Death 07 - For the Love of Death (6 page)

Pax

I’m playing hop-along and it
ain’t no picnic
as Gramps would say. Nausea churns, and cold sweat collects on my feverish flesh.

My arm’s a numb horror, and I can’t think for it.

I stay in the greenbelts where the bots don’t roam.

Like buffalo.

I cackle. And that’s when it hits me: I’m touched in the head.

I haven’t eaten in hours, my arm’s a pretzel, and Paxton is just a little giddy from shock and exhaustion, so excuse his delirium.

And
I can’t leave this fucked up world until I find my sister
.

I stumble and fall to my knees. I left my undead fam to deal with the bot bruisers a few kilometers back as I make my way to the clinic where Mom takes me when shit gets saucy.

Like the time I thought I had telekinesis when what I had was a good case of gravity.

That’d been awesome, one broken arm later.

Same one as now.
And the hits just keep on coming.

I send out an undead search beam. I’m barely here, the clinic should be just a half mile away, but I can’t make it.

I lower my chin to my chest.

I wait.

They come.

A man, woman and daughter.

I feel guilt.

“Master?” the father says.

I have to ask, “How’d you go?”

“Automobile wreck,” he answers swiftly.

A tooth tumbles out like a decaying pearl and rolls, hitting my kneecap. I take a deep breath.

The little girl sucks her thumb and clutches a teddy bear in her other hand.

She lowers her hand, and the thumb’s gone. Her brows come together, the flesh hanging there like a stripe.

“Your thumb…” I sway, falling on my ass, and the motion sends pain so awful it bugs my eyes.

She notices it’s still in her mouth. “Thank you,” she says as it falls out, and stoops over to pick it up. She looks it over then slides it into her dress pocket.

Disgusting.

I look behind me, panting. The zombies watch my stare.

“
I need medical attention.”

The man moves forward.

I did a shit job of raising him. Half his face is gone and one eyeball hangs by a thread.

Can't have that.

I shoot him between the eyes. The bolt of death energy slides out of me like a punch. He stumbles backward, falling to the ground, and his wife and daughter gasp as residual hits them.

Dad’s voice talks to me in memory.

Bind them. Focus, Paxton. It’s like fishing, son. You have the pole; reel them in. Snag then reel.

I do that now. Breathing slow, getting my undead Zen on.

The man comes off the ground like a stiff plank.

He is perfect.

Human and alive. Vital. His clothes are mid-twentieth.
Damn
, that’ll stick out.

I shift my attention to the wife and daughter. They’re pretty rough around the edges, but they’ll do at a distance.

I don’t tell him what to do. He picks me up as though I weigh nothing. I’m two hundred ten pounds, but a feather in his arms.

He carries me to the clinic. It’s a half-kilometer. I feel his family trail us.

He kicks open the clinic door and takes me to the receptionist desk.

It’s a fucking bot.

It stands while I despair. My feelings choke me.

<
Paranormal!
> it croaks loudly.

With one arm, my zombie decapitates it. The head slams into the wall behind its headless body and sticks in the drywall like a hunk of beached driftwood.

My zombie lowers his arm. Broken.

I close my eyes.

When I open them, I’m emptier but the arm is whole again. There’s nothing as powerful as my AFTD and Organic powers working together.

“Organic,” I toss out in an incoherent command.

He moves from room to room. All Organics.

“There.” I point to one door in particular.

Jezebel,
reads the door placard.

Thank whatever is holy there’s a Jezebel in this world, too.

He swings through and there she is. My Organic from home.

Shock and bewilderment wash over her features.

“Paxton Hart.”

Sweat runs into my eyes.

“Set me down,” I say.

My zombie lays me on the bed, and I yell when the thinnest of cotton sheets grazes my arm.

“You’re dead,” she whispers, clutching at her heart.

I bark out a laugh, catching the irony.

I shake my head, and my vision swims. I take deep breaths. “No.” I jerk my thumb at my zombie. “He is.”

Jezebel moves her gaze to the zombie.

He tips his hat. “George,” he introduces.

She pales in front of my eyes.

Panic surges. “Jezebel, don’t you dare pass out on me!”

She falls on her ass to the chair and throws her head between her knees.

Precious seconds float by.

Finally, she looks at me. “How much time do we have?”

“Not much. My zom—
George
disabled the bot at the front desk.”

“The ALB?”

I nod without really knowing what the acronym stands for. The metal thing that does the Body Snatcher bellow.

Yeah, that.

“We’re going to have to set that arm.”

“I know. I’m Organic.”

Her brows collide. “You are?”

God.

“Yes. I mean, on my world.”

Her frown deepens.

I wave my hand around. “Just set the thing, and I can heal it.”

She flattens her lips. “I don’t know if you’re in any shape to do anything, young man.”

I roll my eyes.

“Fine.” She reaches her hand out, hovering above my core.

George looks on with interest.

Jezebel scoots her chair further away from him.

Her hand holds position for about three seconds. “No, your energy is depleted.”

I grit my teeth, and our eyes lock.

She makes a disgusted noise.

I scream when she straightens my arm.

Then blackness swallows my vision.

My consciousness disappears along with it.

*

I wake in jagged pieces of awareness.

Of course, the yelling doesn't help.

“I have jurisdiction here. This patient falls under HIPAA privacy.”

“This human scans paranormal.”

“So we turn away another human being who needs medical attention because they’re different? If this isn’t segregation, I don’t know what is!”

I crack an eye open at the
S
word. Haven’t heard that in forever.

George stands guard. His readiness tells me the poo-poo is about to hit the oscillating device.

Two bots crowd the hole in the open door. An actual human being scans the interior of the small clinic room I’m in.

“His ALB-scan comes up deceased,” the man says from the door.

The human dude.

He folds his arms across his chest, glaring at Jezebel. “Explain that.”

“I can’t. But I can say his broken arm needs time. It was a compound humerus fracture and had begun to heal wrong.”

He ignores her. “We will take him for questioning.”

I shut my eye on instinct, and his stare burns over me.

“My ALBs also detect reanimated humanoid.”

I blink my eye open again, and he’s already moving his gaze to her.

Jezebel sweeps her hand around the room. “Do you see a corpse, Dale?”

I can feel him stewing in his own shit.

Loving it. It’s the little things.

“No,” he admits.

“Just go. I will pulse-communicate when he awakens.”

The silence builds.

“Fine.” A pause. “But you understand the error rate on an ALB scans—”

“Is nearly zero,” Jezebel interrupts. “Yes, I'm aware.”

“Pulse me,” Dale the Douche barks.

“I said I would.”

The door slams shut and she throws what sounds like a bolt.

They couldn't have missed the headless bot out there?

George is there, hands underneath my armpits.

Jezebel turns to me. “Now tell me I didn’t just invite incarceration for no good reason.”

“No.”

Jezebel looks to George again. “And what’s with him?”

“Can you?” I point to my mending arm.

She nods, holding out her palm.

I slip my right hand into hers.

Our power bursts over us, flowing from our connected hands to the palm she holds over my arm.

Blissful relief flows over me as the pain moves to aching.

After five minutes, it's gone.

We let go and I lay back and begin to speak.

She doesn't interrupt once.

Deegan

The low keen of a sirens wail in the distance as I hold on for dear life.

More dear now that I’m lost in a world where an enemy has already killed me and heals as I escape.

We stop, and my zombie’s arms loosen as I slide down.

Did I mention I suck at control? I long for Pax. He’d have such a handle on this.

The zombie turns and I gasp.

He’s beautiful and alive.

His eyes, so deep a midnight blue they’re black velvet kissed by the ocean. His olive skin is rich and dusky, not a hint of ruddiness,
cafe au lait.
Truly black hair, like mine, is a tight cap just shy of curly that covers his head.

He grins and his mouth is pink, every tooth straight and whole.

This is where my control really is bad. I raise him by accident then do a mediocre job. Like a rotting cherry on top, my death energy leaks all over him, and now he looks all lovely and alive. Somehow.

Wow.

The worst part is he's a killer.

And he's all mine.

“Mistress?”

I clear my throat, smoothing my riot of hair out of the way. I grab the hair band off my wrist and tie the mess in a huge knot at the base of my neck.

“It’s Deegan,” I say quietly.

His pupils contract as a slice of sunlight spears the forest, turning his dark eyes to cerulean blue. All colors. One.

I swallow, slopping through some manners finally.

“What's—what's your name?”

“Mitchell,” he says.

Then there is nothing.

The question hangs between us. He's just waiting for me to ask.

“Who did you kill?” I ask in a soft voice. I don't have to be afraid. There's never been a documented case of a zombie killing an AFTD. It's as though there's a fail safe. We control the dead.

I am still afraid. His physical presence is intimidating.

He cocks his head. “How do you know I've killed anyone?”

His face tells me nothing. Cheekbones like forward slashes sculpt a young, hard face.

I look down at my hands. “I can’t raise… anyone who is not a murderer.”

Shame makes my face hot.

Then he laughs.

I snap my head up. Hands to hips, lips thinning. “What is so funny?”

Because it’s not.

He's not chuckling, but laughing deeply, from his belly. “First, I don't know how you can know that. Second, I don't know what I am, why you matter, what in the hell is going on, and third—I don't want to go back.”

I retreat a step. Out of all the zombies I have to raise, it’s one of the really bad ones. Of course, when all I can raise as a four-point are murderers, the choices become limited.

I don’t want to go back
, he said.

I do.
I very much want to go back.

So what does an almost seventeen-year-old girl do? She bursts into tears.

Arms envelop me.

The smell of rot is gone because my emotions are all over the place, and I can’t control the leakage.

I smell many things. The main thing is death.

For an AFTD, death is home. I take a shuddering inhale and grip Mitchell the Zombie’s shirt.

The flannel is soft beneath my fingertips.

The heart I made beat strokes my face with its rhythm, and I cry harder.

His hand comes to the back of my head. “I am here, Mistress.”

“I know,” I sniffle, supremely pissed at myself for losing it.

I pull away, and he thumbs my tears away.

“Deegan.”

Mitchell smiles. “Deegan. And what a funny name that is.”

I nod. The parents weren’t great on picking our names. I love them anyway.

I give him a watery smile.

“I murdered the men responsible for killing my family.”

I look into his face. The unforgiving and matter of fact way he says it brooks no argument. Uncompromising.

“Oh,” I answer in lame reply.

His expression tightens, his eyes glazing to a faraway look, his hands unconsciously clenching into loose fists.

“I was in college, close to home, living with my folks, and I was in charge. They were out of town, see.”

I did see.

Anguish.

Guilt.

Responsibility.

I see it all.

He stares at the ground, exhaling in a rush, and gives a harsh scrub of his head. “Some chumps thought they had easy pickings. Scoping out the neighborhood, I’m sure their plan was to be in an out.”

I shook my head, denying the story to come, and he laughs.

It sounds like choking despair to me, not a bit of humor.

One breath, two… on the third he says it. “They did my sister first.”

His gaze moves to mine. He doesn’t explain.

I close my eyes to the grief. His.

“She was only fifteen.” He pauses. “Then they did my brother. Of course—he was trying to protect her. At twelve.” He shakes his head slowly. “Not a chance in hell. Two guys, twenties.”

I have many questions. But I let him finish.

He raises his eyes, locking with mine. Full of malice. They glitter as I stand beneath the weight of remembered violence.

“They didn’t know anyone was home. Thought the entire family was MIA.”

I have to ask, “What were you doing?”

His eyes never leave mine. “Getting pizza.”

It's funny really. Your siblings killed because of a pizza run. His face isn't funny. It's etched with sadness.

“Cory was still alive when I came in.”

“Your brother?”

He nods.

“What did you do to the men?”

Mitchell puts his hands on his hips. “I beat one of them until his brains came out.”

I grasp my hands. I know how hard the human skull is.

“Weaponless?” I clarify because I have to.

He raises his hands, waving them side to side.

I gulp.

“Then I cut the guy's dick off that raped my sister.”

I gasp and retreat a step.

Mitchell stares at me.

“He took a while to bleed out. I took my time with him.”

I raise a palm. I can't. I just can't hear anymore.

“I know you’re young. But you asked… Deegan.”

I nod. I did.

“How old were you?”

“Nineteen.”

“How old were you when…” I don’t finish my question.

“Twenty.”

I think. “How come they, how come—ugh.”

A sad smile tweaks the corners of his mouth. “I didn't get in trouble for the murders.”

My eyebrows hike.

“They threw me in a nuthouse.”

I laugh. It's such an inappropriate term for people with mental illness. Gram would have a turtle over it.

I'm instantly sad at the reminder and feel my smile slide off my face like melting candle wax. I remind myself Mitchell is from another era. He died almost forty years ago.

Pre-paranormals.

“There was a big ass public outcry: Save the orphan. Of course, the doctors thought I acted vengefully.”

“Did you?”

His answer is instantaneous: “Yes.”

I can’t blame him. But a human being has to have a certain disposition to… retaliate in the way Mitchell did.

“How can you make me alive?” he asks, deftly changing the subject.

He doesn’t tell me how he dies.
Okay.

“After you—ya know, died.” I flick my eyes to him. He returns my stare. “My grandpa is a scientist, and he found anomalous markers on the human genome.”

His eyebrow pops.

“Atypical,” I explain.

He nods, a smile ghosting his lips.

“Then a pharmaceutical mogul gets involved, makes a chemical cocktail that can make these… powers, manifest.”

Mitchell palms his strong jaw.

It occurs to me right then he’s kinda hot, which introduces a mondo-awkward moment.

He’s dead, Deegan.

Thankfully, he’s not paying attention to my discomfort.

“So Grandpa found what kind of genes?”

I swallow, scrambling. “Paranormal.”

He laughs.

I frown.

“What?” he asks. “I know what you are.” He taps his temple. “It’s in my brain. Necromancer, Mistress. I know you rule”—he puts a thumb to his chest—“us.”

I shake my head.

“Not all. I can only raise murderers.”

Now he really laughs again.

I don't.

“You're shitting me?”

I smile despite the circumstance. “I shit you not.”

“Can I say that's not the best ability, or whatever it is you have.”

“Yeah,” I agree, my self-pity begging for a party. I refrain, in the face of his tragedy, I don't think I have the luxury.