Dead Mann Walking

She took a step back as if I were a dog that might bite. “I was hiding when I saw you run back in. I heard the blast. I couldn’t leave you in here. Not after you . . . after you . . .”

Turns out maybe some of the dead do have feelings.

34

I didn’t have the recorder, but I had something else, maybe something better. Nell wasn’t like Misty. She was definitely lighter, despite the remains of dancer’s muscles. She was hesitant, too, unsure if she wanted to touch me. But side by side, we staggered into a smoky day.

The firemen found us before the police, saving us some trouble. They were more concerned about the collapsing building, so it was easy to convince them we weren’t feral or interested in putting up a fight. They even believed me when I told them Misty was trapped in a bin. Not right off. I had to beg them to listen, to let her out. I didn’t care what it looked like to Nell. She already thought I was nuts. Anyway, they’d never seen a chak beg before, so it worked.

A stocky first responder, Thompson, I think, who seemed to have sweated through to the surface of his black rubber coat, headed for the garbage to let her out. I hoped he’d tell Misty who sent him. I wanted her to know I was still . . . whatever it is you call what I am.

While he was gone, two cops came by. Their barely fitting uniforms gave them up as auxiliary. The regulars handled the more important stuff. These rubes were left with the cleanup work, like rounding up the rioters. Each led his own row of chakz, all shackled at the ankles like a monster chain gang. We were not so politely asked to join the line. I tried to refuse, but they insisted. They didn’t bother sorting men and women or children and adults. There were only two kinds of chak: those who obeyed and those who wanted to eat them. Lucky for them, I wasn’t hungry.

“It’ll be okay,” I told Nell as they clamped the iron on my good ankle. She gave me that look again. I imagined there was some fondness to it now, like she was beginning to think of me as a mentally challenged younger brother.

They led us, leashed, to the plaza. The fires still smoldered, but it was relatively empty now, except for the piled bodies. Show over. Buses lined the street. Any chakz who’d somehow kept themselves sane through this mess were being herded on.

It was pretty orderly, considering. Orderly enough for me to spot the master of ceremonies, Jonesey. His left arm looked shot to shit, but his sandy hair was intact, and he still wore a bit of that smile. It didn’t quite match the dazed look on the rest of his face. I was surprised he hadn’t lost it, and wondered how long he had left.

They were about to shove him on a bus when I thought I’d say hello.

“Jonesey!”

He saw me and stopped, nearly pulling the chak ahead of him back out of the bus. Like a windup toy, the chak, not one of the smart ones, kept trying to climb in, unable to turn, unable to realize what held him back.

Jonesey raised his good hand. “Mann! You still hiding out among the living?”

“So far,” I said. “Looks like you made it, too.”

His smile widened. “Have to keep a good thought, right? I mean, it was a start, wasn’t it?”

I furrowed my brow. “A start?”

A cop pushed him into the bus. Good thing, too. I was about to tell him what a fucking idiot he was. Well, he’d figure it out soon, or give new meaning to the word denial . Made me wonder, though, if I’d let him go feral back in that alley whether it would’ve been better for everyone.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one recognizing faces in the crowd. Of course Tom Booth was there; it was his job, after all. He must’ve heard Jonesey call my name. Puffed up like a fighting-mad turkey, clipboard stuffed under his arm, temple throbbing, he stormed toward me, ignoring all the men asking for orders.

“Hi, Tom.”

He pointed at me and barked at my walkers.

“Where was it found?”

The auxiliaries looked like startled fawns. One fumbled for words. “At the hospital. The firemen found him.”

Booth looked at the thick dust on my coat, scraped some of it off with his finger, then rubbed it, looking like he was touching someone else’s shit. “You were in the blast.”

It wasn’t a question, but I nodded.

“That bug, Jonesey, the terrorist who organized the attack, he’s your pal, isn’t he?”

“Terrorist? He’s an asshole. And it wasn’t an attack. It was a rally.”

Booth sneered. “And I’m Miss America.”

“Maybe if they left out the swimsuit competition.”

“You set the bomb.”

Nell, who’d been quiet all this time, grabbed my hand and squeezed. She may have been afraid, or she just wanted to let me know she was there.

I met Booth’s eyes and tried to glare back.

“That’s lame even for you,” I said. “It was a fucking psychopath, the one I was after. Those two contractors you hired to do that work on me? They were his. He was after Odell Jenkins, a remediation worker down in the basement. There must be some record of him, at least. Tom, this psycho, he killed Lenore.”

As soon as I mentioned her name, I knew I’d gone too far.

“Shut up.”

“He saved me,” Nell said.

He looked at her with equal disgust. “Take them out of the line and bring them back to the station.”

“Both?”

“That’s what them means, shithead,” he said. “I’ve got you now, Mann. This time we’re going to figure out a whole new way to kill you.”

He stomped off, a dust devil twirling through the dry, flat, smoky terrain.

We were unshackled, taken from the line, and put in the back of a squad car. Nell and I didn’t speak much during the drive. I was afraid that anything I said would earn me another condemning stare. We did hold hands. Hers were cool, white and smooth beneath the dirt, like some kind of cotton. Mine were gnarled and gray, like tree bark.

At the station, we were separated. I was put into holding and left to sit there rotting for days. No reason to let a chak out to stretch his legs, right? They didn’t offer any medical care, but they did let me keep my foot. To be fair, it was still attached by a little flap of muscle, so it probably would’ve been too much trouble for them to find a pair of scissors.

My old partner, Jimmy Hazen, came by once. If he was sorry he’d betrayed me to Booth, he didn’t say so. He just shoved a needle and thread through the bars and walked away like he’d done all he could. I wished I knew how to sew.

Better yet, I wished I had that recording. If only . . . At least I had Nell Parker to think about. Ever since she saved me, I figured I might as well try to stay saved, at least until I understood why.

As for the rest of the world, I didn’t have access to news, but my guards talked. Over two hundred feral chakz had been put down “humanely”—though there was a bullshit rumor that they’d developed some kind of virus that could spread to livebloods. I’d heard crap like that dozens of times, whenever the LBs got scared. We could walk through walls, bend steel in our bare hands.

I did believe the rest—sick and tired of waiting for the feds to do something, the state was passing its own legislation. Meanwhile, all the chakz were being rounded up and put in camps. At worst we’d all be incinerated. At the liberal end of things, we’d be forced to register and undergo monthly exams. Somewhere in the middle, we’d be stuck in those camps forever. Liberals, unfortunately, are worse at organizing than chakz. They’d do well to hire Jonesey. Didn’t matter much. Thanks to Booth, I was already in my very own special five-by-five camp.

My mind had little else to bounce off of other than itself, but I kept thinking of Nell, and Misty, and the fact that I finally knew what had happened to Lenore. Once, as I sat there, I even remembered, I think, what it felt like