by Dan Wells
My breath became shallow, my heart hammered in my chest. How many times had I dreamed about stabbing someone? I used to dream about stabbing Brooke, or Marci, or even my mother; shameful, terrifying fantasies I’d tried for years to get free of, killing everyone who was close to me. I’d dreamed about killing my father so many times I’d lost count. And now I’d finally done it, knife and all, to this … nobody. And it meant nothing.
I felt a greater rage than I’d ever felt before.
My knife was in her back again, before I even knew how it got there, then I saw my arm raise and the blood drip from the knife and I screamed and drove it in a third time, piercing flesh and snapping bone, and again and again, up and down, my teeth clenched in a frenzy of stabbing and hacking until the body dissolved around my knife, the flesh turning black, the air filling with the acrid stench of burning grease, the body discorporating into ash and sludge and slime. It sunk into the carpet, a smoldering, shapeless blob—and still I stabbed it, until the knife stuck deep in the floor and the jolt knocked my hand away. I gasped for breath. Mary’s gun, lost under her body when she fell, became visible again as the sizzling ash sizzled away around it.
A grunt. I looked up at Potash, who was too weak to breathe, propped against the wall like a broken doll.
He’d seen everything.
5
I volunteered to embalm Kelly, but I don’t think they took the offer seriously. Instead we holed up in our office, waiting for the world to calm down.
“They got a photo of me,” I said, looking at my laptop.
“We’re lucky that’s all they got,” said Diana. She’d managed to slip out of her sniper’s nest unseen, since all the commotion was one street over. I hadn’t been so lucky, though she was right that I had been, all things considered, as lucky as we could have hoped for. Three different neighbors had seen Kelly’s body and called the police, who had arrived, guns drawn, almost fifteen minutes before Ostler managed to flash her FBI badge and smooth things over. Fifteen minutes wasn’t much—they hadn’t gotten me back to the station for fingerprints, they hadn’t had time to interrogate me, they hadn’t even found my name because we didn’t carry ID. But the neighbors had been watching. One of them had a cell phone, and a picture of the mysterious teenager sitting in the back of a cop car had been on Twitter within minutes.
That was last night. We’d barely dared to move since.
“Potash is stable,” said Nathan, setting down his phone. “Trujillo says they have him in protective custody at the hospital, no press allowed.”
Diana looked at me, than back at Nathan. “Is he breathing?”
“Not on his own; he’s on a machine. They think it’s some kind of pulmonary embolism, because of how fast it came on.”
“It’s pneumonia,” I said, remembering Mary’s words.
“We know what you think it is,” said Nathan, though his tone suggested more impatience than recognition. “Let’s let the doctors do the diagnosing for now, okay? She’s been killing people with this … whatever it is … for thousands of years. We’re lucky he’s still alive at all—and if he wasn’t, you’d be the one responsible.”
“Nathan,” snapped Diana, but he bulldozed past her warning with a snarl.
“You told us it was safe,” he continued. I laid my hands flat against the table, trying to stay calm, keeping my eyes fixed on the laptop screen without seeing anything on it. “You told us all she could do was make sick kids sicker, not kill a grown man’s lungs with a flick of her wrist! And she threw Kelly through the damn window, which you also conveniently forgot to mention she could do! And meanwhile you had the gall to sit outside in the car and let them face this thing alone—”
“Nathan!” said Diana again, in a voice that left no room for argument.
Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine. The counting wasn’t working.
They didn’t know I’d stabbed her.
“We have bigger problems to worry about,” said Diana. “Ostler’s bosses are going to be pissed, and who knows what fallout will come from that? We’re practically a joke as it is, and now we’ve lost an agent and caused a public scene. Ostler’s at the police station right now trying to convince them there are monsters under the bed, but we can’t afford to bring the cops in. Rumors are going to start, word is going to spread, and our entire operation is going to be raked by headquarters. I’ll be amazed if we don’t get recalled and fired.”
“That’s the best possible thing that could happen to us,” said Nathan. “Not only are the Withered fighting back now, but even the ones who don’t know we’re coming can still kill us with impunity. We need to get out of here yesterday.”
“Don’t worry about the FBI,” I said. “Worry about whoever else out there is watching.”
“The police are the only ones who know anything,” said Nathan. “They kept the press out of it completely.”
“The police found two people and one dead body,” I said, “sitting in the middle of an obvious fight scene, yet we all claim to be on the same team. If you don’t know what the sludge is, the person we claim to have killed doesn’t even exist. People are going to talk, even if it’s just the cops, and rumors are going to spread. Best-case scenario, they’ll think it’s a government cover-up, but worst case, someone puts it all together and figures out we killed a demon.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Nathan. “Nobody else even believes these things are real.”
“Somebody does,” I said. “Somewhere out there, somebody suspects, and this is only going to confirm it. There’ve been too many news stories, too many unanswered questions, and those pile up—they’ll wonder about the sludge, they’ll wonder about me, maybe they’ll put the two together and get even more curious. I’ve been publicly involved with missing bodies and mysterious sludge three times before, you know.” I pointed at the computer screen. “And now my picture’s on the Internet.”
* * *
With Kelly dead and Ostler running ragged trying to keep our story quiet—and with Potash too sick to speak—nobody remembered the stipulation that I should never be alone. That night after work I found an old jacket and a ball cap in the building’s lost and found, and waited inside the rear service door for the most blue-collar person I could find. A custodian left around six, bundled up tight against the cold, and I fell in step beside him, chatting idly about the weather, feigning friendliness so that anyone who happened to be watching would miss the mysterious boy from an unexplained murder and see only a pair of working-class Joes. I didn’t know who might be watching—Meshara or the other demons, or maybe someone completely unexpected—but that gave me all the more reason to hide. I rode the bus home, sitting in the back on a hard plastic seat, staring out the window at the dirty black snow lining the sides of the roads. I didn’t like being alone, any more than I really liked anything. But I preferred it. It was simpler.
Boy Dog was waiting for me when I got home, wagging his tail in the biggest display of energy I’d ever seen from him. Potash and I had gone shopping that morning before work—had it really only been one day?—and left a large plate of dry food and a bowl of water on the floor of the kitchen. Both dishes were overturned now, mixed and scattered across the floor, and I could smell the powerful scent of hound-dog urine in every corner of the room. But he was only marking his territory: there were no major puddles, and no droppings, so I told him he was a good boy and took him outside to do his business. Cody French, monster or not, had trained his dog well.
I took Boy Dog back inside and cleaned up the mess on the kitchen floor, sopping up the soggy chunks of kibble with an old towel. I poured him another dish of water and another pile of food, then sat in the lone chair in the living room, staring at the blank TV. I didn’t turn it on.
I’d stabbed a woman to death.
Obviously she wasn’t a woman, not really, but she had been when I’d stabbed her. She had the shape, and the hair, and the voice, and the ribs my knife passed thro
ugh were human ribs, stretching wide beneath her skin to give a human form to her back. I’d been present for the deaths of several people, but I’d only ever killed two of them. Now the number was three. Most law-enforcement agencies used three as the benchmark for serial-killer activity: one kill was a murder, two was a coincidence, but three was a sign of habitual behavior. Kill three people in a row and you were a spree killer; kill them over time, with a period in the middle to cool off, lie low, and decide to kill again, and you were a serial killer. I’d tried to kill Brooke, back when she was Nobody. She would have been my third. Now it was Typhoid Mary Gardner, the nurse who slaughtered children and then comforted their parents.
I’d seen her house. She’d had the same TV I did. I stared at the black screen, a flat stretch of nothing turned slightly gray by the light of the kitchen behind me. I could almost see myself in it, a vague outline not quite human shaped; the chair made me look bigger than I was, wide and hunchbacked and menacing.
I still had the knife. The police had taken it, but it was covered with ash, not blood, and they’d had no grounds to protest when Ostler had ordered them to return it. It was back in its sheath now, wiped carefully clean, sitting in my coat pocket. I hadn’t taken the coat off yet. I thought about the knife now, wondering if I should get it out to look at it, to clean the last bits of sludge from the blade. To hold it. I wondered if I should hide it, though I couldn’t think of any reason why. I didn’t know what to do with the knife, or myself, because I didn’t know how I felt about killing Mary. Should I be elated? Relieved? Nathan had said that we couldn’t possibly feel relieved at her death, because we’d lost Kelly in the process, but those seemed like completely separate things to me. We could feel bad that we lost Kelly, and glad that we’d stopped Mary, all at the same time. Couldn’t we? Did it have to be either/or?
I was avoiding the issue. The knife was just a knife, and her body was ash, and it didn’t matter what happened to any of it. What mattered was how I had done it. One stab to kill her was justified—it was “good,” in the way that our morality shifted to cover the spectrum of attack and defense. She was going to kill Potash, so I stopped her. But I hadn’t stopped myself. I’d stabbed her a dozen times or more after that, maybe two dozen, and there was nothing justified about any of those. I wasn’t stabbing that corpse to defend myself or protect a friend or even to avenge the other victims. I wasn’t even stabbing because I wanted to, though that would be bad enough. I was stabbing that body because I couldn’t stop myself from stabbing it. I’d lost control. In all my years of thinking and struggling and following rules, in all my study of demons and Withered and their untold millennia of terror, nothing scared me as much as this. I’d lost control.
Boy Dog waddled past me and flopped down on the floor, panting from the exertion. The knife was in my pocket. I didn’t dare to pet him or touch him or even think about him. I lifted my legs and braced my feet on the seat in front of me, out of reach, where the dog couldn’t lean against them, and I sat in a fetal position, staring at my dark reflection in the TV screen.
I didn’t move for almost thirteen hours.
* * *
Potash was diagnosed with something called cryptogenic organizing pneumonitis, which his doctors defined as “His lungs don’t work right, but hell if we know why.” I’m paraphrasing. Whatever Mary gave him—a virus, a bacteria, or maybe even a fungus—got into his lungs in such high volume that it started rebuilding them, and if he’d gotten to the hospital even a few hours later he probably would have died. The lead pulmonologist, a man named Dr. Pearl, joked that the disease seemed almost supernatural, but none of us ever laughed, and he eventually stopped making jokes.
I kept the knife with me everywhere, but I never took it out of its sheath.
With Mary dead we focused all our attention on Meshara, though without Kelly and Potash to help there wasn’t nearly enough attention to go around. The police gave us access to their files, which was helpful but actually created more work, not less. They set up a few surveillance details as well, but seemed far more interested in watching us. They didn’t trust us, and without Kelly to act as liaison, the relationship was strained. Trujillo redoubled his efforts with Brooke, trying everything he could think of to help control her memories and recall more details about Meshara, but it wasn’t going well; Nathan said that Trujillo, on the rare nights he slept in their apartment instead of the office, was wracked with nightmares.
“It must be awful to listen to that stuff day in and day out,” Nathan confided in me. “She’s got a head full of the sickest, darkest stuff you can possibly imagine.”
“Then why,” I asked, “do you feel sorry for the guy forcing her to remember it?”
He didn’t have a good response to that, but at least he started leaving me alone. His job kept him in the office and the library, looking into every little tidbit Brooke dropped about the Withered, so I didn’t see much of him anyway. Diana and I were assigned to follow Meshara in his human identity of Elijah Sexton, who turned out to be a hearse driver for one of the larger mortuaries in the city. I immediately assumed that his “power,” whatever it was, required access to the recently dead, but I couldn’t know why until we learned more. I could investigate better alone, but Ostler insisted we stay together, so Diana never left my side.
Elijah worked the night shift and seemed to maintain that schedule with adamant zeal; records in the mortuary office showed that when the day-shift guy was unavailable Elijah would go so far as to hire a temp worker out of his own pocket rather than take the day shift himself. Another piece of the puzzle. The most obvious guess was that he couldn’t go out in daylight, but our very first sighting of him at Whiteflower had been in the daytime, so that wasn’t it. Our next thought was that he had something vital to do during the day—like following us, for example—but after a week of careful surveillance, that proved false as well; he slept during the morning, on the normal schedule of any other night-shift worker, and in the afternoon he went shopping, or he went driving, or he shoveled his sidewalks. He didn’t really talk to anybody, but he didn’t avoid them as devoutly as Mary had, either. By all appearances he was just a quiet man who kept to himself; we couldn’t even find evidence that he’d been communicating with other Withered, which made our entire investigation that much more confusing.
The obvious exception to his solitude was, of course, the man he met with at Whiteflower: Merrill Evans. By all accounts, Merrill was a completely normal Alzheimer’s patient, albeit a very young one; he was in his seventies now, but had suffered from crippling dementia for just over twenty years, which meant the disease had struck him earlier in life than most. Elijah had been visiting him the entire time, an average of once a week. Looking solely at each man’s publicly available history we couldn’t determine exactly how they knew each other—they’d never worked together or lived in the same part of town—but the only way to learn more was to interview the Evans family directly, and we wanted to avoid that as long as possible. Instead we focused on Meshara himself, studying his office when he was at home, and his home when he was at the office. When that gave us nothing, we simply watched and waited.
For six nights Diana and I sat in the car and watched his mortuary, our hands tucked into our pockets, too wary of being spotted to risk turning on the heater. This mortuary wasn’t like the one I’d lived in for sixteen years; it was larger and newer, full of offices and chapels and viewing rooms and even a garage in the back. And of course an embalming room, which we’d examined very briefly a few days earlier, under the guise of a murder investigation for an unrelated corpse. There wasn’t a real murder, as far as we knew; we just wanted a look at their facilities. Elijah worked in the garage, staying out of the embalming process completely, and our cursory examination had revealed nothing unseemly about anything in the building—but, oh, did I want to go back there. I hadn’t been in a real embalming room in too long. The memories of it pricked at my heart in the same way Marci did.
&
nbsp; “Hold up,” said Diana, staring out the window with sudden intensity. I followed her gaze across the street to the mortuary. A black car pulled up and three people got out; they wore black coats and were mostly indistinguishable at this distance, but one of them stood out for his size—easily a head taller than the others, with the bulk to match.
“It’s after business hours,” I said, pointlessly, since it was practically eleven o’clock. “They might be from the police, maybe a forensics lab, but they don’t look like it.”
“Elijah’s the only one in the building,” said Diana. “They have to be here to see him.”
“Four Withered in one place is…” I grimaced. “That’s a lot.”
“We don’t know that’s what they are.”
“Can you see the license plate?”
She raised her small binoculars. “It’s too dark,” she said, “but I can see the visitors pretty well in the light by the front door. All three are men, well dressed, clean-shaven. Not sure of their ethnicity—darker than you, lighter than me. The lighting’s too weird to tell for sure. They’re … picking the lock. Whoever they are, Elijah’s not expecting them.”
“Then get ready,” I said, and put my hand on the door.
“Don’t you dare talk to them.”
“Not them,” I said, watching as the three strangers opened the door and slipped in, disappearing into the building. As soon as they closed their door I opened mine, looking quickly up and down the darkened street for any sign of movement. Diana hissed at me to get back in, but I ignored her and trotted across the street. I heard her door open as she scrambled to follow me, and then I saw it—two men in black coats, standard-issue police gear, walking toward the mortuary. Our unofficial police escort would try to use the picked lock as an excuse to intervene in our investigation, to see if our bizarre claims were actually true, but if they went in that building they’d be dead in minutes. I ran to cut them off, and Diana caught up just in time. The cops scowled when they saw us.
