I looked down at Marcus. His bangs were tossed back off his forehead and my eyes had adjusted enough to notice strange shadows there. On impulse, I extended the tip of my ghost hand’s index finger just beyond the glove. Emma called it my ET finger. Like a penlight, it bathed Marcus’s face and forehead in its soft glow, revealing that his skull, just below his hairline, was dented and scarred like something that had been broken and glued back together. The scars were thin, pale and old, very distinct from several new pink scratches on his face, no doubt acquired from our recent tumble. A few of the old scars trailed up into his hair, making it fall in multiple, zigzagging parts. Whatever had broken Marcus’s head, it had happened a long time ago.
Out in the cemetery, the Dark Man rose from a crouch behind Melva’s tombstone and started walking toward the hedge.
I pulled my finger back into the glove and held my breath. Had he seen the glow? What would he do when he looked under the hedge and saw me stuck there? He’d pull me out, that’s what. I could kick and scream and scratch and fight, but he was bigger and stronger than I was. No one was likely to hear my protests from this far inside the cemetery. If he saw me, he was going to get me. And whoever’s side Marcus was on, it didn’t look like it was going to matter.
I felt adrenaline rushing my body as the Dark Man’s feet grew larger and larger, dominating my vision. With my left hand I grabbed the trunk of the hedge as tightly as I could. My ghost hand was on the side toward the opening, so I might be able to use it to distract him, if it came to that. Five minutes before, I had really wanted to get out from under the hedge. Now, I was preparing to fight for my life to stay under it.
The shoes stopped at the edge of the hedge, a mere six inches from Marcus’s face. They were expensive shoes, maybe even Italian, with a fine stitched detailing around the edges in a grey thread that stood out in the moonlight. Did killers wear shoes like that? Did rapists? They seemed so normal, like something a lawyer or a stock-broker would wear. Why was this guy after me? Why was I hiding from him? Surely there was some perfectly reasonable explanation, and if I just showed myself, I’d find out what it was.
Something squeezed my right arm, and I barely bit back a yelp. I saw the white flash of Marcus’s eyes out of the corner of mine. He was awake, conscious, and staring at me, his breath puffing into my hair. I wasn’t alone.
But was he on my side?
He looked at me, and his eyes panned to the shoes, then back to me with a little shake of his head; he didn’t want to be found by the owner of those shoes any more than I did.
The toes of the shoes turned this way and that. The Dark Man had no idea we were lying at his feet. He turned and walked away, back to Melva’s gravestone.
Marcus’s body relaxed slightly, but I could still feel the tension in every line of it; the twitch of his well-defined bicep against my shoulder, the flex of his warm thigh under me. When he’d been unconscious, lying on him had felt like lying across a lumpy, human-shaped bag of sand. It had been so passive. But not anymore. Now his body felt hard and warm and defined, the hair of his arm brushing against mine and giving me goose bumps. Marcus felt just as good as he looked.
I realized I was still gripping the trunk of the hedge, and I let go of it.
Back at my dad’s graveside, the Dark Man slipped something from his pocket, the same thing he’d been using when I’d first seen him coming up Sunset Hill.
Marcus’s entire body tensed under me, and his fingers dug into my arm. “He’s going to find us now,” he whispered in my ear. “I’m going to distract him. And you’re going to run away. But don’t show him your hand or use it on him. No matter what.”
The Dark Man switched on the thing in his hands, and it gave off a gentle glow.
The bag of blades in my backpack exploded with an angry buzz, but they were wedged so tightly between Marcus and me that it was quite muffled.
Marcus’s deep grunt of pain, however, was not so muffled. It sounded like he had been punched in the gut, and he actually tried to buck me off, slamming me into the bottom of the hedge before he fell back, limp, and unmoving.
My face burned, and I felt a warm trickle of blood drip down my cheek where a branch had gouged it.
The blades had zapped Marcus again, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t move away from him. I couldn’t even get off of him.
Surely the Dark Man had heard all that flailing and was coming for us.
His legs had turned toward the hedge again, and he was holding out his device like a Geiger counter.
The blades vibrated against my back, the sound of their edges rubbing together like a whisper just beyond meaning.
The Dark Man took a step toward the hedge, shaking the thing in his hand and jabbing its buttons angrily as if it were a broken remote.
I braced myself again, one hand on the tree trunk, ghost hand out and ready.
A blare of rap music shattered the silence of the cemetery, suddenly cut off when the Dark Man reached in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. Really? That was his ringtone? I found myself biting back a giggle of hysteria.
The Dark Man raised the phone to his cheek, beyond my field of vision and said, “Where are you? Did you bring a meter?”
His voice was deep and commanding and tinged with a slight accent. Not anything strong or identifiable, just an edge of European strangeness.
“This one is not working,” he said, shaking the device in his hand again.
I don’t know how I’d ever mistaken it for a phone. It was way too thick and not quite the right shape. It was something else; something Marcus had been convinced would find us. Except, apparently it was malfunctioning. Now, if the Dark Man would just give up and go away.
“No. I’ll come to you. Meet me at the gate,” the Dark Man said, as if on cue to my wish. He turned off his phone and the meter thing and stuck them both in his pocket. He stood for a moment, facing the hedge, perhaps taking one last look, and then his legs and his feet with their nice expensive shoes turned and headed off in the direction of the cemetery road.
I felt my whole body sink into Marcus’s chest. The Dark Man was leaving. He hadn’t found us. But he might come back, and we had to get out of that godforsaken bush before he did, which meant I had to get Marcus conscious and moving pronto.
“Marcus,” I whispered, wiggling around and trying to create room where there wasn’t any. “Wake up.” It wasn’t like I could slap him or douse him with a bucket of water.
I reached up and broke several small branches so I could turn to my side, forcing my backpack toward the trunk of the hedge so it was no longer between us. I had to dig my shoulder and elbow into him to do it, but that didn’t rouse him either. Finally, I was in a position to look down at his face. In the darkness of the hedge, the whites of his eyes stared back at me eerily.
“Marcus?”
His eyes didn’t move, didn’t look my direction. Was he playing some kind of prank, staring blankly past me like that? Pretending to be unconscious with his eyes open.
“Marcus,” I hissed, poking him in the ribs with my elbow purposefully this time.
He didn’t respond. His lips were parted, but I didn’t feel the huff of his breath on my face like I had before.
Because there wasn’t any.
“No. No, no, no, no,” I chanted, jabbing him with my elbow even harder. “Don’t do this to me.” I lay still for a moment, trying to feel the rise and fall of his chest under me. But there was nothing. No, there had to be breathing. He was just breathing lightly, imperceptibly, because my mind couldn’t go to the place with no breathing. It veered away from—that word. The word that came after not breathing.
Just a minute ago he’d been barking instructions and promising to save the day. Yes, people stopped breathing sometimes. I knew that. My dad hadn’t breathed for a very long time. But the actual end of his breathing had taken two years of hospital visits, and chemo, and radiation, and watching him shrivel as the cancer and the cure raced to see who could kill him first. We’d talked about it. We’d prepared. We’d said goodbye. And I’d sat there listening to his labored breathing for days and days before the final, last, sighing, relieved breath had come and gone. It had still hurt me more than anything had ever hurt when it had come, but at least I had seen it coming from a long way off. But this. This wasn’t possible. Alive and warm one minute, cold and breathless the next. Someone’s existence couldn’t turn on a dime like that.
“You’re gonna be fine,” I told Marcus. He was my age. He was good-looking and in my Calc class. And I was lying on top of him under a hedge. He wasn’t allowed to stop breathing under those circumstances. “We just need to get you out of here. Get some help.”
How long had the Dark Man been gone? Who cared? What was he going to do if he came back? Kill us? Maybe he knew CPR.
I wrestled my way out from under the hedge, pushing against Marcus and the trunk for leverage, clutching at branches and grass to pull myself free. Once I rolled off his chest, the rest was pretty easy.
I yanked off my backpack and set it beside me, then reached into the dark under the hedge and felt for Marcus’s arm. No wonder the Dark Man hadn’t seen us. I wouldn’t have believed Marcus was under there if I hadn’t just crawled off of him.
What had the blades done? With electrocution, or seizures, there was something about turning people on their sides so they didn’t choke on their tongues. Marcus had been on his back with me sitting on his chest and no way to turn any direction. He’d tried to buck me off, but I’d had nowhere to go.
No way was this going to be my fault.
I finally found his arm, and wrapped my hands around it. It wasn’t cold yet, or stiff. How long did that take? How long after someone stopped breathing could you still revive them? I had no idea, but I had to try. First though, I had to get him out of there.
I pulled, but he barely budged. I got on my knees and put my back into it. That was enough to get one shoulder and half his head out. After that I was able to grab under his armpits and drag him out so that his whole head and chest were clear of the bush.
Now, I just had to remember the CPR class I’d taken freshman year so my mom would let me babysit the Waverly twins. First, I was supposed to check for breathing. I’d already done that. Next, check for an obstruction. His mouth was hanging open, but all I could see was his tongue. It wasn’t black or blue or swollen, and it didn’t look like he was choking on it, so I left it alone.
I pinched his nose closed, and bent over his head, terrified that any moment those blank, open eyes were going to focus on me and he was going to laugh in my face. It was psyching me out, so I closed my eyes. I felt my lips touch his face. I had to open my mouth surprisingly wide to span the distance around his mouth, and then I realized I hadn’t taken a big enough breath. Shit. I pulled away slightly, gulped in some air and dove back toward his mouth like I was bobbing for apples. Huff. Take a gulp of air. Huff. How many times was I supposed to breathe into him? Just a few more for good measure. His mouth was warm, but not firm. I began to see flashes of light on the inside of my eyelids. Maybe I was huffing a little too much. The last thing we needed was for me to pass out on top of him. I pulled away and turned my head so my cheek was just above his mouth.
Come on. You can do it. Breathe back at me.
Was that a tickle of breath? I couldn’t tell. The next step was to start chest compressions. But how many? There was a ratio, but I couldn’t remember it. Three breaths and thirty compressions? That seemed like a lot.
Don’t over-analyze this. Just do it
. I was supposed to push down in the middle, right between his pecs.
I laced my fingers together, making sure not to lock my elbows.
As I looked down at him, his body seemed infused with light, like his spirit was suddenly bursting to get out.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, positioning myself over him for the first compression. The phrase “break a rib,” flashed through my mind.
Idiot! It’s break a leg. And that’s for plays.
But my hands never made it to his chest.
His arms shot up, fingers clamping my wrists in a vice grip. “Don’t,” he said, pushing me away from him even as he pulled his legs out from under the hedge and sat up. “Where is he?” he demanded, glancing around and scrambling to a crouch.
“You were dead,” I said. There. I’d used the word. The one that came after not breathing. Except sometimes, apparently, it didn’t.
“No, I wasn’t,” he said.
“Yes, you were,” I insisted.
“Well, I’m not now,” he said, as if that settled it. “Where’s the camper? The one that was stalking you?”
“The camper?” I asked, confused.
“No, not camper. CAMFer. C A M F E R,” he spelled out.
“That guy was a CAMFer?”
“Where did he go?”
“Um, he got a phone call and he left,” I said. And you were dead. And now you’re not.
“He’ll be back,” Marcus said, grabbing my arm just like he’d done in the school hallway, “and we have to be gone before he does.”
“Let go of me,” I said, shaking out of his grip, and standing up. “You don’t have to grab me.” He was so obnoxious when he was alive.
“Then get down,” he said, gesturing for me to crouch like he was.
I crouched, glaring at him.
“I’m sorry I grabbed you,” he said. “It’s just that we’re in a lot of danger. Do you even know what CAMF is?”
“Citizens Against Minus Flesh,” I said. “They’re a lobbyist group trying to pass dehumanizing laws against people with PSS.” That was straight from Wikipedia. “But they’re just lobbyists. They don’t chase people down in cemeteries. They eat lunch with politicians in Washington.”
“Some of them do,” he agreed. “But that man is a member of a more militant branch of CAMF. That device he had is called a minus meter, and it can both detect and extract PSS. He’s been following you since you left your friend’s house, and it wasn’t so he could buy you lunch. So, we really need to get out of here right now.”
“Well his meter thing was broken. That’s what he said on the phone anyway. And someone was bringing another one. Wait. What do you mean by ‘extract PSS?’”