The Dead Road

by Seth Patrick

  Kendrick took a long breath. ‘You carry one,’ he said. ‘You carry a shadow.’

  Ferris laughed. ‘Of course. When the vessel perished, not many shadows survived. They hid. When they found out about Mr Drayton’s new interest, it made sense to get an insider’s point of view. My point of view.’

  Drayton couldn’t bear to listen. ‘You son of a bitch!’ he yelled. The effort left him coughing.

  ‘We know who can be tempted,’ said Ferris. ‘And we know who can’t. Mr Drayton was the latter. Bringing him into the fold will be long and difficult. I was more willing. Mr Drayton will be useful if he survives. You’ll prove to be more of a challenge, I imagine, but we have plenty of time for you to get acquainted.’

  Kendrick reached into his bag one last time. In the padded pocket was a small device, something he’d never considered he would have to use so early; he took the device and put it in his pocket. When he’d been in the study before, the package he’d positioned had been placed in a carefully chosen spot, because the wall it now rested against would allow the fire to spread within the wood-slatted cavity. It had been placed as an insurance policy, just in case Drayton had become a liability. He had another package, still in the hidden compartment in his bag, which he’d hoped to place elsewhere in the house before leaving.

  Change of plan.

  ‘You’ll be glad to know your efforts to stop us were irritating,’ said Ferris. ‘A new vessel has been harder to find than we ever thought possible, especially when you kept interrupting the work. But we did it at last. A blank slate, that was the trick. A tabula rasa. Uncorrupted by something as mundane as morals. Free of a sense of humanity.’ A buzzing came from the far door, and it opened fractionally. ‘Perhaps it’s time for you to meet your new god.’

  Kendrick started to walk towards the door.

  ‘Don’t,’ warned Drayton. ‘You don’t want to see it. Just kill us both, and end it.’

  Kendrick ignored the old man. He wasn’t ready to give up, not yet.

  As he neared the door, the smell he’d not quite identified got stronger. He placed it now: the stench of rotting meat. He looked back at Drayton and imagined the dark bloated creature that pulsated on his shoulder, forcing its way into his mind. Kendrick wouldn’t let that happen.

  He could hear something now – something heavy, a slow shuffling step coming nearer. He reached out for the door, ready to throw everything he had at the slim chance of survival.

  But whatever happened, he’d keep one bullet for himself.

  2

  The name on his FRS security pass said ‘Robert Geary’, but everyone called him ‘Never’. He’d had the nickname even before the Forensic Revival Service existed, when he’d emigrated from his native Belfast for a dream job at the FBI lab in Quantico. Forensic data recovery had been his specialty back then; he’d been twenty-five years old and eager to impress.

  In a way, he still worked in data recovery. Instead of pulling information out of damaged hard disks and flash memory drives, the job of the FRS was to pull information out of another kind of damaged object.

  The dead kind.

  *

  Revival had been around for five years when he was at Quantico, and nobody understood what it was. They still didn’t, not really, but in those early years everyone thought its mysteries would reveal deep truths about the nature of consciousness, or yield a scientific basis for some kind of soul: a means, however vague, for the patterns of thought and personality to survive death.

  The research project that attempted to shed light on these mysteries was known as Baseline, and for years the researchers involved struggled to make headway.

  But no light was shed.

  All anyone knew was that a tiny percentage of people had a newfound ability to bring back the recently deceased. When the dead came back, it was only for minutes, and it wasn’t with any meaningful life. Just a few crude functions, at best – breathing and speech. No blood flowed in their dead hearts. No neurons fired in their dead brains. The phenomenon was impossible. It was baffling.

  It was also undeniable.

  The impact that revival had on criminal investigation came when studies showed that the people who performed revival – the revivers themselves – had a profound insight into the emotional state of their subject. Crucially, the reviver would always know if a subject was telling the truth. The dead could be questioned, and their statements believed with certainty, or identified as outright lies.

  There was a long, hard battle to allow testimony gathered from a revival to be admissible in court, but the battle was won in the end. In Quantico, a small unit of revivers was set up as a pilot scheme, and Never Geary had made damn sure he was involved in what he thought was the most important development in forensics since fingerprinting. As the most tech-savvy member of the team, he’d been the one to devise the technical underpinnings of how revival was recorded for court use.

  When that small pilot scheme grew and became the Forensic Revival Service, Never went with them to their first office in Richmond, Virginia, and there he’d stayed.

  That first office became just one of twelve across the country, but he resisted any attempt to promote him out of what he’d quickly come to think of as his home.

  He was the Senior Revival Technician in what was now the Central East Coast office of the FRS, managing the other Techs on staff. The duties of a Tech amounted to ensuring that a revival was successfully recorded following the very guidelines he himself had been instrumental in codifying, and not throwing up when confronted with some of the more severely mangled corpses which came their way regularly enough – corpses that his seniority tended to guarantee would wind up in his inbox.

  A big part of the reason he’d stayed was his best friend, Jonah Miller – the youngest reviver the FRS had had on their books when it started, and also one of the most capable. Nineteen at the time, Jonah had been fragile and vulnerable, and over the years that hadn’t changed much. He and Never had hit it off from the start, and Never had found himself enjoying his role as protective older brother.

  Then everything changed.

  Revival opened a door, and something had come through. Jonah and Never, together with Annabel Harker, the daughter of a murdered journalist, had witnessed the rebirth of an ancient evil and had barely escaped with their lives. The events at an isolated laboratory in a place called Winnerden Flats had seen the death of many of the best revivers in the world. It had also seen the death of one of Jonah’s oldest friends, and it had changed him.

  When it happened, twenty months ago, Jonah had sunk into a long depression – something that had worried the hell out of Never, even though he’d had his own problems to deal with.

  *

  Those events, and everything that had happened since, weighed heavily on him as he arrived early at work that Friday morning. He swiped his pass and thought of himself ten years younger, as the FRS first came into being. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  His desk was in the open-plan office on the second floor, and when he reached it, things were quiet enough. The handful of staff dealing with overnight problems hadn’t had much to do except log revival requests from the various agencies who could seek one. Urgent requests were typically for on-site revivals in automobile incidents, where clearing the debris was time-sensitive but shifting a body would reduce revival chances significantly.

  The FRS had been forced to limit the circumstances when they would agree to such cases, though. Too many good revivers had been lost at Winnerden Flats, in what the rest of the world thought had been a terrorist attack. Many of those revivers had been working for private revival firms, of course, where the pay was better and the working conditions far superior – at the FRS, there was little respite from grim brutality, nothing like the peaceful family-attended private revivals that many individuals paid a hefty price for. Those were mainly about emotional healing and closure – saying goodbye to a loved one.

  Forensic revivals rarely had much time
left for that kind of thing, after all the questions had been asked. And in private cases, of course, the subject of the revival was expecting to be brought back, and had wanted to be. Many times, Never had been present at FRS cases where the subject was extremely hostile or traumatized. They weren’t exactly comfortable experiences.

  He sat at his desk and got on with things, writing a report on the overnight requests and starting on equipment checks to prepare for the day ahead. Work seemed more stressful than ever, these days, but part of that was the reduction in success rates for revivals and an accompanying dip in office morale. They’d lost their three best revivers, Jonah included, a year and a half ago. The other two had died at Winnerden Flats. Replacing them had been impossible, and the private companies had started to lure away the second-tier revivers as well. It meant that cases the FRS used to take at the drop of a hat were now subject to extreme scrutiny before being accepted. There was little point in getting a reviver to attempt a case if they were very likely to fail, especially since they would be out of commission for a day or more as a result of the attempt.

  He skipped lunch. At 3 p.m., his boss Hugo Adler arrived, having been in DC for a few days attending FRS committee hearings. The hearings had focused on what was seen as a crisis in the recruitment process – Never was pleased to see him, as he was taking the rest of the day off but could only leave when Hugo showed up.

  ‘How’s it been?’ asked Hugo.

  ‘We’ve had a few interesting cases,’ said Never. ‘Some fuckwit driver tried to kill a jogger, ended up ploughing into a tree and going through the windshield.’

  ‘Tried to kill?’ said Hugo. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ said Never. He allowed himself a smile. Morbid humour was a reflex at the FRS, something that helped you survive the day-to-day unpleasantness. There was little better than an idiot killed by their own stupidity. ‘Lex was the reviver. When the subject was brought back, he acted like it was accidental, but Lex got him to spill the beans quickly enough. Turned out the jogger’s husband had given him two grand to do it.’

  ‘Good result,’ said Hugo. ‘How’s Lex getting on?’

  Lex was one of the few decent revivers they’d recruited recently, and she’d made her mark in the three months she’d been there.

  ‘She’s doing well,’ said Never. ‘Considering how new she is to it, her success rates are way above average and her questions are canny.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ said Hugo. ‘What else has come in?’

  ‘Suicide lottery,’ said Never. ‘Genuine, so enough said.’

  One of the earliest policies the FRS had brought in was to randomly choose from cases that were deemed to be unsuspicious suicides, just to check that nothing untoward had happened. These ‘suicide lottery’ cases had revealed an unnerving number of well-disguised homicides – about one in fifteen had at least some degree of foul play involved, ranging from full-on murder to mind-games played by those with a vested interest in seeing the victim take their own life.

  In genuine cases, of course, the subjects were less than happy about being brought back, typically because of an intense regret for what they’d done and the pain their family would be facing. Among revivers, these cases were disliked more than just about anything else.

  ‘And a drowning victim who hadn’t actually died,’ continued Never. ‘A mix-up led to us getting the call, and nobody thought to let us know there’d been a mistake before a three-hour drive. Funny part was a relative saw our team arrive and overheard them mention the victim’s name. Cue unbounded confusion, plenty of shouting, tears. Did I say funny? I meant awful.’ He thought it probably had been funny, in the end – that was usually how people reacted if the outcome was a good one, the desperate relief coming through in smiles and laughter.

  ‘What’s our fail rate been?’ asked Hugo.

  ‘Not so bad,’ said Never. ‘Four cases. None was thought to be particularly challenging, but no luck. How did the recruitment meetings go?’

  Hugo frowned. ‘Nobody’s really talking about it publicly, but the numbers have fallen every quarter for the past year. Fewer people are coming forward as possible revivers, and while it may be due to less willingness to take on that kind of career, it really does seem like less people are developing the ability.’

  ‘Ouch,’ said Never. ‘Any extrapolations?’

  ‘If it keeps falling the way it is now, in another year there’ll be almost no new revivers coming into the FRS, at least at the skill level we insist on currently. The private companies will mop them all up.’

  ‘And they’ll poach more and more of our existing staff,’ said Never. ‘Wonderful.’ They’d already cut back on support staff, and Never had been forced to let two of the revival technicians go, people who’d been with them for a long time.

  ‘You off somewhere nice?’ said Hugo. He nodded to Never’s desk, where a bunch of flowers and a bottle of whiskey sat.

  ‘I’m meeting Sam,’ said Never. Sam Deering was the man who had been responsible for the formation of the FRS – he had been the one who first understood the potential for the forensic use of revival, and had then guided the research that would lead to its acceptance in law. And just as Never had taken on an elder-brother role with Jonah, Sam had been a surrogate father. Jonah’s own dad had died when he was ten years old, and he’d hated his stepfather.

  Sam had retired almost three years ago, but he’d kept in touch with Jonah and Never.

  ‘What’s the occasion?’ said Hugo.

  ‘It’s been a year since the funeral,’ said Never.

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Hugo. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Never. ‘Sam wanted to visit the grave, so . . . Yeah. Hence the whiskey.’ Hugo almost looked in pain. ‘Hugo, don’t beat yourself up. I’ll see you Monday, OK?’

  Hugo nodded and went to his office. With a wince, Never stood. His injury was making itself felt today; he downed a couple of painkillers, grabbed his flowers and his whiskey, and headed off to the cemetery.

  *

  When he got to the grave, Sam was already there, and Annabel Harker was with him. They had their backs to him as he approached; Annabel noticed him first. He gave her a wave and she nodded back. She looked about as comfortable as Never felt.

  ‘Sam,’ he said, as he joined them. Sam shook his hand for far too long, his eyes wet and red.

  Never noticed the bouquets that Sam and Annabel had already set down on the grave, and added his own sorry-looking bunch of flowers. As he stood, he winced.

  ‘How’s your . . .’ said Sam, gesturing vaguely to Never’s chest.

  ‘Good and bad,’ said Never. The injury was from Winnerden Flats; Sam had no idea that Annabel, Jonah and Never had had any involvement. Nobody did, except Kendrick and Sly, two government spooks who’d gone rogue in an attempt to stop the catastrophe as it unfolded. Never didn’t like to go into detail with others about his wounds. It was, in every sense of the word, a sore point. The story he’d had to tell everyone was about as bland and, well, as stupid as they came.

  The truth was as far from bland as it could be: a man possessed by an entity that was close to satanic had torn out one of Never’s ribs, while he was conscious, partly as a demonstration of power, and partly because the fucker had a sick sense of humour.

  When Never was recovering in hospital, he’d tried to come up with a plausible excuse for the scarring the assault would leave him with. Frankly, he’d wanted to choose something that sounded good – something that would paint him in a decent light. Something, perhaps, that he’d be proud of.

  Sadly, the choice wasn’t his. He’d discovered this when, still confined to bed, he’d raised the topic with Kendrick.

  ‘You fell from a ladder while helping to paint a friend’s barn,’ Kendrick told him. ‘You landed on the rusted edge of a sheet of metal, shattered your rib and suffered from an infection as a result.’

  ‘That’s the official line?’ said Never, hopeful that he could tweak the s
tory to include some aspect of, say, courage.

  Kendrick had passed him the notes hanging from the end of his bed, to show him it was official. ‘Now and forever,’ he’d said.

  So, there it was. His chest hurt like hell, pretty often, and it certainly looked like shit, but the story he would have to tell would always put him in the role of clumsy dickhead rather than brave defender of civilization.

  Great.

  He looked at Sam, who was just watching the grave. Their short conversation had, it seemed, ended. He wondered if he should try and say something else, but his ability to pick an opening gambit was notoriously bad. If he opened his mouth, there was a good chance that what came out would be, ‘Been to any nice funerals lately?’

  Or possibly worse.

  The three of them stood in silence, for what felt like decades.

  Eventually, Sam spoke again. ‘I don’t think it’ll ever feel real, do you?’

  Annabel and Never shook their heads.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Sam. ‘Nothing can change that, but every day I think there’s been a mistake. You know what I mean?’

  This time, Annabel and Never nodded, and Never felt an almost overwhelming urge to say something. He resisted.

  ‘Thanks for meeting me here,’ said Sam. ‘I know it’s hard for both of you, too, but it’s meant so much to me to visit him. One year on.’

  After a few more minutes of silence, Sam nodded and shook Never’s hand. He turned and hugged Annabel. ‘He deserved better than this,’ Sam told her. ‘You both did.’

  They watched him go, walking as if the weight of the world was on him. When he was out of sight, Never felt a tangible relief. He heaved a sigh, and caught a glance from Annabel. She clearly felt just as relieved.

  ‘You coming?’ she said.

  ‘I got left off by taxi,’ said Never. ‘I came prepared.’ He nodded to the bottle of whiskey, which was in a bag but still obvious in shape. ‘So, yeah.’

  ‘I noticed,’ said Annabel, pointedly. She led them to her car. ‘Well, that was horrible,’ she said, once they were inside and the doors were closed.