2 Death Rejoices

by A. J. Aalto

  I looked at him like he was crazy. “Uh, it's oozy. It's festering. It's plague-ridden and fuzzy with blight. Also, it's fucking squirming.”

  He jerked his chin at the flexing fingers, which opened and closed the greasy palm under the harsh white floodlights. It was smeared with something that looked like congealed Minestrone soup. “Poke his ring.”

  I stared at that left arm for a long moment, while dread pooled through my innards. A married man. A dead married man. Please don't be who I think it is.

  “What is it?” Batten said, putting his hand over his phone. “Baranuik, what's the problem?”

  “Permission to Grope that ring, Agent Batten?”

  “It's too filthy to get prints. If you think it'll help, go for it.”

  I suggested to him, “Might want to put a K9 search team and cadaver dogs on the surrounding woods here, and see if we can't track down the owner of this arm.”

  He put his phone away. “State health department called for a quarantine of Shaw's Fist. No one in. No one out without sweep and/or clearance.”

  “This day is going to be a lot longer than I thought,” I told him, scrunching my forehead. A trickle of sweat rolled into my eye and I blinked the salt away. “Tell me someone got a line on some coffee.”

  “I'll make a call,” Batten promised. “Do what you gotta do.”

  I sat back on my haunches and watched Declan fish in his doctor's bag to bring out the vial of moths. When he shook it at me, the dried wings were like little fern-green feathers rustling against the glass as if alive and fluttering to get out.

  “Moth-in-chains?” he suggested.

  “What do I need to do?”

  “You just do what you always do,” he told me, worrying at his gold necklace through his shirt, “and leave the amplification to me, all right?”

  “You're sure this is okay?” I asked, wondering what Harry would say.

  “I'm not worried about it.”

  “Brave,” I noted sourly.

  “I've always prided myself on a certain amount of courage.”

  “You know what brave gets you, right?” I eyeballed him across the fallen arm. “Dead. Brave gets you all sorts of dead. Look at that guy.” I jerked my chin in the general direction of Roger Kelly's body inside the shed. “White water rafting with guys half his age, partying all hours at wild, furpile orgies at strangers’ rented cabins in the wilderness. Now he's all sorts of dead.”

  “You know, your pessimism stunts the natural streak of bravery I see in you.”

  “It's not pessimism, it's realism. You recognize reality, don't you, Irish? Reality is that fat black leech on the rotten arm, there, sucking away but getting nothing. And if realism makes me cowardly, that's all right, because it also keeps me alive. Now get real with me, Declan. Is this spell truly okay to do?”

  “What if it's not?”

  “If you taint me with it and Harry finds out, I suggest you change your name to John Smith and move somewhere safer, like Antarctica. Maybe the moon.”

  Declan cranked the vial's stopper off and shook the dried moths into his hand, closing his eyes. “I wouldn't dream of passing my risk to you, Dr. B. Whenever you're ready, you go ahead. It would help to imagine the Blue Sense opening not in the front of your forehead, at the third eye, as usual, but drawing up from the Earth into your core.”

  “By ‘core’ you better mean ‘abdomen’, buster,” I warned him.

  I'd seen the moth-in-chains spell sketched out once, in Ruby Valli's grimoire, during a random peek before I'd shut myself of it. It was a spell meant to capture the moth's last encounter for the witch to extract at a later date, or to amplify psychic impressions on the past. Used for “remembrances” and “alchemicals”, the drawing of the spell in the grimoire made me think two things: a) a trained moth on a window ledge eavesdropping would be seriously cool, and b) if Ruby Valli had stuck to sketching and not sketchy magic, she might be alive today, enjoying a successful art career. She was an Audubon-class sketcher. Of course, she was also evil, which is why I didn't mind so much that she was dead.

  So did Declan Edgar have spy-moths, here? Or had they simply touched upon something he needed? I could hear him speaking softly under his breath, a whispering sound like the wings on glass. I decided to trust him, and, poking the ring with one fingertip, closed my eyes.

  When I opened them, everything was blurry. Visions and voices were overlapping, sand over water, trees, movement, shadow, the night sky, pale waving arms moving through the air, voices both panicked and calm and demanding, messing around inside my ears. I was pretty sure not all of them were real voices, that some were memories and empathic remnants. I felt a rush of excitement, of triumph, and Anne no, not Anne, but Dallas, her name is Dallas, and Cosmo, and Roger, begging please, don't go Annie, and a young woman's high, tipsy laughter, mocking, taunting, sexually free and wild. Cosmo calling her down to look at the “wicked dark spot” he saw in the lake, and then her laughter overlapping again with Roger's begging, please Annie, don't go see him tonight. It's sick, it's just sick. See who? And Anne, no, Dallas, no, Anne, brightly, her playful call lilting above the water, then splashing, her voice clear like bells over the plunk of rocks tossed in the lake, bragging, he wants me, he promised me, and Cosmo shouting holy fuck, dude, you're so wrecked!

  “Dr. B.?” Declan's voice, and I knew it was real, like seeing something move stealthily through fog and knowing it's just a dog and not the rabid wolf of your nightmare. “Tell us what you're seeing Marnie.”

  “Everything. A jumble. Voices. I can hear them. I actually hear them. I've never heard during a vision before.”

  “Hear who?” Declan asked patiently.

  The scuffle of boots on stone to my left. I knew it was Batten by the impatient crunch; somehow he made footsteps sound jerk-like. He remained quiet, letting Declan interact with and annoy me.

  Deep within my psychometric vision, the owner of the ring was moving forward on a mission toward the voices, fixated on the woman. Through the ring, I could feel the water as a thigh-high push of cool eddies, the pain in his disintegrating feet, his rotting knees that no longer worked well, bone grinding in the joints. There was so much pain, not felt in a personal way; a distant agony, dissociated, disconnected. More important was the terrible intensity of his hunger. But under that, a hint of something else: his wife. His wife. Whose wife? He didn't miss her, he didn't love her, not now. He was beyond such abstractions. Now he only had one feeling, one speed, one thought: eat wife.

  Eat Paula.

  Eat.

  Paula.

  I sucked wind through my teeth but didn't break contact with the ring: his wife, his ring, his arm, his hunger, his intensity.

  Aradia's teats, my brain piped up, cursing the day my brother ever set foot on my porch, the day that set this man's murder in motion. What could I possibly say to the cops? I had to tell them the truth. If it really was who I thought it was (don't be dense, you know exactly who it is, Marnie) and if he was, for some reason, shambling around Shaw's Fist (risen, someone has raised him on purpose) eating people … dammit, I had to tell them.

  “Dr. B.?” Declan probed.

  Rob Hood was no more than fifty feet behind me; maybe because of Declan's amplification spell, or maybe because of my own dread, I could feel the weight of Hood's stare. He'd been planning on having divers drag the lake today.

  I had to be sure. I focused on pushing further into the ring's aura, clearing aside piles of bloody imagery and murderous intent to find who had done this, avoiding the memory of his original death; that was not going to serve me at all. I needed to know what happened to his corpse and when, and why it was up and haunting my lake.

  Stay, I heard. A gurgle, some static, and then, Stay.

  Declan's hand landed on my forearm and I felt a surge of power plunge through my veins, nothing like Harry's power, not cool and restrained but warm and vibrant and vigorous, wild like growth. Like life.

  “Come on down.” His
hand slid down to grab my wrist; pulling my hand away from the ring, he broke the contact there. Heat lashed between the ring and my fingertips, inches apart, like a magnetic draw, as though the ring had more to tell me. My hand itched to hear the news. “Easy now, Dr. B. That's enough. We're done. Agent Batten,” he summoned, “That coffee coming?”

  “Declan …” I sighed. His shoulder caught up against mine.

  “Close your eyes and just let it go back into the Earth. It's okay, lean on me if you need to.”

  A firm hand cupped my elbow and I relaxed into it gratefully. The Blue Sense didn't immediately dissipate as it otherwise would have, without the amplification; it spun through my head, half-heard voices, like a TV jerked on and off under the constant buzz of a radio not quite dialed to a station. I felt helpless, and part of me liked it. I let myself go limp against my assistant, let the Blue Sense continue its parting fan dance, revealing tantalizing bits and pieces.

  Groping while under the influence of Declan's earthy augmentation left my mouth dry like I'd been chewing clods of dirt. The spike of energy was almost more than I could handle, and rather than fighting this serious case of belly-tremors, I went with it. Maybe this was what the first hit of an addictive drug was like; maybe this was the high a junky forever chased.

  “No, you're just fine,” Declan said quietly, like he'd read my mind. “You handled that perfectly. Perfectly. You're fantastic, Dr. B. Hold on. Clarity's coming. Few more seconds and it should clear.”

  Psi hung like the heavy cloud of smog ringing Harry after he chain-smoked menthols on a stressful evening. For a few minutes, I hung my head and breathed deeply through my mouth, sorting past from present, letting reality set in, trusting Declan's solid presence at my side, his continuous soothing voice assuring me that everything would be fine soon. It helped to pick out actual voices of other people, mundane people, who were still hovering, pinpointing de Cabrera behind me to the right, Chapel in the distance, and then individual scents, like the smell of Batten's holy-water-and-Brut mixture to my left.

  “He heard ‘stay’ and he stayed here.” I forced my head back up. “I'm betting he's still here, close by. He was told to stay.”

  “Who was, Dr. B?”

  “You know who the arm belongs to?” Batten asked.

  I said sadly, “Let me process. I need a minute to sort my brain out.”

  To my great surprise, Batten let that perfect pitch go without knocking back a home-run insult. “Hood brought coffee and Danish, some muffins, a dozen donuts. Need something to eat?”

  I groaned; I couldn't possibly eat now. “Thanks, no, not feeling so hot.”

  Chapel returned as forensics bagged and tagged the arm and did their thing around us, taking the writhing package away. “State health department's here. CDC's en route. We're stepping aside until they're satisfied. Did you get a reading from the ring?”

  Chapel looked so unsuspecting that I almost hated to say the name.

  “Yeah, I did. I got an ID.” I drew a deep breath and looked past him to Rob Hood.

  The sheriff had been watching me with the attention of a bulldog on a porterhouse. He saw me look back at him and his body language shifted from the edge he'd been perched on, and I knew he knew, knew he'd read it on my face. Hood started running toward us, full-tilt, before I even said it.

  “Dead six months. Raised a week ago. Agent Chapel, I regret to report, we have a confirmed zombie.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “That arm belongs to the late Chief Deputy Neil Dunnachie.”

  CHAPTER 30

  BY THE TIME THE STATE HEALTH DEPARTMENT got their gear set up, I'd finally ducked out of the warmth of the floodlights and into the shadows to have a coffee and calm my jittery stomach. K-9 and cadaver dogs yelped and howled in the woods, chasing scents and leading their handlers to scattered pieces of human remains that may or may not have belonged to Anne Bennett-Dixon — living, dead or undead — or Stuart, Malas’ missing DaySitter, both still unaccounted for. One of the dogs lay down next to a bare foot. Too rotten to belong to a recent disappearance, it was likely Neil Dunnachie's. If pieces of him kept dropping off like this, we might not have to worry about a lengthy quarantine at Shaw's Fist.

  “We gonna get out of here soon?” I asked Batten, who came to sit beside me in the pre-dawn dark. “I live five minutes away and haven't had much rest. I am beyond done.”

  “Got plans?”

  “Brownies and rabid wolverines. Maybe a whole lot of sleep.”

  “Home alone with your vibrator again.” Not a question, but not necessarily a jab either.

  I confided, “It's going to be fucknificent.”

  He gave a tired snort, offered me a swig from his water bottle. I put my empty coffee cup aside and downed half his water, then tried to hand it back. He refused it. “Did Dr. Varney from the CDC call back?” I asked.

  “You know him,” Batten surmised.

  “Don't know why you'd think that,” I sidestepped, “and it doesn't matter whether I do or not. He's not here.”

  “He's there.” He pointed to a van, where health department guys were clustered. “Skyping from Namibia to make sure collection runs smoothly in the shed when the CDC team arrives.”

  “My cue to leave. It's almost dawn. Harry gets pissy if he goes to rest and I'm not in the house. Besides…” I motioned with his water bottle to the crew in their white HAZMAT suits cordoning off the scene and taking readings (of what I had no clue) with some long-handled device near where the arm had been found. No one had touched the shed yet; one thing at a time. They were being very cautious. I approved. “I'm close, if these guys do need me.”

  “That blond guy, Liam something, he needs to ask you some questions about the beetles. He's with their entomology department.”

  “I can answer any questions he has,” Declan offered. I hadn't heard him come up behind us. “Dr. B's had a hard go of it. She's had to use the Blue Sense twice already today, and the second time was more intense than usual. I'm surprised she's still upright.”

  I smiled wanly. “I'll be fine.”

  Declan continued as though he hadn't heard me. “Why don't you let her go home? If there's anything I can't finish up here, I can get her back. It's only a two minute drive.”

  “If you're trying to get rid of me,” I told Declan, “I heartily approve.”

  Batten considered the pair of us and relented with a tired nod. “Get Hood to give you a lift.”

  “He hasn't got his truck. He had to move it back to the doc's cabin, had a propane tank to drop off,” Declan said. “Chapel asked to borrow it for cooking, the stove in that place uses propane and was low. You can take the Buick, Dr. B.”

  I groaned as I got to my feet, using Batten's shoulder to hoist myself to standing. “Or I could just walk for five minutes. I'm not an invalid. The fresh air will help me cool off.”

  “Hold up a few and I'll walk you back,” Batten said.

  I eyed Chapel over Batten's shoulder, talking to de Cabrera. “Yeah, no. Better if I go by myself. I have crispy-brain syndrome. If I don't get some alone time, what's left will crumble like Saltines in soup.”

  Batten followed my gaze, and nodded. “Got your gun?”

  “What?” I snort-laughed. “Of course not.”

  He pointed at his face. “This is a disapproving look, in case you're so used to getting them that you no longer recognize it.”

  “You hate when I carry my gun.”

  “When did that ever stop you?” Batten asked. “You took it to a kid's funeral. Today you forget it at home?”

  “You got me up at ass o'clock,” I said. “I was lucky I remembered to put on pants.” I had changed out of the Tyvek HAZMAT suit after confirming the arm was Dunnachie's, but not until I'd checked myself out in one of the van's mirrors. I didn't think I looked anything like the fat marshmallow Agent Golden accused me of. More like a splortch of Cool Whip.

  He reached under the cuff of his jeans on the right side and pulled out a stake, then he
reached into his back pocket and took out a folding knife like the one Chapel always carried. Finally, he went to his left ankle, where he had an ankle holster, and took out a gun.

  “Taurus model 85 ultra-lite,” he said, like I had any clue what he was talking about. “Never failed to feed for me. Loaded with .38 Special +P Federal Hydra-Shoks.”

  “I don't know what any of that means, but thanks.” I hefted the gun, and felt both powerful and unsafe, like I was fully capable of blowing my own head off in the process of saving the universe.

  “If you get in trouble, best wait until your target is within fifteen feet.”

  “If a zombie gets within fifteen feet of me, I'm boned. I probably couldn't hit the broad side of the boathouse.” I tried to hand it back to him and he scowled at me. “Fine. You're sure it's loaded, or should I just huck it at the zombie's head and hope to knock it off?”

  “Shoot it, stab it, stake it.”

  “Congrats on being bad at zombies,” I said. “None of that will kill one. Where's my Taser-blaster thingy?”

  “Entered it into evidence.”

  “Douche-tarp.” I gave his arm a retaliatory slap.

  He looked away to check on Chapel's whereabouts, but not before I saw the flicker of a victorious smirk.

  “You'll be getting that back for me,” I told him sternly. “Listen, I'm going to need some grappling hooks.”

  “What for?”

  “Anti-zombie preparations around the house. Also, a hang-glider.”

  “You're not getting a hang-glider.”

  “If I don't get a hang-glider, this whole team is pretty much hosed.” I waited to see if I'd get that flicker of a smile aimed at me. “This is the way I always work.”

  “That doesn't mean it's not stupid.” He gave me a withering look that told me not to question him any further. Kill-Notch was hot, sandy, and overtired. I decided not to push it.

  “Annnnd, I'm off,” I announced. I made for the road and the cabin and the shambling undead I actually liked.

  The road was blissfully cool after the heat of a dozen floodlights, bordering on actually chilly, and the pre-dawn breeze whisked away my sweat in a whispering, leafy rush that raised gooseflesh. I welcomed it. The wind in the trees and the scrunch of fresh-poured gravel under the soles of my sneakers were the only sounds keeping me company; it was too early for animals, and too late for nocturnal insect chatter. I'd had enough stress and coffee to keep me up for a few hours, even if I tried to crash. Harry would be stretching out, lean and languorous, in his silk sheets soon, ready for his morning feed before going to rest, hungry even after last night's relative feast. Eager to get back to him, I put my hands in my pockets and started some of Harry's favorite old school hip hop and rap music in my right ear from his iPod. The music flipped to DMX, and to keep my mind off the disturbing events at the shed (big hairy momma zombie spider) and the findings (Dunnachie's arm, it's Dunnachie's arm) I tried to remember the words to “Party Up in Here”.