Both Eric and Paul screamed. It was really the only word for it. The sounds they made couldn’t really be described as a yell or a shout. Nothing so manly. Their voices were shrill and piercing.
The freshly risen corpse screamed back at them, a mirror image of their own terror.
Panicked, Paul raised and fired the gun. Wire Ties fell backward, dead again, a fresh bullet hole in one side of his forehead.
Eric stood there for a moment, stunned, then turned and looked at his brother.
Paul looked down at the gun, then back at the corpse again. “Aw shit…”
“What did you do?”
His features quickly hardened. “What do you mean what’d I do? I killed a fucking zombie!”
“You don’t know he was a zombie! What the hell are you? Twelve?”
“You said he was dead! You checked! That makes him a zombie!”
“I know I checked, but obviously I was wrong!”
“Or you were right and he’s a fucking zombie!”
“There’s no such thing as zombies!”
“There’s no such thing as genies!”
Eric had to admit, that was a difficult point to argue with. Who was he to say there was no such thing as anything?
“If he wasn’t a zombie, then he was a fucking vampire!” Paul’s voice was growing shrill. He was panicking. “Either way, I probably just saved our lives!”
“Just settle down.”
“I can’t settle down!” Paul shouted. “If I settle down I might start thinking he wasn’t a zombie or a vampire and I just killed some guy!”
Eric wasn’t sure what the proper response was. On one hand, he didn’t blame him for getting trigger happy. His experiences with the weird had included being attacked by all manner of unnatural things, from imps and ogres to witches and hellhounds. If he’d been armed when the lifeless corpse suddenly sat up, he might’ve taken the shot, too. But on the other hand, how likely was it that he merely made a mistake when checking Wire Ties for a pulse? What if he was only unconscious? He wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t qualified to declare someone dead.
Had they just murdered this man?
Paul rubbed at a sick pain in his belly and cursed.
“Let’s just get out of here.”
Paul glanced up at him. He was understandably shaken. “Just leave him here? Can we do that?”
“What else can we do? Call the police? Try to explain it was an accident? First we’d have to explain the whole unseen motel thing to them. Then there’s the matter of the dead monster we ditched in the first room.” He didn’t even mention the remains of Aiden’s old mentor lying somewhere else in this building.
YOU CAN’T AFFORD THAT KIND OF TIME, said Isabelle. THOSE AGENTS ARE UP TO SOMETHING AND IT’S GOING DOWN SOON
Eric found this troubling. “How soon?”
SOON, she stressed. DON’T YOU REMEMBER THE VISIONS HOLLY DESCRIBED TO YOU?
Eric felt his heart sink a little. He did remember the visions she described. She saw a number of bizarre things. One of them was a man rising from the grave…
He stared down at the body.
IT’S ALL COMING TRUE AND IT’S COMING TRUE REALLY FAST
He recalled the riddles she saw in the water. The broken clock was a metaphor representing Hector’s letters from the past. The beautiful woman with the devil horns was a slightly less vague metaphor representing that insane temptress at the bungalow. The man rising from the grave was no metaphor at all. That literally just happened. The only things left were for him, Paul and Holly to go to a party and for the city to burn.
AND FOR YOU TO DIE, Isabelle reminded him.
FOR YOUR LIFELESS BODY TO BE DRAGGED AWAY
“Yeah,” he grumbled. “I remember. Thanks.”
“What’s she saying?” asked Paul.
“She says we have to leave.”
“What happens in invisible motels stays in invisible motels?”
Eric nodded. “I think so.” He glanced over at him. “And lose the damn gun.”
Paul nodded. “Yeah. Good idea.” He grimaced and ran his hand over his forehead. He was sweating. “I’m feeling a little queasy…”
“Zombie killing isn’t for the faint of heart, I suppose.”
“Guess not…”
They made their way back through the maze of motel rooms and out into the sunshine. Along the way, Paul wiped his fingerprints from every surface of the gun with his shirt and tossed it into a dark corner.
Eric glanced back at him. “Told you guns complicate things.”
“I know what you told me,” he grumbled.
Holly was sitting behind the wheel, the phone still pressed to her ear. As he approached the vehicle, their eyes met and he saw the look of deep concern there. She knew what just happened. She heard the gunshot. Isabelle was telling her everything as it happened.
The dead had risen.
The flames were one step closer to engulfing Creek Bend.
“Hurry up,” was all she said to him.
Eric walked around to the passenger side and opened the door. Immediately, Spooky jumped out and ran across the parking lot.
“Oh no!” cried Holly. “Get him!”
“Get who?” asked Kevin.
“Forget about him,” said Eric. “We won’t catch him if he doesn’t want to be caught.”
“Catch who?” asked Kevin. “What’s going on?”
“Where do you think he’s going?” asked Paul, shading his eyes and squinting after him.
“Why won’t anybody tell me what’s going on?”
Eric couldn’t even guess what the cat was up to. He’d already turned up inside the Goss building and the high school, as if he’d intended for them to meet him there. It was…well…spooky.
But as he watched, Spooky didn’t disappear around the building or into the woods as he expected. Instead, he ran up to the old sign near the office at the far end of the building and then sat there, looking back at them.
“I think you’re being paged,” observed Paul.
Eric grumbled and slammed the door closed. All he wanted at this point was to get as far from here as possible before something unpleasant happened again. But he hiked across the parking lot to where the cat sat waiting for him.
“What?”
Spooky cried at him.
“I don’t speak cat.”
He turned his furry head and looked at the sign.
“This?” He stepped closer. It was an old, portable roadside sign, the kind where you arranged the letters to create whatever message you wanted on it. The letters themselves were all gone now, blown away, perhaps, in countless storms over the years. The yellowed, plastic face had turned brittle and was broken. The hollow interior was exposed.
Inside was an old liquor bottle, sealed with candle wax.
Careful not to scrape himself on the brittle, broken plastic, he withdrew the bottle and then looked down at the cat. This was the second time he’d led him to one of Hector’s letters. “How do you know these things?”
Spooky had no answer. He turned his yellow eyes to the PT Cruiser as Holly drove up beside them.
“You found another one!” marveled Holly.
“Another what?” asked Kevin.
Eric opened the passenger door and let Spooky in, then he dashed the bottle on the concrete and carefully plucked the message from the wreckage.
Leaving the broken glass here didn’t bother him. The place was already a dump. A dump almost no one could see, even. Besides, he didn’t dare linger any longer than he absolutely had to.
He sat down and closed the door, then carefully unrolled Hector’s latest letter and began to read it aloud as Holly sped away from the unseen motel.