Deadworld Read online

  Deadworld

  J N Duncan

  Deadworld

  J. N. Duncan

  Prologue

  A misty rain swirled down into the darkness between the two brick buildings. Flattened against one cold wall, Archie Lane huddled next to a stack of sagging cardboard boxes, peering out of the narrow alley at the sliver of sidewalk illuminated by a nearby streetlight. This was not how he had envisioned running away. There had been no envisioning to speak of, really. All he had wanted was to escape the smack down going on in his parents’ living room, where Dad had the leg up on the cursing scorecard and Mom was on pace to set a new “thrown objects” record. Now the midnight sounds of Chicago’s suburbs were frightening him even more.

  They were not strange sounds. Archie recognized most of them, from the sounds of tires on wet pavement to the screeching yowls of two cats duking it out, but in darkness, all things magnified in the wrong direction. Every shadow contained lurking doom. Body parts lay rotting in every container. Every passing car was his dad hunting for him. Surely, he was destined for the belt with this one. That threat had been very explicit after the last time.

  The problem was where to go? Every friend he knew would have parents who would turn him over and make a phone call. His grandpa would let him stay, if only he could remember how to get there. He was also a thirty-minute ride by car. On foot that might take all night, if he even knew what direction to go in.

  Archie’s concerns had turned more immediate as the rain began to fall. It was getting cold. His long-sleeved shirt offered piss-poor protection, and, worse, he was starving. Where did street kids go when they were hungry and wet?

  Archie hadn’t the slightest clue. He did not know a single street kid. If he could find one, maybe they could tell him. At worst, maybe he could find a store to hang out in for a while, maybe steal a candy bar or something to fill his rumbling stomach. There was a Kroger not far from his house, but the darkness had confused his sense of direction. It was not on the old downtown strip where he found himself now. It was… somewhere else.

  Archie thrust his hands deeper into his jeans and ventured forth. He would just have to ask someone. It couldn’t be far, and it was open twenty-four hours. He could wander around until the sun came up and maybe, if he was really lucky, sneak back into his room without anyone being the wiser. Mom and Dad would be passed out by sunrise. As long as Dad didn’t come in to kick at the foot of his bed to see if he was sleeping, all would be good.

  At the alley’s opening, Archie stood at the corner and poked his head out. There were only a few cars parked on the street. Further up at the corner, a couple walked quickly down the opposite sidewalk, huddled under an umbrella. Boy! They were in a real hurry, looking back at something, but Archie could not tell what. The intersection ahead appeared empty. Not fifty feet down the sidewalk, a car door opened, and a man stepped out. Nice car. Nice suit. He popped open an umbrella and looked up in Archie’s direction, eyes hidden behind dark, round glasses.

  Archie ducked back into the darkness and watched as the man began to walk toward him. He hardly looked dangerous, but what Archie found disquieting, what spawned a gnawing worm in his gut, was that the slick-looking car eased along the edge of the street, matching him step for step. Archie took another step back into the darkness, just in case.

  The man hummed a tune, some old-fashioned-sounding thing Archie didn’t recognize. His footsteps were silent upon the wet cement. When he got close, Archie held his breath, freezing every muscle of his body, willing it not to begin shivering. There was no way the guy could see him there, melded flat to the brick wall, right? He continued to walk, stepping across the alley’s opening, one step, two, but at the edge he stopped.

  Archie’s heart leaped in his chest. The man, not ten feet away, paused and then turned, the umbrella resting lightly against his shoulder. He looked directly at Archie.

  “I dare say, young man. Whatever are you doing out on a night like this and dressed like that?” His voice was old, reminding Archie of his grandpa, but it had a smoothness to it that belied the man’s age. “And huddled in that rotting, forsaken alley. Surely you must be cold?”

  Stranger at night on a nearly empty street. Archie knew better. These weren’t the sorts of people you talked to when alone. “Pervs will snatch you right off your own street!” his mother had been fond of telling him.

  “Just, um, hangin’ out,” Archie said. “I was on my way home actually… from a friend’s house.”

  A corner of the man’s mouth curled up beneath the shadows of the umbrella. “I see. No ride home from your mum or dad? It’s awfully late. Bad sort of folk out and about this time of night, Mr. Lane.” The blue car came to a stop behind the man, its windows cloaked in glossy, rain-splattered darkness.

  “It’s okay,” Archie said, the worm in his gut now chomping gleefully at his insides. “I’m good. I don’t have far to go.” If he was quick enough, he might be able to bolt past the old guy. If not, one of those gloved hands could easily get a handful of shirt. The man’s words suddenly sunk in. “Hey. How’d you know my name?”

  “I know your mother, Archibold,” he said, the other corner of his mouth twitching up to reveal a ghostly smile. “We met at the mall just the other day. I believe you were at the candy machines getting yourself a treat.”

  Archie nodded. “Oh. Yeah.” His stomach rumbled at the thought of the handful of gummy worms he had gotten last weekend.

  “Would you care for a ride home, Archibold?” When Archie remained silent, the man knelt down. “You ever ridden in a Rolls-Royce before?”

  Archie shook his head. “Nope. It’s Archie, by the way. I hate Archibold.”

  A deep chuckle rumbled out of the man’s throat. “Archie it is. I’ve got soda inside, and I believe there might be something you could eat.”

  A ride in that car would be cool, no doubt. Free food and drink would be good, too. The worm paused in its hungry gnawing to shake its wary head. Don’t ride with strangers. You just never knew, did you?

  “I don’t know. Actually, I think I’m good. My house isn’t far at all.”

  He stood back up, looking down the street from where he’d come. “Almost two miles, Archie. That’s a bit of a walk on tired feet.”

  “You know where I live, too?” Archie pulled his hands from his pockets. The worm was telling him to run, and the idea was making more sense by the second.

  “Of course I do,” he said, kneeling back down. A gloved hand reached up to pull the glasses down the bridge of his nose. “I could not have followed you here if I did not, now, could I?”

  Archie froze, his body and mind coming to an ice-encased standstill. “Whoa, dude. Your eyes are glowing.”

  “They are.” A black gloved hand reached out toward him. “It’s a special trick. Can you see anything in them? If you look hard enough, you will see something very special indeed.”

  One step, followed by another. Archie felt his hand reach out to take the strange man’s hand. There actually was something in the glowing, irisless eyes. Shadows, gray and swirling like fog, danced around inside them. Archie began to shiver.

  “They look like ghosts,” he whispered.

  The man stood up, his hand clasped tightly around Archie’s. “Very good, Archibold. You can see the other side. Would you like to go?”

  The door latch clicked open, and Archie stepped toward the car. “Are they all dead over there?”

  “Every last one, my young man,” he said and pulled open the door. “You see, they are my ghosts, but to join them, you must be one as well.”

  “Oh.” The comforting warmth of the inside of the car beckoned. It felt so good against his wet, shivering skin. “Don’t you have to be dead to be a ghost?”

  The gloved hand
gently pushed Archie in the back, easing him into the black cave of the car. “But worry not, Mr. Lane. I shall take care of that.”

  The door slammed shut, and a moment later the Rolls eased back into the street.

  Chapter 1

  Beneath the serene, protective canopy of maple leaves, a boy reclined against the trunk, withered and bloodless, his skin two sizes too big for his depleted body. It was death in all the wrong ways.

  Jackie Rutledge squinted at the chaos from the parking lot, frowning at the milling gawkers. A gaggle of reporters and cameramen huddled around their cluster of vans waiting to pounce on the nearest unwary law-enforcement officer. She absently rubbed at her throbbing temple. There should have been laws against committing crimes on Mondays.

  The drifting scatter of clouds taunted her by blocking the late September sun only to laugh at her seconds later. Her sunglasses provided little relief from the pain induced from last night’s bottle of tequila, and Jackie hoped that luck would bring a thunderstorm and send the crowd running. There was no luck to be found in this park however. Death had sucked it all away.

  The enormous maple, its branches drooping nearly to the ground, was completely encircled with crime-scene tape. Some of the crew were walking around, combing through the grass. The local police looked to have been put in charge of crowd control.

  Jackie walked over to her partner, Laurel’s, car and accepted the triple-shot latte and four Tylenol. “Thanks for the wake-up. Why can’t killers keep better hours?”

  “Off shifts pay better,” Laurel said and reached up to brush off some lingering sand from the dangling ruffle of auburn hair on Jackie’s forehead. “How was the lifeguard?”

  “My thighs still hurt, so I’m guessing it was good.” Tequila shots blurred out everything beyond last night’s walk on the lake. The guy was long gone when Laurel had pierced Jackie’s skull with the seven AM wake-up. Plopping the pills into her mouth, Jackie swallowed them with the lukewarm coffee.

  She took the FBI jacket offered by Laurel, who was now scanning the crowd past the pair of television vans parked at the curb of the parking lot, her blue eyes narrowed in concentration. Her voice was distant. “Wish my thighs hurt.”

  “So is this the same MO as the Wisconsin woman?”

  Laurel did not answer. Her eyes were closed, and Jackie knew better than to keep talking. Laurel had her psychic radar on, checking for anything out of the ordinary. If this was related to the Wisconsin victim, odds were there would be something. Even with the length of time that she had been dead, there had been a “taint.” For Jackie, some demented prick had drained the woman of her blood. Period.

  She finished off the last of her latte and waited for Laurel. She was ready to get moving, more so to avoid the media that looked to be wandering in their direction.

  “Something is off here,” Laurel said, her voice barely a whisper.

  Jackie cringed. Of course there was. “Not off in a ‘spiked your morning coffee’ sort of way, I hope?”

  “There’s some bourbon in the trunk.” Laurel didn’t smile at the humor. She was too intent on something out in the crowd.

  “Great. Off to a fabulous start already,” Jackie said, but Laurel was shuffling across the grass to the other side of the parking lot where the crowd had gathered. Something had tweaked that little psychic nerve of hers, and Jackie knew when to leave well enough alone. She waved. “Go find your bogeyman, Laur.” Turning around, she made her way toward the overhanging tree before any media might notice she was standing by herself.

  The blanket of leaves and limbs pushed and swatted at Jackie until she found herself standing in near darkness, thin shafts of light shining down on a boy seated neatly against the trunk of the tree. A couple members of the crew were already milling around in the shadows.

  “That you, Jack? Glad you could join us.”

  Jackie’s mouth creased into a frown. Pernetti. He would be the one detailing the victim. As if her headache didn’t already feel like someone cranking screws down into her skull. “Don’t even start with me, Pernetti. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Boy, did you get laid or something? You’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning.”

  For a moment, Jackie thought he might have actually noticed, but then common sense took over. Pernetti was not capable of noticing anything like that. “Kiss my ass. Just tell me what we’ve got here.”

  He knelt down next to the body. “Archibold Lane, age twelve. Some sicko sucked the boy dry. There’s ligature marks on the wrists and ankles. Funky marks, though. It looks like zip ties. Other than the hole in the arm, there’s nothing else visible on him. Scene so far is weirdly spotless.”

  Twelve. What was wrong with people? “Spotless? That’s doubtful.” These days, everyone left something to track. Unless of course you knew how to clean up after yourself, and knew how forensics worked, but even then, it was unlikely.

  “Clean so far, Jack.” He shrugged, pointing at marks on the boy’s wrists. “Other than the marks and the hole, he’s got a couple bumps and scrapes that anyone might get when they’ve been out and about for a couple days.”

  “Two? He hasn’t been dead that long.”

  Pernetti stood back up, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “Runaway, according to the sheriff. Fled from Mom and Dad beating each other up and not seen until this morning.”

  She doubted very much that Mom was doing any beating up on Dad. It hit her then, a brief flash of a twelve-year-old running away from a “domestic dispute” nearly twenty years prior. Mommy certainly had not been doing any of the beating. Jackie took a deep breath. The smell of death was doing little to wash the residue of memory away. “Anything else?”

  “Nope. Area still being gone over. Bowers and Prescott are out canvassing, but it’s looking a lot like that Wisconsin woman we brought in a couple months back.”

  Jackie shrugged and pulled out a pair of latex gloves from her jacket pocket. “Maybe. Okay, move, Pernetti. I want a look.” She didn’t want one, really. There was almost nothing she would see here, she could tell already. The perp had been clean and careful. Even the ground around the body looked undisturbed. Still, she would end up lead on the case, and, if anything, she needed to verify Pernetti’s own observations.

  “Think we should track down those parents and see what they have to say. Let them know their son is dead because they can’t bitch at each other like other civilized folks.”

  She did not bother glancing up at him. “Go away, Pernetti. You’re distracting me.”

  Thankfully left in silence, Jackie gave Archie a quick look over and found nothing out of the ordinary. He seemed almost peaceful, if one could ignore that fact that he looked like a pasty, deflated version of his former self. The thought sent a shiver down Jackie’s spine, and she decided she had seen enough for the moment. Putting her sunglasses back on, she stepped back out from under the tree to find Laurel seated on the hood of her car smoking a cigarette. That was the first sign of trouble right there. A healthy girl by nature, Jackie knew if you hit the stress button hard enough, Laurel would be reaching for that security blanket in the bottom of her purse.

  Jackie knew any shot at the day getting better was vanishing with each puff of smoke.

  Chapter 2

  One hundred forty-four years was a long time to be a failure at something. Nick Anderson felt every last year of it as he looked over the heads of the crowd at the towering maple, wondering how long it had taken to find someone who looked like his son. The boy sitting under the tree was not an exact likeness, but the similarities were obvious. Cornelius was back, and this time Nick knew it was for keeps. The game was on for one final round, and if he didn’t catch the bastard, Nick would be dead.

  The circus atmosphere in the park did little to help. In the two hours since returning from his initial discovery to the park after finding the body, Nick had been talked to by every reporter and cop on the scene. There appeared to be little in the way of evidence, and Ni
ck had not dared do anything to the body earlier. Evidence gathering these days was far too elaborate to miss his tampering with the body. The feds did not appear to have anything concrete going on. He had seen them in action enough to know, and he knew how Cornelius worked. There would be little for them to go on until things were explored a bit more. Immediate discovery was too boring for him.

  A late-arriving fed caught his eye, a tough, slight-looking woman in a black leather jacket, jeans, and hiking boots. He watched her pop some pills into her mouth and wash it down with coffee while they both looked out in his direction, scanning the crowd. There was an easy comfort to the way they interacted. Partners, Nick figured. The coffee drinker donned an FBI jacket and walked toward the tree, and Nick wondered if she might be the one in charge. Not a good sign. Female law enforcement were generally harder to handle. Their bullshit meters were far more finicky. He wondered how long it might be before he was having a conversation with her. A day? Two, perhaps?

  The other one came toward the crowd, and if it was not for the FBI-emblazoned jacket, Nick would never have pegged her for law enforcement. She had none of the swagger or stern confidence most portrayed at a crime scene. She looked far too soft for that, far too kind around the eyes.

  It was the eyes that grabbed Nick’s attention though. She scanned the crowd, but her gaze was unfocused, miles away. He watched her, curious about what she could be looking for until she got within about ten feet of his spot. Those distant and vacant blue eyes came abruptly into sharp focus, and what little color she had slowly evaporated from her face. The cold, probing fingers of psychic energy pushed around him then, and Nick swallowed the bile that rose in his throat.

  Christ! A medium.

  He gave off a definite and profound sense of death, or so his assistant Cynthia claimed. She was a powerful medium in her own right and, after meeting fifteen years before, had told him he felt like a walking cemetery. Not the most endearing sentiment, but apparently true. Nick had hired her on the spot. She had taught him how to know when a psychic was looking around for the dead, opening themselves up to the spirit world. It was a very distinct feeling, and now here he was, face-to-face with one who worked for the FBI who was standing five feet away from him at a crime scene he would undoubtedly be tied to sooner, if not later.