Dead Mann Running (9781101596494) (10 page)

Pandora. Now there’s a story that never made sense. A teenager can’t keep from peeking in a closed box, surprise, surprise, and releases all the ills of the world. Then, she closes it just in time to keep hope inside. What the fuck? All the evils out, hope still trapped? Even the ancients needed a good editor.

I closed the case, carried it to the Subaru, put it in the passenger seat and wrapped the belt around it nice and snug. The keys were still in the ignition, the tank half-full.

I was cruising the dirt road, looking for Misty, seeing nothing but dark, when the cell phone they’d left for me back at the motel rang. I doubted that with two of his men dead I’d be able to again convince the toad of my good intentions. I turned it off so the sound wouldn’t bug me, then found myself missing the voice of the German GPS.

A few hours later, I was no closer to finding her on the
road. That left the office. Once I scratched it off the list, the list would be empty. I was back in the Bones, a few blocks from home, when the dirty yellow haze that passed for dawn arrived. The day promised to be colder, the patches of ice thickened.

I ditched the car in an alley between a wrecked walk-up and a deserted pool hall called
Balls of Fire.
It was the hangout of our few local LB crackheads. Misty always recoiled at the sight of the place, but times change. Praying I wouldn’t see her there, I stuck my head in through one of the glassless window frames.

Six or so skeletal figures lay strewn around the pool tables, broken cues, and other mementoes of a lesser sin. One had an arm missing, another’s face was full of sores. I knew at a glance they were all livebloods. Don’t ask me how, I just did. If they were chakz, they wouldn’t stand out from the garbage in quite the same way.

I didn’t see her, but I called out, “Misty!” in case anything moved.

Nothing even raised its head. I tried to feel good about that.

Hoping to avoid any eyes that might be looking for me, I stuck to the alleys and vacant lots. I did run into two danglers, but lacking mouths, they wouldn’t be able to talk about it later even if they did recognize me, unless they remembered how to write, and I doubted that.

Expecting someone, hell, maybe
everyone
, to be watching, I stopped at the building next door and turned toward the roof. It was up there I’d spotted the figure. If the vantage was good enough for Red Riding Ninja, why not me? It was a plan.

Living up to its name, the rear fire door had long ago
been burned off its hinges. Inside, a skylight put a dull square on what was left of the stairs. Between missing steps, broken railings, and fallen pieces of wall, it took more than I expected to make it all the way up, but I managed, at least until I reached the roof. There were so many holes looking down into the lower floors, I felt like a drunken tightrope walker. Red was hot shit.

I found what I thought was his spot, near a chimney. It faced east, so the sunrise would make it harder to see me, and provided a decent view across the alley and into my home sweet home.

The place was ransacked, not that it looked all that different before. The sight of my ratty recliner, smashed and on its side, gave me a weird pang. I’d left pieces of myself in that old chair, literally. The desk was intact, but askew, as it had been on the webcam, the drawers missing. If Misty hadn’t somehow beaten me here, Red had found the false bottom where I kept our measly savings. I hoped the amount was too embarrassingly small to take.

A thin black rectangle, less than a foot wide, lay sideways against a wall. Misty said the ninja kicked the netbook. Had it been overlooked? Ridiculous. I was probably looking at a hunk of plasterboard pretending to have a shape. I leaned out for a closer look. That’s when the iffy support beam holding my weight decided it’d had enough. It didn’t snap, but I wound up swaying out over the alley, snatching at the chimney to keep from falling thirty feet down into a Dumpster.

That would have hurt. The old thing had been down there so long, it’d all but recycled itself. The wet mess inside had rotted into a mushy soup. Most of it, anyway.
Something lay atop the ooze, barely distinguishable from its surroundings, like a zombie Waldo, gray as a corpse, about the length of an umbrella.

From here it looked like an arm.

I could’ve been hallucinating, I could’ve been wrong, but if that was the sucker that started it all, I had to check it out. The office, the building, the streets, all looked deserted. Yeah, looks can be deceptive, but I headed down anyway, a little too fast for safety’s sake.

Arriving in the alley, I braced my feet against what used to be its blue metal side, gripped the frame and hauled myself up. One look and I didn’t want to go in. Close up, the gunk looked like something I could sink into. It was an arm all right, though,
the
arm, muscles that looked like Dad’s, the thick fingers he wished he’d had.

Whatever voodoo science that gave it its get up and go, had got up and went. It was swollen from the rain, really dead. I pulled closer. Had it been
that
gray when it knocked on my door? Had it been gray at all? I seemed to remember it being pinker, but that’d be crazy.

A bit of white at the end of its index finger looked like a paper scrap. Turned out it wasn’t at the end of the finger, it
was
the end of the finger, exposed bone, the flesh scraped off. Maybe some rat had gnawed on it. They’ll eat anything.

But there were no little teeth marks. The finger had been worn to the bone, like the arm had done it on purpose, scraped its own skin away. On what? Why?

Then I saw it, scratched into the metal, four letters, one word,
KYUA
.

M
isty was gone and all I got was this lousy clue.
KYUA.
The imaginary god of the zombies.

Did the arm get the joke or did it, like Jimmy Stewart in the coffeehouse restroom, have faith and expect the same of me? Faith was Misty’s bailiwick, what she said kept her sober, at least it had this morning. She tried to explain it more than once. The closest she got was telling me about this Hindu book, the
Bhagavad Gita
.

It was basically a chat between God and Arjuna, a poor sap fated to start a huge war among his family. Only he doesn’t want to. Vishnu takes Arjuna aside and explains the universe, the whole ball of mortician’s wax. Once Arjuna supposedly understands, he accepts his role and starts the war. Let the bloodbath roll.

Thing is, I never believed Arjuna really understood. I figured at best he got sick of all the yapping and said fuck it, shut up already, I’ll start the war.

Assuming I was looking at the netbook and not an
optical illusion, she may have had time to put some contacts on it. Could be a way to find her. It could also be a way to get D-capped. Sure, from above, the office looked barren, but someone had been watching everything else so far. I took a leap of faith, as in, fuck it, let the bloodbath roll.

But I was no Arjuna. After climbing three flights and wading through the icy hallway puddles, my bravado wore off. I stood in a corner like a toddler doing time-out, went dead for half an hour. There wasn’t a peep, not a single car driving by, not even an electric hum. The silence was as unnatural as I was.

I went in.

I didn’t check for the netbook right off. Instead, in a rare sentimental moment, I prodded the broken recliner with my foot. The useless frame whimpered like a wounded dog. If I had a gun, I would have put it out of its misery.

Most of our belongings had been scattered, but against the wall, right where I’d spotted it, was the netbook. If it was a genuine miracle, the battery wouldn’t have been drained and the AC adapter missing. If there was a way to get it going, it wasn’t here.

Next, I checked the desk drawer, surprised to find the money still there. That meant Misty hadn’t been here and it wasn’t worth Red’s time. It put a few hundred in my pocket, enough for a new adapter, anyway.

I grabbed my thrift store coat and went through the pockets. My digital recorder, my memory crutch, was gone. I tried to remember what was on it, but if I could do that, I wouldn’t need the damn thing. Then for some reason, I started cleaning. I gathered what I could of
Misty’s things and put them back in her bureau, in case, I don’t know.

I was busy stuffing some of my dryer clothes in a plastic garbage bag when a weird tingle caterpillared along my spine. I didn’t see or hear anything, but I went to the door. The sign with my name lay flat on the floor at my feet. The hall oozed nothingness.

“Misty?”

Nothing answered, but I didn’t trust it, so I headed for the window and tried to open it. It was a contest to see which would give out first, the frame or my fingers, but the wood creaked up enough for me to climb out.

Bag in hand, I clambered down the fire escape. I doubt it was up to code when the building was new. Now, it was more paint than iron, my meager weight nearly pulling it free from the mortar. In the end, I fell, but by that time I was low enough to hit bottom in one piece.

Short-lived victory. I spent the next half hour wandering the alleys trying to remember where I’d left the Subaru. If I hadn’t left the case in it, I’d have given up and taken a bus. Once I found it, I tanked up, bought some supplies at the Quickie Mart, then swapped the plates with an out-of-state van. Why the hell someone would drive to Fort Hammer from out of state is beyond me, but there you have it.

Next, I hit a big box electronics store. The security guy wouldn’t let me in until I showed him my money. I spent too much on a new recorder that didn’t look like it’d work and an adapter for the netbook that looked like it might. The cash about tapped, I headed for the second-most abandoned place I could think of, the warehouse district.

The feeble afternoon sun was being bullied by some massive gray clouds, the ice on the road serious. As I wheeled among the giant corpses of Fort Hammer’s forgotten retail trade, I skidded more than once. The buildings looked so rickety I was afraid one whack would bring the whole block down. Even chakz didn’t bother making shantytowns here. The only guy who’d used the place in recent memory had been a serial killer. And while he was trying to cut my head off, at least he’d shown me which warehouse still had electricity.

I found an outlet, plugged in the netbook, and turned it on. As I waited for it to boot, I pulled out my favorite piece of luggage and set it on the hood. No reason not to look now. The glass vials were the same, that single hairline crack on the one. I gently turned the other, sideways, upside down. It wasn’t viscous. The liquid moved easily. The color was rich, lighter than cerulean, the crayon a kid might use for an ocean if he’d never seen one. I put both vials on the passenger seat, and turned to the briefcase.

There was something stuck in one of the hinges, a bit of pink nylon ribbon, smaller than a fingernail. I pulled it off, then tugged at the bottom layer until it threatened to tear. I got the sense it’d always been part of the case, that both were made just for those bottles. Drug trade gets pretty sophisticated, but I wasn’t thinking local distributor anymore.

I worked my way around the edge of the foam, pulling, getting the same resistance. When I tried the top, though, one corner peeled away revealing something underneath; the end of a plastic card—a credit card or driver’s license.

Ever try lifting a dime from the floor with wet fingers?
The wrinkled pads of my fingers kept slipping over it. My nails were too short to get under. I could shred the foam, but might need the case for the vials.

I fished the proverbial last dime from my pocket and used it to pry the card up. I had to see only the corner of the stylized double-R logo, for Revivals Registration, to know it was a chak ID. If a cop or guardsmen asked and you didn’t have one, into the camps with you. And they asked whenever they could.

The embossed name on it—William Seabrook—had to be fake. Seabrook was the author of
The
Magic Island
back in 1929, the book that supposedly introduced the word
zombie
to Western culture. Somebody had a sense of humor. The number was intact, but there was no picture, the plastic split where it was supposed to be. It’d be easy to put a new one in. This was exactly what a chak would need to escape the camps and start over. Maybe the arm was what was left of an escapee.

The thought of shredding the foam gave me an idea. Everyone was looking for a briefcase, right? I pocketed the card, then tore off enough foam to wrap the vials in, secured them with duct tape and shoved the results into a cinder block. To make it look good, I wrapped the case in two plastic garbage bags along with a couple of bricks for weight, and sealed the whole thing up with duct tape. Then I found a great big vat full of water, tied a rope around the handle and dropped the sucker in.

By now the netbook had booted, so I checked Misty’s contacts. She’d had the thing only a few hours, but there were two. One was Chester, and the other a first name, Mary. Her sponsor in the program. There was a phone number.

I had the toad’s cell and mine, but wasn’t stupid enough to use either. There was a pay phone nearby. I’d used it to call Misty once, when I was bound with a leather strap around my neck. Don’t ask. And I had just enough quarters for a one-minute call.

After three rings, a female voice, ravaged by cigarettes to the point where it sounded like a cartoon, said, “Yeah?”

“Mary?”

“Yeah?”

I’d have swallowed if it would have helped. “Hessius Mann. I’m looking for Misty.”

“She’s in the can. I’ll get her…”

Something like relief flooded my bones. The other big addict in my life, Dad, tried getting sober, but it never stuck. He used to joke that he’d quit so often he should be getting better at it. Misty, bless her, still wanted to take care of herself. And if she was with a friend, she was safer than I was. Which meant now was not the time to stick my nose in.

“Wait. I don’t want her to know I called. I just want to know if she’s all right.”

A phlegmy laugh. “Well, she ain’t all right. She’s been fucked over, good.”