Dead Souls (19 page)

NO PROBLEM WITH THE INVISIBILITY,
a relief, and the next hardest part is moving through the crowd—people are packed so tightly together on the left side of the road that I have to slip through the in-between spaces, trying not to bump or brush against anyone in the process. But once I'm through, I have the right side all to myself. It's cold, I always forget about cold—the air, the grass, even the paved road beneath my bare feet is
freezing—but it always feels primal, this walking among people, naked and invisible. Empowering in a strange way, to see but not be seen.

Soon the road diverges, and while the crowd moves left toward the gym, I turn right, where I see strobing police car lights up ahead. A soft wind blows through the barren trees. Eventually the rooftop of a white colonial house comes into view, and then a Southern Gothic porch, with a sign perched on a small, rounded second-floor balcony, the Greek letters
ΦΚΨ
painted in gold.

This is where the ambulances are thick.

I duck under the yellow police tape. The tension is fraught, palpable, a barely ordered chaos of first responders and technicians. I step past paramedics working on the body of a young blond woman, stabbed or shot is hard to say but there's so much blood it looks like she took a bath in it. She's wearing footed pajamas. They push at her heart, but her glow is gone, I sense nothing there anymore.

Not the way she probably expected her life would end, although at that age the very idea of an end would seem unfathomable.

Where will she go?
I wonder. Is there another side of the equation, a heaven? If so, I can't imagine why it's so underrepresented here on earth, why the devils and the damned have the run of the place.

It's not until I get closer that I see what happened to her face, or what's left of it. A blurry, runny red mess, like someone used the smudge tool in Photoshop. I've seen this before, in a documentary I dragged Justin to about the untouchables in India and how throwing acid in women's faces was considered
justifiable in certain circumstances. Turning down sexual propositions, for example. The top of her pajamas have melted into her skin.

The complete and utter brutality is definitely Scratch's signature. If there was any doubt that this was a dead-soul event, it's gone now.

Good God, what will he make
me
do to Justin?

Better not to think about that. It would be like climbing a ladder and looking down, paralyzing me, and my window of opportunity will close, and then Justin will die, and then I will be damned
and
alone.

I take a quiet, steadying breath. Head for the porch. A police officer almost steps into me, but I manage to dodge at the last second. Too close. I feel painted wood beneath my feet, make my way up the creaking steps, get the sense that I'm walking in slow motion—shouts inside,
“We found another one!”
—and turn my shoulders to avoid another paramedic carrying a girl. Her arms flop listlessly, her face burned beyond comprehension, and a viscous liquid fills her eye cavities.

Don't think about it
.

I put my hand on the rail to steady myself.

Maybe Scratch
knows
we talked about the double deal at the New Parish—he seems to know almost everything else. But then he is the devil—he would know everything, right? Be able to do anything? That wouldn't leave any room for free will though, in which case, how could anyone be saved or damned if they never had a choice in the first place?

It's another Möbius strip of an existential puzzle.
Don't think about it
.

I reach the top of the porch. The front door is open, an in
viting Christmas pine wreath nailed to it. Music,
music
from inside, high and tinny, like it's playing through a bad speaker.

Bing Crosby, it sounds like, crooning “Jingle Bells,” the song the little girls in the pageant were performing just before they were cut down. A cosmic joke or a spooky coincidence?

I step through the doorway. Pass by a detective. He looks grim, and I soon discover why.

The living room. Blood spatters the white walls—
God, so much of it
—and what must be ten or twelve girls strewn about, no one working on them but technicians with latex gloves, cataloging, gathering evidence. The sorority sisters all wear similar pajamas, with duckies, and puppies, and unicorns, like they were auditioning for Cindy Lou Who. There are remnants of some kind of Christmas festivity—pine needle garlands draped along the stair rails and pinned in loops to the wall, a folding table with platters of sugar cookies, frosted brownies, a keg, bottles of peach schnapps and red plastic cups. A coffee table is turned over, broken, and a floor lamp knocked to the floor flickers wanly.

Feelings. It's hard to feel anything because it's so shocking it looks fake, like this is just a film set or at any moment the girls are going to jump up and yell
You got punked!
A viral horror Christmas flash mob.

Murder as spectacle? Some kind of Bernays stunt?

There's a germ of an idea that tugs at me. I step over to a window adorned with paper snowflakes. Someone pulled the shade half off, leaving streaks of bloody handprints. I can see what's happening behind me reflected in the glass—an officer looks down at the face of a girl, his own reads heartbroken—and I can see what's happening on the other side of the win
dow, the flashing ambulance lights, officers talking into their radios. The only thing I don't see is myself, which is as it should be.

So why do I feel like I'm being watched?

Something catches at the corner of my eyes, a shadow flitting through the trees, the movement too big to be anything but human. Then it's up in the tree—I see the shimmer of branches trembling—and a few leaves drift down, fall to the grass. Then it's gone.

Scratch?

But I can't think about it because just then my foot registers something wet, and cold. I look down to find I've stepped in a pool of blood. Beyond the blood is the curled body of a girl lying on her side, her face thankfully turned away from me.

Fuck
. This presents problems. Serious problems. Another step and I'll leave a footprint for sure, evidence that could definitely be traced to me. I'm going to have to ghost myself out.

That feels risky. And to where? If I ghost home, I'll be leaving my clothes behind, the car. I click through how long it will take before they run the license plate, discover that not only is it registered to Fiona Dunn, but said Fiona Dunn visited San Quentin earlier. And then what would they make of my clothes left in a heap tucked away in the shrubbery, with my purse, wallet, and cell phone? The panicked trail of text messages. Did someone mention Jeb and Dan? Christ, I think they did. Ghosting back to the shrub is also risky—a couple of feet off and I'll be a very visible naked woman out in the open, something I'm sure the officers will take note of.

Another pair of technicians wrestle a gurney through the door, and a third heads straight for me.

There was that three-story building, with a long, flat roof. I can ghost there, sort out the rest after. No one ever looks up. My best worst option.

Just as I'm about to close my eyes, a gust of wind blows through, rustles the fliers on a bulletin board festooned with craft paper holly leaves and red tissue paper bunched to form the berries.
Calculus Tutoring just $20/hour
,
Toys 4 Tots Car Wash!
,
Start the New Year with Piedmont Pilates
—and another that catches my eye.

Data Mining Interns Needed for High-Tech Company.
Followed by the Fealtee logo.

Good God, standing in the pool of some unknown girl's blood it comes to me. An offer for a double deal that the devil himself couldn't possibly turn down.

The technician spots the girl by my feet, and his skin blanches.

“Ashley,” he says, his voice bereft.

O
h fuck, he knows her
.

He takes another step toward me, so I close my eyes, let the world fade—

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

—A
ND OPEN THEM
to a world of ash. Everything around me is gray or in the state of becoming gray, a shadowy version of reality with no sound, no color, the boundaries of forms blurry, smudged. Things are tree-ish, building-ish, people-ish, but otherwise indistinct, unreachable. I sense I'm pulled through space and objects, fast and slow at the same time, like I'm speeding up or the world is slowing down around me.
Vortex
, a word from my college physics days;
purgatory
a word from the girl with the perfect lunches. I taste wood, cold air, metal, car exhaust, paint, flesh, bark, paper, blood, water, tar, all the things I pass through, creating a new taste, indescribable. But then I realize all sensation is movement, a current of raw experience, not separated or isolated by increments of time, identity, the things that bind.

It's beautiful. It's terrifying. It's sublime.
Ashley, Jennifer, Hannah, Alice
,
Sarah
,
Rachel
,
Kara
,
Cindy, Delilah, Grace, Tina, Marnie, Beth
. I know their names, they're here somehow, but they're losing their form too, becoming absorbed, consumed.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
.

This strikes me as funny, so I laugh, or I think I laugh but
my jaw feels like its being pulled away from me, my body stretched out into all directions.

Ghosting
. I ghost, you ghost, he/she/it ghosts. We ghost, you ghost, they ghost.
Is this what getting high is like?
I can see the appeal now, discarding the weight of self.

Then I get a sense of up, pulled up to the sky while the ground falls away, and the vortex begins to collapse, the world hardening again, becoming bits and pieces of this or that.

Is this the train from the story Alejandro spoke of? If I had a watch, would I stop it here? There's something nice about everything all mixed and smudged together. Simpler. Once again I'm a ghost in a ghost world, and I wonder if I let it go, all my boundaries, what it would feel like to not be anymore.

A man's soft, bitter voice.
Apple never falls far from the tree
. My father. He's here, in this gray hinterland. And then I think I see him, a tall, lanky shadow with the telltale right-hand quiver. Or is that just me, my memories floating out into the ether, echoing back before they dissipate, disappear?

Still. There's a surprising bit of emotion, seeing him again.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

C
OLD CONCRETE
under my feet. The wind blows through my hair, tickles my naked shoulders. I hear voices, sirens, traffic. I'm back. A part of me doesn't want to open my eyes, a part of me wants to ghost again, see if I can get lost forever in that gray hinterland.
Can Scratch collect if I don't exist anymore?

But that thing called self, it sticks, my ferocious will to be.

So I open my eyes and the world looks new, achingly beautiful. I'm on the roof and, godlike, I can see the rooftops of all the campus buildings, the tops of trees, bent and twisted, the police spreading out on the grounds below, their flashlight beams penetrating the darkness like shooting stars. A good crowd has formed outside the perimeter wall, a mix of what looks like concerned friends and family, and police are now trying to create a detour so more don't join them. News vans have taken the prime spaces along the sidewalks, and while crews fix lights, reporters check their hair. Traffic snakes slowly through the intersection, and I can see the jam extends at least two miles, maybe more.

Even if I can retrieve my clothes, there's no way to get my car out. No good explanation as to why it would be on the
campus. I imagine all the hours that will be wasted, time spent trying to come up with a reasonable lie, time spent sitting in a police station while they take my statement. If they run the plates, will they find out I visited San Quentin earlier? Is their database that good?

I'm running out of time on all fronts. I'm either losing my ability or it's becoming hard to control, a sure sign I'm moving up on Scratch's collection list.
Should I wait?

But I'm so damn
close
. The Fealtee flier. I need to get home, boot up Justin's laptop, see if what I'm thinking about offering Scratch for a double deal is even possible. If it is, I can solve all my problems with one carefully worded trade.

And the big shadow in the trees that I saw earlier. Whatever that was, it can't be good.

A plan starts to materialize—not the best one—that involves me climbing down the drainpipe, then—

I hear a cough directly behind me.

I TURN, STARTLED,
to find Jeb and Dan behind me, no trouble telling them apart tonight. Jeb's wearing jeans and a T-shirt I've seen him in many times before—it reads
FE, IRONY
—and blood clumps his hair, stains his shirt. His right arm is horribly burned, looks like the charred top of an overdone pizza. With the other arm he holds an incoherent Dan around the waist, like he's propping up a drunk buddy, a listing ship. Dan is in full Santa gear with a red velvet suit and a white fake beard pulled halfway down his chin, blood smeared across his face and white gloves.

What's the fastest way I can ditch them?
is my immediate, horrible thought.

“I didn't,” whispers Dan to a vacant spot just over my shoulder. “I didn't. I didn't. I didn't.”

Tears have left streaks in the blood on his face. His right eye twitches. He will never be the same again.

“What did you
do
?” I ask Jeb. Short, terse, interrogatory words. Not the right ones, not
Oh my God, what happened?
or
Are you hurt?
Not the faintest hint, or breath of compassion. It frightens me how unnatural empathy seems at the moment.

Jeb, looking equal parts terrified and stunned, says, “I didn't do anything. Dan . . . he . . . I tried to stop them.”

“What do you mean,
them
?”

“I knew about the party.” His voice is hoarse, ragged. “I was going to swing by the sorority later, but I didn't know Scratch had called in his favor. Which is weird, totally weird, because we
promised
each other, you know, blood-brother promise that if Scratch called in the favor . . . we'd tell each other. I mean that's fucked-up, right? That he didn't tell me?”

“Jeb, what do you mean
them
?”

“They just did what Dan told them to. Like his power . . . it was
amplified
. No one would do that to themselves. I can't . . . I can't even . . .”

“Was Alejandro there taking pictures?”

He shakes his head. “A girl. She was shooting the whole thing on Dan's cell. The lights were going on and off, like when
he's
around. And then I think . . . no I know I saw . . . oh God, he was there. The devil, he was . . . oh God. Oh Jesus fucking Christ.”

Something catches in my throat, a fluttery feeling I don't think a word exists for, a strange mix of fear, excitement, desire, and despair. “Are you
sure
?”

A teardrop of sweat trickles down Jeb's forehead. “He was outside under that big tree, smoking. I felt him before I saw him—turned and there he was, exactly the way I remember, white blond hair, wearing a hoodie. No face. Half the girls were dead by the time I got there. And he was just . . . looking at the sky. Like nothing was happening. Like it didn't even matter. Watched me run into the house, didn't try to stop me. All I could do though was get Dan out. Too late for anything else. And then we saw you through the window.”

The movement in the tree. “That was you?”

He nods. “After what happened, that's as far as I could get us.”

“I
didn't
!
” says Dan, louder and more emphatically this time, and we both quickly shush him. Dan's knees buckle and Jeb struggles to hold him upright, looks at me, pleading. Will the adult please take charge?

Dammit, I have things to do.
Tick, tick, tick
. And now there will be bloody footprints, Jeb and Dan's on the rooftop, little bits of DNA evidence forming connection points, linking us all together. What will they find of me, I wonder? A fallen hair? Flake of skin? Plus my car, my clothes, my wallet, my cell phone. Too many variables to keep track of, layers and layers of complication when all I wanted was time. Why didn't I just ask Scratch for more time?

“Fiona?” Jeb's voice is tentative, wan.

In the distance, I hear the drone of helicopters approaching. The rooftop is suddenly less appealing.

I press the back of my hand against my forehead, try to find the best way out considering the clusterfuck material I'm
surrounded with. I may have to leave them behind, let them take the fall.

As if sensing my mutinous line of thought, Jeb says, “I can't fly well anymore . . . not since this morning.”

I look at him intently. “Your card?”

“Nothing,” he says.

“Show me.”

His face goes pale, shocked that I'd even ask, but the helicopters are getting closer. He reaches into his back pocket with his good arm, pulls it out. His fingers tremble as he hands it to me.

Cautiously, I take it from him.

FAVOR:
blank.

The damned wellspring of hope rises again. I'm not next, there's one left before me.

“It means I'm close though, right? That's what Alejandro said, that our powers wouldn't work so well . . . when we're close?”

He's hoping I'll correct him, tell him he's wrong, but instead, I look away, calculating. Dan's completed, Renata's on her way, but Jeb . . . he could be useful. He
is
close, which means he's probably third on Scratch's list, and until his favor's called in, I know I have some breathing room. My own canary in a coal mine. Plus he's a cybersecurity major. That could be very,
very
useful.

Whir of chopper blades, closer. Not long now until we're spotted.

“I didn't,” whispers Dan. He rubs a bloody hand over his
bloody mouth, chokes back a sob. “I didn't. I
didn't
. Jeb knows. Jeb sees.” He quickly reaches into Jeb's pocket and pulls out a cell smeared with even more blood. “You can see, too.”

My eyes meet Jeb's. “That's the phone that filmed it?”

He nods. “I grabbed it from the girl. Thought it'd buy us some time.”

Wind wraps around my ankles, a soft caress. The pale glint of the moon emerges from behind a cloud.

So. This is how bad I'm fucked.

A favor. Scratch called it a
favor
. Favors are picking up an extra half gallon of milk at the store, running down to the meter to add another quarter, favors are rides to the airport and liking a friend's new page on Facebook.
Favor
was not the right word, not at all, it can't even begin to encompass everything happening right now. But there is no time, not for regrets, or emotions. I must get out of here. I must get out of my favor,
somehow
. I must succeed.

Here are my materials—a boy who can fly, a boy who's incoherent, and a Santa suit.

Possibly
. Yes, possibly, yes.

“Get him out of the suit. Hurry.”

JEB HAS DROPPED ME OFF
in the narrow space between the eave of the building and a Dumpster. It was more like falling than flying and I scraped my hands on the landing, but better than the alternative, ghosting. The Santa suit is too big, the pants are cold and wet with blood, and there are small, scorched holes from where drops of acid fell. I don't know the whole
story, and I'm not sure if I ever want to. But the black leather belt cinches the waist enough, and so I grab the suit jacket, slide it over my shoulders, push out the beard, mustache, and hat, which Jeb wisely tucked into the sleeve before dropping it so a gust of wind couldn't carry them off somewhere else.

I slip the beard over my face, tightening the elastic to hold it on tightly. Grab the hat, place it firmly on my head—my hand registers a clump of dried blood—and try not to think too much about the next part. I can't be killed, but that doesn't mean I want to get shot.

A helicopter flies directly overhead, pressing a large beam of light through the trees like fingers. When it passes, I look up to where Jeb's head peers over the edge of the rooftop, a dark silhouette.

I wave. He waves back, then his head disappears. A few seconds pass, and then I see him—it looks like he's jumping from the building, the barely discernible form of Dan hanging from his neck, their trajectory the tree just above the shrub where I stashed my clothes. In spite of everything, it's weird, spooky, and wonderful to see them in flight. They land in the tree's serpentine branches, perfect timing because moments later another helicopter swoops in, directs its beam to the rooftop where we all were just standing.

I watch Jeb carefully fix Dan's arms so he's gripping the tree's trunk, and then Jeb softly drops to the ground. Darts behind the shrub. Its branches rustle and then Jeb emerges, holding a bundle of my clothes under his arm. He pauses, and then flicks my father's brass Winston lighter on. A small flame dances on its tip. What a bitter moment that was in my child
hood, slipping it out of my father's pants pocket when he was too high to notice, and to think I carried it with me all those years, a souvenir of hard times. More than a decade for its purpose to reveal itself.

Jeb flicks the lighter off.

My turn.

I run.

Bolting out of the shadow of the Dumpster, I brush past officers who turn to look, startled—
Hey, is that . . . ? Did you see . . . ?
—and make a mad dash straight for the police cars blocking the entrance, arms pumping hard, trying to make the most of the moment between their sight, thought, and realization. Men and women in navy fatigues drop their hands to their gun holsters—shouts of
stop! stop!
—but I can't, I won't, because I have to train all their eyes on me.

I make it past the entrance, jump over the intersection of two squad cars, sliding over the hoods just like they do in the movies, but the landing isn't as graceful—I fall on my face, feel the scrape of asphalt against my hands again—

Click, click
of guns locking.