Hitchers (22 page)

It made my skin prickle with involuntary dread, but I hugged her, felt her shoulders bounce as she cried into my neck, felt Summer's small breasts pressed against my chest. It was strange to be holding my Lorena but feeling Summer's thin arms, seeing skin so pale the blue of veins shone through where Lorena's warm brown should be.

“I'm sorry I left you in the boat. I'm so sorry. I should have been there.”

She laughed spasmodically. “I'm such an idiot. Why didn't I listen to you? I died of stupidity. It's not your fault I'm stupid.”

“You're not stupid. You have a phobia.” Or was it
had
a phobia? How do you refer to someone who's both alive and not? I squeezed her tighter, wanting to cherish every second, wishing she smelled like Lorena. I closed my eyes, pictured my Lorena the first time I held her, on our first date. I'd taken her to Ele, the best restaurant in the city where I could get a reservation, and spent a fortune trying to impress her.

Lorena pushed away from me, hard.

“Get your hands off me!”

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” I held up my hands. Summer was shaking hers as if she'd just touched some horrible bug. “I was holding my wife. I thought I'd lost her forever, and I had a chance to hold her. How could I not?”

“This is not your wife's body. Don't you
ever
—” She made a fist, raised it to punch my shoulder, then lowered it to her lap, gasping for breath.

I thought of Grandpa kissing Grandma, how violated it made me feel. “You're right. I really am sorry. I wasn't thinking. Can you see how you could forget, if someone you loved suddenly came to life right in front of you?”

Summer rubbed her face with both hands. “It feels like being buried alive.”

“That's a good way to put it.”

“God, I don't want this to happen any more. I can't.”

I was stinging from the disappointment of Lorena leaving so quickly. I wanted to see her again. At the same time, I knew what it felt like, and I didn't want Summer to have to suffer it again. Somehow I was able to separate those two desires and wish for both.

“She's come back because of you,” Summer said.

“What?”

“‘I waited for you. The wind kept blowing but I tried to hold on.'” Summer was staring off toward the staircase, her tone listless, almost plaintive. “The ones coming back are the ones who don't want to be dead. The ones who find it most intolerable. Ghosts haunt because they're not at peace. They desperately don't want to be dead. Or they have unfinished business, like Gilly.”

I thought of Lorena. If there was a way to get back to the world of the living Lorena would be the first in line. Grandpa had been drawing the day he died, clinging to this world. Not even death would snuff that much ambition. And Gilly—as soon as Gilly came out, he started working on The Album, the one that was going to relaunch Mick's career and make them friends again.

“Yeah. That sounds right.” And it seemed important. “What was it Krishnapuma said? Under the right conditions, the dead might get pulled back into the world of the living. Maybe if enough dead in one place wanted back in, they could storm the gate, so to speak.”

Summer didn't look like she was in the mood to muse on the motives of the dead. She nodded absently, hugging herself and rubbing her upper arms as if she was freezing.

It made me uneasy that we'd be running with a conclusion based on so little evidence, though. If we wanted to drive the hitchers back to where they came from, it seemed important to be sure we knew why they were here. We should hunt down other people who knew who was haunting them, see if they were all restless souls, not ready for that wind to take them up. If Annie
were back, for instance, we were on the wrong track. She'd wanted to die.

“Hang on,” I said.

Before I could voice my idea, I was gone again.

G
randpa drove right back to Grandma's house. On the way he tried to consult with his attorney about getting an injunction to block the publication of
Toy Shop.
His attorney had died in the anthrax attack. When Grandpa tried to explain to another member of his attorney's firm that he had been dead for two years, the attorney hung up on him.

“Ah, ya stinking rotten—” Grandpa pounded the dashboard with my phone. “You think it bothers me, what you did, don't you? Well, it doesn't. Little Joe doesn't go away just because you put it in a strip. How many times did Tina run him over with a bicycle and leave him all bent up? He doesn't spend a month in a cartoon hospital after that, now does he? He's back the next day. It's not a story. It's not a
book
. It's a God damned cartoon, for God's sake.”

I glowered inside, feeling cheated. It had been less than eleven hours since I'd regained control, and I was already back in my prison, forced to listen to his rants. If I'd had another hour I could have set up my plan.

“And another thing—I want you off my property,” Grandpa said
as he hung a left onto his block. “You've got a lot of nerve, living there.” There was a car I didn't recognize in Grandma's driveway. “Now who is this?”

The front door swung open; Mom stepped out. She folded her arms, waiting. Grandpa's hands tensed on the wheel; for a moment I thought he would cut and run. He turned off the ignition.

“Hello, Jenny gal,” Grandpa said as he stepped out of the Maserati.

Mom looked him up and down, her arms still folded. She looked exhausted. “Who are you supposed to be?”

“I'm your father, Jenny. I've come back to you.” He opened his arms as if waiting for her to run into his embrace. “I don't know how it's happened.”

“You've come back.” Mom yanked her hair out of her face, shook her head violently. “No. You don't come back. That's not how it works.” I couldn't have said it better. “What the hell is going on? Tell me what's going on.”

Grandpa closed the distance between them, put his hands on her shoulders. “Jenny, I don't know. It's a miracle.”

“It's not a miracle. It's an abomination.” She shrugged his hands off of her. “Where is Finn? Where's my son?”

Grandpa pinched his lips together, studied Mom. Or maybe he was buying time while he thought of how to phrase it.

“He's here. We got stuck together somehow; I don't understand it any better than you. It's a miracle, is what it is.”

I wished I had eyes to roll. Suddenly he was a victim in all this; an innocent rube, a confused old man. What was it about my mother that led him to rein in all of his venom?

“I want to talk to him,” Mom said.

Grandpa shook his head sadly. “It isn't up to me who gets to talk when.”

She pierced Grandpa with a look that made me flinch. It was a very familiar look from when I was a boy and I was misbehaving. “I want you to leave Finn alone. You had your life. You can't have Finn's. I won't let you.”

Grandpa held his open palms in the air. “I told you, I had nothing to do with it. I just found meself here, like I was dropped from the sky.”

Mom put her hands on top of her head. “I can't believe I'm having this conversation. You died. I was there; I saw you die.”

“Come inside and sit down.” Grandpa tried to steer her through the door, but Mom didn't budge.

“This isn't your house. You don't live here and you have no right to invite me in.”

Grandpa held up the key. “I paid for this house. Every penny, with my sweat and blood. Don't you tell me it isn't mine.”

Mom didn't respond; she just glared.

Grandpa huffed. “Well, I'm going in. If you want to come in and have a cup of tea, you're welcome.” As he unlocked the door with the spare key Grandma had given me to replace the one I'd lost at the bottom of the reservoir, he turned, held the screen door open. Mom stood with arms folded, staring toward the street. I heard her sniff back tears as the screen door swung closed.

W
ithin hours, Lorena and I were on CNN.

“You can clearly hear Finn Darby call ‘Lorena,' although the woman he's addressing is Summer Locker, a waitress who lives in northwest Atlanta. Lorena is the name of Darby's late wife, who died two years ago in a boating accident...”

They played a tape of Grandpa's phone call and covered that angle as well. There were probably a half-dozen news vans parked outside my apartment; fortunately I went straight to Mick's apartment when I regained control of myself. Summer was there, watching the news while Mick talked to his mole at FEMA.

They were quarantining the city. They had secured Route 285—the perimeter—but if we could trust what the feds were saying it was to protect the victims of this new “disease” from throngs of superstitious miscreants whose threats against us were growing louder each day. (For good measure MSNBC aired a few clips of sundry extremists airing their opinions of what to do with the afflicted.) People with good reason to move in or out of the city would be allowed, according to the news. Still, the images of National Guard
troops lining the perimeter was disconcerting.

MSNBC also reported two separate multiple homicides, where the only thing that connected the victims was all of them were known to have hitchers. There was some debate about whether these could be classified as hate crimes.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Mick growled as he closed his phone. He flopped onto the couch. “They've documented at least two cases of people who've left and not come back. The bleeding hitchers appear to have taken them over permanently.”

We digested this in silence.

“So now we know,” I said.

“Now we know,” Mick echoed. He turned his face toward the ceiling, expelled a plume of cigarette smoke.

The news didn't chill me the way I might have expected, probably because deep down I already knew how this was going to end if we couldn't figure out a way to stop it. I didn't have much faith in FEMA or the CDC; this was too bizarre for a federal agency to get a grip on it.

“Summer has a theory about what's happening, and I think I've figured out a way to test it,” I said, trying to strike a positive note.

We drifted into the space that served as Mick's living room and I explained. It hinged on my late friends, Annie and Dave. As I talked I pulled out my notebook, wrote their names on opposite sides of the page.

“One of the last things Annie said to me was not to feel bad for her, because she wasn't all that sorry about dying.” I underlined Dave's name a half-dozen times. “Dave had a wife he loved like crazy. Just a flat-out happy guy.” If Dave was still on the other side, we were probably on the wrong track.

“So you want to check to see if these people are in Deadland, eh?” Mick said.

“That's the idea,” I said.

Mick nodded. “Annie should be there, Dave shouldn't, because Dave should be back here.”

“How are you going to get Grandpa to go to the places where Annie and Dave died?” Summer asked.

“How am
I
going to?” I laughed. “I'm not. My job is to float around on the doorstep of the dead and look for these people; you and Mick have to get me there.”

Mick flexed his bicep, looked at Summer. “We're the muscle.”

Summer shook her head. “It's simpler if I go this time; Lorena would probably go willingly if you asked.”

She had a point. The thing was, I wanted to do this. I wanted to see the evidence (or lack thereof) firsthand. “I see what you're saying, but I'm hoping I can communicate with Annie if she's there. She'll help us if she can. You don't know her.”

“I had a brother who drank himself to death about a year ago,” Summer countered. “We could use him instead. If he returned to the world of the living, we're definitely wrong, because he hated it here.”

“Where did he die?” I asked.

“Piedmont Hospital.”

I shook my head. “There'll be thousands of dead in a hospital. Locating him would be dodgy.” Then I remembered something Summer had said. “Plus, I have one foot in Deadland already, remember? There's no guarantee you can get there.”

Summer kicked at the spine of a paperback lying on the floor. She sighed. “You're right. But I'm still going to try to find Deadland next time I'm inside. Anything's better than being trapped in there.”

I handed Summer the spare key to the Maserati. Now there was nothing to do but wait for Grandpa.

“So have you found out anything that could help Finn when he gets over there?” Mick asked, gesturing at the stack of books Summer had brought along.

Summer fidgeted with a corkscrew somebody had left on the coffee table. “I don't know how it could help, but it's all here. Krishnapuma spent entire days watching Deadland, and by the time he
died he saw it for what it was.”

“Which is?” Mick asked.

Summer shrugged. “A waiting room. We go on from there.”

“We go on in little bits, blown away,” Mick said. “That's not very reassuring, is it?”

Summer pulled one leg onto the couch, steepled her hands under her chin. “We don't just blow away, it's much more than that. We return to where we came from, back into the...” she swept her arms in a grand gesture—“into the all. Our individual selves are just an illusion, just a game we play, and we remember this, one fleck at a time. It's beautiful. Very Vedic.”

“The way you interpret it, it is,” Mick said. “Why couldn't it be purgatory? When the last of you blows away, you go to hell.”

“You know,” I said, “right now I couldn't care less where we go. I just don't want to go there any time soon.” I wasn't in the mood for a theological debate. “Does he say anything that can help us—”