Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  “The moment of death?”

  “Yeah. Maybe?”

  Maybe. Because that was what she had these days.

  A mile outside Templeton, heading south, she finally saw Hollowell. He was standing in the middle of the road, facing her as she approached, like he owned the road and everything surrounding it.

  It took more will than she’d expected to step hard on the gas and drive straight at him.

  He disappeared.

  Something hit the side of her truck with a loud bang.

  She punched down on the gas, wondering as she did it if you could outrun a reaper. Maybe she should have asked Laddie that, back when the dead were still talking to him. Another heavy thump against the bed of the pickup. A quick glance in the rearview mirror showed her Hollowell standing in the truck bed. He swayed slightly—she was going close to eighty—but otherwise looked untouched by the speed or the wind that buffeted him.

  Hallie slammed on the brakes and swerved to the side of the road. She was out the door with the prybar already in hand, the momentum from the sudden stop still pushing her forward. Before she could reach her arm back to swing, Hollowell was out of the truck bed and had slammed her against the open door, his right hand clenched in the folds of her jacket and jerking it up tight against her throat, choking her.

  “Where. Are. They?”

  Hallie’s breath rasped against Hollowell’s choke hold. “Who?” she whispered, like she didn’t know perfectly well.

  Hollowell’s grip tightened. “Don’t play games with me,” he said.

  The way they were standing, Hallie couldn’t take a full swing with the prybar, but she could give him a short tight thump in the ribs, which she did. He flinched and took a step back. “Kill me,” Hallie said. He couldn’t. She knew that. And he did too—or, at least, she’d told him. But maybe he would try anyway. Maybe it would be close enough. Maybe.

  Moment of death.

  That was what the dead had told Laddie. Told him more than once, so maybe … maybe.

  Hollowell smiled at her, the thin-lipped grin of a ghoul. He put his hand on her face.

  Wham!

  Just like that, she was there. Explosion. Dirt. Pain. Afghanistan. Ignore it, she told herself. Hollowell was in front of her. Directly in front of her. Right here. The desert, the explosion, the sound of someone screaming. Old and done. It was done.

  But it was so real. She could feel it. And yet, she could feel something else too, like someone trying to tear her head from her neck. She realized what she should have realized before, it wasn’t just a reaper’s touch that could kill her. He could break her neck, right here, right now, like a regular human killer.

  She raised the prybar, which she couldn’t feel, but which she knew was in her hand. Had to be in her hand. She jabbed it hard into Hollowell’s side, couldn’t reach his chest; he was holding her too tightly. But jabbed it so hard, it had to penetrate, right underneath his ribs. She felt something, something like a rip in the air around them, saw the gray South Dakota sky, then, in the middle of that other place. She drew back and hit him again, as hard as she could, as if it could penetrate stone. Or human flesh.

  Snap!

  She was back. On her knees on the cold pavement.

  Hollowell was gone.

  * * *

  I’m sure you wonder why I’m talking to you.

  Who are you?

  You’ve died. And you have a choice to make.

  I haven’t—I’m not dead.

  I can send you back. And I’m going to. But the time may come when I’ll ask you to make a choice.

  What are you talking about?

  Or … you may never hear from me again.

  * * *

  After a moment, Hallie became aware of the hard ground, of the cold wind across her face, the quick spatter of rain on the dry roadbed. She hauled herself to her feet, leaning heavily against the door of the pickup, the cold metal biting through her jacket. She kept getting these fragments of conversation, a conversation she’d had when she was dead, back in Afghanistan. With a reaper? With Death? With someone who wanted something from her, but she had no idea what.

  Yeah, well, he could just get in line.

  Her forehead burned where Hollowell had touched her, like he’d brought some hellfire right out of hell with him. Her neck was sore where he’d tried to—what? Choke her? Break her neck? Whatever he’d been doing, it hadn’t worked. But what had she done? Had she actually killed him as he was killing her? The moment of death? Or was he just gone, like before? Because she’d had the prybar? Maybe it was all bullshit, what the dead had told Laddie. Why would they know, anyway? They were dead. Killing a reaper at the moment of death obviously hadn’t worked for them. If they’d tried it. If they’d even known before they died, because although it startled Hallie sometimes, how much people did know if they paid attention to the supernatural, most people didn’t pay attention. It might well be the sort of thing you didn’t learn until it was too late.

  When her breathing was marginally less ragged, she pulled out her cell phone. Then …

  Right. He didn’t have a phone.

  She dug through her pockets with shaky hands. She found the notepaper where Boyd had written Beth’s number, smoothed it out, and dialed.

  “Hello?”

  Beth sounded scared even across cell towers.

  “Can you put Boyd on?”

  A pause, then, “Yes?” the one word more abrupt than Hallie was used to hearing from him. She wondered how much sleep he’d had the last three days. Then she wondered if he’d been dreaming about the future or what might turn out to be the future, if he had any idea what was coming, what was already here.

  “Any trouble?” she asked. “Where are you?”

  “The Pabahar ranch. We’ve been here almost an hour. You?”

  “Yeah.” Hallie’s throat felt razor-edged and raw, but she was pretty sure her voice sounded perfectly normal. “He was just here.”

  “Damnit, Hallie! We should have stayed together. I’m—”

  “I’m fine,” she said, which was almost not a lie. “But I wanted you to know. It took him,” she checked her watch, “over two hours to come back and to find me. I’m heading to the ranch now.” She paused. “Look,” she said. “This is more than just Hollowell and what he wants from Beth. Call in. Ask Teedt. He can tell you what’s been going on.”

  “Hallie,” Boyd began—like, Don’t leave me hanging, like, Tell me right now what you’re talking about.

  “I’ll be there,” she said; then she disconnected, like it was a promise, like a promise would be enough to hold him.

  After she put the phone away, she stayed where she was, leaning against the truck. Her head ached, and there was a blackness crowding her vision that made her reluctant to start driving right away.

  She was about to push herself upright and get back in the truck when she saw something moving out in the field. It said something about how lousy the whole day had been that she briefly considered just driving away. But she didn’t. She grabbed her shotgun from behind the seat and walked out into the field to meet Death.

  When she reached the shadow this time, she walked straight into it instead of letting it come to her. It felt like falling. She scrambled to catch herself, but there was nothing to hang on to. After what seemed a very long time, she stopped, though it didn’t feel as if she’d hit bottom. It didn’t feel like anything. Except stopping.

  After a moment of nothing—no sound, no light, just her own breathing and the ache of the bruises on her ribs—the kaleidoscopic images began, though they came slower than the other times, like an old-style slide show. A brick schoolhouse with the windows painted over. A man on horseback riding away. Yellow tulips in rows in a field stretching to the horizon.

  And Death.

  He looked younger, though not young—gray hair instead of white, a face with laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and a crease along his forehead: his eye, the one she could see, was dark,
not blue. Still thin, still with a gold-knobbed cane, still dressed in black. Still Death. He still had a black patch over one eye and a deep slash across the other cheek, which looked painful though he didn’t seem to notice it.

  “Have you seen her?” he asked.

  “Who?” Hallie still didn’t feel as if she were standing on solid ground, and it disoriented her and made her feel vulnerable, which made her mad.

  “What?”

  “Her. ‘Have you seen her?’ That’s what you said.”

  “I did?” Death looked at her. “I must have meant— I meant you.”

  Jesus.

  “Hollowell is totally out of control,” she said. “Aren’t you in charge down there?” Not that the idea exactly inspired confidence.

  “Over,” Death said.

  “What?”

  He stared at her. “Not down,” he said, then frowned as if he’d forgotten what he was going to say. “Not down,” he finally said again. “Over. A separate space.”

  “Huh,” Hallie said. By which she meant, I don’t care. Because she didn’t. Because she was talking to Death. Talking. To Death. Where Death lived when he was at home seemed like a minor and petty detail.

  For a moment there was silence, as if neither of them could recover from that brief unnecessary side trip. Then Hallie said, “Hollowell. And the white reaper, the one who’s after Delores Pabahar. Shouldn’t you be able to control them?”

  “Yes,” Death said. Although he definitely looked younger, he seemed, conversely, to lean more heavily on his cane than he had the last time. And that ugly slash. Hallie wanted to ask him about it, but it seemed like another unnecessary side trip.

  “Reapers cannot—have not—cannot—” He stopped, thought. “Have been under my control. That is their debt.”

  “So what exactly is going on now?”

  Another silence, and this time Hallie wasn’t sure he was going to answer at all. His lips moved, like he was talking to himself. He inclined his head. “The walls,” he said. “Very thin.”

  “Because of Martin.”

  “I don’t—know.”

  But hadn’t he told her it was Martin? Maybe it wasn’t just the walls that were getting thin. Because it sure looked like he was too.

  “People are disappearing,” Hallie said. “Because the walls are thinning. You need to send them back.”

  “I don’t—” Death frowned. “There are strangers,” he said. “They’re … I know they don’t belong. But I’m not—”

  “If I stop Hollowell,” Hallie said, interrupting him, “will it end the problem? Will the walls go back up? Will things be solid again?”

  “Hollowell,” Death said. Hallie wanted to shake him, to say, Come on, you know. You’re the one with power. I’m just along for the ride.

  “If I stop him, does it stop the rest, the thinning walls, everything?”

  “Stop him,” Death said. Hallie wasn’t sure whether it was an answer to her question or if he was repeating what she’d just said.

  “You talked to me once,” she said. “Back—back when I—over in Afghanistan.”

  “I don’t remember that,” he said. He leaned on his cane, and his expression seemed serene to Hallie, like none of this mattered as much as it ought to. And it ought to matter a lot because … well, because it was pretty important that there be a line between the living and the dead. Like, pretty damned important.

  “You need to do something,” Hallie said.

  He looked at her for what felt like an uncomfortably long time. “I am doing something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I have you.”

  “What? You don’t have me. No one has me. You can’t—”

  And she was back, like a curtain falling, on her knees in the field twenty yards from her pickup.

  Her heart pounded like she’d run a marathon, her head pounding in sympathetic vibration. She thought she was going to be sick, but she closed her eyes and breathed through her nose and it passed. Until she tried to stand up and almost fell.

  Another minute and she could stand. Two more and she could walk across the field to her truck. It was a good five minutes before her heartbeat slowed, another ten before the pounding in her head subsided, and longer than that before she drew her first unshaky breath.

  She turned the key in the ignition and put the truck in gear. She was not Death’s dogsbody. Or Death’s anything else. And what did he want, anyway? Did he even know what he wanted? For her to stop Hollowell? Well, she was going to do that. As soon as she figured out how.

  But she wasn’t doing it for him.

  She felt close to normal by the time she reached Pabby’s. Or as close to normal as someone who had been blown up, attacked by a reaper, and had talked to Death could feel. She’d taken an extra fifteen minutes on the way to stop back at the house, grab her father’s shell loader and necessary makings, and leave him a note that said,

  Helping Pabby. May be late. Or tomorrow.

  As she went up the long drive to Pabby’s house, she passed at least twenty black dogs. Boyd wouldn’t have seen them when he and Beth had arrived. She wondered if Pabby had said anything about them. Or if it mattered.

  She saw that Boyd had driven his rented SUV right up into the yard and she followed suit, parking parallel to him so that both their vehicles were well inside the ring. The dogs moved aside as she passed, then moved back, like closing the gate behind her.

  Pabby came out on the porch with her rifle raised as Hallie got out of her truck, even though she must have recognized the pickup.

  “It’s me,” Hallie said as she stepped out of the vehicle.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Pabby said. Hallie took that to mean that she looked like hell, which was probably just about right, even though she’d tried to clean up some in the truck. She felt like hell, felt like her bones ached, felt worse in some ways than when she’d woken up in the field hospital outside Kabul. Although, maybe she just didn’t remember how bad that had been.

  Or maybe dying had been easier.

  Boyd came out of the house right behind Pabby, not running, but moving quickly. His limp was showing, as it did sometimes when he was tired. When he reached her, she took a step back, like he was too close, though he wasn’t. She regretted it, because Boyd noticed things, noticed practically everything. It was just—it had been a hell of a day, and most of it there’d been someone or other right up in her face.

  “I was worried,” Boyd said. He didn’t say it like an accusation, but even in the lowering light of late afternoon, Hallie could see how tight he was wound, showing more than he usually showed, probably more than he wanted to.

  “Why? What time is it?” she asked, because it couldn’t have taken that long, talking to Death.

  “Past four,” Boyd said. “We’ve been waiting three hours.”

  That didn’t seem right. “I brought groceries,” she said, not as an explanation but, well, because she had.

  Boyd tilted his head and looked at her, and she knew that he saw more than most people, though exactly what he saw or thought he saw in this instance she had no idea. He looked back at the house, as if thinking about the reason they were all here, behind an iron ring on someone else’s ranch. “We should have stayed together,” he said.

  “No,” Hallie said, shaking her head. “No, because you got here and Beth is safe and that’s what counts.”

  “What took you so long?”

  Hallie wanted to say, Nothing. She was tired and her body ached and she couldn’t figure out how to talk about it—which might have been the oddest part. Usually she didn’t worry about how to do things; she just did them. But Death was talking to her. And that felt—well, she didn’t know how it felt, that was the problem. She said, “It’s weird—really weird—but it’s not Hollowell. I would need to—I don’t know—I need to think about it first.”

  She watched him adjust what he was thinking and what he wanted to do, watched him fold back his need to
know and leave her room to operate. It was—she couldn’t even articulate how much that meant—that he wanted and probably needed to know what was going on, but that he listened to what she was saying, what she needed and, right now, in this minute, when she needed it, let her have it.

  He nodded. “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  21

  They went on in the house and Hallie headed to the bathroom to clean up.

  Boyd found her there five minutes later.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, standing in the doorway of the small bathroom so that Hallie felt trapped, then pissed off because she felt that way.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Hollowell can hurt me, maybe. But I don’t think that he can kill me.”

  “What do you mean he can’t kill you?” Hallie wasn’t sure the skin across Boyd’s cheekbones could stretch any tighter.

  “Because I died,” she said.

  He rocked back on his heels, like she’d hit him.

  You forgot, didn’t you, she wanted to say. You forgot that I died. Because he didn’t see ghosts every day or black dogs. Because shadows didn’t grab him. He’d told her more than once that he wanted her to stay in South Dakota, wanted to see what kind of future there was between them. But she sometimes wondered if he wouldn’t be better off if she did leave. No more ghosts. No more reapers. No more people who used to be dead.

  A muscle in Boyd’s jaw worked hard against the bone. “He can hurt you,” he finally said, indicating her temple, where she’d just put a new bandage. He ran a hand along his jaw. “I shouldn’t have let you get involved.”

  Hallie examined her forehead in the mirror, because if she spoke too soon, she was going to say something they’d both regret for a long time.