King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (13 page)

To my surprise, a familiar form stood waiting at the end of the street.

He was a giant of a man, even in death, towering over everything at just a hair above seven feet. His fists were like sledgehammers, his legs as thick as oaks, and he had the disposition of a junkyard bulldog that had been kicked one too many times and now intended to take the leg off the next person who came too close.

His real name was Thomas Matthews, though I’d only discovered that a few months ago, and I’d never called him by that name.

To me, he was simply Scream.

I hadn’t seen him since that night in September when he’d helped me put down the shade of a sorcerer named Eldredge. The night Detective Stanton had died. The night the ghosts of two little girls, Matthews’s daughter and my own, were finally put to rest.

What was he doing here in New Orleans?

I waved my thanks to the sax player and set off down the street, toward the spot where Scream was waiting. Before I reached it, however, he turned and moved away from me, looking back as he did to be sure that I was following.

All of a sudden the anxiety that had been plaguing me for over a week came back with a vengeance, but I didn’t care. I trusted Scream; if there was something he wanted me to see, then I needed to see it.

We moved through the streets for several blocks, until I turned a corner and found myself facing a shallow cul-de-sac. A small wooden church stood across from me. The front doors were open and a faint light like that from candles drifted out from inside.

Scream had disappeared.

Now, I may not always be the sharpest tool in the shed, but even I was able to figure out that whatever it was that Scream wanted me to see had to be inside that church.

Still, I hesitated.

Me and the Almighty weren’t really on speaking terms, you see. I’d never been all that religious in the first place and when my daughter disappeared and none of my prayers for her return were answered, I drifted further and further away. Then came the night when I sacrificed my sight and discovered that the world was full of creatures and things with a lot more power and majesty than I’d ever imagined. I saw demons and angels alike, the darkness and the light, and if they existed then I was pretty sure the Big Man Upstairs did as well.

The same Big Man Upstairs I’d cursed eleven ways from Sunday when I’d understood that He was not going to reach down and save my precious Elizabeth.

I hadn’t set foot inside a church since long before I knew the truth about the world. I wondered what I would see if I went in now.

When
I go in, I silently admonished myself.

Steeling myself for what was to come, I walked across the cul-de-sac, followed the path to the front door of the church, and with my heart in my throat, stepped inside.

No lightning bolt.

That was good, I told myself. Means you’re too insignificant to command His attention.

Or He’s just waiting until you’re not looking for it
, a sly voice in the back of my mind whispered.

Telling myself to shut up, I took a good look around.

The interior of the church was small; there weren’t any pews, but you couldn’t have fit more than a few dozen in the place. At the far end was an altar, a massive wooden crucifix hanging on the wall behind it. Candles lined the altar, throwing off soft light, but most of the rest of the place was shrouded in shadow, allowing me to take a good look around provided I didn’t face the altar directly.

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty cots filled the church, arranged in orderly rows, and each of them held a sick man, woman, or child. In the shadows on the far side of the room, a nun sat with one of the patients, her back to me, her voice a low murmur in the otherwise silent room.

I remembered what Denise had told me about the people in Gallagher’s clinic and a shiver ran up my spine. It was downright eerie to see so many people in one place and not have any background noise, not even the sound of anyone’s breathing.

What was going on here?

I knew this was what Scream had wanted me to see, so I moved forward, my footsteps on the bare wooden floor sounding uncharacteristically loud inside the small structure. I walked between the first rows of cots, glancing from side to side as I did. In each of them, I saw the same story.

The patients lay on their backs, pillows beneath their heads and their arms resting flat at their sides. The blankets on each cot were tucked in but not so tight as to hold them in place, yet none of them moved as I walked past. Every face was pointed directly upward. Each and every pair of eyes was open and staring, yet seeing nothing. It was as if they all had stopped to look at something above them for a moment and then had frozen there, unable to turn away.

It was creepy as hell.

What made it worse was the fact that none of these people even looked sick. Their breathing was even and steady, their color was good, and there weren’t any signs of fevers or lesions or sores that you might associate with a biological agent of some kind.

There had to be something here that I was missing. Scream wouldn’t have led me here otherwise. I could feel it nagging at the back of my brain, but whenever I tried to chase it down it just ran away from me.

Remembering the angry ghosts that had emerged from the clinic the other night, I made sure I had a clear path to the door in case I had to escape quickly and then cautiously threw that mental switch deep in my head, the one that activated my ghostsight.

A single glance was all it took.

I literally staggered under the shock of what I was seeing and was forced to grab onto the end of the nearest cot to keep my balance.

With my ghostsight, I see the world’s true face. Nothing can hide from me; nothing can defeat the purity of my gaze. I can see through magick and glamours to reveal the real creature underneath as easily as I can see the state of a person’s soul.

You’ve probably heard someone somewhere described as “wearing his heart on his sleeve”? Well that’s a pretty good description of how my ghostsight reveals a person’s soul; I can see it gleaming about a person, almost as if they are wearing a second skin. Some say that it is this form, this spirit, if you will, that remains behind when a person becomes a ghost, but I’m not so sure that’s true. What I do know is that every living person I’ve encountered since I sacrificed my natural sight had one, and from time to time I’ve used the appearance of those souls to make a judgment call about who they were or what they were saying. Our souls are the mystical representations of our true selves and reveal us as we actually are, rather than the face that we show the world. We can no more change them than we can the DNA that makes up our chromosomal structure.

Which was all well and good, except for one minor problem.

The souls of every single one of these people appeared to have been violently torn from their bodies.
Only the thinnest tattered wisps remained, and even these were fading quickly as I stood there and watched.

Their bodies might still have been breathing, but I knew they couldn’t last much longer.

For all practical purposes, every one of those patients was already dead. Their bodies just didn’t know it yet.

18

HUNT

I’ll be the first to admit that the horror of it was nearly overwhelming. Facing off against angry ghosts and rampaging doppelgangers was one thing, but staring at a room full of people who will never wake up from their comas because their souls have been violently torn away was something else. What the hell could do something like that? I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, and my head hurt from the sudden increase in blood pressure. I knew I had to get out of there or I was going to be in serious trouble.

As I dropped my ghostsight and turned to leave, motion by the front door caught my attention.

Turning, I caught sight of the nun I’d noted earlier. She was moving swiftly toward the front door, her robes swishing around her as she went. I shouted at her to stop.

“Sister! Please wait!”

She ignored me and by the time I managed to thread my way through the maze of unconscious patients and reach the door, the cul-de-sac outside was empty. Whoever she was, she was gone.

No matter. I had no doubt that I’d seen what Scream had brought me to see. Now was the time to figure out just how far this problem extended.

I wandered around for a bit until I made my way back into a more populous section of the Quarter. From there I caught a cab back to Gallagher’s.

Walking up to the building, I had to admit that it wasn’t much to look at. Certainly not the kind of place I’d expect the city’s Lord Marshal to be headquartered in. The clinic itself was a long one-story building that seemed to have more in common with a warehouse than a doctor’s office. The walls were cheap stucco over brick, with windows lining the area just under the roofline. Attached by way of a short connecting corridor was the two-story house Gallagher was using as both home and office. Like the clinic, it had seen better days, though at least it was missing the chest-high water stain that marked so many other structures we’d seen on our drive into the city.

Rather than heading for the house, I turned toward the clinic.

I had to see the patients.

A couple of Gallagher’s men were standing guard outside the room, but they’d seen me in their boss’s company and didn’t prevent me from entering. Once inside, I had a flash of déjà vu as I stared at the rows of cots bearing silent, unmoving forms. If it hadn’t been for the lack of the altar, I could have been back in that church at the end of the cul-de-sac.

Then and there, I knew what I would find.

These people were never waking up either.

Still, I had to be sure.

I walked over to the nearest patient, an elderly man with a small patch of hair combed across his skull, and stared down at him for a moment, hoping against hope that I would be wrong, that what I had seen in the church was some kind of weird hallucination, an anomaly that couldn’t be explained but that was limited to just that particular group of patients.

Steeling myself, I triggered my ghostsight.

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later I knocked loudly on Denise’s door. I kept knocking until I heard her get out of bed.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Hunt.”

I heard the lock click and then she was standing there, staring at me in confusion.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” she asked angrily.

I didn’t know and I didn’t care. We had more important things to discuss.

“I need you to come to the clinic right now,” I told her, “so get dressed and go downstairs. I’m going to wake up Gallagher and Dmitri and we’ll meet you there in five minutes.”

Even half-asleep she was a quick thinker. “What did you find out?” she asked.

“Five minutes,” I said and then turned away, headed for the other bedroom at the end of the hall. Two men stood guard outside Gallagher’s door, thanks to his official status as the Lord Marshal of New Orleans. I told them I needed to talk to the Marshal and waited while they woke him up. When he stepped out into the hall, I went through the same spiel. He pressed me for details, but I told him it was easier to show him than to explain and that I would answer any questions he had once we were all in the clinic.

Thankfully, he left it at that.

Dmitri heard the commotion and was already coming down the hallway to join us. I filled him in as quickly as I could.

Less than ten minutes later the four of us were gathered just inside the doors to the clinic.

“All right, Hunt,” Gallagher said. “We’re all here. Now tell us what you’ve found out.” He spoke in a whisper, as if afraid of waking any of the patients, despite the fact that none of them had moved or otherwise acknowledged anyone’s presence since their arrival.

I gestured out at the sleeping multitude.

“They’re not sick at all. They’ve been attacked.”

I told them everything that had happened to me that night: how I’d been led through the streets by Scream, how I’d used my ghostsight to see the patients’ true condition while in the church, how I’d come back here to find the exact same thing.

They listened without interrupting me, though I didn’t think it had anything to do with my oratorical skills. They were scared; something was feeding on these people, one soul at a time, and if that didn’t scare the crap out of you, nothing would.

I turned to face Gallagher. “So what do we do about it?”

To his credit, he’d already thought through the implications and come up with a plan of action. Say what you want about him, he was a better leader than I was.

“We need to confirm just how widespread the situation is before we do anything. Maybe these are isolated cases or there’s something different about the patients in these two facilities that we aren’t seeing elsewhere.”

He turned and looked at Dmitri. “Take Hunt to the clinics on Jolene, Davidson, Babbage, and Green. Go inside with him and let him get a look at the patients, see if the situation is the same there as it is here. If anyone gives you any trouble, have them call me directly.”

He faced me, a sardonic expression on his face. “My people and I have been trying to crack this thing for a month. You go out to play tourist and come back with more information than we’ve been able to come up with in all of our efforts combined. I don’t know whether to hit you or hug you, Hunt, but I can tell you this—you have my thanks.”

I was tempted to fire off a wisecrack, but surprised myself by taking his hand when he offered it and shook.

I pretended not to see Denise’s smile.

“You’ve been out half the night. Are you up for this?” he asked, indicating with a wave what he’d just ordered us to do.

“I’m good until the sun comes up. After that, it will get harder for me to see.”

“Then you’d best get going; you’ve only got about an hour.”

We borrowed the keys to Denise’s Charger and were on the road moments later. The chill I felt as we rolled through the streets had nothing to do with the weather.