The Pulptress Versus The Bone Queen: Blood and Bone (3 page)

"So one person is doing all of this? Some kind of necromancer or something?" Jackson asked, turning down another dirt road filled with potholes that bounced the truck.

I braced my hands on the ceiling of the car to keep from slamming into it. "Something like that. You're taking this a lot better than I thought you would honestly."

She took a deep breath. "See, I..." she trailed off then shook her head. ”My grandfather use to tell me this story when I was little. He said there was a soldier during the Civil War that had been touched by the devil because he wouldn’t die. He told me that he was there, he saw the devil, shot him clean through and the man kept coming." she looked at me as she drove. “He told me that eventually they bound the man in an iron casket and buried him in an unmarked grave here in Epsilon. If there are dead things rising…”

“It’s not him. That’s some folktale. I know who is behind this and I’m here to stop her,” I said. Nothing was going to change my mind.

Those things in the morgue looked exactly like the chiffoniers I’d faced in Paris, and I had no doubt that it was that woman behind all of this. How one of them had gotten my contact information into its hand was something I still hadn’t figured out.

Jackson kept quiet as we pulled into an empty grass lot that served as a parking lot. Low, crumbling brick walls circled the cemetery with at least three old wrought iron gates around the property. An entire section of wall had crumbled to the ground around the back areas. In the distance I could make out what looked like an old church steeple sticking out just above an area of woods around the graves.

“How big is this place?” I asked Jackson as she put it in park.

“Oh a few dozen acres. It’s massive.” She said, “Heard some developers tried to buy it up but they did a land survey and found miles of tunnels under the graves. Guess it was used as some kind of barricades during the Civil War maybe, no one’s found the entrance yet. Most people just think it’s an urban legend.”

I unbuckled and opened my door before turning to Jackson and telling her, “You should just wait in the truck.”

“I’m not waiting in the truck,” Jackson scoffed and crossed her arms, “You’re hunting dead things and telling me that my story about the dead rising is some fairytale? You don’t know any better than I do why those people came back to life!”

I took a deep breath, "I do know better than you. I’ve dealt with these things before. Now I don’t know why they’re here, or why one of them had a piece of paper about me, but that’s what I’m going to find out. I can’t be worried about you wandering around with these things on the attack. Maybe you've missed this somewhere along the line but it's dangerous. There are going to be things, undead things, trying to kill me and anyone with me."

"One of them tried to kill me before I even knew you existed. It was delivered to my morgue with your name and number in its hand. I want to know what's going on just as much as you do. This is my home, and I need to know what's going on or else I can kiss my job goodbye for losing several bodies."

"We can find a way to keep that from happening," I told her. "Your life is more important than your job."

Jackson smiled. "Yeah I know that, but I think with us working together I can keep both of them just fine and figure out what’s going on."

I shook my head, but stopped arguing, it was wasting time. Getting out of the truck, it was clear that this grassy parking lot didn’t see a lot of traffic. In fact, the only car here besides us was a sleek black car covered in dust and pollen. It’d clearly been here a while without moving.

"Not a real popular place is it?” I asked.

Jackson laughed. "I don't think anyone has been buried here since...phew, maybe the 50s," she said after a moment of thought. "Most of the people buried here are in unmarked graves. Leftovers from the Civil War mainly. My grandfather's out here somewhere."

I frowned. "Unmarked graves?" I asked as I got out of the truck.

Jackson followed behind me. "Yeah, I guess maybe mass graves would be a better term. You see the uneven patches of the ground, the weird hills and valleys. Those are from graves where they just dumped the unclaimed bodies. There are a few actual tombstones, and a few families even have mausoleums." She motioned toward the east side of the cemetery. "But otherwise it's just a collection of unknowns. Historians come out here from time to time to try to make headway on who’s buried here, but most of the time they find nothing but a few abandoned churches about a mile outside the cemetery." She stepped over one of the broken sections of the wall.

I followed behind her and took a quick look around the cemetery. The ground sloped and fell in chaotic, unnatural patterns, and in the distance I could see a few dark shapes that must have been the tombs and graves Jackson had mentioned. Of all the mass graves in the world, why was the Bone Queen here in Epsilon, Georgia?

Jackson walked away from the wall and into the cemetery. She took a deep breath. "Rosemary is this way," she called over her shoulder.

I let my hand rest on the butt of my gun and headed after her. "You think the rosemary will lead us to where those things came from?"

She nodded. "It's a good place to start unless you'd rather just wander the cemetery looking for dead things."

I frowned but didn't respond as we tracked through the graveyard. I caught the scent of the rich, warm tang of rosemary crisp against the humid air and pushed past Jackson, taking over the lead.

Over a hill we came to a patch of wild, overgrown rosemary, thick spiked plants grabbing at the edges of my pants and sticking to them. Jackson knelt beside me and pulled a small plastic Ziploc bag from her purse and carefully collected a few pieces.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"If I can get a match of this to the plants that were on those bodies that will confirm they came from here inside the cemetery. It's a start at least," she said, putting the evidence back into her bag.

Overhead dark clouds rumbled. Jackson pulled her white leather jacket tighter around herself. "We need to find something and get out of here before the storm breaks."

"I'm not going anywhere," I said, reaching into the bushes and trying to feel through the tangles of branches and clinging pine-like needles to see if there was any sort of hole or trap door hidden there. "This isn't a mystery that needs to be solved. This is a simple case of finding the person doing this and stopping her."

Jackson huffed. "Alright, fine. You want to putz around a cemetery in a thunderstorm, that's-"

I froze as something seized my arm and jerked me forward. I nearly toppled into the rosemary bushes, but Jackson grabbed the back of my shirt, then my arm and pulled me back. Another hard yank and me and the thing holding onto me flew backwards and crashed into the ground into a pile.

I scrambled for my gun as Jackson and the thing still holding onto my wrist, struggled to get upright.

Abandoning trying to get to free my gun from my hoodie, I finally settled for my knife and slashed at the hand holding onto me. It jerked backwards and I followed, pressing my blade into the pale neck of a gaunt, blonde man.

"Wait a second!" Jackson grabbed my arm, "Wait, don't just-"

“Who are you?” I demanded.

The man was dirty with a sickly yellow coloring to his skin. He didn’t move like one of those dead things, but he didn’t seem totally alive. His eyes were dark and the cut on his hand from my knife didn’t bleed. I tightened my hand on the blade and readied it to plunge into his chest, “Speak now if you can.”

He spoke with a faint smirk. "I thought I saw an angel."

I sputtered and the knife pressed against his chest, ready to pierce him as I said, "What did you just say to me?"

"If you are not interested, that's all you had to say." He offered a smile “I can handle ‘no’.”

“Stop!” Jackson hissed. “Get your knife away from him!” She grabbed at my arm but I easily avoided her grasp.

I pulled the blade to his throat. "Stop with the cutesy act. You can talk, so talk. What are you doing here? Where did you come from?"

"Oh, shall I tell you about my childhood? What an awful time that was," he said with a grin. A very faint French accent hid under his words.

“Jackson, check him for a pulse.” I said, pulling my knife off of his throat, and instead taking out my gun to aim at him. “One wrong move, and you’re gone.” I told him.

He just smiled and stayed still as Jackson pressed her fingers to his throat, then his wrist, and finally to his chest. She leaned back, looking to me and then to him. “I can’t find one. I swear he doesn’t have one.”

"And you would be swearing correctly. I am dead. Quite dead in fact," he said before sitting up with a soft groan.

"Then how are you talking?" Jackson asked.

"Ah, well, there's the trick. I may be technically dead, but my body keeps on moving. What is that saying? The spirit is willing but the body won't? Something like that?" His smile split crooked across his face.

"Who are you?" I pulled back the hammer on the gun. "Tell me."

"Name's Aramis," he said, looking up at me. "And you must be The Pulptress."

"How do you know me?" I demanded.

"It isn't hard. You've earned a reputation, particularly your bone hunting ways," he said with a wink.

"You know about her? About what happened in France?" I dropped the gun down just an inch.

“
Est-ce que je connais la France
?" He laughed, “Oh, I know more about what happened in France and about her than you ever will. I know that she killed someone very dear to you in Paris. Do I need to say more than that?" He tilted his head faintly.

"What is going on?" Jackson demanded.

I took a deep breath and reluctantly put the gun away. "The woman I told you about who killed my mentor.”

“I know that woman," Aramis added, "Well, knew," he corrected. "We haven't spoken in oh a good thousand years or so at least. Since the last time we tried to kill each other probably." He shrugged.

"You've tried to kill her?" I asked, "How? How do you kill something that's already dead?"

"That's the problem," he said. "I can't."

“But?” Jackson prodded.

He smiled. “First I think getting out before it rains might be in order. Rotted skin and water don’t mix well.” He pointed up toward the sky then slowly got to his feet. He stumbled and Jackson steadied him.

He closed his eyes with a faint groan as thunder rumbled again.

“I think we have guests,” he said.

“What?” My gun was out and at the ready again, and it only took me a second to see the hoard of stumbling chiffoniers. “We need to go now!” I said, grabbing Jackson’s arm and pulling her back toward the parking lot.

Chapter 2

Jackson stumbled after me, and the strange man followed right behind her. I didn't bother trying to count the number of creatures coming toward us. I could hear their steps against the soggy ground and see glimpses of shadows moving with every bolt of lightning striking near us. As the rain rushed over us in a near torrential downpour, I struggled to keep Jackson with me, and, paying more attention to who was behind me than what was in front of me, I plowed straight into a headstone and toppled to the ground with the air knocked out of me.

Jackson tripped over me and fell to the ground, skidding across the damp clay.

I grunted and tried to get back to my feet, but struggled with the slick mud clinging to my shoes. The man, Aramis, appeared in another flash of lightning, grabbing my hand and helping to pull me to my feet. I used his grip as a counter weight and jerked myself upright and then backwards, shoving myself into the chest of one creature that had gotten a bit too close. However, another grabbed a fistful of my hair and jerked me backwards. I stumbled back toward the approaching hoard.

"Go!" I yelled at Jackson and the man.

Jackson picked up her baseball bat and charged forward swinging. The man stayed where he was.

Jackson's bat cracked through several fragile skulls, and dusty remains of the chiffoniers splattered in thick clumps against my cheek. Letting loose of her weapon with one hand, Jackson took my arm. "Come on!" She pulled me.

I let her drag me ahead as I tightened my grip on my pistol and fired at anything that got too close. Aramis rejoined us as we crawled over the brick wall and rushed toward the truck as another group chased after us.

"Get in the back!" Jackson yelled as she scrambled to unlock the truck's door and get into the driver's side. I jumped into the bed of the truck with Aramis right behind me. I fired a few shots at some of the creatures as they screamed and reached for us. "Jackson!!" I roared.

"I'm trying!" She yelled back, the engine sputtered several times before finally turning over. Tires squealed and tore through the mud, knocking a few more chiffoniers back from the truck as it tore toward the road.

I grabbed onto the side railing and Aramis did the same as the truck bounced wildly, and the rain just made the metal bed slicker. My grip kept slipping and I slid closer toward the end of the truck bed and a drop straight onto the gravel road.

Aramis reached out and offered his hand, and after a few seconds of hesitation I grabbed it.