God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel (16 page)

The dead woman’s advance faltered as she turned toward Clover and AJ lifted the tank lid above his head, bringing it down as hard as he could, the impact traveling all the way up his arms.

The blow drove the dead woman to her knees and Clover changed her grip on the plunger handle, one hand gripping it about halfway up, the other hand braced against the end of it. She took a step forward, let out a small scream of effort, and jammed the plunger handle through the cracked dome of the dead woman’s skull.

The dead woman’s rotting hands came up, slapping at the plunger handle as she howled.

The tortured screams of the corpse they were trying to kill filled his ears and seemed to echo there, as if they had been there before. It was as if he were hearing them from long ago, perhaps hundreds of years ago. He didn’t like the way they sounded but couldn’t deny that they sounded as if they belonged.

“Fuck…
you
!” Clover shoved the plunger handle in even further, losing her grip on it when the dead woman fell backward onto the floor, convulsing.

AJ stood above her, slamming the toilet tank lid into the other side of her skull, crushing it, and finally the kicking stopped.

AJ dropped the tank lid, now cracked up the middle, and stepped back, panting, sweat running down his temple.

Clover caught a small grin spreading across his face as he turned, and her first thought was, my god, is he actually enjoying this? Am
I
?

“You’re a goddamn natural at this,” AJ said with a tired laugh.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, yanking the plunger handle out of the skull. She took his hand and led him toward the front room. AJ took the lead when they got to the living room and, seeing what had happened Officer Bill Tamir, stopped short.

“Don’t look at this. You don’t need to see it,” she whispered into his ear. She squeezed his hand but stopped him, pulling him back.

“Get his gun,” she said.

It was on the floor about a foot from the officer’s head, which in turn lay about a foot from the body in a pool of tacky, already drying blood. He knelt to pick up the firearm.

* * * * *

Lubbock stared up fixedly at the small “5” above the elevator door. Finally it lit up and the doors opened. The two of them stepped out of the elevator cautiously. It was quiet.

Almost too quiet
, the B-movie buff in John quipped. Then the fire alarm went off. Steve jumped. He turned to him and let out a long breath, shaking a little with laughter and a little with the adrenaline that had pumped into his blood.

They rounded a corner and stopped. There was a body on the ground, a cop. He knew it must be Nick Black, the one he’d stationed in the hall. John’s heart began to sink as they neared the corpse. He tried not to notice that Nick’s throat had been ripped out as he passed. Steve nearly stepped on it as he skirted around the body. As John stepped into the room, he saw both AJ and Clover. AJ was kneeling to pick up a gun and, when he heard the two cops come through the door, he reacted.

How can he be that fast? John asked himself as AJ’s arm became a soft blur and snatched up the gun, cocked it, and leveled it at Steve’s head, all the while looking John directly in the eyes. John would replay this later and wonder about it.

They were frozen there. AJ’s breathing was heavy and erratic. The gun quivered in the kid’s hand and John could see the tendons and veins standing out in his arm.

Steve stood still, hands open, palm out.

“Kid...put the gun down,” John said, trying to soothe him. “It’s us, the good guys, remember?”

Slowly AJ lowered the gun on the floor.

“Jesus, man, I’m sorry--” AJ’s apology was interrupted as someone else charged through the door. Everyone jumped and turned to see Logan as he entered.

“Ah, Mr. Perish, I presume?” John asked. The cop in him wanted to immediately start peppering the guy with questions, regardless of what Jin’s letter had said, but then he took a closer look at the man, at the pale and somehow ashen color of his face. Any question he might have had dried up when Logan came all the way into the hotel room, quietly closing the door behind him.

“What the fuck, John?” Steve whispered.

AJ stared at Logan’s arm and reached out to Clover, clutching her sleeve.

There was a severed head stuck to his forearm, the teeth buried in the flesh. The head itself was splattered with blood and Logan’s arm was a slick, red glove from his elbow all the way to his fingertips. The head still bore a few wisps of hair but the nose looked, from where he stood, to have mostly rotted away. Blood ran off Logan’s arm and out of the tattered neck hole of the head onto the floor.

“I got two of ’em in the stairs,” Logan said.

The room was silent but for the splattering of blood on the carpet, a small pool already forming next to Logan’s boot.

“Can someone help get this off me?” Logan asked.

No one spoke. There was still nothing but the sound of dripping blood. Finally Clover cleared her throat and stepped forward, still carrying the plunger handle.

“Brace it against the door,” Clover said after looking it over.

Logan held his arm up and leaned it against the door. Clover leaned in again, her face wrinkling in disgust.

“Will this make you…one of them?” AJ asked.

Logan just shook his head.

“Are you ready?” Clover asked.

Logan nodded and she stepped in closer to him, working the end of the plunger handle into the space between mouth and arm, wriggled it around and adjusted it until she had the angle and leverage she wanted.

She looked up at him. “Count of three?”

“Count of—”

Clover stepped forward and slammed the heel of her palm against the plunger handle.

Logan let out a guttural bark of pain as AJ and John flinched.

There was a crack like breaking ice and several teeth popped out of the affixed jaw, ticking off the wall, one off Clover’s forehead. The jaw now hung loose like a busted drawer, held in place only by decaying skin and muscle. She dropped the plunger handle to the floor and carefully, as though diffusing a bomb, placed her hands around the head. Only AJ noticed the slightest of tremors in her hands. She jiggled it back and forth a little and then pulled it off in a rush of blood and a few more falling teeth.

“Let’s get a towel on that,” Steve said and went toward the bathroom.

Clover looked at the bloody, rotting, severed head in her hands, and then a dark smile crossed her face and she held the head aloft, looking up into its eyes, some of Logan’s blood running down her forearm or in between her fingers and down the back of her hand.

“Alas, poor Yorick,” she said in a deep voice, affecting an English accent..

“Jesus Christ,” John said with a snort of laughter. She smiled again and to AJ it looked like she was going to start screaming but she swallowed it, whatever it was: the horror, the grief, the exhaustion, the terrible acid trip reality that had become their waking life.

She dropped the skull into a small, metal trashcan next to a writing desk near the door with an echoing clang, then turned to Logan.

“Thank you,” Logan said, taking a towel from Steve. Clover took the towel from Logan and he slowly started to take off his trench coat.

He looked like shit, but he was alive, they all were.

Except for Nick,
John thought.
And Gomez. And Bill and god knew who else.

CHAPTER SEVEN

AJ came out the hotel feeling responsible for the twelve dead people inside. John Lubbock led their small party out, bulldozing a path through the crowd. AJ couldn’t turn his head in any direction without seeing a cop, reporter, hotel employee, fireman, or paramedic.

The sky was still black with clouds and the rain was falling just as hard, adding to the chaos. Everywhere were lights, flashing off police cruisers and ambulances and the fire truck that had just arrived. News vans from three different networks and two major papers were on the scene. Cameramen shone hot lights in his eyes and reporters screamed questions and stabbed at his face with microphones bearing station logos as uniformed officers tried to fend them off. The lightning became a part of the mob, forming a pulsing, savage backdrop. AJ felt like the fabled cow about thirty seconds before being skeletonized by the school of piranha. He looked around for Logan but saw no sign.

“Get in the car,” John shouted above the commotion and helped Clover into the back of a cruiser. The door was closed behind them and the car crept through the mass of people. Although physically and mentally exhausted, the frenetic energy of the scene got AJ going and he felt unnaturally hyper. It reminded him of his brief high school experiments with speed. In the bulletproof rear window he caught his reflection and didn’t know what to make of the smile he saw there.

AJ looked up at the detective across the conference table, remembering what he’d looked like in the sights of a 9mm. When John and Steve came through the door, his hand had been guided; it had been an involuntary action and he’d almost pulled the trigger.

Dean Harris came in and sat down next to John Lubbock, who was next to Terrance. Steve sat next to Clover, with AJ next to her, the two of them holding hands under the table.

“We got a leak somewhere,” John said. “It’s the only way they coulda found us.”

“There’s still another side to all this, John,” Dean said. “We don’t have any idea what they’re capable of.”

“What, you mean like telepathy?” John asked. “Let me put an APB out on Miss Cleo.”

“Dean’s right, though,” Terrance said. “If we accept that this is happening, we have to leave room for whatever else might come up.”

Dean turned to AJ. “Now what about this book?”

AJ shrugged. “All I know is that we need it as soon as we can get it.”

“First thing tomorrow you’ll drive to your parents’ house, followed by a couple cops,” Dean said.

“Okay, just make sure that once I get there, they stay out of sight. I’m not up to explaining this to my mom.”

They went over a few more specifics before ending the meeting. By the time they all left to go to another safe house, it was around eight o’clock in the evening. John Lubbock and Steve were sent home. John protested again, but was once more overruled. AJ and Clover were accompanied by Terrance and four other officers. The five of them followed their two charges into the hotel and began trying to guard them from whatever might happen.

* * * * *

The voice that answered the phone sounded fuzzy around the edges.

“H’lo?”

“Mom?” Clover asked, wondering how many pills she’d popped since the evening news.

“Clover? Izzat--”

In the background Clover could hear her father asking who was on the phone.

Her mother cleared her throat. “It’s your
daughter
,” she said, perhaps thinking Clover wouldn’t be able to hear, perhaps too stoned to care. Her father interrupted again.

“Where in the Hell has the child been?”

The child isn’t deaf, you know.
Clover rubbed her eyes, beginning to wish she’d waited until the morning to call.

“Dear?” Her mother came back on the line, sounding a bit more alert than before. “Are you all right?”

“Mom, I’m fine. It’s just—”

“We tried to call you after all this terrible mess and we couldn’t get a hold of you, and Angie didn’t know where you were she talked about some
boy
--”

The familiar hysterics trembled in her mother’s voice.

“Mom--”

“And then! And then we see you on the
news
at that
hotel
where all the people were killed but they won’t say who did it, and then you were with that--that
boy
! Holding his hand! How long have you even known--”

“Mother!” Clover heard her mother gasp and then say something, and the next thing she knew, she was talking to her father. Or, rather, he was yelling at her. Her mother’s drugged sobs filled the background.

Clover rubbed her eyes again. Welcome to Introductions in Dysfunction! An American Classic!

“Just what have you gotten yourself into, girl?”

“Dad--”

“Don’t you ‘Daddy’ me! First, you’re out in the middle of the night with some boy at a gas station, and then you drop out of touch? Now your mother sees you on the television! What am I to think, girl? Are you on the dope or--”

“No!”
On the dope?
He had to be kidding, right?

“Is it the boy from the gas station? He got you into something you shouldn’t--”

“You don’t even know him, okay! This is
not
his fault!”

Well,
technically
she supposed it was, being as he was the one that carried a trail of zombies with him wherever he went, but
she
didn’t blame it on him. It wasn’t like either of them had known what was coming.

“And now sass talk! I’m getting worried about you, girl. Worried that--”

“You’re only worried because you can’t control me anymore!” Clover hissed into the phone.

“I’m worried because you’re a stupid, confused little girl who has forgotten exactly who it is she’s speaking to!”

Her mother wailed in the background.

Clover resisted the urge to tell him to go fuck himself or to slam the phone down. Instead, she set it gently in its cradle, breaking the connection.

“Clover,” a voice said from behind her, the only voice she wanted to hear. She turned around and faced him; she could see the concern in his warm, grey eyes.

“You all right?” AJ asked.

Hot tears suddenly filled her eyes and he came to her, held her. She hugged him tightly and they sat down on the bed. She stared at the phone through her tears, remembering not just the most recent conversation, but all the ones that had preceded it.

“You gonna be okay?” AJ asked, whispering the question into her ear.

“Yeah, it’s just--” she said, breaking off, not knowing what else to say. She looked at her watch. It was now 10:30 P.M. on Sunday night. In the morning, they would head upstate to AJ’s parent’s house to get the book.

“Will you sit here with me for a while?” Clover asked, looking into his eyes.

“As long as you want me here,” he said, and they re-situated themselves, leaning against the headboard with the pillows propped behind their backs, her hand in his. The two of them sat like that for quite some time, not really talking, just being with each other. Eventually AJ slipped through the fingers of consciousness, but still, sleep eluded her.

As she lay there in the darkness, she found herself wondering about a lot of things, questioning her beliefs.

She believed in a god, though certainly not the cruel hypocrite she had been raised on. She knew that the living dead didn’t mean that there was no god...but what
did
it mean? Who was in control and just stood aside, watching terrible things like this happen? Perhaps even causing them to happen? Maybe something, but...maybe nothing.

It was unsettling to have to lie there in the dark, on the brink of a war she didn’t understand, questioning things she had seen as unchangeable, cast in stone. All she could do was get through tonight, she supposed, and hold on until the blessed sun could take the world back from this long, wretched night.

She rolled over in her bed and began to wait.

* * * * *

AJ lay there, not sure what time it was and not really caring. He was at the dazed stage between sleeping and waking, his eyes half open, and he was very aware that an arm that certainly wasn’t his was draped across his chest. A slow smile crept across his face and the warm body next to him nuzzled in a little closer. He turned his head slightly and looked at her. Only a puff of blond hair was visible under the mass of blankets they were buried in. She rolled over and opened her eyes. They were not the beautiful, green eyes he was used to but instead a dead sort of black. The heat seeped out of the bed and he could no longer feel the gentle thrumming of a pulse in her arm across his chest. Her skin wasn’t soft and fair, but dead and peeling. It wasn’t Clover. It was her corpse. AJ stared, a scream building in his chest.

Then the corpse lunged forward, sinking her teeth into his throat.

AJ sat upright in bed. He looked around the room, frantically. Empty, as was the bed. He was alone.

“Ah, fuck,” he said in a voice still drunk with sleep. He plopped back down onto the pillow, staring at the ceiling.

His half-opened eyes registered the door opening and Clover walked in.

God, she’s beautiful,
he thought and on the heels of that:
I love her.
His eyes drifted closed and the next thing he knew, her soft, warm lips were pressed to his. He came fully awake and kissed her back. Finally she drew back and looked at him, smiling.

“It’s time.”

And there they were, an hour later, three cars in succession. There was a police cruiser out in front of Clover’s blue Mazda and John’s undercover car behind them. Logan had shown up as they were preparing to leave, saying he had a lot to talk to AJ about. The strange, white-haired man seemed to have a knack of coming and going when time was short and time to question was even shorter. AJ had looked at John, who was visibly struggling with himself, staring Logan down with those X-Ray Cop Eyes, but ultimately, said nothing. AJ again wondered what, exactly, had been in that letter, and who it had been from. Logan sat in the back of Clover’s car, AJ in front, her behind the wheel, and they set out on the drive.

“The Bible is only right about a couple things,” Logan began. “In the beginning, there was light.

“All forces of life and death are controlled by separate entities, each the opposite of the other but part of the same whole. The Being that controls the light--birth, life, and creation--is called Jh’aask. The other Being controls death, the destruction of the soul, and the Beyond. It is called Enopac.”

“Should I be hearing all this?” Clover asked.

“Yes. You’re a part of this, too,” Logan said, thinking,
you have been since the beginning.

“What about God?” Clover asked. She stared at his calm face in the rearview mirror.

“There isn’t ‘God’ in the sense you’re talking about. The Biblical God, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, they’re just variations. Every religion has one. Jehovah, Allah, Ra, Ganesh, whatever. You see, these Beings are the essence of
every
god, of
every
religion. Enopac generally represents the devil, although isn’t really evil.”

“Occupational hazard of controlling the Beyond,” AJ said. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Logan, he had no reason not to. Sure, it was a far different idea than he was used to, having been raised vaguely Baptist, but it all rang very true to him, as if it was something he’d always known but had forgotten. He just wasn’t at the stage where could he comfortably admit this to himself and he’d always used sarcasm as a defense mechanism.

“Something like that,” Logan answered with a trace of smile.

“But there
is
something after we, well, after we die?” AJ asked.

“Of course. The majority of a soul’s existence is in the Beyond. Life on any level is a way-station of sorts. The concepts of Heaven and Hell are also very correct. That’s the one other factor basic religion got right. Limbo, too, or Purgatory, whatever you want to call it. Down there, they call it the Grindhouse. How you behave during life dictates what you receive after it. Now, as I was saying, these two Beings have been at peace with each other and with themselves since time out of mind, before there even
was
time. The two of them exist in a perfect balance. Then the 1300s rolled around and another Being became a problem.”

“Other what?” Somewhere deep inside, AJ knew the answer to this question too.

“Another Being, another Entity. This one is called Daed Sixxez. He is the Lord of the Nexus, of the process of decay and agents of chaos. He gained power over bodies without souls...corpses, essentially. The longer the body is without a soul, the weaker it becomes. It breaks down. But the shorter the time, the stronger the physical being is, and easier for him to control.”

“So when does a soul leave a body?” Clover asked.

“Directly after the death of the body.” There was a short but somehow eerie silence that settled within the car, like a shroud upon dead skin.