“Didn’t plan on it,” I said. I slid down the length of the log, listened for footsteps or tells. “I just make a point of shooting folks who shoot me.”
He was silent.
“I want to know if I got this right,” I shouted. I willed him to make a move while I talked, willed him to peer out and try to find me. “You were sick of it, weren’t you? The preaching. The wilderness. You were sick of it, and you were sane, and you wanted to go live with the living, so you ran off to the city and got caught up in cards and whiskey. Do I have it right so far?”
Wind in the leaves. The snap of a reloaded magazine. I focused on the snap, raised the barrel of the Colt over the log.
“You play the tables long enough in the New French, you start owing money around town. Which, in the end, really just means you owe Coroner. I bet it wasn’t long before Coroner came calling, and you started to wonder what you could give him to get him off your back. Then you remembered your daddy, and it all—”
He cut me off with a thundercrack. I fired twice over the log.
The Colt clicked.
Christopher must have heard it. He coughed and fired into the dead tree, tearing through moss and bark and wood as if he were hacking with a machete, moving closer and coughing and ripping apart the air—
And then he stopped.
There was a snap, and the woods fell silent.
I peered over the log.
She held him like a lover. His head hung limp, twisted. Her forearm was mangled, her mouth bloodstained. She was still covered in the powder from the airbag. Three dead rescue workers in camouflage armor staggered through the trees behind her.
I gave up, then.
Those armor suits, so bulky and futile. Xin Sun with blood in her mouth. Everyone was dead. No one was coming for me. And even if I found my way home, Coroner would be waiting.
Xin pressed her lips against the dead boy’s throat. At first, it looked like a kiss. And then it didn’t. She opened the artery, ripped away muscle. Her eyes flicked to the side and met mine; she seemed torn between finishing her meal and moving on to me. The boy’s blood ran down the front of her shirt. The rescue crew’s legs were all bent into painful angles—maybe they’d wrecked—but they still hitched toward us, inch by inch.
“You were right,” I said softly. “I’m a stupid asshole.”
She watched me, shifted her weight. You look the dead in the eyes, you see the judgment.
“I can’t go back to the city. Don’t know why I’d go back, anyway. I ain’t got no family, no daughter in California. All I got is a landlord and some funerals I ain’t paid for.”
The rescuers were close now. I opened my fingers, dropped the Colt.
“I don’t want to be owned,” I said. “I don’t want to owe nobody no more. I been stuck a long time.”
She was silent. I tried to relax. Tried not to feel the blood drum in my neck, my chest. The air tasted good—I was glad to die outside. It was the best I could hope for, going out where I could see the birds. There was a kind of relief in it, a lightness. This is how it’s going to be. Feet scuffed the dirt, one step and then another.
“Go on, Xin,” I said.
She jerked backward with a thwip.
Xin and Christopher fell, tangled together. Before they hit the dirt, the rescue workers’ heads shattered in a spray of bone and blood. I spun around, followed the sound of silenced shots. The preacher stood at the base of his tower with a pistol in each hand, his guns raised toward me and the dead, his face empty as an abandoned city.
We burned the bodies in silence. Joseph stood too close to Christopher’s pyre, head bowed and lips moving wordlessly. The sun was almost down. I held one of his pistols and watched the woods. Far as I could tell, the preacher didn’t know what his son had planned to do. I wasn’t going to tell him. I didn’t have anything more to say to Xin, and I felt guilty for it. Still, I stood by her pyre, clinging quietly to my only friend at a lonely party.
When the preacher finished his prayers, we climbed the tower and watched the fires burn down. He made bitter coffee, and we drank it slowly as the stars came out, denser and brighter than I’d seen in years. When Joseph spoke, his voice was hoarse and flat.
“You still want to try to take me back to your city?”
I reckoned I could do it. Carry him to Coroner. My debt might not be paid, but the boss would be off my back for another day. He’d have something priceless, something that no thuglord or company—not even the few who could fly over oceans—could buy: words that could hold the dead at bay. Joseph might not cooperate, but Coroner knew how to make a man talk. He’d learn the loops and rhythms, put poets on his payroll, try to vivisect the tongue of Heaven. He’d try to figure out what other things those words could make the dead do.
I swallowed my coffee. “No, sir.”
The old man nodded, then unsheathed his knife.
“You were blessing her,” he said.
I watched the knife’s tip, tried to work out the right answer. He took my silence for confusion.
“The woman. You were blessing her.”
The pyre coals glowed below, a constellation of deaths.
“Her name was Xin Sun,” I said. “She was the nearest thing to family that I had.” I looked up from the knife and met his eyes, willing him to believe me. “I don’t know how to save a soul, but I would have liked to have saved hers.”
There was nothing about Xin’s soul that needed saving. I hoped she would have forgiven the lie. Joseph leaned on the rail and toyed with his knife, moonlight glinting on the blade. My palms were sweaty, my throat tight with unasked questions. I wasn’t used to wanting something like this. Wanting to walk in the wilderness, outside of walls. Wanting to ride the roads and forests, far from companies and criminals, free from Coroner and the machinery of obligation. I’d never believed that kind of life was possible, and now I was drunk on the fantasy.
“If you want me to teach you,” Joseph said at last, “I’m gonna have to cut out your feed.”
I touched the warm nub on my neck and bit back a smile.
Mark of the Devil.
Already, I could feel it. The sting of alcohol. Metal on skin, the knife’s edge like nightbreeze. Blood. One drop, and then a trickle. The cut, the last hum of the feed running my numbers.
And then a release, when it tells the world that I’m a dead man.
Resurgam
Lisa Mannetti
“You can’t buy human flesh and blood in this country, sir, not alive, you can’t,” says Wegg, shaking his head. “Then query, bone?”
For most of the nineteenth century, anatomy professors and students could secure bodies only on surreptitious nocturnal visits to a church cemetery or, more likely, a potters field.
It had happened before and Auden Strothers knew it. So now on an uncharacteristically snowy March night he was in Yale’s Cushing Whitney medical library looking for answers that stubbornly evaded him.
This morning at approximately 2:00 a.m. the cadaver (nicknamed Molly until today) he shared with three other fledgling doctors suddenly sat up, hemostats clinging to her open mid-section like long silver leeches, widened her jaws and took a chunk out of Sheri Trent’s right shoulder.
Sheri hissed—as much from surprise as pain, Auden guessed—and clamped her left hand against the wound. Auden’s own breathing became rapid behind his paper mask, and he found himself staring at the blood that seeped between the fingers of his teammate’s pale yellowish latex glove. Sheri’s gaze followed his and, for a second (a second too goddamn long, Auden thought), she watched the blood that dripped from her glove and pattered on to the naked woman’s waxy thighs.