C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

He’d been dead when I was at the museum yesterday. I opened my mouth to say that, then decided it wasn’t the best way to keep a conversation going. I glanced at myself instead, discovering my astral self didn’t feel a need for bulletproof vests, and that I wore knee-torn jeans and an oil-stained white tank top. Work clothes, in other words, though the job in question was mechanic, not detective. I guessed I knew how my subconscious continued to define me. “It’s fine. You look better than you did yesterday, too.”

Because yesterday he’d had his head bashed in, which hadn’t been such a good look for him. Today his self-image was what he’d looked like alive: young, broad shouldered, short black hair, quick smile. He was cute, the kind of guy you’d bring home to Mom. “How’s your head? Billy said you had a migraine.”

“It’s gone,” he said with a mix of astonishment and satisfaction, then laughed. “The migraine’s gone. My head’s still here.” He clapped both hands against it, making sure of that, and grinned again. “So, did you guys have any luck with the cauldron? The other detective said he’d clear my going home with Sandburg, but he’s gotta be pissed. You’d think he’d given birth to that thing, or something.”

“We’re still looking for it. That’s…” Ice crept over my arms and made me shiver. Jason Chan apparently had no idea he was dead. I didn’t know what would happen if I pointed it out to him. “That’s why I’m here. I hoped I could ask you a few more questions.”

“Sure.” He glanced around, then came back to me with a smile. He smiled easily, this dead young man. I wondered if he had when he’d been alive. “Would it be unprofessional if I took you out for a drink while I answered your questions? This isn’t the greatest place to get to know each other.”

There were many aspects of my bizarre life that I was coming to accept. Getting hit on by a dead guy was not one I was eager to mark up as commonplace, or, in fact, as anything less than seriously creepy. “Maybe we’d better keep it professional. If you could concentrate on your surroundings, it might help you remember details that escaped you earlier due to your migraine.”

“Oh, sure.” Jason frowned, glancing around again. I had no idea what he saw, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t the rolling endless gray of the Dead Zone. “Like I said to the other detective, I came in to work with a low-grade migraine. Seemed like I’d had one all month, so my focus wasn’t at its best.”

“I’ve only had a migraine once. I thought I probably had a brain tumor and was going to die.” Embarrassingly enough, that was true. It certainly gave me sympathy for somebody who suffered them regularly.

Jason shot me a rueful look. “Yeah, basically. It wasn’t that bad, but—you know, it was weird, but I swear it got worse around that cauldron. I always get a light show when a migraine comes on, but just looking at that thing was like staring at the sun.”

The ice that had settled over my skin melted suddenly, turning to a trickle of interest down my spine. “Really? I know it sounds odd, but that might be important. Can you describe exactly what you saw?”

He hesitated, eyebrows drawing down. “I hadn’t thought about it, but now that you ask, it was always the same. That’s not what usually happens. Usually the patterns change when I looked away from something. Anyway, usually it was—” He broke off with a sheepish laugh. “You’re going to think this sounds stupid.”

“You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve heard, said and done in this job. Try me.”

Chan rolled his eyes and looked away, then glanced back. “I said it was like looking at the sun, and it was. All kinds of flares and loops in really bright white and gold. But it was dark in the middle of it, like there was a black hole in the center of the sun. And the way the loops wove around it, moving all the time, it was like they were constantly retying themselves around the darkness in the middle.”

“The warding spell.” I dropped my face into my hands, rubbing a thumb over the scar on my cheek. Lots of people got migraines. I wondered how many of them were at least occasionally seeing, but not recognizing, auras or magic being done. Hoping Jason hadn’t picked up on the spell comment, I looked up again. “Is that what it looked when you came in Saturday?”

“Shouldn’t you be writing this stuff down?”

“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.” I reached for my back pocket, where, in real life, I never carried a pad of paper. But this was the Dead Zone, an astral plane, and if I needed paper, it would be there. And so it was, a little spiral-bound blue notebook with a puffy Mustang sticker on the cover. My subconscious not only thought I was still employed as a mechanic, but also that I was nine years old. Great. At least there was a pen stuck through the spirals. “Sorry, go ahead.”

“It’s Jason Chan, C-H-A-N, and my number is 216—”

I laughed, cutting him off. “I have all your particulars back at the station, Jason.”

He snapped with a melodramatic sweep of his arm. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

“I guess not.” Too bad he hadn’t had the opportunity to try when he was alive. “So, Saturday night?”

“There was nothing weird. Archie and I always trade off which wing we’re doing. He did the special-exhibits wing first while I did the permanent wing, and then we’d switch. The place is so quiet we never thought we needed to stick together. We’d say hi when we crossed in the lobby, and if one of us was early—like we’d made it into the other wing before the other one was done—we’d give each other hell. Archie’s a cool old guy. Is he okay?”

“We don’t know yet. I’m sorry.” Jason’d told Billy the same things, but I wrote everything down in my notebook. I wondered again what he’d think if he realized he was dead, but I didn’t want to get into it. I’d thought avoiding the topic of the cauldron with Sandburg had been complicated. At least that hadn’t made me want to apologize.

“So my head was hurting anyway, but now that you asked me to think about it, the lights I’d gotten used to seeing around the cauldron were different. It was like the black in the middle was getting bigger. I radioed Archie and said it was coming to life, like in that movie? I mean, it’s that time of year and everything.” He smiled suddenly. “I’m taking my little sisters trick-or-treating tonight. They’re eleven and fourteen and they’re dressing up as these anime characters. First time I saw them in their costumes I just about locked them in their rooms. My sisters aren’t supposed to look that hot.”

My answering smile didn’t get anywhere near my eyes. I was pretty sure Jason’s sisters weren’t going trick-or-treating, and might never again, with all the associations Halloween would now have for them. “Anyway,” he said, “Redding told me I was an idiot and I kept going on my rounds, but every time I came through there was less light than there’d been. I remember it must’ve been around ten-thirty or eleven that I stopped and really took a good look at it, because I’d never been able to without it making my head hurt more. Then—” A deep frown marred his forehead, and I wished there was a way to head him off. “Then I guess the lights flared up again, because my migraine got a hell of a lot worse. The next thing I really remember is talking to Detective Holliday, and…and then to you.

“Detective Walker, what happened to me?” Jason’s voice got very small, the Dead Zone pulling him impossibly far away, until he was barely more than a dot in my perception. Sonata’d called him close to the living world, and now the dead one was taking him back.