kids of my own. I like the life I’ve had, but that’s still something I wish I could have done.”

  “I never thought much about kids,” I said.

  “I was heartbroken about it right after I died. Then I found other things to live for. But still. What’s your favorite thing about being undead?”

  “My what?” I said. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No way. There must be something you like about it.”

  I looked at her like she was crazy.

  “Mine is not having a period. I know that’s part of what makes me sterile, but really, there is nothing about that I minded losing.”

  “I suppose that is a perk,” I said. “But it’s not like we don’t have to deal with blood.”

  “Mmm,” Alicia said. “Also true. Were your legs shaved when you were turned? Because mine are hairy for eternity, but I always thought it would be nice to have a permanent shave.”

  “They were,” I said.

  Alica smiled. “Sweet.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It felt wrong to think of something I liked about my life, besides video games.

  “So are you from LA originally?” I asked.

  “England, actually,” she said. “Though I’ve lived with too many Americans. I’ve developed an accent, over the years.”

  It wasn’t until then that I realized she only took in breath to talk, just like Thorpe. “You were born in the thirties, you said?”

  “Nineteen twenty-five.”

  “You don’t talk like someone from the twenties.”

  “It’s like the accent,” she said. “I’ve changed over time.”

  “All those years—that’s enough time to get used to this?”

  Alicia shrugged. “I’ve lived much longer undead than I did as a beater. Some corpses never get over their deaths, but I don’t see the point in being miserable for eternity. This existence is worth something.” She leaned toward me. “How long has it been for you?”

  “Six months,” I said.

  She nodded like she understood. “It gets better.”

  I looked away. I didn’t know how to hope for that.

  “How’d you get turned?” Alicia asked.

  I froze. Even Jack hadn’t asked the question straight out like that.

  “Vance,” I said.

  “Oh,” Alicia said. Her face turned serious. “Sorry. Some corpses have really good turning stories. I guess yours isn’t one of them.”

  “Not really.” I was grateful she wasn’t going to push me to tell it.

  “Mine’s not that great either. I was raped.”

  My gut twisted. How could she just say a thing like that, out loud, like it was no big deal?

  She misinterpreted my silence. “I know, no surprise, right? I guess that’s how sixteen-year-old corpses are usually made.”

  I sat and curled my knees up onto the chair. “Who was it?” I asked.

  Alicia must have heard the strain in my voice, because she sat up, looking me in the eye. “Older brother of a schoolmate of mine,” she said. “We were holed up together during the bombing of London. We’d been flirting for a while, which I guess I thought made it my fault. I didn’t know he was dead until afterward. We didn’t have any heat, so we were all cold.”

  “But doesn’t it bother you now?”

  “It did for a long time,” Alicia said. “I was a mess, and then I was pissed. But I didn’t want that one thing about me to define my whole existence, you know?”

  “It’s kind of a big deal,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound defensive, but that’s how it came out.

  “It is. But if you can’t heal, it’ll poison the rest of your days.”

  Zeke had always acted like our days were already poisoned, and there was nothing we could do about it. But he was young, too. Would I feel that way about it, after years had passed? I supposed it depended on what happened between now and then. “I don’t think very many corpses under Vance have nice stories,” I said. “He turns most of us himself, and he’ll kill anyone else who does it.”

  “Drew says Vance mostly turns little girls, and men who look like him.”

  I nodded. “Zeke said that Vance doesn’t have a sexuality. It’s all about power.” I’d always known that about Vance, but for some reason, saying it out loud made me feel better. Like when Jack named what had happened to me.

  I still wasn’t ready to use that word.

  “Well, I’m glad you both got away from him,” Alicia said. “And I hope you never have to go back.”

  “What about Drew?” I asked. He’d been a friend of Zeke’s, but I’d never heard how he turned. “He’s not a Vance look-alike. Does he have a good story?”

  “Better,” Alicia said. “He fell in love with this girl. I guess I shouldn’t call her a girl—she was like twenty-five when she was turned. Lucky. Anyway, he talked her into changing him. He thought it would be awesome to live forever. You know, typical mortal idiocy.”

  “And she did it?”

  “Yeah, she did. Only they were both living under Vance. And she didn’t get permission.”

  I stared at her. “He didn’t kill them both?”

  “Just her. That’s the sad part of the story. Drew took it really hard, and then Vance took him under his wing. And I guess you know what that’s like.”

  “How long ago did that happen?”

  “Two years. He hasn’t had that long to adjust. I think that’s why he still has all these hang ups about my age. He’ll get it eventually.”

  “I hope he does,” I said. “So are you still here to watch Thorpe, or to be near Drew?”

  “A little of both. Thorpe isn’t a threat to the Old Ones, but it’s not like they mind if I hang around and keep an eye on him.”

  The Old Ones. The term sounded so ominous and archaic. “How old are they?”

  “Ancient, as far as I can tell. I haven’t spent a lot of time with them or anything. But I look pretty harmless. That’s why they sent me.”

  “And Thorpe doesn’t mind you spying on him?”

  “He only gets twitchy if I’m in regular contact. But I told them Thorpe wasn’t planning a revolution—against them or Vance—and they haven’t asked me for anything since.”

  “So what do you do, if you’re not working for them?”

  “Freelance writing,” Alicia poin
ted to the laptop on her desk. “Ad copy for cosmetics, mostly. It’s kind of hilarious how much companies love stuff about immortality and unchanging beauty.”

  “So you don’t work with the bodies?” I indicated downstairs.

  She wrinkled her nose. “No. Drew helps Thorpe with the embalming sometimes, but I steer clear. I might have to drink blood, but I don’t like to think about where it comes from.”

  I wish I didn’t have so much recent experience with exactly that. “I know what you mean.”

  “So don’t let the creepiness of the mortuary scare you away. Thorpe might make noise about making you earn your keep, but he won’t actually throw you out.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “He threatened to shoot me through the heart. Repeatedly.”

  “Don’t let him scare you,” Alicia said. “He always talks like that, but he’s been protecting us these last few months. He just worries about anything that might upset the balance of power around here.”

  I sat back in my chair with a sigh. “He’s right to worry,” I said. “I don’t think Vance is going to let me go.”

  Fifteen

  I wasn’t wrong. The sun hadn’t even completely set the next evening when I felt the group of corpses moving toward us. What at first felt like a buzzing formed into the images of seven male corpses, seated and grouped together as if riding in a van. Beyond them, I could feel more buzzing, all moving in the general direction of the mortuary.

  Downstairs, I found Thorpe already readying his rifle. Beside it on the entryway table, he’d laid out two pistols and a shotgun, and was meticulously checking and loading each.

  “There are corpses coming,” I said.

  “No kidding,” Thorpe replied. “Give the girl a medal.”

  “Is it Vance?” I asked. “Can you feel him?”

  Thorpe was silent for a moment, and I nearly crawled out of my skin before he said, “No. Not him.”

  “It’s Vance’s men though, isn’t it?” Drew asked, coming up the hallway with Alicia and Jack right behind him, carrying a second rifle. “Is Delia with them?”

  Thorpe cocked his shotgun. “Who else?”

  Jack moved to my side and put his arm around me. I didn’t flinch at his touch—it felt natural, comforting. I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get used to that. “It’ll be okay,” Jack said. “We’re both dead now. If he wanted to kill us, he would have already, don’t you think?”

  I did think, but it wasn’t a comfort. “There are worse things than dying,” I said.

  Jack nodded resolutely. “I’m not going to let them take you.”

  I would have found that comforting if I’d believed he had any choice in the matter.

  “Can you tell how many?” Alicia asked. She was addressing Thorpe, not me, but I focused on the ones beyond the first group. They were farther away than corpses I’d been able to sense in the past, but in concentrating, I managed to pull them into focus. “Ten?” I said. “Twelve?”

  “Fifteen,” Thorpe said. “They’re traveling in a caravan of three vehicles.”

  I nodded. That didn’t sound wrong. “What do we do?”

  Thorpe leveled his shotgun at my chest. I knew enough about guns to know that this one wasn’t accurate, but if he’d loaded it with bird shot the spray pattern was bound to pierce my gland.

  “Whoa!” Jack shouted. “Slow down.”

  He went to move in front of me and Thorpe pointed the shotgun at him. “What we do now,” he said, “is march the two of you out the front door and let Vance have you.”

  “No,” Alicia and Jack both said together.

  “We have the superior position,” Drew said. “And home turf advantage.” He took Thorpe’s rifle. “I’ll go for the other guns. We can make a stand. Fifteen against five isn’t so bad with the advantage we have.”

  And as if Thorpe wasn’t standing right there with a shotgun pointed at us, Drew handed both Jack and me a pistol.

  I held it awkwardly, pointing it at the ground. I knew enough to know you weren’t supposed to point a gun at people you didn’t want to shoot, but not much else. For all my hours playing first person shooters, I didn’t know how to load a real gun, or how to aim it properly. I didn’t even know how to tell if the safety was on.

  Judging by the way Jack was staring at his, he didn’t have any more of a clue than I did.

  Thorpe waved his shotgun in the air, apparently not concerned about shooting any or all of us. “This is my house,” he shouted. “Doesn’t anyone care what I think about it?”

  “Of course we do,” Alicia said as she and Drew turned the table back into a barricade so that we’d have the length of the hallway to dust the oncoming corpses. “And we’ve all heard your opinion. Now help before they arrive.”

  Thorpe gave me a withering look, but then he sighed and slung his shotgun over his shoulder. He pointed at Jack and Drew. “You two take the back door,” he said. “I’ll take the entryway. Alicia and April get the back mortuary entrance. Take cover behind the hearse.”

  Alicia nodded and took a rifle from Drew. Jack squeezed my hand, and then she and I headed out through the garage, where Alicia grabbed the keys to the hearse and parked it sideways across the garage door opening so we could take cover behind the length of it.

  “Want me to show you how to use that thing?” she asked, pointing to my gun.

  “Is it that obvious I don’t know what I’m doing?” I asked. “I play a lot of shooters, but I don’t know anything about the real thing.”

  “You know how to point it,” she said. “And how not to wave it in my face. That’s something. Hold it like this.” She demonstrated how to steady the gun across the top of the hearse while using the car to shelter my body. “Your instincts will tell you to duck, but you don’t need to. You can take a bullet to the head. Just keep your chest covered, and try not to overexpose your neck. The right weapon can take your head clean off.

  “If anyone comes after you, unload the clip. Aim for the chest—everything else is useless. This is the least useful gun in these circumstances—it’s not that accurate and doesn’t scatter—but at least it’s loaded with hollow points. The bullet will spread when it hits the chest. It might not get through the ribs, but you don’t have to be as accurate.”

  I gripped the gun handle. “But if it doesn’t get through the ribs—”

  “It might,” Alicia said. “Depends on the spread pattern. That’s why I’m telling you to unload. Don’t try to conserve bullets. We have more.” She passed me a box of bullets and then showed me how to reload, but I wasn’t at all confident I was going to be able to do it with any speed. Or at all.

  Alicia bent over her own rifle, and I wished that real guns were as simple as ones in games, and I could just push Y to reload.

  “How close are they?” she asked.

  “Less than a mile,” I said. “I think.” I reached out, searching for the corpses. They were driving in tight formation, now, winding up the road that led to the mortuary. The crystal outlines of the corpses felt more solid now, like the individual droplets had congealed together into a coating. It was similar to what I’d felt from the corpses near the fountain and in the compound, but more complete. “I’m not sure what’s going on,” I said. “There’s something different about them.”

  “Yeah,” Alicia said. “Delia’s probably controlling them.”

  I stared at her. “That’s a thing?”

  “It is,” she said. “You don’t know how?”

  Another thing Thorpe should have told me about. “No,” I said.

  Except that time at the fountain, when I’d wished the corpse away.

  Had I controlled him?

  The corpses drew closer. I had a sudden impulse to hide in the hearse. I could try to take Alicia’s keys. I could drive away.

  But if it was me the corpses were after, they’d chase me. I didn’t know how to drive—and I’d be in a hearse. They’d catch me in no time.

  Besides, I’d brought this down on Al
icia and Drew and Thorpe. I’d guided Vance, or Delia, or whoever else here. And if I ran now, I’d be running for the rest of my life.

  “I hope the others are ready,” Alicia said, and she took up position behind the car, rifle over her shoulder. I stood behind the rear tires, hiding behind the hearse.

  “I can see them coming,” I said. “I can target them for you.”

  The cars pulled to a stop outside the mortuary, and half the corpses headed toward the front door, while the other half headed around the back toward us.

  “They’re here,” I said. “They should be in view in three . . . two . . . one—” I steadied my hands against the car as the first corpse came into view beneath the outdoor lights, and Alicia promptly shot him in the center of his chest. The corpse—a tall, thin man, who was uncharacteristically bleach-blond—stumbled back a few steps. And then he smiled, raised his gun, and returned fire.

  Something fell to the dirt at his feet, and I squinted to see what it was in the dim light.

  Oh, no.

  It looked like a bullet.

  “Damn,” Alicia said. “Bullet-proof vests.”

  She put another round into the corpse’s neck, but it wasn’t enough to take his head off. His head lolled back momentarily, and he nodded forward until his muscle and bone wove back together.

  And then he unloaded at the hearse. Glass shattered. I ducked down behind the back of the car. I hadn’t shot a single round, but if we couldn’t penetrate their skin, it wasn’t going to make a difference. More corpses closed rapidly in on us. I could feel them advancing from the other side of the hearse.

  I couldn’t know if they were all similarly protected, but I had to assume they were. This wasn’t working. They were going to overtake us. Alicia took cover with me behind the hearse, and I saw her look up at the door to the inside, contemplating if we could make a break for it.

  We couldn’t risk it. And inside, they’d still be wearing those vests. We needed to get out of here, now.

  “Give me the keys,” I said.

  Alicia looked up at me. “What?”

  “The keys to the hearse,” I said. “Give them to me.”

  Alicia reached into her pocket and tossed me the set of keys. And I wasted no time climbing into the driver’s side while Alicia climbed over the broken glass in the open back. Alicia didn’t bother to ask if I knew how to drive, and I wasn’t worried about my lack of knowledge. I understood the basics. Steer with wheel, press on gas.