Over Your Dead Body (3 page)

I looked at the door to our room; I probably had a few minutes before Brooke woke up. I made sure it was locked, then walked toward the front desk to ask for information on the commune—motel clerks didn’t freak out about drifters, or anything else it seemed. We were some of the most normal people they saw.

The man at the garbage can went back in through the rear door of whatever business he was opening for the day. A pawn shop, maybe. It was too early to be a bar. The town was quiet, only just waking up, and I wondered what it would be like to live here, to put down roots and stay here forever. Not much different than in Clayton, I supposed. What brought people here, instead of there—or there instead of here? Did they choose to live here, or were they just born here and never moved away?

The front office had a bell on the door that dinged as I walked in.

“Good morning, sir.” He called me sir even though I was only eighteen and looked even younger. I’d tried growing a beard, hoping it would make me look like an adult, but it just came in wispy and thin—I was so obviously trying to look like an adult that I gave up and shaved it off. He glanced down at Boy Dog, who followed me in. “That room working out for you?”

“It’s been great,” I said. “Thanks for letting us keep the dog; a lot of places get picky about pets.”

“No problem. What can I do for you?”

I needed information, and I was caught by the sudden urge to torture it out of him—to tie him down and cut him in strategic places, just a bit at first, then more and more until he told me everything I wanted—

No. I wasn’t allowed to hurt people. I took a breath and spooled out the story I’d concocted instead. “Well, I’m looking for my sister—”

“That’s the girl you were with last night?”

Did he suspect we were runaways? More to the point, had he turned us in? I fed him some more of my made-up backstory, hoping some extra information would cool his suspicions. “No, that’s my wife—we’re taking a semester off of college to try to find my sister, who last I heard was hanging around this part of the state. Kind of drifting, you know?” I grimaced, as if the thought was painful. “My sister’s a little younger, still in high school; she ran away from home last year.”

“That’s too bad,” said the clerk. He leaned on the counter; a good sign that I’d caught his attention with the story. He might take it seriously enough to actually help me. “You think she’s in Baker, specifically? You have family around here?”

“We don’t,” I said, “but I’d heard…” I trailed off, like I was too embarrassed to say it, and when he nodded I knew that I had him. Suddenly I wasn’t a suspicious outsider asking about the local cult, I was a concerned family man, one of the normals, someone he could gossip with about those weirdos on the farm. I looked out the window, checking for Brooke, but our door was still closed.

“The cult,” said the clerk, nodding again. “Spirit of Light? You think she’s fallen in with them?”

“I hope not,” I said, and paused just a moment before saying, “So it’s real, then? They’re actually here?”

“Sad to say,” said the clerk. “A friend of mine joined up with them a few years back; local boy. We figured he was smarter than that but I guess nobody ever got rich overestimating the intelligence of rednecks. Them Light-Brights come into town for groceries and medicine and stuff like that, whatever they can’t make on the farm I guess, toilet paper and whatnot, and so Nick he starts chatting with this one girl every time he sees her, bagging her things in the checkout aisle and whatever. We all told him them folks was nothing but trouble, and he insisted, right hand to God, he was just trying to talk her out of the cult, not himself into it. Inviting her to the Dairy Keen and asking her to movies and such. She keeps saying maybe and then saying no, and then finally one day the big man comes in: the High Chief Light-Bright or whatever they call him. The Messiah. You don’t see him often, but he comes in now and then looking for this or that, and every time someone follows him back out. This time it was Nick. Didn’t even finish his shift. Now he’s the one comes into town buying toilet paper, and we talk to him sometimes and he says hi but he’s gone—nothing in his head but songs and stories and ain’t-it-great-to-be-alives. He smiles and nods and I’m not even sure he recognizes us anymore. Which I guess is just a long, depressing way of saying that if your sister’s in there, you’ve got a long, empty road ahead getting her back out, and that road don’t even lead out, so you’d best not take it in the first place.”

“Has anyone ever left the cult?” I asked. “Voluntarily, I mean?”

“Not that I recall.”

I asked the next question carefully, trying to sound awed by the mystery instead of desperate for concrete details. “Does anybody ever disappear?” If the cult leader was really a Withered, like Brooke’s memories said he was, he had to be killing them somehow. Learning how could be the first step to finding Yashodh’s weak points.

The clerk squinted. “From Baker, you mean? Sometimes, but they always show up as Light-Brights sooner or later.”

“But from the commune, I mean,” I said quickly. “The Light-Brights themselves, they’re not being … killed or anything?” I glanced outside again. Brooke was still in the room.

The clerk shook his head. “Trust me, kid, there’s not a person in this town doesn’t know somebody out on that farm. If they was disappearing we’d be out there with torches and pitchforks, but this ain’t the kind of cult that people disappear from. Every single one of them’s still there, growing their own food and sewing their own clothes and praising whatever non-Christian whosit they’ve decided to worship. They don’t die, they don’t leave, they don’t … do anything.”

I realized I was frowning, confused by the lack of deaths, so I changed my expression to what I thought was hope. “Thank you,” I said. “At least that means she’s still alive.”

“If she’s there at all,” said the clerk.

“How would we get out there?” I asked.

“You don’t.”

“But obviously people do,” I said. “Which road is it? Which farm?”

“You’re not listening to me,” said the clerk. “People who go there don’t come back. The city, sometimes, or the police, but folks like you? Just Light-Brights waiting to happen.”

This was interesting. “They’re that persuasive?”

“They persuaded Nick, and he grew up more afraid of them than the boogeyman under his bed.”

“Thanks,” I said again. “We’ll be careful.” I took a step toward the door, but I still didn’t know where to find them. I looked outside, but still no Brooke. I turned back to the clerk. “How about a roadside stand? A lot of these places sell cheese or vegetables or whatever—does Spirit of Light? Maybe I could ask there, see if anyone knows my sister?”

“Head out on State Road 27,” said the clerk. “Plenty of folks buy produce from them—it’s safe enough. You don’t have a car, though, right?”

“Just the bus.”

“Bus don’t run that way, but you can try hitching.”

I tried to look serious, eager to convince him we were as normal as could be. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“You’re heading out to the most dangerous part of Baker there is. Someone kidnaps you on the way there, it’ll be a kindness.”

I thanked him and left, trudging toward our room. It was good to have information, but most of it made me uneasy. Where were the deaths? Was Yashodh using some kind of mind control? Most of the Withered were too dangerous to confront head on; we had to lurk in the fringes, learning everything we could until we found a weakness we could exploit. This Withered sounded like he might be too dangerous to even meet.

I paused in front of our door, thinking. What if we just left? He wasn’t killing anybody, apparently. We didn’t have to kill him. Maybe we shouldn’t. But I couldn’t shake the sound of the clerk’s voice as he warned us away, too scared to—

The door opened, and Brooke started in surprise to find me standing silently in front of it. “
Sranje!
Šta radiš
ovdje
?”

“English,” I said softly.

She stared at me, confused, and then tilted her head to the side as her surprise turned to curiosity. “What language was I speaking?”

I stepped past her into the room and closed the door carefully behind me. “No idea. Something you’ve used before, I think, but I didn’t recognize the words.”

She walked back and sat on the bed. “I asked what you were doing there. Guarding me?”

I starting gathering our few belongings, repacking them in our backpacks. “No, just lost in thought and standing in a weird place. Tell me about Yashodh again.” The Withered assumed human identities, but they had their own names. Nobody, the demon who’d taken Brooke, had been called Hulla. The Lord High Light-Bright, as the clerk called him, was named Yashodh.

Brooke shook her head. “You know I don’t like talking about Yashodh.”

“Well, we’re going to meet him at some point, so we need to get over that.” I zipped one pack closed and collected some discarded socks for the other one. Today was my last clean pair; we’d need to do laundry soon. “You knew this day was coming. We’ve done all the other Withered we can find, so it’s time to do Yashodh.”

“We haven’t done Attina.”

“This is on our way to Attina,” I said. “We do it now, or we do it six months from now.”

“I know,” said Brooke, falling back on the bed, “I just … I don’t know. Maybe I can remember some others.” Her memory was riddled with holes, but it was also the only tool we had to find and hunt the Withered. She clenched her teeth. “You don’t know him like I do.”

“So tell me about him.”

“I already told you everything I know.”

“You can’t have it both ways,” I said. “Do you know him or not?”

“He hates himself,” said Brooke, “even more than I do.” I glanced at her; I’d known her long enough to see the real meaning behind that statement.

I corrected her softly. “You mean ‘more than Nobody hates herself,’” I said.

“I am Nobody,” said Brooke. Or, I suppose, said Nobody.

I shrugged and zipped up the second backpack; she didn’t show any warning signs of another depressive attack, so it wasn’t worth arguing.

“Each of the Withered gave something up,” said Nobody, and her eyes got that faraway look they sometimes had when she talked about the distant past. Nearly ten thousand years ago, if the FBI’s researcher had guessed right. “I gave up my body,” she continued, “because it was horrible and I hated it. Yashodh gave up himself.”

“But what does that mean?” I asked. “We’ve been tossing that around for a year now, trying to figure out what he can do. Nobody gave up her body and gained the ability to take the bodies of others. Can Yashodh take the ‘selves’ of others? What does that even mean? It might explain the cult, if he’s somehow subsuming their individuality into some kind of collective, but why? What does he possibly gain from doing that?”

“He’s weak,” said Nobody, her voice dripping with disdain. “He’s lucky to get anything, let alone something he wants.”

“He’s a ten-thousand-year-old monster,” I said, “one who can probably mind control people. The more we look into him, the more I think he can get
anything
he wants.”

“Then why is he here in two-bit Crapville?” asked Nobody. “Everyone loves him, and he can have everything, and he doesn’t even have to kill people, and all he does is sit here picking his nose—”

“Wait,” I said, standing up in a rush. “That’s new—you’ve talked about Yashodh for a year and this is the first time you’ve said he doesn’t have to kill people.”

“That’s new?” Her eyes went wide and she looked down at herself as if expecting to see something different. Almost immediately she shook her head and closed her eyes, squinting them shut as she thought. “Something new … think…” She clenched her teeth with the effort. “He doesn’t kill people … he doesn’t have to kill people.…”

“Do they worship him?” I asked. If he’d set himself up as a messiah figure in a backcountry cult, maybe it was the worship itself that sustained him. “You said everyone loves him, right? Is that a means to an end, or is that the end itself?”

“That would make sense,” said Nobody, rubbing her fingers together as she spoke, staring at the wall.

“But is it true?”

“I don’t know,” she growled, “I’m trying to think.” She focused on the wall like it was a portal to the past. “Come on, brain, spit it out. He doesn’t need to kill people. Maybe he doesn’t want to kill people. Maybe he can’t kill people.”

“He gave up himself,” I said, trying to keep her thoughts focused; brainstorming new ideas wouldn’t help us, we needed to dig deeper into the handful of truths we already had.

“He gave himself up,” said Brooke. “Everybody loves him … because he gave himself up. He saved them.”

This sounded wrong. “From what?”

“From sin,” said Brooke, looking up at me. “He died for our sins.”

I shook my head. “How many of your personalities are Christian?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Lots. I’m just talking about Jesus now, aren’t I?”

“Yashodh is not the messiah,” I said, “but he needs to convince people that he is. For … something.”

“So he can be happy,” said Brooke.

“That’s it?”

She looked at me with a frown. “What do you mean, that’s it? That’s everything.”

“The Withered are not trying to be happy,” I said, “they’re trying to gain … power, money, something. They’re trying to survive.”

“That’s what happiness is, John. It’s how we survive. It’s why.”

I sighed and rubbed my face with my hands. “Whatever. We can think on the way.” I grabbed my backpack, and looked down at Boy Dog. “Sorry, dog. You’ve got a long walk ahead.”

3

“What’s your favorite song?” asked Brooke. We’d found State Road 27 but hadn’t managed to catch a ride yet so we were just walking along—slowly, so Boy Dog could keep up.

I answered without thinking. “‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ by Foreigner.”

Brooke laughed. “No it’s not.”

“Sure it is,” I said. “Why not?”

“The question isn’t why not,” she said. “It’s why. What on earth about that song makes you like it?”

“You say that like it’s impossible to like,” I said. “That’s one of the most popular songs of all time.”