The Daredevil Corpse (The Departed Book 2)

by Sean Arthur Cox

  We begin our circling dance again and soon we’ve evenly split the room into defensive zones with our mutual friend Dan Germany in the middle as a dividing line. She seems surprisingly hesitant to injure Danger Man for someone hell-bent on killing him. I can only assume it’s because she wants to make sure she can catch it on camera when she finishes the job.

  “It seems we’re at an impasse,” I say. “You know I can’t harm him unless I can get it on tape, but you’re guarding the camcorder.”

  “Not necessarily,” she says. “Eventually, he’ll bleed out, and then I win. I think I can more than establish I did that.”

  I hear a noise, a scuffling of movement behind me.

  “Finally joining the fray, Blondie?” I ask. “Make yourself useful and grab something sharp.”

  The ting of metal being picked up tells me that he has. Easing up behind me, I feel his hot, panicked breath pant against my neck.

  “He can’t die,” he whispers in my ear.

  “What are you talking about?” I say.

  “He can’t die,” he says. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve seen it. He just comes back to life later. I’m the real Dan Germany.”

  For a moment I think that grief has driven him mad. Then I remember how I got myself tangled in this mess in the first place.

  “What is it?” monkey woman asks. “What did he say?”

  “He says we should get out of here while we still have the chance,” I say.

  “He’s smart,” she says. “You should listen to him.”

  “I never was good at following directions,” I say with a shrug and slash the old man’s throat. “Looks like I win.”

  “You bitch!” she screams and charges for us. I try to dodge, but she comes too quickly and sinks a blade into my right side. It’s not deep, but it hurts me like an insult hurled at a sensitive kid in a YouTube comment section, and it’s going to make defending myself a task and a half.

  Out of nowhere, Blondie or Dan Germany or whoever he is drives his blade down on her arm, cutting deeply into her bicep. She yelps in pain and drops the knife in her left arm. I hope the real Danger Man presses his advantage, but he doesn’t and she’s able to put several steps between us and her.

  She grabs the camera with her bad arm and backs toward the door, holding the knife ready to strike. “No problem,” she says. “I have enough on video here to stake my claim.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, goading her. “Maybe I’ll just take a selfie with the body and the knife.”

  “Maybe you won’t.” The monkey woman drops her weapon and grabs a large jug sitting by the door. Flinging it one-handed with far more strength than I would have expected from her, she sends it hurling across the room, crashing into the fireplace. The room erupts into flame as gasoline splashes across the wooden floor and walls and the dead body of Dan Germany.

  “Bye now!” she says and disappears out the door.

  “Who the hell was that?” asks Blondie Dan Germany.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say SoccerMomByDay, but now’s not the time to play match the screen name to the monkey face.”

  “Right, right,” he says.

  The smell of broiling old man fills our nostrils and it’s my turn to contribute vomit to the pool of glass and blood on the floor. By the time I recover, Blondie Dan Germany has already pulled off his shirt and begun to beat out the flames on the old man’s body.

  “Way to keep it together,” I say, and for a guy smothering a fire consuming his own dead body, he smiles pretty big.

  I’m about to pull my own shirt off to help but spot a pile of Old Dan Germany’s clothes near the table. No sense distracting an old man with the sudden vigor of youth by taking my shirt off, not at a time like this.

  We make quick work of the flames, and though it will be a long time before I can shake the revulsion of the memory, we pull at his charred body. As we do, the skin and fat around the wrists sloughs off, and his arms slide free of the manacles. Missing flesh and muscle perhaps, but free just the same. His feet are a different story. Young Dan Germany has a difficult time dealing with the way Old Dan Germany’s skin crackles like a Thanksgiving turkey. Just as well. We weren’t going to be able to pull those feet through the chains anyway.

  “What do we do?” Young Dan asks. Overhead, we can hear the creaking groan of old wood getting ready to give up the ghost. The room is aglow with flame that’s spread throughout the entire cabin, torching the curtains and blanketing the walls.

  “We don’t have time for this,” I say and grab an ax. “Sorry, old man.”

  Young Dan Germany turns away in horror as I begin hacking the feet off of Old Dan’s corpse.

  “They’ll grow back,” I say. “Grab a hatchet and help! This whole place could come down any minute.”

  He stands there, petrified.

  “If you aren’t going to help cut your own feet off, at least get the car started,” I say, tossing him the keys.

  He catches them, nods, then slowly backs away, eyes transfixed against their will at my gruesome work. I’m usually pretty happy with my build. I’m athletic enough to get the job done without having to slave away at the gym. It’s an advantage to killing from a distance or using the old drop of poison. Not much call to for a rigorous fitness regimen. Of course, taking four and five swings to hack through an ankle while the room burns down around me does make me wish I had maybe developed a little more upper body strength before now.

  Wood cracks overhead and the far side of the cabin collapses, barely missing us. I hoist Danger Man’s corpse over my shoulder and stagger my way toward the exit. Thank goodness the body’s so old and frail, or I’d never be able to carry him. The floor is a nightmare collage of fallen blades and burning debris. One wrong step and I may join the old man in the land of the dead, and unlike him, I don’t have a return ticket. I try to sprint for it, but right as I’m about to reach the door, a support beam crashes down from overhead, blocking the only exit.

  No, I realize. Not the only exit. There’s still a window on the far side of the room. The flaming curtains and glass will no doubt tear me to shreds and cook the rest, but it’s my only choice, presuming I can even climb out with a body in tow, which would take too long. I’d be dead before I got the window open.

  But I don’t need to open it.

  Grabbing the table. I flip it over and make a ramp leading up. “No disrespect, old man,” I say, “but better you than me.”

  Charging forward, I race up the ramp, and using Dan Germany’s body as an oven-roasted meat shield, I smash through the window, a tangled mess of burning fabric and jagged glass, and crash to the dirt outside, mere seconds before the whole cabin crumbles in on itself.

  Young Dan Germany rushes to my side where I lay clutching a charred and mangled corpse for dear life in the blinding glow of my minivan’s headlights.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  My words sputter as I try to clear smoke from my lungs. “I feel like I should say something clever, but I can’t breathe right now.”

  Young Dan just laughs and helps me load the corpse into the back of the minivan, covering it with a blanket. Battered, beaten, bloodied, and burnt, I drag myself into the back seat. “You get to drive,” I say as I curl up against the window.

  “I’m not a stunt driver,” he says with a grin.

  “Good,” I say. “I was hoping for a nice, smooth, easy ride.”

  I wake in the hotel, still coated in sweat and soot from the night before. It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep can do for you. My body still aches, but not nearly so much as I would have expected. After the events in the cabin the night before, the cheap motel sheets feel like angel’s breath against my skin.

  “Wait a second,” I say. “Where are my clothes?”

  “Getting washed,” Young Dan says. “Don’t worry. I didn’t do anything untoward. Just bandaged your wounds.”

  I pull back the blanket and take a moment to take full stock of my situati
on. He’s taken my pants and shirt but left me in my underwear. My injuries, at least the serious ones, have been cleaned and dressed, and not poorly either.

  “You get in enough accidents, you learn a thing or two,” Young Dan says and tosses me a sausage biscuit from a fast food bag. “I looted your wallet for food money. Hope you don’t mind.”

  I didn’t.

  “So, what do we do now?” he asks.

  “Now?” I say between bites. “Now I wash last night off of me, we get on the road, and we find someplace to lay low until your friend says the stunt is ready. Hopefully he’ll be back alive by then. Where’s the body?”

  “Still in the back of your car,” he says.

  I nod. “Okay. We’ll take your car and get the glass replaced there, then swap the body to the trunk of your vehicle when we get far enough out of town. I’m not comfortable keeping a corpse in a hatchback. Too easy for people to discover it.”

  I polish off the last of the sausage biscuit and grab my laptop. “Now if you’ll excuse me,” I say, “I need a hygiene break. Kindly leave my clothes by the door.”

  The shower is heaven, and once I’m clean enough that I don’t have to worry about turning the water into Olivia soup, I fill the bathtub for a good soak. After some indeterminate amount of time, I check my fingers to ensure they are sufficiently pruney.

  “That’s enough pure relaxation,” I say. “Time to work while I relax.”

  I rest my laptop on the toilet seat and bring up the Hide and Seek website. Sure enough, SoccerMomByDay has posted some particularly disturbing footage of Dan Germany being tortured with a claim that she’s done the deed. While the boards are disturbingly giddy to watch, each depraved killer chiming in about his favorite part or listing the timestamps for “the good bits,” the general feeling is that at best, it’s a potential kill, since he’s never shown actually dying. The official verdict is there’s a one-week period in which someone else can step forward with something more confirmable, but after that, they will take SoccerMomByDay’s word for it and award the prize. I find myself hoping Dan Germany revives before then. I’d certainly hate for that psycho to get rewarded for what she’s done.

  A Google search turns up page after page of speculation about the stunt, the leak, and related auction. Theories fly like fighter jets about the accident, the shootout in his apartment, and where Dan Germany is now since he seems to have completely disappeared off the map. Nothing credible, however, says anything about his possible death. I guess this means the police still haven’t put together the clues I left about the website. Just as well. The speculation is already wild enough as it is. Young Dan Germany explained the plan to me about the stunt and the legacy. It’d be a shame if that all fell through because it got leaked a little too early that he might be dead.

  I dry myself off and check by the door to see if my clothes are ready. Finding them piled neatly within reach, I grab them and get dressed, eager to get out of this hotel. Even if people on the boards agree Dan Germany is probably dead, there are still no doubt those few zealots who will want to be sure by killing anyone in a ’76 Impala they find.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I say, emerging from the bathroom ready to roll.

  Dan settles the bill downstairs while I load my things into the back seat of my car. When I’m sure no one’s looking, I take a peek at the body. The skin isn’t charred anymore, but still looks like a particularly bad burn victim. The lesser cuts are gone and the throat has almost completely re-closed. Where once bone was visible, muscle tissue has begun to reform on the hands. The feet, however, still have a long way to go. I guess bone just takes longer.

  “Wait,” I say as Dan is about to open the door. “Before you get in that car, let me check something.”

  “What’s up?” he asks.

  “These people who’ve been coming after Old You don’t strike me as the tidy type. If they left a mess hoping to get you, it might still be here.”

  He doesn’t seem to follow what I’m saying, but I don’t care. I don’t need him to understand. This is my area of expertise. Lying down beneath the car, I pick at each wire, following where it goes until I find one that doesn’t belong. I trace it to the steering column in one direction and in the other toward what looks to be a lump of clay taped above the gas tank.

  “Just as I thought,” I say and carefully disconnect the wire.

  “What is it?” Dan says.

  “Bomb,” I say and hand him the wad of C-4. “That could have been you.”

  “Really?” he asks, gingerly placing it on the ground and backing away.

  “True story.”

  He pulls out Old Dan’s phone and asks me to dial a number, which I recognize as the one I tagged earlier. “Hey, did you get the explosives yet?... Well, no need to worry on that score. I think someone was kind enough to give us some for free… Enough to blow up a car, I’d guess… Yeah, no problem… Uh huh… We’ll let you know.”

  Dan shoves the phone into his pocket and says, “We’re going to need to find a place to store that.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Materials guy for the stunt,” Dan says. “No sense buying explosives if I don’t have too. Less overhead means more for me.”

  Dan and I hit the road, he in his car and me in mine. He reminds me as we’re about to swap the body to his trunk that maybe it’s not the best idea.

  “If I get pulled over, they’re pretty much guaranteed to search the car,” he says. “After all, this is a brand-new identity. I don’t have a driver’s license or insurance yet. I might not even have a birth certificate.”

  “Perfect,” I say. “Then they’ll have a hard time giving you a permanent criminal record.”

  Is it a jerk move? Maybe, but I feel particularly concerned about keeping my own record clean. No prints, no nothing. Anything to make it hard for police to track me down in case things ever go particularly wrong on a job.

  We take a moment to pick a random page in an atlas from the back of my car and make plans to lay low there. If there’s no rhyme or reason to where we go, maybe it will be harder for other people to find us.

  Chapter 21

  JAIME

  MEMORIES OF FLESH AND BONE

  The wait for Monkey Lady to return was interminable. I wanted to die, but it was too soon. She had to be here for it. She had to make it hurt. She had to take off limbs. At least fingers. I needed to stay dead for as long as possible.

  Hours passed and the fire dwindled. My heart leapt with every cracking twig outside, but no one ever came. Just animals probably. The pain had mostly died away. That or I’d gotten used to it. Probably more of the latter. No, my real torment was the hunger.

  For a while, I raged against my bonds hoping to break free but to no avail. Monkey Lady knew what she was doing when she put this rig together. The delirium from no food, blood loss, and heroin withdrawal sent my mind reeling through time, blurring every torturous moment into one. The Monkey Woman’s cabin. Josef Mengele’s lab. I remembered the Spanish Inquisition shortly after my return to Europe from Japan. I remembered being buried alive. And deep back through the haze, I remembered the natural torture, not at the hands of man, but by the sheer spiteful nature of my condition. I remembered being lost in the woods forever ago before I knew about all of this, back in my first life.

  I know memory is a fluid and impermanent thing, that it can be colored and rewritten by our experiences, but when I looked back then, though I knew for a fact some of the details I recalled weren’t accurate, I knew the story was true. Though every detail may have changed over the millennia, I remembered the spirit of my first death truly.

  I had grown old, had children, and they were beginning to have children of their own. My oldest, whose name I can no longer remember much though it saddens me, had been married off to a leatherworker and moved with him to a nearby village to start his own trade. I had not gone to see her in quite some time. Travel is for the young.

  The first snow had fa
llen when I set off to pay her a visit. Her father was ailing, and I would need to find a family member to take me in once he passed. I hoped to lay the groundwork for a transition with this trip, but it was not to be.

  It had been so long since I had left my home. As a young woman, I could make the trip between our two villages by foot in two days, with a stop at an inn just by sunset. I realize that so long ago, it was likely not an inn but a farm, but after thousands of years of revision, that was how I remembered it. My youngest son had offered to take me there, but in my pride, I said no. I would soon lose my independence, and I felt determined to enjoy the last of it. In my pride, I had not considered that an old woman would walk slower through snow than a young woman would walk through grass. I never reached the inn.

  The sun had set and I still had not seen the familiar landmarks. I thought it could not possibly be much farther, so I pressed on, each moment growing colder and weaker. The longer I walked, the more I felt certain that the inn must have been close, that it would have been folly to turn back when it could be just over that hill, just around that bend. I fell many times into the snow and I got back up almost as often, until at once, I simply did not have the strength anymore. I pulled myself to a tree and made myself comfortable as best I could, letting its trunk and branches protect me from the elements.

  There I sat, freezing to death, all the while certain that someone would come, that the men and women at the inn just beyond the next tree would see me and take me in and let me rest beside the nice, warm hearth fire. I closed my eyes and dreamed of the flames growing warmer and warmer, and soon I felt them. I could not open my eyes, I could not move. I could only lie there while the flames grew from warm to hot to blazing. The fires consumed me, sparking in my heart and spreading throughout my body. Every fiber of my being screamed beneath the raging inferno that swept me up and held me in its heart. I could think of no reason for this endless burning and no comparison for a heat so intense. I had no Judeo-Christian religion to give me a concept of Hell and no science to tell me how hot the sun burned. I only knew pain, and I wondered how I had offended the gods in my long years to punish me so. Was this for my hubris, for not accepting my place as an old woman?