Waking Lazarus (2 page)

William’s hand found nothing. Nothing at all.

He pulled his arm out of the water, trying to banish the terrifying pictures that muddied his thinking. Cold and snow swirled around him, but his throat became a desert of grit as panic slid into his stomach. Jude was drowning.

He plunged his head into the hole, not really knowing why, but driven by a need to do something else,
anything
else. He tried to open his eyes under the water, really tried, yet his body refused to cooperate. He pulled his head from the water, gasped for air, and felt rivulets of trickling water beginning to freeze as they traced lines down his forehead.

A few more seconds. Rushed panting. Thinking.

William thrust his arm back into the murky water, stretching it as far as possible and willing his fingers to touch something, anything other than ice and liquid. Although he’d never been a religious man, he subconsciously begged God to—

His finger brushed something. Then, not just his finger, but his whole hand. He grasped and pulled, closing his eyes against the exertion. The dull purple of Jude’s winter coat surfaced, now slick and shiny with water. William used both hands to reclaim his son’s motionless body from the lake.

Streams poured from Jude’s clothing as if he were a sunken treasure lifted to the surface after centuries in the murky depths. William rubbed at Jude’s face, tried to open the eyes, find a breath, a heartbeat, anything.

Jude was still.

William looked to the pickup again, tore off his own coat, and wrapped it around the lifeless form. He picked up the body and turned toward the shore, then slipped and sprawled across the ice after a few steps.

But he wasn’t going to lose his grip on Jude. Not now.

William crawled to his feet and started shuffling toward shore once more. He listened to the slow drizzle of water draining away from Jude’s clothes. Or maybe it was the sound of time draining away from him. For a second—just for a second when Jude slipped through the ice—he had thought about . . . Again he pushed the idea from his mind. Couldn’t think about that now. Couldn’t think about that
ever
. Had to get to the hospital.

He opened the passenger door and pushed aside a jar of pickled beets as he slid Jude into the cab. He ran to the other side of the pickup, put the key in the ignition, and turned it. The old Ford roared to life, and William had it in gear before it was hitting on all cylinders, spraying snow and ice from the tires as he turned and started the twenty miles back to town.

As his pickup and his heart raced each other down the icy county road, an odd realization settled into his brain:
Dead
. His mind didn’t reject the thought but instead embraced it.
Dead, and ain’t nobody
gonna change it
. He knew they were easily half an hour from the nearest telephone, maybe twenty-five minutes from the hospital. Jude’s last breath had been something like ten minutes ago. So, Jude’s body would be almost forty minutes gone before . . .

William skidded around a lazy corner, chirping across the road and toward the ditch. At the last moment he regained control of the pickup and straightened its path again. The adrenaline circulated in his veins, and the word returned to his mind:
Dead
.

The hospital’s automatic front doors slid open. William blinked a few times before stepping inside. Pink, the lobby was pink. What were they thinking? He pushed the irritation from the front of his mind and took in more of the scene. A woman sat behind a large desk. Evidently she hadn’t heard him, because she was still reading.

But how could that be? Couldn’t she hear the deafening roar of water leaking from Jude and spilling onto the floor? He shifted his weight to his other foot as he looked at Jude’s dull blue face again. Okay, the water wasn’t really coming out in a stream now, more like a steady drip, but the cursed drip was deafeningly loud.
Drip
. He could hear the sound bouncing off the harsh pink-tinted walls.
Drip
.

The nurse still didn’t acknowledge him, so he took another step toward her oak-finished desk and cleared his throat. She finally looked up and focused tired red eyes on William. Then, her eyes widened.

Drip
.

William didn’t have to say anything after all. The nurse shifted gears, dialed a phone, said something he couldn’t quite decipher, then rushed around the counter. Running footsteps approached, bringing a woman and a man—a nurse and a doctor, he guessed—to take Jude from his arms.

It wasn’t difficult to let go. It was a relief, really, to feel the wet body being lifted from him. Now it really was out of his hands, ha ha, had always been out of his hands, hadn’t it?

‘‘I said, you his father?’’ The doctor’s question brought him back into focus. Guy didn’t have one of those white lab coats, but he had to be a doctor. He was obviously in charge of the situation, directing the two women to cover Jude’s body with some kind of blankets. Blankets. Yeah, those would help a boy who’s been dead over half an hour.

The doctor must have sensed William’s thoughts. ‘‘Need to bring up his core temperature,’’ he said.

‘‘Sure,’’ William answered.

The doctor and the nurses started to push Jude’s cart down the hall, toward a pair of large steel doors with small windows. He looked back toward William again. ‘‘What happened?’’

‘‘Fell through the ice,’’ William answered.

The doctor looked as if he wanted to hear something else when the front of the gurney crashed into the doors. ‘‘Just wait here,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ll—’’ He kept on barking something, but the steel doors whisking shut behind him swallowed the words. Not that it mattered. Jude was dead. William knew that. Even the doctor knew it.

He walked down the hallway to the steel doors, peeked through one of the windows, and saw nothing. A large sign told him HOSPITAL STAFF ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

He didn’t move. He stood at the door for what felt like five hours, occasionally looking through the small glass window.

No sign of the doctor.

He tried to ignore the gaping, insistent thought his mind had birthed on the ice, the thought that now continued to grow inside and threatened to devour every other thought.

‘‘Sir?’’ The voice echoed off the tiled hallway behind him. William whirled around and couldn’t help feeling as if the doctor had known what he was thinking.

‘‘I’m sorry,’’ the young doctor said. ‘‘We couldn’t save him.’’

William stared for a few moments, half expecting the doctor to add something, to say
I know what you were thinking out there on the
ice
, but he simply returned the gaze. William nodded, thinking the doctor would take that as a cue to leave. The doctor
had
to go first; if William did, it would seem shallow, callous.

‘‘We tried to raise his temperature,’’ he offered. William noticed the doctor studying his own face now, gauging his reactions. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ the doctor finished abruptly. ‘‘We tried everything we could.’’

William nodded again, hoping that would be enough to send the doctor on his way.

It was. The doctor backed through the steel doors and disappeared into the bowels of the pink-tinged hospital.

Now it was time to go home and tell his wife their son was dead.

When Jude awoke, he didn’t move. Didn’t even open his eyes. He felt the crisp linen of a sheet pressed against his face, pressed against his whole body, and the sensation made him realize his clothes were missing. Buck-naked, as Mom always said when he popped out of the bathtub. And something was tied to his toe. A piece of string? What kind of game was that? Not one he liked, he decided.

Where was he? He concentrated. He could remember doing something with his dad. Grocery store? Movie? Wait. Ice fishing. Yeah, ice fishing and . . . that was all his mind would give him right now. That, and a sense he couldn’t quite explain, something like the way he’d felt when Mom had dropped him off at kindergarten the first time. Yes, it was that: the feeling of
missing
—not missing Mom, exactly, but missing all the same—and it tasted like a mouthful of pennies.

He stifled a gag, trying to swallow the awful taste of copper, and froze when he felt the sheet brushing his face. Yes. He was in a strange place. Maybe an unsafe place. He wanted to throw off the sheet, but he was afraid to move. He had spent many nights under the protective cover of a sheet in his own bed, hiding from the creaks and moans that blew through the farmhouse where they lived. Even now, he told himself that’s where he was: home in his own bed, huddled under his own sheet, just a few feet down the hall from Mom. Yet he knew this wasn’t his bed. The cold metal biting the bare skin of his back said as much.

A sound came to him from the terrifying world on the other side of the sheet. A repeating sound in a steady pattern:
click-click-click-click
. Footsteps. Moving toward him. Jude closed his eyes again. No, this wasn’t his home, wasn’t his bedroom. And that meant the person walking across the floor wasn’t his mother.

Maybe, if he stayed very still, he wouldn’t be seen. He held his breath and listened, feeling the dull beat of his own heart pounding in his head.

Suddenly the sheet lifted from his face. He felt it but kept his eyes closed, not wanting to see whoever, or whatever, had come for him.

Silence. No movement, no voice. After a few seconds, Jude ventured a peek, thinking he had perhaps imagined all of it. The harsh fluorescence of the hospital morgue’s lighting attacked his pupils, forcing him to squint against the glare.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw a woman staring at him. Though he didn’t know the woman, her warm smile seemed . . . safe. He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. Instead, she simply held out her hand. He returned the smile and reached out, guided by a need to touch the offered hand. To make sure she was real.

Jude Allman was back from the dead.

2

BECOMING
Now

The Hunter moved quickly, putting away the chloroform-soaked cloth while lifting the child’s limp body and rolling it into the black Dodge’s trunk.

In precise terms, the Hunter was not human.

Certainly the Hunter had once started as a human, but had progressed, evolved even, to a higher plane. Now the Hunter was something much more, a being of a higher order, unconstrained by human emotion.

The Hunter had simply
become
.

Of course, the Hunter still needed to interact with others; that’s what the Normal’s role was. The Normal presented a typical presence to other people, mixed in with them, made them believe it was one of them.
Hi, how ya doin’? Nice day, ain’t it? How are the kids?
These were the kind of pithy things the Normal had to say, the kind of blather lower beings disgorged in conversation. The Normal was good for that sort of thing, actually seemed to like idle chitchat occasionally. On some levels the Normal perhaps tried to ignore the existence of the Hunter, maybe even feared the Hunter’s roles. Stalking. Trapping. Killing.

Not that the Hunter really liked killing. Killing was, in fact, the Hunter’s least favorite part. It had been enjoyable once, a very long time ago, in the early stages of
becoming
. But not now.

The stalking. That’s what brought the sweet taste of anticipation to the Hunter’s tongue, what made the back of his head crackle and spark. When hunting, he was quiet and careful, almost invisible. Definitely scentless. The trick was to never let the Quarry smell excitement. Before he started, he always rubbed dirt—dark, loamy dirt was best—on his exposed skin to mask the scent of excitement. If he didn’t, the strong, citrus smell of his excitement would overpower carefully laid plans, alerting the Quarry.

The Hunter didn’t look around, concentrating only on the immediate tasks. Wandering gazes invited suspicion, and suspicion made people notice. This didn’t really matter, though, because no one would recognize him. When he was the Hunter, he walked with a practiced limp. He gained forty pounds, thanks to a padded body suit. He even cocked his head to the side and imagined himself as a hunchback. That was all his Quarry would ever see: the Hunter, not the Normal. They were two separate figures, two separate lives.

The Hunter opened the front door of the car, slid into the seat, and sat motionless. Killing. Killing was too messy, making the Hunter feel hollow. The way he had felt after breaking toys as a child. He always regretted breaking the toys, making them worthless bits from the past. But even worse, he hated ruining the future: a broken toy was useless, empty.

The Hunter sighed and retrieved a cigarette from the pack on the car’s dash. He didn’t smoke, not when he was the Normal. But he was careful to do so when the Hunter, to do everything differently.

He inhaled the dry, crisp tang of the tobacco and let a tendril of smoke slide from his lips, wondering if there might be someone like-minded wandering the streets out there. An opposite doppelganger who loved the actual kill, for instance. Maybe, if he could find such a being, they could complement each other, work together, confide. Perhaps, here on God’s green earth, he wasn’t the only one who had
become
.

He stubbed out the cigarette after just a few puffs, stubbing out thoughts of similar beings along with it. Of course there were no others. He was special, a unique creation all his own.

He looked at the watch on his wrist, watching as the analog second hand ticked its way around the face. Time to lock up the Quarry.

Two smells always comforted the Hunter: root cellars and burlap. They made him think of his father, a worthless drunk who had riddled his liver with cirrhosis by age fifty. In fact, drinking was one of two things his father had seemed to do well. That, and gardening.

When the Hunter had been a child, he had figured gardening must be easy. Had to be for his dad to be so good at it. But he only had to try gardening once to figure out the task was considerably more difficult than hoisting a bottle of Aces High whiskey.

He had planted carrots, corn, and potatoes. Then the weeds took over. No matter what he did, the weeds infested his small garden patch, mostly a low-growing viny thing that sprouted white flowers. And the more he hoed, the more he dropped to his knees and yanked vines, the more he sprayed the leaves of the weeds with chemicals, the more the weeds laughed in his face, taunting him.