The Dead Road

by Seth Patrick

  ‘I thought you had access to other revivers,’ said Jonah.

  Sly shook her head. ‘Maybe he gave you that impression, but no. He knew you didn’t want to do any revival interrogations, but if you’d known he had no others to go to, you might have felt obliged.’

  ‘I didn’t think he gave a damn,’ said Jonah.

  Sly raised an eyebrow. ‘When he got to know people, he did,’ she said. ‘Besides, if you’d been willing, then he would have had the option too, right? To take it to the next step.’

  Jonah frowned. ‘Kill someone just to interrogate them.’

  ‘Exactly. I don’t think he wanted to go there again, if he could avoid it.’ She finished her vodka and thumped the glass down on the table. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Are we going to do this?’

  Jonah closed his eyes and nodded.

  9

  Jonah and Never carried the bag down to the lower basement, and cleared a space on a table by the wall. If Jonah decided to go ahead with the revival, the body would be at a good height there for what could prove to be a very long process. He still had what was left of the standard med pack he used with Grady; the wide range of pill strengths meant that there was just enough left to meet his dose, although again he got Never to work it out for him.

  ‘I assume we want this to be recorded?’ said Never.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sly.

  ‘OK.’ He turned to Annabel. ‘You got any stands? Cameras?’

  ‘One camera and a tripod,’ said Annabel.

  ‘Fetch them,’ said Never. ‘Power lead too.’

  Annabel nodded and went off to get the equipment.

  Jonah gritted his teeth and unzipped the body bag. The smell hit first, of course – the stale smoke, undercut with the unmistakable odour of spilled blood, and meat gone bad.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Never.

  What they needed from Kendrick was information, so Jonah had already been planning to attempt a non-vocal revival – with no requirement for evidence as such, non-vocal would allow a faster flow to the revival even with Jonah repeating aloud everything that Kendrick said.

  Looking at Kendrick’s body, though, it was clear that a vocal revival would have been impossible anyway.

  Kendrick’s throat had been torn out.

  The wound was ragged and brutal. His torso had suffered badly too, pierced and ripped around the ribcage, clothing tattered. Some of the ribs were probably broken, Jonah thought. There were deep lacerations to the abdomen. Adipose tissue and part of the lower intestine protruded in several places, worsened by the body having been transported.

  There were signs of the fire, too; that was the most concerning part, as far as revival odds went. Cooked bodies didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘I know burns are bad news,’ said Sly. ‘The rest of it doesn’t help.’

  ‘It depends how deep the fire damage is,’ said Jonah. He looked at Never and pointed to a box at the back of the room. ‘There are medical supplies in there, should be some latex gloves. Throw me a pair, would you? And scissors.’

  After a brief hunt, Never came back and Jonah put the gloves on. For the revival – if a revival proved possible – he would have to have direct skin contact with Kendrick’s corpse, usually by taking the hand.

  He began his examination.

  The man’s face had suffered from fire damage, certainly. The left eyelid had retracted unevenly, and there was blackening around that side of the face, but the eyeball itself was intact. Jonah reached out and palpated the orb. It still had some give, and the iris and pupil were clearly visible. The cornea would have been opaque if significant heat damage had penetrated. A corpse’s hair was a good indicator of where flash-heat had reached, and the hair on the right-hand side of Kendrick’s head showed little sign of it.

  The clothes were singed in multiple places, probably where burning debris had fallen.

  ‘Was he covered by anything when you found him?’ asked Jonah.

  ‘There was charred paper mainly,’ said Sly. ‘Boxes of documents had tipped onto him. Stonework and a burnt piece of timber were over his legs. I cleared it myself.’

  Jonah nodded. ‘How established do you think the fire in the basement got?’

  ‘The collapse wasn’t under the main fire in the house, but the basement held so much paper it was inevitable some of it would go up.’

  ‘Paper can be good and bad,’ said Jonah. ‘Thick stacks of it tend to smoulder rather than flare, especially if the throughput of oxygen is restricted.’

  ‘The heat was severe, though,’ said Sly. ‘I could tell from the surrounding area.’

  ‘Paper can also insulate. That may be why the flesh isn’t as badly scorched as you might have feared.’

  Annabel returned with a plastic bag and unloaded a handful of cables, a tripod and a camera. She started to set them up; Never stepped over to help.

  Thus far, Jonah hadn’t highlighted any of Kendrick’s more gruesome injuries. Now that he was satisfied that the heat damage wasn’t immediately disastrous, the other wounds needed to be looked at closely.

  Penetrative wounds were a mixed bag when it came to revival. Even a bullet in the brain wasn’t always that much of a problem, yet multiple piercing injuries to the chest could prove surprisingly difficult to handle in the reversal.

  He took the scissors and cut Kendrick’s shirt to expose the damage. He sensed movement above him, and in the corner of his eye he noted Sly turning away as he continued his examination. He was glad, given what else he needed to do.

  Wound by wound, he pulled the flesh apart and dug around inside with his right index finger, like a surgeon exploring an incision to locate a piece of shrapnel. Familiarity could help during the reversal; he was trying to get a sense of the depth of penetration, and the internal damage caused. The injuries seemed consistent with a bladed weapon, yet the throat looked more like the result of an animal attack.

  One thing he didn’t see was the cauterized edges to the wounds that had been an indicator of attacks by the shadow-parasites, and for that he was glad. Then Sly spoke.

  ‘I smelled something I recognized down there,’ she said.

  Jonah looked up, questioning.

  ‘In that basement,’ she said, looking wary and shaken. ‘That acrid vinegar scent that we got in Winnerden Flats, when the shadows died.’

  Jonah said nothing for a few seconds. Anxiety was in danger of flooding him, and he tried to focus on his breathing. ‘You think they were attacked, maybe?’

  Sly shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Drayton was helping Kendrick find anyone with an interest in the shadows, so maybe they’d been compromised.’

  ‘But the shadows hadn’t shown up,’ said Annabel. She shot an urgent look at Jonah. ‘There’d been no sign of them, right?’

  Jonah said nothing, but Annabel must have seen something on his face. She gave him a curious look, as if she knew he’d been holding out on her.

  ‘Drayton was tied up,’ said Sly. ‘By Kendrick, for all we know. I didn’t get to see the police photographs. If I had, I’d know by the way he was tied whether or not it had been Kendrick who’d done it. So, Drayton could have been conspiring.’

  ‘And the smell you got suggests a shadow perished there,’ said Jonah. ‘Drayton may have been a host.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Sly. ‘We knew they were out there somewhere. It was just a matter of time.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Annabel. ‘I was still hoping they’d all died when Andreas did.’

  There was an awkward silence, and again Annabel gave Jonah a look. It was left to Never to puncture the moment. ‘Camera’s all good to go,’ he said. ‘Ready when you are, Jonah.’

  Jonah nodded. ‘May as well get on with it,’ he said. There was an office chair in the far corner. He removed his gloves and walked over to it, wheeling it back.

  ‘This could take a while,’ he said. ‘Maybe an hour or more. You don’t have to hang around for the boring part, but if you do, you should get comfor
table.’ By ‘the boring part’, Jonah meant the reversal – it was a long and uneventful period for onlookers, and anything but uneventful for the reviver.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ said Never. ‘Of course. Keep an eye on the camera. I won’t start recording until you succeed, though, OK?’

  It was normal FRS practice for the entire revival process to be recorded, but in this case there would be little point. ‘That’s fine,’ said Jonah. He looked to Annabel, glancing to Sly and hoping that Annabel got the message – Sly needed a break, but saying it aloud wouldn’t be helpful.

  Annabel understood. ‘Come on,’ Annabel said to Sly. ‘May as well sit it out until it’s worth being here.’

  Sly seemed hesitant, but she nodded. She looked at Jonah and Never. ‘The moment anything happens, you get me, understand?’ After a nod from Never, she and Annabel left.

  ‘Well,’ said Never. ‘It’s been a while, right? You and me, on a case.’

  ‘I’d rather be anywhere else than here, doing anything else than this,’ said Jonah. He looked at Kendrick again. ‘I don’t think this will be easy.’ He sat in his chair and adjusted it until he felt comfortable. He looked at the tripod-mounted camera Never had set up. There was a natural urge to state his name, the formal way all forensic revivals began, but he ignored it and took Kendrick’s dead hand in his own.

  Then he began.

  *

  The moment he closed his eyes, he could feel the death flowing into him, filling his senses. It hit the way it sometimes did, like a physical liquid covering him, clogging his nostrils with rank fluid. He held his breath until he got used to the sensation, enough to convince his body that he wouldn’t choke when he took another breath.

  He breathed it in, the sensation of the gore and the clotted rotting blood; breathed it, and let it seep through his pores and into his own flesh. A decade of experience had taught him how to control the panic that threatened him, but it was difficult. He was drowning in death, drowning in decay, yet he knew it for what it was, and knew it posed no real threat.

  After a few seconds, he’d mastered it. He was only dimly aware of the room now; in his senses, he inhabited Kendrick’s corpse. He sought the injuries, and in his mind he healed the damage. The ragged stabs to the torso knitted together, from the deep flesh outward to the skin, the intestinal protrusions returning back into the protection of the abdominal cavity; the ribs, shattered in places, were forged whole; the devastated throat flexed and gathered itself.

  It all took time, and the damage was significant. Eventually, there was little left to attend to – just the scorched flesh, the eyelids, the myriad abrasions.

  The physical corpse was unchanged, of course, but the body Jonah inhabited in his mind was whole once more, pristine, ready for the blood of life to flow again.

  Ready for the essence of the man to return to it.

  The reversal was almost over. Jonah reached out into that unfathomable void, searching, waiting. Then his hand was taken, and he pulled.

  It was time for the surge, and he was dreading it. Kendrick’s traumatic fate would, he expected, make for a particularly challenging surge. He was right.

  He felt himself plummet through darkness, falling and falling, waiting for the sudden rush of memory and image that would come. It hit him hard – anger and fear and adrenaline and urgency, images of desert and city and ruin and street; gunfire and blood, shouting and panic. Then: a man, horribly burnt yet somehow still alive, facing him in a glaringly white room. Then: Jonah’s own face, his chest bleeding profusely. Then: Sly, younger, her face full of rage and sorrow.

  And then darkness again, the eyes of a child staring out of the black. He heard a voice: the perfect vessel isn’t easy to find, it said.

  More, more, more, the images came too fast even to see, with sounds that grew ever louder. He felt pummelled by it, beaten by the sheer force of experience. He held on, though, and at last it subsided.

  He opened his eyes. It would take a few more moments before the dead man spoke. ‘He’s here,’ said Jonah. ‘How long was it?’

  Jumping up from where he’d been sitting on the floor, Never checked the time. ‘Seventy-three minutes,’ he said. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Tired,’ said Jonah. ‘But I’m fine. Go get them.’

  ‘Will do,’ said Never. He ran, returning quickly with Sly and Annabel in tow. They got settled, and Never started to record with the camera.

  There was no movement from the body, even as Kendrick started to speak. Non-vocals weren’t always like this. There was often twitching of the muscles of the face, spasms from limbs, but not now.

  ‘Jonah,’ said Kendrick. ‘Good. I wasn’t sure my body would even be found. I wasn’t sure there’d be anything left to revive.’

  It didn’t surprise Jonah how easily Kendrick had come to realize he was dead. One of the things Kendrick had done in his long career was to develop revival as a means of interrogation – including methods that amounted to torture. To counter his own work, he’d also devised training that taught operatives how to resist. How to be revived without being compromised.

  ‘Sly found you,’ said Jonah.

  ‘How is she?’

  Jonah wasn’t sure how to answer that. ‘She’s safe,’ he said. ‘She’s here. Annabel and Never, too. This is non-vocal, so I repeat everything you say.’

  Kendrick was silent for a moment. ‘Understood. Tell Sly I’m sorry. I got careless.’

  Jonah passed it on. Sly nodded. ‘Ask him to report,’ she said. ‘We may not have long.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Kendrick when Jonah told him. ‘Virgil Drayton. He was my link to a network of people obsessive enough and paranoid enough to see what the rest of the world might miss. I told Drayton what to keep an eye out for, and we found them. People connected to Andreas, planning anything unusual. From those I saw, none of them were hosts to those shadows, those parasites. If anything, that was their goal – they dreamed of becoming hosts, to creatures they knew almost nothing about.’

  ‘You killed them, I assume,’ said Sly once Jonah had finished repeating it. She spoke with a matter-of-factness that was chilling, if unsurprising.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kendrick. ‘That kind of interest . . . I wanted to excise it. I used fire when possible, to make sure that if there were any shadows, they would perish. There’s a file, Sly.’

  ‘I looked in the usual places,’ said Sly. ‘There wasn’t anything.’

  ‘It’s not in a usual place,’ said Kendrick. ‘The picture of your parents. The one you always keep. I slipped a note into the frame a while back. It’ll tell you where to look.’

  Sly didn’t reply, but she nodded. Her eyes were wet, Jonah saw.

  ‘Drayton got in touch,’ continued Kendrick. ‘He said he had more to tell me. I’d decided to rig his house, just in case, so I’d brought the goods and I had the chance. I planted a device where I knew it would be devastating. Drayton had an assistant called Ferris. A butler, I guess. He told me Drayton was in the basement, in his precious archives, and I was to go down there.

  ‘I should have been more careful. Drayton was tied to a chair. He told me he had a shadow on him, burrowing into his flesh, trying to take him. Drayton said they brought it here, the thing the shadow came from. The source of it. Ferris started to mock me over a PA. He admitted to having a shadow, said that there weren’t many of them, but there were enough. When the vessel perished, those shadows that didn’t die managed to hide. He said they’d struggled to find a new vessel. But they had done it. A blank slate, he said. A tabula rasa. Uncorrupted by something as mundane as morality. Free of a sense of humanity. The perfect vessel isn’t easy to find, he said.’

  The words Jonah had heard in the surge. ‘The vessel was the thing Drayton had talked about?’ he asked. ‘The source of the shadow that was on him?’

  ‘I assumed so. Drayton told me where it was. I went to the door, and I could hear something on the other side. I opened it. There was a long corridor, almost dark. I could
see movement at the far end, and the smell that hit me . . . my God. Death, shit, decay, blood . . . nothing I say could do it justice. I’d brought a second incendiary, and I knew that was my only chance. I backed away from the open door, and slowly the thing started to come towards me. It lumbered out into the light and, Christ, it was an abomination. The flesh was the glistening black of tar, limbs with joints that almost seemed random . . . It was the height of the ceiling, roughly shaped like a man, but from its flesh things protruded – claws, teeth. Angles and blades, that was what I saw, but it made little sense to me. Then I saw its face, and I saw its eyes, and I felt a fear I’ve not felt in my whole life.

  ‘I threw the incendiary and detonated it. I watched the burning fluid cover it and spread, but it shook itself. The fire should have stuck to it, but instead it was like a dog shaking off water. It screamed, raging, and it looked hurt, but it wasn’t burning any more. It ran towards me blindly, shielding its face. Around the doorway to the corridor, the fire was taking hold. I saw my chance. I ran, making it through the door and pulling it closed. I’d been burnt, I could tell, and the fire was already inside that corridor, but the creature seemed wary enough of it not to follow through at once. I hoped to find a way out before it regrouped.

  ‘The fire was taking hold. I could hear it rage. But all I got were dead ends. No way out. I could hear it coming. It must have been fleeing the worst of the blaze, but perhaps it just wanted me.