Broken Souls (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 2)

by D. W. Moneypenny

  “Mara?” Ping whispered, poking his head out into the night.

  “Yeah, is the power out?” she said. She lightly closed her car door, not worrying if it fully latched and walked toward the flashlight.

  “There was power a minute ago, but I didn’t want to light up the whole place. With a glass storefront, we’d look like some kind of beacon on this block. I don’t want to draw the interest of those strange creatures lurking around out there.”

  “How many people do you think have been affected by this thing of Prado’s? I mean, I ran into more than half a dozen between here and Eighty-Second Avenue.”

  “I’ve no idea. We can check out the news online in my office, assuming electricity and Internet access is available. Come on in,” he said.

  The smells of cinnamon and lemon struck her as she followed him across the kitchen past the swinging doors that led to the customer area and into a small office built into the back wall of the building. She heard a couple clicks and switches while computer screen ignited, casting a glow across Ping’s face. He launched the browser and entered the Web address of a local television station. A screaming headline filled the screen: Shedding Epidemic Spreads Fear and Confusion across PDX. Below that was a simple button labeled Live Coverage. Ping pressed a button on his speakers and clicked the button on the screen.

  A live shot from a helicopter appeared in a video frame, and the muffled voice of a reporter narrated, “It seems that most of the people stricken with the shedding have awakened from their comas and are mindlessly walking out of their hospital rooms. Many of them have staggered into the streets and have yet to be retrieved by their caregivers.”

  A spotlight from the helicopter flashed down over what looked like the Morrison Bridge leading out of downtown Portland. In the center of the roadway, several of the patients, dressed in pajamas and hospital gowns, lurched forward without acknowledging the light or the noise from the helicopter.

  The voice of the anchor cut in. “Miles, it looks like they are all heading in the same direction. We’ve gotten reports from the eastern part of town that they are heading west and from up north that they are heading south. Is it possible all of these poor souls are trying to get to the same place?”

  “Charlie, are you asking me if I think these delirious people are coordinating their movements in some way? If you are, I think that sounds a little kooky, don’t you?”

  There was a moment of silence, then the anchor said, “Just trying to make sense out of what is going on. It’s not easy, considering the deluge of reports of strange sightings we’ve been getting tonight. Do you have any observations that may help our viewers?”

  “Nothing more from up here. We’re heading into the southeast portion of the metro area to see what we can figure out. Chopper 8 out.”

  The picture switched back to the perfectly coiffed middle-aged anchor who said, “Regarding those strange sightings from around town, if you have any pictures of what appear to be greenish specter-looking phenomena, please send them to this email address or you can load them directly on our Web site. Here are a few of the dozens we have received already.”

  On the screen, a series of amateur photos appeared in sequence, all of them of transparent people, fluorescing green, mostly in grainy out-of-focus shots. The anchor provided another voice-over. “Our reporters are getting information that many of these photographs appear to be images of people afflicted with the shedding, but we cannot get confirmation of that from local or hospital authorities. Some sources are speculating that these phantom images are some kind of hoax, but we are getting too many photographs from too many sources for that to be the case. Dozens more are showing up on social media.”

  Ping closed the browser window but left the computer on to provide a little light. He turned to Mara. “You need to get the Chronicle. I think Prado might be leading all these people in this direction for a reason. The shedding victims are definitely converging on this area. I circled around the neighborhood a couple times on the way here, and it appears they are coming from every direction, centered on Woodstock.”

  “Isn’t that a little paranoid? How would he even know we were here?”

  “Did you encounter any of the shedding victims on the way?”

  “I saw a couple.”

  “Well, if you saw them, then it’s likely that Prado saw you.”

  “I can’t believe—”

  A crash at the front of the bakery shook the entire building. Ping’s eyes widened in the glow of the computer screen, and he jumped up. “Stay here. Let me take a look.”

  He jogged over to the swinging doors and nudged one open enough to look out into the front of the bakery. Four half-rotted, gray-skinned people were clumsily crawling through the bashed-in window that had served as the store’s front wall. Ping turned and whispered, “Let’s go. We have to get to the Chronicle.”

  The door next to his head swung inward and struck him squarely in the face.

  CHAPTER 45

  Sam could see his breath condense in the cold night air as he and his mother tried to keep pace with Buddy, who continued to move under Prado’s influence and jerkily made good time up a hill past a row of tiny shops and a drive-through restaurant. Diana pulled up her overcoat around her neck and leaned into the incline without seeming to exert herself. The hill felt more challenging to Sam than it appeared to be for his mother.

  “Let’s give him a couple more blocks, and then I think you should prompt him to go back to the house,” Diana said. “I don’t think he actually has a destination in mind. He looks like he’s sleepwalking.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Sam said. His phone rang, and he took it out of his jacket pocket and lifted it to his ear.

  “Did you guys find Buddy yet?” Mara’s tinny voice blared at him. Crashing sounds reverberated in the background.

  “Yeah, he’s like ten yards ahead of us, going up the hill by the drive-in place with the great corn dogs. I know you said all corn dogs are the same, but—”

  “Shut up about the corn dogs! Prado’s zombies have Ping cornered under the sink in the back of the bakery.”

  “So? Zap them or pixelate them or time lock them or whatever.”

  “These are real people. I can’t go around pixelating and shooting lightning bolts at them. They’re victims too. And I don’t honestly think I can freeze all of them at one time without, you know, fading out. They are coming from everywhere.”

  Diana looked over, concerned. “What’s going on? Let me talk to her.”

  “Hold on,” he said to Mara, then turned to his mom. “Mara and Ping are apparently in the middle of some kind of zombie apocalypse. I’ll be right back.” He jogged up to Buddy, passed him, then turned around on the sidewalk directly in his path, standing under a streetlight. “Hey, Prado, you in there?”

  Buddy’s face was in much worse shape than it had been earlier. The black fissures that split his skin had now distorted his features, making his mouth look as if it were a gash running from his chin, up through a nostril and to the bottom of his left eye, bulging out of its socket. He kept walking toward Sam, who walked backward ahead of him, ducking his head down, trying to get Buddy’s attention. It took a moment to catch a glint of acknowledgment, a subtle hiking of a disintegrating brow.

  “Stop right there,” Sam said. “Don’t move a muscle.”

  Buddy halted with one foot planted solidly on the ground ahead of the other, stopped midstride before he could bring the trailing foot forward. Sam raised the phone back to his ear and watched his mother speed-walk toward him. “Mara? Hello?”

  Diana approached and said, “Did you lose her? Did the service go down?”

  Sam looked at his screen. “No, the battery’s dead. All that video recording earlier drained it.” He turned to Buddy and said, “Repeat after me . . .”

  * * *

  Ping, dazed and bleeding from a small cut above his left eyebrow, had managed to crawl along the floor and duck under a stainless stee
l bar that ran between the legs of the sink to the right of the swinging doors. The creatures now pushing their way into the kitchen didn’t appear to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. They vacantly staggered around, bumping into counters, walls and the large mixer along the far wall, seemingly unable to coordinate their own limbs, much less execute a coordinated assault on the cowering baker.

  Mara shook her phone in her hand and placed it back to her ear “Sam?” Talking to Ping, she said, “I think we lost him.” She turned toward the sink under which Ping hid, and yelled over the clatter of pots and utensils being knocked across a stainless steel counter and onto the floor. “I lost Sam. I’m not sure he understood what to do.”

  Three of the shedding victims turned away from the sink, which they couldn’t seem to navigate, and shuffled toward Mara. Several more stumbled through the swinging doors, kicking pots across the room, filling the darkness with loud clangs and metallic screeches. Mara backed away from the entrance to the office and eased toward the rear exit. An old lady with a white beehive and few features left to her face lunged, growling in a deep register that made Mara’s skin crawl. Successfully dodging, Mara nearly fell into the arms of a tall, thin man wearing nothing but pajama bottoms. His ribs strained against his decomposing flesh, making him look particularly skeletal in the indirect lighting coming from the office computer. To avoid touching him, Mara twisted her midsection in midair and yawed away from him, losing her balance and falling onto the floor where she landed with a slotted spoon sticking into her back.

  The weak light from the office was soon blotted out by the silhouettes that gathered above, a circle of lurching, swaying cadavers that bent closer and closer. Mara raised her hands before her, resigned to striking out, even if these were innocent victims.

  The noise stopped. The circle of creatures above stopped bending toward her. She looked to her right, between the legs of her unmoving stalkers and thought she could make out the sheen of Ping’s eyes under the sink.

  “Ping? Did you do something?” she said.

  “No.” He made a grunting sound and then groaned.

  “Are you hurt? Did they touch you? Are you infected?”

  “Um. The dragon. I’m trying to keep from . . .”

  “Don’t you dare, Ping! No dragons, not now! I am pinned down by a bunch of zombies and I refuse to deal with a dragon. Get a grip, or I swear I will pixelize your butt to kingdom come when I get out of here.”

  He exhaled loudly.

  Then something wet dripped down from the dark, landing on Mara’s cheek. Squealing, she wiped her face and looked into her mind’s eye, in that place where she could tap into her abilities. As she was about to strike out, the zombies spoke, in unison, and in that creepy baritone she had come to associate with Prado.

  “Mara,” they said.

  A shiver went down her spine.

  “We have Buddy. No, that probably sounds creepy to you,” they chanted.

  Mara opened her eyes and looked above at the darkened faces hanging over her.

  “It’s Sam,” they said.

  Ping shouted from across the room. “It’s a distraction. A trick of some kind.”

  “Wait,” Mara hissed back at him.

  “All corn dogs are not equal. She’ll know it’s me if I say that,” the zombie chorus said. “The zombies won’t move for a while, but we can’t leave Buddy on the street like this too long.”

  “It’s Sam, he’s prompting Buddy, and it’s coming out of these guys,” she said.

  “Hurry,” they chanted.

  Mara raised her feet and pressed the soles of her shoes against the legs of two of the men that towered over her. They staggered backward enough to allow her to scoot between them.

  “I hope that black mist can’t get through the bottoms of my shoes,” she said. She turned toward the sink. “Come on, Ping. I don’t know how much time we have.”

  He rolled under the stainless steel bar and into a couple pots. Grabbing the edge of the sink, he pulled himself up and followed Mara to the back door. As she opened it, the zombies said in unison, “Call Mom.”

  Rolling her eyes and grabbing Ping’s arm, she stepped out the door.

  And slammed into a wall of a person.

  Mara gasped and recoiled, pushing Ping back into the bakery, sure she had just exposed herself to the shedding. As she reached to slam the door, she heard a familiar southern drawl.

  “Good Lord, are you okay?” Bohannon said.

  Mara froze for a second, allowed her mind to catch up with what was happening, then stepped into the back alley, pulling Ping again outside. Closing the door behind her, she turned to Ping. “You got your friend under control?” she asked Ping. “No breathing fire and breaking the furniture tonight, right?”

  Ping nodded. “Right. I’m okay now.”

  Shaking her head, Mara turned to Bohannon. “What are you doing here?”

  He held up a paper cup with a plastic cover on it.

  Mara shook her head. “What? Coffee?”

  “I was under the impression you needed Prado’s ashes for something.” He wiggled the cup in front of her face and handed it to her. “I’m assuming I would be better off not knowing what you guys intend to do with them. Promise me it isn’t something weird that’s going to end up on the six o’clock news. I know it’s overly optimistic of me, considering everything that is going on, but I’d like to be a detective long enough to actually call it a career.”

  “Oh, I completely forgot about that,” she said. “No promises about the six o’clock news. It seems like the barriers to what they will cover are coming down pretty quickly. But we’ll do our best to keep a low profile.”

  “You mean like having all those shedding victims chant your name on television?” the detective said.

  “That was completely unforeseen and unavoidable,” Mara said, then added, “And so was the second time.”

  “Second time?”

  “Yeah, just a minute ago, assuming it got caught on camera.”

  “We should go into the shop before Sam releases those creatures, and they begin to pursue us again,” Ping said. “Detective, are you joining us?”

  “No, I’ve got to get back. Everyone’s been called in because of the rampant unrest and insanity that’s going on. People are going crazy all over the city. I mean, literally crazy. We are getting dozens of reports of ghosts all over town. I think all these shedding patients lurching around has sparked some kind of mass hysteria.”

  “Yeah, it’s mass hysteria all right,” Mara said.

  Bohannon turned to walk back to the end of the alley where his car was parked. Mara touched his arm, and he looked back. “Detective, don’t let one of them touch you.”

  “I already figured that much out,” he said. He tilted his head at them and added, “You two be careful with whatever it is you’re up to.”

  * * *

  Sam stepped back from Buddy, who remained frozen, and looked over to his mother, who pulled her coat more tightly around herself. Her nose and cheeks were rosy in the cold air, and she stomped in place to get warmer.

  “We can’t stay out here very much longer. It’s not good for him or us for that matter. We look a little conspicuous standing out here like this. Eventually a police cruiser will happen by or a concerned citizen will call it in,” she said.

  “Let’s give Mara another minute, and then I’ll prompt him to go home, but I’m a little concerned about doing that,” Sam said.

  “Why? What’s the problem?”

  “If I prompt him to go back to our house, won’t all the other people Prado has infected begin heading there too?” Sam asked.

  Diana’s eyes widened. “Is that possible? I mean, most of them are up in Portland, right? I thought when you prompt someone, it was temporary. Surely they won’t have time to walk down to Oregon City, would they? It’s unlikely that some of them would show up at the house.”

  “Unless there are some of them already here in town. The whole th
ing started over in Clackamas at the bank that Prado and his friend, the giant bug, tried to rob. That’s closer to us than Portland.”

  “I do not want these people showing up at the house. One is enough,” Diana said. A trill came from the breast pocket of her coat.

  “That’s probably Mara,” Sam said.

  Diana answered, “Get your butt home right now, young lady.”

  “Mom, I’m a little pinned down at the moment,” Mara said.

  “You wouldn’t be pinned down if you had your butt parked in bed like you’re supposed to instead of sneaking out in the middle of the night.”

  “Now is not the time for maternal discipline, Mother. I’m sort of in the middle of something serious right now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “We came in the back door of the shop. There are rotting people and green ghosts running all over town. A bunch of them trashed Ping’s Bakery, and, according to the news, there are more on the way,” Mara said.

  Diana switched over to Speakerphone so Sam could hear. “Green ghosts? You mean like Buddy’s apparition at the house?”

  “Yeah, when Opie got the bright idea to prompt me into making him visible, apparently it affected all the people who got evicted from their bodies, not only Buddy. Now they are running around all over the place, scaring the bejesus out of everyone.”

  Sam leaned toward the phone. “Just trying to help. Why don’t you make them invisible again?”

  Mara yelled back loudly enough to overload the phone’s speakers, causing her voice to intermittently crackle, “I can’t remember how I made them visible, genius!”

  “Enough bickering,” Diana said. “Mara, come home, and we’ll figure out what to do from here.”

  “I’m thinking it might be safer to stay put, at least until the police—or whoever is in charge of rounding up all these people—clear the streets. There are dozens of them out there right now.”