C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

A few minutes later a supernova expelled us onto Archie Redding’s lawn.

Tuesday, November 1, 12:01 a.m.

From my perspective, quite a lot of time had passed since I’d jumped into the cauldron. From the world’s, it looked like very little time had passed at all, and yet what had passed was filled with bitter dredges.

There was no fight left in Ida Redding’s body, nor in her daughters’. They were still relaxing, in fact, falling out of tormented arches and twisted shapes to collapse into stillness on the earth. A terrible stillness: one that spoke of life already spent and gone. I didn’t need the Sight to tell me we’d broken the cauldron too late, but it washed over me anyway, lighting up the bodies of three people who should have been left in peace more than a century and a half ago.

Two things came blazingly clear, holding me in time and letting the rest of the world fall back in irrelevance for just an instant. The Reddings’ fresh-born souls still lingered, bewildered and injured but not ripped from their bodies; not swallowed by the banshees’ hunger. I blinked in astonishment and my ability to see them faded; mine wasn’t a talent for observing ghosts, and all I was left with was a layered look at the bodies they’d abandoned.

Between midnight and one minute after. That was the window Redding could revive his family in. What he hadn’t known, what the banshees and the Master had never told him, was that those sixty seconds would be the only time in which life ran in their veins again. The bodies lying on the grass were tens of decades dead, burned with years of primitive preservation. It hadn’t been only salt and ice that had kept them together, but magic, as well, and I could see that fading; could see the collapse of cellular structure. They would decompose by morning, finally gone to the ashes they should have been so many years ago. Exhaustion and sorrow closed my eyes for a moment, before I made myself look again at the chaos surrounding me.

Redding himself was on his knees with his forehead against the earth, hands folded over his head. I could hear his sobs, and thought, uncharitably, that he was doing nobody any good. Suzy was hidden behind Gary, who still had my blazing blue rapier in hand, though he’d flung his sword arm up as if in defense. Morrison looked as though he—

Actually, he looked like he was in the midst of cauldron-diving himself, only to rebound off an invisible barrier. He looked pissed, mostly, with a solid dash of confused added to the mix.

As for myself, I lay on a huge iron-bound oaken circle, shards of the cauldron blown to bits around me. In fact, iron bands were scattered all over the yard, and chunks of oak were floating in the pool. A half circle of slivers, some delicate and some massive, lay at Morrison’s feet, like they’d hit something and slid off again. I shot another look at Gary and my sword. He lowered it and shrugged.

Belatedly, I realized I was technically lying on Billy, not on the cauldron’s base at all, and that he wasn’t breathing.

There was something in shamanism called soul retrieval, which was exactly what it sounded like: sometimes people get inexplicably sick and began to fade away. The shamanistic viewpoint on that was their souls somehow become dislodged from their bodies, which then begin to die, as the essential life force is no longer there to vitalize it. Soul retrieval was the moral equivalent of Shamanic Graduate School: it was not the sort of thing the half-trained and emotionally damaged should undertake.

Obviously, I undertook it. I rolled off Billy’s chest bellowing, “CPR! CPR! Morrison, he needs CPR!” which, really, was not the calmest or most awesomely shamanistic way to approach the situation. The truth was, though, I didn’t think I had the stuff to get Billy’s breathing back in line and go chasing after his soul at the same time. I trusted my boss could handle restarting Billy’s heart.

Me, I closed my eyes and ran for the Dead Zone.

I had one advantage. I knew Billy’s soul had gotten lost. I wasn’t working on conjecture. Caroline had wiped out the cauldron, and it could be read one of two ways. One, she’d taken too much of Billy with her. Two, and this was the one I thought more likely, he’d just flat-out refused to let go, and had been ripped away from the life she was trying to give back to him. If there was anything left to her now, she’d be trying to stop him from crossing over. I just needed to get there in time to give her a helping hand.

The Dead Zone refused to let me in.

Intellectually I knew why. I was too agitated, not centered enough, and hadn’t been forcibly thrust into an alternate state of consciousness by, say, being clocked over the head. Shamans, I suspected, were supposed to be patient. Patience was a virtue. I was not especially virtuous. I felt Morrison crash down beside me on the cauldron’s remnants and let go a silent shout at the inside of my head: Morrison was doing his part. I had to do mine so he wouldn’t be disappointed. I had to do whatever it took to find Billy and stitch him back to his body. While I railed at myself, Gary picked me up and moved me from the cauldron, which was no small feat. A moment later I heard a whisper of breath being pressed out of Billy’s lungs, like wings on the wind.

Raven wings had cut the air when I’d last left the Dead Zone.

I dropped my chin to my chest, throat going tight and eyes filling with hot tears. “Raven, Morrigan, Trickster, Maker. You guided me once before. You showed yourself to me when I sought a teacher. I don’t do you the honor I should, I know that, but for what it’s worth, it’s because I’m an idiot, not because I don’t trust you. I just don’t…think about giving thanks and bringing baubles. I’m still not very good at this. I’m taking it more seriously, but I’m still not what anybody’d want me to be.” I opened my eyes, turning a tear-stained face toward the cool distant moon. “I need your help, Raven. Protect my spirit. Protect my soul. Help me find my friend. Please.”

Sleek black feathers enclosed me, and I fell backward into the Dead Zone.

I had never, not once, felt any degree of control in the Dead Zone. Sometimes I could slide from place to place, but mostly if I moved it was through my subconscious getting the better of me. Tackling Jason had been a by-product of my entrance: an object in motion tends to stay in motion.

The raven on my shoulder changed all of that.

I didn’t know if it was because ravens were so strongly associated with death, or if it was that having a spirit guide in a dangerous part of the astral realm genuinely made it safer. Either way, the Dead Zone’s near-infinite curve shrank to a definable space, one that I could look from end to end of. My vision was unusually sharp and clear, letting me see things I’d never seen before. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of ghosts slipped through the emptiness. They were on a journey, and for a brief moment I saw all the paths they took. Thousands upon thousands of them traveled a river; thousands more walked hand in hand with a figure who shifted from the familiar cowled death’s-head to a slender and effete being I thought of instantly as Morpheus. As many again rose upward, soaring to whatever lay beyond, and thousands sank down, all of them crossed the Dead Zone in search of another world.

I could have seen them all, if I’d wanted. Could have looked into their eyes, known them as the people they’d been. My vision was that clear, a raven-sharp consideration of a transition mortal eyes weren’t quite allowed to see. Another time I might want to do that: to sit and consider, to sense fear or hope or a hundred other emotions, but not now. Not with Morrison trying to force breath back into Billy’s body, and his spirit taking one of these innumerable tracks to a new aspect of existence.