Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

She stops with one hand resting on the cold door handle, and thinks of the map.

Walking over to where Yates's body lies, she squats down and sticks her hand into his pants pocket but finds only his wallet and keys. She checks the other pockets. There's nothing but a disposable lighter and an almost-full pack of Marlboros, some wadded-up Kleenex, and loose change. Then something occurs to her, and she lifts the body up, rolling it onto its side. The floor beneath him is covered in blood.

The map is down there, pressed between his body and the floor, protected in the evidence baggie. In one smooth gesture Sue lifts it from the baggie and tucks it under one arm, puts her hands in the pockets of her unfamiliar wool coat, and heads back out the door.

She climbs over the fence into the impound lot. It's brightly lit and full of wrecked vehicles, snowcapped ghosts of a dozen different traffic accidents, making the Expedition easy to find. It's the only one that hasn't sustained some kind of career-ending automotive trauma. She opens the driver's side door, hears the familiar chime. The keys are in the ignition, tagged with an orange piece of cardboard with her name and the date of impound written on it.

She needs to get out of here, but there's one other thing that she has to do first.

Leaving the door ajar, she walks around to the back of the Expedition and lifts the hatch, lowering her eyes swiftly for a look inside.

Marilyn's body is missing.

Is this a surprise? Not really. From what Yates told her, it sounded like they'd taken it out already. And under any other circumstances, on any other night, that fact alone would've been a sufficient explanation for why it was no longer here.

But Sue notices that the other body, the Engineer,is still here-or movedback here, anyway-wrapped in his shroud of plastic garbage bags. The question arises: Why is he here while Marilyn is gone?

And the answer surges up from the animal part of her brain. The Engineer is her passenger, just as he's been her passenger for all these years, riding along in the back of her mind through whatever else was going on in her life. Because, she thinks, it is like Phillip says, the past is never done with us, not in any substantial way, and anybody who tells you otherwise hasn't taken a good look into their backseat lately.

But Marilyn, where is Marilyn?

As she climbs back into the driver's seat, from the corner of her eye Sue catches a shadow-flicker of motion off to the right, on the far side of the chain-link fence, twenty, maybe thirty yards away. The high-powered sodium lights end abruptly at the fence's perimeter, as if they don't have any interest in illuminating whatever lies beyond, but she can still make out a shadow of something trundling its way over the snowy hillside where it gives way to the access road. It's a human-sized shadow, but it doesn'tmove like a human, or even an animal; it lumbers and flops its way along with the innate clumsiness of something stiff and inanimate being dragged across the snow, kicking up clouds of white powder as it advances blindly forward. Like an anchor dragging the ocean floor.

Sue's eyes chase the shadow over the snow between two pine trees, where it vanishes momentarily in a pool of darkness, then reappears on the other side, right outside the police station. There's a vehicle waiting in the lot. She can see the beams of its headlights-and then the shadow steps into their glare. From here Sue can see the source of the shadow with undeniable clarity.

It's Marilyn.

For a moment the woman who was her daughter's nanny stands wavering in the headlights, hunched stupidly forward, jaw slack, arms dangling at her sides. She looks very old, very dead. Her hair is a greasy ruin of kinks and angles, mashed unevenly against one side of her skull, and dried blood covers her cheeks and neck like a beard, staining the entire front of her sweater.

Then with a slow shuffling of feet, Marilyn turns herself until she's facing Sue. She's twitching her head up and down with little sniffing gestures.

Is she smelling me? Sue wonders. Searching for my scent?

She can't help but stare. Even from this distance she's aware that the vacancies of Marilyn's eye sockets are not entirely empty anymore. There's a dark gleam inside them, moving slightly, as her head jerks up and down, as if some alien optic instrument were incubating deep inside Marilyn's skull.

Her new eyes, Sue thinks. Her route eyes. They're growing back.

Releasing Sue from that horrible myopic gleam, Marilyn turns and slumps her way toward the embrace of the headlights. And though she's moving more slowly now it's the same tree-stump stumble, lunging forward and then catching herself, as if the tendons and ligaments aren't connected right anymore.

Then she stops again and turns herself back toward Sue.

What's she doing? It's like she's waiting for somebody to join her. But who else is here except for-

All at once a hand grabs her from behind.

The fingers are cold, clamping over her mouth. A sudden tree of terror bursts from her spine upward through her chest, its branches spreading down her arms to her fingertips. The hand pulls her back against the headrest and flattens her lips against her teeth, compressing the scream that has no time to emerge. She writhes in the seat, trying to get free, but the grip is unyielding and she can't even turn her head. One of the fingers worms its way between her teeth and she tastes cold salt, dirt, and blood mingled together against her tongue. Simultaneously gagging and biting down, she shuts her eyes and feels tears springing up from them, her stomach clenching spasmodically.

Relaxing its grip slightly, the thing crawls up between the driver and passenger seats, and only then does Sue manage to twist her head enough to look over to see who it is. She spots the white T-shirt and bloodstained face. Then the smell hits her. A cloud of foulness clings to him so densely that it almost seems to pulsate from his flesh.

"Susan," Jeff Tatum says. "Remember me?"

She stares at him, her stomach roiling with nausea and shock. Like Marilyn's, his shot-out eyes are beginning to come back, and now Sue has a closer look at the results. Instead of empty sockets, there are now black, jellylike orbs quivering inside his skull, the way she imagines shark's eyes must when they're first beginning to take shape. What must the world look like through such eyes? she wonders bleakly.

"It's better this way, Susan. You'll see when you get here. You don't feel anything anymore. It's like the best drug you ever had."

He pulls away so she can respond. "What do you want?"

"I'm just a messenger, here to deliver a reminder."

"Which is what?"

His fingers go up to tease the tatters of flesh around his shimmering, embryonic new eyes. "To stay on the route, if you want to see your daughter again."

"When I saw you before, you told me not to go any farther."

The ruined face flushes with anger. Without the slightest warning he swings his right hand at her face, slamming her in the cheekbone, knocking her backward into the door. "Don't youever fucking argue with me, you stupid bitch. I know what's best. I'll decide if your little Veda comes back to you dead or alive. Or have you forgotten that already?"

"No," Sue says levelly. "I haven't forgotten." The blow to the face has had a paradoxical effect of restoring some cruel kind of alertness; it occurs to her now that she might be able to use this moment to her advantage, if only in a minor way. "There's something else I haven't forgotten, either, Jeff."

"I'm not Jeff anymore. Jeff is gone."

It's an old poem. You have to remember it. It can help you.

And despite everything that's happening Sue finds herself mouthing the words. They come out as little more than a whisper-but they come out just the same.