Dead Push (Kiera Hudson Series Two#7) (17 page)

“The one you use as a ringtone,” I reminded her.

“I like it. Why?” she asked.

“No reason,” I lied.

We sat in silence; I guess neither of us knowing what to say. Then turning to look at her, I said, “Why did you show me those… those… lumps on your back?”

“Because the thought of them scares me,” she said, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. “I needed to show someone.”

“What does Sparky think they are?” I asked, wondering if I was now pushing my luck.

“He hasn’t seen them,” Kiera said.

“No?” I said, trying to hide my surprise. “But I thought you two were…”

“What?” she asked, shooting me a sideways
glance.

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know, Potter,” she said, looking back at the rain-slicked country road we were now heading along.

“I thought you two were having jiggy-jiggy.” I didn’t know how to say it.

“What’s jiggy-jiggy?” she asked.

I looked at her. “You know… a bit of humpty-dumpty…” I then saw the faintest of smiles tugging at the corners of her lips. “If you’re gonna take the piss, I won’t bother talking to you. You know exactly what I mean.”

“If you must know,” she said, slowing the car to navigate a tight bend in the winding road, “me and John are just good friends.”

“Really?”
I asked, trying to mask my delight at this news. “But I thought you two were…”

“Having humpty-dumpty, as you so eloquently described it?” she cut in.

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“So now you know,” she said.

I looked out of the window again and tried to hide my grin.

There was another long silence, only filled by the squeaking sound of the wipers driving away the rain.

This time Kiera spoke first. “So have you had jiggy-jiggy with anyone else since… since you left?” she asked, unable to bring herself to look at me.

How did I answer that? There had been another… the other Kiera. 

“No,” I said. “There has only been you.”

Was that really I lie? My brain was starting to ache.

“Okay,” she said, that little smile tugging at the corner of her lips again.

Wanting to change the subject and unable to think of anything else to say, I said the first thing that came into my head. “So what do you think those lumps are?”

“My wings,” she said.

“You’re shitting me, right?” I asked, staring at her.

“Why couldn’t they be?” she asked right back.

“Because people don’t have wings, Kiera,” I told her.

“Perhaps,” she said, more to herself than to me.

How much did Kiera know? How much did she remember? Were her wings breaking through a result of the cracks Noah was making? 

Kiera slowed the car to a stop and killed the engine. She pushed open the car door and climbed out and I followed. It was raining hard, and as Kiera headed through the puddles towards the train in the distance, mud splashed over her boots and up the hem of the jeans she was wearing. It was a freight train which had struck the victim. Its engine was long and black and pumped thick clouds of diesel into the overcast sky. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the train that had carried me here. Wind blew across the open fields on either side of us, and I thrust my hands into my coat pockets.

We reached the train and the whole scene seemed surreal to me.
I had seen a lot of dead people in my life – some of those I had killed myself – but it was bizarre to see the upper half of this teenage boy’s torso sticking out from beneath the train, whilst one white hairy leg lay further along the track wearing only a black shoe and sock. But the most peculiar thing about the whole incident was that the kid under the train was wearing a rubber Maggot Frogskin mask. Maggot had replaced Mickey Mouse in this
pushed
world, I reminded myself.

I think Kiera saw the look of bewilderment on my face and said, “Why don’t you go and speak with the driver.”

“Sure,” I said, turning away from the dead kid wearing the mask. I made my way along the tracks to the driver’s cab. I knew the whole point was to find out from the driver what had happened. Was the death of the kid a deliberate act on behalf of the deceased, suicide for instance, or was he being pursued or was he pushed in front of the train? In which case the area would be declared a crime scene and a full murder enquiry launched. But if what Kiera said was right about the wolves masquerading as cops in the town, they probably wouldn’t give a diddly shit about how the kid ended up dead under the train. To them it would just be another dead human. 

I established pretty quickly from speaking to the distraught train driver that the kid had been standing by the tracks as he approached.

“I blew up on the horn to warn him that I was approaching, but he just waved at me, pulled on one of those cartoon rubber masks, and stepped in front of my train! In all my years, I have never seen anything like it,” the driver said, trembling and upset.

I made my way back to Kiera, my boots crunching on the ballast, to find her pulling the mask from over the deceased’s head. The rubber mask made a
squelching
sound as it peeled off the kid’s face.

“The driver said the kid just stepped out in front of the train,” I said.

“Freaking wolves,” Kiera cursed under her breath.

“What’s this got to do with the wolves?” I asked.

Instead of answering my question, she said, “C’mon, give me a hand to get him out from under the train.”

We bent at the knees and began to pull the upper torso free from under the train. I couldn’t get what Kiera had said about the wolves from my head. Had she used that
seeing
thing she did in my world to figure out a wolf had been involved in this kid’s death?

“Come on, Potter, don’t wimp out on me now. I need your help, these things are heavy.”

“Sorry,” I said, pushing the remark Kiera had made about the wolves from the front of my mind.

We had found some I.D. in the kid’s wallet which had made identifying him easy. His name was John Baker and he had been sixteen years old.  Once the ambulance crew that Kiera had summoned to the scene had left the mortuary with the remains of John Baker’s body, we made our way to his home address to inform his relatives of his death.

We climbed from Kiera’s car and made our way up to the front door of the small house. It looked more like a shack than someone’s home. Before we’d had a chance to knock, the door was flung open by a woman in her early thirties, who had a chocolate-smeared toddler clutched to her chest. 

Kiera produced her police badge from her coat pocket and showed the woman.

“Thank you for coming so quickly, officers,” she said in a panic-stricken voice.

“Why do you think we‘re here?” Kiera asked her.

No one had informed this woman about the death of the boy, as far as we knew, that’s why we were knocking on her door.

“The note! I’ve just found John’s note – says he’s gonna kill himself… so I called the police station…” She then stared into Kiera’s eyes. The woman holding the child must have seen the sorrow in them.

“No! No! No! I don’t want to hear it… Go away…” and she started to push the door closed on us.

Kiera quickly put her hand out and prevented the woman from closing the door. We quietly made our way into her home.

John Baker had been this woman’s younger brother. He had managed to escape from one of those schools run by the wolves. The school had been called Ravenwood. We sat and listened as Baker’s sister told us how her brother hadn’t been the same since returning from that school. Although he had managed to escape, he had suffered from nightmares since his return.

“He felt guilty, you see?” the woman said.

“Guilty, why?”
Kiera asked.

“He left his best friend, Sam Brook, behind. They had grown up together.”

I knew she was talking about Kayla’s friend Sam. Was I surprised by this connection? Not really. I guessed it was the two worlds overlapping like Murphy had said.

John Baker’s sister described how she had often found him sitting
alone at night and crying.

“I begged him to tell me what had happened there,” the woman sobbed. “But all I got was nonsense.”

“What kind of nonsense?” Kiera asked, taking a notebook from her pocket.

“He spoke of a place he called the Rat House,” she said. “He would wake at night screaming in fear. Kicking and thrashing out with his legs and yelling that the rats were going to eat him.”

“Did he describe anything else?” Kiera asked, making notes.

“Not really,” she said, shaking her head and wiping her tears away.

The toddler the woman had been holding now ran about the room saying over and over again, “Maggot Frogskin! Maggot Frogskin!” The kid stopped only to search through a toy box on the floor.

I looked back at the woman as she sat and tried to stop the flow of tears streaming from her bloodshot eyes.

“Did your brother ever tell you how he managed to escape the wolves without being matched?” Kiera asked over the sound of the kid chucking toys around the room.

“No,” she said, then after some thought added, “I thought my brother had gone mad.”

“Why?” Kiera asked.

“John told me that the teachers often checked the children’s hands for missing fingers, and he’d heard rumours that some of the girls had their backs checked to see if they had wings.”

Kiera shot me a look. I turned away and watched the kid.

“Mummy, Mummy! Maggot Frogskin?” the kid asked, patting his mother’s knee.

“Charlie, I haven’t seen your Maggot Frogskin mask. Go and see if it’s in your room.”

Hearing this, I got up and left the house. Standing alone outside, I lit a cigarette. It was then I understood the comment Kiera had made beside the tracks about the wolves. The kids they didn’t destroy through matching with them killed themselves because the wolves haunted their nightmares forever more.

Jack

Isi-bore didn’t return above ground for a few days. Part of me was glad about that. I occupied myself during the day by tagging along behind Melody, and by night I visited Mrs. Last. She didn’t like the shallow grave I had her buried in, but she eventually stopped screaming when her mouth became clogged with earth and dirt. I killed her on the third night when the cops started combing the woods I was holding out in. They wouldn’t have caught me, but this was the world where the Vampyrus had taken it upon themselves to hunt down wolves like me. I didn’t want any freaking bats snooping about. Anyway, Mrs. Last had bored me, unlike Melody. She had started to interest me. On the morning after the whipping her mother had given her, I followed the girl to a tattoo shop on the outskirts of town. It was called ‘Red Ink.’ I liked that. There was a bar across the street, so buying myself a beer or two, I spent a couple of lazy days sitting across the street and watching Melody come and go from the tattoo parlour. Now what would Momma say if she knew? I wondered with a wry smile. What would Isi-bore say? Perhaps that’s how he came about his own tattoos – the black flames that scorched his chest, arms, and neck in the world I knew him from. The longer Melody stayed in the tattoo parlour, the more I became curious as to what kind of tattoo she was having adorned on her young body. Perhaps she was having ‘Fuck you, Momma’ stencilled in red ink across her forehead? Perhaps she was having it adorned across her arse – so her Momma had something to read the next time she was giving Melody a good whipping? And that’s what fascinated me about Melody. Unlike Isi-bore, the girl seemed to have some guts. She was something close to a rebel, even though she looked and dressed like a nun. I’d always wondered what really went on under a nun’s habit. So with my curiosity getting the better of me, I swigged the last of the beer from the bottle and crossed the street to the tattooist.

Standing back from the window, I peered inside. Melody was
lying face-down with her head turned away from the window. A thickset man, who himself had practically every inch of his body covered in tattoos, was bent over the girl as he inked hundreds of roses down the length of her back. The roses were bright pink.

I thought of what Noah had said, and now had no doubt that he’d been warning me not to hurt Melody Rose. Did Noah believe that I killed the girl? Then rubbing my temples, I turned away and headed back across the street to the bar. Did I kill the girl? Is that how she died? Why would I kill her? I wondered, taking a seat at the table by the window so I could keep an eye on the tattooist.

“Why did you kill me?” someone asked, and I looked up to see the bride was now waitressing my table. “Another beer?” 

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” I growled, leaping up from the table and sending it toppling over onto the floor.

I staggered back out onto the street, my brain aching. It felt like somebody was wringing it out like a wet cloth. Unable to bring myself to look back to see if the bride was following me, I headed back up the road and out of town. I reached the woods circling the lake, and collapsed against a tree. I waited for sundown and crept deeper into the woods. That was the night I finally put Mrs. Last out of her misery.