Authors: Lyn Gala
Dead.
He was dead.
Only he couldn’t be dead. He was looking at her with brown
eyes wide with panic, and then he started breathing again, but at this point
Paige had the feeling breathing was more about habit than oxygen. “You must…”
Paige stopped, a dozen thoughts in her head. There had to be a scientific
explanation. His heart rate might be really, really slow. Maybe his blood
pressure was down. He might just be holding his breath…for way longer than
Paige could manage. Of course, if those were true, he should be unconscious or
something. Paige’s hands were sweating and she could feel this weird pressure
in her head.
Paige slowly backed away. For a second, Brady tried to hold
her hand, but when Paige pulled away, he let her go.
A thousand thoughts ran through Paige’s head like monkeys on
crack. Dead people. Walking around dead people. Walking around dead people who
had managed to bite her arm. Pretty much every horror movie she’d ever seen ran
through her head. True, she hadn’t seen many. She’d probably seen more horror
movie commercials than anything else, but still…getting bit by the walking dead
never turned out to be a good thing.
Paige’s chest ached. Hell, she was getting sharp enough
pains that it might be a heart attack and she still couldn’t get her brain to
summon any words. She could only stare blankly.
“You have to help me. I don’t—I don’t know what to do.” He
looked at her with the same sort of anxiety he’d had on his face the first time
he’d been face-to-face with a real victim. She stared back. “Please,” he asked
softly. Taking a step back, he leaned against the wall and started to slide
down until he was hunched on her living room floor. Dead. She had a dead man in
her living room. Well shit.
Chapter Two
“We could still call this in,” Paige said, even though she
knew it was wishful thinking. She liked Brady and she was still having some
very panicky, unpleasant thoughts. If anyone found out about his sudden case of
dead, he was either going to get vivisected by some secret government
conspiracy or burned at the stake by the local church.
People in this part of the country did tend to take
witchcraft a little more seriously than in the bigger cities up north where
kids could proudly claim to be Wiccan. Around here, that got you a prayer-in
and a whole bunch of church ladies showing up to talk to you about God and hell
and burning alive for all of eternity.
Yeah, no one in this town was going to be reasonable about
the walking dead.
She looked at the paper towel she’d used to wipe the blood
off her arm. And she’d be right there in the middle of the panic. An
uncharitable little part of her brain suggested that she shove Brady onto one
of the freight trains that ran through town—just tell him to start running and
keep right on going. However, she figured that was fear talking. She wanted to
break down in total and complete terror, but she wasn’t going to let herself
get lost in that feeling. Brady was her partner, and whatever happened to him,
he was still her partner.
Paige shivered as a new thought occurred to her. The rape
case they were working—more women had been raped than reported it. Crime was
like that. If you had one pedophile case, you had a dozen hiding in the
shadows. If one person complained about vandalism, you probably had five more
in the same neighborhood.
Just because Brady was the first walking, talking dead
person she’d met didn’t mean he was unique. Somewhere out there, there were
more. Hell, there might be whole government labs full of them. Churches might
be having private burnings where only the faithful came to see the walking dead
sent off in a blaze.
Maybe she was having a moment of total irrational stupidity,
but her brain started coming up with all sorts of unpleasant thoughts. A shiver
traveled her spine and Paige clutched the bitemark in her arm as she wondered
how deep she’d been pulled in.
“I’m sorry,” Brady said for the hundredth time. “You smelled
good.”
“Sadly, that’s the best compliment I’ve gotten this month,”
Paige joked, even though her heart beat painfully in her chest.
“I won’t do it again.”
Paige looked over at him. He was still huddled on her floor,
his misery visible in every tightly hunched line. Under normal circumstance,
Brady was a handsome man who had his Italian mother’s dark good looks, but
right now he looked terrible. Paige’s blood had dried into a brown streak that
ran down his chin. Whatever was going on, Brady wasn’t the threat. He was the
victim. Paige gave him a lopsided grin. “You’d better not. I’m still pissed
about this time.”
He hunched in a little tighter.
“Shit.” Paige hadn’t meant to make him feel worse. Clearly,
her humor was a little rusty. “Okay, so we have to figure this out. The first
step is to get you cleaned up. If we aren’t going to call for Forensics, then
you don’t need to stay in those clothes.” Paige tossed the paper towel at the
counter and stood up.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” He whispered the
words and Paige wished she could just call in one of the victim advocates and
let them deal with the grief. However, he was her partner and he’d come to her.
“Bathing would be a good first step. You stink.” Paige went
down to one knee in front of him. “Come on, Brady—you’re the one who complained
for a week after we had to go into that dumpster. Would you really put up with
walking around in dirty, stinking clothes? That’s not you. So we start by
making you look more like you and less like a homeless man.” Paige smiled at
him, teasing him about his sheer horror at having to get in the trash.
“It was slimy,” Brady said with just a hint of his old
personality peeking through.
“Yeah, it was slimy. No offense, but you’re looking a little
slimy now, so either we get you cleaned up and deal with the whole—” Paige
stopped. She just couldn’t bring herself to say out loud that Brady was dead.
Did that make him a zombie or a vampire or something? She looked down at her
arm. Zombies went for brains and vampires went for blood. What went for arm?
“Either we get you cleaned up or we preserve the evidence
and call Forensics. Shit or get off the pot, Brady.” It might not be the most
emotionally supportive comment ever, but he was a cop. He was a good cop, a man
who had been dealing with one of the nastiest serial rape cases Paige had ever
seen. He didn’t need coddling; he needed to remember who he was.
Brady looked up at her with bloodshot eyes. “Shit or get off
the pot?” he asked.
“Yes.” Reaching out, she laid her hand against his knee.
“Brady, I will back you whichever choice you make, but you have to do
something. You can’t just sit in my living room forever.”
“I should be dead.” His eyes lost their focus and Paige
suspected that he was remembering what they had done.
“Hey, I’ll call Forensics and they’ll help us track these
bastards down. If we’re lucky, maybe they won’t even notice that you’re—”
She went to stand up and Brady leaped up and reached out for
her. “No! No, don’t call them. They…” His voice trailed off. “No, I’ll clean
up.” He looked around like he expected a bathtub to magically appear. Hell, the
way her morning was going, maybe one would. A little magic would just be the
cherry on the shit sundae.
“The guest bath is torn up. Tiling and I are not the friends
I thought we’d be,” Paige admitted. “You can use my bathroom. It’s that way,”
she said, gesturing down the hall. Morning was coming and faint light was
starting to stain the curtains. “Are you going to turn to dust or something if
the sun comes in?” She was pretty sure that happened in movies.
He stopped two steps into the hall. “I don’t know.” He
looked her. “Do you think I will?”
Paige made a face and just didn’t answer. She had no idea
what was going on.
“What if I do?” Brady was starting to sound a little
panicked now.
“I will not let you get turned into dust,” Paige said
firmly. She put her hand on the small of his back and urged him toward the
bathroom. It was odd, comforting someone who was a good six inches taller and
who looked physically much stronger than she was, but he went as docilely as
any victim. He might be a vampire or zombie or something, but he was still
Brady—a man traumatized by a horrible crime. Getting rid of the bloody clothes
would help him feel more human.
She stopped and Brady went a couple of steps on his own
before he turned to look at her. “What?”
“I don’t have clothes for you.” Paige’s shirts wouldn’t even
fit over his shoulders and if he tried wearing her shorts, he was going to
castrate himself.
“I’ll live.” Brady said that in the same sort of wry tone
she’d heard from him a thousand times, but then he flinched. “Or not,” he added
quietly. With a sigh, he shrugged. “A sheet will be fine. I can pretend I’m a
ghost. I have the dead part down.” Paige wanted to say something comforting
that would make him feel better, but the police training on working with
victims had never covered this situation.
“I can go to your place—get some clothes.” Paige closed the
distance between them and starting urging Brady toward the bathroom again.
“I don’t have my key. I don’t think so, anyway.” He started
patting himself down. “I think someone was there—at my house. My keys should be
on the kitchen counter still.”
“They grabbed you in your house?” He didn’t answer her, but
the pain on his face made it clear he was still remembering. He rubbed his
right arm, fingers finding a rip in the shirt. “No biggie. You get the water
going and I’m going to find a towel and some duct tape for the window. You are
not allowed to turn to dust, okay?” Paige said as cheerfully as she could. She
suspected she didn’t sound all that cheerful.
She gave him a shove toward the open bathroom door, cringing
at the old underwear with almost washed out bloodstains hanging from the towel
rod. However, he didn’t seem to notice. He just started stripping off layers of
crusty, torn clothing, letting it fall to the ground.
Paige headed for the bedroom where her nightstand drawer
stood open, the empty gun safe still waiting. If someone had been chasing
Brady, they would have broken in by now.
Whoever had killed him either didn’t know he was gone or
hadn’t been able to follow. Maybe the sun was a danger. Sitting on the edge of
the bed, she put her weapon away and double checked that the box had locked.
The clock said 4:23. Paige rubbed a hand across her face and slid the drawer
closed. In about a half hour, she was going to have to get ready for work and
then…what?
She got up and headed for the garage, but Brady had left the
bathroom door open and her eyes searched him out when she passed. Even though
she didn’t mean to invade his privacy, Paige watched, horrified at the sight of
white scars across his pale back. It looked like some sort of curly writing had
been carved into his flesh, but the wounds looked weeks old. Surely he would
have mentioned an earlier attack.
“Brady, did you hurt your back earlier?”
He turned and twisted to try to see his back in the mirror.
“Okay, that’s not good.” Reaching around, he stretched and watched the scars
move with the skin. “Did someone write on me?”
Paige stepped into the bathroom and reached out to trace the
curve of a line. “No, they’re scars.”
“But they only did this last night.” He looked over at her.
“I remember an old house and a room and I could see the letters in blood on my
back. How could they be scars? Paige?”
She didn’t have an answer. Ignoring her own emotions,
including the horror of someone carving into her partner, she tried to focus on
it as if it were a case. “Maybe we can use the writing to figure out what’s
going on.” Paige headed out of the bathroom and grabbed a notebook out of the
bedroom. When she came back, he was still studying himself in the mirror.
“It’s not me,” he whispered.
Right now, his back didn’t look like him. “We just need to
figure out the letters,” Paige pressed on Brady’s shoulder to get him to turn
so she could see it better. It was hard to tell where the writing started
because it seemed to be in two circles, one inside the other. “This might be a
clue.”
“Of what? Are they even letters?”
“Some of them are,” Paige said. She raised her hand and
traced an oddly formed X on the small of Brady’s back. A shiver went through
him, and Paige pulled her hand back. “I can write them out. Maybe they’ll mean
something to you.”
Paige cleared her throat as she grew uncomfortably warm. She
thought about taking off her robe, but her nightgown was a little ratty, so she
decided to suffer through. Working quickly, she sketched out the symbols in a
rough circle.
One of the Os seemed to be more faded than the others, and
before Paige realized what she was doing, she reached out and traced the edges
of the circle with one finger. The other symbol she’d touched felt almost sharp
as the thin ridge of scar rose up out of Brady’s back. But this O was a dull
bulge, almost like a swelling under the skin. When she traced the O for the
second time, Brady hissed.
“Sorry.” Paige jerked her hand back and turned away from
him. She seriously did not have her head screwed on straight. Focusing on the
page of symbols she’d drawn, she studied it. It wasn’t the prettiest sketch
ever, but it looked roughly like the original on Brady’s back.
“Look familiar?” she asked as she turned back and offered
him the notebook. Brady studied the symbols, his eyes more red than ever. With
him distracted, she grabbed the panties and tossed them behind the door.
“I don’t know how this is a clue. It’s not even English.”
“Well, maybe we just need to figure out what it is,” Paige
said, but she had to admit that as clues went, it wasn’t that good. “You said
they had you at an old house. Do you know where the house was?” Paige asked.