Shallow Graves (23 page)

I STOOD WHEN
I saw headlights and heard the growl of the truck's engine. Jake was driving. Zeke slid over to let me in the passenger side. They didn't ask me anything except, “Are you hurt?” and “How far?” and I didn't offer anything more than “Not very.”

Jake stopped the truck in front of the gate. I jumped out to open it, but when I had my hand on the latch, metal cold beneath my fingers, I couldn't do it.

The headlights cast long, distorted shadows over the narrow dirt road. Me, impossibly tall, and the horizontal bars of the gate like a silhouetted prison. The tunnel of trees stretched into the forest in shades of washed-out yellows and greens. Somehow that
artificial light was worse than darkness would have been.

“Breezy?”

Zeke got out of the truck behind me, and a second later Jake did too.

“What is it?” Jake said.

The last thing I wanted to do was follow that road again.

I was shaking my head before I realized what I was doing. “I can't. I can't go back there.”

Even where I stood, in the light, behind the false security of a green farm gate, it was too close to the mine. Too close to her.

“We should leave,” I said. But I couldn't turn around. That would mean putting my back to the forest and the road. My hand was still on the gate; I flicked the latch open and closed, open and closed. “We shouldn't be here. We need to go.”

“Okay,” Jake said gently. He put his hand over mine, didn't even flinch at the blood caking my fingers, and stopped the soft metal click of the latch. “Can you tell me what's up there?”

I felt a burst of annoyance that he was talking to me like that, like I was a little girl afraid of the gaping black space beneath her bed. But it steadied me too. It was better to be annoyed than addled with fear.

“I'm not going back up there,” I said. I tried to sound stubborn, not terrified. He wasn't fooled. “You want your dinner, go get it yourself.”

“Okay. Zeke can stay here with you. Tell me how to get there.”

“It's past the end of the road. There's a trail, it goes over a creek, and this old cabin—” I pulled my hand away and turned to face
Jake. “You can't go past the old cabin. Even if— He's there, by the old cabin. The body.” I didn't want to say his name out loud. He wasn't a person anymore. There wasn't anything left of him except the memories I had stolen. “But you can't go past that point. You
can't
. For any reason. Don't go to the end of the trail.”

“What's at the end of the trail?” Jake asked. He wasn't afraid. Worried, yes, but mostly curious.

“Something you're not going to see, because you're not going that far,” I said.

Jake hesitated, then shrugged. “Fine. I won't.”

“Promise me.”

At that he started to look more concerned. “All right. I promise.”

It wasn't enough. “Promise him,” I said, pointing at Zeke. “Promise him you won't go past the old cabin.”

Jake said, “Okay. I swear to both of you that I won't go past the cabin. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

I opened the gate for him, and he drove away. The red taillights disappeared into the forest.

“You are completely freaking out,” Zeke said.

“I am not.”

“Yes, you are. What's down there?”

“Will he be able to find it?” I asked.
It
, because that was easier than
him.
“I didn't give him very good directions. Does he even have a flashlight?”

Zeke's answer was wry. “We're not good at much of anything, but finding dead bodies in the dark is one thing we can do.”

“Oh. Right. Makes sense.” I inhaled slowly, tried to get control of my breathing, tried to slow my heart rate. It wasn't working. “Will he do what he said? Will he— I mean, he won't get curious or something? Keep going?”

“No, he'll come right back,” Zeke said. “Maybe if he were alone he'd do something stupid, but not with us waiting for him.”

“You're sure?”

“I wouldn't have let him go if I wasn't.”

“Okay. That's good. Okay.”

I felt exposed and unsteady standing there in the middle of the road. My knees felt shaky, my feet were sore, my head aching. The torn skin of my fingers stung with sweat and dirt. I was tired. I was so damn tired. I sat on the top rail of the fence and let my shoulders slump.

Zeke said, “What happened, anyway? How did you get up here?”

“Violet,” I said. “The girl I was looking for. I found her. She was . . . she was having doubts about her life choices. She wanted me to do something for her.”

“What do you mean?”

I didn't want to go through the whole afternoon. “It's a long story.”

Zeke came over to sit beside me on the fence. “Why would you help her?”

“It's not like she was going to kill me.”

“Someday you're going to get tired of saying that.”

“I'm already tired of it. I've only been a reanimated corpse for
a few weeks and I've already used up all my zombie jokes.” I rubbed my hands over my face, regretted it when I felt the scrape of grit and dirt on my skin. “I don't want to talk about it.”

Not in the dark. Not in the mountains. Maybe in the morning, with the sun burning hot in the blue Colorado sky, miles away from the mine, maybe then I would explain, if he still wanted to know. Not here.

He wasn't going to leave it alone. “But you went with her. Why?”

“Figure it out, Einstein.”

It seemed so stupid now, that I had ever thought I could ask anything of the woman in the mine. That I could walk in there and leave behind only the parts of me I didn't want anymore, these powers and this darkness, and keep everything else. She would take exactly what she wanted, nothing more and nothing less, from everybody who stepped into her prison.

“It didn't work out the way you wanted?”

“Can't you tell?”

“You still smell kind of dead,” Zeke said.

“Aw, I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Shut up. Are you sure you're okay?”

“Well, I'm still an undead monster who rose from the grave, but at least I'm not a drooling, brain-dead monster who rose from the grave. I'm great. Awesome. Couldn't be better.”

Zeke kicked at the low fence rail and looked up at the stars. “Whatever. Next time you're stuck in the middle of nowhere, call somebody else.”

I didn't remind him that I had nobody else to call. He knew it;
he was here. “I got you dinner. That's got to be worth at least a tank of gas.”

He glanced at me. “You killed a guy and called me to get rid of the evidence.”

“I know. Worst first date ever.”

He laughed a little. “You are seriously the most annoying undead person I've ever met.”

“He was a really bad man,” I said, after a minute or two of silence. I hadn't told him much, but Zeke knew Rain's story, and he had seen Brian Kerr's house. He knew what they had been doing. I asked, “Do evil people taste evil?”

“Uh, no,” Zeke said, like he wasn't sure it was a serious question. “They all mostly taste the same.”

“Huh. Okay.” It didn't seem right. There should be something rotten inside somebody who did things like that, something that made them taste like sulfur and decay and maggots. Something that made them different. “That would have been interesting to know when I did that report on the Donner Party in fifth grade. Why did nobody dig me up?”

“What?”

“When I was buried. Before I woke up.”

My thoughts were racing, my legs jiggling on the fence. I hated sitting there at the edge of the woods waiting for the first sign of headlights in the dark. It was taking too long. We shouldn't have let Jake go by himself.

“I was there for a
year
. If you can smell a body well enough to find it in the woods, why didn't anybody figure out I was stuck in
the ground in somebody's backyard?”

“You don't smell
that
bad. It's not like you're rotting or anything.”

“You said you can—”

“I can tell you're not completely alive,” Zeke said.

“You mean it's a magic thing, not a smell thing? Like how I can tell when somebody is a killer?”

“I guess. Sort of. It's both. There aren't any ghouls in Chicago,” he added, like that was an important detail. “Too many magicians.”

“But somebody did find me. When I first woke up.”

“The birds weren't exactly subtle.”

“Yeah, my magical bird flu epidemic was big news. I didn't do that on purpose. Would that be enough? For somebody to find me?”

“If he knew what he was looking for, maybe.” Zeke shook his head. “Probably? I don't know. Ask a magician.”

Thinking about the man by my grave only reminded me of his hands on my face and his excitement. Y
ou're beautiful, you're perfect
, as though he had known exactly what he was going to find. And his memories. Especially his memories. I didn't want him in my head.

“Mr. Willow . . .” I stumbled on his name. “His whole deal was telling people they were evil whether they did anything evil or not, and promising to fix them.”

“It doesn't work that way,” Zeke said.

“He convinced a lot of people it did.” I thought of Violet with her glowing eyes and her hands clamped over her mouth. “And when he couldn't convince them, he didn't give them a choice.”

Zeke shrugged. “That's what humans always do.”

“You don't like humans very much, do you?”

“I would like them more if they weren't always trying to kill us.”

I couldn't argue with logic like that. “Thank you for helping me in spite of your prejudices.”

“You're not human anymore,” Zeke said.

“I'm thanking you anyway.”

“Uh, yeah. Okay. It's no big deal.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, tilted my head back, and when I looked again the stars were still there.

“You know
Challenger
? The space shuttle that exploded back in the eighties?”

Zeke gave me a quick, confused look. “Yeah. I think so. We learned about it in school.”

That threw me for a second. “You go to school?”

He made a face and kicked the fence again. “Jake makes me.”

“You're a man-eating corpse-stealing creature of the night and your big brother makes you go to school.” For some reason that felt like the most bizarre thing I had heard in a long time. “Does he check your homework too? Go to teacher conferences? Sign field trip permission slips?”

“Yes,” Zeke said. And after a beat: “The conferences never go very well. He picks fights with the teachers.”

I laughed. Something dense and tangled in my chest began to ease.

“What about it? The space thing?” Zeke said.

“
Challenger.
The space shuttle. I was just thinking about—there's
a transcript of everything that happened when it exploded. And right before it happened, everything—everything was fine. They thought it was fine. The shuttle was taking off and everything was perfect, right up until it wasn't. The last voice picked up by the flight cabin recorder was the pilot.”

I scrubbed my palms on my knees; my jeans felt grimy and gross. I was so tired of being dirty and hurt and bloody all the time.

“Michael Smith. He was the pilot. He said, ‘Uh-oh.' Then it exploded. They all died. Seven people. They think some of them might have survived the explosion and they were still alive for—for the fall. Back to Earth.” I swallowed; my throat was dry. “But the last thing mission control heard from them was just that. ‘Uh-oh.'”

Zeke didn't say anything. He was waiting for me to go on.

“My best friend Melanie tells me—used to tell me—it was morbid that I knew things like that. She said it was creepy and stupid to think about tragedies all the time. But I always thought . . . I only thought it was sad. They didn't even make it into space. They just died.”

I took a deep breath. My heart wasn't racing anymore. My hands weren't shaking.

“I was lying when I said I couldn't remember who killed me.”

“I know,” Zeke said softly.

“I thought I was lying better than that,” I said.

“No, I mean . . .” Zeke trailed off. He bounced his leg nervously, shrugged his thin shoulders. He wasn't looking at me. “I think if you keep trying to tell yourself and everybody else that you don't remember something because it was . . . I think that mostly means
you remember it really well, and wish you didn't.”

I looked at him, at his profile in the darkness. “Yeah. It's like that.”

I thought he would ask. I waited for the inevitable question, tense and uncomfortable, but he didn't.

“The person you killed,” I said. “Who was he?”

“Does it matter?”

“I don't know. No. Sorry.”

“He was a really bad man,” Zeke said, a mocking echo, but he meant it.

“What did he do?”

He was trying to decide what to tell me. In the end, he only said, “He hurt Jake.”

“What does it feel like?” I asked. “When you kill someone. What does that feel like?”

Zeke was quiet for so long I didn't think he was going to answer.

“Nothing,” he said finally. “It doesn't feel like anything.”

He was lying, lying, lying. I let him. It was an unfair question anyway.

“I didn't think I could be scared anymore,” I said. “I've been imagining that worms or something got into my brain while I was buried and ate away the amygdala. That's the part of the brain that feels fear. I forgot what it felt like, to be scared. I don't know. Maybe it doesn't even feel the same for me anymore. Now it's like—”

“Like what?” Zeke said, when I didn't go on.