She’s standing in her living room, talking to something out of a nightmare while her father bleeds to death, and she wishes she could make herself believe that this was really happening—or better still, that this was really a dream, and not something she’ll have to survive. Right now, she isn’t sure she wants to survive.
“People hurt you,” says the thing. “People violated you. They should never have been allowed to do that. In a just world, they would never have touched you. But there is no justice here. There’s just us, and the willingness to do what must be done. To touch, and tear, and rend, and take. We could take you, if you’ll come. We could show you what it is to sleep for a hundred years and ride the night on wings of vengeance. We could show you what it is to die, and live forever, and endure. And you would never be hurt again.”
Esther stares at her, eyes wide and shining. The thing’s words are smooth, cadenced to make her listen. They make promises she’s sure can’t be kept, but finds herself enthralled by all the same.
A scream pierces the silence they have drawn between them, as high and shrill as the screams of her father when she was still upstairs. This one is even higher, hitting notes that opera divas would envy, shattering and shredding them before racing onward to the next, even higher peak. It’s a voice Esther knows better than she knows her own, knows almost better than she knows her father’s. She takes a step backward, suddenly cold again, suddenly inescapably sure of one thing: she’s not dreaming.
“What are you?” she demands.
“We are the dead, and you belong to us now,” says the thing.
When she moves, she moves with the supernatural speed of the grave, as swift as a chill racing down the spine, as relentless as the October wind through the leaves. Esther is still, somehow, faster. In this place, in this moment, her feet seem to have wings, and she spins, and runs barefoot down the hall to the kitchen, moving with a speed she has never had before and may never have again, no matter how long she lives—assuming she survives this night. She runs, and behind her, her father’s screams split the night…but there’s a note of triumph to them now, like he’s dying content in the knowledge that his little girl is getting away.
This is the meat of the scenario: this is the place where reality and nightmare collide, healing wounds as old as the psyche itself. Or it would be, had the failsafes not been removed, replaced by a gaping hole into which self and sanity seemed poised to fall. Esther should have been given whispers, rumors, local legends to ease her into the idea that the dead could wake and walk under the right circumstances. She should have been prepared, not dropped into a situation that would shred the credibility of anyone who wasn’t there, who wasn’t watching the monsters feed on the flesh of those they loved.
Esther should have been prepared. She should have salt and candle and book and shovel, ready to defend herself, shaped into a warrior by a hundred small, seemingly unrelated incidents. And even that assumes this new, modified situation, and not the harmless haunting Dr. Webb had originally designed for her. Instead, she is barefoot, teenaged, and running for her life, into a night that teems with the hungry dead.
Jennifer isn’t screaming anymore by the time Esther reaches the back door. The realization is enough to open a chasm in her chest, deep and terrible and seemingly insurmountable. Her father is dead: she has no question about that. It’s strangely easy to accept, like a part of her has been waiting for the universe to realize that it broke up a matched set ever since taking her mother. But if Jennifer is dead, if her best friend is dead, then she’s lost everything. She might as well stop running and let the dead take her.
Still, inertia is more powerful than fear, and so her feet keep moving, propelling her onward, through the hole she and Jennifer have carefully cultivated in the fence, into the half-tended yard so similar to her own. The only difference is the sliding glass door at the back of the kitchen, standing already open, letting buttery light spill out into the night air.
There is a body sprawled there. Her heart lurches up into her chest before her eyes finish understanding what they see: a naked man, with skin like gray and polished marble, a knife handle protruding from his open mouth. He’s been stabbed clean through the head, but oddly, that doesn’t seem to be what killed him. Instinctively, she knows that honor belongs to the salt pooled in his eye sockets, great spoonfuls of salt puddled into mounds atop his face.
There is motion. Jennifer appears, a fireplace poker in one hand and a canister of salt in the other. She’s wearing her Bill Nye T-shirt over a pair of yoga pants, and there’s a streak of blood down one side of Bill’s face, matching the smear of blood on her own cheek. It’s a terrible scene. Esther wants to weep for joy.
“You want some?” bellows Jennifer. “You want some, you dead fucks? Because you’ll get some!”
Esther wants to tell her not to yell, not to attract more trouble when there’s so much trouble already close at hand. All she manages to do is keep running, heedless of the poker, and fling her arms around her best friend’s neck, clinging to her like an anchor. Jennifer jumps, stiffens, and manages to recognize Esther before she swings the poker. She doesn’t drop it as she closes her arms around the other girl. Her eyes scan the night, over and over, looking for signs of danger, finding them everywhere.
“I thought you were dead,” whispers Esther.
“I almost was,” says Jennifer. She pulls away, looking Esther assessingly up and down. “Are you hurt?”
Esther’s face falls. “My father—”
“My parents too,” says Jennifer. There’s a brittle bluntness to her that Esther recognizes. Esther falls apart first, gets down to business later. Jennifer is the exact opposite.
For the first time, Esther feels a flicker of hope. If they stay together, they might stand a chance. “How many?”
“Five of them. I killed them all.” Jennifer doesn’t comment on the nonsensical idea of killing what’s already dead, just looks down at the body next to her and delivers a vicious kick to its side, rocking it more securely onto the threshold. “I would have killed a hundred.”
“How did you know to use salt?”
“I didn’t.” For the first time, Jennifer looks faintly embarrassed. The blood on her cheek lends a surreal childishness to her appearance, like she’s been caught playing in her fingerpaint for the first time in years. “I was just throwing things, and I threw the salt at one of them, and when it got in his eyes, he fell down and stopped moving. I think it…lays them to rest somehow.”
“How much do you have?”
Jennifer lifts her canister, gives it a shake, so that Esther can hear its contents shift. “Not enough,” she says grimly. “The street out front is full of them.”
So is Esther’s yard, and there’s no way they won’t eventually start coming through the hole in the fence. It would be foolishness to assume any differently. “Okay,” she says. “So we run.”
THE WOMAN in front of the terminal looked at the screen impassively. The pair of them were doing a surprisingly good job of navigating a scenario with the safeties entirely removed, seeming to know without conscious awareness that if they slipped and died, they would be in trouble. A normal therapeutic revision could involve the death of the subject—Dr. Webb had spoken about the necessity of what she called the “cleansing demise” to drive the point home, and while her research was controversial, no one had been able to disprove its veracity—but only under very carefully controlled circumstances, and only when the chemical balance of the subject had been adjusted to be just so.
Under the wrong circumstances, with the wrong chemical cocktail in their veins, subjects could quite literally be frightened to death. An incident which should have been survivable could easily turn fatal, otherwise. If one of the hungry dead—referred to as “revenants” in the project notes, and one of only six types of basic zombie available to the operator—managed to rip out the throat of Dr. Webb’s avatar, she might never wake up again. The same went for Esther Hoffma
n, although the little reporter was a much lower priority. It might even be better if she survived. Truly discredit this facility. Show that nothing good can come of it, and walk away with the research, to continue refining and improving it in private, where no one would be watching.
There was a click from behind her. She didn’t turn.
“If you think you’ve got the nerve to shoot me, shoot me,” she said. “If not, run away before I decide this isn’t funny anymore. Either way, you might survive. Anything else, you won’t.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
A male voice this time. She was running out of technicians. With the limited staff currently at the facility, this might be the last she needed to kill. That would be nice. She wasn’t getting paid extra for their deaths, and she had never enjoyed freebies.
“My name is irrelevant. If you absolutely must call me something, I believe ‘Marline’ is still legal in this jurisdiction.” She’d burned so many identities over the years that sometimes she couldn’t remember which ones were still good, or which ones were absolutely unsafe to use, connecting as they did to deeds which had yet to be attributed to her, things which her employers had paid well to keep off the radar of the general public. “Really, I recommend either shooting or running. You’re almost out of time to do either.”
She wouldn’t still have been talking, had it not been for one simple fact: she knew the person on the other end of the gun wasn’t going to shoot her. He sounded too horrified, too unsure. He wasn’t a killer. He might be willing to kill to save himself, but once she started moving, he wasn’t going to have the opportunity.
The trouble with pursuing this career for so many years was that nothing really surprised her anymore, and hadn’t in more than a decade. Employers came and employers went. Jobs were done. If she was good, careful, and lucky, in that order, the work kept coming in, and the money came with it. One day, one of those things would desert her, and she would find herself in the only retirement home offered to people like her—the comfort of the grave. Until then, she would have to work with what she had.
“What did you do?”
She didn’t need to see his face to picture it, the horror, the confusion, the revulsion. Really, people were so dull. “I killed two of your colleagues, and I’m about to force your employer into a critical synaptic overload. It’s going to look like she snapped and killed them herself if I do this correctly, and I always do this correctly. It’s going to be beautiful.”
“You’re here for our research.” The horror in his voice was beautiful in its simplicity, briefly overwhelming more squeamish concerns. She felt the brief, inhuman warmth in her abdomen that always accompanied a moment of recognition, of seeing herself in someone else’s shadow. This man was no longer troubled by the loss of life, by the fact that two of his colleagues were dead on the ground, unavoidable casualties of the sort of slow war that was more commonly fought in boardrooms and conference centers. He was worried about his research.
Clever man. Reputation and research were two of the things that could endure beyond the flesh, and the flesh was really of minimal consequence: the flesh was weak. The flesh ended. Information went on. Even if it seemed to be forgotten, what was known once would be known forever, in some dusty book, in some dusty room, waiting to be rediscovered.
“Yes, I am.” Marline finally turned, standing at the same time, so that she was facing him when she rose.
He was tall, black-haired and brown-skinned, and he frowned at the sight of her, in confusion more than any sort of disapproval. I’ve seen you before, said his expression, and it didn’t matter whether he had or not, because he was exactly right and exactly wrong at the same time.
James Bond and Black Widow had long since presented the world with an inaccurate image of the professional spy: poised, perfect, and eminently fuckable, never a hair out of place or a smudge in their lipstick. The sort of person who could wear a tuxedo under a SCUBA array without wrinkling it, who could do backflips in stiletto heels without twisting an ankle. Marline could do backflips in heels, if she absolutely had to, but would have been happier eating ground glass. Or simply shooting someone. Shooting someone was almost always the better option.
She was tall, for a woman, with broad shoulders and the sort of soft, rounded build that strangers judged as indolent and her trainers judged as the perfect physique for a weightlifter. Her hands were the only dainty things about her, with long, dexterous fingers that had picked more than their share of locks and cracked more than their share of security codes. She wasn’t a thief by trade: leave that to the young and the flexible and the foolish. She was a killer who sometimes took recovery jobs, and knew how to put every ounce of her considerable weight behind a punch.
Her features were plain and pleasant, not entirely eye-catching, capable of being enhanced with the right cosmetics, or played down with the right hairstyle. They had been modified by the virtual world in which Esther and Jennifer were trapped, turned into the best version of themselves, a queen among monsters. Here, in the real world, she was making no such effort. Her tawny brown hair was pulled into a tight bun, and her only concession to vanity was a thin layer of lip gloss, applied when she was still pretending to be a patient. The man in front of her could have seen her a thousand times without consciously registering her presence, and she liked things that way.
What she didn’t like was the gun in his hand. She sighed deeply, meeting his eyes. “This could have been accomplished with at least a thin veneer of civility, you know,” she said. “You could have chosen to shoot me, or to run. You might even have saved some lives, if you’d run.”
“What?” asked the man.
Her kick connected squarely with his wrist, and the uncomfortably wet sound of bones breaking filled the air even as the gun flew from his hand and landed in a pool of congealed blood. He sucked in a breath, clearly intending to scream, and stopped as her fist struck him in the throat, crushing his trachea and silencing him for good. His eyes bulged. He was still clawing at his throat when she slashed it open, releasing his last breath in a hissing sigh that was tidily drowned out by the hot red rush of blood.
“I do regret this,” she said, as he dropped to his knees on the floor. “Honestly, I’m not being paid nearly enough for the amount of killing I’ve felt compelled to do since I got here. You represent a professional failing.”
The bleeding man, clutching at his throat, said nothing.
“You wouldn’t have needed to die if your boss had simply been willing to acquiesce to reasonable requests for investment opportunities. I hope you’re aware of that. This is entirely your Dr. Webb’s fault, and when you see her in the afterlife, you should give her a piece of your mind.”
The man collapsed, no longer clutching at his throat, no longer doing anything. Marline prodded his body with her foot. He didn’t move.
“Right,” she said.
The room was a disaster: no one who walked down the hall would be able to miss the fact that something bad had happened here, even if they weren’t close enough to see the bodies. The drive she had attached to the main terminal was still blinking as it transferred data. These were secure files measured in terabytes. Even with the best equipment money could buy—and hers was the best equipment money could buy—she still needed time to get things done.
“I will have my bonus or I will have your head,” she muttered, and closed the door. Let the remaining staffers raise a hue and cry. It wouldn’t slow her down any further than their pointless interruptions, and she was nearly done here. She just needed a little more time.
A little more time, and to finish her secondary objective. Marline walked back to what she had come to think of as “her” chair and settled, reaching for the keyboard. It was time to finish this.
___6. Confrontation.
ESTHER AND Jennifer flee hand in hand down the street, both still in their pajamas, neither of them looking back. Bits of rock and gravel bite the soles of their feet, making Esther r
egret that they left so fast that neither of them stopped to scavenge for shoes. They had no choice. There were noises from her backyard and from the cemetery beyond the fence, making it quietly obvious that time is running out. So they ran, and they’re still running, still together, fleeing an impossible fate.
Survival matters more than a few scrapes and bruises. Survival, and staying together. They’re both orphans now, and if they had the breath to speak or the ability to form a coherent thought about anything beyond survival, they would be apologizing to each other, grieving with each other. Instead, they’re reduced to living with each other, and that may be the most painful thing of all. They have to keep on living.
Esther runs and knows that she can run forever, as long as Jennifer is with her; as long as she isn’t facing this, or anything else, alone. If they stay together, she’ll survive.
Jennifer runs and knows she can’t run forever: that her body will eventually betray her, that her fear of failure will overwhelm her ability to keep on moving, that she doesn’t have Esther’s experience with loss, or Esther’s faith. Esther believes in her. She’s always known that, and been happy to take quiet advantage of it, painting herself as the ringleader in their little circus of two. But now, there’s no one for her to lean on, and if Esther leans too hard, she’s going to topple over.
They need a miracle. They need a rescue. They’re unlikely to find either.
Lights are on all up and down the street. Doors are kicked open, windows are smashed, and the screams, when they come, are agonized and short-lived. The dead are mostly inside, for now, filling their bellies on the living. When the living are exhausted, however, the dead will return. The girls know that, as surely as they know that their only hope sits at the end of the block, in a rainbow haze of neon lights and two-for-one hot dogs.