Managing Death (34 page)

Only one man stood before my mother. He wore a blue suit and a striped tie that shimmered like the steel in his shadowed eyes. Wavy blond hair. Square jaw. Handsome, maybe. Handsome devil. Zombie.

All of them, zombies. Human shells. Living. Breathing. Possessed.

My mother made me slide to the floor. I clutched the hem of her coat. I tried to be small. I knew danger. I knew threats. I knew a demon when I saw one.

My mother raised her hand. Metal sparked between her tattooed fingers. A star from the road. Bristling with spikes. The zombie smiled. He also raised his hand. In his palm, a deck of cards.

‘All we want is a look,’ he said. ‘Just one. You know how it is.’

‘I know enough.’ Her voice was so cold. She could not be the same woman, not mine, not my mother. Her hand tightened around the spikes, which dug into her skin but did not puncture, no matter how hard she squeezed. I watched her hand, the straining tendons. I heard metal groan.

The zombie’s smile widened. ‘One-card draw. Highest wins.’

‘If I refuse?’

‘Now or later. You know the rules.’

‘You pervert them,’ said my mother. ‘You pervert this world.’

‘We are demon,’ said the zombie simply, and stepped sideways to the battered bar, its surface scarred and mauled by years of hard elbows and broken glass. Ashtrays overflowed. Bottles clustered. Everything, sticky with fingerprints; even the air, marked, cut with smoke and sweat.

My mother watched the zombie. She watched them all and shrugged her shoulders. Her jacket slid off slowly, falling on the floor beside me. She wore little. A tight white tank top, a harness for her knives. Silver tattoos roped down her arms, glinting red. Eyes. Open and staring.

No one moved. Even the zombie in the suit went still. I watched their auras tighten, pulsing faster, harder. My mother’s mouth curled. She took my hand. Squeezed once. Led me to the bar where the zombie waited, leaning on a stool. His smile was gone. He looked at her tattoos. His eyelid twitched.

My mother tapped the bar. ‘Last time it was chess.’

‘You were ten,’ he replied, tearing his gaze from her arms. ‘And that was your mother’s game. You’re not her.’

Her mouth tightened. ‘Show me the deck.’

The zombie placed it between them and stepped back. My mother fanned the cards. Her gaze roved, flicking once to me.

She shuffled. So did the zombie. Three times each. The slap of the cards sounded like gunfire. My mouth dried. My heart thundered. I clutched her leg, and her fingers buried deep into my hair. She held me close. The zombie tapped the deck and slid one card to the side. My mother did the same.

‘Two of diamonds,’ she said. Voice hard, like she wanted to kill. The zombie remained silent. He flipped his card and pushed it to her. My mother stared. Her hand tightened in my hair. Her jaw flexed.

‘You run,’ said the zombie softly, ‘and it will be worse next time. I think you remember.’

‘I think you ask too much.’

‘We ask for so little, considering. Just one glimpse. Painless.’ The zombie leaned in. ‘Do
not
be your mother.’

She shot him a cold look. He slid from the stool, and the rest of the room shifted, shadows crawling like worms – zombies scuffling from their chairs to cross the floor. Closing in. Eyes black. Auras writhing. My mother faced them. I did not see her hand move, but her fingers flexed, and a knife suddenly glinted, held loosely. No hilt. Just blade. Razor-sharp. In her other hand, that barbed star.

The zombie loosened his tie. ‘You can’t kill us all. Not without injuring our hosts. Innocents, all of them.’

My mother said nothing. So still. Hardly breathing. Her fingers squeezed the blade, and she turned, blocking the entire room from my view. She looked down at me, and her gaze was hollow, impossibly grim. Her eyes, black as a demon’s tongue, and just as cold.

‘Do not be afraid,’ she whispered.

I tried to hold her to me, but she slipped away, and zombies took her place. So many. Shoulders broad as mountains. Packed tight. Breath hot. Stinking with sweat and winter wool. I could not see faces for shadows, but the zombie in the suit leaned close. Crooked his finger like a hook. I remembered cold shock. Hammers in my heart. I had thought they wanted my mother, but it was me. They wanted me.

‘Frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails,’ murmured the zombie, his eyes glinting silver. ‘Sugar and spice, everything nice.’

He grabbed my jaw with one hand. Squeezed. Pushed down until I was forced to kneel. I could not breathe. I felt my thoughts bleed – for sunset and the boys, my mother. I wanted her to save
me. I wanted it so badly, so hard, wished so much to understand.

I wanted to understand.

I could not forget. Consumed and hunted –
I know what it is to be hunted
– feeding those creatures my fear and pain, dispensed like so much sour candy. Demons in their stolen human skins staring with darkling eyes, searching for weakness, a way into my mind. Wanting to make me one of them. Zombie. Infected with a parasite.

I fought. I must have. I remembered voices in my head. Whispers and howls. Zee and the boys, raging in their dreams. I remembered my heart. My heart, opening like a bloody mouth, tasting my terror—

—And then biting it out of me. My heart, shedding the fear and tossing it away. Letting something else slip into its place.

Something from me. Of me. Born in the roots of me. A darkness deep and vast, forever dead, forever cold – and in my soul a slow, shuffling resurrection, a terrible yawning hunger, rising through blood and bone as though every cell of my body had been born empty and frozen and now –
here
– nectar and milk and honey.

Mine to take. Mine to steal. Mine to kill.

I never felt so clearheaded as I did then. Never so strong. I could have killed those zombies. I could have killed them all. Eight years old. Ready to murder. Starving for it. Skin, pulling. Muscles stretching from my bones. All of me, reaching with my soul. Grasping at demons.

The zombie let go of my face. He let go, and I grabbed his hands. I held him to me, and a gray pallor spread – like stone cracking beneath his skin, cold and dead – and I stole him. I stole him away and felt the taste of demon in my blood, rich and sour, like bitter, bilious honey.

And the darkness grew, and I could see it – I closed my eyes to bear witness – and saw it was not a mere void, but a body, turning and turning beneath my skin – glinting like obsidian touched by moonlight, shiny and slick and sharp.

The zombie’s eyes rolled back. His friends grabbed him, hands
appearing under his arms, across his chest, in his hair – pulling him, hauling hard. My fingers could not hold his wrists. He slipped free. Everyone stumbled back, and I followed. Something inside me wanted to follow.

My mother slipped between them, catching me. Holding tight as I struggled, still trying to chase the hot stink of those zombies – those scared little demons – burning me blind and hungry. My mother said my name, my name –
Maxine, Maxine
– and placed her hands on my face, forcing me to look at her. The boys, those tattoos sleeping on her palms, kissed my flushed cheeks.

They swallowed the darkness. Wrapped themselves with treacherous tenderness around my soul and knitted shut my heart like a door – a door never opened, never seen. They ate the needle and thread, consumed the key. Murder and hunger and death – obsidian and moonlight – nothing more than a bad dream.

A bad dream. Less and more than dream, after all these years. I remembered my mother in that moment – her breathlessness, the softness of her face – and behind her, that zombie in his suit, stretched on the ground, his skin gray and his eyes open and staring. His whisper, the slow, churning hiss of his breath as he said, ‘She passed. She’s strong enough to kill the others. She’s strong enough for
them
.’

My mother said nothing. She held me closer. I felt her heart pound. The other zombies backed away, lost in shadow – less flesh than shadow – and only that zombie with his shining hair and cracked skin tried to stay near, rising slowly to his feet, lurching one step closer. He watched me, and behind my heart, something rattled, wanting out. My mother’s arms tightened. She backed away, toward the door, carrying me. The zombie followed, bent over, holding out his hand. My mother shook her head. ‘I played your game. You had your test.’

‘This was not part of the test,’ he whispered, pointing at himself. ‘This was not part of anything that should
be
.’

My mother turned, and he grabbed her shoulder. She let him.
She stood still as ice as he pressed his mouth against her ear and whispered words I could not understand, whispered long and low and hard. I watched my mother’s face change.

The zombie pulled away. Skin peeled from his face in strips. Fresh blood dotted the corners of his eyes. He swayed, like he was weak. Dying. ‘Do it, Hunter. It’s not worth the risk.
Kill her
. Have another child. You’re still young.’

My mother’s mouth tightened. She set me down and rubbed my head. Gentle, reassuring. At odds with the death in her eyes.

A knife appeared in her hand.

She moved fast. Opened the door of the bar and shoved me outside, into the snow. I fell on my knees. The door slammed shut behind me. I tried to go back inside, but the knob would not turn. Locked. I banged on the wood with my fists, screaming for her. Screaming and screaming.

Men screamed back. Women howled. I heard pain in those voices, terror, and now – now I realize – death. I listened to my mother murder. I stumbled back, breathless.

Silence was worse. I did not know who would come through that door. And when it opened and I saw my mother, I still did not know who had come through. Her hair was wild. Her face spattered red. Eyes dark and burning.

I did not know what I said. I did not remember. I was sure I stared. That much, I stared. I tried not to flinch when she knelt and looked into my face. She held up her hands for me to see. Blood glistened on her fingers. Blood that slowly disappeared into her tattooed skin. Boys, drinking up. Feeding.

‘I don’t want you to remember this,’ she whispered, touching my forehead. ‘Baby. My baby.’

She stole from me. Memories, hidden behind dreams. I did not know how I lost so much – how she did it – but I blame my youth. I was so young. I forgot it all – even later, when I saw more. So much more. Even then I did not remember those zombies, that bar – my mother and the darkness, caged.

So naïve. I thought I was wise. I thought I knew everything.
But thirteen years after that moment in the snow I watched my mother get shot in the head. And I finally understood. I remembered. I got it.

I got it all.

I was standing beside a former priest in the small secondary kitchen of a homeless shelter, trying to convince an old woman that marijuana was not a substitute for sugar, when a zombie pushed open the stainless-steel doors and announced that two detectives from the Seattle Police Department had arrived.

I listened. Heard pans banging, shouts from the other kitchen; the low, rumbling roar of voices in the dining hall, accompanied by classical music piped in for the lunch hour. Tchaikovsky’s
Sleeping Beauty
. My choice for the day. Sounded pleasant with the rain pounding on the tin eaves, or the wind sighing against the cloudy window glass.

I heard no sirens. No dull echoes from police radios. No officious voices grumbling orders and questions. Some comfort. But on my skin, beneath the long sleeves of my leather jacket and turtleneck, the boys tossed in their sleep, restless and dreaming. Today, especially restless. Tingling since dawn. Not a good sign. When Zee and the others slept poorly, it usually meant someone needed to run. Someone, being me.

‘Impossible,’ Grant muttered. ‘Did they say why they’re here?’

‘Not yet. Someone could have called.’

‘Any idea who?’

‘Take your pick,’ Rex said, the demon in his aura fluttering wildly. ‘You attract busybodies like gravity and a 34DD.’

The old woman was still ignoring us, and had begun humming a complicated melody of show tunes from
South Pacific
. A tiny person, skinny as a scrap of leather, with a nose that had been
broken so many times it looked like a rock-slide. Pale, wrinkled skin, long hair white as snow. Wiry arms scarred with old needle tracks and covered in thick plastic bangles.

Mary, one of the shelter’s permanent residents. A former heroin addict Grant had found living in a gutter more than a year ago. His special project. An experiment in progress.

I watched her lean over a red plastic bowl, filled to the brim with brownie mix and chocolate chips. Her right hand stirred the batter, a pair of long, wooden chopsticks sunk ineffectively into the mix, while her other hand held a glass jar packed with enough finely crushed weed to make an entire city block high for a week.

She peered through her eyelashes to see if Grant was looking – which he was, even though his back was slightly turned – and we both flinched as she dumped in another lump of the green leaves and started stirring faster.

‘You need to get rid of that stuff,’ I said. ‘Split it between the garbage and the toilet.’

Grant’s knuckles turned white around his cane. ‘It could be a coincidence the police are here. Some of them stop to chat sometimes.’

‘You willing to take that risk?’

‘Flushing evidence won’t take care of the basement.’

I looked down at the old leather of my cowboy boots, pretending to see past them into the cavernous underbelly of the warehouse shelter. Furniture used to be manufactured in this place. Some of the big sewing machines and leatherworks still gathered dust in those dim, dark spaces. Lots of places to hide down there. Rooms undiscovered.

One in particular, hidden behind some broken stairs. Found by accident, just this morning. Filled with heat lamps. Packed wall to wall with a jungle of carefully cultivated, highly illegal plants. A makeshift operation. And one old lady hip deep in the middle of it, singing to her green babies. Knitting little booties for real babies.