Lightbringer

before. Have you?”

“They can run,” Piotr said slowly, taking time to think while he answered, “but they generally don’t. That’s why we call them Walkers, da? They walk, we ride.” He shook his head, chuckled. “Or we did, before cars.”

“Really?” Wendy chuckled, then pressed her hand to her mouth, looking green. “You know, I never even thought to ask why you all called yourselves that. So you, what, rode horses around all the time?”

“It was the easiest way to escape with a Lost. Riders still need to sleep, at least every now and then, and the Walkers—so far as we can tell, at least—don’t. So you’d pile your Lost into a wagon or a buggy and,” he mimed cracking a whip, “vamoose. It’d take them ages to catch up.”

Impressed, Wendy whistled under her breath. “And you didn’t have any problems finding transportation in the Never?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as all that. Wagons were easy to find, no issues there, but locating a dead horse that stayed in the Never was difficult.” He laughed, remembering, and took her hand in his as they began drifting slowly up the street and back toward the light rail. “Dogs are loyal, they hang around until their master dies. Cats like Jabber will hang about if they like a particular family member.”

“Is that why Jabber’s sticking around? He misses Mom?”

“Most likely. But horses? They were worth their weight in salvage; if you found one, you needed to hold on tight.”

“Servitude even when you’re dead,” Wendy mused. “Must have sucked to be a horse.”

“Of course not! We’d never force them and most were used to the work. They didn’t mind helping. They kept good conversation too, if a man didn’t have anyone else to talk with.”

“Animals talk in the Never?” Wendy gasped. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Like, with words and stuff?”

Piotr looked at Wendy strangely. “Da. Jabber’s never spoken to you before?”

“Uh, no. Not once. Has he spoken with you?”

Piotr nodded. “All the time. He’s very particular about how he’s petted. Behind the ears only.”

“Weird! I wonder why he’s never spoken to me?”

Shrugging, Piotr hid a grin. “Maybe he feels that you, being alive, couldn’t understand where he’s coming from?”

“Ha-ha, very funny. Okay, so if they can talk, could a horse, I don’t know, tell a knock-knock joke?”

“Not exactly,” Piotr drawled, looking at Wendy oddly, as if she’d suddenly grown a third eye or sprouted wings from her shoulder blades. “Words are an entirely human concept, Wendy. But the Never is different from the world you exist in. Things are far more free-flowing and open. Language exists, yes, but not exactly as you know it. Words aren’t always finite over here, they carry ideas straight to the heart.”

“So specific languages don’t really matter once you’re dead? You all can understand one another anyway? And get what horses and cats and whatnot are saying?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Piotr smiled. “I am Russian, da? When a concept is hard to express in English, I still speak my native tongue. The gist is passed on to the others but not the exact words. But they do understand.”

“So weird,” Wendy said. “I guess it’s just one of those things I’ll have to be dead to get. Piotr, you are blowing my mind over here,” Wendy laughed, shaking her head with disbelief. “When I get home I’m totally gonna sit down and see if Jabber will talk with me. But you! I still can’t believe that you had your very own Mr. Ed.”

Piotr frowned. “Mister who?”

“It was this old TV show? From the fifties?” Wendy licked her lips, feeling foolish, and shrugged. “You know, reruns? Nick at Night? No? It’s not important. You were probably too busy saving the Lost or whatever to pay attention to television in the fifties anyway.”

“I’m told the television set is an amazing invention,” Piotr said gravely. “However, most mechanical things, unless they are very, very simple, do not work in the Never. So I’ve never seen one that worked. The shells of television sets, certainly. Many people pour emotion daily into those boxes, the way they are doing with computers now, so more than a few show up on our side. But advanced machines rarely work for us. They turn on but there is just static.”

“But my calculator isn’t a simple machine. It’s got a computer chip in it, right?”

Piotr shrugged. “I do not know. I died before these computers were created. Perhaps it is simple enough in its own way?”

“Huh. Weird. Maybe it’s a combustion engine thing. I mean, I’ve always wondered why I saw only certain sorts of cars in the Never,” Wendy mused as they crossed the street with the light. She hung to the back of the pack of lunchtime businessmen so Piotr could avoid being bumped and burned. “Fancy cars mostly, BMWs, Porsches, Ferraris, and such. But they never moved.”

“They wouldn’t. Bicycles, skateboards, skates…simple machines to use and well-loved in general, especially by children. Any of them are real finds.” Piotr indicated a bike messenger, whizzing by at frightening speeds with a stack of red insulated sleeves strapped to the rack behind the seat. “See how that bike glows around the edges? When he finally throws it away it will most certainly come over. It’s well used and well loved.”

“So if you’ve got bikes lying around all over the place, why don’t the Walkers use them?”

Wendy stopped near a wheeled cart where a man was selling fragrant hot dogs. Piotr’s eyes twitched and the cartoons on the cart popped out at him, frantic yellows and reds that screamed across his retinas in a fury of painful color. Piotr turned away as Wendy purchased her lunch, forking over neatly folded bills for a cup of sloshing soda and a long dog oozing onions and relish. They walked across the street and she settled on a bench beside a pocket park, a tiny fountain birdbath festooned with thick fronds burbling merrily only ten feet away.

Piotr shrugged. “I don’t know everything there is to know about Walkers,” he tried to explain as Wendy bit into her lunch. A quartet of teenagers passed the small park, singing Deck the Halls in four-part harmony, unconcerned with the looks they were getting or the warm gust of wind blowing their hair off their faces and billowing the backs of their choir jackets nearly off their shoulders. “But I do know that when Walkers lose their life cord they lose most memories of what it’s like to be human. All they remember is what it’s like to feed.”

Wendy, still gazing after the fa-la-la-ing students, took another large bite of her lunch. “It still seems so weird,” she mumbled as she chewed, holding up one hand to cover her mouth. “What in the hell were half a dozen Walkers doing running through town, then? Especially these Walkers. They jumped a bus to get down here, Piotr. Phased right into one and sat at the back. I nearly gave myself a hernia racing to catch the dumb thing.”

“You are serious?” Stunned at this, Piotr struggled for words. For as long as he could remember the Walkers had struggled with the remnants of living society, preferring to live at the edges and avoid all mention and memory of who they’d once been. Walkers walked—that was what they did. They didn’t run and they most certainly didn’t catch buses to travel across town. The thought of them doing otherwise sent chills down Piotr’s spine. But…was he truly surprised? Really? Because he’d had an inkling about this already, hadn’t he? He’d sensed that something wasn’t quite right.

I knew there was something strange about those Walkers in the park yesterday, part of him triumphed. Walkers just don’t work in complex teams like that, strategizing their attacks. At least, they never did before.

“I bet it’s the White Lady,” Wendy said. She drank deeply of her soda, pressed fingers over her mouth, and burped behind her hand. “Excuse me,” she muttered. “Anyway, yeah, maybe the White Lady is teaching the Walkers all about technology on top of everything else.” Wendy wrinkled her nose in distaste. “And you saw their faces yesterday, right? More and more of those sorts of Walkers are showing up. You know, mutilated and stitched back together somehow. It looks really sick, if you ask me.”

“Specs said they were taking him to see the White Lady,” Piotr agreed. “That she had the ability to keep him from walking through walls somehow. What if she has some way of enhancing the Walkers around her, too? Not just mending their flesh, but their minds as well? What if she can make them remember how to use machinery? Or could reteach them?”

Wendy whistled. “That would be bad. Real bad. They could go anywhere then, not just hang around the cities.”

“We must stop her,” Piotr whispered. “Not just rescue the Lost, but stop the White Lady herself. Undo everything she’s done thus far. Maybe make the Walkers forget what she’s taught them. Start over from