Waking Lazarus (11 page)

His behavior modification system was homemade. One of a kind, his own design. Simple enough to build with some parts from the local hardware store, along with a little knowledge of electricity.

He clenched his teeth, then threw the switch and embraced the current. The machine had been integral to
becoming
. The machine would make sure he would keep
becoming
.

The leak would be plugged.

14

SAVING

Jude opened the door to the Red Lodge Cafe, then hurried inside. It was just rolling into dinner hour, and the place had more people in it than he had ever seen. Of course, Jude was usually here when he knew other people wouldn’t be.

He scanned the cafe, looking for her. Behind the counter a gray-haired waitress poured a cup of coffee for a grizzled man sitting at the counter. Out of the kitchen bounced a large, middle-aged waitress, bearing a couple specials of the day.

Those were the only two. She wasn’t here.

He moved to the counter and flagged down the woman pouring coffee. She shuffled over and looked at him with watery eyes.

‘‘Last night I was in here. And there was a young waitress, about twenty years old or so, with short blond hair.’’

‘‘Ginny?’’

‘‘Yeah, Ginny. Is she here?’’

‘‘Wish she was, buddy. She called in sick.’’

Jude’s stomach greeted the news uneasily. ‘‘Do you have her address or something? Some way I can reach her?’’

‘‘Yes,’’ the woman answered, then stood staring at him.

‘‘Can I have it?’’

‘‘You think I’m going to give some pretty young thing’s address to any wacko who happens to walk in off the street?’’

Jude nodded. ‘‘I totally agree. It’s just . . .’’ He leaned closer. ‘‘It’s just, I think she might be in danger.’’

‘‘Especially if I tell a freak like you how to find her. Beat it.’’

‘‘No, no, really.’’ He stopped. ‘‘Maybe you could come with me. Or someone else who works here. Someone.’’

The waitress studied his face a moment. ‘‘What makes you think she’s in trouble?’’

He sighed, shook his head. ‘‘It’s not a story you’d want to hear right now. Could we just go? If she’s fine, no harm done. But if tomorrow rolls around and something’s happened to her, you’ll think about this moment the rest of your life.’’

She continued to look at him, considering. Finally, without taking her eyes from his face, she shouted to the other waitress. ‘‘Brandy, can you cover for me for about fifteen minutes?’’

Brandy stopped in mid-step. ‘‘It’s rush hour here, Linda!’’

‘‘Then rush a little more. I’ll be right back.’’

Brandy banged through the doors into the kitchen with a huff. Linda, the gray-haired waitress, dug under the counter and retrieved a purse, then looked back at Jude again. ‘‘I just want you to know,’’ she said as she opened the top of her purse and let him peer inside. Jude saw the glint of a small-caliber revolver and nodded his head. ‘‘Don’t do anything that’s gonna make me open this purse. Understand?’’ Jude nodded again.

She took off her apron and headed for the door without waiting for Jude.

He caught up with Linda—who was quick on her feet—about halfway down the block. ‘‘How far?’’ he asked.

‘‘Just a couple of blocks,’’ she said. ‘‘I swear, if I find out you’re some kind of stalker or something, I will personally castrate you with a butter knife.’’

‘‘Understood.’’

They rounded the corner and cut through an alley, then came to an old house in the middle of the street. ‘‘She’s in the basement apartment,’’ Linda said as she went down the small flight of steps to a green door with the paint flaking off it.

She knocked. ‘‘Ginny? You in there?’’ They listened for an answer but didn’t hear one. She knocked again, a little louder. Still no answer.

Jude looked at Linda, arched his eyebrows. ‘‘Should we?’’ he asked.

She frowned. ‘‘Yeah, I think we should. You’ve got me a little spooked now.’’

Jude put his shoulder into the door, trying to bust it open. It didn’t move. He backed up as much as he could on the basement stoop and prepared himself for another crack at it.

‘‘Hang on,’’ Linda said. ‘‘Did you try the handle?’’

He reached for the handle. It turned in his hand, and the door creaked open. He looked at Linda and shrugged, then waved her inside first.

They walked in slowly. ‘‘Ginny?’’ Linda called. ‘‘You here, honey?’’ No answer.

They came to the living room, where Ginny sat at a card table, staring at the wall. In front of her was a pad of paper and a large bottle of pills.

Linda rushed over and put her hand to Ginny’s cheek as if to check her temperature. ‘‘You okay, dear? I—we—just wanted to check on you.’’ Ginny didn’t answer; she simply stared at the wall.

Jude entered the room, and the metallic tang of copper assaulted his tongue. He hesitated as Linda looked at him. ‘‘What is it?’’ she said.

‘‘Nothing. Check the bottle of pills.’’ He motioned to the prescription bottle.

Ginny broke her silence. ‘‘I haven’t taken any. Yet.’’

Linda looked at Jude, her eyes asking him what they should do. Jude moved across the room and pulled a folding chair up to the table. ‘‘Ginny,’’ he said softly, ‘‘I’m—’’

‘‘The guy from last night,’’ she finished, looking at him. ‘‘Peach pie.’’

He nodded. ‘‘We were worried . . . something was wrong.’’

‘‘That’s right, dear,’’ Linda joined in. ‘‘Do you want me to get you water or something?’’

‘‘No,’’ Ginny said, her gaze fixed on Jude. ‘‘What made you think something was wrong?’’ she asked.

‘‘You wouldn’t believe me, and it’s not important anyway.’’ He started to reach across the table to touch her hand, then stopped. ‘‘I . . . I know this sounds weird, but I need to touch you for just a minute, I think.’’

‘‘Oh, good gravy,’’ Linda blurted out. ‘‘You
are
a pervert. I knew it.’’ She started to open her purse.

Ginny looked calm, almost expectant. As if, on some level, she had been waiting for them to come crashing through her door. ‘‘No, wait, Linda,’’ Ginny said, eyeing Jude. ‘‘It’s okay.’’ Linda stopped but kept one hand in her purse.

Ginny put both her hands on the table and nodded at Jude.

Another headache was starting to buzz inside his skull. He wasn’t used to all this talk. In the past day he’d spoken more than he had in the past year. Even worse was the touching; it made his skin itch to think about it. Still, he needed to touch Ginny, because he needed to
know
.

He put his hand on top of hers. Instantly a new film-negative vision began.

In the vision, Ginny sat at her card table, writing on the pad. He could barely make out her features. The deep oranges and blacks of the vision combined to make her face look like a ghastly skull, the eyes hidden in dark ovals of black. Abruptly, in the vision, Ginny put down her pencil, reached for the bottle, poured an assortment on the table, and began stuffing them in her mouth.

The scene hyper-rewound and came to a stop on Ginny in a doctor’s office, sitting on a bench. Tears squeezed from her eyes—still sunken and hidden, even though the tears were obvious—and trickled down her face.

Yet again the scene hyper-rewound, then stopped on Ginny sitting in front of an empty canvas. She studied the canvas before tracing a streak of dark purple across it with a brush.

Suddenly the vision ended, and Jude felt like a door that had suddenly been slammed shut against a wailing storm outside. The world snapped back into focus as he shook his head, looking down at the table.

‘‘You okay?’’ Ginny asked.

‘‘You grew up in Butte. Your parents are John and Shelly. You loved playing softball in high school. Catcher.’’

‘‘All right, I’m calling the police,’’ Linda said, moving for the phone. Ginny reached out and grabbed Linda’s arm, stopping her.

‘‘Yeah, that’s all true,’’ Ginny said.

‘‘You need to know, before you do something drastic,’’ he said, his eyes dropping to the bottle of pills, ‘‘that you can tell your parents your secret. That they will love you, no matter what. That someday your painting career will go somewhere. That this—’’ he waved his hand in the air, indicating the nearly empty apartment—‘‘this isn’t
who
you are. It’s
where
you are. And that, when you think no one else is listening . . . God is.’’ The word
God
felt unnatural and foreign in his mouth, as if he were trying to chew on something too big. Jude was stunned even to hear himself say it. After God had taken his mother, after he’d ridiculed people for their bumbling attempts to convert him, he was now spouting the same gibberish? It didn’t make any sense.

Tears brimmed in Ginny’s eyes. ‘‘Excuse me,’’ she said, then got up from the table and went toward the bathroom.

Jude stood and caught Linda staring at him, her mouth agape. The look in her eyes was one he knew well from his previous life as everybody’s favorite life-after-death boy: part wonder, part fear. ‘‘I don’t know who you are,’’ she whispered after a few seconds, ‘‘but thank you.’’

He nodded. ‘‘Do you think she’ll be okay now?’’

‘‘I’ll make sure of it,’’ she answered.

Jude turned to head for the door again, then stopped and looked back to Linda. ‘‘I don’t know who I am, either.’’

15

FREEZING
Eight Years Ago

The third death started uneventfully enough. Jude was twenty-four then, a couple of years out of college, and still at his first job. He had earned his degree in business administration, a generic kind of diploma he knew was a big disappointment for some. His father, for one. William Allman was of the firm belief you didn’t need a piece of paper to tell you—or anyone else, for that matter—you were smart enough to do something.
He
didn’t have one, and he did fine for himself. He saw Jude’s desire to go to college as a sign of weakness, an admission he was somehow deficient and in need of something more.

Jude’s mother, on the other hand, nearly did a back handspring when Jude was accepted. She came from a hard family, a very hard family, and Jude would be the first one ever to attend a university. In fact, Jude had already gone further than most in the family—including his mother—just by finishing high school.

In the end, Jude’s mother probably wouldn’t have cared if he had decided to study underwater basket weaving; she brimmed with pride just to have Jude an actual, living, breathing college student.

Others, of course, had different ideas about what Jude should study. The general consensus among people who slightly knew him, and those who simply knew
of
him, assumed he’d declare pre-med and later head off to medical school. It was an obvious choice. The guy who had come back to life a couple of times, well, who wouldn’t want him as a doctor?

Still, he eliminated medicine early on. First, he’d always hated hospitals. Second, it would have vindicated all the people who were experts on his life, even though they’d never met him.

He received letters from some of these people occasionally. Most came from the rural parts of Nebraska, but some filtered in from out of state, as well. The writers wondered if Jude could help them by contacting a dead relative, or by telling them if aliens had mutilated cattle at so-and-so’s farm, or by healing someone who was sick and who didn’t have long to live.

Jude had never billed himself as a psychic—had, in fact, spoken as little as possible about his two deaths. But that didn’t stop other people from talking about it.

The business degree, then, was partly a stand for independence, partly a way to slide into comforting anonymity. Sure, a lot of people had business degrees. That was the point.

After graduating from college, he took his first job in South Dakota, working in the marketing department for a farm equipment manufacturer. They made the giant harvesters that mowed through grain fields across Nebraska and the Midwest each autumn. He liked the work, liked his office mates, liked being out on his own.

As an added bonus he got to leave Nebraska, and no one in South Dakota knew him as The Comeback Kid, a moniker the columnist in Jude’s hometown weekly had given him after his second death.

The town where he worked in South Dakota wasn’t far from Bingham, and he traveled home once every couple of months to see his family and a few friends. By this time, Kevin had gone to Iowa City or someplace like that to work as an engineer for a company Jude couldn’t remember. But there were a few other friends around. A few.

The holidays rolled around, and Jude’s company closed its offices between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Going home was never a question; Jude wanted to see his mother, have a few bites of her peanut butter fudge, sit in her house, and watch the snow fall softly outside.

He packed his car with a single duffle bag before hitting the interstate for what was typically a three-hour trip.

When he left his apartment in South Dakota, a light snow was falling, puffy swabs of cotton that fluttered in a kind of slow waltz. After an hour on the road, the snow changed to something heavier and wetter.

Jude turned on the radio, flipped through AM stations until he found one talking about the weather. Parts of South Dakota and Nebraska, the radio told him, were under a severe blizzard watch, and people were urged to stay indoors except for emergencies.

He hadn’t checked the weather or road conditions before leaving. He never did, mainly because the drive had never given him any problems before. He knew it well.

The blizzard watch proved to be well-founded. Soon Jude’s car slowed to a crawl while the storm around him clamped its jaws tight and held on. Still, Jude refused to stop; if he did that, he might not get moving again before the storm’s end. Besides, it was a regionalized storm, and he had to come out of the other side of it at some point. One more mile, he kept telling himself, and the storm would let up. Five more miles and he’d be on mostly dry roads again. That was what winter driving was all about; he’d seen it happen countless times before.

Until the car slid beneath him.

For a second it seemed as if he were on a carnival ride, a Tilt-A-Whirl maybe, but then he felt a scrape and heard a muffled
chunk
as the car settled into the ditch. He put the car in reverse and hit the accelerator, knowing before he tried that it was useless. He was stuck. He thought about getting out of the car, trying to dig out the snow from under his tires and give himself some traction, but dropped the idea. Many people in this situation would ruin their tires by spinning the tread off or burning all their fuel. Jude was too smart for that. He was a college graduate, wasn’t he? He was here for the duration of the storm, unless a snowplow or someone else happened by.