Shaman

by Chloe Garner

  East of Albuquerque he typed. Need work.

  I’ve got you, Simon answered. Bodies going missing in CO.

  Send address Sam answered, looking up at Samantha with a smile. Perfect. Zombies.

  <><><>

  The next morning in the car, Samantha was settling in to go to sleep when Jason looked over his shoulder.

  “Kind of been too much going on, but I’m not letting you off without explaining yesterday,” he said. Sam frowned. That was right. There had kind of been stuff there that they hadn’t talked about at all. She sighed.

  “Okay. Where would you like to start?”

  “How about you going hand to hand with a demon with a hatchet and a machete?” he asked.

  “What about it?”

  He paused a beat.

  “You did it.”

  “And?”

  “Successfully.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Actually,” Sam said, “she didn’t. She used something else to kill her.” He looked back at her, and she smiled, nodding. He had noticed.

  “Yeah.”

  “And she didn’t ash,” Sam said.

  “Yeah,” Jason said. “What was up with that?”

  “That was Lahn,” Samantha said. “My sword.”

  “You named it?” Jason asked. She laughed.

  “Gwen, much?”

  He growled, and Sam grinned.

  “Still a little weird,” he told her. She shrugged.

  “She’s an epic blade,” she said. “They all have names.”

  “She,” Jason said dismissively. “You guys do have egos.”

  “No. It was forged by a dark angel. It’s imbued with incredible power,” she said.

  “Imbued,” Jason mocked.

  “Can I see it?” Sam asked. She shook her head.

  “I don’t want her out any more than she has to be, or else she’ll start attracting attention on the other side.”

  “You think demons just watch you for fun?” Jason asked. She sat up.

  “When you first crossed, what did you find?” she asked.

  “Carter was there,” he said.

  “And?”

  Sam watched Jason think.

  “A pile of bodies, as you mention it. At the time, I thought they were just scenery.”

  “They’re the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “I’m glad he wiped them. I’ve been negligent.”

  “What?” Sam asked.

  “They’re parasites. In a figurative sense. They follow people around and watch their lives. Incredibly boring at the time ratios they’re dealing with, but what else do they have to do? The hope is that after the person dies, someone will summon their spirit, through a ceremony of some kind, and then all they have to do is know everything about them, and they get a free trip across. They also get the odd payoff for information, which is why they risk following me, the ones who still remember who I am. It’s considered good maintenance to cross from time to time and wipe them out. Gets rid of the best records of your history, hellside.”

  “I swear, if I hadn’t seen the place myself, and then seen you yesterday, I’d still believe you were making all of this up,” Jason said, then paused. “Actually, even then, I still think you’re making up half of it.”

  “You were telling me about… that knife,” Sam said. The word had sounded simple, but he couldn’t keep it in his mind.

  “Lahn,” she said. “Lahn. Lahn. I don’t know how long it will take you to remember. It’s the word in angeltongue for peace. And victory. They use the same word.”

  Jason grunted.

  “My kind of people.”

  “You have a knife that was made by an angel named after peace in the language of angels, and you stabbed my ex-girlfriend in the head with it… and she didn’t die,” Sam said.

  “I charged the blade. Needed her blood,” Samantha said.

  “Yeah, you’re definitely making that up,” Jason said.

  “How about the slow-mo ash?” Sam asked. Samantha smiled, sliding down in her seat and nestling her head into her pillow. She pulled the stiletto out of her boot and handed it to Sam.

  “That isn’t the knife that did it,” she said. “But they’re identical. That’s the dither. I guessed right which one he’d be allergic to.”

  “Dither?” Sam asked, twisting the point against his fingertip. The knife had a spine, a central spike of black wrought iron that had symmetrical steel blades set into it.

  “The knife that convinces the other side that there’s nothing special about it. Complicated.”

  “Demons have allergies,” Jason said. “I know that’s made up.”

  Samantha sighed.

  “You’re right. There’s just no better word for symbolic sensitivities.”

  Jason sighed.

  “That’s still really a nice knife,” Sam said, handing it back to Samantha. She reached for it, then jerked her hand away.

  “Oh.”

  He frowned.

  “Sorry.”

  “Here,” Jason said, reaching for the knife. “Take the wheel.”

  Jason wiped the blade with his shirt and reached it over the seat to her. She sniffed it, not touching it.

  “And the handle,” she said.

  “Dang,” he said. “I thought it was just mental.”

  “Used to be. Getting worse,” she said. She settled back onto her pillow again and sighed.

  “So, can we talk about the elephant in the room?” Jason asked, handing her the knife again. She smelled it and took it back, putting it back into her boot.

  “Which one is that?” she asked. Sam looked out the window.

  “You channeling Kara,” he said. Sam turned back and frowned. He had actually managed to forget that part.

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “That was hot. Where is that girl, the rest of the time?” Jason said.

  “She’s fake,” Samantha said.

  “So?”

  Sam looked back at her as she flipped onto her side.

  “And I think that’s it,” she said. “I’m going to sleep now.”

  They were quiet for maybe thirty minutes as Jason drove, then Jason looked over.

  “You okay, man?” he asked. Sam glanced back at Samantha.

  “That’s why we’re going,” he said. “Just want to keep moving.”

  Jason nodded.

  “I get that. Bunch of moaning undead headshots brighten up my day every time.”

  “She’s keeping me alive, they said,” Sam said.

  “I think that may be overstating things,” Jason said. Sam shook his head.

  “No, like the soulburn would have killed me by now, if it weren’t for her,” Sam said.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “That’s what it sounded like. Even she said it.”

  Jason stared at the road.

  “So?”

  “So, what if it killed her, too?” Sam asked. “What if she could get away, and she decided not to?”

  “We just can’t let her go through with it,” Jason said. Sam nodded.

  “So you’re with me on this?”

  Jason looked surprised.

  “Not that it’s going to come up, but, no, I’m not going to let her die just because you do. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Promise me, when the time comes, you’ll take my side,” Sam said. Jason snorted.

  “I don’t make promises like that, dude. You know that. Don’t worry about it. It’s never going to be an issue.”

  <><><>

  “This is the place,” Jason said, pulling over in front of the cemetery.

  “No such thing as the undead,” Samantha said again. He snorted.

  “More headshots for me,” he said. “You don’t like guns, anyway, do you?”

  “Never said that. So… Before we let this go too far, explain to me exactly what it is that you’re looking for,” she said.

  “Digging graves… eating dead bodies… Too slow and too
dumb to catch live prey… brains… brains… Zombies.”

  Samantha shook her head.

  “Not ringing any bells, but that doesn’t mean they’re real.”

  “But it does mean you don’t know everything, which I was beginning to worry about,” Jason said.

  “Where do you want to start?” Sam asked.

  “Caretaker?” Jason asked.

  “Done.”

  Samantha sat up in the back seat.

  “What am I doing?”

  “You’re staying here, gimpy,” Jason said. “Hard to explain you.”

  Sam glanced at her and she shrugged.

  “He’s right. Don’t do anything stupid.” She grabbed Jason’s shoulder. “If he spaces or falls down or acts weird at all, you call me. Brandt hasn’t given up on him. Right?”

  “If those are the rules, I may as well just leave him here, too,” Jason said. “Relax. It’s going to be fine.”

  Jason got out and Sam cast a final look at Samantha before following.

  “Want to go get the lay?” Jason asked, crossing the street.

  “Sounds like a good start,” Sam said. “Church, state, or citizen?”

  “Call it in the air?” Jason asked.

  “Sure.”

  Arthur had once remarked on how unhealthy it was, the amount of time they spent paying attention to graveyards. Sam certainly felt a measure of out-of-placeness this time that was new. There were four fresh-dug graves at one end of the cemetery. They stood over them quietly.

  “Can I help you boys?” a man asked, approaching with a set of pruning shears.

  “Don’t normally get four fresh graves lined up like that,” Jason said. Citizen.

  “Family,” the man said.

  “What happened?” Sam asked.

  “Water heater malfunctioned. Carbon monoxide.” He looked at them. “You must not be from around here. It was all over the news. There was a memorial.”

  “Our dad is from around here,” Jason said. “It was time for us to start looking…”

  “Yeah,” the man said. “It’s a nice area. Pretty view of the mountains.”

  “We’d heard some bad stories,” Sam said. “Just in the last day or two?”

  The mound of dirt over two of the graves had been disturbed more recently than the others. The caretaker knelt and put his hand over the grave in front of him.

  “The police will figure it out. Most of the time, pranks are teenagers, but I don’t really see them having the stomach or the follow-through for this.”

  “What do you think?” Sam asked.

  “Digging up fresh bodies is bad business. I don’t know what drives someone to do that,” the man said. Sam nodded.

  “Bad business,” Jason agreed, then rubbed his hands together. “Well, I need a beer. How about you?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Sam said. The older man stood, rubbing his hands on his overalls.

  “Good luck to you,” he said, nodding as he headed off into another part of the cemetery. Jason watched him leave.

  “I love zombies,” Jason said. “No hiding, no finding, just sit on a fresh grave and wait for them to show up.”

  “They are simple,” Sam agreed, leading the way back to the car.

  “So, I was serious about the beer,” Jason said as they got in.

  “Sure,” Sam said. “We’ve got until dusk.”

  “What did you find?” Samantha asked.

  “Four fresh graves. Two of them dug up,” Jason said. “As long as they haven’t moved on, which I don’t see why they would have, they’ll be back for the last two.”

  “Won’t the police be watching?” Samantha asked.

  “Maybe,” Jason said. “It’s a graveyard. Kind of a dull stake-out.”

  “Or we could find where they’re taking the bodies and avoid the confrontation,” Samantha said. Jason grunted.

  “But I like sitting in graveyards with a case of beer and picking off zombies as they show up,” he said. “This is like the best part of this job.”

  Sam laughed.

  “Someone is stealing bodies. There are lots of things you can do with bodies. I think we shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Samantha said.

  “What do you do with an embalmed body?” Jason asked, twisting in his seat. “I’d love to hear the list.”

  “Teeth and nails go into curses, hair can be used in a bunch of dark magics. Dead men’s lungs can be fatal if you know what you’re doing. A dead man’s heart filled with goat’s blood can be used in summoning rituals for high-level demons. Should I go on?”

  “Somewhere in the middle of Colorado? New Orleans, maybe. Reno, sure. I don’t want to know what you do with a dead body in New York,” Jason said.

  “Part it out, collect the checks,” Samantha said. “They had to create a certification process to keep people from robbing mortuaries.”

  “How much is a whole body worth?” Sam asked.

  “If you don’t care what they use it for, depending on the size, freshness, and health of the body, along with a couple of other things that can make a huge difference, somewhere between a hundred and a hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Geez,” Jason said. She nodded.

  “No one wants to sell a hot body, though. You have to be able to prove that the deceased approved of sale and that no survivors or authorities are going to try to claim it. It’s a smaller market than you’d think.”

  “You’d think some enterprising individual would find a way around that,” Jason said. Samantha shrugged.

  “The market is mostly gray. They don’t have many humans that they’re allowed to be in contact with. It’s a narrow group of people who are interested enough in the money to deal with them.”

  “How many people do we know who would sell granny for a hundred grand?” Jason asked.

  “Even if they knew that her liver was going to be used to allow a Sorceress to bind a demon to her?” Samantha asked. “Most people are uncomfortable with the worst of it, at least. A lot of the Sorcerers have to harvest their own ingredients.”

  “And what do you do with two bodies?” Jason asked. She paused.

  “Either something world-ending, or something I don’t know about,” she said. “There’s a huge amount of power available there, if you know how to tap it.”

  “I say we get a case of beer, a pair of rifles, and go find a good vantage point,” Jason said.

  “You’ve seriously done this before?” Samantha asked. Jason nodded.

  “Flash suppressors, silencers to keep the general populace asleep in their beds, clean up the bodies after.”

  “How are you not in prison?”

  “Quick wits,” Jason said.

  “And a lot of close calls,” Sam said. “At least this time, if they find the bodies, they’ll find bodies that got shot after they were dead. Not quite as much energy to chase us, at that point.”

  Samantha frowned.

  “What happened to the body of the old creeper at Heather’s place?”

  Before Sam had sent Samantha away, they had had the closest call of Sam’s life with a human psychopath who had nearly killed both Jason and Samantha. Sam had shot him three times. In the aftermath, Sam had completely forgotten about the body.

  “Heather left it out for the coyotes. She said she’d drag it out to the back corner of the property. She knows how to deal with that kind of thing,” Jason said.

  “Demons ash,” Samantha said. “I don’t like dealing with bodies.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice for you,” Jason said. “Beer?”

  “Sure,” Sam said.

  “Can we look for the bodies, please?” Samantha said. “If we’ve got nothing better to do?”

  “You take all the fun out of it,” Jason complained.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start,” Sam said.

  “Yes, we do,” Jason said. “Dark spots on the map, police complaints. I would just much rather do this the way we always do, rather than waste the whol
e day. Colorado girls are in great shape, and they’re adventurous. Such a waste.”

  Sam looked back at Samantha.

  “Well, let’s do it, I guess.”

  <><><>

  Simon pulled the police reports while Sam and Jason pulled land usage information. Samantha sat in a corner working on her laptop - Jason wasn’t sure what she was doing. There were two or three likely regions around town where zombies might sleep during the day, but when the police reports came in from Simon, they narrowed it down to the last one.

  “Missing cats and dogs, police called about menacing vagrants,” Sam said.

  “Sounds like a winner. And like zombies,” Jason said, looking over at Samantha. She looked up from her computer and stared back. He refused to look away. She was ruining his zombie field day, and he wasn’t going to let her shame him into letting her do it without a fight. Sam cleared his throat.

  Twice.

  “What?” Jason asked.

  “Shall we go?” Sam asked.

  “If she really is going to make us,” Jason said, not looking away. She smiled coldly.

  “I am.”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “Load up,” he said. He checked his gun and then his duffel bag - shotgun, rifle, hunting knife, bullets. Lots of bullets. All there. Sam was doing autopilot checks on his rifle and Samantha stood, hefting her backpack onto her back and picking up her crutches. He snorted.

  “I think you’re staying in the car, Sam,” Jason said.

  “What? Why?” Sam asked.

  “Her,” Jason said. Samantha was glaring at him.

  “Not a chance,” she said. “No way I’m letting Sam go out there on his own, or you for that matter. I want to make sure you aren’t killing things you shouldn’t be killing.”

  “I’ve been doing this a long time, Sweetheart. Longer than you, actually.”

  “Not even close, in point of fact,” Samantha answered, shuffling her shoulders some to get the backpack to settle better with the crutches.

  “You’re just pitiful,” Jason said, walking towards her. “Give me the backpack.”

  “No.”

  “You look ridiculous. Give it to me.”

  She stabbed him in the chest with a crutch when he got too close.

  “Touch me and find out.”

  “Find out what?”

  “You don’t want to know the answer to that,” Sam said softly from behind him. “Leave her be.”