The Vengeful Dead (20 page)

Chapter 24

A perk of being dead was that you never got tired. You could walk for hours and hours and not feel a thing. If you knew where you were going, it did not even require walking. All you needed was a reference point and you could will your spirit to that place. If one were so inclined. Most spirits had no such inclination. Why bother? There were no crosstown barbeques to attend. You could not go see a movie. Church services were not held. Dying had the tendency to sap all the fun out of life.

Laurel continued walking. It had been a couple of hours, she guessed. Telling time in Deadworld was difficult given that it did not seem to flow in the same manner as physical reality. She had an address, had looked at the map on Shelby’s phone, and shuffled off to find Rosa. She had wanted to stay with Jackie, be there when she woke up, and assure herself that she was recovering. When Shelby had informed her that Jackie had been shot, panic gripped her, sending her instantly to the hospital before Shelby could even tell her the room number.

But determining if Rosa was finished took precedence. If she wasn’t, then she would be looking to possess someone else in order to finish the job. When Shelby had told her Morgan was dead, her first thought had been to see if Jackie had become a victim of Rosa’s wrath, but her presence had been gone, only the lingering taint leftover from the fight with Morgan.

She continued to walk, up avenues of empty businesses and through silent neighborhoods, cloaked in the perpetual hanging fog that continually shifted to obscure and reveal the colorless landscape. Laurel made careful note of the places she went. Solid reference points would make traveling much easier in the future. A detailed knowledge of the city was what had allowed Nick’s friend Reggie to move almost unimpeded throughout Chicago. That ease of movement had saved Cynthia against Drake’s goons.

On occasion, she would find other spirits walking aimlessly through the streets, looking right through her most times, oblivious and lost in their own laments, but once in awhile someone would look at her and offer a nod of acknowledgment or stare at her with wide, hopeless eyes. Many, she expected, had been lingering here for so long that they had forgotten why they remained. The times she had made an effort to strike up a conversation had generally been met with stony silence. If they did speak, it was almost always plaintive requests if she’d seen someone. So many souls unable to let go of their lives.

It would have been easy to get depressed, but thank the Great Mother, Laurel had a purpose still. Jackie needed her—to help nudge her life in the right direction and keep her from spiraling down into ruin, where she continually teetered on the brink. As much as she wanted to, Laurel knew the decisions were not hers to make.

And then there was Shelby. What sort of relationship did they have? They could not be together in a physical way, other than the few blissful moments when she would pull Shelby across for a brief kiss goodnight. Even then, the contact was dulled, not quite there, and more often than not left her wanting. She would give almost anything to have a bit of real, physical time with her. Shelby had more life in her than a dozen living people. Funny, smart, giving, and a walking poster girl for sensuality, Shelby was a girl’s wet dream. Or dream anyway; the dead had no physical response to desire. She would take what she could get, having lost so much in her dogged love for a woman who would never feel the same for her.

But her only regret was in failing Jackie by not helping her face those things that continued to pull her down and keep happiness always at arm’s length. For that she would linger until Jackie was gone, if it came to that.

Rosa’s neighborhood was not unlike the previous miles Laurel had walked, an endless, gloomy tract of buildings, seeping into the mist, lifeless structures coming out of the featureless, stony ground. Laurel wondered why this world presented itself as it did, how there were buildings but no trees, as though someone’s architecture class had built models of everything in Chicago and failed to accessorize. Worst of all, perhaps, there was no sense of the Great Mother here, no vastness to the universe or feeling of greater power existing within and around all things. There was power in this place. It permeated everything, and Laurel could only guess that it was this power that formed the landscape in which she traveled, that gave her the energy she needed to travel to the living world.

It was then she realized she had no sense of anything at all in this area. No ghosts wandered these streets or lingered in the homes nearby. It was as though nobody had ever died in this neighborhood, as if they had all been well-adjusted souls who moved on, or for some reason had all left the area. It was a ghost town for ghosts. With a growing sense of unease, she continued on.

Laurel had street names and an address. It was all she needed to find Rosa’s home, but within a few blocks, Laurel realized an address would not have been needed at all. The keen of Rosa’s baby echoed through the fog, a ceaseless wail of fury and fear. Even the blanketing sky needed respite from the onslaught, drawing away from the power of the babe’s spirit to leave a clear, pristinely detailed group of houses centered around the glow of Rosa’s. The whole area had a light of its own, radiating from the core, a tiny sun in a dark sea of the dead. The empty neighborhood now made sense. Who would want to linger in the presence of this anguish and anger?

The baby’s spirit had the intensity of innocence and burned with the rage of having it stolen before it had even begun. She could not feel Rosa’s presence, though perhaps it was buried beneath the power of the babe’s. Laurel continued to approach, cutting between houses now, making a direct line for the source. The wail continued, fueled by spiritual strength not air, so that it sounded more like a never-ending siren. It reminded Laurel of a tornado warning.

There was no way to hide or disguise her approach. The babe would sense her, but there was no way to judge what his reaction would be. If Rosa was there, obscured by the power of her child, Laurel realized she might not know until she actually reached them. Would she be viewed as a threat? She would have to assume that was true until proven otherwise.

Three houses from her goal, Laurel began to sense another presence, but it was not Rosa’s. It had a different quality all together, a familiar taste upon her senses that she knew all too well. Laurel stopped in the middle of the street.

“Jackie?” How was that even possible? Jackie could not be here. “Jackie!” she yelled and began to run. There was only one reason she could be here. “Sweet Mother, no.”

Laurel willed herself to the front of the house and was instantly whisked over to the front door. It stood half open. Jackie’s presence was clear now, in sharp relief to the more diffuse, radiating energy of the baby. She pushed the door open.

“Jackie!”

From up above, a hesitant, confused voice answered. “Laur?”

And then she was gone. The cool rush of wind signaling the opening of the door to the living world blew through her and then Jackie’s presence abruptly vanished. In her place someone else had come.

Laurel paused at the foot of the stairs. This taint was familiar, too. Rosa had returned.

She stood frozen, hand clenched on the banister, staring up the stairs. It took Laurel a moment to let this turn of events sink in, to process the meaning of what had just happened. Jackie had been in Deadworld. She left at the same moment Rosa arrived. Had they somehow switched places? It did not make sense. Possession didn’t throw you into the other side, not as she understood it anyway, but then Jackie was different. Something had happened to her here, where no living soul should be able to come. She had been changed by the experience. Was it possible to possess someone by literally swapping out their spiritual energies? She had possessed Jackie to get her out of Deadworld before.

There was no other conclusion Laurel could find. Rosa had possessed Jackie and forced her spirit self to the other side. Rosa would have free, unfettered control of Jackie’s body. And now she was back. Had she felt Laurel’s presence approaching her babe?

Rosa’s frenzied, roaring voice answered her. “Stay away from my baby!”

“Rosa,” she called. “My name is Laurel Carpenter. I was—”

“Get away from my baby!”

Behind her, the door slammed shut, blown shut by the force of Rosa’s voice. Laurel decided she had better run. She knew that tone of voice. It was the voice of someone past the threshold of reasoning. Nobody was going to get near her babe, whether good, bad, or indifferent. She was a threat, pure and simple, and Rosa would likely do whatever she could to neutralize that threat.

The door would not open. Laurel exerted more force of will upon it, but she could do little more than budge it. Laurel began to draw her will to go to Jackie. She needed to warn her, but the door to the living got closed before she could even try to open it. Too late, Laurel turned to face the charging whirlwind of Rosa Sanchez.

She barreled into Laurel, hands outstretched, with the speed of a rampaging bull. Laurel slammed into the door and blew it right off the hinges, sending her tumbling across the stony ground. Being dead, the blow itself did no harm to her body, but the blast of energy that coursed through her felt like she had stuck her finger in a light socket. For a few precious moments, Laurel lay on the ground stunned. Before she could get her bearings again, Rosa was on top of her, hands clasping for her throat.

“You leave my baby alone! You can’t have him!”

Laurel clamped her hands around Rosa’s wrists, but there was strength there beyond a single person. She was drawing from her babe. “Ro . . . sa. I . . . don’t . . . want . . .”

She could not get the words out. Rosa kept pounding her head against the ground, holding her throat in a viselike grip. Each blow sent drowning waves of energy through her body. Her soul was literally getting blown out of her body with each shock of her head against the ground.

I’ve got no chance against her,
Laurel realized. It was the Drake situation all over again—pitted with a foe that completely outmatched her and at their utter whim. This time, however, there was no holding out for the cavalry. Nick and Shelby had no clue she was even in trouble. Her only hope lay in letting Rosa believe she had won, think that she was truly dead.

Laurel ceased fighting against her, let her body get beat against the ground over and over. She turned her focus inward, concentrating down to that small core of her being from which all of her spiritual energy sprang, pulling herself down, deeper and deeper. All of her remaining energy condensed down to a tiny, protected point, a hard shell of energy that, she prayed to the goddess, would remain impervious to Rosa’s rage.

Her sense of body drifted away to nothing. The world of the dead evaporated into darkness, and Laurel braced herself for the inevitable assault. She could only hope this tiny slice of herself that remained would disappear beneath Rosa’s blind anger, and she would be left with the sliver of hope that Jackie, Shelby, or Nick might find her and give her enough energy to come back from the brink.

Laurel quieted her mind—emptying it of all thought, focusing on nothing—and waited while somewhere out there her spirit bled away, one violent slam at a time.

Chapter 25

Jackie covered her ears. The baby’s wailing was incessant, a droning, endless cry born of injustice and pain. Her hands did little to quell the sound. The gray fog of Deadworld drifted through the sky above her, cold and unforgiving.

“Great,” she muttered. “Another damn Deadworld dream.”

Only this time she got to be the ghost. Her flesh gave off the familiar soft light and was gray as the ground beneath her bare feet. At least the pounding in her head was gone. She reached up and felt the long stitched welt on the side of her head. Dreams apparently could only do so much.

She turned around to get her bearings and recognized the home of Rosa Sanchez, clear and colorless, appearing quite unlike what she had seen here before. It had a glow to it not unlike her own flesh, throbbing in syncopated time to the infant’s cries. Somewhere in there, probably writhing on a bloody mattress, was the source of the awful sound. Jackie thought for a moment to tell her dream to fuck off and just walk in the other direction, but she knew how dreams worked. No matter what direction she went, the house would reappear. Jackie went to shove her hands in her pockets only to realize she had on her sweats, and so huffed in annoyance and began to walk toward the house.

“Stay out of my house.”

The voice came from all around and inside her head. Jackie stopped and turned in all directions. Nobody was in sight.

“Rosa?” She was fairly sure that’s who it was. The voice was rushed and low, bordering on a growl. The accent was certainly Latino.

“You keep away from my house,” she said, “or I shall make sure you stay broken. Do you understand?”

Jackie winced. There was that phrase again, in all its awful simplicity. “What are you talking about?”

“Just keep out of my house!” Her voice was an intense whisper around Jackie, almost like she did not want other people to hear.

“Yeah, whatever. It’s my dream. I’ll go in there if I want to,” Jackie said to the air. “Besides, I’m dead. Doesn’t fucking matter now, does it?” For a brief, stomach-clenching moment, Jackie wondered if perhaps she was indeed now dead, having drifted off into some drug-induced coma while she slept. What a shitty way to go that would be. But she was in front of Rosa’s house, which would not have happened if she were really dead. She would have been at her apartment, looking down on her corpse with half its hair shaved off and a wretched football lace running along the scalp. Nick would surely want to kiss her now. And she cared about this, why?

“To kiss or not to kiss,” Jackie said and began to walk around the house, the wail pushing against her with literal force, forcing her to lean toward the house as though she were walking in a strong wind. This was one of the most intensively tactile dreams she could ever remember having. Her previous dreams of Deadworld had been very muddled, full of swirling images, violence, and cold that caused your bones to break into tiny shards. Of course now she had a screaming babe to deal with.

Jackie wondered how she would feel about this if she were a mother. Would those cries sound different to her? Probably so. But she did know about innocent lives stolen in the worst of ways, and this was just an extreme example of that.

“What was his name going to be, Rosa? If you’re going to be talking to me I may as well see how I answer.”

She was in the backyard when the answer came. “Antonio.”

Jackie nodded. “OK. I like that name; good, strong, male name. After the father? Or was Rennie Vasquez the father?”

A string of Spanish clapped down around Jackie like a sonic boom and knocked her to her knees. Likely, the words were not kind ones for Rennie Vasquez.

“Wow.” Jackie got back to her feet, more surprised than hurt. “So we don’t like Rennie.” She was coming back around to the front door. She stared up at the upstairs windows where somehow the wailing siren of Antonio continued to blare, his rhythm and intensity perfectly constant. “What is little Antonio saying, I wonder?” Jackie stepped up to the door and turned the handle. “Is he crying for mother or screaming for vengeance? What do I think?”

Rosa said nothing until she was near the top of the landing. “He cries for blood.”

Jackie stopped and looked around, half expecting to see Rosa. Her voice had gained a sudden clarity, but this time there were tears. There was rage for sure, but behind it, Jackie could hear the voice of someone on the verge of tears. “Maybe he’s crying for you, too.” As all children do for the parent they have lost. Jackie felt her throat clenching up. “OK, let’s get this conversation going in a different direction. I am really curious and a bit petrified of just how I think Antonio must look here on the other side. Will he be a normal crying infant or something . . . else I really don’t want to see.”

“You are in my house?”

Jackie chuckled. “You mean you can’t tell? How does that work?”

“Get out! Get out now.”

“Rosa,” Jackie said, more flippant than she might have been had this been real, “fuck you. I want to see him.”

Spanish expletives faded into the backdrop of the baby’s cries. Jackie walked forward and grabbed a hold of the master-bedroom door.

“No!” Rosa yelled. “Stay away from my baby!”

“I’m not going to touch him, Rosa. I swear,” Jackie said. “I just want to see.”
And hopefully not turn this dream into a nightmare.

“Jackie!” The voice was faint, barely discernible over Antonio’s, but still instantly recognizable. Laurel.

Jackie turned away from the door. “Laur?”

“Damn you, you broken bitch,” Rosa’s voice sounded dangerously close.

She spun around to see the yawning bright door between worlds, and Jackie felt herself being sucked through. And it had just been getting interesting, too.

Jackie gasped awake, sucking in a huge lungful of air as though she had been suffocating. She lay sprawled over the end of her bed, covers thrown aside. Her head played a horrid techno-beat on a big bass drum in time with her pounding heart. Roughly ten miles away, the bottle of Percocet sat on her end table. Jackie flopped over and fumbled for the bottle, focusing at last on her alarm clock. It read 7:12
AM
. She lolled her head over and could indeed see the sky was getting lighter, even if it was soaked with rain.

“Shit. No way.” Jackie groaned. She felt exhausted and lay on her back until her body calmed itself from the shock of jumping through that doorway. Apparently even in dreams it fucked you up. Bickerstaff leaped up on the bed and poked his wet nose at her face. “Hey Bickers. Give me a minute, would you? Mommy is still out of it.” He gave her a lick and then proceeded to jump down and trot back toward the kitchen.

Jackie realized she had to pee about thirty minutes ago. Her bladder pleaded no matter how she turned. A moment later, the phone rang. It could be any number of people trying to reach her. She reached over and picked it up, rolling painfully over on her bladder. Caller ID said it was McManus. Jackie remembered now. He was going to call last night, but she probably had slept right through it.

She clicked the TALK button. “Hey, McManus. I just woke up.”

“Finally,” he said in an exasperated tone. “I called twice last night, but figured you must have been pretty much drugged out. How you doing, Jack?”

“Percocet party,” Jackie said. “Sorry. I had to. My head is still throbbing. Hard to believe a couple of smacks against the floor can do this.”

“Don’t mess with a concussion, Jack,” he said. “Just get some rest.”

“Trying to,” she replied. “I slept all night, but feel like shit right now. Anyway, I have to pee and get coffee in me. Let me call you back in a few minutes.”

Jackie struggled to the bathroom and relieved herself. It took a great deal of effort just to flush and get back up. The toilet wasn’t all that uncomfortable really. She could lay her head against the counter on her arm and doze for a bit longer. Bickerstaff nudged the door open and meowed.

“OK, fine. I’m coming.”

She opened the can and let him eat off the kitchen counter while she put some coffee on. It was then she remembered Nick had bought her cold coffee drinks. There were still two Doubleshots in there. She grabbed one and went back to take a shower and another Percocet. Once naked, Jackie caught sight of herself in the mirror and realized how much of a beating she had taken. There were bruise marks from Morgan’s fingers around her throat and a huge purple and brown patch in the middle of her back where the screen door had hit. Her left elbow ached, her knees were scraped, and her feet felt like she had been walking for miles. Of course there was her head, a tender welt the size of a damn golf ball on the back and shaved down the left. She could handle the cuts and bruises. That was just part of the job, but the exhaustion and the throbbing made it difficult to think, and an FBI agent who couldn’t think was pretty much a dead one.

The shower felt so good, Jackie stood beneath the hot spray until it ran out and cold water snapped her back to being half-awake. The phone rang again the moment she sat down on the couch with her coffee. It was 8:01.

Jackie clicked the phone on. “Hi, Nick,” she said, attempting to sound more chipper than she felt. “I’m still sore, tired, and my head hurts. But I’m clean and I have coffee. How are you?”

“Not as sore or clean,” he replied. “How’s the head? No signs of major concussion?”

“No, Dr. Nick. It seems to be just a normal, minor concussion.”

His soft, deep chuckle rumbled in her hear. “Sorry. Habit. You tend to just ignore things when you shouldn’t. So I’m playing it safe.”

“I can’t ignore a concussion,” she said, wondering if he was being just a little bit patronizing. “It makes it difficult to function. Not that it matters. I won’t be doing much of anything for a while.”

“Perhaps. I can bring you something from Annabelle’s. You hungry?”

Do I really want him over here right now?
“Sure, that’d be great.”
Thank you, mouth. You’re a big help.

“One or two?”

Not all that hungry really, and don’t want to sound like
—“Two. I need to call McManus, though. Told him I’d call him back a bit ago about the case. See you soon.”

Jackie dialed McManus and laid back on the couch, sipping her coffee. He was already at headquarters, and if the speed of his voice was any indication, his nerves were rattled. They had to get their story straight, make sure there were no inconsistencies or errors in logic.

“The Standards guys aren’t out to get us, McManus. You realize they’re on our side.”

“Yes, I know,” he said and blew out a deep breath away from the phone. “Sorry. They stress me out, and they will get on us if our stories don’t match.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Jackie felt the gnawing worm of worry in her stomach. “They find something there, Ryan? Did something . . . weird happen?”

“You mean besides killing a Chicago detective who was offing gang members who may or may not have been responsible for the deaths of Rosa Sanchez and her husband?”

“Yes,” Jackie said. “Besides that.”

There was a pause, maybe half a second before he replied. “Isn’t this case weird enough without all the ghost shit getting in the way?”

The ghost shit.
Jackie frowned. It did not sit well with her. “Yeah. Well, Ryan, why don’t you give me the official run down of what’s in the report and I’ll just make sure my story matches up. OK?”

“Sorry, Jack,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just the Standards guys aren’t going to like the sound of anything weird.”

“Didn’t Belgerman gag you on talking about ghost stuff?”

“Yes.”

There was a lingering “but” in there. Jackie could feel it. “But what, McManus?”

He paused for several seconds. “I’ve got the impression you don’t always do what Belgerman asks.”

Jackie wasn’t sure if she should laugh or be pissed. “From who? You’ve been here for, what, a week? Who gave you that impression?”

“Um . . . everyone, really. Don’t get me wrong,” he added hastily. “I actually find that refreshing. Bosses don’t always know everything.”

She laughed. “This one does. Don’t cross John. You’re not a pigheaded bitch like me, so you’d never get away with it. Speaking of which, has he come in yet?”

“Yeah. He was here before I got here at seven thirty.”

“Great. Shit is hitting the fan already,” Jackie replied and closed her eyes.
John really must love me right now.
It would be a good idea to make sure their knowledge of events didn’t contain any inconsistencies. “All right, Ryan, tell me what you’ve told anyone so far about what happened. I had a few in to see me last night but my answers were all the same. I saw Morgan about to enter the house, I approached, he shot whomever it was that answered the door. I tried to tell him to stop and he attempted to shoot me. I returned fire and then tackled him in the entry of the house. In the struggle to subdue him, he got his hands around my throat and slammed my head against the floor until I blacked out. No memory of anything after that.”

“That’s about what I figured,” McManus said, but Jackie could hear that wasn’t all he had to say about the events. He told her his side of things until he got to the part about finding her in the dining room. “Wait a minute. How the hell did I get from the entry into the dining room?”

“I’d hoped you had an explanation for that,” McManus said. “I’m guessing you were delirious from the concussion and crawled over there before passing out.”

“OK, maybe, but Morgan was dead in the entry?” She was in the dining room? The other victim was in the kitchen. It didn’t make any sense.

“The presumption is that he staggered around the corner to kill the second vic and then fell back into the entry.”

“Oh. I didn’t actually see him die, so that’s possible. That must have been what happened.” Had to be. She was going to have to look at the evidence soon and verify what the hell had gone on there. “I’ll be in later today so I can go over the evidence. We can get some official paperwork written up for this.”

“That would be great, Jack. Thanks.” He sounded clearly relieved. “Be nice to get this case out of the way as soon as possible.”