by J. C. Nelson
I patted the knives sheathed on my hips and checked my messenger bag. Wallet? Check. Passport? Good. Cell phone? Thank god. Fresh pine branch, sharpened to a point? All the essentials. Not that any of those would help me against an angry woman or her sister.
On the rooftop, I crouched behind two air conditioners. They rattled and labored against the summer night.
“Brynner?” She insisted on mispronouncing my name. Briner is what you soak a ham in before you cook it. Brynner, like the grin I’d turned on her the night before, was mine. She looked over the edge of the far side. All I had to do was wait for her to climb down, and I could make a dash for the roof access door.
My cell phone rang from inside my bag, like the worst-timed game of Marco Polo ever.
She spun, zeroing in on the noise. “Brynner.” She circled the air conditioner to where I crouched, my shirt unbuttoned, the white bandages across my chest barely concealing fresh stitches.
“Hi . . . Elena.”
She pointed the knife at me, trembling with rage. We’d enjoyed a wonderful room-service breakfast until she answered the hotel door and had an awkward conversation with her sister. “What is my name?”
My cell rang again, the emergency tone. I flipped it out with one hand, and kept my eyes on Dimitra. Dina? Now that I thought about it, it wasn’t clear which of the two lovely embassy representatives had chased me out the window. “Give me a moment.” I held the phone to my shoulder and backed away. Jealous women and angry badgers deserved their space. “Brynner Carson speaking.”
A computerized voice on the other end barked out, “We have a situation, asshole. Get a move on to the shipping district. Car’s out front.” That would be Dale Hogman, field team commander of the Bureau of Special Investigations.
“Call someone else. We just had a situation, and I’m in a bit of a situation myself right now.”
Elinda? Athena? She yelled at me in Greek, something about a goat and my mother.
“Is that the native you had draped over you last night? Saw her on the telecast.” Dale didn’t bother hiding his amusement. Or his familiarity with the scenario.
“Could be her twin from the night before.” I’d consumed more than my share of wine even before moving to the more private celebration.
“Love her and leave her. We’ve got a moldy-oldy on its feet. Trust me, no one else is going to be able to handle this one.” Dale cut the call off, right as Etria came for me.
She swung the knife at me in a high overhand arc, not bad for killing a mummy, but not the best way to carve out a man’s heart.
I stepped to the side and caught her wrist, spinning her around.
A younger me would have leaned in to kiss her before dashing away. A younger me once got kicked in the family jewels for doing exactly that, so I let her land rump first and ran for the stairwell. Two nights earlier I was a celebrated hero. Last night I was an honored guest, and by tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be able to smile at a waitress in the city without getting spit on.
Women talk.
And that was exactly why I preferred my day job, my night job, my going-to-get-me-killed job. I sprinted down the stairs, met the driver at the front door of the hotel, and picked up my bag of equipment from the passenger seat while calling back in to headquarters on my phone. “Brynner Carson. Give me the details.”
“Now you’re in a rush? Sure you don’t want some more time to work things out?” The strangled gasp from the other end sounded like a man’s throat being crushed, but I knew better. I’d seen Dale in person enough times to know he was just taking a cigar puff through his tracheal tube.
“I don’t think couples counseling will help. I’m five minutes away.” I strapped on my Kevlar and titanium body armor while the driver careened down cobblestone streets. “Situation report?”
“Like I said: Corpse woke up a few hours ago. Took apart three guards and half a cargo crew.”
We continued downhill into the port, veering past cranes and loading trucks. “Near the water?”
“Better. On a boat.”
“Bullshit.” Even on my first day working for the Bureau of Special Investigations, even on my first assignment, I knew better than that.
Dale waited so long I thought he might’ve dropped the call. “No. And that ain’t the freakiest part. It knows you.”
My hands froze, leaving one boot untied. Freakiest part in this particular conversation was a series of contests. Freaky that a three-week-old corpse had reanimated and gone on a rampage? A little. Well, not really. More like an everyday job for the BSI.
Freaky that one had done so on a boat? Completely. Contact with living water could drive the Re-Animus straight out of the shell. That scored an eight on the scale of bat-shit crazies, where one would be the homeless guy at the grocery store and five would be us hitting dead things. “How can you be sure?”
“This one’s talking.”
I yanked my boots tight and snapped my fingers. “Bullshit.”
“And writing hieroglyphics in blood.”
“Bullshittier.”
Dale laughed, a rumbling cough that sounded like he’d need to tweeze a piece of his lung out of his breathing tube. “And if you believe the cargo guys who got away, this one’s asking for you by name.”
That killed the friendly banter deader than the corpse had been a few hours earlier. Because meat-skins, or the Re-Animus running them, never spoke. Though I wanted to sleep in the sun for a month, I couldn’t let this one get away.
“Happy hunting. Don’t get dead.” Dale clicked out.
I rode the rest of the way in silence, wondering where my life went wrong. Probably around eighteen, when I walked into a BSI field office, signed my name, and asked where the nearest dead thing was.
The car pulled to a stop and I got out, a walking armory of wood and religious symbols from damn near every religion on earth, including a few that sane folks didn’t practice anymore.
The police stepped out of my way. Sure, the cops might handle normal criminals, but they left the dead to us. Donuts didn’t have a habit of ripping your insides out and playing with them. As I passed, they made the sign of the cross, which was fantastic, assuming the meat-skin I was up against had been Christian. Not a bad guess, for Greece.
I tore the cordon out of my way and walked up the cargo ramp alone.
Why it had to be a cargo ship, I can’t say. It wasn’t just the warren of steel boxes and narrow pathways, perfect for a meat-skin to hide in. It was that I’d always gotten seasick just standing on a boat. Hell, I puked in a canoe at summer camp.
So my roiling stomach wasn’t due to nerves as much as waves, the rocking sensation at my core wasn’t that I was hunting something that killed six men less than an hour earlier. At least, that’s what I told myself.
Closing my eyes for one moment, I listened, threading my way through a forest of sound to find the one that didn’t fit. Dale hadn’t lied. Beneath the undercurrent of traffic and the gentle slosh of waves, a voice like gravel and coffins echoed in the hull of the ship.
Which meant I wasn’t dealing with your garden-variety walking corpse. Dale had been right to call me. It was a Re-Animus. An unholy spirit known for animating the dead and tearing apart the living. Again.
It whispered into the shadows, mumbling at times and moaning at others.
Dad always said Re-Animus never spoke, for fear of what might slip out. That the act of stealing a body was so heinous that their very souls cried out to be imprisoned the way they imprisoned others. Controlled the way the Re-Animus did the dead.
Someone never mentioned that to this one.
Stake in hand, I jogged along the deck till I came to a cavernous hole leading to the cargo bay. Imagine a football field inside a boat. Now turn off the stadium lights and turn loose one recently live corpse run by something so foul we had to invent a w
ord for it.
That, right there, is why I looked forward to vacation.
I hopped down stacks of cargo containers, well aware each hop sent a booming echo through the hold. The meat-skin might be dead. The Re-Animus in the driver’s seat would have had to be to miss me coming.
And things grew weirder still.
In the distance, at the far end of the hold, a torch flickered. Not a flashlight. The Re-Animus had lit an honest-to-god torch, like a tiki torch. It illuminated a dim circle on the vast hull of the ship, and in the flickering light, the meat-skin shambled back and forth.
Dale called it a moldy-oldy. Meaning someone dead a few weeks. Plenty strong but not exactly a threat, so long as people did the sane thing and ran. Away, not toward it like I did. Fresh corpses could be downright deadly.
The ones everyone feared, the mummies, could barely move, let alone threaten someone. The worst they might do is get dust all over you when they disintegrated. This body had all the signs of a grave robbery gone wrong. The grave cuffs still hung from one wrist.
It turned toward my light, one eye sagging and the other wild. And began to laugh. “Carson. Finally.” So the Re-Animus was still on board. Fully present. Fully capable. That familiar voice had wailed as I drove it out of a body not three days earlier.
“That is one ugly ride you picked. It’s an island. Couldn’t you find a tan corpse?” I stayed just beyond the torchlight, hopefully farther than it could leap.
It took a step forward, staggering to the left. “I had a great body. I had a whole collection, if you hadn’t destroyed them. We’ll settle that some other time. I’ve come to speak with you, Carson.”
“I’m not really in a mood to talk, but I could arrange for a therapist to call you if you want.”
The corpse turned away, slouching back toward the hull, where it resumed painting by gnawing a finger and dabbling the blood that oozed out.
Score: Dale, 3. The thing wasn’t writing. It was drawing. Technically, it was writing as well, since the pictures were hieroglyphics.
While it had its back turned, I crept up on it as stealthily as I could, my stake drawn. Green pine could suck the power right out of the meat-skin, killing a chunk of the Re-Animus. The key? Getting in the first blow. I leaped forward, driving the stake down in an arc meant to strike just above the shoulder and continue down into the rib cage.
The Re-Animus caught my hand without looking. “Carson, you killed one of my favorite bodies that way not three days ago.”
I was in trouble.
The last body was fresh. The last body was fast. The Re- Animus must have spent the last three days pouring itself into this body, building it up for pure strength. Under the force of its grasp, the armor on my wrist crackled and shifted.
It swung another hand around, gnarled fingers grasping at my throat. I didn’t wear a titanium neck brace for style, but neither could I keep my feet on the floor as it lifted me higher, then twisted my head so I couldn’t look away.
“I came to deliver a message.” Its foul breath washed over me, the stench of rotten fish and clogged toilets. “The old man’s body molders, and now she stirs. Give back the heart, Carson. Carson’s blood took it, she says. Carson’s blood will pay if it isn’t returned.”
He liked to talk, so while I could still breathe, I wanted to set a trap. “Who do I send it to?”
“The darkness follower. The edge walker. The eater who lives in sin and walks in the shadow of the new temple. You cannot trick me into revealing anything, lesser Carson.”
And that right there, that pissed me off. With my free hand, I drove a stubby silver blade into the arm holding me, and when my feet hit the floor, I hurled myself at the meat-skin. Four years of high school football taught me how to lead with my shoulder, drive with my feet.
Using momentum to drive a stake through an animated corpse when we hit the hull wasn’t covered in physical education, though. Thank god my dad had homeschooled me in corpse killing.
The stake sizzled and popped as it drove the Re-Animus out. Black clouds of smoke billowed into the night. To me, dying Re-Animus always smelled like burning hair. Three breaths later, I stood alone. Me, a once-again dead body, and the lap of the waves.
I snapped a picture of its finger painting with my cell phone and called Dale. “I put our walker back to bed. You’ve got to see what it was drawing. I’m sending a picture now.”
After a moment Dale swore. He’d tweaked the inflections on his voice module to get the curses just right. “You didn’t repeat any of that out loud, did you?”
“According to you, I can barely read the instructions on a condom wrapper. Pretty safe bet I didn’t read the glyphs. That what I think it is?”
When Dale spoke, his voice trembled, as much as it could, being mostly mechanical. “Wipe it off the walls, get the hell out of Dodge. I’m booking you a flight back to the U. S. of A. We need to talk to the director.”
I rolled the corpse over, making sure it was dead for good. “The Re-Animus threatened me. It might just be some sort of curse.”
I waited for what seemed like an eternity until Dale answered.
“No. I’ve seen that pattern before. I think it’s a spell.”
J. C. Nelson is a software developer and ex-beekeeper residing in the Pacific Northwest with family and a few chickens. Visit the author online at authorjcnelson.com.
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