C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

My watch, which regularly beeped on the quarter hour and which I was typically too habituated to notice, beeped. A single beep, which meant it was a quarter-hour notification, rather than the double-beep of an hour. I didn’t know which quarter hour it was. It’d been pushing ten o’clock when I’d left Petite in front of somebody’s driveway. In the worst-case scenario, I had fifteen minutes to get myself out of this. Except my watch was set seven minutes fast to prevent myself from being late, so in fact in the worst scenario I had twenty-two minutes to get myself out of this, and in the best I had over ninety. I thought I should probably go with the shorter time frame, just in case.

It turned out having an extremely short deadline, where the dead part was going to be depressingly literal, helped clarify my thoughts to a remarkable degree. I was a shaman. I could heal things. I could, therefore, presumably encourage my blood to ignore gravity and work its way back into my system instead of trying to all explode out of my skull.

This fell under the category of easier said than done. I ended up with this dreadful mental imagery mixed between reinflating a tire and a clown blowing up balloon animals, but it worked. It also caused screaming pain in my extremities as blood was reintroduced to them, but at least if I could get myself out of this trap I’d be able to catch myself before I fell into the cauldron. I hoped. I hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to magically snap the ropes tying me in place, but I was working on it.

I rubbed my face against my shoulder again, relieved myself of residual itching. The movement knocked my blindfold loose and sent me swinging a slow circle as the piece of cloth fell into the cauldron below me.

Seeing: a bonus. What I was seeing: less of one. The sound of water was from a family-size swimming pool a few yards—the measurement, not the behind-the-house garden area—away. The pool water glowed with a peculiar colorlessness, as though it had been sterilized. A play set with swings, a slide and a sandbox filled the area beyond the pool, but the Sight showed them as gray and utilitarian. The same held true for a beach ball and other scattered toys: none of them had any life, like they’d all been purchased for show, not use. Creepy. Appropriate for Halloween, I guessed, but creepy. It was even more appropriate to the setting in which Suzanne described my forthcoming demise, which didn’t even qualify as creepy. I didn’t have a word for that, except maybe augh. Augh seemed like the right response to being hog-tied in the place I was supposed to die.

I swung away from the swimming pool on a slow turn, like a rotisserie chicken, and caught a glimpse of the pole holding me up. It belonged to a basketball backboard, and beyond it sat a picnic table. That was okay. It was gray with disuse, like the rest of the yard, but generally okay.

The freezer-burned female corpse sitting at the table was considerably less okay.

My brain wouldn’t let me process more than the dead woman for a few seconds. She’d been blond once upon a time, and for a desiccated corpse she still had a lot of hair. It was piled in a loose bun that was beginning to fall around cadaverous cheekbones and sunken eyes. Her skin was mostly blue, with rough raw purply-red streaks marring her flesh where it was exposed under her dress. At a guess, I thought she’d been dead for over a hundred years. Not that I really knew from long-dead bodies, but her dress looked straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The two little dead girls sitting with her, which my eyes had been trying very hard not to see, wore equally old-fashioned clothes. Their hair, dull brown, was carefully braided, and the fragile lace on their collars looked as if it’d undergone an attempt at cleaning bloodstains and viscera from them.

All three of them were partially crushed, though their bodies were sitting in such a way as to almost disguise that. The woman, though, tipped to her left, like her hip couldn’t bear weight, and there was a collapse to the left side of her torso that couldn’t be accounted for by perspective. Her left ankle, booted in fading leather, seemed both whole and delicate, which made the rest of the mess that much worse.

The bigger girl was angled away from me, but once my vision adapted to her mother’s misshapen form, I could see that the child’s shoulder and rib cage were smashed in, and I thought her face was turned the other way to hide similar damage to her features. The littler girl was more broken in half, a childish smile on her dead face as she rested her head on her arms against the table. I suspected that was the only way she could sit up at all, given the flatness of her hips and waist. Even frozen solid, her body wouldn’t have the integrity to remain upright.

I rotated another quarter circle or so, and Archie Redding stopped reading the foreign language to smile beatifically at me and say, “Hello,” in perfectly comprehensible English.

I said, “You crazy motherfucker,” except I had a gag in my mouth, so it came out something like “Y’kavee moffaffuka,” which, under the circumstances, I felt got the point across. Redding looked like somebody’s genial grandfather with sparkling green eyes and a sweet old smile, just as he had in his museum security photograph, although he hadn’t been wearing a long black hooded robe in that. “Wwava vuk iv wong wivvu?”

“I’m sorry,” he said very earnestly. “I’m afraid I can’t understand you. I’d remove the gag, but I can’t allow you to start screaming, so we’re going to have to do without clear communication. Don’t worry, though. It won’t last long. I’ll be cutting your throat in about ten minutes. I need a test case for the cauldron, you see. My guide suggests that between midnight and the first minute after, it has the power to actually bring the dead fully back to life, rather than simply make undead warriors like these poor fellows.” He gestured to one side, and I finished my rotation to discover ten silently screaming dead men standing in rank beside me.

I admit it. I’m not proud. I screamed like a little girl. The gag did a decent job of making me sound deeper and more rugged, but in my heart of hearts I knew that the sound that had erupted from my throat was up there with the most soprano of sopranos, a pure ripping sound of absolute terror.

I spent a good fifteen seconds at it before I realized the dead men weren’t lurching to pull my flesh from my bones or eat my eyeballs out or anything else of equal disgustingness. Nor, at a second look, were any of them Cernunnos or his Riders, so I flung my weight sideways and rotated back to Redding. “Whevva vukivva Hhnnt? ”

He shook his head with what looked like a genuine affectation of sympathy. “I do wish we could speak. I’d like to know what brought you here, and there’s so little time.” He brightened. “But if the cauldron works as my guide believes it will, then we’ll be able to talk afterward.”

Hopefully, I said, “M mmnt hweem,” and meant it. I’d gotten all my screaming out already. I was sure I could make better use of my time than screaming if he’d ungag me. Like biting his face off, or something.

Redding looked like he’d understood me that time, but it didn’t make him remove the gag.

“Whovvavuk iv vrr ghyyyv?” I was getting better at talking through the gag. At least, I thought I was. Redding didn’t seem impressed. What’s a girl got to do? I ask you.

The obvious answer was keep him talking. If I could stretch my useless interrogation out to one minute past midnight, the dead family would stay dead, I would stay alive, and maybe I could jimmy myself off the basketball hoop and knock Redding out with my body weight as I tried to avoid head-diving into the cauldron. It was a plan. I ran with it. “Vvt hhvvnd voo vr fmmvy, Revving?” I was getting better at talking. My gag was loosening. Apparently Redding hadn’t taken Kidnapping 101 before tying me up here.