“Yes,” Gryphon replied, not even bothering to be defensive. Either way they thought he was nuts: either he was talking to himself or talking to a ghost, or thinking he was talking to a ghost while talking to himself. There was no way to win.

She gave him a funny look, but eventually turned away and got on the radio, which she originally intended to do, ignoring him completely. He liked it that way.

He slept again, until Varner shook him awake. “Gryph, you wanna go home?”

“That’d be nice,” he admitted, still not fully awake yet. He got out of the car, and the cold, damp night air woke him up a little, at least enough to make him stop yawning. But Varner’s car was more comfortable than the squad car, which was a problem.

Still, on the way back, Varner told him that they found lots of evidence that they were sure would help identify victims and just maybe the killer. They were looking into who might have a key to the padlock on the back door, but since making a “dupe” (duplicate key) wasn’t that difficult, they didn’t think that would get anywhere. He asked if they found a finger, and told him it belonged to Anna Alvarez. Varner gave him a new species of funny look, and gave it to him for a long time, but eventually looked away and went back to chattering hyperactively. Had he been gulping coffee? He must have been. They probably didn’t allow Red Bull at crime scenes.

The lights were off in the house, save for the solar lights lining the drive and the porch light, so he tried to quietly sneak in and didn’t know how successful he was. But he didn’t hear anything as he got undressed and collapsed into bed, exhausted from speaking to the dead for too long. Who knew that would take it out of you?

Inevitably he found himself back inside the store, lit only be a Coleman lantern, as the killer butchered someone, cutting them up into component parts. But as Gryphon stood there, watching him perform his grisly task, he suddenly stopped, his shoulders tensing. He turned his head slowly, looking over his shoulder, his face hidden behind a mask that kept the blood off of him. Gryphon could see nothing of him but his blue eyes, regarding him like some kind of ghost, which was ironically appropriate.

This must have been a dream – there’s no way this could have been happening. And yet, he got the curious sensation of being in a room with another person. He wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t just his passengers keeping him company. This was weird, and it made his skin crawl a bit … but on the other hand, he got a sense that the man looking at him was just as freaked out, maybe even a little more.

“You better hope the cops find you first,” he said, hoping that he was somehow sharing space with the man. Although there was no way he could be. (Right?) The man just stared at him, his eyes cloudy behind the mask, but Gryphon sensed the turn of his anxiety, the clenching of his stomach. Somebody was talking to him; somebody was threatening him. A ghost.

He was being threatened by a ghost.

Gryphon was woken up by the pervasive smell of strong coffee and a rhythmic pounding over his head and against the glass. It wasn’t raining; it was pissing down with a drunkard’s intensity. It was a true Oregon rain, something violent and nasty and undoubtedly cold. The light was grey, like it was being filtered through dirty cotton, and it struck him as a tremendous day to sleep in.

Get up you lazy ass, Taneesha cracked.

Okay, so, maybe not.

He eventually stumbled downstairs to find Clay sitting at the rustic kitchen table, holding a coffee mug with autumn leaves stenciled on the side, staring off into space. Gryphon checked the clock on the microwave, and just as he thought, it was pretty late. Clay should have been at work at his day job by now.

“Something wrong?” he wondered, grabbing a cup off the mug tree beside the sink and gravitating towards the coffee maker.

It took him a moment to respond, his tired eyes sliding towards him. “Oh, yeah. My back was acting up again this morning, so I decided to take the day off.” Clay had hurt his back installing an air conditioning duct a week or so ago. Just a pulled muscle, but those hurt, especially when you did a lot of bending and lifting. His doctor had given him heavy duty painkillers, but he didn’t like to take them – which baffled Gryphon, as he’d happily take them now, and he didn’t have a bad back.

“Oh. If there’s anything I can do to help -”

Clay snickered, which made Gryphon give him a funny look. “What’s so funny?” He found the sugar and started dumping teaspoons full of it into the strong black coffee Clay usually made.

You ever heard of diabetes? Mr. Aronofsky said. You’re not indestructible.

Actually we don’t know that, Hugh said. He could be.

Don’t encourage him, Mr. Aronofsky scolded.

“You’ve done enough for us, Gryph,” Clay said, after taking a sip of his coffee. From the way he winced and set it down, it was still too hot to drink.

That gave him a suddenly bad feeling. “Did I get you guys in trouble?”

Now his snicker from before became a chortle, and he wasn’t sure how to take that, so instead of sitting at the kitchen table he leaned against the counter, out of hitting distance. “Far from it. We heard from Mrs. Bledsoe, the woman who hired us to exorcize Phillip Chapman from the house in Salem. She’s giving us a five hundred dollar bonus. She said you could feel the difference just walking in the house. There was no sense you were being watched, no slamming doors, no inexplicable cold breezes. She seemed stunned, like she expected us to be frauds.”

“They all treat us that way.”

“I know. But I think they must know they hafta stop now.” He shoved his mug across the tabletop with his fingertips, and then shoved it back towards him, the liquid equivalent of playing with his food. “We gotta call this morning from a guy down in Los Angeles. He offered to pay us to fly down there. There’s a mansion down there where a family was killed, and supposedly it’s a hot spot of ghost activity. And we heard from someone who works for the Fortean Times. They want to interview all of us.”

“The Fortean Times?” That sounded vaguely familiar, but not in an useful way.

“It’s a British magazine that deals with strange phenomena, but it’s not a tabloid rag. It’s actually very respected, a big deal.” His eyes darted towards him, almost bashfully. “Although the guy said he wanted to talk to us, I know he really wants to talk to you.”

“I’m horrible in interviews,” Gryphon said, shaking his head. “They want to talk about me, and I’m not about to expose what’s left of my family to this … stuff.”

You mean admit to them what you’re actually doing, Mr. Aronofsky said.

“And I can’t go into great deal about what I do. I mean, I don’t control this, I don’t understand this, I’m just a poltergeist “agent” whose best friends are all dead people.”

I ain’t your friend, Taneesha snapped.

Clay studied him for a moment, his expression unreadable, and Gryphon just knew he was going to ask him a question he had no desire to answer. Finally he did. “Why don’t you ever tell the complete story of how you became an agent? You start and then you stop.”

“Because I have to.”

“Why?”

“’Cause if I told anyone everything that happened that night, they might be legally liable, an accessory after the fact.”

Clay’s eyebrows lifted slight, and Gryphon grimaced at him. “C’mon, what do you think my passengers really want? To do things they never got a chance to do, or live one more day? They’re poltergeists, Clay – they’re dead as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore.”

You stole that from Buffy, Taneesha accused.

Yeah, but it’s still amazingly apt, Hugh said.

Clay must have gotten his meaning, as his eyes widened slightly and he paled faintly, blood draining out of his face. “You’re – you’ve said they’re not all violent.”

“They’re not. But most of my passengers are murder victims. What do you think they want? Sending someone to rot in prison doesn’t feel like justice to most of them.”

Fuck no, Ray agreed.

I want to strangle Doherty to death with his own fucking intestines, Ruby added.

I wanna shove a sawed off shotgun up Dave’s ass and blow the top of his head off, Ray continued, as if trying to top her in a gruesome death competition. Ruby still had the edge, mainly because it was easy to imagine her plunging her hands in Doherty’s stomach and ripping out his intestines to throttle him. Ray was angry but had the unfocused nature of a follower requiring a leader – Ruby seemed more like the Terminator. She didn’t need a leader, just a target.

“Believe me, if you could hear them talk, you’d shit your pants.”

Clay looked like he wanted to say a thousand things, but had lost the ability to talk. Gryphon sipped his coffee while he waited for him to regain his speech. He felt bad for Clay and Shane, when it came down to it. They were true believers, guys who honestly hoped ghosts existed and went about trying to prove it. Now they had their proof, and it was so much more fucking scary than they ever credited it for. The dead were not a happy people – what a shock.

Finally, Clay asked, “Did Louis Stanhope really disappear?” His Adam’s apple bobbed wildly in his throat, enough so that it was almost hypnotizing to watch.

“Do you really want to know?” He sighed, and told him, “He’s missing. He will never be found. Leave it there and be glad you don’t know the details.” Actually he’d already been found, but since his body was burned beyond all recognition, it was just assumed he was a homeless man who accidentally set his squat on fire, and was dumped anonymously in a potter’s field. He would never be found, as he was already buried as a John Doe. For the purposes of the world, he was so gone he was barely even a memory.

Clay stared at him with his storm cloud eyes, wanting to ask more but not daring, and jumped about a foot when there was a knock at the door.

We didn’t do that, Hugh claimed, as others chuckled.

“That’s either Varner or O’Leary,” Gryphon guessed, wandering out of the kitchen to the living room.

Opening the door revealed O’Leary standing on the porch, looking sullen and miserable huddled beneath a yellow rain slicker that he had probably ripped from the back of the Gorton’s fisherman. He glared at him like the downpour was somehow his fault. “You ready to head out to Wax’s house?”

Wax’s house? Wasn’t that a horror movie with Vincent Price? Rather than lob out that bon mot – surely O’Leary wouldn’t appreciate it – he said, “Give me a minute to get changed.” Which probably should have been obvious since he was wearing blue velvet Old Navy “lounge” (pajama) pants with a little cloud and crescent moon pattern all over it (and they were about a size and a half too big for him, which just added to the general comedy), and a pale olive tank top that was also a size too big for him, which was doubly odd since it was a cast off from Clay, who had a similar bird like build to him.

These probably looked like a sleeping outfit to Clay and O’Leary, but it was all a ruse. He had slept in his underwear. He only put these on to go downstairs, so no one could see his ribs standing out in relief on his chest, or see the unexplained, oblong bruises that dotted his scrawny legs like the harbinger of the plague. It actually bothered him to spy himself semi or totally naked, which was probably a bad sign overall.

He left O’Leary dripping in the small foyer as he went back upstairs and changed into some more weather appropriate clothes, which was basically a heavy fisherman’s sweater that made him look like he was being swallowed by a rather large piece of a wool/acrylic polyblend, and heavy jeans that would weigh approximately a thousand pounds when they did get soaked, but would take a long time to soak through. He had a coat with a hood, but it was a dorky brown jacket with black fleece surrounding the hood – it couldn’t have made him feel sillier. But it was waterproof, so he couldn’t complain.

He went back downstairs to silent but troublesome tension, indicating that O’Leary and Clay had had a brief but awkward conversation that had left both of them feeling unsatisfied, although they weren’t about to spring the details on him. O’Leary was a big wet glowering yellow thing that he followed out into the deluge, and he had a new car today. No, not a car – a tank. Some kind of black SUV that he had to climb into carefully, lest he fall and break his neck while scaling Mount Vehicle.

Inside, the front seat – cockpit? – seemed vast, with a huge dashboard full of all sorts of displays and thingamabobs that he could only guess at, and the seats seemed to be made of black leather that squeaked under their wet asses. He began to think of A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, but he wasn’t sure why. Rain pounded hollowly on the roof, sheeting down the enormous windshield, making him feel like he was in a deep water submersible.

O’Leary was quiet until he started the leviathan and pulled out of the gravel drive, but Gryphon got a sense that he wanted to tell him something, so he simply waited. When they were on the road, the whole SUV humming like he imagined a tank with great shock absorbers would, O’Leary finally said, “So … I heard you found that store for Varner.”

“Yeah.”

Thick, awkward pause. “Did he, uh … did he say anything about me?”

What the fuck was this? Was he a kid of divorced parents, having his dad grill him about his mom’s new boyfriend? Just when he thought his life couldn’t get more bizarre, it went ahead and did just that. “Not really, no. I figured out that he recommended me to you.”

“Yeah.” O’Leary studied him out of the corner of his eye, and did so for a long time. Gryphon tried to ignore him, figuring he wasn’t going to play this game. Did he want to know if he told him about the raid? If he told him that, in his opinion, that the entire strike team lied in their version of the story? He wasn’t about to say. Let him twist in the wind.

They drove out into the rural countryside, the green fields a pleasant contrast to the gunmetal grey sky, and Gryphon actually saw a wet, miserable looking cow. When was the last time he’d seen a cow? He suddenly felt like a kid on a driving holiday. Maybe weekend dad would take him to a petting zoo.

He turned down an unpaved, rutted road where holes had become surprisingly deep mud puddles, and slowly on the left side of the horizon a rather sad looking clapboard house started to come into view. It looked like it was starting to lean slightly to one side, and the roof seemed to stick out over the side in an ill fitting manner, like it had been removed as one whole piece and then slammed back down in disgust. It had probably once been white, but was now sort of a dirty snow color, the trim nude wood that had bled through the paint that had once been there. It was the perfect serial killer house, complete with an overgrown yard, weeds twisting around the body of an Oldsmobile that may or may not have had tires.

“This is Wax’s place?” Gryphon asked, a bit surprised. “He’s really let it go.”

“I don’t think child molesters are known for their gardening skills.”

“You’d actually be surprised,” he replied, knowing from sad experience that many were quite neat and tidy. Also religious, but that was another can of worms.

O’Leary gave him another funny look, but had to shift his focus to the dirt road as a deep pothole nearly sent them airborne.

It was then that Gryphon noticed a man standing at the edge of the yard, watching them drive up. He was deep into middle age, with a sizable paunch and a few wisps of meager hair covering a scalp with a waxy sheen. Oddly enough, he seemed untouched by the rain, and O’Leary drove so close to him he nearly hit him, but he didn’t move, and O’Leary didn’t react at all.

Didn’t he look familiar? Yes. It was Clifford Wax, with about twenty five pounds and several lines added to his mug shot. And oh yes, he was dead.

“Prepare to be disappointed,” Gryphon warned the ex-cop.

Varner gave him a suspicious look. “That’s not just a guess, is it?”

“Hey, not bad for a cop,” the ghost said. “Think he can spell his own name too?”

Good one, Ray said.

Gryphon sighed, and Varner looked over his shoulder, following his gaze, trying to see what he saw. He couldn’t, of course. “No. there’s another victim here, Anna Alvarez. She doesn’t think much of our investigational skills.”

“Hey, you’re okay,” Anna said. “It’s the fucking cops that should have found this place three victims ago. What the fuck do we pay taxes for?” She paused briefly. “Okay, not me personally, but other people.”

Varner scanned the darkness, like Anna wasn’t standing a mere three feet from him, the blood in the hole in her forehead glimmering like sunlight on the surface of a stagnant pond. But she wasn’t there, not as far as Varner was concerned. After a moment, he turned back to him, and asked, “What can she tell us about him?”

Gryphon didn’t even ask, just looked at Anna and waited. The ghost shrugged and threw her hands in the air. “Fuck if I know, I was totally wasted when he did me.”

“Can I see?” he asked, knowing he’d regret it.

Kid, no, Hugh insisted. We can find him some other way. She was shot in the head – there’s probably no memories worth anything anyways.

She looked at him like he was insane. “What d’ya mean can you see? What the fuck is that? You gonna crack open my head and look in?”

“It’s just a process,” Gryphon told her. He noticed Varner staring at him out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t interrupt. “I don’t know how it works -”

And as if talking about it was the trigger, he suddenly got it – it flooded into his mind in a series of jagged images as sharp as glass and sensations that were so disorienting that he felt like he was suddenly on the deck of a sinking ship in a raging sea. Reality slid sideways and suddenly everything was too bright and too loud, images smeared across his retinas like the landscape flying by too fast for the eye to settle on anything, fragments of things that didn’t quite make sense. A slice of white – the van? – the beige/pink/tan of a Caucasian face, darkness, a bright flash like the light of a muzzle. A sharp pain augured through his brain like a drill bit, and nausea washed over him, dragging him back to a reality that was dark and somehow less vivid than the drug addled, damaged memories. He had a taste in his mouth of vomit, blood, and something like old pennies.

“Holy shit, are you okay?” Varner asked from somewhere over his head. Gryphon retched for a moment before realizing arms were across his chest, and slowly it dawned on him that Varner was holding him up. When had he collapsed?

When the disruption in his mind had settled and he felt the confines of his body around him again – and he got the urge to barf under control – he said, “’M fine, okay? Jus’ – fuck, I hate memories where I get shot in the head.”

“What?”

Gryphon tried to stand on his own power, failed, and then tried again, Varner still holding him the whole time. The second time he succeeded, but the cop seemed reluctant to let go. “I’m okay, I’ll be okay, I just … can someone help me sort through those images?”

“Huh?”

“I’m talking to my passengers.”

I saw shit, Ray said. What the fuck was that?

He offered her twenty five dollars for a blow job, and she figured she needed the money for a fix, Julie, of all people, said. While she was doing that in his van, he pulled out a gun and shot her, although she didn’t know he had a gun until the barrel was against her forehead.

Gryphon was honestly shocked on two fronts. Julie actually speaking, which was so rare he was always surprised she was still with him. But then there was the shocking fact that she actually saw a coherent narrative in all that mess. “You saw all that?”

It goes by fast, but it was there, she said. I don’t know why I could see it. Maybe because of how I died.

How would being beaten to death by a hammer allow her to see it better than the rest of them? Maybe it was the head injury connection, or perhaps the shocking amount of betrayal and needless brutality in the violence. “I’m okay, Jason, really,” Gryphon said, standing on his own. He wavered a moment, but he managed to stay vertical. “Holy fuck, I think we need a sketch artist. Julie, did you catch his face?”

I think so. She must have thought about it, because suddenly an image popped into his head, of a shadowy man who was so nondescript it was almost painful. Except for the look in his eye – it was remarkably cold, disdainful, and dead. It was the type of look that, if you saw it on an armed person, would make you wet your pants. You’d know you were doomed.

Varner was looking at him quizzically. “Is there another ghost here?”

“Julie’s one of my passengers. And yeah, I know what this fucker looks like. I need a sketch artist.”

His eyebrows raised slightly, concern etching lines into his otherwise smooth face. Suddenly he looked a bit closer to his genuine age. “Are you sure you don’t need a hospital? That was a quite an episode you had.”

“It wasn’t an episode,” he replied scornfully. But what the hell was it? It wasn’t like he could remember. “It was just somebody else’s memory.”

“Of getting shot in the head.”

“Yeah.”

He shook his head. “That’s some gift you’ve got.”

He wanted to point out that it was no gift at all, but he obviously knew that.

Varner wanted to get a search warrant for the Packer’s building anyways, so Gryphon rode along with him back to the station, where the cops on duty who recognized him seemed genuinely surprised to see him. As police station’s went this one was pretty modern, echoing the usual rectangular shape but with a lot more glass and exposed steel than he was used to seeing in a cop shop, the interior bright white and full of utilitarian furniture, the air heavily conditioned and redolent of coffee and copier toner. It could have been an office, only with employees wearing polyester uniforms and carrying guns. Which was a scary sounding office, come to think of it.

Varner went right on back to his office – and you knew you were important if you had your own office – but on the way there they were intercepted by the biggest damn cop Gryphon had ever seen. He was maybe six foot six and well over two hundred pounds, although actually quite lean, athletically built. He was a fairly young light skinned black man with a rather severe buzz cut, like maybe two months ago he shaved his own head and thought better of it, and it was very slowly growing back. “Jase, something up?” he asked, giving Gryphon a suspicious look.

“Yeah, I need to get a search warrant, and someone with an identikit. Is Rochelle still here?”

The cop – who seemed to be named Glass – glanced towards the back, but it may just have been something to do while he was trying to remember. “I’m not sure. I’ll go check.”

“If she’s not, just tell Dihn he’s doing it.”

He followed Varner into his tiny office, which seemed to echo the interior of the rest of the place. Only there was a very old filing cabinet tucked into the far corner, and listing piles of papers beside an older model Dell desktop, which made it seem if not exactly homey at least a bit less cold. He sat in a stiff plastic chair as Varner sat in his more cushioned office chair and picked up the phone, calling the judge – or whoever; it was a judge, right? – for a warrant.

Gryphon quietly offered to let Julie take over and describe their guy, but she didn’t want to; she was content to let him be her voice. Which was typical really – Julie preferred other people speaking for her, perhaps because if there was a beating meted out for it, it’d be that person who suffered and not her. He couldn’t blame her really.

Rochelle must not have been here, as the person who came in with the identikit was a somewhat grumpy Vietnamese cop who complained that this wasn’t really part of his job, but Varner ignored him like he was used to this kind of thing. Eventually the picture they put together was of an oval faced man with thinning light brown hair that made his forehead look broader, and a Roman nose with a bump in the bridge, suggesting it had been broken eons ago. His eyes weren’t small more than they simply lacked a certain expressiveness that made them look like they were sinking into the wide expanse of his face. He wasn’t ugly nor good looking, striking or awful – he was just ordinary. He was the poster boy for the guy you saw twenty times every day and never really noticed. As soon as they were done, Dihn clicked his tongue, and said, “This guy is gonna be impossible to single out.”

“Not necessarily,” Varner said, glancing at him in a rather knowing way. Gryphon knew he meant he could find him simply by following the ghosts.

The story Varner told was that he (Gryphon) had seen this guy in the area after hearing a noise that sounded like a gunshot – it was sort of true, and yet mostly not. Gryphon was kind of amazed that a cop was lying his ass off to other cops right in front of him, but Hugh said, They’re people like everyone else. They lie. We firefighters do that too. Everybody lies. Sometimes professionally.

I was wondering when somebody was going to bring politicians into this, Mr. Aronofsky said.

Varner got his search warrant within two hours, and as they left the police station, he told Gryphon he wanted him to be on the scene, but clearly he couldn’t be inside while they were going over the place. He asked him to remain outside and let him know if any other ghosts popped up or relayed any helpful information.

Fuck him! Ray exclaimed. We’re doin’ his work for him! Demand some scratch before you tell him one more fuckin’ thing.

But what ended up happening was Gryphon dozed in the backseat of a patrol car while the cops and the forensic teams went over the store. From the sudden flurry of activity, the uniformed people boiling out of the broken open door like ants from a disturbed hill, the killer hadn’t cleaned up as well as he thought he had. Gryphon didn’t think he’d actually sleep, but he dosed for a while, woken up once to find someone sitting in the back seat with him. It was Anna, the hole in her forehead still glistening wetly, dark blood dripping down her chin and hitting the seat with a soft plop. “You know why it took so long for anyone to notice? ‘Cause you can kill all the whores you like and no one cares.”

“They weren’t all whores,” he replied sleepily, rubbing his eyes, wondering when talking to people with grotesque head injuries had become normal.

“Naw, I guess not. Some of ‘em were just junkies, or stupid little girls who didn’t take to heart advice about taking rides with strangers. Either way, it was kinda amazing how he picked ones that he knew wouldn’t be missed very much. They were mainly white girls! Don’t missing white girls get all the media attention?”

“Being rich or at least fairly well off helps a lot. I don’t think anyone thinks much about the poor ones. If you’re poor, shit happens to you. It’s just not supposed to happen to the better off.” Wow, when had he gotten so cynical? Oh, right, when talking to dead people with head injuries became normal.

“Yeah, prob’ly.” She turned and looked out the passenger window at all the cop cars and some kind of forensics van, where the bulk of the activity was happening. “I wonder if they found my finger.”

“He chopped off your fingers?”

“No. But he was experimenting with a new chopping technique to make shorter work of the dismembering process, and he partially severed one of my fingers. While he was working on the rest of the body, a rat came along and chewed off the rest. He hates rats and he killed it, but he never noticed the missing finger.”

This may well be the most disgusting story I’ve ever heard, Sylvio said.

“Do you wanna kill him?”

Anna looked back at him, pondering her options. “I dunno. I want him to suffer. Can we nail him to a wall so it takes him three days to die?”

“That might be difficult. We’d need a really secluded place.”

Don’t even joke, Mr. Aronofsky scolded.

She sat back against the seat, and he could see a bit of the exit wound in the back of her skull. She had bloody clots of brain matter like raw meat in her blood stiffened hair, little white bits of skull sprinkled about like casually tossed confetti. “What do ya think they’ll do to him in prison?” she wondered.

Gryphon shrugged, as Ray said, I think serial killers are in one of two categories: if prisoners think they’re just mad dog crazy or bad ass, they avoid ‘em. Otherwise, they’re priority targets. Hurting or killing a serial killer will give you instant rep. That‘s why a lot of them are held in special custody.

“I’ll probably have to ask Varner, but I don’t know if he’d tell me.”

“He likes you. The cop.”

Gryphon shrugged. “I think he wishes he could see you and talk to you. It’d make his job infinitely easier.”

He looked out the windows at some of the cops talking, too far away for him to decently hear, while Anna shifted in her seat, a wet noise thanks to all the blood, and asked, “Why I haven’t I joined your crew? What’s that about?”

“I think you only wanted to impart a message. Or something. Really, I have no idea how this fucking thing works, what tips a ghost over into my realm. I’m a dumbass, I’m afraid. This gig couldn’t have gone to a worse person.”

“Maybe not. Maybe if someone knew what they were doin’, it would get … I dunno … all fucked up.”

Or you’d be a power crazed fuck like Louis Stanhope, Ruby said.

“But that works out best for all of you, not necessarily me.”

Well, there’s other benefits, right? Hugh ventured gamely. The psychokinesis is pretty neat.

“But that’s yours too. I’m always sick, always half dead.”

“At least you didn’t go all the way,” Anna said, pointing at the bullet hole in her forehead. That shut him up. It seemed petty to complain when he was still technically alive.

He looked out the window at the spinning lights of cherry and sapphire, casting lurching shadows on the scarred pavement, and suddenly felt a certain odd coldness on his leg. He looked down to see that Anna was patting his knee in a comforting manner. “What are you gonna do to him? You gonna chop him up like a deer too?”

He glanced at her sharply. “Like a deer?” It took him a moment, but he got there. “Holy shit, he’s a hunter? That makes sense. Only now he’s changed game.”

She shrugged. “’Spose so, but there’s no sport in shooting someone point blank in the head.”

“No, there’s not. But it’s probably the kill that gets his rocks off, not the hunt.”

Man where do all these warped fuckers come from? Ruby wondered irritably. Is there a place in Texas just churning these shit suckers out?

Anna quirked an eyebrow at him, a tacit prompt. “So what’re you gonna do? Turn him over to the cops? Kill him?”

He shook his head and shrugged, not sure how to answer her. “I don’t know.” And he didn’t. He hadn’t decided yet how to proceed. He just assumed that he or his passengers would know when the time came, as they always seemed to. It was as mysterious as the process that allowed people to join him and left others out.

After a minute she nodded, as if that had been a fair answer. “Be careful. This fucker’s crazy.”

Undoubtedly, but he liked to think he was crazy too, so he knew the terrain. He gave her a faint smile, sorry she was dead, as she seemed like she had probably been a cool – albeit troubled – person when she was alive. “Don’t worry. All apologies to zombie films, but you can’t kill what’s already dead.”