Passing Strange (21 page)

He felt his gorge rising, and swallowed it back. That morning, when Pete had gone back to his mother’s car, he couldn’t find his mask.

“Steady, son,” Duke said, his voice almost soothing. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

Pete looked at him, then at the thing against the glass. Every emotion he’d ever had was swirling around his head. How could he possibly master them all?

Duke gripped Pete’s shoulder.

“The Devil is tricky, Pete. He ties some of his biggest evils inside the prettiest packages. But this is what those things are beneath the skin. Monsters cloaked in dead flesh.”

Duke put his arm around his shoulder, and Pete thought he could see something, a flash, a flicker of something deep within the thing’s shining eye. Something like consciousness, but then it was gone. A trick of the light, maybe.

“The Devil hides among us,” Duke said. “But this is his real face, Pete. We wanted to make sure you could see it clearly.”

I can see, Pete thought, staring into the creature’s eyes like he would his own reflection. “I can see.”

I
HAD THE MASK, AND MAYBE
I should have gone straight to the authorities, to the Undead Crimes Unit, and taken my chances. But I also had a promise from Pete to leave Phoebe alone, and what I didn’t have was the exact location of where his lawyer was hiding out. If I could get that, I thought, then I’d have everything I needed to take One Life down and get my friends out of the lake.

I’d also faced the blue fog and beaten it back. A couple moments late, maybe, but that was behind me now. I’d escaped the fog, my body had healed itself from wounds made from bullet and blade; I was feeling invulnerable.

But I wasn’t.

I’d been squeezing my hands together so tightly the other night that my fingernails had made holes in my palms, a row of four crescents on each hand. I covered them with Band-Aids. My cover story was that I’d burnt them both gripping a hot fireplace poker, but I never got to use the excuse.

I was in the back room opening boxes with Craig when Tamara leaned her head in through the door.

“What happened to you?” she said, instantly picking up on the bandages. “Stigmata?”

Before I could even open my mouth she told me that someone was there to see me.

“Oh,” I said, looking over at Craig as he rolled his eyes skyward. I stuck out my tongue at him and stepped over the open boxes to join Tamara at the door.

“Give me a minute,” I said. “I’ll be right out.” I had the box cutter in my hand. I realized it might have usefulness beyond cutting boxes. I slipped it into the pocket of my jeans.

Pete was standing at the front of the store. He saw the look on my face, and grinned from ear to ear. Sometimes I’m less deadpan than other times. His scar was a livid red line on his face.

“Hey, Christie,” he said, and Tamara looked sharply at me. She’d seen me climb into Pete’s car once a few weeks ago, and to keep up the charade (or maybe to help me get into character) I’d spent more than one shift babbling on about Pete and how into him I was. She hadn’t seen him up close, but it was possible that now she could add two and two and realize that
my
Pete was Pete Martinsburg, slayer of zombies. His calling me Christie probably sparked her curiosity as well. “Miss me?”

He walked over and gave me a rough, loud kiss, aiming for my mouth but getting my cheek as I turned. Tamara, a frightened look on her face, took a step backward.

“Well, did you?” he said, his face, his scar, inches from mine. He put his hand on my back as though to draw me closer, and Tamara gasped. He withdrew his hand.

“Terribly,” I said, mustering up “flirty” from my bag o’ many voices. “But I’m working.” Sing-songy, trying not to offend.

“Oh, I know,” he said, his hand going to my shoulder. “I just wanted to stop by and say hi. I went shopping.”

“Oh?” I said. I glanced at Tamara, who wore a look of abject horror on her face, which I couldn’t quite figure out. She always came across to me as feisty, tough. Pete was being a little scary, but I was surprised she was even picking up on that.

“Yeah. Bought a shirt.”

He opened his bag and withdrew a collared dress shirt, which was creased where it had been pinned to the cardboard prior to Pete’s trying it on.

“Nice,” I said. Something was going on here, but I wasn’t sure what.

“Hey, thanks,” he said, with exaggerated enthusiasm. He looped his arms around me for a hug, and he squeezed me for a quick second, his hands patting me on the back, at my waist, and even my backside. Tamara gasped aloud as Pete stepped back.

Craig came out of his office to run a register report or something, took one look at us, and said, “What the hell?”

I’d thought Pete was acting strangely, of course. The kiss, the smile, the frequent touches. Even the shirt seemed a totally random thing.

But then he reached over and placed his hand on my shoulder, right near my neck, and I saw what he’d been doing, because he did it again. He leaned close to me.

“I know what you are,” he said, his voice a harsh, angry whisper, “I’ve known the whole time.”

He withdrew his hand, and I saw it. Those frequent touches? The hugs and pats? Each time he touched me he’d pushed one of the pins from his shirt into my body. There were a row of them down my back, pushed in deep so that their heads were nearly flush with the surface of my skin.

“You didn’t even feel it,” Pete said. Something was happening to his face; some loosened veil tearing away. “You didn’t feel anything!”

He shoved me into the Z display, and I went crashing to the ground. Tiny bottles of Endless broke beneath me on the floor.

“You don’t feel!” he said, punctuating each word with a kick. Most were to my side, one found my face. He might have broken bones, but like he said, I don’t feel.

I tried to rise and he hauled me up, spinning me and throwing me into another display. The world danced, spun, and soared. He threw me again, and I got to my feet as he was stepping over a fallen goth mannequin, something worse than murder in his eyes.

I turned to Tamara, who was looking at me like the monster that I was. My heart broke a little then; I couldn’t help but think that for all of her pro-zombie talk, all the buying of Z and Kiss of Life lip gloss and all of that, that she was just as much a bioist bigot as the rest of them. Maybe—I hope—I misread her. Maybe it was the pins and my humiliation that she was reacting to. I didn’t know, and I didn’t have the time to figure it out. She was still my only hope.

She shrieked as I moved toward her, and I stumbled against the box of product we’d been putting together. I embraced her, and she shrieked as I put my mouth against her ear, while taking the box cutter out of my pocket.

“In my jacket pocket,” I said. “Bring it to the Haunted House.” I told her where to hide it, and I clung to her. She may have hugged me back, or she may have been so rigid with terror that she did nothing at all. I put the box cutter in my mouth, for once glad that my taste buds were only semi-functional.

“Police! Step away from her, you zombie freak!”

I stepped away, then glanced over my shoulder. One of the cops had his Taser out, and I thought briefly of George. The other cop had his gun ready. It was pointing at my head.

“Turn around! Get on the ground. Now!”

I did as they asked. Tamara was shaking, on the verge of hysteria.

“Head down! Do it!” One of the cops yelled.

“What the hell?” Craig repeated.

My hands were cuffed behind my back. I suppose the knee in my spine would have really, really hurt a living person, but I didn’t have to worry about that, did I? They hauled me to my feet—easy to do, I’m just a little slip of a girl, really—and told me to walk.

I looked at the cops. The one doing all the talking I didn’t recognize, but his partner, the one with the Taser, was very familiar to me. He was the one that let me escape that night at St. Jude’s. Our eyes met and I thought that he might have given a slight nod, a signal, and I decided not to resist. Beyond him, Pete Martinsburg was beaming heroically, chest heaving, protector of the living from the evil dead. Maybe there would be reward money.

“Don’t look at anyone,” the talkative cop said, shoving me forward. “Keep your head down.”

They dragged me out, under the curious eyes of all the people with whom I’d talked and worked with the past few months, the people who I’d stop and chat with on my breaks. My only regret was that I never found out where One Life was hiding Guttridge.

No one said anything. Not even good-bye.

I
KISSED HER, PETE THOUGHT
, rolling over in his bed, still not sure if what he’d just experienced was dream or nightmare.
I kissed her.
The clock read one thirteen. He hadn’t been asleep that long.

He sat up. The dead girls were all jumbled up in his head. He’d been holding hands with Julie, but then her hand was frozen, and when he looked, it wasn’t Julie but Karen, and her diamond eyes were filled with hate, but when he looked again it was Julie, only not Julie like he’d known her—freckled, tan, and smiling—but Julie, dead. Her freckles became purplish motes on her bluish skin. She had the dry, brittle-looking hair and the wide staring eyes that tracked a second too late. It had to be Julie, because he’d held hands with no other girl since; sentimentality had died with her, and much like the girl herself, was unlikely to ever be resurrected. Dead Julie smiled at him in that twitchy, paralytic way that the dead smile, and he cried out. The sound he made was like the sound Adam made when called to the witness stand to testify about his own murder.

Pete’s heart was beating. He, at least, was alive. He wasn’t sure if his dream self had cried out in horror or elation. He peered around the room, half expecting the girls to coalesce out of the shadows and step toward his bed. Julie, Karen, Julie, Karen.

He threw the covers back, climbed out of bed, and paced the floor for a few moments before taking a seat on his weight bench. Karen wouldn’t survive being imprisoned. One way or another, he knew that she wouldn’t walk out of that prison under her own power. He wondered if her dead friends would try to get her out, or if her dead friends even knew she was there. They’d all gone into hiding somewhere, all except for Layman and Williams, but Williams wouldn’t be doing anything from D.C. Some speculated that they just gave up, that they had conceded defeat, and crawled back into their welcoming graves and pulled the dirt up over their heads, but Pete didn’t think that was the case.

I should try and find them, he thought.
But then what?

He really didn’t know. Would he turn them in like he’d turned her in? Or would he step aside and let them try to free her?

Or would he help?

He lay flat on the weight bench, sliding between the struts that supported a barbell with a fifty pound plate on each end. He reached up and wrapped one hand around the cool metal.

It’s too late
. The thought came into his mind and wouldn’t leave, as though whispered by a voice not his own, a voice from beyond. He was certain that the voice was speaking the truth.

There was much he regretted about what happened with Karen—everything that happened to her, not just the horrific end. He wrapped his other hand around the steel bar as he thought about the awful things he’d done to her, and the memory of those things made him confused and angry and sad all at once.

But the memory of what he’d done—what they’d done—wasn’t what intensified those feelings the most. It was the look in her eyes just before the police took her away. One of her eyes had drained of all color and sparkled like a diamond, but it wasn’t their otherworldly quality that haunted him so. Rather, it was the look of forgiveness that he saw deep within them.

He lifted the bar from the cradles, brought it down to his chest, and exhaled evenly as he pressed up. There was no strain; a hundred pounds was his curling weight.

I should find them anyway, he thought, returning the bar to the cradles. He closed his eyes, wondering if he could fall asleep beneath such a weight.

I
WAS IN A HOLDING CELL IN
at the Winford police station. I was alone in the cell and I hadn’t seen anyone since I’d been delivered there. I was alone in the cell and I was contemplating grave things.

It may have been midnight; it may have been another day entirely. I don’t know. I don’t even have a heartbeat to help me mark the time.

Sometimes my eyes would go out of focus, and the bars of the cell and the baby-vomit-yellow color of the walls would disappear and give way to blue, a harsh gray blue that blotted out the world.

I took out as many of the pins that Pete had pushed into me as I could. One or two I couldn’t reach. Some were so deep I needed to pry them up with the edge of my thumbnail. A few of them were blue-black at the tips. Karen DeSonne, the human voodoo doll.

I also took out my contact lenses and placed the rubbery blue disks on the bench beside me. One of them had scrunched up under my upper eyelid when I was being beaten by Pete.

I was contemplating grave things because I’d been so, so close. One more “date” with Pete and I think I would have had everything I needed to get him and Duke arrested, get Guttridge found, and all of their evil, zombie-hating deeds brought to light. That would have given Tommy a platform to succeed in Washington.

Even more, solving the crime would have made me a better person. It would have given me the strength to tell my friends, Tak and Phoebe and Mal and Margie and everyone else, who I really was. It would have given me the strength to go back to the town where I grew up and died and find Monica and tell her how sorry I was.

I was also thinking that I wouldn’t leave the prison system alive. Ha ha. But really, I was thinking about final termination—the kind that no one comes back from. The half-moons that my fingernails had made in my palms the day Pete almost caught Phoebe were still there, unhealed. Maybe they’d closed up a little, and maybe they hadn’t; maybe I only had a certain amount of healing allotted me.

Maybe the next time will really be the last time, I thought.

I was thinking about this even before I had my first visitor.

I didn’t recognize him until I saw his eyes, and the moment ours met he sort of recoiled, then composed himself and continued to approach my cell. It was the policeman who’d let me go on the night of St. Jude’s massacre.

“Karen?” he said, looking at me. “They said at the store that your name is Karen.”

I nodded. They hadn’t done anything in the way of processing me as a criminal, and I’d already decided that the lack of paperwork did not bode well for my chances of survival.

“I’m Officer Pelletier, Karen. I wanted to talk to you, but I’m going to have to talk fast because I’m not supposed to be here at all.”

I waited for him to continue. There were reasons I didn’t want to say much.

“First,” he said, “I wanted to apologize for that evening outside the church. For shooting you.”

“I forgive you,” I told him, through the bars and clenched teeth.

“This isn’t right, what we’re doing to you. What I did to you.”

“It didn’t hurt,” I said. “Much.”

“When I saw you…when I saw you in the street, running…you weren’t a person to me. You were a thing.”

I didn’t say anything. Sometimes it’s better just to let people talk.

“I was scared,” he whispered, as though the admission alone was a shameful secret. “We were all scared; when they briefed us, they said you couldn’t be killed and that you each had the strength of a gorilla.”

I raised an eyebrow at that one. He nodded and repeated that that was what “they” said.

“But when you looked up at me…after I shot you.. . I could tell. I could tell by the look on your face that it wasn’t true. What they told us about you wasn’t true.”

“So you let me go.” My voice was harsh, almost like Tak’s.

“I let you go,” he said, and he pressed his forehead against the bars. I could have grabbed him then, grabbed him right by the throat and used my super gorilla strength to crush the life out of him. That’s what would happen in a movie, I thought. Except I don’t really have super gorilla strength, and I had no desire to crush the life out of him, or anybody. Even if it meant I could go free.

“I was this close to killing you,” he said. “They told us a headshot might work, so most of us were shooting for your heads. But when you looked up, I didn’t see a monster. I saw my daughter.”

He stepped back a moment, and I was able to connect the dots. Around the eyes he looked an awful lot like Holly Pelletier, an airhead who used to date Adam. Holly is one of the most virulently anti-zombie people I know, so I thought it was pretty interesting that her father should have an epiphany while pointing his weapon at my already perforated face.

His next words made me wonder if I was projecting my thoughts.

“You’d been shot,” he said, scrutinizing me. “But the wound is gone.”

I didn’t confirm or deny, so eventually he gave up on trying to see the unseen.

“When I looked into your eyes, all I could think is that you could be my little girl there, waiting for her brains to get blown out. Then I thought that it could be her in my shoes, and that if it was, she’d have no hesitation at all in erasing your existence. It made me think about it. It made me think about how wrong we were.”

“Glad…to be…so helpful,” I said, barely moving my lips and deliberately slowing and zombifying my speech.

“Why didn’t you hide?” he said. “Why did you put yourself at risk?”

I shrugged, purposely lifting my shoulders out of sync.

“We can’t…hide…forever.”

“They’re going to destroy you, Karen,” he said. His voice actually broke when he said my name. A big tough policeman, and he was getting choked up about a little voodoo doll zombie. “Your parents have been here a few times already—the last time with a lawyer—but they’re not letting them see you. The company line is that you aren’t a legal entity, so we can do whatever we want.”

“Mom…Did my…mommy…come, too?”

He nodded, sniffing.

“You are going to be transferred to the correctional facility in Nihantic first thing in the morning. You’ll be released into gen pop. They’re going to destroy you.”

“Murder,” I whispered. “You can say…murder.”

“They’re going to murder you. The guards will do it if the prisoners don’t get you first. They were talking about it in the squad room earlier. You’ll never make it.”

I wondered if this was the point in our story where Officer Pelletier passed me the key, or tipped me off to his cunning plan of busting me out after causing a diversionary fire in the men’s bathroom, but no such luck. Instead he was trying as hard as he could to keep the tears that were welling in his eyes from rolling down his cheeks.

“Thank you…for telling…me,” I said. “About my…mom.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“There is,” I told him. I reached through the bars and wiped the corner of his eye with my thumb. He didn’t try to stop me. “Tell them…I…was…a person.”

“I will,” he said, standing a little straighter.

“And please,” I said. “Tell my…family…I love…them.”

He said that he would, and then he was gone.

After he left, I went back to my bench. Already my contact lenses had begun to crinkle and collapse inward as they dried out.

So that was it, I thought. I was going to die. Again.

I don’t want to die. Even though the blue fog is all around me, even though I’m technically dead, and according to some people, damned, I don’t want to die. Where there’s life, no matter how we define it, there’s hope.

I had so much hope these past few weeks. I hoped that what I was doing would make the world a better place for my kind, and I hoped that at the other side of it I could be myself. That I wouldn’t have to hide or pass as something and someone I’m not.

And I hoped that I could figure out why I alone among zombiekind was healing, because that was a gift I wanted to share.

The blue fog was all around me, but I still had hope. I was still “alive.”

I opened my mouth wide. Wider, I’d guess, than any living person could, and I reached into the back of my throat with two fingers, back to where I’d hidden the box cutter. Somehow I imagined getting it out would have been easier. I probably hadn’t needed to go to such extreme lengths to hide it, because they barely searched me—heck, they couldn’t stand to look at me, much less touch me—once I’d arrived at the jail.

Of course, I could have used it on Pete, but I don’t have the ability to hurt people that way.

Only myself.

The first thing I did once I had it was to scratch “Love Karen” in the baby-vomit paint coating the bench, just below my desiccated contacts.

Then I got to work.

I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know if this will work at all, or if I’m just going to drift out into the blue fog.

But I have hope.