The Beautiful Dead (10 page)

And with that,
the cheery woman is already at the door ready to usher me out.

“Wait,” I say,
panicked.

He looks up at
me, brows raised. “Yes?”

I want to ask
him about his conversation with the Judge, but I can’t. I want to ask him why
the Deathless are hunting me …
if
… they’re hunting me. I want to ask
what the Judge meant by calling me the missing progeny. What’s the missing
progeny? Who am I? What am I?

“Out with it,”
he sings sweetly. “Your Raise awaits!”

“Nothing,” I
finally say, defeated. I can’t even confess a simple eavesdrop. “Nothing at
all.”

And so the
cheery woman draws me back from where I’d come in, down a hall and out a door.
That’s all I get for a briefing. That’s all the prep I’m allowed, courtesy of
the self-admitted not-very-good Mayor.

In a few more
rushed minutes, the north Trenton gate yawns before me. I haven’t yet left the
city on my own, but I guess now is as good a time as any. Bracing myself for
whatever’s to come, I march through the tall iron gates and head down the only
path before me. At each fork in the road, I choose left, just as I was told.

The further I go,
the less I want to.

The haze of
dead trees I’m cutting through becomes scarcer, each tree spaced further apart,
until at last the dead woods give way to the murky fields that feel so
unexplainably familiar to me, considering I’ve only been here once before.
Crossing the vast, dirty lowland, I look around for the so-called mist or cue
or whatever I’m supposed to be looking for. Listening for the cue in the mist,
isn’t that what the Mayor told me?

I spin in
circles. Nothing for miles in all directions. Every way I look, it’s just an
infinite plain of soil and murk. Just crossing this filthy terrain, I already
want to take a shower. I regret my choice in shoes. At least I’m still wearing
that comfortable outfit I’d planned on staying home in. It’d be really nice if
Grim were here with me right now, telling me I’ll be okay.

“Lost?”

I jump,
totally surprised by the sudden company I have. It’s an older lady, her hair in
blue-grey curls. She peers at me over the rims of her glasses and says, “This
is my sixth Raise. I do get very weary of these. Your first?”

“Sixth??” I gawk.
I hadn’t realized so many Undead were produced from this earthen grime.

“Ooh, there’s
my call,” she says, her ears perking up. “Good luck, darling.” And she’s off in
the direction of wherever, pursuing some sound I can’t hear.

“Hello? Wait!”
I call out, feeling stupid and insecure, but she’s already gone, fog enveloping
her.

So I’m alone
again.  Ambling around without an idea what I’m supposed to be doing, without
course, without any help, I keep staring into fogs and mists that seem to rise
out of nowhere. The silver sky is so intense above me, it feels like with every
passing minute my body grows double in weight, heavier, heavier.

And then I
hear a howl. Or perhaps it’s whispering, I can’t tell. If it is a voice that
whispers, it’s in no language I understand, no words I can pick out.

“Is that my
cue?” I ask no one in particular.

Following the
sound of that unnecessarily-creepy whispering, my field of vision grows smaller
and smaller. It’s like the mist is pushing in, swallowing me up. Whispering,
howling, rolling winds like an advancing storm, I keep moving until the howling
grows to a level far too thick for comfort.

Then a hand
bursts forth from the earth, grabbing my ankle.

Naturally, I
scream and fall backward. The hand clings to my ankle like a metal cuff, grip
unrelenting. How and why the hell is anyone buried out here in the middle of
nowhere? This isn’t a cemetery. Do the Raises just materialize in this field? …
Did I?

Questions
rapidly fill my mind. I can’t answer them because there’s a hand on my ankle.

Contrary to
what any logical person would do, I don’t wrestle away from it, nor do I
attempt to cry out or kick it off and run away screaming. Instead, I reach out
and take the hand as though it were a friend’s.

A friend hanging
from a cliff.

“I got you!” I
cry out to my whoever. “Pull!”

Of course they
don’t. Taking hold of his or her hand, I decide quickly that just pulling won’t
be enough to free the mystery person from the murk. Letting go for a moment, I
start clawing away the dirt, shoveling it with my bare fingers like I were
disentombing a treasure chest, unearthing a dog’s bone, digging, digging, until
with that hand now bears an arm, and then a shoulder, and then a head. Helena
was right. Like childbirth, but infinitely more regrettable.

“I got you!” I
cry out again, pulling with all my might the arm of my person. Slipping free
now, she breaks from the earth and lands at my side, the whole length of her.
Literally caked in soot, both slippery and dry as a bone, she just lays there
with her eyes clenched shut and her mouth quivering like she’s cold, scared, or
crying.

The sight of
her face, even ugly as it is painted in mud, inspires me to care for her
instantly. This poor girl, just like I was, suddenly wrenched into this world
she could never possibly know was waiting for her on the other side of death.

“Hi there,” I
murmur softly, still holding her hand.

She doesn’t
respond at all. Only her lower lip moves, still trembling, shivering, whatever
it is.

“Can you hear
me? My name is Winter.”

All around us,
I hear that incessant whispering, ghostly, stormy, chaotic, psychotic. I
realize belatedly that I’ve heard this whispering before at my own Raising.

“My name is
Winter,” I try again. “What’s yours?”

It doesn’t
dawn on me until after I ask it that, of course, she doesn’t know her name. She
knows nothing. She’s probably trying to remember her life, even right now. This
poor girl’s mind is desperately reaching for the familiar things she feels she
knew only seconds ago, already fading away, already gone.

“Don’t worry,”
I decide to tell her, echoing the same words Helena used to comfort me. “You’re
only dying.”

Her parents
she knows she has, but can’t picture their faces for some reason. Her brother
or sister, their name or names escaping her. That last thing she clenched in
her hand. That last meal she had with a friend. That one thing everyone would
call her … what was it? … a name? … what was her name?

“Undying,” I
amend. “That’s what I meant. Undying.”

She’s not
screaming, not like I apparently was when I was Raised. No wonder Helena
couldn’t stand me from the start … my incessant screaming. I remember how awful
I was, how I could’ve broke my own voice right then, how I must’ve been such an
awful experience. This girl before me, my own Raise, she isn’t so bad.

“Your Old
Life’s, uh … going away slowly,” I tell her, improvising. “No need to remember
any of that stuff. You’re gonna be a new person with a new life now. You will,
uh … and stuff …”

I’m trying
here. I’m trying really hard, but this girl is as good as dead. What else
should I do? Is there anything in particular I’m supposed to be saying to this
corpse?

“We’re going
to take you to the Refinery,” I go on, trying the most soothing voice I can
manage. “There, we’re gonna clean you all up and, uh, criticize your skin and
prod you and … Where’s your other arm?”

The girl sits
upright in an instant—nearly smacking me in the face, I might add. Her panicked
eyes find mine at once, her little lips still quaking.

“Hi,” I croak.

And then the
screaming starts—except she’s staring right at me, face-to-face, and the effect
is very upsetting.

“Please!” I
try to shout, combatting her impressive, violent volume. “Stop yelling!—You’ll
wake the dead!”

Before I can
even blink, the girl’s jumped to her feet, knocking me back. She’s flailing her
arms—her whole left one, and whatever remains of her right—still screeching at
the top of her voice.

“Stop it!—Stop
screaming!”

The girl spins
on her heel and bolts. I clamber to my feet, reach out with remarkable agility and
manage to grab her by the ankle, just as she had done mine. The one-armed girl
falls forward, shrieking murder, her left hand tearing at the earth, clawing
her way to freedom as her right stub of an arm pummels the ground senselessly.
I’m reminded for a moment of a fish thrown out of water, walloping and
thrashing its way back home.

But this poor
girl, she has no home.

“I won’t hurt
you!” I cry out.

Then she kicks
me in the face, full-on, breaking not only my nose, but also free from my grip.
She escapes again, this time with conviction.

Into the mist,
out of sight.

“Stop!—Stop
it!—Come back!”

Blinded by the
direct kick to the face, I plummet into the fog in pursuit of the screaming
girl, desperate not to let her get away from me again. “Get back here!” I
shout, muffled and nasally, holding my own nose so it doesn’t fall off or worse.
“I won’t hurt you!” I keep calling. “I can help you!” But the screaming soon
dies, the mist keeping her utterly hidden from me, too-perfectly veiled,
too-impressively concealed among its vaporous curtains of grey-white secrets …

I can neither
see nor hear her any longer.

“Where are
you!?—Come back!” I holler, losing faith with every cry, stumbling over my own
feet in my clumsy hunt for the girl, my earth person, my Raise.

The screaming
has been stolen away by the mists, along with the girl. The fog fades,
revealing once again the barren plain that yawns in all directions, save the
way back to Trenton by which I’m supposed to return—but not alone. Even the
whispering winds have abandoned me, left me all by myself.

“Hello!?” I
bellow out.

The girl is
gone.

C H A P T E R – S E V E N

“You
what??”
cries Helena.

I am in deep
doo-doo.

“It was instant,”
I say in my own defense. “I couldn’t keep ahold of her! She had all this fight,
thrashing about, kicked me straight in the face and bolted!”

“And you just
… let her go??”

“What was I
supposed to do? All that fog in the way, it’s a miracle I’d even see her if she
were only two feet ahead of me!—and I still need my nose fixed.”

She pounds the
empty Upkeep table with her bony fist—the table that was supposed to be hosting
my Raise. Two other women are in the room with us, one of them the mouthless
girl who fixed the hole in my chest, the other one Marigold, both familiar to
me, both having mended me in dramatically different states.

“
You
,”
Helena growls, “will need to fix this. Who knows where she is now? Who knows
what sort of awful state she’s in, tortured of mind as she is?—tortured of
soul, tortured of body?”

“Oh yeah,” I
recall tardily. “She’s missing an arm too.”

Helena and the
two girls stare at me like I’m the world’s biggest moron. Maybe I am. Maybe
there was something easy I could’ve done to trap the girl better, to keep her
from running, to console her, anything.

I know I
messed up. I know I messed up badly, but admitting that to Helena, the rude
woman who’s hated me for no reason at all since the moment she first pulled me
out of the ground, is not something I have the humility to do right now. Or
ever.

“I have to
report this to the Judge,” she decides in a chilling, quiet voice, shaking her
head with utter outrage.

“My nose,” I
repeat, pointing at it, staring at the two Refinery girls imploringly. “We need
to fix my nose.”

“You need to
find that girl!!” Helena screams. I step back, stunned by her snapped temper.
“This cannot be allowed! You have committed a—a—a—”

“Grave
mistake?” I offer.

I should’ve
held my tongue. Helena swipes the first thing she can, a sharp tool off the
workbench, and chucks it at my face. I’m deft enough to duck, then hop out of
the way when she lobs a bottle of Flesh Molding at me too.

“I,” she
heaves, “regret,” she goes on, quaking all over, “the day I called you from the
Grounds. Regret!!”

If only I’d
been given an ounce of forgiveness from her, I’d be apologizing now instead of
visualizing twenty different ways I can behead Helena fast enough to make her
shut up. Way one, with that tool she just chucked at my head. Two, with my pretty
fingernails. Three …

“Whatever the
judgment you face,” she threatens me, pointing at me like Death’s finger, “you
face it alone. I will
not
be blamed for this.”

“Why would you
be?” I ask honestly. “It was my fault. I let the girl slip away … She’s missing
because of me. It was my mistake.”

There, I said
it.

“Because I’m
responsible for you,” she answers. “You are my Raise, my reflection, my
problem. That’s why.”

I sigh,
collapsing into a stool-like thing. “I still don’t understand what this has to
do with you.”

“The Judge
will assume,” she goes on, “since you allowed the girl to get away from
you—without an apparent care in the world—that my
own
Raising of you was
not an effective, educational, or otherwise rewarding experience for you at
all. That I, in essence, failed you. Thank you very much.”

“I’ll fix
this,” I tell her plainly. “Whatever I have to do, I’ll find the girl. Leave it
to me.”

“I’ve left
enough to you.”

With that,
Helena storms out of the Refinery, her heels clicking against every spot of
wooden floor she crosses, stabbing every stair she descends. The room is
shrouded in silence now, the first moment of concord since I arrived here to
deliver my admittedly awful news.

I turn to the
girls with renewed hope. “My nose?”

So an hour,
maybe two hours later, I’m finally free of the squatty pink building and
slumping my way back home. As much as I dislike Helena, a part of me realizes
she’s completely right, and I feel awful about it. I failed not only the new
girl, but Helena too. I’ve shown her to be a bad example that, in one way or
another, I copied. I even used some of her lines on my own Raise, but nothing
seemed to pacify her. Or maybe the mistake was mentioning the missing arm. I
suppose that’d be enough to freak anyone out, new to this world or not.

And now
there’s a girl out there, confused, panicked, scared half to death, scared half
to life—and it’s my fault.

I suddenly have
to sit down, collapsed into a bench in front of a closed hair salon. When I
look up, I realize I’m not alone. On the other side of the street seated in a
bench of his own is a bearded man with messy hair. He doesn’t seem to regard me
at all, just staring off into the silver night. His totally lax demeanor, for a
moment I envy. I take notice of the facility he’s seated in front of, realizing
it’s the brothers’ gym I’ve been hearing about.

“Are you the
owner?” I ask, bothering to disturb the silence of this barren street.

He doesn’t
flinch, doesn’t respond, doesn’t even so much as bat an eyelash. I wonder if
he’s dead, then realize we all are.

Then it clicks.
“You’re the brother,” I say. “You’re the doctor … the surgeon. Collin is your
name?”

“Was,” he
agrees unflinchingly.

I try humor. “I
think I suffer from a severe case of
hate existing in this fake dead town where
I apparently can’t do anything right
syndrome. Any treatment for that,
doc?”

He doesn’t
respond, still staring off. Just being in his presence saddens me. This
unwavering, perpetual sulk of his. A total disregard for this new mindless
existence ever since his Waking Dream. All the life in him—the unlife—gone. Even
without having mine, I think I can relate.

“You’re not
alone.” I put on a smile. “I haven’t even had my Waking yet, and I feel so
little purpose in this place. Already, I’ve gone and messed everything up. I
just had my first Raise and let her run away from me. I don’t know what to do.”

Again, no
response, not even a nod or a shrug. I lean forward and say, “My name’s
Winter.”

Nothing.

“This
conversation has been the loveliest I’ve had all week. Oh, what peace of mind
one can bring without uttering a word at all. Thank you.”

No response.

“You know,” I
go on, unable to help myself, “maybe you should consider employment at the
Refinery. With your knowledge of anatomy, you might be able to supply them with
a valuable perspective they don’t yet have. They’re all the fakery, the
cosmetics, the art of a person. You have the science. You have the truth,
Collin.”

Again,
nothing.

I was almost
sure that last bit would’ve inspired a smirk at the very least. Maybe a shrug.
A sigh. Anything. But I get nothing.

I tried.
Figuring I’ve said enough—might as well have said nothing at all—I rise from
the bench and continue my way home, leaving the surgeon Collin with his own
thoughts, whatever they are. Really, I don’t blame him. If I weren’t so
restless, I’d be sulking just the same.

Back home now,
I realize it’s the dead of night when I sing my little tune climbing the steps
and no one’s there to let me in. John must not be paying attention. Slightly
annoyed, I peer over my shoulder to ensure no one’s watching, then push at a
weak spot in the window I trust no one knows about, swing it open, and let
myself in the awkward way. Once inside, I lock up the window and move to the
bedroom doorway where a big brawny Human sleeps curled up like a cat on my
pillow.

Like a little,
big cat.

I softly sit
on the edge of the bed and watch him, captivated. The gentle rhythm of his
breathing. The smooth rolling of his heartbeat which I can hear, maybe even see
in the pulsing of his cheek. His fingers twitch a few times, maybe because he’s
dreaming. His eyes closed, his large hands clutching himself, his thighs pulled
up to his chest. Like he’s protecting himself from the dark.

I wonder what
I’d dream of, curled up as he is … Maybe a paradise I could live in, free from
this wretched nightmare where girls are pulled from the earth and run away from
you, getting you in lots of trouble. Free from Judges who spear you with
swords. Free from a surrogate dead mother named Helena who’s probably not many
years older than you, who scolds you all the time and secretly hates your very
existence.

A world where
I could live in a real house, with real Sunday dinners, snuggling in a warm bed
with …

With who?

Then John has
me by the throat with crazed eyes and bared teeth.

“Sorry,” he
breathes, letting go. “I thought—”

I bring a hand
up to my throat, nursing it. But really, it didn’t hurt in the least.

“It’s okay,” I
assure him. “I shouldn’t have … snuck up on you, I guess.”

He pulls back
to the opposite side of the bed, leaning against the headboard. He squints,
attempting to make out my face in the dark. “What were you doing there,
watching me like that?”

“I …” It’s a
little embarrassing to admit, but I do. “I was fascinated, watching you sleep.
I miss sleep.”

He just
studies my face skeptically, his eyes moving down to my throat. “Sorry I almost
choked you.”

“You couldn’t
hurt a fly,” I say dryly.

“Yes I can.
And have.”

Every time he
says something cryptic like that, I think worse and worse on what’s held in his
past … on what he isn’t telling me about his situation at the Human dwelling,
wherever that is.

Or, maybe he
meant he’s literally hurt a fly. Maybe whitesmiths make flyswatters too. “Tell
me something I don’t know. About you.”

His eyes
detach for a brief moment. Then, slowly, he gazes out the window as if to find
the something he’s about to say. “I lost my parents when I was very young. They
were taken from me.”

I look down at
his hands, unable to respond to that. He’s picking at a loose thread in the bed
sheets, tugging at it, unraveling it.

“I used to wish
I had seen them die,” he adds quietly, “just to stop the nightmares. Every
night, I dreamt a new way they might’ve been killed … a new torture they
might’ve had to endure. Sometimes their deaths were instant and merciful.
Sometimes slow. I had these dreams for years.” He points out the window.
“Moon’s very bright tonight. You swear you can’t see it?”

Distracted by
his morbid recollection, I reluctantly lean forward, peering out the window at
the grey sky that only shimmers and twists like restless shapeless dragons.
That bright spot only Grimsky seems to see, I cannot.

“I think I see
it,” I lie anyway. “Very … bright.”

Our eyes meet.
He knows I can’t see the moon, I can tell in his expression. But I can also see
he appreciates my effort in trying to comfort him. How my lying comforts him, I
can’t quite explain. Maybe it makes me seem less of a freak to him … less of an
abomination. More Human.

“Do you know
who … who took your parents?”

He nods. No
words, just nods.

“Okay.” I
judge his face carefully. “Can you say who? Or … or would you rather not—”

“Zombies,” he
answers. “They took my parents.”

I’m beginning
to get the feeling that he isn’t referring to any citizen of Trenton. “There is
a lot,” I suddenly find myself admitting, “that I don’t know about … about my
people. The more I know, the less I want to know.”

“These zombies
aren’t like your people.” His eyes are heavy, locked onto mine. “They have no
feeling, no remorse, no anything. They eat. They have bone and rotting flesh
for bodies. They eat people. Kids, too. They took my parents from me, and I … I
will be damned if they ever dare to step foot in my direction. If they dare to
breathe the air I breathe, those disgusting wastes of movement, of space and
time and energy, whatever animates them—Life, I know it’s not. Soul, it’s not.
If one dares to look at me, I’ll pull out its spine.”

Well, that’s
one way to put it.

“I can’t
imagine,” I finally mumble, “how you can put up living with
someone—something—like me. How do you even trust me?”

“Most of the
time I don’t,” he admits.

I have to
watch his face to know he’s humoring me. At least I think he is. Maybe not. “I
wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t,” I tell him honestly. “You’d have every
right.”

I rise from
the bed to leave when suddenly he grabs my wrist. I turn, surprised by the warm
sensation. The look in his eyes as they meet mine, it smolders.

“Take this.”

I distractedly
peer down and realize he’s placed something in my hand … a small, lackluster
ring.