Long Dark Night

by Janci Patterson

  I just didn’t know how to drive well.

  This, I demonstrated when I gunned it first without moving an inch, then figured out how to put it in drive. My next stomp on the gas pedal sent the hearse careening forward, hitting the edge of the garage opening and taking off a one-foot section of drywall.

  Thorpe was going to kill me, but he couldn’t do that if Vance’s people killed me first. I turned furiously on the wheel and gunned it again, flying out of the garage and running three corpses down in the process.

  The others scattered, gunshots ringing from all directions. But my chest was protected behind the dash, behind the wheel, behind the door. A bullet took me in the head, another in the shoulder, another in the neck. One of my eyes lost sight, but I kept my good eye open and trained ahead of me, and my hands on the wheel as my body splintered apart and then grew back together. I wove back and forth—such as I could in the massive tank of a vehicle—mowing down as many as I could while still heading for the front of the mortuary.

  Alicia was in the back, rifle out the broken window, firing away.

  “Can you call Thorpe?” I shouted back at her. “Have them meet us out front, and we can all get out?”

  Alicia shouted back. “You think he’s going to answer his phone right now?”

  She had a point. Jack might, if he knew I was the one calling him. But I realized I didn’t know his phone number.

  I swore, and swerved the hearse around the corner of the mortuary fast enough that the back tires actually got drift on the dirt.

  And right in front of me, Delia looked up in horror right before she went down beneath the hood of my oncoming car.

  I slammed on the brakes. If she was controlling these corpses, then in order to take them out, we needed to get her, not them. After that Thorpe would be able to take control of them. I might even be able to do it, in a pinch, though I would have preferred time to practice.

  I opened the door and jumped out of the car, keeping the hearse between me and the other corpses.

  From beneath the car, Delia shot something at me—instead of a bullet, a dart hit the ground, cracking open and splattering liquid all over the driveway.

  What the hell was she doing? A dart that size wasn’t going to pierce my heart and my metabolism wouldn’t let me be taken down with a poison or tranquilizer.

  Would it?

  I advanced on her. Delia was trapped beneath the car, the tires resting on top of her legs. She looked even smaller than I remembered, though that could have been the burned paste of her calves that was even now fighting to regrow beneath the tires. Alicia kept shooting, keeping the other corpses off me, even catching a couple of them in the neck.

  But I didn’t have more than a moment before they’d be able to get around her.

  I heard the click as she loaded another dart into the gun. I did the only thing I could think of: I grabbed the gun out of her hand and stabbed the dart into her neck. Whatever the liquid did, she’d tried to use it on me, which meant it would almost certainly work on her.

  Delia scrambled beneath the car, groaning and grunting as if she were trying to pull her own legs off to escape. Her hands gripped a sharp rock, and she turned it on herself, which I’d give her was a reasonable plan. Another dart fell out of her pocket as she sawed away, not even succeeding at breaking the skin. All around us, gunfire rang.

  And then I felt it. In my mind, little crystal drops sprouted all over her body.

  I could sense her.

  Delia screamed and reached out at me, but the droplets suddenly spread, coating her body like they had the others. She froze in place, still stuck beneath the hearse.

  Still as death.

  All around me corpses froze in various states of picking themselves up off the ground and moving toward the car or the front of the house.

  Alicia scrambled out of the back of the hearse. “Did you do it?” she asked. “Did you get her?”

  I stared down at the dart gun in my hand. “I did something.”

  A moment later, I heard a gunshot toward the house. I walked away from the hearse to find Thorpe in front of the mortuary, his shotgun on his shoulder, popping frozen corpses in the chest, their shirts and vests torn open. One by one, they crumbled to dust.

  Alicia followed me up the drive. “What happened?”

  “I stabbed Delia with her own tranquilizer,” I said. “And it gave Thorpe an opening to control her, and the people she’d been controlling.”

  Alicia gave me a skeptical look, and I couldn’t blame her. Tranquilizers didn’t work on corpses. But Vance must have developed drugs to help him deal with corpses like us. Lyle’s research, I supposed, was proving to be good for something.

  Drew and Jack came around the house, both looking relieved to see us alive. Another shot rang out. The corpses fell over one at a time, their bodies dusting and blowing away in the wind.

  “Wait!” I shouted at Thorpe.

  Thorpe took one more shot, then stopped with two left standing.

  “We shouldn’t just kill them,” I said. “They might know something important.”

  Thorpe reloaded and shot the second to last one in the chest before I could protest again.

  He pointed to the last man standing. “If any of them knew anything, I hope it was him.”

  Alicia sighed. “Can we get inside?” she asked.

  I looked around. No one had come up the road during the fight, and hopefully we were far enough outside the city for the gunshots to go unnoticed as well.

  But all the same, we’d made a lot of noise.

  “Sure,” Thorpe said. “Just let me take care of the little girl.” He headed off toward the hearse. Toward Delia.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t kill her. Can’t we tie her up or something?” She was dangerous. I knew that. But Vance had done the same thing to her as he had to me.

  Thorpe waved a dismissive hand at me, but Drew hurried to catch up with him. “She’s right,” he said, catching Thorpe by the shoulder. “We can put her in one of the lockers. That’ll hold her.”

  Thorpe rolled his eyes. “What are we going to do with her? Invite her to stay? Seems to be the new thing around here.”

  “No,” Drew said. “But if you kill her, Vance will come after you.”

  “I figure he will,” Thorpe said. “But I also figure he’s already coming. I told you we shouldn’t have let those two stay.”

  Alicia put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s not your fault,” she said.

  Thorpe snorted. “Like hell.”

  “That’s not fair,” Alicia said.

  “Fair or not, she brought this down on us.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “I endanger everyone around me. Just ask Jack.”

  Jack shook his head at me, but he didn’t verbally deny it.

  Everyone was quiet then.

  “We’ll lock her up,” Drew said.

  “Fine,” Thorpe said. “But you’ll have to drive the car off of her, first. And then you lot can carry them in.”

  “You can walk them just as well,” Drew said.

  “I could,” Thorpe agreed. “But I won’t.” And he marched around the side of the house, past the hearse, to take care of the few corpses that remained.

  Sixteen

  After helping the others carry Delia and the other corpse inside—both of them with limbs so stiff they might as well have been made out of wood—I went back outside to find Thorpe. He’d driven two of the cars around the back of the mortuary, and was working on the hearse. I waited for him to park and get out.

  “What are you going to do with the cars?” I asked. “Won’t people ask questions?”

  “Maybe,” Thorpe said. “Drew and I should drive them farther out over the next couple of days and leave them. For now I just wanted to get them off the road.”

  “I need your help,” I said.

  Thorpe eyed me. “You’ve got nerve, I’ll give you that. I believe I’ve made it clear I have no intention of helping you. I
should have shot you in the chest the first time I saw you. We all would have been better off.”

  “You could have killed me any time,” I said. “The fact that you haven’t leads me to believe you’re not going to.”

  “Girl,” Thorpe said, “I’ve been living out here for decades. Vance hasn’t killed me yet. But never for a moment have I thought that means he isn’t going to get around to it someday.”

  That should have scared me, but it didn’t. Maybe because I’d spent so long living in terror of a man who claimed he was trying to help me. Something about being told outright that I didn’t matter made me feel safe.

  Probably unwisely so. But still, I wasn’t going to give up. “I need you to teach me how you froze those corpses.”

  “Oh, that,” Thorpe said, slamming the door to one of the cars. “No. Not happening.”

  “I’ve already put you in danger,” I said. “Neither of us can help that now. If you help me learn, I could become a tool that might one day save your life.”

  Thorpe rolled his eyes. “As if anything you could do would keep Vance from descending on us.”

  “So what do you want to do?” I asked. “Run?”

  Thorpe shook his head. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “Paris,” I said. “Once we’re gone, Vance won’t come after us there.”

  Thorpe turned and faced me, staring me down. “There’s a Vance in Paris,” he said. “His name is Michel, and he’s a ruthless bastard who’ll kill you as soon as look at you.”

  I stared at him. “But you sent people over there. You sent them where they’d be safe.”

  “I sent them where the local corpse lord won’t have an immediate inclination to murder them on sight. Normal corpses can fit in, join the fold, so to speak. You and me?” Thorpe laughed. “We’re a threat, wherever we go. The only reason Vance has let me live this long is because he likes keeping his conquests around to humiliate them.” Thorpe turned and walked back toward the house, like that was the final word on the subject.

  “I’m not a threat,” I said. “Not unless you teach me to be.”

  Thorpe paused. “And why would I want to make you a threat?”

  “Because Vance humiliated you,” I said. “And you’d love to see someone take him down.”

  He spun around and doubled over laughing. “And that someone is you?”

  I pressed my lips together. The small, mewling part of me whimpered in the back of my mind. Of course it wasn’t. I was nothing. I was helpless. I was Vance’s plaything, nothing more.

  The rest of me wanted that part to shut up.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Thorpe smiled, though there was something snide and mean about it. He watched me for a long moment, and I forced myself to hold still, not to cringe away under his gaze. I’d never been able to do that with Vance.

  Maybe controlling corpses wasn’t the only thing I could stand to practice.

  Thorpe shook his head and turned. “Come on,” he said. He led me in through the back door of the mortuary, into a room with metal tables and strange looking instruments and a drain in the center of the floor.

  Even though it was clean and smelled of bleach, underneath the chemicals, I could smell the blood. It had seeped into the grout of the floor, the edges of the table legs, the crevices of the hoses and nozzles.

  No amount of cleaning would ever get it out.

  Thorpe led me over to the metal bank of body lockers where we’d stored Delia and her minion. The refrigerator units hummed. I could feel the frozen corpse, lying flat on his back. His image was solid instead of dotted, and had been since Thorpe first took him over.

  “Are there . . . other bodies in those?” I asked, indicating to the other lockers.

  “Not right now. It’s been quiet the last few days. Except for you.”

  I remembered the way Lexa smelled after she died, the way her blood curdled. Working here would be like working at a restaurant that only served spoiled food. “Doesn’t it bother you to work with rotten bodies?”

  “You mean the smell? I’ve gotten used to it. As I work, the bodies get more preserved, and the smell gets better. It’s always a relief to finish.”

  “But you don’t eat them. You can’t.”

  “No. We get our blood from the blood bank, same as everyone else.”

  “Why work with bodies at all, then?”

  Thorpe shrugged. “It’s what I did before I was turned. That was a long time ago, though. Didn’t have refrigeration back then, or any of the fancy toys.”

  I was about to ask how long ago that was, when Thorpe cut me off. “We’re not here to chat,” he said. “I’m going to let go of that corpse in there, so you’d better get ready.”

  At once, the smooth image of the corpse in my mind fragmented into thousands of tiny dots, like water beading up on an oiled surface. The corpse sat up quick, banging his head on the top of the refrigerator. He grabbed what must have been an upper rack, rattling it with his hands. I could hear the beating of his feet against the back refrigerator wall.

  I took a step backward and ran right into Thorpe, who pushed me forward again. “What do I do now?” I asked.

  “What are you here for? Take control of him.”

  “And how exactly do I do that?”

  The corpse howled again, and then all movement stopped. The crystal drops remained.

  “Did you take control of him again?” I asked.

  “No,” Thorpe said. “He’s just wising up.”

  “Let me out!” the corpse shouted. “I swear I won’t hurt you.”

  Thorpe scoffed. “Like to see him try.”

  “Please!” the corpse shouted. “Let me out!”

  Thorpe sighed. “Are you going to ask inane questions all day, or are you going to try?”

  “Fine,” I said, focusing on the image of the corpse in my mind. I tried to slide the tiny dew drops around in my mind, push them together to make them smooth as glass. But they didn’t move.

  “Vance made me do it,” the corpse shouted. “I swear! Let me out of here and I’ll tell you everything.”

  I looked back at Thorpe. “That could be true, couldn’t it? Vance could have done this to him.”

  Thorpe rolled his eyes. “Even Vance can’t control every motion of all his people constantly. Trust me. Delia might have had control when they arrived, but if this guy is working under Vance, he’s done some things of his own free will.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” I said.

  “Don’t be stupid, girl,” Thorpe said. “There’s always a choice. Sometimes there just isn’t a good one.”

  My knees shook. I hadn’t had a choice about what Vance did to me. But I supposed I’d made the choice to stay with Zeke. I’d made the choice to save Jack’s life. I’d made the choice to come here.

  The corpse gave up his pleading and began to bang on the door to the locker again. His feet beat against the back wall.

  “Get him,” Thorpe said.

  “I’m trying,” I said.

  “Try harder or he’s going to bust my damn refrigerator.”

  I focused in on the corpse’s face. The silvery dots peppered his nose and cheeks—it wasn’t just his hair that made him different. His face was too wide to be a proper Vance look-alike. Perhaps that was why he’d ended up in Vegas with Delia.

  I concentrated on the marks across the bridge of his nose. When Thorpe took over, those dots widened until they covered the whole area—no gaps between them. I drew at one of them with my mind, trying to pull it out to touch another.

  A thin, silvery thread drew out of that dot, connecting it to the one next to it, and the one next to that. The corpse kept banging on the refrigerator, but I concentrated on his face, pulling the rest of the image flat until his facial features held perfectly still.

  I recognized the web-like pattern I’d made; I’d sensed it on corpses before, when I was in Vance’s territory, and again when the cars of Delia’s corpses approached Thorpe’s. I
pulled on the points of connection, and succeeded in drawing open the corpse’s mouth, though he jerked it shut again a moment later.

  There were levels of control. That’s why sometimes I’d felt the spidery webs, and sometimes a full, smooth surface.

  The corpse jerked on the upper rack, and I heard it crash down inside of the refrigerator.

  “Progress,” Thorpe said. “But you might have started with his hands.”

  I concentrated on the rest of his image, stretching out the silvery web until it spiraled over his whole body and then smoothed out flat, like slowly spreading oil.

  The corpse stopped moving.

  “Good,” Thorpe said. “That rack better not be broken.”

  “What do I do now?” I asked.

  “Hold on tight,” he said.

  An invisible force whipped through me so fast I felt like I’d been punched in the head. I doubled over, and when I stood again, the image of the corpse in the refrigerator waved at me.

  “Not tight enough,” Thorpe said.

  I cringed. If Thorpe could take control from me that fast, Vance would be able to as well. “How can I prevent that?” I asked.

  “Practice,” Thorpe said. “And time.”

  “How do you do it with so many at once?”

  “Practice,” he said again.

  “Vance isn’t going to give me time.”

  “It’s your funeral.”

  I looked back at Thorpe. In his line of work, I hoped he was careful who he said that to.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Thorpe shrugged. “If you think you can use this against Vance, you’re fooling yourself. He’ll squash you flat.”

  That might be true. But if I was going to lie down and take it, I wouldn’t have run to begin with. And if there was really nowhere to go . . .

  I turned toward the fridge with Delia. I’d never imagined a refrigerator could feel cold from the outside, but to me, this one did.

  “How does it work with her?” I asked.