Stefan Petrucha - Dead Mann Walking

She sighed and nodded. “I’ve got a sledgehammer under my cot.”

I gave her a hug. “Thanks.”

She grimaced. “Fuck you, Hess.”

I headed out.

Putting a bunch of McMansions on the far side of General Buell Park, so close to the Bones, sounded like real bad planning, but they were here before we were. Not before the street people, but Collin Hills was intended to reclaim the area from them. When chakz started stumbling around in the abandoned buildings here, sales dropped to nothing. To keep the current homeowners from bolting, the developer installed a big stone wall, topped with an electric fence and a twenty-four/seven security system.

In practice, up until now, it worked. Chakz never went past the park. We’re not interested in making that kind of trouble anyway, and the police made it real clear what the consequences would be if we did.

So of course that’s where Jonesey and I were headed.

We passed a few patrol cars cruising the neighborhood. They used to be as rare as UFOs. Things had changed. Otherwise, the Bones looked empty as usual. Not Buell Park. Flashlight beams flitted along the overgrown bushes like morbidly obese fireflies. The police were looking for the thing.

As we neared the park entrance, I caught a thick whiff of kerosene. Roundabout the knees of the bronze statue of Buell that stood in the center of the park, I caught a fiery flash. It wasn’t a flashlight. The boys in blue had a new toy, a flamethrower. Great. It might not work on the skeleton, but it sure would work on me and Jonesey.

Back when I was alive, I sucked so badly at staying hidden it was a joke in the neighborhood. It was one of the few parts of my skill set that being dead had improved. If I wasn’t stupid about it, and no one was staring right at me, I could get around pretty well without being seen. Jonesey would consider it politically incorrect to say so, but it had to do with being more a thing than a person. LBs don’t realize it, but they’re wired to sense other living things. Unless you had a dog’s nose, or we had some rot, there’s nothing to sense here. It’s one of the reasons it’s so easy for a chak to sneak up on a liveblood.

Some moans to the south got the cops all excited. When they raced off to follow, it gave us a break. We crouched like crazy just the same, avoiding the paths, plodding through a rat’s nest of hedge and tree.

“There been a lot of moaners lately?” I asked.

Jonesey gave me that look again. “A couple every day now. Like I said, I got most of the cops to go home before your friend showed up; now it’s . . . Where have you been?”

“I said we’d talk later.”

Another moan, forlorn as a lonely loon crying in the middle of nowhere. I saw a powerful blast of flame, heard the creaking rush of burning wood, and a few seconds later felt some heat in the air.

Jonesey shook his head. “At least they could’ve made sure whoever it was had gone feral first.”

“Come on; we’ve got business.”

The twisted mass of branch and leaf ended in an eight-foot black iron fence. As we sneaked up, I could see lights on in a few of the Collin Hills houses. There was a second blast from the flamethrower, more distant. Another moaner gone. Before the glow vanished, we were over the park fence and across the well-lit street.

We hit our knees behind a row of parked cars. I didn’t like it here, not at all. Unlike the Bones, everything worked, especially the streetlamps. It was so bright I felt naked as a dead jaybird.

The Collin Hills wall was behind us, a big stucco sucker tipped with barbed wire. The wire was the good stuff, thin black strips that fit right in with the decor of the terra-cotta rooftops beyond. To add insult to injury, it was electrified. A small sign warned about the voltage. That level of electricity wouldn’t destroy a chak, but our flesh would sear and stick to the wire. We’d end up doing major damage trying to pull free.

“Where’d it climb over? You see it happen?” I asked.

Jonesey muttered some mnemonic to himself, then pointed to a spot down the block half-hidden by an oak. “There.”

We crept closer. Thanks to the great lighting it was easy to see that the stucco covering had been chipped, revealing the less dainty color of the concrete beneath. The broken patches made a line, more or less, that headed up to a spot where the wire looked slightly bent.

“So it climbed? I didn’t think it could see .”

“He didn’t. Not exactly.” Jonesey went into another weird little pantomime. “He runs up like this, hits the wall like he doesn’t see it, then feels it with his hands. He reaches up, but the wall’s too high. So he gets angry. He punches. He scratches. When he stops, he fingers the holes he made; then he uses them to pull himself up a little. He still can’t reach the top, so he does it again and again, until he lobs himself over, nothing but a spark and a gzt from the wire. I expected alarms, but there was nothing. I’ve seen some freaky shit, but I’m telling you, that was freaky.”

“Chakz never come here. Maybe the alarm broke and the owner didn’t bother to repair it.” I eyed the wall and the tree. “Bottom line, it can do it; we can do it.”

Jonesey gave the handholds a shot while I shimmied up the oak. By the time I’d made my way across an overhanging branch, he’d gone up as far as he could without touching the wire. Flat against the branch, I reached down, grabbed his hands, and swung him over.

It was close. The soles of his shoes cleared by an inch. Once he landed, I squirmed along the branch as far as I could, then jumped. I hit the ground on a patch of wood chips. Some splinters, but no big damage so far.

The lights of the security gate glowed beyond the neatly trimmed hedges. I could see the rent-a-cop in his little house, guarding the main entrance. He was awake, listening to some iThing. Good. The skeleton hadn’t attracted attention here yet.

With no trail to follow, we skirted the edges of the properties. I was hoping it might still stink of acid, but the whole place was thick with the smell of chemicals, fertilizer and chlorine from the pools.

On the one hand, we hoped we’d bump into it; on the other, we were so terrified we would that we were startled by every cricket chirp. We really jumped when we heard the dog. A big one, it barked three times, then let loose with a final, pained yelp.

Not good for us or the doggy. It sounded like it was nearby, right in the next yard. With a quick glance at each other, we gave up on crouching and ran toward the sound.

When I saw how the pretty little picket gate was mangled, I half knew what to expect. I didn’t expect something heavy to fly through the air and land at my feet with a warm, wet thud. Jonesey clamped his hand over his mouth. I had to bend down to make sure. It was a rottweiler, head twisted around so it had a nice view of its own tail. The heart-shaped collar said the dog’s name was Annie.

“Heh-heh.”

Beyond the gate, I saw it. The moonlight and streetlamps gave it a kind of perfect, white metal sheen. The color fit. It was bouncing around the fenced yard like a silver pinball: hitting a wall, changing direction, hitting a fence, changing direction again. Sometimes, out of frustration, I think, it lashed out at whatever was nearest, like a lawn mower. Something like that must’ve happened to the dog. Either Annie had been stepped on, or she got wide-eyed at all those yummy bones and attacked.

“Heh-heh.”

As for the skeleton, left on its own, eventually it’d either fall into the pool or find the exit and wander out. We didn’t have time to see which, because the house lights came on. We didn’t have time at all.