Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (17 page)

No wonder she wouldn’t take us up there.

“Polly, do you think—” Becky never got to finish her sentence.

Up until now, everything had been quiet and peaceful, though not completely silent. The chirrup of crickets and sounds of other nocturnal creatures coming out was starting to provide a background soundtrack as the sun disappeared behind the Rockies in the west. Long Brook had remained as still and calm as we had found it when we arrived earlier that afternoon. It was only now that I realized that the run-down old sanatorium must have been holding its breath, just waiting for a trigger to set off the explosion that would shatter the night ahead into a million desperate pieces.

We looked at one another, all four of us, trying to figure out what was causing the shrill, piercing warble that was suddenly disturbing the tranquility of dusk. Whatever it was, it was loud, and it was artificial. Brandon suddenly cursed, realization written across his face.

“I know that sound,” he said, and from the sound of his voice, he was suddenly somewhere very close to either rage or panic — it was impossible to tell which. “That’s the alarm system on my Blazer!”

“Somebody’s stealing my damned SUV!”

I guess it had been rage rather than panic, because Brandon was taking the stairs three at a time, his hiking boots slamming down hard as he practically flew down from the fifth floor down to the ground. Becky and I had a hard time keeping up with him, but we were every bit as motivated as he was — that Blazer was our ride home, and neither of us wanted to be stuck out here, trapped without transportation with God only knew who running around out there.

For her part, Polly was keeping pace by jumping gleefully from landing to landing, her pale blue outline flaring and flashing with psychic energy as her joy and playfulness manifested itself with increasing strength. She acted like this was some kind of game, which I guess this really
was
to an eight year-old girl, and judging by the sound of her giggles, she was having an absolute
blast.

I was huffing and puffing, fighting for breath when I hit the ground floor of the stairwell. As I came through the doorway, flashlight beam swinging crazily with each desperate gasp for air, I caught sight of Brandon vaulting athletically through the closest window-frame and vanishing into the night outside.

The car alarm was much louder now, and the annoying, incessantly high-pitched yelp seemed borderline sacrilegious in a place like this. I had gotten so used to the constant hush that this felt extremely jarring. My exit over the same window-sill was considerably less graceful than Brandon’s had been, but adrenaline helped speed me along. Becky was right on my heels, and we both sprinted full-tilt along in Brandon’s wake, heading towards the flashing yellow headlights of the parked SUV. She was in much better shape than I was, and it wasn’t long before she outdistanced me.

We both covered the couple of hundred feet in what felt like no time at all, though I was badly winded when I caught up with the pair of them. I had to bend over and rest my hands on my knees, unable to speak and hungrily gulping down great lungfuls of air.

“Oh no,” Becky said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Oh no. Oh God. ”

She was standing in the high-beam of one of the Blazer’s headlights, resting a supportive hand on Brandon’s shoulder. He wasn’t saying a word, seeming instead to be completely dumbfounded. When I got my breath back at last and straightened up, I saw why.

Somebody had gone to town on the Blazer, and not in a good way. The windshield had been shattered, probably by the heavy chunk of masonry that was sitting guiltily in a mess of sparkling glass fragments on the driver’s seat. Whoever had vandalized the car hadn’t seen fit to stop there, however. They had popped the hood, and even propped it up on the hooked metal support arm that was designed to keep it open so that repairs could be carried out; but
repair
was the very opposite of what had happened here.

It looked to me as though somebody — a
strong
somebody — had taken a fire axe or maybe a sledgehammer to the engine block, beating seventeen kinds of crap out of it in a fit of rage. Oil and other fluids I couldn’t name had splashed everywhere, seeping from holes and tears throughout the compartment, and all four of the tires had been either slashed or punctured, leaving the Blazer to wallow on the metal wheel rims.

I can’t tell you what Brandon said next, but it somehow managed to be not only descriptive and creative, but also obscene at the same time. I was actually kind of impressed. I hadn’t realized that his vocabulary had been that broad.

“At least the battery still works.”

Even as I said it, I knew that it sounded pretty lame. He flashed me a seething look that almost made me take a step back, the pure venom I could see in his eyes almost unsettling in the strobing yellow light. It can’t have helped any that Polly was dancing and capering happily around the wrecked SUV, singing along to a song that only she knew the words to.

“Is there any way we can stop that thing?” Becky had to yell to be heard over the clamor. Wordlessly, Brandon reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the keys, pointing a plastic fob in the direction of the Blazer and pushing a button. With a chirp, the alarm died instantly.

“Who the hell did this?” he growled, fists clenched and the rest of his body practically shaking with barely-contained anger. “Because when I get my hands on the piece of—”

Becky coughed, jerking her head towards Polly in the universal sign language for ‘hey, watch your mouth — there’s a kid around.’ Reluctantly, Brandon let his voice trail off. I totally understood why he needed to vent, this most definitely was not cool at all.

“It was the mean people,” Polly said quietly. She looked meaningfully up towards the top floor. “They don’t want you to leave.”

CHAPTER TEN

“You’re
seriously
trying to tell me that ghosts did this? Ghosts. Spooks. Angry dead people trashed my car.” Brandon sounded incredulous, and to be fair, it was hard to blame him. I mean, if you were in his shoes, what would
you
think?

The four of us had climbed the stairwell back up to the roof again, and were now sitting carefully on the battered chairs that had been abandoned up there. I for one wasn’t trusting more than a fraction of my weight to the rickety old deathtraps.

The Milky Way galaxy arched gloriously overhead, and I halfway wished that I had brought my telescope out here with me. This was a real dark-sky site, well away from all of the urban light pollution we had in Boulder.

Hey, dumbass — somebody just destroyed your only means of getting out of here, and you’re thinking about freaking
astronomy?
Get a grip!

It was 9:30 according to my iPhone, and I was more than a little bothered when I noticed that its power bar was down to just 43%, even though I hadn’t taken many photos or used its flashlight feature. It was less of a surprise to see that there was still no cellular reception, so I went into the phone’s settings and flipped it into airplane mode, in the hope that turning off the wi-fi and other cell functions would help conserve some of that precious juice.

“Well, it’s either that, or somebody else is running around out here,” said Becky, ever the voice of reason.

“Why is that so difficult to believe?” I weighed in. “I’ve seen more than my share of ghosts, but none of them have ever smashed up an SUV. Sorry, man.” I made an effort to sound sympathetic, but to tell you the truth, underneath it all I was actually getting pretty worried. Whoever had wrecked Brandon’s Blazer was one angry individual, and it would probably be smart to avoid tangling with them.

“Because we didn’t see any cars arrive,” was Becky’s retort. She went on to tick off each objection on one of her fingers. “Because we haven’t heard any engine noise since we arrived. Because there are no tire tracks except for ours out there.”

“It’s not like we’ve walked the entire perimeter of this place,” Brandon shot back, more than a little testily. “We could easily have missed the signs.”

“But we’ve made a lot of noise, and yet we haven’t heard anybody else moving around down there.” Now I was playing Devil’s Advocate, and starting to warm up to my theme a little. “We came back up here unmolested, didn’t we?”

“We also didn’t hear anybody smashing the Blazer to bits,” Becky countered. “Not even the windshield breaking…but we heard the car alarm go off. Something’s just not right about all this.”

“Look, I’m just not buying the idea that a bunch of dead people totaled my engine block!” Brandon’s frustration was starting to show, and to tell you the truth I was starting to feel a little frazzled myself. With the exception of Polly, who was now amusing herself by sitting on the swing and making it rock back and forth, I hadn’t seen any other spirits on our afternoon tour of the sanatorium.

Which didn’t mean that there
weren’t
any…

“Who are the dead people?” she asked, sounding confused.

Uh-oh.
I searched for the proper words with which to discuss death with an eight year-old girl. “Um…it’s sort of like…” I looked helplessly over at Becky, begging silently for her to help bail me out. It had just become painfully clear to me that Polly had absolutely no idea that she herself was dead.

“Well, Polly, do you remember when some of the people here got really, really sick?” Becky said gently. Polly nodded, her eyes as wide as saucers. “Sometimes those people just didn’t get better, did they?”

“No,” Polly answered slowly. “No, they didn’t.”

“What happened to them, after they got really sick?”

“They went to sleep, and the nurses took them away in a special bag.”

I winced. This was brutal. The poor kid…my heart went out to her.

“Honey, those people
died,
” Becky said, her tone a study in absolute compassion. Man, but she was handling this well. She must have a natural gift for it. Me, on the other hand…I felt so hopelessly clunky around kids on a good day, let alone when trying to figure out how to explain the concept of death to them. How did you even
start?
“Do you know what that word means?”

“I think so. My goldfish died when I was little, and Mommy flushed him down the toilet. Is it like that?” Her blue-limned outline flickered in what I knew was an expression of her reliving the sad event all over again.

Brandon laughed. I’m pretty sure that he didn’t mean to, that it was probably just the tension of our situation suddenly making its way out, but I dug him in the ribs with an elbow anyway. “Not cool, dude.”

“Sorry.”

Becky shot both of us a look filled with daggers. “Yes, honey. It’s a little like that, but we don’t put dead people in the toilet.” Despite the near-total darkness, we both caught the meaning of her ‘
don’t say a WORD’
glare, and neither of us would have dared to cross her, even if we had been mean-spirited enough to want to. “What happened to your mommy, Polly?”

There was an uncomfortable pause. “I don’t remember,” Polly said at last. “She came to visit me almost every day…and then one day, I think I must have slept for too long, because when I woke up she wasn’t here, and I never saw her after that.”

Spirits can cry, and Polly appeared to be on the verge of it right now. They’re not
real
tears, of course — that would be ridiculous. Spirits don’t have tear ducts, for one thing. No, the tears are another outward expression of whatever they happen to be feeling at the time, in the same way that the aura surrounding their energy form will change color or fluctuate. A single, fiery blue tear rolled down Polly’s cheek, disappearing beneath the curve of her chin.

“Do you know how long ago that was, Polly?” Becky pressed, her tone and demeanor still gentle, but now also probing a little. Polly shook her head sorrowfully. “I think that was the day that you di-”

“
I’M NOT DEAD!”

Those three words were infused with so much anger, rage, and above all a sense of profound loss, that it took all three of us completely by surprise when she screamed at us. No longer on the swing, which was now swinging through the air without a passenger, Polly had suddenly materialized less than a foot in front of Becky, yelling her denial directly into the startled older girl’s face. “I’m
not
dead! I’m
not! I’M NOT!”

Backing off a few steps, Becky raised her hands in a futile attempt to placate the now-hysterical child. Polly was throwing a full-blown tantrum, closing the distance between them both and beating her fists against Becky’s chest and abdomen. Brandon’s jaw dropped as he watched Polly’s tiny, balled fists sink repeatedly into Becky’s body, disappearing inside and flying straight back out again. “Wow,” was the best he could come up with.

None of us were prepared for what happened next.

With an ear-splitting
boom,
the door at the top of the stairwell was blasted outward on its screeching hinges, chunks of it splintering away as something
enormous
hit it with all the force of a speeding freight train. Four heads jerked around in unison, just in time to catch sight of the enormous figure that emerged from the ruined remains of the door.