Читать книгу PROTECTED - Marcus Calvert - Страница 8

Sheriff Dale Reubens knelt by the gaping hole at the center of Catherine Intle’s grave.

The tall West Virginian was thirty-six with a troubled demeanor on his weathered face. His uniformed, 5’8” frame was a seventy/thirty mix of muscle versus fat. A beige, wide-brimmed hat protected his brown eyes from the sun. Cassie Bueller stood behind him, a librarianesque coroner wearing dirty blue jeans and a red blouse. Her ID badge dangled from a blue lanyard around her thin neck.

They stared down at a freshly-made hole, which went down into Catherine Intle’s caramel-colored coffin: and through it. There was enough sunlight for the sheriff to see that the coffin was empty. Barely large enough for a person to crawl out of, the hole was too narrow to have been dug up from the outside. The grass around the grave was relatively undisturbed. Still, he didn’t want to believe the obvious conclusion.

“Are you absolutely sure?” Reubens asked.

“Yep,” Bueller nodded. “The breach was from the inside. No signs of any tunnels or unusual digging. She fits the DF profile the feds sent.”

Reubens winced as he rose to his feet. He used to date Catherine in high school. While they were serious, he didn’t make the cut. She eventually married Darren Intle and had four little girls. Then she had a fatal aneurysm just after her thirty-first birthday. Reubens went to her funeral and even let a tear fall. To him, Catherine was the one who got away: that dream girl every man came across at least once in his life.

But whatever busted out of her locket casket, clawed through six feet of dirt, and walked away wasn’t Catherine. She’ll be the first reported case of a Death Factor (DF) in the entire state. The first recorded DF cases were reported within a few hours of the new millennium. Those strange days were casually touted as the beginning of the Apocalypse. Reubens disagreed with the notion, seeing as it was now July of 2009. “If this is the Apocalypse,” he’d usually scoff, “it’s taking its sweet damned time.”

Most DFs tended to pop up near densely-populated areas. New York and L.A. had the highest numbers in the U.S. The FBI managed to capture some “live” DFs and interview them. Based on the information gathered, they figured out what it took for a DF to rise.

According to their profile, there had to be a place with a lot of deceased (a disaster area, cemetery, war zone, etc.). There also had to be at least one fresh corpse - in decent condition - within a five-mile radius. Most importantly, there had to be some restless spirits with unfinished business lurking about with enough ethereal angst to take root within that corpse. If these conditions were met, the spirits could lie dormant within a body for days, months, or even years. They would fuse into one spiritual entity, reanimate the body, and then break loose to resolve that unfinished business.

The problem with DFs was two-fold.

One, some of these spirits were downright evil and/or had a grudge to settle against the living. Reubens remembered hearing about a prison in Michigan where an inmate’s body broke out of a fresh grave and slaughtered twenty guards before they could put it down again. DFs were always inhumanly strong. They didn’t breathe, eat, drink, sleep, or even bleed. Unlike the zombie movies, a bullet to the head wouldn’t put one down. Destroying the body was the most common way to deal with a DF.

The second problem with DFs was a matter of mental stability. In time, even those few DFs with good intentions became violently unstable. Last year, a female DF rose out of a mudslide somewhere in Venezuela, amongst the corpses of a few hundred people killed during a tropical storm. The spirits in her body wanted to see if their living relatives were still alive and say some good-byes. They even helped out with the rescue efforts and initial reconstruction.

But the effort of keeping the body up and running was too much for the spirits inside of it. Rather than cross over, they poured everything into their host body – even their sanity. Eventually, the DF lost it and killed sixteen people before it was put down. Some of the victims were even close friends, relatives, and lovers. To date, there had never been a case of a DF staying benign for more than thirty-one days.

Most governments believed that DFs were a threat and hunted them down whenever one was reported. Some countries destroyed the bodies and cremated the remains. Others locked them away until they eventually ran out of spiritual energy. Depending on the number of spirits within a body, DFs could take months to –

“Earth to Reubens,” Bueller called out. “What’s the game plan?”

Reubens looked over at her apologetically.

“Call the FBI. I need a chopper and three SWAT teams with heavy ordinance. Have Dispatch send four cars to her house and evacuate her family. I’ll meet them there after I set up the search parties.”

“You think she went home?”

“Maybe,” he shrugged. “It all depends on whether or not Catherine’s spirit is even in there.”

Reubens started to leave.

“Anything else?”

“Run the names of everyone in this cemetery, especially murder victims. Look for any situations where someone would have an axe to grind.”

“You think they’re evil?” Bueller frowned.

“I don’t know,” Reubens sighed. “I just know that a man’ll go further to return an injury than he would a favor.”

“I’ll get it to you ASAP.”

Reubens gave her a slight nod as he got into his white police cruiser and started the engine. He turned on the siren, floored it, and raced onward deep in thought. He hoped some ambitious Fed would take over this mess and he wouldn’t have to put Catherine down like a rabid dog. Losing her once was bad enough.

The sheriff was so distracted that he almost drove right past the reanimated corpse of Catherine Intle.

Three miles from her grave, she stood on the interstate in her black funeral dress with her thumb out, trying to hitch a ride. Her curly red hair ran halfway down her shapely back. Her skin was just as flawless as the night they first –

Reubens stomped on the brakes and stopped thirty feet away. While he knew that he should call it in, he just couldn’t do it … not yet. He had to know if any trace of his one true love was still inside of this “shell.” Rubens unclasped the gun holster on his right hip. Then he opened the door with a fear-laced sigh. As he stepped out of the car, the DF approached with Catherine’s beautiful one-dimpled smile: the smile that won his heart so long ago.

Sensing his discomfort, she stopped a good eight feet away.

“You’re looking good, Dale,” the DF said with her melodic voice. “How’ve you been?”

“Much better, since I quit smoking. Thanks for asking.”

“How long have I been gone?”

“Four years and two-odd months or so,” he replied. “How many of you are in there?”

“Forty-eight,” Catherine’s shell replied.

“Wow,” Reubens winced, remembering that the more spirits that inhabited a DF, the stronger it got.

“What brings you all way back here?”

Catherine folded her arms and cocked her head to the left.

“Oh come on, Dale!” Catherine playfully exclaimed as she patted her tight stomach. “You know every dead person in here – including me. There’s nothing sinister going on here.”

“That’s a relief,” Reubens grinned, until he whipped out his Glock .40. With a two-handed grip on his pistol, the sheriff kneecapped the DF with two lucky, well-placed shots.

He figured that, while her body could shrug off a lot of bullets, the DF still needed kneecaps, in order to stand. All of the spirits within the DF screamed at once as their host body flopped to the gravel, belly-first. He realized that the scream didn’t sound like forty-eight people. It was more like three people? Maybe four? And they were male voices … mixed in with Catherine’s. Odds were that she wasn’t in charge of her own body anymore.

As the DF futilely tried to rise, Reubens holstered his weapon. He then hopped into his vehicle and mentally cursed himself as godless swine for what he was about to do. The sheriff actually backed the police cruiser onto Catherine’s body as it tried to crawl away into a roadside ditch. When he stopped, his car’s front left tire rested squarely on the DF’s back.

Reubens pulled the release for the trunk and then for the fuel tank. He stepped out on the passenger side and headed for the back of his police cruiser. Along the way, he stopped to unscrew the gas cap. The cruiser subtly began to shift. Reubens drew his Glock, knelt down and gawked. Catherine Intle’s petite corpse was in a push-up position and had lifted his cruiser a few inches off the ground. Bit-by-bit, she began to crawl free. Reubens backed away, gun still in his right hand. The DF glared up at him from under the car’s front bumper as it laboriously scooted out from under it.

“We’re gonna take that gun away from you and rip both of your damned arms off!”

The males voices were male and perfectly in synch as they threatened Reubens. Whoever was yelling at him wasn’t Catherine. It was the sons of bitches keeping her from finding peace. The thought of her being someone else’s slave enraged him. He dropped to one knee and aimed for the elbows. Nine shots later, the DF’s elbows were shattered and the car pinned it down again. Even with shattered elbows, the spirits within Catherine’s body scowled up at him as they tried to squirm free.

Yep, Reubens thought, this is about a grudge.

Reubens ran for the trunk and retrieved a loaded jerry can of gasoline. Wordlessly, he splashed it over his own car … and then he doused the body of his first love.

“Don’t do this,” it pleaded with Catherine’s sweet voice.

“Drop the act,” Reubens growled as he emptied the jerry can and tossed it aside. Then he pulled a cheap disposable lighter out of his pants.

“You said you quit smoking!”

“I guess I lied, too,” he scowled. “Let Catherine speak.”

The DF stared at him defiantly.

“Do it!” Reubens yelled with red-faced ire.

It tried one last, feeble time to move. Then it reluctantly nodded.

“I’m here,” Catherine smiled faintly.

“Why are you still in there?”

“They hopped into my body the second I died,” she shrugged. “I couldn’t get out.”

“How many spooks are really in you?”

“Two. The McKnittle brothers – Abe and Gary.”

When Reubens was a kid, his dad used to mention them. A bunch of devil-may-care drunkards, they made moonshine and grew pot when his old man was only a young deputy. They died when their barn - where they made their hooch - burned down. Everyone thought it was the result of accidental stupidity.

“What’s their beef?”

“They were murdered,” Catherine explained.

“How?”

“Back in ’63, they made a bad batch of ‘shine and one of their customers – a teenager name Sophie Gassen – went blind. The poor girl killed herself soon after. She had three big brothers who decided vengeance was in order.”

“So they beat ‘em up and torched ‘em with their own hooch?”

“Yeah,” Catherine replied. “Only one of the three Gassen brothers is dead. They got impatient and decided to go after the other two.”

The sheriff sighed as he walked away from the car. The DF’s eyes followed him as he moved.

“They want to know what you’re going to do.”

“A crime’s a crime,” Reubens said at length. “I’ll re-open the case.”

“They want blood.”

“They’ll have to settle for justice,” Reubens sighed as he looked up at the sky. “And Catherine, I … I –”

“I know, Dale,” Catherine interrupted with a soft smile. “I always knew.”

The McKnittle brothers abruptly took over and yelled curses, threats, and - in the end - pleaded with Reubens not to deny them their revenge. The sheriff quietly flicked on the lighter and tossed it. It landed on the car’s gasoline-covered hood. Flames erupted and quickly spread. The sheriff turned and walked away as his tears began to fall.

Even when the car exploded, Reubens didn’t look back.