The Walking (14 page)

e assistants, were visibly shaken by the sight of Bob pacing the periphery of his room. Ralph asked a series of rapid-fire questions as he put on gloves and a surgical mask: When did he have the stroke? What was the extent of the brain damage? Was he sure Bob was dead?

Miles gave a quick rundown of his father's recent medical history, described the way he had come home and found the barricaded door and the abandoned house.

Covered and protected, Ralph and his assistants walked into the bedroom. The two men held his father while Ralph injected the body with some sort of drug, sticking the needle in his upper arm because that portion of his body showed no attempt at movement. The moment he was through, he backed away. The two men continued to hold him, visibly straining against the forward motion of Bob's still moving feet.

A few seconds later, his father slumped forward. Ralph took over from one of the men, a young husky intern named Murdock, and held Bob up until the assistant returned with a gurney. Ralph helped lay the body down, then let the other two men strap it in.

"What was that you gave him?" Miles asked. "It's a very powerful muscle relaxant." "Is he... dead?"

Ralph nodded, the expression on his face one of extreme weariness. "Oh, yes. He's dead."

"What do you think happened?"

His friend shrugged. "I don't know."

"You ever seen anything like this?"

Ralph shook his head. "I have to admit, I haven't."

Miles looked back at Graham. "Keep this out of the Weekly World News."

"Tell it to your doctor friend. If there are any leaks, they'll come from the coroner's office, not me."

He faced Ralph. "Can we keep this quiet?"

"Definitely. At least until we figure out what it is. We don't want people panicking." He took off his gloves. "You know, I should be doing cartwheels over this. Something this rare doesn't come along in... well, it never comes along, to be honest about it. This is a coroner wet dream: something that's never been encountered before, a chance to get in all the journals. And as deputy assistant coroner, hell, this is a career maker."

"But..." Miles prodded.

"But I'm not happy. I'm not excited."

He looked at Miles. "I'm scared."

Miles shivered, looked over at Graham. Ordinarily, this would be the lawyer's cue to make some cynical, wiseass remark. But Graham merely looked pensive.

"What are you going to do?" Miles asked.

"I don't know. We'll take him in, but obviously I'm not going to do an autopsy if he's still moving. I'll call Bill and the chief, let them in on it, see what they come up with. For now, I guess we'll bring your father to the morgue, give him a private room, keep him strapped down and see what happens when the drugs wear off. You want to come along? You're welcome to ride in the wagon." Miles looked back at Graham.

The lawyer tried to smile, only partially pulled it off. "I think we'll follow in my car," he said.

Miles awoke from a nightmare in which he was being chased through a maze by a jogging mummy with the rot ring face of Liam Connor. He sat up, blinked. It was light outside, and one look at the clock told him that he was supposed to have been at work two hours ago. He had not called the office or anyone from it, and he quickly reached across the bed, grabbed the phone, and called Naomi. He explained that his dad died and asked her to patch him through to either Perkins or Miller, but she told him she'd take care of it, just do what he had to do, call in when he could, all their prayers were with him. "Thanks," he said gratefully.

The next call was to the coroner's office. Ralph was still there, sounding dead tired, and he said there'd been no change. His father was still deceased.

And there was still muscle movement in the legs:

Miles asked what he'd been afraid to ask the night before. "So does this mean he's a zombie.

"I don't know what it means," Ralph admitted. "None of us here do."

Miles got up, took a shower, made himself some coffee. He was at loose ends and had no idea what he was supposed to do next. Ordinarily, he'd contact a mortuary, call friends and family, but right now everything was up in the air. He should definitely call his sister, he knew, but he didn't want to worry her, and decided to wait until their father was really and truly dead.

Really and truly dead.

He shook his head. He had the feeling that he was supposed to understand what was happening here. On some level perhaps he did, but any connections between his father's un-death and any related information in his own brain remained stubbornly buffed. He found himself thinking about his dad's recurring dream, about the occult books he'd checked out of the library. Had Bob known what was going to happen? Had he somehow been preparing himself?. And, if so, why hadn't he let Miles in on the secret?

His fathiwas--had been?--nothing if not organized, and a copy of his will, the title to his car, a breakdown of all his assets, and a key to a safety deposit box were in the desk folder marked DEATrt that he had shown Miles long before the stroke.

The safety deposit box, Miles assumed, contained the

original will and assorted other documents, perhaps some family photos or heirlooms. Valuables. Checking it out would at least give him something to do, so he drove down to the bank. He was led into a vault by an elderly female teller who removed a long metal box from its niche in the wall and set it down on a table. Both he and the teller inserted their keys to unlock the box, then he thanked the woman, waiting until she had left the room before pulling up the lid.

Miles blinked in confusion. The box was filled with phials of powders and strange-looking roots floating in small bottles of clear liquid.

There were branches and leaves in sealed plastic bags, a necklace of teeth, what looked like a dried, flattened frog.

He stared, unmoving, thrown off balance by the sheer unanticipated lunacy of it all. Where were the documents he'd been expecting? The insurance policies? The letters? The family heirlooms?

And what the hell was all this crap?

None of the bags or bottles were labeled, but there was about them the aura of the occult, something that under the present circumstances did not exactly fill him with joy. The necklace of teeth was particularly disturbing, and he tried to think of why his father had such a thing, where he could have gotten it.

Gingerly, he took the items out of the box, spreading them out on the fake wood of the table. The teeth rattled in his shaking hand. He dropped the rough dusty frog. The materials looked like magic paraphernalia to him, the sort of stuff that was used to cast spells and concoct potions.

A chain of thoughts passed through his head. Magic. Voodoo.

Zombies.

He thought of his dead dad, walking around the disrupted bedroom, and he stared down at the bizarre paraphernalia on the table. His eyes were drawn once again to the necklace of teeth. He didn't like this.

He didn't like this at all.

And he sat alone in the vault, feeling very empty and very, very cold.

Fred Tunney awoke in the middle of the night to see a woman at the foot of his bed, a beautiful woman with long straight black hair, a perfect smile, and the most evil eyes he had ever beheld.

He knew instantly who she was, and he said her name, though he had never before met her, had never before seen her and had only heard about her from his parents.

Her smile grew wider and the smile, he saw, was evil too. He was frightened, of course, and surprised, but this had not come entirely out of the blue. For the past several months, he'd been dreaming about the old days, about the town, about magic, and about a wall of water that he could not escape and that bore down on him as his feet remained cemented to the floor of his bedroom. Now she was here.

His parents had always feared this would happen, and no matter how far they had run, the specter of the town and the curse had followed them, had hung over everything they'd done. He himself had never believed any of it, had thought they were overreacting, but he had been only a child when they left the town, and obviously they had possessed knowledge he had not.

He knew that now.

Fred sat up against the headboard, not taking his eyes

Off the woman. He could feel the power radiating from her, washing over him in waves that were the sensory equivalent of darkness. He was chilled to the bone, afraid in a way that he had never thought possible. She spoke his name. i "Fred." :

The fact that she knew who he was terrified him even more, and he pulled his knees up, preparing to throw off the covers and run like hell out of the room.

She was too fast for him, though. In one fluid movement she was around the side of the bed and next to him, cutting off his avenue of escape.

He could feel the coldness coming off her, and he looked up, into those horrify evil eyes, and he knew that he was only the latest victim. She was coming for all of them, one at a time, coming after all of the residents of the town, all of the residents who had escaped.

Her smile broadened as if in acknowledgment, and in a flash of insight that came from somewhere other than himself, he understood that. she was not just coming for them. She was after the builders, too. All of the government people who'd worked on the project.

A thought intruded on his mind. No, not a thought. An image. A headless body lying in a watery tomb. "Fred," she said again. And reached for him.

He tried to call on his powers, tried to right her off, but it had been too long and he had forgotten how. She only smiled at his attempts, mocking them. So he tried to attack her physically, kicking off his blanket, kicking out at her, but despite her apparent solidity, she was not really there. She was a shade, a projection, and he understood suddenly why she had come.

She wanted him to get her out.

She wanted him to help resurrect her.

As soon as the knowledge came, it was accompanied by the certainty that he was going to die.

He tried to run through her, toward the door, toward the hallway outside and freedom. While she was not solid, she had substance. It was as if he hit a wall of ice, and the impact was accompanied by a feeling of deep, dark despair so powerful that it sent him staggering back to the bed.

The expression on her face altered. Her features did not change in any way, did not become monstrous or deformed, but they did not have to. The look on her face was so malevolent, so unlike anything he had ever seen before or even imagined, that he felt his heart leap inside his chest. i Felt the coldness nestle around it

Felt the pain spread through his left side as he fell to the floor gasping, trying to breathe.

He was having a heart attack. She stood there, look thing down at him, watching as excruciating pain spread throughout his body, as the tears came to his eyes and the agony was replaced by an even worse numbness.

She faded away silently, smiling, leaving behind only a cold spot in a room that was growing increasingly dark to him.

Gasping, he tried to move, tried to sit up, tried to reach the phone on the nightstand, but the pain was unbearable, and he could not even move his arm.

The world turned black, disappeared.

He died.

And then he started walking.

Russ Winston stared out of his office window toward the mall, the white phallic spire of the Washington Monument just barely visible over the top of the generic government

building across the street. Outside, the sky was clear blue and cloudless, the January air cool and crisp. On days like today he regretted ever having taken a des job. He wished he had not allowed himself to be promoted through the ranks of the department and was still working outside. Back at Yellowstone, perhaps. Or Arches. Or Zion.

No. --= Not Wolf Canyon. Anyplace but there.

An involuntary shiver passed through him, and he swiveled his chair, looking away from the window. He was too old for the outdoors now anyway. Hell, he was too old for the job he had. Retirement age had come and gone two presidents ago, and he was lucky to have enough pull in the department to be able to remain on even in this position.

Russ looked at the framed photo of the president mounted on the opposite wall. He tried to think of something else, but he no longer had the control of his thoughts that he once had, and against his will, his mind kept coming back to Wolf Canyon.

It had been his first government job. His previous experience had been in construction and cement contracting, and because of that heed been assigned to one of the big dam projects out West. He'd worked there for nearly a decade, moving up the on-site hierarchy through aptitude and a series of fortuitous friendships to the position of shift supervisor.

' They were damming the Rio Verde at the foot of Wolf Canyon. Another, smaller dam had been constructed twenty miles up the river, at the canyon's head, some twenty years before, but it was determined that the reservoir would not be sufficient for Arizona's needs even ten years hence. Another, much bigger dam was needed, one that could also be used to generate electricity for the town of Rio Verde and

the other desert communities spread out across this portion of the state. So the river was diverted, its output cut back to a mere trickle while they completed the project.

There was a town in the canyon between the two dams, a small remote community that had to be evacuated under eminent domain, and the residents screamed bloody murder about being moved, lodging complaint after complaint in Washington, being granted extension after extension, though the outcome of this battle was already a foregone conclusion.

But other than that, it had been smooth sailing, and Russ had enjoyed his dam days. He liked the warm western sun, liked the rugged landscape, liked the easy camaraderie he shared with the other workers.

Only afterward, after it had happened, after it was all over, had his perspective changed.

Then the horror set in.

He had spent the rest of his life denying what had occurred, avoiding any thought of it, and while he had remained in the West for most of his career, even when he transferred to Interior, he had never again gone back to Arizona. Not even to see the Grand Canyon.