Passing Strange (20 page)

“I couldn’t lose you,” he said. “Not again. No more schemes.”

She moved him back, gently, with her slim, cool hands.

“Really, Pete?” she said. “You mean it?”

“Honest,” he said. “I’ll finish up taking photos for the Reverend, then get the hell out of Dodge.”

She hugged him and kissed his cheek.

“That makes me happy,” she said. “I really should get going.”

“Christie,” he said. “Are you coming with me? To Arizona?”

She reached behind him to get her bag from the backseat.

“I don’t know, Pete. I think maybe yes.”

They got out of the car and crossed each other in front of the headlight beams. He didn’t pull away until she was halfway down the street, because she always stopped at a certain house, turned, and waved.

He waved back, even though he knew she couldn’t see him any longer.

“P
ETER,” DUKE SAID
, taking Pete’s hand in a firm, dry grip. “You’re looking well.”

“Duke,” Pete said. “You too.”

Actually, Duke looked the same as he always looked: tall, bald, and pale, his eyes bright and yet somehow dark at the same time, perhaps because the light they held revealed his sarcastic, mocking character.

“Eager to revisit the asylum?” he asked.

“Alish isn’t here, you said?”

“No. He’s traveling to D.C. for the great maggotfest.”

“Nice.”

He could feel Duke looking him over.

“Are you okay, Pete?”

“I’m okay,” Pete said.

“Did the Reverend call you?”

“He called me.”

Duke waited him out, and Pete capitulated.

“He told me how proud he was of me and that he wants me to accomplish a few more things here before I go back. He wants photos of our enemies.”

Duke clapped him on the back. “I knew you were the man for the job, Pete,” he said. “I’m proud of you, too.”

“Thanks.”

“Ready to go see Miss Hunter?”

“Sure,” Pete said, feigning enthusiasm.

Miss Hunter greeted Pete with an expansive handshake and her killer smile. Her legs, as usual, were flawless, even though her skirt went all the way below her knees. He always thought that Alish must have created her in a test tube somehow; she was so perfect and beautiful.

“Mr. Martinsburg,” she said. Her hand was like Christie’s, slim and smooth, but warm. “How are you?”

“I just wanted to stop in and say hello,” he told her. “I’m not going to be in town much longer.”

She waited.

“And, um, I wanted to thank you for all the help you gave me. I really think it’s changed my perspective on the differently biotic.”

“Really?” she said, smiling. “I’m so glad to hear that. I understand you’re continuing your education at One Life Ministries?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“One Life isn’t exactly known for its enlightened view on the differently biotic,” she said, and he thought he detected an extra trace of irony in the term “differently biotic.”

Pete tried without success to keep his eyes on Duke as Angela sat on the edge of her uncluttered desk. Her skirt rode up past her knee, and she noticed him noticing.

“I can see why you’d say that,” he said, his mouth dry. He couldn’t quite read her expression.

“I’m sure you’ll find your place with One Life, Pete,” she said. “You have a lot to offer. Much more than you know.”

He wondered if she ever took a break from being a head shrinker. “Well, thanks. Tell Alish I said hi, would you?”

“Certainly.”

“I’ll escort him out, Angela,” Duke said. She nodded, and they both watched her walk around the desk to her seat.

“Thank you, Duke. Good-bye, Peter.”

“Later.”

Following Duke out into the hallway, Pete made eye contact with the girl in the admin office, and he felt his heart stutter when he realized that she was a zombie. Was his zombie radar so off that he could no longer tell the living from the dead?

“It was good that you did that,” Duke said, distracting him as they continued down the corridor. “Miss Hunter’s heart bleeds for everything—stray puppies, lost sheep, maggot farms. Your little talk will bother her all night.”

“What is it with you and her, anyway?” Pete said. “Doesn’t the Reverend own the foundation, or something?”

“It’s complicated,” he replied.

Pete wondered if Duke practiced being inscrutable. But then, of course he did—if Duke ascribed to Mathers’s religious views, then it was safe to assume that he also practiced the same sort of emotional mastery that he, Pete, was learning.

He realized that Duke had walked past the corridor that led to the exit. He might also have glanced at the camera mounted at the end of the hall, but it was difficult to tell because of the unreadability of his expression.

“Are we going somewhere?” Pete asked him.

“I want to show you something.”

“Oh no. Not another secret lab?”

Duke laughed. “Something like that, actually. I want you to see how complicated our relationship with the foundation gets.”

Pete shook his head, then he stopped in his tracks. Duke looked ready for an argument, misunderstanding the cause of Pete’s hesitation.

“The girl in the office,” he said. “I just realized. She was the one they were dissecting, wasn’t she?”

“She was.”

“Damn,” Pete said, remembering things that his conscious mind attempted to suppress. Some of her organs had been removed from her body when Duke had brought him to the lab; grayish, pulpy-looking things that sat in plastic trays under glass domes like spoiled bakery confections. There was a length of intestine coiled like rope, and Pete hadn’t been able to eat sausages since. He’d realized that the girl, the half that was strapped to an upright gurney, had been watching him as he peered over her insides, her wild eyes tracking him as he went from table to table like he was examining exhibits in a museum. He’d examined all the beakers containing her parts; he’d even perforated a grayish lump with the point of a pencil while she’d watched. Her attention, even more than the sight of her guts, had brought him to the point of nausea.

“You told me that the Hunters didn’t know what they were doing. That Alish was crazy.”

“He is,” Duke said. “Even voodoo science gets lucky sometimes.”

“You told me that he was just exploiting them, looking for the fountain of youth or something. ‘Trying to cure death,’ I think is what you said.”

“He is. And exploiting them. Now will you come on? We don’t really have an eternity of time ourselves here.”

“She looked pretty good to me,” Pete said, not moving. “I couldn’t even tell that she was dead, at first.”

Pete saw from Duke’s sinister smile that he’d made a mistake, but he didn’t know what the mistake was.

“Yeah, you’ve been having that problem a lot lately, haven’t you? Now come on.”

“What does that mean?”

Duke smiled. “What, indeed?”

They walked on.

“So you have yourself a little girlfriend now?” Duke said. He wasn’t smiling, Pete realized. He was leering.

“What about it?”

“Don’t you find her a little frigid?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“She a cold fish? A little lifeless in the sack?”

Pete wanted to kill him, but he regulated the emotion and followed Duke down the hall toward the small dormitory wing.

“She’s fine,” Pete said, trying to keep from sounding affronted. “She’s going to go back to Arizona with me.”

“Ha! Now
that
would be interesting.”

Pete wanted to ask him just why he found that so interesting, but he let it lie, hoping Duke would elaborate. They walked on in silence.

Pete knew from his time working off his community service as a maintenance worker under Duke that there were six small rooms set aside for the zombies, only one of which had been inhabited at the time. The room was empty now. Pete used to sit in the monitor room and watch him on the screens when he’d take walks around the perimeter of the building. Cooper or Hooper or something like that; Pete figured that the zombie must have taken off when his dissected pal was discovered by his friends.

“Alish has had some success with his experiments,” Duke said, whispering even though the cameras mounted in the dorm wing weren’t microphoned. “He’s like a kid playing with his first chemistry set. The walking corpse you saw is pretty much his only real success, and his failures could fill a cemetery, believe me. You don’t want to spend any time digging behind the building.”

The foundation was set up on a low hill, and there was a scrubby lawn, like an untended baseball field, that stretched out to the perimeter fence. Duke was right; Pete didn’t want to spend any time digging there.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Why does Reverend Mathers let him keep working if he’s actually helping the zombies? That doesn’t make sense to me.”

Duke stopped in front of the last door in the hallway.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” he said. “Half the world’s doomsday devices—nerve gases, super diseases, nuclear weapons—were all created by someone looking for something they thought would benefit mankind. On the way to finding an endlessly renewable energy source, humanity creates a weapon that can devastate a city. We reach out to explore space and as soon as we get there, point our cameras—and our missiles—inward, at our neighbors, at our enemies. We seek to cure death and instead give death dominion over the earth.”

He smiled.

“The Reverend lets Alish tinker because he thinks eventually he’ll discover something that can wipe out all the maggot farms in one shot.”

There was a noise behind the door. Duke glanced over his shoulder, and Pete thought that maybe he looked a little nervous.

“There’s something horrible behind that door, isn’t there?” he said. “Another monster that you want me to see.”

Duke’s laugh had no humor in it.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “But you still want to look, don’t you? It’s only human.”

He stood back, motioning to Pete like a carnival barker at the entrance of the freak show.

“Go ahead. Feast your eyes.”

Pete knew he should walk away, but instead he stepped forward and looked through the window in the door.

“Oh, gross,” he said.

The zombie inside the room fit the part. It was staring at the splintered ruin of what looked like a wooden bed frame and mattress. Long shreds of cloth that had been torn from the mattress lay about the otherwise empty room. Its flesh was hanging off its face in patches, and its clothing was in tattered rags that did little to hide the fact that chunks of its flesh were missing. What was left of its hair stood up in a ratty tangle.

“Alish’s newest pet,” Duke said. “It was the one the cops caught after we had our fun.”

The fun he was referring to, Pete realized, was the night they and a few other right-thinking Americans framed some zombies for a murder that was never actually committed.

“I thought it was dead,” Pete said. “Deactivated, like. The papers said it collapsed after getting Tasered.”

“It was. The cops didn’t know what to do with it, so they sent it here at the foundation’s request. Alish got the brilliant idea of Tasering it a second time, which must have gotten it going again. Like I said, voodoo science.”

The thing turned to the window in the door, as if noticing them. But there was no recognition in the unblinking eyes, not even acknowledgement. There was a hole in its face where its nose used to be.

“Gaah. It’s disgusting. It looks like its arm is broken,” Pete said, pointing at its left arm, which hung uselessly from the socket at an unnatural angle.

“The cops worked it over pretty good before the Taser,” Duke said. “Look closely, you can see some of the bullet holes. See that black blotch on its throat?”

The zombie staggered over to the door as though each step took an enormous effort. The glass was reinforced, Pete noticed, which meant the window must have been replaced sometime after he’d stopped working there.

“The interesting thing is that Alish hasn’t even told anybody outside the foundation about this.”

Its lips were gone, which made its expression even harder to read than the average zombie. The eyes gazed out vacantly, as though Duke and Pete were as easy to stare through as the window itself. It leaned forward until its gray, pitted forehead pressed against the glass.

“Thanks for this, Duke,” Pete said, lacing his voice with sarcasm. “To be frank, I could have gone my whole life without seeing this.”

The zombie lifted its working arm and its hand fell against the glass, as though it were punctuating Pete’s statement. At least two of its fingers were obviously broken, pointing from the bare knuckles at awkward angles. Each digit was peeling, in some places all the way to the bones beneath.

“Could you?” Duke said. “We weren’t sure.”

Pete couldn’t take his eyes off the horrible monster on the other side of the door, but he knew that Duke’s expression could be just as unreadable.

“What is that supposed to mean?” he said.

Duke’s eyes were ticking back and forth in their sockets, scanning Pete’s for data he couldn’t find.

“My God,” he said, finally. “You really don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“God bless America. If the Reverend knew how truly clueless you are, he’d toss you out of One Life so fast your head would spin.”

“You’ve lost me, Duke. I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Not so fast, sport.”

“Say what you mean, then.”

“Well,” Duke said, tapping at the corner of the glass with his knuckle. The monster didn’t react. “You’ve been spending an awful lot of time with maggot farms that aren’t as obvious as Stinky here. A weaker man might even think that some of the maggot farms you’ve been fraternizing with were
attractive
. Almost like the corpse down the hall.”

He paused and leaned in toward Pete until he was no farther away than the dead boy, but without the pane of glass separating them. Pete’s throat was suddenly dry. The zombie’s insides glistened where they were exposed to the air.

“Almost
exactly
like the corpse down the hall, in fact.”

“What…what are you saying?”

“Your girlfriend is dead, Pete,” Duke whispered, his coffee breath in Pete’s ear and his nostrils. “She’s a corpse.”

Pete stepped back, wondering why Duke would say such a thing to him. It took him a moment to register that he wasn’t speaking about Julie, because he hadn’t told anyone at One Life about Julie, not even the Reverend.

Duke smiled. “She’s Karen DeSonne, and she’s dead. Minus the Catholic-reform-school-girl getup, of course. She might have darker hair and blue contacts, but it’s her, just as dead as ever.”

Pete slumped against the wall, feeling like Duke had just knocked the wind out of him. Opposite, the lipless dead creature was pressing its face against the reinforced glass window.

“Did you kiss her, Pete? Did you give death a great big soul kiss?”

Pete’s internal organs began to rebel. He knew what Duke was saying was true. It was her.
Christie
. She was the one he followed in the woods that day, the one with the crazy glass eyes. It was true. Maybe he’d always known it.