Back from the Undead

by DD Barant

  “Not exactly,” Charlie rumbles. He seems less than thrilled about our upcoming road trip. “Just up to the gate.”

  “Well, yes,” Eisfanger admits. “But from there it’s just a formality, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Charlie says.

  * * *

  When we get there, I understand Charlie’s attitude.

  We can see the border long before we actually arrive. The spotlights are visible from miles away, and the sound of helicopters and the occasional fighter plane echoes through the air as we get closer. We’re in Charlie’s car, a lovingly rebuilt black 1947 DeSoto with whitewall tires, plush leather upholstery, and enough chrome to blind a hooker. Eisfanger’s in the backseat, leaning forward like an excited kid on a holiday trip. Charlie’s driving, of course.

  “This is terrific,” Eisfanger says. “I can’t wait!”

  “You been across many borders?” Charlie asks.

  “Sure,” he answers. “Well, a few. Okay, one. Japan counts, right?”

  “This,” Charlie says, “won’t be much like Japan.”

  I don’t need an explanation for that. Eisfanger was with us when we flew into Hokkaido, as part of an official NSA team investigating a crime under the terms of the TSCA Act. This time, we’re traveling a lot farther under the radar.

  The line we’re in creeps another few feet. The fence ahead stretches to either side as far as the eye can see, and it’s all the more impressive for how fragile it looks. I estimate it must be at least sixty feet high, and seems to be made of spiderwebs spun between tall steel posts with blinking red safety lights at their peaks. That has to be an illusion, of course; for one thing, a spider’s web wouldn’t be visible from this far away. And if it was, I’d hate to see the size of the spider …

  “Tell me about the fence,” I say.

  Charlie grunts. “Created and charged by High Power Level Craft. Unbreakable. Anything smarter than a squirrel goes into a coma if it comes within a foot of it. Linked to a network of monitoring stations that run from Washington State to the East Coast. Goes subterranean, too, but nobody’s sure how deep—that seems to vary.”

  HPLC is the kind of sorcery only governments have access to—scary, Elder Gods stuff. I wonder what the price was to have this fence erected, and who paid it. “That’s a pretty massive expense just to keep a few thropes and pires from getting high.”

  “It’s not just about the drugs,” Eisfanger says. “It’s cultural. In the United States, thropes are proud of how civilized we are. Across the border, they tend to embrace their animal nature with a lot more … enthusiasm. You’d be surprised how many people find that attitude frightening.”

  I think about my own world. “Yeah, not so much,” I say. “Doesn’t matter where you’re from, people are always scared of taking too close a look in the mirror. When they do, they usually discover that the personality trait they hate the most in other people is the same one they hate in themselves.”

  “Huh,” Eisfanger says. “So, deep down, a racist really hates—wait, that doesn’t work.”

  “Racists don’t hate personality traits, they hate races. What I mean is that somebody who can’t stand, for instance, pompousness in others hates any trace of pompousness in himself—so much so that he tries to completely repress it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

  “So,” Charlie says, “a person who’s always telling others to shut up thinks she talks too much herself?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Mouthy but generous, that’s me.”

  I can see the actual checkpoint now. Big, blocky buildings on either side of multiple lanes with guards in booths. Lems in body armor carrying compound bows of matte-black carbon fiber stomp up and down the lanes at random, glaring into vehicles. They all look a lot like Charlie, glossy plastic skin stuffed with black volcanic sand.

  I wonder if that means we’ll be treated better—or worse.

  Most border guards I’ve met have the attitude and authority of a heavily armed bouncer, in a job that’s really a glorified version of the guy who sells tickets at the cineplex. It’s like training a pit bull to kill giant rats and then chaining him up in the parking lot at Disney World; he knows there’s something he should be stopping, but it’s always just out of sight.

  And in the meantime, he just has to clench his fangs and smile at all the clueless, idiot tourists that stream past day after day, asking the same questions, getting the same answers … no wonder these guys tend to go ballistic at the slightest provocation. They’re ticking time bombs, getting wound tighter every day, and all they’re waiting for is an excuse. Add in the usual territorial attitude of cops, a little nationalism, maybe some pack instincts, and you’ve got a recipe for an absolutely outstanding introduction to another country.

  The car ahead of us is a thrope family, station wagon piled high with camping gear, three or four kids in the backseat that keep morphing from wolf cub to child and back, merrily bounding off the windows as they do so. One of them peers at me through the rear window, his little pink tongue lolling, ears perked up like a puppy. I smile and wave. He gives me the finger, and is promptly tackled by a sister who clearly feels this is an inappropriate response to a friendly overture.

  “I have a cousin with a friend who works for the Border Patrol,” Eisfanger says. “These guys are hard-core—they have to be. I heard a story about a woman going through a checkpoint with a baby—”

  “Dead kid, body stuffed full of drugs and sewn back up,” I say. “Right?”

  “Uh, well, yeah—”

  “Urban legend, never happened. Any others?”

  “I’ve got one,” Charlie says. “Not a legend, though. Wish it were.”

  I give him the quizzical eyebrow. Charlie likes to pull my leg, and took full advantage of my cultural cluelessness when I first got here. He still likes to give it a yank now and then. “Go on.”

  “Guy I know. A lem. Big fella, one of those specially built heavy-duty laborers that stand about eight feet tall? Had this pire woman contact him, make him an offer. Seems she’d met her husband up in Canada, but they got into some trouble with the law and she wound up deported. She couldn’t go there, he couldn’t come here. What she wanted from this lem—let’s call him Ricky—was some help getting across the border. She had this crazy idea that she swore would work, and she offered him a whole lot of money to give it a try.

  “A lem’s life force is embedded in the sand that makes up the inside of his body. You can replace the plastic container that holds it in, but lose too much of the sand itself and the spell animating the golem breaks and he keels over dead. But you can take out quite a bit and then put it back with no ill effects, especially if you keep it nearby. And this pire, she was a pretty small woman…”

  “She wanted to be smuggled across the border inside the lem?” Eisfanger says.

  “Sure. Why not? A pire doesn’t need air. She’d studied the idea, figured out how much sand she’d displace, learned how much you could temporarily remove from a lem and then replace … had it all figured out.”

  “I’m guessing it didn’t go too well,” I say.

  “Everything went fine, at first. Cut a slit in his belly, scooped out just enough sand, wiggled inside and got herself good and buried. Ricky taped up the cut, made sure he kept the container with the sand right next to him. It’s not unusual for a lem to travel with some extra for emergencies, and being a big guy gave him an excuse for a large amount. But they didn’t figure on one thing.”

  Charlie shakes his head. “See, people try to smuggle stuff in lems all the time. The border uses metal detectors and body-imaging tech and spell alarms. The pire had a masking charm to make her spiritual signature kind of blend in with Ricky’s, but neither of them thought to mask the extra sand. That was still giving off a lem signature, good and strong, one that almost matched Ricky’s—almost but not quite.”

  “Because his was getting distorted by the
pire hidden inside him,” Eisfanger says, nodding. “Sure. I can see that.”

  “So could the border guard,” Charlie says. “He put it together about as quickly as you did. Decided to have a little fun.”

  “He sweat the poor guy?” I ask.

  “Oh, yeah. Dragged it out as long as he could, tightening the screws one at a time. Went on for hours. The guard was determined to break Ricky. Didn’t have anything to do with the law or right or wrong by that point; it was just pure meanness.”

  “How’d it finally end?”

  “Badly. The guard was going through Ricky’s paperwork for the fifteenth time, asking him all kinds of inappropriate questions, just trying to push him over the edge. No dice. Finally, the guard tells him he’s all finished, he can go as soon as he signs one more form. Hands Ricky a pen. Ricky takes it. Then the guard smiles and says, “Oh, hang on. That form has to be signed in pencil.” He picks one up, leans forward—and punches it straight into Ricky’s chest.”

  “Which means—oh, no.”

  “Yeah. This pire was a couple hundred years old. The instant that yellow Number Two pierced her heart, she crumbled right to dust.”

  “That’s—” Eisfanger shakes his head. “That’s monstrous.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not the end. They confiscated Ricky’s vehicle, made him walk out on foot. Took him a while to get anyplace where a lem specialist could look at him. Enough time for the dust and sand to mix together real good.”

  “So he’s what—half pire and half lem, now?” I ask.

  “Technically. But what happened to Ricky was more in his attic. Thoughts, memories, emotions, they all got twisted around in his head. He gets cravings sometimes, even though lems don’t eat or drink. He can’t stand being out in the sun. Sometimes he talks about doing things or going places he’s never been. Doesn’t usually make a lot of sense.”

  Charlie falls silent. The punch line I was waiting for never arrives. A story is a journey, and sometimes that’s how it is with a journey; you wind up in a completely different place than you expected.

  “That’s hard to believe,” Eisfanger says. “I mean, you’re telling me the guard committed murder—that he ended a centuries-long life, just for trying to sneak across a border? I can’t see one pire doing that to another—”

  “Never said the guard was a pire.”

  “Even so. Yes, there are a lot of thropes that don’t get along with pires, but for one to go that far—”

  “Never said he was a thrope, either.”

  That stops Eisfanger dead.

  “You think thropes and pires have the market cornered on mean?” Charlie asks. His voice is cold. “There’s a reason they use black sand for enforcement lems, and it ain’t ’cause it’s so easy to coordinate an outfit around. It’s the color of our souls.”

  There’s a charged silence in the car for a second after he drops that one on us, and then he says, “Of course, it does simplify picking out accessories.”

  The car lurches ahead another few inches.

  * * *

  Finally, we’re the next car. The vehicle ahead with the family in it takes twenty minutes to be processed, or at least that’s how long it is between when they vanish behind a gigantic steel barrier that rises from the roadbed and when it lowers again.

  Now it’s our turn.

  A metal wall rises up behind us with a grumble of hydraulic pistons. There’s another one in front of us, blocking us in, and two grids of metal bars over one-way glass on either side. I feel a little like I’m in a cage, a little like I’m in a terrarium. Take a look at the exotic specimen from a parallel world, everybody—give her a cappuccino and she’ll do a trick.

  My brain is more than a little hyperactive, because it knows exactly where I am. This isn’t a waiting room.

  It’s a killing box.

  The barriers are there not only to hem us in, but to protect the guards on the other side of whatever lethal voodoo they have aimed at us right now. Something fast and fatal and capable of eliminating all three of us and our vehicle, I’m sure; when it comes to defending national borders, overkill is the only language the powers that be understand. Maybe we’re parked over a portal to some other-dimensional Hell, and the push of a button will open a trapdoor and dump us into a demon-infested Infernal Pit; a place filled with those Eternally Damned by God, Devil, and Homeland Security.

  The wall in front of us looks like it’s been etched by some chemical process that left it full of tiny grooves and furrows, but that’s an illusion, too; if I squint, I can make out the shape of runes, the entire surface covered with some sort of arcane script. I don’t squint for long, though—even a few seconds spent examining those markings is enough to give me the beginnings of a queasy headache. A spell no doubt, something long and intricate crafted by government shamans deep in the bowels of the Pentagon.

  And that’s the truly weird thing: even though I’m about to enter Canada, this checkpoint isn’t staffed by Canadians. It’s an American facility, ostensibly there because the United States is generously offering to “help” with cross-border security; really, it’s because the American government considers the local cops to be so hopelessly compromised by drug money that they can’t be trusted. That, and it’s a convenient excuse to spy on their own citizens—because, hey, anyone leaving the good old US of A must be up to no good, right?

  The chamber fills with an eerie blue light. It doesn’t seem to be radiating from anywhere in particular, it’s just there. I know it’s sorcery because I can literally feel it; like ants crawling all over my skin, probing, sniffing, tasting. It’s a vile, invasive sensation, and Eisfanger doesn’t look like he’s enjoying it any more than I am. Charlie just stares straight ahead, his face impassive—but I notice he’s gripping the steering wheel with both hands.

  “Deep spirit scanning,” Eisfanger says. His voice has a strange resonance to it, like I’m hearing him through a bad phone connection. “Don’t worry, it’s completely safe. Well, mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Side effects have been documented,” he admits. “In a very small percentage of cases. Less than two percent.”

  “What kind of side effects?” Suddenly I’m feeling nauseous. Feels like the ants are crawling around inside me now, which is exactly as disturbing as it sounds.

  “Memory loss. Synesthesia. And occasionally … vestigial growths.”

  “So I could forget my own name, start smelling purple everywhere and have an extra nipple sprout from my forehead?”

  Eisfanger doesn’t answer. On reflection, I decide I don’t really want to know.

  The blue light fades away, leaving me feeling like I just had a whole-body colonoscopy. A voice that sounds as if the speaker is about six inches away from my right ear intones, “You’re going to need an interview. Park your vehicle in the lot to the right and wait for an escort.”

  “Terrific,” I mutter.

  At least we get to leave the box. I wonder about who’s on the other side of those cage walls, and what the blue light let them see. And then I do my best to stop thinking about that, because I’m already ticked off and getting angry is only going to make things worse.

  Charlie parks. There are already three other cars in the small lot, including the station wagon that was ahead of us. Eisfanger starts to open his door, but Charlie turns in the driver’s seat and stops him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “We wait for the escort,” Charlie says.

  And we do. Another twenty minutes passes. I do my best to stay calm, but I’m no good at waiting unless I’m on a stakeout. I try to get into that mind-set, but it’s not easy when you feel like a suspect instead of a cop. What I’d really like to do is walk in and flash my badge—NSA trumps Border Patrol—but we’re supposed to be traveling incognito. So I sell the concept to myself as a personal challenge: If I can endure this without losing my temper, I win. After all, if Ricky the lem-pire can keep his cool, then so can I, right?

  Our escor
t finally shows up. A big black sand enforcement lem, just like Charlie—and just like in Charlie’s story. Even without guns, it’s funny how much the cops in Thropirelem look like the cops in my world; this one’s wearing body armor over his uniform, he’s got a big leather belt loaded with every kind of gear except a pistol, he’s even got a pair of mirrored sunglasses tucked in his pocket. His attitude is brisk but professional, and when he marches all three of us into the building, he politely holds the door open for us. I start to think we’re going to be okay.

  But then he parks us on the end of a long wooden bench facing a counter, and disappears through a door. More waiting ensues.

  Five minutes go past until the door opens again. It’s not our escort that comes through it, but the family from the station wagon. One of the kids is crying as quietly as she possibly can, while the mother tries to comfort her. The other kid looks stricken, like some essential part of his world was just smashed in front of him. And the father—

  The father is an average-looking guy, short brown hair, a little paunchy. And at this moment, I doubt even Charlie would want to get in his way; he’s got the rage of pure murder in his eyes, and it’s being held back by the thinnest of leashes. The whole family stalks past us, and once they’re gone I let out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

  “So,” I say brightly. “We shouldn’t have any problems, right?”

  A squat, yellow sand lem with a clipboard steps into the doorway. “Jace Valchek,” he says.

  We all stand up. “Just Valchek,” the lem says. He turns and trudges back inside. I follow.

  The room is small and windowless and has a table bolted to the center of the floor. He takes a seat on one side, I take the other. The chairs are bolted down, too.

  “Miss Valchek,” the lem says. He’s got a brass name tag pinned to his white shirt that reads DELTA. He doesn’t bother introducing himself, and I’m a little weirded out by the fact that he knows my name when I haven’t shown anyone my ID yet. “I have a few questions.”

  “About what?”

  “You’re not in our database.”