Dead Mann Walking (21 page)

Some moans to the south got the cops all excited. When they raced off to follow, it gave us a break. We crouched like crazy just the same, avoiding the paths, plodding through a rat's nest of hedge and tree.

“There been a lot of moaners lately?” I asked.

Jonesey gave me that look again. “A couple every day now. Like I said, I got most of the cops to go home before your friend showed up; now it's . . . Where
have
you been?”

“I said we'd talk later.”

Another moan, forlorn as a lonely loon crying in the middle of nowhere. I saw a powerful blast of flame, heard the creaking rush of burning wood, and a few seconds later felt some heat in the air.

Jonesey shook his head. “At least they could've
made sure
whoever it was had gone feral first.”

“Come on; we've got business.”

The twisted mass of branch and leaf ended in an eight-foot black iron fence. As we sneaked up, I could see lights on in a few of the Collin Hills houses. There was a second blast from the flamethrower, more distant. Another moaner gone. Before the glow vanished, we were over the park fence and across the well-lit street.

We hit our knees behind a row of parked cars. I didn't like it here, not at all. Unlike the Bones, everything worked, especially the streetlamps. It was so bright I felt naked as a dead jaybird.

The Collin Hills wall was behind us, a big stucco sucker tipped with barbed wire. The wire was the good stuff, thin black strips that fit right in with the decor of the terra-cotta rooftops beyond. To add insult to injury, it was electrified. A small sign warned about the voltage. That level of electricity wouldn't destroy a chak, but our flesh would sear and stick to the wire. We'd end up doing major damage trying to pull free.

“Where'd it climb over? You see it happen?” I asked.

Jonesey muttered some mnemonic to himself, then pointed to a spot down the block half-hidden by an oak. “There.”

We crept closer. Thanks to the great lighting it was easy to see that the stucco covering had been chipped, revealing the less dainty color of the concrete beneath. The broken patches made a line, more or less, that headed up to a spot where the wire looked slightly bent.

“So it climbed? I didn't think it could
see
.”

“He didn't. Not exactly.” Jonesey went into another weird little pantomime. “He runs up like this, hits the wall like he doesn't see it, then feels it with his hands. He reaches up, but the wall's too high. So he gets angry. He punches. He scratches. When he stops, he fingers the holes he made; then he uses them to pull himself up a little. He still can't reach the top, so he does it again and again, until he lobs himself over, nothing but a spark and a
gzt
from the wire. I expected alarms, but there was nothing. I've seen some freaky shit, but I'm telling you,
that
was freaky.”

“Chakz never come here. Maybe the alarm broke and the owner didn't bother to repair it.” I eyed the wall and the tree. “Bottom line, it can do it; we can do it.”

Jonesey gave the handholds a shot while I shimmied up the oak. By the time I'd made my way across an overhanging branch, he'd gone up as far as he could without touching the wire. Flat against the branch, I reached down, grabbed his hands, and swung him over.

It was close. The soles of his shoes cleared by an inch. Once he landed, I squirmed along the branch as far as I could, then jumped. I hit the ground on a patch of wood chips. Some splinters, but no big damage so far.

The lights of the security gate glowed beyond the neatly trimmed hedges. I could see the rent-a-cop in his little house, guarding the main entrance. He was awake, listening to some iThing. Good. The skeleton hadn't attracted attention here yet.

With no trail to follow, we skirted the edges of the properties. I was hoping it might still stink of acid, but the whole place was thick with the smell of chemicals, fertilizer and chlorine from the pools.

On the one hand, we hoped we'd bump into it; on the other, we were so terrified we would that we were startled by every cricket chirp. We really jumped when we heard the dog. A big one, it barked three times, then let loose with a final, pained yelp.

Not good for us or the doggy. It sounded like it was nearby, right in the next yard. With a quick glance at each other, we gave up on crouching and ran toward the sound.

When I saw how the pretty little picket gate was mangled, I half knew what to expect. I didn't expect something heavy to fly through the air and land at my feet with a warm, wet thud. Jonesey clamped his hand over his mouth. I had to bend down to make sure. It was a rottweiler, head twisted around so it had a nice view of its own tail. The heart-shaped collar said the dog's name was Annie.

“Heh-heh.”

Beyond the gate, I saw it. The moonlight and streetlamps gave it a kind of perfect, white metal sheen. The color fit. It was bouncing around the fenced yard like a silver pinball: hitting a wall, changing direction, hitting a fence, changing direction again. Sometimes, out of frustration, I think, it lashed out at whatever was nearest, like a lawn mower. Something like that must've happened to the dog. Either Annie had been stepped on, or she got wide-eyed at all those yummy bones and attacked.

“Heh-heh.”

As for the skeleton, left on its own, eventually it'd either fall into the pool or find the exit and wander out. We didn't have time to see which, because the house lights came on. We didn't have time at all.

Moving fast, I grabbed the longest thing lying around, a pool net, and whacked the skull with it to get its attention. Jaw slack, it turned, laughed, and headed toward me.

Careful to stay out of its reach, with a few more well-placed whacks I managed to steer it out the gate, all the way across the next yard, and then into a little patch of trees near the security wall.

So far so good, and I knew what had to happen next. But with all of Misty's soul talk and Jonesey insisting on calling it
he
, I was having trouble. I had to wonder if Ashby might still be in there. It was the fucking heads all over again, theme and variation.

Was he still thinking, still
feeling
?

If I played it long enough, the guessing game would drive me feral all by itself. I had to tell myself it didn't matter. It just didn't matter. It couldn't. It, it,
it
.

I gave Jonesey the pole, told him to keep whacking the skull and backing up. I took out the crowbar. The skeleton moved past me, blind, oblivious. I came up behind it.

In case it was an issue, I wanted it to be quick, merciful. There was survival involved, too. I had to make sure the first blow immobilized it, so I wouldn't wind up clawed to pieces. So did I hit the neck or the hips first?

I swallowed hard and swung at the neck for all I was worth. The bones were strong. The first blow only staggered it. It took another swing, so strong it nearly yanked my arm out of the socket. It sent the skull flying. The body crumpled. The skull careened into the stucco, bounced off, and fell where I couldn't see. It was only quiet for a beat.

“Heh-heh.”

Damn. It was still talking. I didn't want to think about it. Fortunately, I didn't have to. Behind us, a door was opening.

“Annie? Where are you, girl?”

They'd find the dog. Even if the alarms didn't work, there'd be lots of screaming.

I stepped toward the bushes where the skull had landed.

“Jonesey, grab those bones,” I whispered.

“What're you going to do?”

“Finish it.”

I saw a clump of white and poked it with the crowbar. A stone. A big white stone. I had to wait until I heard the laugh again. It only took seconds.

“Heh-heh.”

The sound was waist-level. It hadn't hit the ground. There it was, held by a web of branches, wedged in the bush. I stuck the crowbar in and lifted it by the eye socket. The jaws kept moving. Alas, poor Ashby.

“Heh-heh.”

Trying to act dead, like an
it
myself, I laid it sideways on the stone, pulled back, aimed, and swung. I didn't just swing once; I did it again and again. I cracked the skull, snapped the jaws, and kept swinging. It—fine, maybe
he
—had saved my neck, or to be accurate, everything
below
my neck, and here I was pummeling his remains.

Misty's words echoed in my ears:
It could have been worse.

When I was finished, the stone was covered with white dust and a few pieces no bigger than a marble. But I swear—I'm telling you, I
swear
—that even the white flakes looked like they were still moving, curling, twitching.

I backed away, scaring the shit out of myself when I bumped into Jonesey.

We both stared at the shivering pieces a while before they finally stopped.

“How the hell was he moving at all?” I whispered. “No muscle, no ligature. Nothing.”

I was thinking out loud, but Jonesey answered. “A luz.”

“A what?”

He shook his head apologetically, like he was sorry he hadn't thought of it sooner. “It popped into my head just now. It's from the midrash. A luz is a bone in the human body that's completely indestructible. They believed it contained the soul. Maybe after everything else was burned away, your friend was one big luz.”

“The midrash? You Jewish, Jonesey?”

“I . . . I don't remember.”

T
he same oak tree got us back over the fence. We dumped the bones, luz and all, into the sewer. It hadn't rained in a while, so they landed with a low, distant clatter.

Ashby, ripped and RIP.

Alarms were beeping and clanging everywhere. Police, with their flashlights and flamethrower, rushed into the front entrance of Collin Hills. We waited, then made it back into the park.

Soon all the screams were behind us. Annie's owners might be bereft, but for the cops it'd just be a dead dog. There'd be a few chakz dragged out of bed, more tension, more patrols, but nothing as bad as if that thing had stumbled in on some family curled around the TV laughing over
Tea with the Dead
.

The deeper into the park we went, the fewer working lights, leaving us to rely on what there was of the moon. We tramped through the grass, silent as zombie church mice. I kept rubbing my hands, thinking little pieces of Ashby were still on my fingers. I didn't want to say anything to Jonesey. I especially didn't want to tell him how I'd nearly moaned before he walked in on me, or how I wasn't sure what was holding me together now.

But as the shapeless bushes and half-dead trees gave way to the broken-box rectangles of our beloved neighborhood, Jonesey decided to tell me what I was feeling.

“You must be pissed.”

Pissed? More like if there was a button on the wall that said, PUSH TO END WORLD, I was ready to press it. I wiped my hands on my pants and looked at him.

“I know
I'm
pissed,” he said. “Now, more than ever, I'm ready to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get out there and organize.” To punctuate his clichéd imagery, he slammed his fist into his hand. “And you're going after whoever did this, right?”

Me? I said, “Yeah.”

He shook his head. “You don't sound so sure of yourself, Hess. You have to sound sure of yourself.”

“Oh, for the love of . . .”

He stepped in front of me, stopped me in my tracks. “Say it again, Hess, but this time like you mean it.”

My sympathy only goes so far. I growled at him. “I swear, you tell me to turn my frown upside down, I'm going to rip off what's left of your lips and feed them to the rats.”

“Good. At least now you look pissed,” he said. He grinned as if he'd accomplished something.

By the time we hit the sidewalk I figured I'd grunt something more. “I said yeah; I meant yeah. Of course I want to find him. I'm just not sure I can. I've been going from one horror show to another for days, and more often than not, I'm the star. This guy's a major screwball. I don't know why he's doing it. I don't even know if he knows. I'm not sure I could have found him in my best days, and those are long gone.”

He nodded sympathetically. “I hear you. But you know what I'm going to say. You gotta act as if.”

If I'd met Jonesey when he was alive, I would've hated him, thought him a parasite for shoveling a crappy line of shit at people, living off their hopes and dreams. But seeing that ridiculous Pollyanna expression plastered on his grayish skin was, if nothing else, funny.

I threw my hands up. “Fine. You can act like an asshole, no reason I can't act like a detective.”

“That's the spirit!” He slapped me on the back.

Whatever. As if. As if what? Turgeon was probably an alias, and I didn't even have fake names for Grandpa or Watt. My only leads were the two chakz I'd found on the police database. A quick check on the recorder gave me their names—Nell Parker and Odell Jenkins.

Two chakz. Right. And here I was standing next to my own personal chak database.

“Jonesey, you know a Nell Parker?”

He went into his little mnemonic dance. “Bell . . . toll . . . death . . . Nell Parker. Oh, man, oh, man.”

“What? Believe me, at this point I'm pretty sure I can take it.”

“She's hooked up with Colby Green.
Colby Green
. You don't want to go down that route. Forget it.”

I made a face at him. “Geez, you run hot and cold. I thought you wanted me to act as if.”

“Yeah, but you should act as if you've still got a brain. I mean . . . Colby Green? I home-delivered some ketamine to his estate once. He has these special bug zappers set up out front. Bug gets fried, falls into a small reanimator at the bottom, then comes back, only to get fried again. And that's what he does to
bugs
.”