by Joe McKinney
“Paul?”
He blinked, then looked at her. “Hey, you’re home.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Are you...okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“What are you doing on the floor?”
He nodded to himself. He said, “I made this today.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Um, what did you do today?”
“Just this.”
“Oh. Did you sleep?”
He didn’t answer.
She said, “It’s hot in here. Did the landlord call today?”
“No.”
“Oh. You didn’t happen to call him, did you?”
“No.”
She waited for more. She hoped for more, something to break the weirdness of the moment.
Nothing came.
“Paul?”
He almost snapped his answer at her. “What?”
The suddenness of it surprised her. She stepped inside and put her purse on the bookshelf near the door. The shine in his face was going away, but she could still see it, and he was still sitting on the floor. He wasn’t looking at her.
“Did you think about what you want for dinner?”
“No.”
“Oh, okay. Do you want to go someplace? We haven’t been to dinner in a while.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”
“Oh.”
He rose from the floor and dropped into his favorite recliner. She crossed the living room and sat on the edge of the bed. She hadn’t planned on discussing this so bluntly. Her idea of how it would go was more subtle. She would come in to the apartment and get dressed into something more comfortable, jeans and a light blouse maybe. They would sit next to one another on the couch. She would hold his hands in hers. She would say something like, “Paul, I’ve been thinking about this all day, and I have to tell you, I just don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t know if you do or not, but I know that you’ve told me you’ve seen your father. You’ve told me he’s killed somebody. That black boy in the train car. I’ll be as honest as I can be and say I don’t believe that. I’m not calling you a liar, but I just don’t believe the dead walk beside us. I don’t believe they hurt people. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some other explanation. Tell me everything. Maybe together we can figure it out.”
Her days were spent filing billing statements at the dentist’s office where she worked. It was mindless work. She could turn off all but one percent of her brain and still look like the best bill-filer in the business. Normally she thought of anything else but work. She and her friends laughed about their stupid husbands or their thoughtless boyfriends or books they were reading or patients who deserved the toothaches they got because they were such assholes, but all day long she had been thinking about that speech. She had worked it out, more or less word for word, hoping it would be enough to get Paul talking. Sometimes he was so hard to get talking.
But now, in the face of his complete disinterest in her, all that came out was, “Paul, can we talk about what you told me? You know, about your father?”
He said, “You know what, I am kind of hungry. Make me some fried chicken.”
That caught her off guard. She said, “What?”
“Fried chicken. You know, a little egg, a little flour. You fry it up in some oil.”
“Um, yeah,” she said. “I know.”
“Good. Make me some chicken.”
“O-okay,” she said. “Sure, Paul. Anything you want.”
He turned away from her.
She said, “Paul, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Just make me the fucking chicken,” he roared. He stood up and glared at her. When she didn’t move, he waved her off with a disgusted flick of his hand. “Goddamn it, Rachel. It ain’t that fucking hard. You complain about the goddamn air conditioner. You complain that I never take you out to eat. For fuck’s sake. Do me a favor, would you? You wanna fucking complain? Go outside and tell it to the wall so I don’t have to fucking listen to you.”
Rachel was so stunned she couldn’t answer him.
He gave her another disgusted glare, then crossed to the little closet next to the bathroom door and took down a fresh uniform.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m goin’ to work.”
“Paul, it’s not even six thirty. You don’t have to be at work until—”
“I’m going to work,” he said.
And then he shouldered his uniform, took up his gun belt and boots, and walked right out the door.
Rachel watched him go, speechless.
Chapter 16
Paul stood beside a junked Buick in the vacant lot next to Magdalena’s house. From where he was he could see her moving around inside through one of her kitchen windows. She was pacing her floor, grinding her hands together, looking like someone who has realized too late that they are in far over their heads.
Off to the west the sky was the color of rust and copper. Dust tails curled over the cracked and wrinkled street. Paul had the sensation of standing outside himself, almost as though he was floating above his body, watching what happened with a drugged disinterest. He wanted to pull himself loose from what was happening, but it was so hard. He felt so sleepy, and it was so easy to just float and watch and not fight.
Inside the house, Magdalena was moving from the living room, towards the front door, and out of sight. When she reappeared, she went to the window in the kitchen and looked outside. She was definitely expecting something.
“Time to go,” a voice inside his head said.
***
Paul slipped over the hurricane fence that surrounded Magdalena’s backyard and walked through her herd of goats on his way to the backdoor. Male goats piss on each other’s heads as a show of dominance, and the urine smell was strong here. These were Angora goats exactly like the kind his family had raised, though the pen these goats were kept in was much smaller than the one his family had used on their farm. The goats had eaten all the grass from the ground and there was a muddy pit in the middle of their pen. They had been rolling in the pit, and the goats that watched him cross the yard to the house were crusty with dried mud. He cooed at them to keep them quiet, looked around to make sure no one was watching, then knocked gently on the door.
He had heard Magdalena moving around inside, pacing the hardwood floors of her living room, but when he knocked that noise stopped. He reached out with his mind and was surprised by what he could see. She was in there, her fingers touching her lips, her eyes darting this way and that like a mouse in a room full of sleeping cats, and he could see it all as clearly as if she had been standing right in front of him, no door in between.
He knocked again.
When she didn’t answer, he jumped the fence and crossed to the kitchen window that had given him such a good view of her before. She was standing there, watching the backdoor in exactly the same pose as he’d seen her in his mind. He knocked on the glass with the backs of his knuckles and watched her jump. She stared at him through the glass, and though there was recognition on her face, it was like her feet were nailed to the floor.
Paul glanced towards the street. Earlier, there had been a two- or three-year-old little boy out there, playing with an empty beer bottle in a weedpatch yard. Now, there was an ancient looking heroin junkie staggering down the sidewalk. He couldn’t see the kid.
He turned back to Magdalena and said, “Open the door.”
She nodded and made for the front of the house.
He tapped the glass again with his knuckles and said, “The backdoor.”
“Oh,” she said, and turned around and went to the back of the house.
A moment later, Paul was standing in her living room.
***
She was a nervous wreck. She paced and muttered and squeezed her hands together like she was trying to scrub them clean. Paul sat on her couch, leaning back casually, one leg crossed over the knee of the other, watching her. With every step she
took he felt his feelings hardening towards her. More and more of his father was seeping into him, taking control of the situation, and as that happened, Paul began to lose interest in what was about to happen to her.
“You said you could answer my questions,” he said. “You mind sitting down to do that? You’re making me dizzy.”
“Oh. Yes. Yes, of course.”
She pulled up a chair and sat down in front of him. She wore a purple blouse and brown pants with a frayed and muddied hem, like they were too long for her. Her face was round and splotchy with pencil eraser-sized blemishes. Deep crease lines were etched into the corners of her eyes. Her lips looked gray. Paul supposed he could still see traces of the girl in the red dress that had come to the Mexican motel room all those years ago, but only with effort.
“The last few days have been hard on you,” he said. Not a question.
She nodded. “Yes, very hard.”
“It shows in your face. When I saw you at the funeral you didn’t look this way.”
“Much has happened,” she said.
Paul picked at a loose piece of skin at the corner of his thumbnail. He said, “You told me you had answers. What kind of questions am I supposed to ask you?”
“You have had the visions, yes?”
“A few, yes. I know how you know my father, if that’s what you mean.”
“You know that I was raised by my Abuela, my grandmother.”
“The woman with the rattlesnake. Yes, I know.”
Magdalena sounded alarmed at that. “You have seen her with the snake?”
“In a dream, yes. I saw her. She was trying to hand me a live snake. She was speaking a language I didn’t recognize.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
He shrugged.
“It is true then.” There was awe and terror in her eyes. “You are meant to inherit this power.”
“That’s what I’m told.”
“Paul, I am very scared. Your father possesses great power. Power far beyond my own. Even from the grave he is powerful. But your father is a dark man, Paul. A bad man. I think he has corrupted the power that he inherited from my Abuela, the power he intends to pass on to you. He is using what he knows to do horrible things.”
Paul sighed. “What are you saying, Magdalena? My dad is Darth Vader?”
“I...I do not understand.”
“You know, big dude, black helmet, sounds like James Earl Jones? Is that what you’re trying to say, that my dad is strong in the dark ways of the force? I guess that makes me Luke. Who does that make you? Are you supposed to be my Obi-wan Kenobi or my Yoda?”
She looked thoroughly confused.
“I do not know what you mean. I do not know these people.”
“Are you kidding me? You’ve never seen Star Wars? Who in the hell hasn’t seen Star Wars?”
“Paul, I am being very serious with you. You have seen the visions. You have seen your father. You know the power is real.”
“Yes, I know it is.”
“Paul, I am very scared. My Abuela taught me how to use this power when I was little girl. She told me it was meant to heal. It is used to strengthen the soul. So long as all things are in balance, it can accomplish anything.”
“Yes, that’s part of it.”
“Part of it, yes. But your father, Paul. He has done many horrible things. He has murdered many men. He has taken that which is good and strong and balanced and made it a force for wickedness.” She hung her head, like a spy who’s just been made to talk, a heretic admitting her crime. “He made me raise the dead, Paul. Do you have any idea what a great transgression that is?”
She looked down at her hands and he could tell she was willing them to stop shaking.
She looked back over her shoulder, then down at her hands again. “Paul,” she said. “You are not alone in this. Others are trying to help you. But they cannot do it alone. Your father is too powerful for that. In the end, fighting him will be up to you. To do that, you have to find something to help you stay in this world. He will try to lead you into his world; you must fight that. You need to center yourself in this world. Find something worth holding on to, because the dead will take you over when you quit being a part of this world.”
“Well, that certainly sounds serious,” he said.
She looked shocked by his flippancy. She stared at him for a long time, and as he stared back at her, he could see the knowledge of what was going to happen dawning within her.
She swallowed hard.
From somewhere behind her came the sound of windows breaking. She jumped to her feet and spun around to face the noise. Paul kept his seat. He looked at his fingernails and waited.
“Oh my God,” Magdalena said.
“Something like that,” Paul answered.
The backdoor blew open. Paul heard the sounds of bare feet walking over broken glass on the hardwood floor. He heard the moans of the dead coming closer. They were stepping out of the shadows, taking shape as they stumbled from the kitchen to the living room.
Magdalena saw them and gasped. There were four of them. Each man was completely nude, their chests bearing the Y-shaped stitching of an autopsy. Their bodies had the faintly yellow tint of dead flesh. Their eyes were completely vacant. Paul had attended an autopsy as a cadet and he knew the doctors bagged all the organs that had been slopped out of the torso into plastic trash bags and then stuffed the bag back inside the body before stitching it up. The memory came back to him now because the dead man who was first through the door had a scrap of trash bag sticking out from one corner of the Y-shaped seam in his chest.
Magdalena turned on Paul and her eyes were pleading for help. She said, “But he hasn’t turned you yet. You can’t do this. You have to protect me.”
Paul stared back at her with cold indifference. A small part of him did feel uneasy, but that part was buried deep down, and it couldn’t compete with the thundering echo of his father’s voice coming out of that wall of static.
“Please,” she said.
Paul’s expression didn’t change.
Magdalena shook her head no, like it wasn’t fair, then ran for the front door.
She never made it.
The dead moved fast. They swarmed over her like piranha on a sinking carcass. From his place on the couch, Paul listened to her screams. He could hear the dead men tearing her apart, ripping into her with their hands and their teeth, and then, with awful suddenness, all was quiet—save for the sound of wet body parts being tossed onto the hardwood floor.
It didn’t last long, hardly five minutes. When the dead passed through the living room, bound for the backdoor, one of them was dragging Magdalena’s left leg. There was a long, ropy piece of tissue hanging off the severed end, painting a thick blackish-red smear across the floor.
The dead man dropped the leg in the middle of the floor and walked out the backdoor with the others. They faded into nothingness as they stepped outside.
Paul watched them go and that static voice inside his head told him it was time for him to vanish as well.
Chapter 17
Paul drove to the Eastside Substation, showered, and changed into his uniform. He barely remembered the drive. The entire evening was a dim blur, vague images moving behind a red veil. He knew he had built a stick lattice. He remembered the feeling that had come over him as he touched the wall of static that appeared in his vision, but that was the last clear thing he could remember. Everything after that, from leaving Magdalena’s house to the start of his shift and the six calls they’d made so far, was a blur.
Mike said, “You want some?”
He was holding up something that looked like a giant pork rind. They were at The Cave again. Paul had barely touched his burger.
“What is that?” Paul asked.
“Chicken fried bacon,” Mike said. “You want some? It’s a heart attack waiting to happen, but this shit is good.”
Paul shook his head. “You really eat that?”
�
�Hell yeah. Don’t worry about the heart attack part, Paul. They put EMS on stand-by every time somebody orders this. Try it.”
“No thanks.”
Mike shrugged and took a bite. “Suit yourself.”
“44-70,” the dispatcher said.
“Damn it,” Mike said. He keyed up his radio. “Go ahead, 44-70.”
“44-70, make the south entrance of the Morgan Rollins Iron Works and contact 85-07. He’s standing by.”
“85-07?” Paul said. “Who’s that?”
“Homicide,” Mike said. “Remember, Homicide is the 85 series?”
“Yeah, I guess.” He rubbed his eyes, trying to force himself to think. “Sorry. Just tired.”
Mike gave him a worried look.
“44-70.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mike said. He keyed up his radio. “44-70, I copy, ma’am. Who is that by name, please?”
“Homicide is all he said, 44-70. He requested you and your partner by name though, sir.”
“Great. Well, pull yourself together there, sleepyhead. Let’s go see what Homicide wants.”
***
For the past week, Keith Anderson had been working his way through mountains of paperwork. He and his team had gone through every document of government record that mentioned the original forty-five murder victims and every report mentioning David Everett. They’d gone back through every report Bobby Cantrell ever wrote. They poured over autopsy reports and crime scene photos and anonymous CrimeStoppers tips and patrol-initiated field contacts, and so far, they had a big handful of nothing.
