Over Your Dead Body (15 page)

“Black SUV,” said Marci. I followed her sight line to the far side of the intersection and saw the SUV waiting at the light, two cars back in the nearest lane.

“Don’t look directly at it,” I said, turning my head but keeping it in my peripheral vision. “How far are we from that drug store?”

“Couple of miles, maybe,” said Marci. “Unless I’m totally turned around, that car’s headed toward the drug store, not coming away from it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think you’re right.”

“So what do we do?”

I thought for a long moment, my mind racing the stoplight as I tried to come up with a plan. “We try the speed-bump test,” I said at last.

“What’s that?”

“The speed-bump test,” I said, walking toward the corner, “is how we avoid a long, drawn-out mind game.” I walked slowly, watching the lights turn yellow, being careful not to run or attract too much attention. The plan wouldn’t work if everyone was watching me. “Identifying a tail isn’t what we typically use it for, but it’ll do the job.” I reached the sidewalk right as the cars started moving.

“How does it work?”

“It’s simple,” I said, watching the first car move toward me. “We’re going to hit him with a truck.”

“What?”

“Pull me back.” The first car passed me, and I stepped out suddenly in front of the black SUV, waving my arms wildly. Marci grabbed my backpack and yanked me backward, shouting my name in alarm, and the SUV slammed on its brakes, swerving wildly to the side, getting rear-ended by the truck behind it and clipped by another truck passing in the next lane. The SUV bounced toward us and we jumped back again; the truck driver slammed on his own brakes, and the traffic behind them piled up with a chorus of blaring horns. I looked at the license plate.

187 RCR, Mills County, Iowa.

“Run.”

I picked up Boy Dog and we ran back through the people on the sidewalk, shocked commuters interrupted on their way to work, hearing the sounds of the accident and trying to catch a glimpse. How many of them had seen that I was the cause of it? Half a dozen, at least. I heard a few shouts behind us, calling out for us to stop, but no one tried to restrain us, and we ran for two blocks before Marci started slowing, clutching her abdomen and limping to a stop.

“You hurt?”

“Cramps,” she said, and she grunted through clenched teeth. I looked behind me, but no one seemed to be chasing us. She nodded at a coffee shop nearby. “Can we just lay low for a bit?”

“I want to get out of the area.”

“Then that’s what they’ll assume we’ll do,” she said, trying to straighten up. She winced and stayed slightly bent.

“Actually running is safer than trying to second-guess the people we’re running from,” I said. “Let’s just make it to the next bus stop.”

“Easy for you to say.” She took another pained breath, then loped forward as fast as she could. I set down Boy Dog and let him waddle along behind us, and took Marci’s arm to try to help her.

“Don’t touch me,” she hissed, and when I backed away she shook her head, still plowing forward. “Sorry, I’m not mad, I’m just…”

“There’s a stop right up there,” I said, pointing. “It leads away from the accident, and we’ll be able to relax.”

“Good.”

We made it to the stop as quickly as we could, but still had to wait three minutes for a bus. Nobody followed us. We flashed our transfer tickets and dropped onto a rear bench, exhausted. Boy Dog was panting like I’d never seen him before, and I wished I had some water to give him. “Don’t worry,” I told him, between pants of my own, “we’ll get you a drink as soon as we can.”

“Angels in heaven,” gasped Marci, practically doubled over. “I haven’t hurt like this since the baby was born.”

My eyes went wide. “You had a baby?” I hadn’t known Marci well until we were sixteen—had she gotten pregnant in middle school? Is that why she was so … but no. Of course it wasn’t Marci anymore.

“What do you mean, ‘you had a baby?’” she grunted. “He’s right here—” She stopped abruptly. “Where’s the baby? Where am I?” She looked at me with haunted eyes. “You’re not Anton.”

“My name is John,” I said softly. Marci was gone again, and this was a new personality, with no idea where she was or what was going on. Some of them shared memories, and some of them didn’t. I took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I have very bad news for you.”

“I was attacked,” she whispered. She shuddered at the memory. “Some kind of … black thing. Like swamp water, but thicker, and it … moved on its own.” She started to cry. “What’s happening to me?”

“The black thing is gone,” I said. I wanted to help her but I didn’t know what to do besides just telling her the truth. I put my arm around Brooke’s shoulders, hoping to keep the new personality calm and far away from a suicide episode. “Now someone else is chasing us, and I’m trying to keep you safe. We are safe, for now.” I hoped it was true.

“Where’s my baby?”

“Tell me your name,” I whispered.

She hesitated a moment. “Regina,” she said at last. “Why … why do I feel like I know you? Why do I trust you so much?”

“Because I am your best and only friend in the entire world, Regina.” I closed my eyes, trying to convince myself that everything would be okay. “Do you remember what year it is?”

“The year of our Lord 1528.”

I took another deep breath. “Regina, your baby lived a long and happy life and died more than four hundred years ago.”

She broke down in tears again, and cried into my shoulder while the bus trundled across the city.

12

The great thing about fire is that it doesn’t come from anywhere else—you light a piece of wood on fire, and the fire comes from the wood. Light a piece of paper, and fire comes from the paper. It’s like the inner soul of an object is trapped in a physical form, and when you set it free as a flame it roars to life, reaching for the sky as its old husk shrivels and disappears behind it.

A piece of paper without a soul looks like a twisted, poison leaf, curled and warped and blackened, so thin it might fall to pieces when you touch it.

I flicked my lighter and lit another piece, watching the flame leap out while the paper retreated, recoiling and empty.

“What are you doing?” asked Regina.

I dropped the paper as the fire crept too close to my fingers, watching the bright orange flames drift slowly to the ground, weighed down by the ashy paper, still heavier than air. The orange tendrils reached up, flickering into the orange sky, tiny sparks drifting in their wake.

“I’m waiting,” I said, and pulled another page from the newspaper. The lighter flicked, the flame jumped up, and another soul broke free.

“Waiting for what?” she asked.

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.

The sun was slowly setting, making bright bands of color across the horizon—red and orange and pink and yellow, shining in the sky and painted on the clouds. Overhead the sky was dark—not the deep blue we saw in the country, because we were still close enough to the city that the lights drowned it out. Just a dark, matte black. Maybe later we’d see the blue, when night fell for real. We sat now in a kind of half-light, where everything was visible and dark at the same time.

“That building is ugly,” said Regina, “But the sky is beautiful.”

We were hiding out in the lee of a small ridgeline outside of the city, across a field from what I assumed was an oil refinery. Did they have oil refineries in Dallas? Maybe it was something else, I don’t know. Squat metal buildings and round welded tanks and giant chimneys reaching up into the darkness, every surface covered with pipes and gantries and bright yellow warning signs. Most of the chimneys were belching out giant clouds of steam, but one of the smaller ones shot a pillar of fire into the sky, at least twelve feet tall, brilliant even in the fading daylight.

We’d walked at least a half a mile from the nearest road, and the small copse of trees nearby showed none of the litter that came with a common camping spot for the homeless. No one ever came here, and no one was likely to find us or even see us, even with my little fires.

I lit another one and watched it burn.

“You should have seen my baby,” said Regina. “We named him Anton, like his father, and he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

“I’m sure he was.” I pulled out another piece of paper and, on a whim, I rolled it this time into a loose cone, to see if the flames would travel through the middle before the whole thing lit on fire.

“His hair was dark,” said Regina. “Most babies have so little hair, bald, like little old men, but my Anton was hairy as an ox, and strong as one, too. I’m sure he grew up to be a good man, maybe a soldier.”

Boy Dog whined, and I looked up. We were still alone, as far as I could see. I looked at Regina and saw her cradling something imaginary in her arms, a tiny baby made of memory and air. She was feeling better now, as amazed by the fast-acting ibuprofen as she had been by the horseless bus, the glass-and-steel skyscrapers, and the constant stream of airplanes that flew over us, to and from the airport. She had no idea what an oil refinery was, and I’d eventually given up trying to explain it; she just called it “that ugly thing,” and I couldn’t argue with the description. Now that we weren’t running, her cramps had subsided, and she’d been able to figure out well enough how the pads worked when it was time to change them. She’d been convinced that they would never hold enough, but it looked like absorbency technology had improved in five hundred years.

Regina took the time gap pretty well, all things considered. I figured some of Brooke’s memories were coming through, or Marci’s. Enough to make Regina feel that her current situation, if not “right,” was at least normal.

That put us on a pretty ridiculous scale of normality, didn’t it? Maybe “understandable” was a better word, but no. “Tolerable?”

“Endurable.” We’d push through it and survive and hope it got better.

I lit my little cone of paper and watched the flames swell and surge and flicker and die.

“What is she like?” asked Regina. I looked over at her again and saw that her face was half obscured by darkness now; night was falling in earnest, and soon we’d be lost in the black. I looked up at the pillar of fire, fierce and deadly even in the distance.

“Who?” I asked.

“Brooke Watson,” she said. “The girl whose body I’m … sharing, I guess. Borrowing.”

“She’s … kind,” I said. How could I encapsulate an entire person? “She’s a lot of things, but that’s the one I feel like I ought to say first. Kind. She’s my friend now, because she has to be—we’re the only people in each other’s lives—but she was my friend before, too. She saw something…” I stopped. “I don’t know.”

“Was it the monster?” asked Regina. She scooted an inch or two closer, across the weeds. “Did she save you from it?”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said.

Regina sighed. “I would have liked to have been a hero, even if it was only in another hero’s body.”

“She is a hero,” I said, and laid down on the ground, my head on my backpack. The stiff, dry grass scratched my neck. The sky was half clouded and starless, like a lid over the world. “I didn’t mean to say that she saw a monster, but I guess she did. She saw me, first as a good person, and then as a bad person, and then … as whatever I really am, I guess.”

“A good person again,” said Regina.

“No.” I shook my head, just millimeters to either side.

“You’re helping her,” said Regina. “Of course you’re good. You’re helping me, and you’re helping all the other girls.” I’d explained the situation as well as I could, and she’d understood it as easily and innately as all the other personalities that surfaced in Brooke’s mind: they accepted the core reality of their fractured existence. On some level it felt right to them, even in a case like this, where none of the memories had transferred. The reality had. I suppose that on some subconscious level they’d had centuries to come to terms with it.

I hadn’t.

“I’m not helping Brooke because I’m good,” I said, “I’m helping her because it’s all my fault. I can’t make it go away, so I do what I can to make it … endurable.” It was the only word that worked.

Regina raised her eyebrow. “Is that how she sees it?”

“She’s broken,” I said. “She can’t see it for what it is.”

“You don’t give her enough credit.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, staring up at the sky. I wanted one star—just one star—to peek out. None did.

Regina shifted, turning to face me, forcing Boy Dog to get up and reestablish himself in a new spot, his body pressed against her legs. “How can you spend so much time with the woman you love and know so little about her?”

“I don’t love her.”

“She loves you.”

“I thought you couldn’t talk to each other.”

“I love you,” she said. “And I’ve never met you until this morning. Who else could that emotion be coming from?”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Aren’t you married?” she asked.

“Of course we’re not married.”

“It’s hardly proper of you to spend all this time alone together, then.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, and squeezed my eyelids tighter together.

“You’re sharing your life with her,” said Regina. “How can you do it so … coldly?”

“Because I’m cold,” I said, opening my eyes again but carefully, purposefully, not looking at her. “I don’t connect with people, and the people I connect with are dead.”

“That’s a contradiction,” said Regina.

“How do you even know that word?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“How do you even know English?”

“We’re speaking French,” said Regina. “Now: you said you don’t connect with people, and then say that you did. Just because the people you connected with before are dead now doesn’t mean you can’t do it again.”

“You don’t know me—”

“Am I wrong?”

I stopped, not daring to answer. She was right, about part of it at least—all the people I’d connected with were dead.

“Am I?” she asked again.

“It’s more than that,” I said. “It’s like…” I stopped, trying to put it into words. “Okay, imagine that you wanted to bake a loaf of bread. You’ve baked bread, right?”