by Dan Wells
“Why are you on this team?” I demanded. “What brought you here? Who are you? No one knows anything about you: not your background, not your motives, not your outlook on life. Why are you doing this? What are you doing that you don’t have to do?”
“I’m not just a killer you can analyze, John.”
“But you could be,” I said. “In another situation, in another place, if you’d gone down a less official path and I’d gone down a better one, I might be tracking you right now as the worst serial killer in history. You kill people—why? You live apart from the world, even more than I do—why?”
“Because someone needs to do it.”
“So it may as well be you?”
“Better me than someone who doesn’t know how,” said Potash. “I fought that bastard Rack to a standstill—I almost had him—where anyone else would have died. Everyone else did die. I followed him through a cellar so messed up I can’t even describe it to you, and I’ll have to live with what I saw down there for the rest of my life—and anyone else would go mad even trying to.”
“And you haven’t?” I asked, glancing down at the ashy remains.
“Elijah needed to die,” Potash insisted. “They all do.”
“Why?”
“Do you think he’s the traitor?” asked Nathan.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then why are you asking him all these questions?” asked Brooke.
“Because I want to know!” I yelled. “I want to know what he’s doing here—I want to know what I’m doing here! Is any of this wrong or right? Have I been wasting my time trying to be the good guy, when good and bad don’t even make sense anymore? Elijah was one of the best men I ever met, and this guy just cut his head off, and he’ll probably win a medal for it and I want to know why! Why do our choices even matter if someone can just decide what right and wrong mean? Why did he have to die if this is all just arbitrary?”
“You’re asking why a Withered had to die?” Potash asked. “Do you even hear yourself?”
“What if he wasn’t called a ‘Withered’?” I asked. “What if he was ‘Cursed’?”
“The word doesn’t change what he was,” said Potash.
“What he was was a man,” I said. “He was a driver, and a mechanic, and a regular visitor in a rest home, and yes he made a mistake and yes he was dangerous, but he spent more time trying to be good than any of us have ever spent trying to be anything.”
Potash looked at me, the seconds ticking by, until at last he shook his head. “Making these decisions is the hardest part of our job, but we still have to do it. Killing isn’t just pulling a trigger or swinging a blade—it’s making a choice about who deserves to live and who deserves to die.”
“Elijah deserved to live.”
“That decision will hurt me for the rest of my life,” said Potash, “but now I’m the only one it will ever hurt. He won’t drain another mind, and he won’t make another Merrill Evans, and he won’t endanger another Rose Chapman. The FBI won’t spend any more time or money hunting him down and confining him, which gives them more time and money for the bigger threats, which gives the rest of the world fewer threats to worry about. The world is better off without Elijah Sexton in it.”
“And you?” I asked. “Would it be better off without you in it?”
“Everybody take it easy,” said Nathan, stepping closer to Potash. “Nobody’s going to start anything crazy, or do anything stupid, or—” His hand came up behind Potash’s back, and he shot him through the head.
My ears rang again.
“No!” screamed Brooke.
I jumped back, my eyes wide, my mind reeling. Nathan looked at me and rolled his eyes.
“What, like you weren’t planning to do the same thing?”
“He was…” I didn’t even have the words. I was used to violence, to death and pain and terror, but this was too much, and too random. Ostler and Diana, and now Elijah and Potash—it was all so senseless. “Why?” I demanded again. I tried to follow it up with another question, something biting and insightful, but all I could manage was another “Why?”
“Because he was dangerous,” said Nathan. “He was a wild card we couldn’t predict or control, and he could have outfought all of us put together.”
“But we didn’t need to fight him at all.”
He gestured at me with his pistol. “Then what were you planning to do with that knife?”
I looked down at it, clasped so tight in my hand my fingers were as white as bone. “I don’t know,” I said, closing my eyes. “I don’t know what I was going to do, or what I wanted to do, or anything else. But I didn’t want to kill him.”
“Yes, you did.”
“But I knew it was wrong!” I shouted.
“No, you didn’t.” Nathan shook his head. “You can’t have it both ways: you just spent five minutes telling the guy he was a dangerous psychopath and the world would be better off without him, and now you’re freaking out because you weren’t the one to do it? Like you’re the world’s sole arbiter of justice?”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said.
“You don’t know what you mean,” said Nathan, and I had no response because he was right. I’d wanted Potash dead—when he killed Elijah I wanted him dead more than anything in the world—but now that I’d seen it happen I couldn’t bear it. I knew that sometimes people had to die; I’d had that realization before. But I knew now that I had no idea how to make all the other decisions that come with it: who had to die, and when, and how. Humans and demons were categories that made sense to me, or at least they used to. Now nothing did.
Nathan nodded, prodding the corpse with his foot. “I was lucky you were distracting him—there’s no way I could have taken him if he was paying attention to me. A quick shot in the back of the head was my only chance and I had to take it.”
“No you didn’t,” I said. “He was … on our side.”
“Don’t be naive,” said Nathan. “He was on our team but he was never on our side. Maybe Ostler’s or Diana’s side, but not yours, and definitely not mine. We’ve gone our own way, and whether we abandoned them or they abandoned us, it’s all the same in the end.”
“They didn’t abandon us,” I said, “they died.”
“You left them long before that,” said Nathan. “Or are we pretending you weren’t sending e-mails to Rack?”
I looked up suddenly, focusing on his face. How did he know that? Nobody knew that but me and Rack. And since I didn’t tell him …
“You were talking to him, too,” I said.
“Of course.”
I nodded. “You’re the one who told Rack all those secrets, aren’t you? Who better to dig up our buried pasts than the doctor of library science? All of it was public information, except yours, and we couldn’t figure out who had told him because no one knew it. No one but you.”
“I didn’t really want any of you to know, either,” said Nathan, “but I figured you’d be dead soon anyway.”
“So you just turned on us,” I said, “just like that.”
“Just like that,” said Nathan.
“Why?”
“You aren’t smart enough to figure that out on your own?” asked Nathan. “John Wayne Cleaver, the great psychological mastermind?”
I nodded, trying to think—not just about his motives, but about our situation. What was Nathan planning? How could we get out of it? Was he keeping us alive just to gloat, or did he have something else in mind? He didn’t want to kill us, or he could have done that an hour ago. That meant he was waiting for something—for Rack? Was he handing us over to Rack?
“All Rack’s letters were addressed to me,” I said. “He wants to talk to me.”
“He’ll be here soon,” said Nathan. “I sent him a text on the bus.”
Then we didn’t have much time. “He wants to talk to me, but he offered something different to you.”
“We don’t want to be here if Rack’s coming,” said
Brooke. She’d come up behind me and gripped my arm tightly. I couldn’t help but have a quick flashback to Potash and what had happened when Nathan came up behind him, but I pushed it from my mind. Brooke wasn’t there to kill me.
I looked around the room, trying to see what we had to work with. The white plastic tank in the back of the truck just held water, now that I saw the label up close. That wouldn’t help us. The garage door was still open—should we run? Would that solve anything, or just postpone it? Our only real weapon against Rack was Elijah, and he was dead now; Nathan had tried so hard to keep us away from here because he knew Elijah was Rack’s only weakness.
But no. He had other weaknesses, too. He needed hearts, for one thing. His body was strong and fast and regenerated at a ridiculous rate, but it was still a human body, and it still functioned the way a normal human body functioned. It couldn’t function without a heart. He had other weaknesses too: he didn’t have a mouth or a nose, so he couldn’t taste or smell. I could use that. More than that, though, maybe more than anything, was Rack’s biggest weakness of all—his one glaring blind spot.
He’d never lost. So he didn’t think he could.
I studied the garage carefully: the fuel pump, the tool bench, the water pump on the white plastic tank. The knife in my hand. I could do this, but I didn’t have much time. And I needed one more piece of information.
“You joined Rack because he offered you something big,” I said, not looking at Nathan but circling away from him, looking at the water pump. How long was the hose? How big was the nozzle? “You’d done the research on us, so you already knew we were a pack of degenerates: killers, gangsters, psychos. A former rapist. I assume Trujillo is dead, by the way?”
“I killed him right before you called,” said Nathan. “We timed it to coincide with the attack on your strike team.”
I nodded. “And you were fine with that attack because we had no moral high ground. Compared to people like Cody French and Mary Gardner, our team was equivalent at best, and compared to Elijah Sexton we were monsters.” I read the label on the water pump: sixty psi at the lowest setting. It was high, but it could work. I circled past Nathan, stooping down to study the floor.
“You think you offended my tender sensibilities?” asked Nathan. “I sold drugs for five years, kid. I’ve seen people do some of the darkest stuff you can imagine.”
“Exactly,” I said, studying the subtle slope of the floor. “You’ve already proven that you’re willing to get your hands dirty if you get something out of it, but with us you weren’t getting anything out of it. You spent your days in a rented office and your nights in the cowboy bars of scenic Fort Bruce.” The floor was relatively clean, with two good drainage holes. I nodded and stood up, circling back toward Nathan. “You figured you deserved better,” I said, “and since you were working for a bunch of killers anyway, why not switch teams to a killer who could actually offer you something? What did he promise you, money? A big house somewhere, maybe a prestigious post at a university?”
“Money’s all it took,” said Nathan. “That’ll buy me all the other stuff. And you’d better believe that a man who’s been alive for ten thousand years has a lot of money to offer.”
“I bet he does,” I said, stopping beside him. He looked at me uncertainly, his eyes flicking over my face and body and arms as if he wasn’t sure what to expect from me; whether he should pat me on the shoulder or shoot me in the gut. I assume Rack had ordered him not to shoot me, but if I made any sudden moves he’d react without thinking. Unless I made him think about something else. I looked him in the eyes. I still needed to know one more thing. “Did you tell Rack how much I hate you?”
He made a sort of half frown, half smile. “Why … is that relevant?”
“Did you?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I need to know what to expect when he gets here,” I said. “I want to be ready.”
“You think he’s going to hurt you any more than otherwise just because I told him what a little prick you are?”
“So you did tell him?”
“That you’re insubordinate and mouthy and stubborn as hell?” asked Nathan. “Yeah, I told him. I told him no matter what he wants you for, you’ll never do it, and you’ll be completely useless, and anything he needs I can do a better job of.”
“Thank you,” I said. Our eyes were locked, each sizing the other up, each waiting for the other to blink. Would he make a move? Would I? How long did we have until Rack arrived? Time to move. I tried to smile, to unnerve him with my confidence at the last second, but I couldn’t do it. Nothing I was about to do made me happy. “If you think Rack’s going to share his power with you, maybe you should remember what we learned about Gidri.”
Nathan frowned. “Gidri? What’s he got to do with this?”
“He’s gorgeous,” said Brooke. She slammed her hand on the hood of Elijah’s car. “I hate him!”
“Oh, come on,” said Nathan, rolling his eyes. “Now you’ve done it, she’s going to freak the hell out again—” He turned toward her, and I stabbed him. Up under his ribs, as deep as the knife would go. I put my other hand on his back to hold him place, shoving the knife in further, clenching my teeth and twisting the blade. He tried to turn but I had him in a lock, wrapping my arms around him, practically hugging him, turning as he turned, so he could never get a shot. His body twitched against mine, convulsing with pain, doubling over and then curling back, and I pulled out the knife and slammed it in again, hearing him grunt and grunting in time with him. He dropped his gun, and his body went slack, and I lowered him gently to the floor. He twitched again, and his eyes rolled back in his head, and he was gone.
19
Brooke was screaming in a rage, beating the wall with a heavy metal wrench. “I hate him!” she shouted, “I hate him I hate him I hate him I hate him!”
I collapsed on the floor, exhausted, between the bodies: Potash and Nathan, and Elijah’s smear of ash. I looked at the garage door, but no one was there yet. I took a deep breath, dropping the knife, pausing only a moment before clambering back to my feet. We didn’t have much time.
“I hate him!” screamed Brooke. “I hate him!”
“Be quiet,” I said, “you’re going to wake the neighbors.”
I looked at Potash’s body; his forehead was mangled by the bullet, but his face was intact. Nathan’s face was untouched. I only had time to prepare one body, so I had to choose the right one. Whose voice would Rack try to use? What did he want to say to me, and how would he choose to say it?
That’s why I’d asked Nathan that question. Rack was arrogant; everything about his letters told me that he’d want to gloat. The gloating would hurt more coming from someone I hated. Did Rack know how much I hated Potash? Maybe. He definitely knew how much I hated Nathan, though, and after this betrayal he’d know I’d hate him even more. Nathan it was.
I dragged Nathan’s body closer to one of the drains, setting his head almost exactly on top of it, then ran for the water pump. They must have used it for washing something, or maybe for watering the plants around the grounds; it had a long rubber hose, ending in a smooth metal nozzle. I screwed the nozzle off, leaving a slim metal tube about a half centimeter in diameter, and then opened the tank’s dump valve, letting all the water splash out onto the floor.
I looked at the garage door again. He wasn’t there yet.
While the tank drained I ran to the tool bench, ignoring Brooke’s rant, and searched for a roll of wire or duct tape—anything I could use to clamp down on an artery to create a seal. Brooke seemed to calm slightly, distracted by my actions. I combed through the bench and found nothing but a vise grip and decided it would have to do. The water tank was nearly empty now, so I closed the valve and pulled the gas hose as far as it would go, sticking it into the top of the water tank and setting it to fill as fast as it could. It would be easier if I could use the gas pump directly, but the pressure would be wrong. I let it fill and sat do
wn next to Nathan, with the water pump in one hand and the vise grip in the other. My knife lay beside me.
“What are you doing?” asked Brooke.
“I’m embalming him,” I said. I took a deep breath. Let’s do this.
I set down the tools and picked up my knife, wiping away the grime from the floor and then carefully slitting open his neck. The skin split open like a piece of raw chicken, blood welling up at the wound. I’d never worked on such a fresh body before. I lengthened the hole, pulling it wide, and reached inside with my finger to find the jugular artery. It felt like a thick hose, not much different from the water-pump hose by my feet. I pulled out a loop of it, and looked around for something to anchor it.
“What do you need?” asked Brooke. Her eyes were wide, watching the process with morbid fascination. I didn’t know if it was Brooke or Nobody or some other personality I hadn’t even met yet.
“A screwdriver,” I said.
“Phillips or flathead?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She brought me a screwdriver from the workbench, and I placed it under the loop of the artery to keep it from sliding back inside the neck. I looked up at the door. Empty. I took my knife and slit the artery carefully, making a hole big enough for the slim metal water pump. I slid it in about two inches, pinched the artery closed around it, and clamped it in place with the vise grips.
I stood up gently, trying not to disturb the body. The water tank had several inches of gas now, and I turned the pressure dial as low as it would go. Sixty psi was the upper limit for most embalming pumps; anything higher might tear the blood vessels apart. I put my hand on the switch, ready to turn it on, then stopped suddenly and looked wildly around the room.
“What do you need this time?” asked Brooke.
“A ventilator, a fan, something like that.”
“The door’s open,” she said, “we’re not going to choke.”
“Call it a superstition.” I spotted a vent in the ceiling and took a deep breath, nodding. These things had to be done right. “Let’s hope that fan doesn’t give out on us,” I said, and flipped the switch on the pump.
