The Rising Dead
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Stella Green
THE DEAD MAN logo is a registered trademark of Adventures in Television, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
EISBN: 9781477867822
Cover design by Jeroen Ten Berge
CONTENTS
Editor’s Note:
This book contains details that might spoil the surprises in
The Dead Man
novels
Ring of Knives
,
The Dead Woman
,
The Midnight Special
, and
Colder Than Hell
. You might want to read those books before this one…though it’s not necessary to know those stories in order to fully enjoy this tale.
CHAPTER ONE
A yellow jacket was circling Matt’s fourth cup of coffee. He’d been shooing it away for the last half hour, but the creature wasn’t giving up. When a woman leaving the diner smiled and offered him a newspaper, Matt took it, intending to roll the
Provo Times
into a flyswatter until he spotted the headline “Miraculous survival turns tragic.” That could have been the title of Matt’s life story. Coincidence? Probably not. The article was partly obliterated by a murky stain, and was unreadable under the cheap fluorescent bulbs. The yellow jacket finally got to taste the wonders in the cup because Matt was out in the sunlight reading about the teenage mountain climber who had fallen into a crevice and survived eighteen days. His rescuers couldn’t feel a pulse, but he surprised them by reviving during the helicopter ride to the emergency room. The EMT trainee who practiced CPR on the climber for forty-two minutes was given an award.
A few weeks later, after all the celebrations were over, the young man had begun insisting that some of the people around him looked like monsters. He had even chased the mailman away with a baseball bat. Afraid his hallucinations meant he was suffering from a head injury, his mother had checked him into a hospital. The hospital moved him to the psych ward, and now he was fighting to prove his sanity and gain his freedom. Matt suspected that the teenage climber saw what he saw: the evil inside a person appearing as putrefied, reeking flesh—usually on the person’s face. Ever since Matt had come back from the dead, he could see and smell the rot. The more decay, the closer the person was to committing some heinous act. He avoided talking about it because he knew
it sounded crazy. Could the teenager prove what he saw wasn’t a delusion? Matt didn’t think so, but it seemed important to get to Denver. Maybe he could help. A stay in a mental hospital for another man like them had ended in a bloody mess.
“No.” The admissions clerk looked at Matt with glassy, tired eyes. She seemed sad and so weighted down by her troubles that sitting upright took all of her energy.
“Would you check again?”
She looked rattled by the request, but agreed. Matt carefully spelled the climber’s last name for the second time while the clerk typed into her computer.
“No. No patient by that name.” She sighed, relieved that she had accomplished the task.
Matt pulled out the newspaper and slid it across the counter.
A worried expression appeared on her face as she realized he wanted even more effort from her. After slowly smoothing the pages, she read using her finger to follow the words.
“Oh.” When she raised her head, she had a slight flush and she looked at Matt carefully, as if he had suddenly become interesting. “How do you know him?”
“I’m just a friend.”
“A good friend?”
“Good enough. Is there a problem?”
She sat up a bit straighter and hesitated, as if she was trying to come up with the right words. “I’m afraid your friend is dead. He committed suicide a couple of days ago.”
Matt got the feeling she would be telling this story for months to come. He didn’t care. “What happened?”
“Well, he jumped off the balcony. From the seventh floor. Such a shame.” There was no sadness in the words, only excitement. She paused and then asked, “Do you want to see where he landed?”
Matt must have looked surprised, because she quickly added, “It’s been cleaned up.”
Back outside, Matt moved quickly off the medical center grounds. The sad little ghoul at the desk hadn’t done anything to improve his opinion of hospital employees. He was free to move on, but for the moment, there was nowhere to go. Even if there was, he didn’t want to leave because he still felt that he was meant to help somehow. Matt decided to visit the young climber’s family.
Their home was a sweet little A-frame near the forest. Before he rang the bell, Matt noticed the peeling tan paint around the door. The house hadn’t been shown any love for years. The button moved reluctantly, like it wasn’t used much. Just as he was about to give up and walk away, a twenty-something man with a shaved head opened the door. His tight muscle shirt showed off hefty biceps and black chest hair. On his forehead was a moldy green sore the size of a dime. A small spot of rot like this one might not be a problem, but Matt knew it could grow quickly. He caught a faint whiff of decomposing flesh.
“I just wanted to tell all of you how sorry I am…”
“Fuck off!” The sullen man spoke with a heavy Russian accent.
From somewhere back in the house an older woman called out, “Please, please wait.”
A plump, silver-haired head squeezed into the doorway. “I’m sorry. Dmitri is a friend of my daughter’s. He’s still learning English.”
Dmitri was now dribbling tiny globules of a putrid yellow liquid from the spreading sore, which now covered his forehead. He looked like he might swing his weight to the side and crush the woman’s neck against the doorframe.
Matt knew that if the climber had lived here, he’d definitely been seeing monsters.
The mother invited Matt to stay for dinner. Because she had a fermenting Russian at her house, Matt agreed. Inside, two skinny female shapes emerged from behind clouds of cigarette smoke.
“This is Nadia—she’s our exchange student—and my daughter, Chloe.”
“Who this is?” Nadia’s low, throaty voice was deeper than Dmitri’s. She approached on stiletto heels as smoothly as if she were walking barefoot. Nadia’s dark eye makeup was heavy enough to have made Cleopatra proud. The bloodshot eyes and sallow skin hinted at a life of excess. She looked thirty-five, but Matt guessed she was really about ten years younger. At the corner of her lip was something that looked like a small cold sore. He was sure it would turn out to be something more.
“Mom! You can’t just ask some loser in. You’re so stupid!” A skinny teenager with blue streaks in her long black hair wobbled through the haze in high heels just like Nadia’s. The skin around her left eye was gray and cracked.
“She isn’t dealing well with her brother’s death.”
“He was fucking nuts. Said I looked like a zombie. Said I stink, too.”
“It’s the pain talking.”
Matt nodded, even though he was pretty sure Chloe wasn’t as broken up as her mother thought.
The Russians began to argue loudly in Russian like no one else was in the room.
“Talk English!” Chloe was on the verge of tears. Then she turned to her mother, yelling, “You ruin everything!” before running into the back of the house. A door slammed. The Russians followed her and the house was quiet, but not peaceful. The presence of the trio unsettled the atmosphere.
The daughter was in a pout and refused to come into the dining room for dinner, which left the mother running back and forth like a waitress. Matt felt sorry for her, but he was glad those three were in the other room, because the lady could cook. He didn’t need festering sores ruining the meal. After dinner, she fed him homemade apple pie with ice cream. Every time he tried to excuse himself, she brought out other goodies: beer, brownies, chips. Matt refused the food, but the mother nervously pressed him to eat while flitting around the room like a pigeon afraid to land.
During one of her trips to the kitchen, Matt slipped away and peeked through the now open door into Chloe’s room. Dmitri was playing video games with Chloe while Nadia, still smoking, talked endlessly on a cell phone. Dmitri stopped for a moment to squeeze Nadia’s puny ass. Then he grabbed Chloe with his other arm and stuck his tongue down her throat. Matt sat back down at the table. “What grade is your exchange student?”
“We were supposed to get a seventeen-year-old high school girl. We’ve done this before and it was always so nice. Inga from Sweden was just lovely. She still sends me Christmas cards. There was some sort of mistake and we got a college student this year. I told Nadia she has to leave in two weeks when the semester ends. Perhaps you’d like to stay for a while longer? I have an extra room now.” She looked sadly down the hall toward the bedrooms. “I’m sure my son wouldn’t mind.”