Come to Dust

by Bracken MacLeod

  “Who was it?”

  “Those detectives,” Tony said. “They don’t believe me when I say I haven’t seen you. I think they talked to Dr. Downum at the morgue. I don’t know that for sure, but Miranda’s not answering my calls, so it’d be my guess. They said the next time they come back, they’ll have a warrant to search upstairs. I don’t know what they’re waiting for, to be honest.” He didn’t need to say it was time for Mitch and Sophie to move on; they all knew it.

  “You’ve done way more for us than I should have ever asked you to.” Mitch closed the book. Sophie muttered a quiet objection. Mitch scooted her off the sofa onto the floor where a couple of stuffed animals lay, momentarily neglected. She sat, staring at the adults as if, given a conversational opportunity, she’d chime in with the answer to all their problems. Mitch spoke instead. “I have a line on a safe house in Vermont where we can hole up for a few days. From there, I know some people in Peterborough, Ontario, willing to let us stay with them, if we can get across the border to their place. Li sent me a SteamText this morning. She’s already there.” He glanced at his prepaid smartphone. Like the name suggested, Liana’s message had already evaporated into the digital atmosphere.

  “How are you going to get into Canada?”

  Mitch shrugged. He had an idea, but he’d put off trying to implement it. It went against his head down philosophy. The time had passed, though, to stop doing time, and make the most of it instead. “I need to get something from our old place... Our passports, if they’re still there. Then we’re headed out of town.”

  Tony nodded and started toward the curtained window at the far end of the living room. “I need to show you something,” he said. As he walked by, Sophie reached out and hugged his leg, making him pause for a moment. He leaned over and reached down to tussle her hair. She closed her eyes and leaned her face closer to him. Mitch gently peeled her off Tony’s leg and picked her up. Since spending a day locked in a safe, she didn’t like to be too far from any familiar person she could cling to. He was happy to hold her as much as she wanted.

  Tony led them to the window and pulled back the curtain, pointing into the parking lot below. Mitch ducked out of the way at first, then approached the window at an oblique angle to see what his friend was trying to show him. Parked near the wrought iron gate in the back was a small, sun-faded blue car. Tony said, “There’s a booster seat in the back and a full tank of gas.”

  “I can’t... I don’t have the money to...”

  “This wouldn’t be a very good stop on an underground railroad if I made you pay for the way out.”

  “But a car is exp—”

  Tony held up a hand. “It was a donation from a sympathetic client who lost her daughter a while ago. It was supposed to be a sixteenth birthday present. Instead, she wants Sophie to have it. So she can have a sixteenth birthday, and hopefully a lot more after that.”

  Mitch hugged his friend.

  “You do know how to drive, right?”

  “I think I remember.”

  44

  Mitch parked around the corner and sat in the darkened car for a while, looking into the rearview mirror and waiting. He had no idea how to identify a “tail” and didn’t possess the skills to lose one if he could’ve picked out someone following him. He had a driver’s license, but it had always been cheaper to take the T than own a car. He couldn’t afford insurance and upkeep. His skill behind the wheel extended to not running off the road and not hitting any other cars on it. All you gotta do is miss, he told himself. Liana’s motto. The car he was sitting in was likely as temporary as his continuing U.S. citizenship. Either that or his freedom.

  After enough time had passed that he felt somewhat less vulnerable, he got out and opened the back door. Sophie hadn’t wanted to sit in the car seat, but reluctantly let him strap her into it. She could tell how badly he wanted her to be safe, and so she let him have this thing. She’d sent a tendril of rot through one of the arm rests, though. “Hon,” he said. “This seat has got to last. You can’t—”

  “Sorry,” she said. Her voice was so thin, so ethereal, he wasn’t sure he heard her as much as imagined what she said. Her bottom lip quivered and he dropped the subject. All the chair had to do was keep her safe until they got near the border. He expected they’d either be walking across it, or riding in a trunk again. They certainly weren’t driving through a customs checkpoint, not unless something about them both changed. Though Tony had accepted his lie about passports without challenging him, Mitch didn’t believe for a second that he’d fooled his friend. An ex-con with an off-the-books adopted—now abducted—child didn’t have a passport any more than he had a third eye that saw into the future. He pulled her out of the car and locked it up with the keys instead of the remote fob. It was a Toyota and there was no way to lock or unlock the thing from a distance without the lights flashing and horn beeping. Even the quiet clack of the locks sliding into place with the key was more noise than he wanted to make.

  Together, they walked up the block toward their old apartment. He heard a faint screeching and looked up. Perched at the top of the lamppost in front of the house, a hawk tore at the body of a pigeon. Downy feathers fell to the concrete below, blowing along the gutter in the light nighttime breeze like snow. He focused back on the dark block and headed home.

  Their house had been picked apart as badly as the bird. The front windows were smashed and someone had spray-painted DEADOPHILE!!! in two-foot-high red letters beside the boarded- up door. Mitch doubted the back entrance was in any better shape. If the doors were nailed shut, that meant the upstairs neighbors had left... or were forced to leave. He’d once liked this neighborhood. It wasn’t swanky, by any stretch, but the people were friendly enough. They waved when they saw each other on the street and would say “hi” at the bus stop; the rest of the time—most of the time—they minded their own business and expected the same from everyone else. At least they had once. Times changed.

  He thought about atrocities he’d seen on the television in war torn parts of the world, how dehumanization of other people gave license to folks claiming righteousness to turn against their neighbors and behave as badly as the human species was capable. Torture and beheadings, rape as a weapon of war, mass murder and “ethnic cleansing” were all the natural result of reducing one’s neighbors to something less than human. If you can look in the eyes of a person and ignore everything about them that resides in you, then there are no limits to the evil you can do. If they’re apes, rats, cockroaches, or viruses, then anything responsible human beings can do to keep their filth from spreading is justified. Isn’t it? What’s lower than a virus?

  A corpse.

  Don’t speak ill of the dead. Show some respect for the dead. These platitudes were trotted out when a family member “passed away” and their body was out of sight and not a problem, being handled by guys like Tony Tremblay who took on the responsibility of sanitizing death, preparing the living to see a false, made up version of it in a chapel, in a box, in a hole in the ground. But a cadaver in a hospital bed or in the street is rotting meat, and the potential for more disease and death. Getting rid of a corpse—cleansing the places they’ve infected—these are things people must do to ensure their survival. Especially if the dead are intruding upon the places normally owned by the living.

  Deadophile.

  Hell, if that’s what he was, he’d wear the name with pride. He had a responsibility he’d taken on even before Violette left. When he’d come out of prison she introduced him to his niece, the living legacy of the man he hadn’t had the heart to murder. She told him that although she loved Sophie, every day she looked at her, the girl reminded her of her father. She looked so like him. Mitch didn’t see it—she looked like herself to him. Maybe a mix of the two of them in the right light, or when she turned this way or that. But that didn’t matter and Sophie spent an increasing amount of time with him until finally he was all she had when Violette ran away. And then Faye killed her,
robbing him of his chance at redemption. But the universe, or some mysterious science, had given him another chance to get it right—and he was going to take it.

  He glanced over at Faye’s boyfriend’s car parked out front of their house and heard the music thumping inside. Laughter and shouting carried through the closed windows like they were playing a game or having a celebration. The detectives had explained it to him already: corpus delicti. No body, no crime, no accountability. Faye and Meghan had their alibis, the evidence of her crime had walked out of the morgue, and for all they knew was long gone. They were free to get on with their lives without paying any price for Sophie’s death. Free to lift a few drinks and celebrate having gotten away with it.

  His neighbors.

  The people who killed Sophie.

  He walked up to the steps of their old apartment, and knowing what his niece needed wasn’t inside, took her around the back of the house instead. He lifted Sophie over the low chain link fence separating their backyard from Faye’s before climbing over after her. She waited patiently, quietly, while he stumbled over and rattled the fence loudly. He didn’t have to shush her or try to distract her. She was a natural predator. Silent as the grave.

  The music was so loud he figured he could kick in the back door without anyone hearing. Hell, he could have thrown a grenade through their window and no one in the neighborhood would have known any different. Instead, he crept around to the cellar window that had been broken as long as he’d lived next door—probably longer. It popped right open when he kicked at it. He got onto his hands and knees and backed into the opening, hanging down and feeling with his feet for the floor or a shelf or a washer and dryer. Anything. It wasn’t a bottomless pit, he knew. If he just shimmied in and dropped, he’d land on something solid after another foot or two. Still, it felt like dangling over the edge of a cliff. He let go and dropped down. Once he had his feet under him, he held the window open for Sophie. She slipped in on her bottom and he pulled her free of the window, letting it close behind them with a muted bang.

  The cellar was dark, but a little light spilling in from the street lamp at the corner helped him make out the shapes of the things stored there. Piles of boxes and old junk. A bicycle leaned against the far wall, gears rusted and tires flat from disuse. A stinking heating oil tank stood at the far end of the room, next to an old refrigerator near it in the corner. Above them, loud music and stomping, elephantine footsteps rattled the boards over their heads. Without any insulation between the first floor and the cellar, he could hear everything above as clearly as if he were up there sharing a beer with his neighbors. Steven Tyler sang about walkin’ the dog, while Faye laughed at a story her boyfriend told about getting in a fight in a bar with someone named Fitzie. Mitch climbed the stairs to the door leading out of the cellar into the kitchen. He turned the knob carefully and the door opened a fraction before catching on a hook latch. He could undo that easily enough with a finger. He closed the door and returned to the cellar to wait. Let them finish the bottle and pass out. Then we’ll go up.

  He tried to pull the girl close to him to wait out the revelers’ celebration, but she wouldn’t budge. Instead, she wanted to inspect a corner of the basement near a pile of boxes. Mitch followed her over. “What is it, hon?” he whispered. She didn’t answer. She let out a groaning sigh and pointed at the ground beneath the stack. The checkered vinyl flooring was torn, exposing the two-toned concrete beneath. There was a clear, jagged line where it appeared new concrete had been inexpertly poured and spread to patch an older portion. Sophie knelt and ran her hands over the rough, lighter-colored cement. She looked at Mitch, pleading silently.

  “What? I don’t get it.”

  She held his wrist and pulled him down to the ground next to her. With her other hand, she touched the cement and said, “Here,” in her thin dream voice.

  “I don’t understand, hon. We just have to wait for a while and then we can go upst—” She slapped at his forearm in the petulant way she’d done when she was still alive and wasn’t getting her way. He tried to imagine what it was she wanted, but couldn’t.

  She pointed at the floor and pleaded again before caressing the cement some more. “Here,” she insisted.

  He stood up and began moving boxes out of the way, not sure what she was looking for. He imagined he wouldn’t be surprised if he uncovered a door in the floor leading down into... what? A sub-basement? But once the stack was shifted away, he found nothing but the light patch surrounded by the darker, older concrete. “It’s just the ground, baby. There’s nothing there.”

  Sophie flattened a hand out on the lighter colored patch of floor and the black veins snaked out from her hands. She grew more pallid and her skin tightened around bone until she looked nearly skeletal. Mitch tried to pull her away from the spot, but he couldn’t move her. The concrete darkened and broke under her palms, loud cracks echoing around them. He held his breath waiting for the sounds of the heavy footfalls above to move toward the basement door and come clomping down the stairs. The party overhead continued unabated, however. Sophie kept rotting the floor, spreading her decrepitude out until it had consumed a section maybe four feet across. She sat back up, wobbly and weak. Her face was sunken in and her skin seemed as thin and translucent as onionskin. Mitch felt a sharp pain of desperation stab at him. This wasn’t what he’d come here to do. She was almost all gone. If he asked her to rot a lock or a doorknob, he wasn’t sure there’d be anything left of her but a sack of bones.

  “You have to stop, baby! You have to keep something for yourself until we can get upstairs.” She shook her head and pointed at the ruined concrete. “What’s down there, hon?” He wanted to say, don’t make me dig. Please don’t make me dig it up, whatever it is. But he didn’t. Instead, he set her gently aside, letting her lean against a crate full of old kitchen junk, and began to carefully pull away the cracked and loosened cement chunks with his hands. Shoving them up against the wall, he uncovered damp earth below. He didn’t need to look at his niece to know she wanted him to go deeper. So he did. Shoving his fingers in, he pulled back at the dirt, two, three times, before finding what it was she was after.

  He pulled the dead boy up out of the ground by his jumper. It was hard to tell, but Mitch figured he was maybe two or three years old. His overalls had Thomas the Tank Engine on the bib. His skin was patchy and rotted away and what remained was black with decay. He smelled like earth, and for that Mitch was thankful. When the boy opened his shriveled eyes, Mitch wanted to drop him and run away. Instead, he pulled him the rest of the way out of the ground and sat back with the child in his lap.

  Lips thin and pulled back from tiny teeth, his sockets barely filled with the shriveled remains of what had once likely been big bright eyes, the child moved its face in a horrendous mockery of a toddler waking from a nap. It reached up with skeletal hands and rubbed at what was left of its eyes. The kid barely looked human. Mitch tried to contain his horror. His body wanted to run, to climb back out that little window and into the night, and never look back. But he couldn’t. Not until he got Sophie what she needed. Not until both of them got their second chance. But now this. This boy. The corpse in his arms wriggled and reached up for him. Mitch felt a chill on his face like an arctic blast. Sophie crawled over and touched the child. He turned his head toward her and they studied each other for a moment. The cold receded.

  Mitch’s eyes filled with tears and a fresh rage gripped at his heart. He’d just pulled the body of a boy out of a shallow grave in his neighbor’s basement. Buried in the cellar like some dirty secret Faye could just cover up and pretend was never there. Just like she’d treated Sophie. Put in her crib and covered with a blanket like nothing at all was wrong.

  Non-accidental trauma.

  BANG!

  Anger.

  BANG!

  Shame.

  BANG!

  Rage.

  He looked to his niece for some kind of direction. She knelt in front of him, quietly s
tudying the child in his arms, and gave him no guidance. Whatever she’d come back knowing or feeling, she was still just a child with a child’s way of telling him what she wanted.

  He thought about the people upstairs. What if two aren’t enough. What if Faye and her boyfriend won’t heal both these kids. So what do I do with him? Sophie took the boy’s hand and pulled. Mitch placed the tiny thing gently in her lap. She smoothed the remains of the hair on the boy’s skeletal head gently like she’d once done with her dollies and cooed at him. The boy opened his mouth to groan in response but no sound emerged. Not even a breath. He just opened and closed his rictus in a decrepit pantomime of speech and wiggled his shriveled little eyes. Mitch wondered if they shared some kind of connection, like a psychic link. She’d known he was under the concrete after all. Maybe it’s not as strong as that. We know our own, don’t we? I bet you can just tell when someone like you is near, huh? He’d once been at a party with a friend of a friend who had been recently discharged from the Marines. The guy shook Mitch’s hand and asked where he’d seen combat. Mitch told him that he’d never served and the guy just nodded and gave him a look that said he knew he wasn’t in the forces but that there was more than one kind of war zone. They spent most of the evening talking about other things: sports and the weather, the hosts, the quality of the beer. Just a couple of broken men sitting around talking about anything but being broken. Some of us can just find each other, can’t we. The bungled and the botched can feel each other from miles away.

  He sat behind his niece, wrapping his arms around her while she tended to the dead boy. Fatigue started to set in. He forced himself to stay awake. Forced himself to keep listening to what was going on above them. After a while, the diminishing sounds from upstairs suggested the partiers had celebrated enough for the night. He checked his watch and blearily noted the hour. Half past two. Give it another half an hour. We’ll still have enough time for Sophie to take what she needs and for us to get on the road before sunrise. We can get to a motel and I can catch some sleep before we head the rest of the way.