Hitchers

CHAPTER 27

Within hours, Lorena and I were on CNN.

“You can clearly hear Finn Darby call ‘Lorena,’ although the woman he’s addressing is Summer Locker, a waitress who lives in northwest Atlanta. Lorena is the name of Darby’s late wife, who died two years ago in a boating accident…”

They played a tape of Grandpa’s phone call and covered that angle as well. There were probably a half-dozen news vans parked outside my apartment; fortunately I went straight to Mick’s apartment when I regained control of myself. Summer was there, watching the news while Mick talked to his mole at FEMA.

They were quarantining the city. They had secured Route 285—the perimeter—but if we could trust what the feds were saying it was to protect the victims of this new “disease” from throngs of superstitious miscreants whose threats against us were growing louder each day. (For good measure MSNBC aired a few clips of sundry extremists airing their opinions of what to do with the afflicted.) People with good reason to move in or out of the city would be allowed, according to the news. Still, the images of National Guard troops lining the perimeter was disconcerting.

MSNBC also reported two separate multiple homicides, where the only thing that connected the victims was all of them were known to have hitchers. There was some debate about whether these could be classified as hate crimes.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Mick growled as he closed his phone. He flopped onto the couch. “They’ve documented at least two cases of people who’ve left and not come back. The bleeding hitchers appear to have taken them over permanently.”

We digested this in silence.

“So now we know,” I said.

“Now we know,” Mick echoed. He turned his face toward the ceiling, expelled a plume of cigarette smoke.

The news didn’t chill me the way I might have expected, probably because deep down I already knew how this was going to end if we couldn’t figure out a way to stop it. I didn’t have much faith in FEMA or the CDC; this was too bizarre for a federal agency to get a grip on it.

“Summer has a theory about what’s happening, and I think I’ve figured out a way to test it,” I said, trying to strike a positive note.

We drifted into the space that served as Mick’s living room and I explained. It hinged on my late friends, Annie and Dave. As I talked I pulled out my notebook, wrote their names on opposite sides of the page.

“One of the last things Annie said to me was not to feel bad for her, because she wasn’t all that sorry about dying.” I underlined Dave’s name a half-dozen times. “Dave had a wife he loved like crazy. Just a flat-out happy guy.” If Dave was still on the other side, we were probably on the wrong track.

“So you want to check to see if these people are in Deadland, eh?” Mick said.

“That’s the idea,” I said.

Mick nodded. “Annie should be there, Dave shouldn’t, because Dave should be back here.”

“How are you going to get Grandpa to go to the places where Annie and Dave died?” Summer asked.

“How am I going to?” I laughed. “I’m not. My job is to float around on the doorstep of the dead and look for these people; you and Mick have to get me there.”

Mick flexed his bicep, looked at Summer. “We’re the muscle.”

Summer shook her head. “It’s simpler if I go this time; Lorena would probably go willingly if you asked.”

She had a point. The thing was, I wanted to do this. I wanted to see the evidence (or lack thereof) firsthand. “I see what you’re saying, but I’m hoping I can communicate with Annie if she’s there. She’ll help us if she can. You don’t know her.”

“I had a brother who drank himself to death about a year ago,” Summer countered. “We could use him instead. If he returned to the world of the living, we’re definitely wrong, because he hated it here.”

“Where did he die?” I asked.

“Piedmont Hospital.”

I shook my head. “There’ll be thousands of dead in a hospital. Locating him would be dodgy.” Then I remembered something Summer had said. “Plus, I have one foot in Deadland already, remember? There’s no guarantee you can get there.”

Summer kicked at the spine of a paperback lying on the floor. She sighed. “You’re right. But I’m still going to try to find Deadland next time I’m inside. Anything’s better than being trapped in there.”

I handed Summer the spare key to the Maserati. Now there was nothing to do but wait for Grandpa.

“So have you found out anything that could help Finn when he gets over there?” Mick asked, gesturing at the stack of books Summer had brought along.

Summer fidgeted with a corkscrew somebody had left on the coffee table. “I don’t know how it could help, but it’s all here. Krishnapuma spent entire days watching Deadland, and by the time he died he saw it for what it was.”

“Which is?” Mick asked.

Summer shrugged. “A waiting room. We go on from there.”

“We go on in little bits, blown away,” Mick said. “That’s not very reassuring, is it?”

Summer pulled one leg onto the couch, steepled her hands under her chin. “We don’t just blow away, it’s much more than that. We return to where we came from, back into the…” she swept her arms in a grand gesture—“into the all. Our individual selves are just an illusion, just a game we play, and we remember this, one fleck at a time. It’s beautiful. Very Vedic.”

“The way you interpret it, it is,” Mick said. “Why couldn’t it be purgatory? When the last of you blows away, you go to hell.”

“You know,” I said, “right now I couldn’t care less where we go. I just don’t want to go there any time soon.” I wasn’t in the mood for a theological debate. “Does he say anything that can help us—”

I was going to say “help us boot these damned hitchers,” then I remembered one of those damned hitchers was Lorena, and she could hear me. It was like a riddle I would never solve—I wanted Grandpa out, I wanted Summer to be free, but I didn’t want to send Lorena back to that place. Yet here I was, plotting to boot her back to that place.

“Nothing about reclaiming your body from hitchers, no. In a few places he suggests it might be possible for the dead to possess the living, but I don’t think he ever saw it firsthand.” Summer spun the corkscrew; it rotated, slowed, stopped with the sharp end pointing at me. “He did write this weird entry about what he called soul eaters.”

“Soul eaters?” I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

“I don’t know if he meant it literally or figuratively. So often his writing blurs the lines between the two. What he said was that some people just can’t let go; they’d rather stay in the land of the dead, whole, than reunite with God—”

“Blow away, you mean,” Mick said.

“So as they blow away they replenish themselves by absorbing others…” Summer trailed off.

This was getting weirder and weirder. If I had come across Krishnapuma’s book in a used book store before any of this happened I might have bought it for a laugh. I could picture myself in a bar with Dave, flipping through the pages, saying, “Wait, wait, listen to this one…”