Deadgirl

by B. C. Johnson

  He shook his head. Not far then. All right.

  “Are we in danger?”

  Puck nodded.

  “Mortal?” Zack asked.

  Puck nodded.

  “Seriously though, do I pull off the bad-ass crowbar thing or what?” Morgan asked.

  Puck nodded, turned, and stalked off down the center of the road, examining the rusting hulks of cars as he passed. We all trudged after him.

  “It’s a tire iron,” Zack said. “But, yes, well done.”

  Our road-trip atmosphere didn’t last. Another mile down the road, the noises began.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Midnight Train

  The sound of a rock sliding down a hill. Nothing much else, really.

  We turned to examine the sound, only to see a tiny pebble skipping lazily down the side of a grey swell of dirt. I watched everyone’s hackles rise, their fists tighten. Everyone knew. No one joked. Or talked.

  The sounds echoed around us, shuffling, snorting, feet breaking into frantic runs, and then stopping. None of us felt the need to communicate the truth—something tailed us, and it made no effort to hide its presence. Puck turned back down the road and began walking.

  Zack turned around as we walked, shuffling backwards, his eyes on the road behind us. I touched his shoulder, but other than a barely noticeable tightening of his lips, he didn’t react.

  The noises grew louder, shuffling, scraping. Puck bent forward, and began jogging. So did we. Zack stayed behind us—no doubt using Puck and himself to shield us helpless girls in the middle. The thought bugged me, but the chivalry was damn cute.

  We shuffled past the rusted wrecks of a hundred cars, dodging around them, sliding over the naturally occurring blockades. I made a point not to look in the cars—while fairly certain there was nothing to be found, my brain kept conjuring the image of a hideously grinning bleached skull staring at me, its skinless fingers still clutching the steering wheel. I’d probably cribbed the image from some bad horror movie, but that knowledge didn’t soothe the nervous ache in my belly whenever we ran too close to a car window.

  A deep ragged moan rose up over the sound of our feet hammering pavement. I couldn’t help myself—still jogging, I glanced over my shoulder toward the source of the sound. The hills hugged the battered highway, their dark forms barely perceivable from the roiling clouds in the endless grey sky. As my eyes pierced the gloom, trying to make some sense of the spine-scraping, hollow moan, I saw it. Low, slithering. A human-shape at the top of the hill, crawling on its belly, its elbows stuck out at angles as its palms pulled it forward across the dirt. It moved in sharp jerking motions, its head snapping up toward the sky, then back toward the ground. Long, dirt rags hung from its thin frame, cutting wide swaths in the dirt behind it.

  Then, it looked at me. Two greenish-gold glints flashed in the deep hollow pits of its sunken eyes. Its jaw stretched beyond human boundaries, scraping the dirt beneath it. Its neck twisted, staring up at the sky again, and it moaned. The noise, filled with sorrow, rife with hunger, made my skin crawl.

  The thing began sliding down the hill on its stomach, dragging the tattered remains of its legs behind it.

  When I turned and sprinted, everyone joined me without a word.

  The moans began to rise—a chorus of mournful howling. Puck shifted, angled for—it looked like a freeway off ramp, and we were almost on top of it. In another minute, we were there, sprinting off the highway at full speed. Morgan and Zack were sucking greedy mouthfuls of air. I felt tired, certainly, but Zack and Morgan’s faces were bright red, and the air they dragged in didn’t seem to sustain them.

  In no way, on no world, was that normal. Morgan was an athlete in incredibly annoying shape, and Zack was Mr. Physical Activity. I should have been passed out on the ground miles before either of them felt winded.

  In front of us, past the tiny skyline of broken automobiles, the street wound out into a grey suburban wasteland. The sound of the moaning faded as we left the ramp.

  Small shops, tiny streets—detached single-family houses huddled together, their paint long since stripped by weather and rot. Grass, long dead, brown and grey. Minivans and SUVs pulled to the curb, caked in grey dust. We passed by what looked like a desiccated 7-Eleven, its huge yawning windows caked in inches of dirt. I half-expected crude signs carved in the dust—maybe “Jacki wuz here” or a startling, graphic depiction of genitals. But there was nothing—it was empty, like everything else. Devoid of life. It reminded me of Terminator or Resident Evil—a world post-apocalypse. That’s what this whole damn place reminded me of, come to think of it.

  What had happened here? Had anything happened here? Was there even a here? I wanted to ask Puck, but I had an idea he didn’t have the answers either.

  I couldn’t stop looking behind us as we walked—every time I turned my back to the distant moaning, I pictured that thing on the hill, crawling toward us. From there, my mind conjured a pack of them—wild, snarling, and hungry. With legs that worked and teeth that chewed hungrily, and eyes like bronze coins, shot through with patina-green veins. The fifth time I tried to look behind us, Zack grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around.

  “I’m watching,” he whispered. “Don’t turn around again. It won’t make you feel safer, trust me.”

  I didn’t look behind me anymore.

  We passed through three more intersections. I didn’t recognize any of the street names.

  We passed the remains of a Taco Bell on the corner of Raymond and Willard. Zack looked up at its faded plastic sign and made a noise. He leaned in and whispered in my ear. I laughed.

  “What’d he say?” Morgan asked.

  I smiled at her. “‘Run for the Border.’”

  Morgan’s lip twisted, and she let out a little snort.

  I wasn’t sure, but it looked like we were moving into a rougher part of town. Distinguishing upper class from lower class in a rotting corpse of a suburb wasn’t an exact science. But the large rotting houses were making way for small rotting houses. We passed a high school with twelve-foot chain-link fences circling it on all sides. It reminded me of my school, actually, but with a rougher edge. E.J. Beryl High—I’d never heard of it.

  “What is all this?” Morgan asked, echoing my thoughts.

  When Morgan answered her own question in Puck’s voice, I felt a shiver ripple down my back.

  “It’s just a dream,” Morgan said. “But not by the living.”

  I frowned, but Zack asked the question for me.

  “What does that mean?”

  Puck’s shoulders popped up in a shrug. I stared at the back of his head, as if to draw answers from the tangled shock of gray hair.

  “The Grey is where the dead dream,” Morgan/Puck said. “Or more accurately, it is the bed from which the dead dream of life.”

  “Wait,” I said, and jogged up to him. “This is a dream?”

  I could see, as I passed him, that Puck’s face was drawn. His mouth sketched a line on his face, and his eyes were narrow. He looked at me with sympathetic eyes. Over his shoulder, Morgan spoke for him.

  “‘No. And yes,” Morgan/Puck sighed. “It is a dream from which there is no waking. As real as life, as inescapable as death. It is the home we chose.”

  I grabbed the front of Puck’s shirt, and he stopped walking.

  “I didn’t choose anything,” I said.

  Puck shook his head, his sympathetic eyes unchanging.

  “We all choose, Lucy,” he said, with Morgan’s voice. “We choose to accept, we choose to deny, or we choose to overcome.”

  “Death?” I half-laughed it out, incredulous.

  Puck and Morgan nodded. “There is always a choice.”

  “Stop talking in fucking riddles.”

  Puck stepped back, and the glint in his eyes changed. He drew up his thin frame and raised his chin. His long slender fingers re-wrapped the blood-red scarf around his slender throat. After a long beat, he pointed forward, over my shoulde
r. I didn’t bother turning to look.

  “The longer we chat,” Morgan/Puck said in that monotone voice. “The more time the broken souls have to sniff out your friends. They’ll flock to us, and then they’ll take their memories, their lives, and their souls. They’ll devour them, for all eternity. And then they’ll feed on us, you and I, for the stolen essence. Do you understand that? Do you understand that if we don’t get out soon, we die? Forever?”

  I backed up, my hands clutched together. My mouth went dry.

  “Come on,” Morgan/Puck said, and brushed past me. “The train station isn’t far.”

  I listened to the scrape of his shoes on the sidewalk for a few long moments, looking into the distance. Zack and Morgan, standing together, in the middle of a broken grey street. The remains of a grey abandoned suburb spiraling out behind and around them, framing them as solitary motes of color. I could feel them, I realized, as I took in slow breaths. The heat baking off of them, and the smell. Just breathing, softly, trying to calm the fear and the rage and the despair, I could taste them.

  Like a pungent but delectable spice. Something I didn’t have a name for.

  Morgan crossed the gap and wrapped me in her arms. She pressed me against her, and I relented. My face against her shoulder, rogue strands of golden hair tickling my ear. Her neck, just underneath my nose. Her skin burned, and as I breathed deep, I felt the cold trickle in my body ripple, like someone tossing a stone into a still pond.

  I tasted the image of two little girls hugging in a sandbox surrounded by blacktop, one of them, the dark-haired one, cradling her hand. A splinter the size of a crochet needle, at least to a five-year-old, stuck out of her thumb. A little path of bright red blood streaking down her wrist, living little rubies in the tiny sand dunes. The blonde little girl shushed her, cradling her sobbing form.

  I opened my eyes. I wasn’t surprised to feel tears on my cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  I felt Morgan tighten her grip around my back.

  “What for?”

  “Nothing,” I said, knowing I’d accidentally stolen that memory from her. Maybe forever. “Everything.”

  “Let’s go, Luce,” she said, her fingers tangling in my hair. “We’ll get out of here and we’ll figure this all out.”

  I smiled and wiped the tears self-consciously from my face. Zack, God bless him, looked far too interested in the dilapidated high school beyond. He only turned back to face us when I cleared my throat.

  “So,” Zack said, his hands in his pocket. “Are we uh, going?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and smiled at Morgan.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Morgan said, and marched after Puck. She raised her voice. “And no more talking through me unless you ask, got it?”

  Puck flicked a hand over his shoulder. The gesture equivalent of whatever, I imagined.

  We found the train tracks before long. They snaked off in opposite directions, long grey parallel lines against the grey earth. Most of the wooden ties looked intact, but more than a few had been crushed, cracked, or simply rotted through. On our right, the tracks streaked off, maybe forever. They became a dot in the distance, indecipherable from the landscape.

  On the left, the tracks went maybe another half-mile before ending in what had to be a train station. A large, domed structure, squatting over the tracks. It looked to be in better shape than its surroundings—I could make out a mural on one of the high walls facing us. The colors hadn’t faded very much, but from that far away, the shapes were indistinguishable.

  “I guess that’s the station,” Zack said, echoing my thoughts. “I don’t have any cash on me.”

  “I don’t think it’s really a train station,” I said. “Right?”

  Puck nodded and began walking left, down the tracks.

  “I don’t like metaphors,” Morgan said, suddenly, rubbing her hands together.

  We struck off down the tracks. The mural I’d seen from far away depicted a grotesque-looking pilgrim festival—the artist had painted terrible proportions, people with giant lips and skewed faces, like they’d been made of clay and squished between fingers. Like someone’s horrible dream of what people might look like. I decided I didn’t need that particular brand of nightmare fuel, and looked away. We crossed around the side of the station and almost walked straight into a train.

  The tracks split as we rounded the corner. They diverged into three separate tracks, all with loading platforms beside them. One of the tracks was empty, and stretched off into the distance. The other two housed trains. A pair of locomotives stared us down with their yellowed eyes, dead and unused. Their slatted iron cowcatchers, just like out of an old cartoon—or a nightmare—gave the impression of toothy, frowning faces.

  The number on the first locomotive was “0315-96.” The number on the second was “1128-95.”

  I knew the first one right away. But I didn’t even get to share what I considered to be a startling revelation before Zack snorted derisively.

  “That’s my birthday,” Zack said, pointing to the second one. “Holy shit.”

  Morgan walked up to the front of her train—the first one—and put her hand on the wide iron bars of the cowcatcher. She ran her hand down one and whistled. When she turned back toward me, her face looked almost serene.

  “Mine too. What is this?” she asked, her voice sort of…zonked out. Dreamy, almost.

  Zack shook his head. He stood on the tracks in front of his train, his feet wide, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. I wished, in that moment, I’d had a camera, or an easel and a talent for painting. I’d tack that shot up on my wall and call it Fate Train. The idea popped in my head, fully formed. I was almost overwhelmed by a giddy urge to share it.

  Puck shook his head and walked up the steps to the platform next to Zack’s train. He waved a hand at all of us. We followed him, even Morgan, though she showed a marked reluctance as we went away from her train. I grabbed her wrist and led her up the steps to the platform.

  Zack’s train wasn’t long—just two passenger cars bookended by engines. The coaches were the same old-west style as the engine. Yellow painted slats along the outside, a long black roof with black trim. Wide windows with narrow openings. I could make out the darkened shapes of the benches inside through the windows. A small step folded out from between each of the passenger cars, with a little hand rail.

  We stared at it for a long while. Zack wrapped his hand around the rail of the fold-out steps. I watched him look up at the train, and I wondered what he could possibly be thinking. The smooth lines of his face gave nothing away, and he examined the train with the same single-minded concentration he used to peruse news articles in the library. He slid his hand across the railing and rapped it with his knuckles. The railing gave out a hollow, metallic whang.

  “This is real,” Zack said. “This is me?”

  Puck shook his head, and when Morgan spoke, I knew it was her, not Puck, talking.

  “It’s not real,” Morgan said. “But yeah, that’s you all right.”

  I turned to Morgan, to try to decipher this sudden burst of insight, but she still wore that slack, dreamy mask.

  “How do you know that?”

  Morgan looked me in the face and smiled. Her bright green eyes glittered like emeralds, unnaturally bright. Behind her, Puck fiddled with his scarf in a very un-Puck-like way—nervous, almost. I didn’t know where the two oddities fit together, and part of me didn’t want to. It left a hole in me that was filling with dread.

  “I just know,” she said. “It looks like him.”

  She walked to the edge of the platform and looked down at the gap between her and the train. She unfolded her hand toward the train and slapped it lightly with a wide-open palm. It reminded me of third grade, when we’d gone to the San Diego Zoo. Little eight-year-old Morgan in pig tails, staring up at Mogo the Elephant as he passed by. She had held her hand up, palm out, just like that. Like the world’s most bewildered c
rossing guard.

  “Are you okay, Morg?” Zack asked, turning to look at her.

  Morgan shook her head. “I doubt it.”

  I laughed, despite the eerie scene. Morgan looked over her shoulder and grinned.

  “I think it’s time to go,” I said. Her smile faded slightly, but she nodded.

  “How do we...go?” Zack asked. He was looking down at the first step onto the train like it was covered with writhing cobras.

  Puck pumped his arm in the toot-toot gesture.

  “That’s it?” Zack asked. “I go inside and what…wake up in my body?”

  “That’s it,” Morgan said. It still wasn’t Puck’s voice. I had become used to her being Puck’s mouthpiece—even if it was creepy. But Morgan providing all the answers herself freaked me out even more.

  Zack stepped off the platform and turned around. He looked straight at me, and I clenched my fists. He flashed me that crooked smile.

  “I’ll see you soon, Luce,” he said. I felt my stomach spasm in terror.

  “I—” I said, and stopped. My heart danced like a jackhammer in my chest.

  “Hmm?” Zack said, his eyebrow raised.

  My skin tingled across my whole body, and I felt my cheeks flush despite the chill in the air. Looking Zack in the eye, I knew I could take on the world and yet have trouble tying my shoes. The contradictory sensation gave me vertigo.

  “I think I l-love you,” I said. I couldn’t stop myself. This didn’t feel like an “I’ll-see-you-soon” moment. It felt like the part of the movie where the guy says, “I’ll be right back” and then dies in some tragic but undoubtedly noble way.

  “I know,” Zack said, and winked. He stepped backward onto the train and turned to go inside.

  I ran to the edge of the platform and slapped the side of the train with my hand. Zack turned, just before opening the door to the coach.

  His lips turn into a crooked grin, his eyes on fire with mischievous light. Looking into mine, the playful light dimmed, becoming something simple and earnest and beautiful.

  “I love you,” Zack said.