The Dead Ones (Death Herself Book 3) (14 page)

She kicks opens the doors at the bottom of the stairwell and carries my body into the parking lot. In the process, however, she bangs my head against the side of the door.

“Sorry,” she mutters, taking me out into the afternoon air. “Did you feel that?”

“I don't know,” I reply, putting a hand on the side of my head as I realize I feel slightly woozy. “Maybe for a moment.”

“You should be fine,” she explains, “at least for a while. The machines were there to monitor you, not to pump you full of drugs. We'll get you somewhere safe and then we'll come up with a proper plan. A
better
plan. Don't worry, I always think of something. I just need a little pressure to build up first, something to get the juices flowing.”

“How much pressure do you think will be enough?” I ask. “I mean, there seems to be quite a lot already.”

“Stop stressing,” she replies, hurrying between two parked cars, banging my head against one of them. “Sorry again.”

“Can you -”

My head hits the side of another car.

“Careful!” I hiss, feeling a distinct ache. “Do you mind not bashing me to death while you're rescuing me?”

“You're in a coma,” she replies as we reach the edge of the parking lot and she carries my body into the forest. “Maybe you should try complaining less. A few bumps might even do you good.” She glances back at me. “In fact -”

Before she can finish, she trips on a tree-root and falls forward. My body spills out of her arms and crashes down into a pool of mud. Almost tripping over Hannah myself, I stop and stare down at my unconscious, mud-soaked body.

“Thanks,” I mutter.

“This is why you shouldn't ask dumb questions,” she continues, taking a little more care this time as she starts to lift me from the mud. Dirty brown water dribbles from my hospital night-gown, and I can't help wincing even though I can't actually feel the mud right now. “I know a place where we can hide out,” Hannah continues, “at least for now. Dyson is going to be looking for us, and it won't take him long to come up with another plan.”

“But you stared him down before,” I point out as we make our way through the forest. “He backed off when he saw you.”

“That was just shock,” she replies. “I wish I could say I'll always have that effect, but I won't. He just wants to claim your ghost and then he'll move on, leaving this town forever. I'm not going to let him get what he's after, though. We have to find a way to get you back into this body.”

“And how are we going to do that?” I ask.

“I don't know,” she mutters, “but I'll think of something. Just try not to bug me to death first or -”

Before she can finish, she bangs my head against one of the trees. When she turns to look, she bumps me against another. At the same time, I feel the start of a headache.

“Sorry,” she says with a faint, force smile. “Come on, we have to get moving before Dyson finds us.”

Chapter Sixteen

“There,” she says as she wipes matted, muddy hair from across my comatose body's face. “You'll be okay for a while.”

We're in an abandoned old factory at the edge of town. I used to come here as a kid, with Debbie and Molly and a few other girls. We used to play dumb games to while away the hours, but that all feels so long ago now. Even Malcolm came down with us occasionally, back in the days when he was just my older brother rather than a mass-murdering psychopath. He's gone now, and so's Molly.

“How's the plan coming along?” I ask.

Hannah gets to her feet and steps past me, but she doesn't reply.

“Do you
have
a plan?”

“Not so much,” she mutters.

I wait for her to continue, but she remains quiet, lost in thought. I guess I was hoping that she'd miraculously come up with a way for us to get out of this mess, whereas she seems to be merely stalling for time.

“Won't they notice I'm gone?” I continue, staring at my body on the floor. I can see my chest rising and falling as I breathe, but other than that my body is completely motionless and unresponsive. “At the hospital, I mean.”

“Totally,” she replies. “People can see me, remember? When they check the security cameras, they'll see me running out of the building with you in my arms. I'm sure the police are hunting for us both by now, but I had no choice.” She starts examining an old workbench in the corner, wiping dust from the surface. “If I'd left you there, Dyson would have killed you by now, and then there'd be nothing to stop him claiming your ghost.”

I watch as she takes a look at some old tools. Despite all her outward confidence, I can't shake the feeling that Hannah is definitely hiding something from me.

“This wasn't supposed to happen,” she says finally.

“No kidding,” I mutter. “Stealing a body from a hospital is -”

“Not that,” she snaps, glancing at me with guilty, pained eyes. “The whole thing. The shooting, everything, the whole goddamn mess.”

“But...” Pausing, I start to realize what she means. “You were supposed to stop it?”

She shakes her head. “I wasn't
supposed
to. In fact, I'm very much
not
supposed to interfere. The people I work with, or at least the people I
used
to work with, are strictly opposed to the idea of messing around in human affairs. But when I realized what your brother and his friend were planning, and when I looked ahead and saw how many people would die, and how many more would suffer... How many lives would be destroyed...” She takes a look at a rusty old wrench for a moment, as if she's trying to distract herself. “I thought I could break the rules,” she continues, with a hint of deep regret in her voice. “I waltzed into town, the way I always do, and I told myself I could somehow talk your brother and his friend Jonathan out of what they were planning. I knew it'd be messy, but I figured I'd muddle through. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.”

“How did you
know
what they were planning?” I ask.

“Traumatic events like the shooting...” She pauses. “They echo through the world and through reality, in every direction. It wasn't hard to figure things out, but I thought I could stop them. I've never failed before, not really, not at something so important.” She sets the wrench down and now there are tears in her eyes, although she quickly sniffs them back. “I came to town about a week before the shooting happened. I started talking to Malcolm and Jonathan, trying to subtly steer them away from their plan. I listened to them for hours, all their boring self-righteous justifications for hating society, and eventually I started to realize it wouldn't be as easy as I'd expected. By the end, only they could see me. I was at the school with them when they burst into the cafeteria, I was screaming at them to stop but...”

Her voice trails off, and after a moment she wipes her eyes on her sleeve.

“I failed,” she adds finally.

“No, you -”

“I did!” she hisses, as anger fills her voice for a moment.

I shake my head.

“I tried to stop them,” she continues firmly, “and I failed.”

“That doesn't mean it's your fault,” I point out. “Believe me, I've been through mental contortions trying to blame anyone
but
my brother for what happened that day. Eventually I realized that for whatever reason, he made a conscious decision to take guns to the school. Each time he shot someone, he made the choice to pull the trigger.” I pause, thinking back yet again to the horrors I witnessed in the cafeteria. Sometimes I feel as if the sound of echoing gunfire has never really left my thoughts since that day. “Unless you're saying that something had taken control of him,” I continue, starting to feel a ray of hope. “Is that what happened? Did some kind of monster manipulate Malcolm and Jonathan into carrying out the shooting?”

She turns to me, and I can see the sadness in her eyes.

“That would explain it!” I continue, as the sense of hope blossoms in my chest. “I knew Malcolm wasn't like that, I knew there had to be something else that -”

“Bonnie -”

“This Dyson creature
made
him shoot those people!”

“Bonnie, listen -”

“It's so obvious now!” I stammer, relieved to finally understand why my brother would do such an awful thing. “Dyson must have reached into his head and forced him to do it all!”

“No,” Hannah says firmly.

“But it's the only explanation!”

“It's not,” she continues. “Bonnie, Dyson didn't cause the shooting. He was attracted here by the stench of death, but he didn't influence Malcolm or his friend to do what they did.”

“Then...” Pausing, I realize that the hope is starting to fade. With tears in my eyes, I try to think of some other answer. “Then why
did
Malcolm do it?” I ask finally.

“I honestly don't know,” she replies. “Anger, I guess. Or pain. Humiliation. A mixture of all those things and more.”

“Everything thinks he was evil,” I whisper, sniffing back more tears.

“No human is truly evil,” she mutters. “Twisted, maybe. Able to contort their minds until they believe black is white and right is wrong? Sure. But I've never met an evil human, not in all my travels.”

I open my mouth to reply to her, before another shock of realization hits me. “Jonathan was shot early,” I tell her, “which means... Malcolm must have been the one who shot
me
. I ran to the door, and then he... My own brother.”

“Maybe he didn't realize it was you until too late,” she suggests.

I feel a sense of hollow anger in my chest as I imagine him pulling the trigger, hitting me in the back. “He killed Mom,” I say finally. “Why wouldn't he try to kill me too?”

“Everything about that day was human,” Hannah replies after a moment. “Dyson only showed up to feed on the aftermath, but the shooting was a very human event. I don't know exactly what caused your brother and his friend to do it, but I know that I tried to stop them and I failed.”

I want to tell her to stop blaming herself, but I'm too shocked to get the words out. My own brother tried to murder me.

“I let my ego get too big,” Hannah continues. “It never seriously occurred to me that I wouldn't find some way to break the rules, to stop the shooting. And then finally I ended up standing in that cafeteria, surrounded by so many dead kids, and I realized I'd screwed up. After that I went away for a while. I had to be alone. Maybe that was selfish of me, but I was in shock. It took a long time before I realized that I should come back, that I needed to deal with everything that happened next. And then when I got here a few weeks ago, I immediately sensed that another type of entity had come to leech off the misery in this town.”

“You mean Dyson?”

She nods.

“He has some kind of creature with him,” I continue. “I don't know what it is, but Dyson doesn't burn the ghosts himself. The creature does it for him.”

She nods again. “The creature is called a Flesh Weaver. They're usually very peaceful, very noble animals, but Dyson has managed to enslave one. They live in the depths of the Underworld, working with the Loom People, and it's very rare for one to be seen out and about like this. Unfortunately, Dyson has found some way to enslave one of the poor things. The Flesh Weaver burns the bodies and passes the souls on to Dyson, because otherwise Dyson would have to spend much longer on each one. He's a typical addict, really. He needs more and more hits, and he needs them faster. A place like this town, following the massacre at the school, is his perfect hunting ground.”

“But nothing happened until yesterday,” I point out. “Why did he wait until my brother had been executed?”

“He needed to take your brother's soul first,” she explains, heading over to the dirty, cracked window and peering out for a moment. “There are certain rules about this kind of thing.” She pauses again. “This has gone too far. I should have stopped it.”

“You can't always -”

“Yes I can!” she shouts, turning to me with anger in her eyes. “I should have stopped it all!”

“But you said it's against the rules.”

“So?”

“So maybe there was nothing you could have done,” I continue. “Believe me, I tried to work out what
I
could have done to stop Malcolm, and it took a long time before I realized there was nothing. Literally, there was no way I could have anticipated what my brother was planning.”

“Of course
you
couldn't do anything,” she sneers. “You're just a kid. You're just mortal.”

“Well -”

“I'm
more
than that!” she yells, grabbing the edge of a nearby bench and tipping it over, sending the tools clattering across the concrete floor. She takes a deep breath, as if she's shocked by her own momentary burst of anger. “I'm so much more than that,” she adds breathlessly. “I can change things that happen right in front of me. I can banish demons, I can keep people alive, I can see into the future. I have all this power, so when I fail at something, it's not because of my own limitations, it's because I screwed up! It's because I got so accustomed to saving the day, I forgot to be careful.”

I wait for her to continue, but she puts her head in her hands, and after a moment I realize she might actually be crying.

“Are you...” I pause, not really sure whether I want to know the answer to my next question. “Are you, like... Are you God, or something like that?”

She turns to me, and after a moment she smiles. “No,” she says with a renewed sense of calmness, “I'm not God, or
anything
like that. I'm just someone who works behind the scenes. Someone who should have known better. And now a whole bunch of people are dead, and worse than that, their souls were consumed by that Flesh Weaver so they could be passed on to Dyson. I didn't cause the shooting to happen, but I damn well should have prevented it. There shouldn't be any limits to what I can do.”

“We all feel like that sometimes,” I point out.

She opens her mouth to reply, before smiling again. “Don't.”

“Don't what?”

“Don't be smarter than me,” she continues. “I don't like it.”

Turning, I look back down at my comatose body. “Maybe you can't save me,” I point out. “Maybe this is another limitation.”

“Oh, I'm definitely going to save you,” Hannah replies. “I don't know how, but I am damn well not going to fail again. I've been watching you for a while, Bonnie. I pretended to be a student at the school, I hid my true identity from Dyson so I could get closer to him and work out what he really wanted. I've invested a lot of time and effort here, and I am
not
going to walk away until I've salvaged something.”

“So you only care about yourself?” I ask, turning to her. “Is that what this is about? Pride?”

“I'm not proud,” she scoffs, heading to another window and peering out. “I've never had a problem with pride, thank you very much. I'm far too honest with myself, almost to a fault.”

“I had a bird in a box,” I tell her. “I thought it was dead, but then it was alive and then... It seemed to constantly switch from one to the other.”

“Of course it did,” she replies. “It was being looked after by someone whose energy was doing the same thing.”

I want to ask what she means, but I get the feeling that none of her explanations are going to make too much sense. In fact, the more I try to understand, the more I feel as if I'm getting a headache.

“So what are we doing here?” I continue, looking around at the abandoned factory. “Are you hoping that I'll just miraculously wake up?”

“Maybe we should get Prince Charming to come and give you a kiss,” she mutters, staring at my body on the floor. “Then again, I guess he tried that himself at the hospital. This isn't a fairytale. True love never won the day, not in my experience. We need something more solid, something that'll give you one hell of a jolt.”

We stand in silence for a moment.

“Electricity?” I suggest finally.