Guilt warred with worry as Piotr and Wendy approached the bookstore the next morning. The sun was rather high in the sky and Piotr was concerned that he may have already missed the other Riders. He’d wanted to leave earlier but Wendy, waking early, was gone before sunrise. She’d spent the morning at the diner with Eddie and had come back both sulky and bemused. They had, she declared, made up, though for how long still remained to be seen.
After the previous night he’d decided to give Eddie a chance. Once upon a time, he reasoned, Wendy might have had a thing for this Eddie, but that time must be long gone. And there were more important things to stress about than the people his living girlfriend—his girlfriend!—surrounded herself with.
“Wait here,” Piotr told Wendy, sitting her on a bench across the street from the bookstore. “I’ll go in and explain.”
“Good idea,” she whispered, trying to appear inconspicuous. The streets, even this one, were thronged with milling tourists enjoying the holiday and doing last-minute shopping in San Francisco. Wendy, who’d brought a backpack along, settled herself on the bench and drew out a thick novel, The Stand. Glad that she wasn’t clinging, Piotr dodged through the crowd toward the shop, wishing that he’d thought to bring her here before now. Elle was going to have a fit.
He was right.
To be fair, the remaining Riders heard him through to the end before Elle lost it. Thankfully, his reflexes were as quick as hers, and Piotr was able to duck and dodge out of the way as Elle began chucking books, bags, and whatever other refuse she could get her hands on directly at his head. She pegged him a few good times before Lily intervened, stepping between Elle and Piotr and holding up her hands to catch the missiles.
James, who’d always kept Piotr at a distance, did nothing to help the situation; he merely lounged on the stairs to the second floor and smirked as Elle ranted and raved. Piotr caught his eye once or twice with a wordless plea to step in, but James was having too much fun to intervene. When Lily interceded the smile dropped off his face and he sulked, disappointed that Piotr hadn’t been injured in the barrage.
When she’d calmed enough to do more than throw things and scream, Elle (hands on hips) demanded, “What kind of balled up BS is all this? You get goofy over some hotsy-totsy jane and you expect us to just be jake with it?”
At first Piotr wasn’t entirely sure he’d understood her—when Elle really got going her flapper patois took hold and often even Dora had trouble untangling the verbal knots of her speech—but Elle’s furious expression and pointed sneer spoke volumes. “I expected you to be my friends,” Piotr replied coolly, crossing his arms across his chest and resting against the counter. “The kind that support one another.”
“We are your friends,” Lily began, “and we always will be, but—”
“But? What but?!” Elle picked up one of Dora’s abandoned sketchpads and waved it in the air, shaking it nearly under Piotr’s nose. “I got a beef with ol’ Pete here and I aim to have my say. This palooka’s got some nerve if he thinks he can just waltz on in here and think we’re gonna goosestep in time to his little suicide parade.”
“Suicide? I’m already dead!”
James shook his head. “Man, there are worse things than being dead. You know that. And if this girl Wendy is the Lightbringer like you say she is, then you’re not just playing with fire, you’re downright taunting it.”
“Wendy would never hurt me.”
Infuriated, Elle threw down the pad and began poking Piotr hard in the chest. “Listen to you! ‘Wendy would never hurt me,’” she mimicked in a high nasal falsetto, tucking her tongue between her teeth on each vowel so she lisped. “Maybe not you, but what about the rest of us? What about the Lost? That girl’s job is to exterminate our kind!”
“She’s setting us free—”
Elle snorted and poked him again. “Free! Listen to yourself, Pete! Did what happen to those Walkers look like ‘free’ to you? They were burned up from the inside. That’s sick. That’s just wrong. And you kissed it.”
“This I will not discuss with you,” Piotr snapped. “It is none of your business, Elle.”
“Fine, neckin’ with the freakshow aside, what about the Lost, huh? You said she and the Lost have some sort of wacko connection, right? Well, you ever think that maybe your gal Friday out there was the one who took ’em? Maybe she’s not killing off the Walkers, maybe she’s just in league with them, had them come on down here and scoop the Lost up for her. You yourself said you told her where we all were before you knew she was the Lightbringer.”
“Your point being?”
“My point being that I think it’s awful convenient, her just happening to hang ’round the park when you got yourself ambushed over Specs.”
“It is nothing like that,” Piotr protested. “She could have come and reaped all of us anytime she wanted, but she did not! She’s not that sort of person.”
“Sure she ain’t, Pete. Sure. The glowing tentacle monster that eats our kind up like we were penny candy ain’t like that. I guess that means you, Mr. Petey Optimistic, ain’t stuck on her at all!”
“Do not call her that,” Piotr snarled. “Wendy has a duty—”
“A duty! Hah!” Elle threw up her hands and laughed long and hard, but there was no mirth in the sound, only shrill, venomous sarcasm. “The monster’s got a duty. She’s all about doin’ the right thing, making sure everything in the Never’s copasetic, right? Sure she does! She understands all about duty, I bet. That’s why she kept you, Piotr, not just any ol’ Rider but the big cheese who started the Riders, away from us when we needed you most. That’s why you, Mr. Hi-You’re-Dead-Here’s-How-The-Afterlife-Works himself, was off neckin’ with a monster when you should have been here running a shift!”
“Ny ti i svoloch’,” Piotr said flatly, slapping her poking hand away. “Insane, Elle. I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Course you don’t,” she spat. “Ol’ Petey never has a goddamn clue ’bout nothin’ these days, monsters and Riders included.”
Piotr stuffed his hands in his pockets, weary now of the shouting and yelling but at a loss for how to stop it. “Elle, you’re not being fair.”
“I’m not bein’ fair? I’m not? Fine. Fine, Petey, I’ll be fair to you. I’ll be fair because I’m sick of it. I’m sick of protecting you, of playin’ along. You wanna drop us for some livin’ dame? Fine! Then I’m gonna lay a little truth on you before you walk out that door and go back to your precious Lightbringer. I’m gonna talk and you’re gonna sit here and listen! That fair enough for you?” Piotr, frustrated, turned his face away.
Elle twisted until she could look at James, still lounging on the stairs, elbows resting on knees and avidly following the debate. “Jaime-boy, tell the truth. Have I or have I not known this piker for years? Ain’t we had a caper or two?”
“Long as you’ve been dead,” James replied in his slow and thoughtful way, lifting one tightly braided dreadlock and examining the end. “Long as I’ve been dead too.”
“Ha-ha,” Piotr grumbled, “this is not the time. This trick I’ve heard before.”
“So Pete, you’ve known me goin’ on a century,” Elle continued, ignoring Piotr’s protests. “And James for almost two. If I remember right, you found me in a speakeasy and Jaime-boy hauling cotton south of the Mason-Dixon line.”
Terror gripped him, set his stomach boiling with acid and anger. This joke had gone on long enough! “Elle,” Piotr whispered through lips pressed tightly together, edges bled white from the pressure, “stop. This is enough.”
She was on a roll and couldn’t hear him, or simply chose not to. “Whether you remember it or not, you’ve traveled some, Pete, and you took us along for the ride. Hell, you and Lily’ve been dead together longer than most of the Walkers ’round this town’ve been walking. Ain’t that right, Lily?”
The insistence Elle sank into each word chilled Piotr to the bone. Lily wasn’t denying the wild claims and Piotr knew that James, infuriating as he was, had never been much of a liar. But what Elle was claiming was sheer, unadulterated insanity, and impossible to boot. Piotr couldn’t remember his own death—few ghosts could—but surely he’d remember having died more than two centuries before. Wouldn’t he?
“Net,” Piotr murmured louder, shaking his head. “I don’t believe you.”
“She’s telling the truth,” James said. “You’re older than Moses, Peter. You’re older than anyone any ghost I know’s ever met. You’re damn near ancient.”
“Believe me or not, Petey-boy, I think I’m tired of givin’ two tin shits about it,” Elle sneered, thrusting her fists on her hips and wagging her head from side to side for emphasis. “Worrying about you all the time just ain’t cuttin’ it for me anymore. I’m just pointin’ out that you ain’t exactly playin’ with a full deck lately, and unless you’ve been lyin’ this whole time then you never remember us, Pete. You never do.”
“A couple decades pass and it is like meeting a new you,” Lily agreed, voice pitched low and quiet, but calm and firm. She looked apologetically at Piotr, spread her hands wide, and dropped them to her sides. “Your accent and some Russian phrases remain, but the rest, your memories and recollections…they are new like snow, like the clear mountain stream. When I first met you, you were like the great and wise Yanauluha; you guided me in my struggles and taught me much of the ways of the Never. You were serious then, but kind, and knew how to calm the troubled waters of my mind. But years passed and with them passed the man I’d known. Who you are now is not who you were then. You are not a bad man now, but different.”
Piotr groaned, rested his fingers at his temples, and massaged, hoping to drive away the tension headache that was building there. “You sound like you miss this ‘old me’ a lot.”
Lily did not reply, but her cheeks grew dark.
“Great,” Piotr muttered. “Fabulous, what a great bunch of friends you all are.”
Roughly, Elle coughed, then bent over. Piotr was startled to realize that Elle, strong and nettlesome Elle, was crying. Her hands opened and closed convulsively, her shoulders shook. Lily moved as if to comfort her and was waved away.
“All that time,” Elle croaked, furiously swiping the tears off her cheeks, “all that time we’ve spent with you, fretting over you, looking out for you and yours, all that time not knowing if or when you were going to start sliding into being someone else, and now you’ve thrown us over. And for what? Because you’re stuck on some dizzy sheba who don’t even have the decency to be dead? One you can apparently touch but, you know, just not for that long?” She sneered and spat on the floor, mere centimeters from Piotr’s shoe. “Well ain’t you the biggest sap I’ve ever seen.”
“You’ve got a right to be upset,” Piotr began tensely, forcibly keeping himself from wrapping his arms around Elle and simply hugging her. Elle rarely cried and he hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings; Piotr felt lower than low for doing so. “Before the kids were taken I hadn’t been around, pulling my shifts as I ought to have, you’ve got a point there. You and I…I wasn’t happy hanging around. I felt I was an imposition.”
“So you dumped the kids?” James asked derisively.
“Net,” Piotr retorted, annoyed and wishing James would quit needling him. “I assumed that with all those Riders staying here I could be away more often, but I know now that no matter how uncomfortable being here made me, I could have helped. I should have helped.”
“Damn right, you should’ve,” James grumbled, lapsing into a sharp and pointed silence.
“Pros’tite, I’m sorry for that,” Piotr continued, ignoring James. “I truly am. But the rest of it…this Yannihula—”
“Yanauluha,” Lily corrected. “The first shaman.”
“Yannihula, Yanauluha, it doesn’t matter! This talk like I’ve been some other person, it is insane, Elle. Nothing but crazy, creepy talk. Why do you keep going on like I’ve been around forever? I didn’t start the Riders; I haven’t been dead that long!”
For a brief moment Piotr hesitated—no matter how impossible it seemed, there was a chance, slim as it was, that they weren’t teasing him but in fact were telling the truth—but, try as he might, Piotr couldn’t bring himself to believe it. This was his afterlife, right? Piotr was certain, he could feel it in his very bones, that if what they’d been saying was true, if he truly had been forgetting things and slowly shifting personalities over centuries of existence, that somewhere deep inside he would have sensed such dichotomy before now. He would have!
Which meant that they were ganging up on him for some crazy reason; getting together to make Piotr feel bad for not being around when the Lost were taken, and for meeting with Wendy behind their backs. This was simple, petty revenge and nothing more, and he was ashamed of them and for them that they would stoop to such lows. Lily especially. Such meanness was normally beneath her.
So long as he’d begun, he might as well finish the fight and say goodbye to these petty people who were supposed to be his friends. Piotr straightened and firmly said, “I’m worried about you, Elle. About all of you.”
“He is worried about me,” Elle sighed, and then laughed. “Petey the boy wonder here is worried ’bout little ol’ Belladona Tinker. Well, ain’t that the cat’s meow, folks?”
“I am,” Piotr said. “I’m disappointed. This joke has gone on long enough.”
She nodded, the picture of thoughtfulness. “I have one thing to say about that.”
Straightening to her full height, Elle slapped him.
“You worry about me and I’ll worry about everything else,” she snarled. “Maybe, just maybe, if you’d been really worried before, maybe you would’ve been here when we needed you. Isn’t it funny, Pete, how the one time you run off for more than a few days they just magically appear and take us out? Like they knew one of our best fighters was gone!”
“Yeah,” James chimed in.
“Or,” Elle said, gaining steam, “maybe if you hadn’t had your head down in your pants and your hands down hers, Specs and Dora would be a little more here and a little less gone!”
Flabbergasted, Piotr could only open and close his mouth, jaw gaping like a fish. His hand drifted to his cheek, examined the heat there, the sting and momentary swelling where her palm had cracked against his cheekbone. Then Piotr grew angry.
“Ej! Smotret’ nyzhno! Listen to me, you—you arrogant bigmouth,” he growled, hands clenching into fists. “Wendy isn’t like that. She’s great! She’s fantastic! And unlike some of the people I know, she likes me for who I actually am, not who I’m apparently supposed to be. Or was. Or whatever! And as for Dora—”
“Elle, Piotr, stop,” Lily said reproachfully. She stood, shifting herself once again between Elle and Piotr, and shot James a hard glance for not stepping forward with her or stopping the fight earlier. “This talk is going nowhere. You are thunder booming in the distance. Neither of you is thinking straight and you’re only hurting yourselves.”
“Da, that’s obvious,” Piotr said, stepping back. “Wendy’s waiting outside. I think I’ve heard all I need to in here.”
“If this girl’s on the level, then she oughta prove it,” Elle called as Piotr stormed away. “She oughta step up and pull her weight a little more; maybe do some real business instead of just bumping off a Walker here and there. If she’s all fired up about duty and doin’ her job then she ought to go take care of the White Lady herself instead of pickin’ on ghosts like us. If you weren’t so goofy over this dame, you’d see that.”
“And if you had any faith in me, you’d trust me to know when someone’s a good person or not,” Piotr yelled over his shoulder. He paused at the door, hand pressed against the thick wood, and glanced back. They stood in a line in the far archway, Lily and Elle on either side of James like slim bookends leaning against one wide and battered book. The gloom loomed behind them.
“I’ll be back,” Piotr added, relenting at the sight of Lily’s mouth tucked in at the corners and Elle’s wide and watering eyes. “With Dora and the others. I promise.”
“You’re going to get yourself bumped off,” Elle said, clear and low, as he began leaning toward the door. “Soon’s you let your guard down. I’d lay a million clams on it. Two mil.”
For old time’s sake Piotr smiled; the expression felt brittle on his face; he half-expected the smile to crack and sift to dust before he could flee the building. “I’ll keep that in mind, Elle,” he called over his shoulder as he stepped through and back onto the busy and sweltering street. “Take care. Dasvidania.”
Picking his way through the crowd, Piotr expected to find Wendy still sitting on the bench with her book in her hands, but the bench was empty save for Wendy’s battered paperback. The wind ruffled the cover back, exposing dog-eared pages and filling Piotr with a sense of foreboding. He glanced left and right, seeking some sign of her, but the sun was high in the sky and the crowd was thick with holiday shoppers using the narrow side street as a shortcut to more fashionable places to be. Wendy was nowhere to be seen.
Tucking himself between the bench and a trashcan, Piotr stood in the small pocket of safety and stared at the crowd eddying by. The heat was immense, but after spending the previous night basking near Wendy’s flame, it was almost bearable. At a loss for what to do or where to go, Piotr closed his eyes and turned in place, arms spread wide. Thanks to his night with Wendy, he could feel pressure as his right wrist slid through the top of the trashcan, could nearly sense the chill of the day in the living world on his skin.
When Piotr opened his eyes the flawless sky flickered above him—grey-blue-grey—and the hazy, indistinct shapes of the real buildings solidified for one brief moment, leaving Piotr awash with vertigo at the shifting, melting world around him. Not far away, only a few miles south, the blackened ghostly remains of the Palace Hotel winked out of existence, stuttered, and returned with the wash of grey sky above. There was an ephemeral glitter, barely seen above the hulks of wood and stone, and a short flash of fierce shining light.
There. Wendy had gone in that direction.
Taking his time, Piotr gauged the crowd and the buildings around him. Most were stores full of trinkets: stepping through the walls and cutting through the buildings would be useless this time of year, every shop was stuffed with holiday shoppers and he could easily be burned by some bargain-hunting biddy diving through him for the last knickknack on a shelf.
No, he decided, the streets were safer.
Leaving the narrow pocket of safety he’d found proved easier said than done. Piotr had to wait until a hole appeared in the crowd, a six-foot space between a gaggle of giggling teenage girls and a trio of boys who hung slightly back, checking them out from behind.
Blessing his luck, Piotr stepped into this gap and traveled in relative safety most of the way to the light rail. Once there, avoiding the pulse of the crowds shuffling on and off the train, Piotr phased into a corner and prayed no one would sit where he was standing. He was lucky, the trip was short and most of the living around him were too hyped up on the season of cheer to pay much attention to the pocket of icy air that hung in the corner of the car. Any that approached were repulsed by the chill and soon, despite the crowding on the train, only Piotr’s corner was free; the living sat shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, but no one was willing to situate themselves in his frigid corner.
The light rail was swift and Market Street approached in no time at all. Piotr waited to disembark until all the living had done so before him. It was still crowded and busy here, but it was a different sort of crowded. Market Street sat near the hustle and bustle of downtown San Francisco, only a short distance away from skyscrapers crawling with important businessmen and rich gallerias. North Beach and Union Square were close but still a bit apart; nothing for someone like Piotr who was accustomed to walking, but far enough distant that most of the living preferred locomotion other than their feet to get them from point A to point B. Those who did walk were far less hurried; they milled about and enjoyed the day, tipping their faces up to the broad expanse of sky and sipping flavored drinks out of steaming paper cups. Their relaxed speed allowed Piotr the opportunity to bob and weave among them, following the sweet siren song he could now hear faintly in the distance, calling him.
Piotr found the Lightbringer on Kearny Street, reaping half a dozen Walkers in the shadow of the Telesis Tower. Though he itched to help, Piotr knew now to keep his distance, and instead settled within watching range but far enough away that he wasn’t tempted to drift forward and join the Walkers on their journey into the Light.
The wind picked up her voice, tossed it so she sounded near. “Where are they?” Piotr’s stomach clenched—Wendy was asking about the Lost!
Drifting as close as he dared, observing her, Piotr’s eyesight stuttered strangely again, stripping the ghosts from the scene and showing him the world as Wendy must see it, all angles and glass and hard metal stretching to the sky. In the Never, the Telesis Tower was a tall but flimsy structure, growing more stable as the years of accumulated career-oriented passion within its walls drifted higher, but still relatively fragile in the grand scheme of things. In the living world the Tower was a monstrous beast of a building, wide and tall, a peer of the realm amidst other, older structures. Piotr rubbed his eyes and the Tower he knew returned, shaped of forgotten hopes and dreams, wispy and fragile and new.
Despite himself, faced with the sight of the Tower alternately solidifying and fading before his very eyes, Piotr thought of Elle’s recent accusations and Lily’s lies. They claimed he’d been changing again, always changing, his memories flaking away and leaving him something new and not necessarily better. What if their claims hadn’t been false? What if they’d been telling the truth? This bizarre double vision was certainly something he’d never encountered before, not even in rumor.
What if he was truly changing?
“Idiot,” he muttered under his breath, shoving the traitorous thought away. “They got under your skin. Whatever this is,” he glanced around and winced as the world took on a realistic edge for a fleeting second, “is just some sort of residue from being with Wendy. That’s all.” But, his mind whispered, what if it’s not?
Lost in his thoughts, Piotr didn’t notice the battle end, and when Wendy, shed of the Light, touched his arm, Piotr jumped and stumbled back, hand pressed to chest and eyes wild. “You scared me! Give a man some warning!”
“Sorry,” Wendy apologized, tucking her hands behind her back and hunching her shoulders slightly. “I didn’t mean to. I thought you saw me coming.”
“I did not,” Piotr said, forcing himself to take a deep and calming breath. “My fault.”
Chuckling nervously, Piotr drew close and hugged her, marveling at the wash of sensation that drowned the initial sting of her touch. Wendy tucked her curls beneath his chin and wrapped her arms around his waist, ignoring the momentary steam that billowed around them. They were tucked off the street away from prying eyes, though to the casual passerby it might seem as if Wendy were stretching her arms oddly forward and perhaps popping her neck as she did so. Still, Wendy didn’t dare stay that way more than a few moments, lest her peculiar posture draw unwanted attention.
“Wendy? What is the matter?”
“It was rough going this time,” she admitted, releasing Piotr and stepping back. “You have no idea how much it hurts to hold off on a reap, but I got what we needed to know.”
“You were asking about the Lost, da?” Deciding that she had enough on her plate as it was, Piotr declined to mention the strange stuttering his vision had picked up.
“She’s at the Palace Hotel,” Wendy said. “The White Lady is holed up there with some Walkers for bodyguards, but no Lost. However, some are due to come in to be drained a few days from now, so we’ve got time to sort out a plan and see if the other Riders want to help.”
“About that—” Piotr began.
“Later,” Wendy said, pressing her palm to her midsection. “I’m so hungry I feel like I’m gonna puke! Reaping’s the best diet I’ve ever been on, I swear. I need some food, and fast. Come on, let’s go this way.”
As she talked Wendy reached into her bag and fumbled out a slim black headset that she tucked into her ear. A small blue light winked from one end. “I’ll look like a douchebag,” she explained, pulling her hair back and making sure the headset was visible to the casual passerby, “but that’s better than looking crazy.”
“I see,” Piotr agreed. Her fight with the Walkers had drained her somewhat; her face was pale, and dark rings circled under her eyes. “You didn’t wait for me.”
“I couldn’t. I planned to, but I saw a ghost who I thought was my mom. I went after her but she turned out to be just some Shade. I was about to turn back when that group of Walkers ran by and I had to follow them.” Wendy wiped her mouth and glanced sharply around, making sure there were no ghosts of any variety near enough to overhear their conversation. “It was so weird, Piotr, they were outright booking it! I’ve never seen a Walker run before. Have you?”
“They can run,” Piotr said slowly, taking time to think while he answered, “but they generally don’t. That’s why we call them Walkers, da? They walk, we ride.” He shook his head, chuckled. “Or we did, before cars.”
“Really?” Wendy chuckled, then pressed her hand to her mouth, looking green. “You know, I never even thought to ask why you all called yourselves that. So you, what, rode horses around all the time?”
“It was the easiest way to escape with a Lost. Riders still need to sleep, at least every now and then, and the Walkers—so far as we can tell, at least—don’t. So you’d pile your Lost into a wagon or a buggy and,” he mimed cracking a whip, “vamoose. It’d take them ages to catch up.”
Impressed, Wendy whistled under her breath. “And you didn’t have any problems finding transportation in the Never?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as all that. Wagons were easy to find, no issues there, but locating a dead horse that stayed in the Never was difficult.” He laughed, remembering, and took her hand in his as they began drifting slowly up the street and back toward the light rail. “Dogs are loyal, they hang around until their master dies. Cats like Jabber will hang about if they like a particular family member.”
“Is that why Jabber’s sticking around? He misses Mom?”
“Most likely. But horses? They were worth their weight in salvage; if you found one, you needed to hold on tight.”
“Servitude even when you’re dead,” Wendy mused. “Must have sucked to be a horse.”
“Of course not! We’d never force them and most were used to the work. They didn’t mind helping. They kept good conversation too, if a man didn’t have anyone else to talk with.”
“Animals talk in the Never?” Wendy gasped. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Like, with words and stuff?”
Piotr looked at Wendy strangely. “Da. Jabber’s never spoken to you before?”
“Uh, no. Not once. Has he spoken with you?”
Piotr nodded. “All the time. He’s very particular about how he’s petted. Behind the ears only.”
“Weird! I wonder why he’s never spoken to me?”
Shrugging, Piotr hid a grin. “Maybe he feels that you, being alive, couldn’t understand where he’s coming from?”
“Ha-ha, very funny. Okay, so if they can talk, could a horse, I don’t know, tell a knock-knock joke?”
“Not exactly,” Piotr drawled, looking at Wendy oddly, as if she’d suddenly grown a third eye or sprouted wings from her shoulder blades. “Words are an entirely human concept, Wendy. But the Never is different from the world you exist in. Things are far more free-flowing and open. Language exists, yes, but not exactly as you know it. Words aren’t always finite over here, they carry ideas straight to the heart.”
“So specific languages don’t really matter once you’re dead? You all can understand one another anyway? And get what horses and cats and whatnot are saying?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Piotr smiled. “I am Russian, da? When a concept is hard to express in English, I still speak my native tongue. The gist is passed on to the others but not the exact words. But they do understand.”
“So weird,” Wendy said. “I guess it’s just one of those things I’ll have to be dead to get. Piotr, you are blowing my mind over here,” Wendy laughed, shaking her head with disbelief. “When I get home I’m totally gonna sit down and see if Jabber will talk with me. But you! I still can’t believe that you had your very own Mr. Ed.”
Piotr frowned. “Mister who?”
“It was this old TV show? From the fifties?” Wendy licked her lips, feeling foolish, and shrugged. “You know, reruns? Nick at Night? No? It’s not important. You were probably too busy saving the Lost or whatever to pay attention to television in the fifties anyway.”
“I’m told the television set is an amazing invention,” Piotr said gravely. “However, most mechanical things, unless they are very, very simple, do not work in the Never. So I’ve never seen one that worked. The shells of television sets, certainly. Many people pour emotion daily into those boxes, the way they are doing with computers now, so more than a few show up on our side. But advanced machines rarely work for us. They turn on but there is just static.”
“But my calculator isn’t a simple machine. It’s got a computer chip in it, right?”
Piotr shrugged. “I do not know. I died before these computers were created. Perhaps it is simple enough in its own way?”
“Huh. Weird. Maybe it’s a combustion engine thing. I mean, I’ve always wondered why I saw only certain sorts of cars in the Never,” Wendy mused as they crossed the street with the light. She hung to the back of the pack of lunchtime businessmen so Piotr could avoid being bumped and burned. “Fancy cars mostly, BMWs, Porsches, Ferraris, and such. But they never moved.”
“They wouldn’t. Bicycles, skateboards, skates…simple machines to use and well-loved in general, especially by children. Any of them are real finds.” Piotr indicated a bike messenger, whizzing by at frightening speeds with a stack of red insulated sleeves strapped to the rack behind the seat. “See how that bike glows around the edges? When he finally throws it away it will most certainly come over. It’s well used and well loved.”
“So if you’ve got bikes lying around all over the place, why don’t the Walkers use them?”
Wendy stopped near a wheeled cart where a man was selling fragrant hot dogs. Piotr’s eyes twitched and the cartoons on the cart popped out at him, frantic yellows and reds that screamed across his retinas in a fury of painful color. Piotr turned away as Wendy purchased her lunch, forking over neatly folded bills for a cup of sloshing soda and a long dog oozing onions and relish. They walked across the street and she settled on a bench beside a pocket park, a tiny fountain birdbath festooned with thick fronds burbling merrily only ten feet away.
Piotr shrugged. “I don’t know everything there is to know about Walkers,” he tried to explain as Wendy bit into her lunch. A quartet of teenagers passed the small park, singing Deck the Halls in four-part harmony, unconcerned with the looks they were getting or the warm gust of wind blowing their hair off their faces and billowing the backs of their choir jackets nearly off their shoulders. “But I do know that when Walkers lose their life cord they lose most memories of what it’s like to be human. All they remember is what it’s like to feed.”
Wendy, still gazing after the fa-la-la-ing students, took another large bite of her lunch. “It still seems so weird,” she mumbled as she chewed, holding up one hand to cover her mouth. “What in the hell were half a dozen Walkers doing running through town, then? Especially these Walkers. They jumped a bus to get down here, Piotr. Phased right into one and sat at the back. I nearly gave myself a hernia racing to catch the dumb thing.”
“You are serious?” Stunned at this, Piotr struggled for words. For as long as he could remember the Walkers had struggled with the remnants of living society, preferring to live at the edges and avoid all mention and memory of who they’d once been. Walkers walked—that was what they did. They didn’t run and they most certainly didn’t catch buses to travel across town. The thought of them doing otherwise sent chills down Piotr’s spine. But…was he truly surprised? Really? Because he’d had an inkling about this already, hadn’t he? He’d sensed that something wasn’t quite right.
I knew there was something strange about those Walkers in the park yesterday, part of him triumphed. Walkers just don’t work in complex teams like that, strategizing their attacks. At least, they never did before.
“I bet it’s the White Lady,” Wendy said. She drank deeply of her soda, pressed fingers over her mouth, and burped behind her hand. “Excuse me,” she muttered. “Anyway, yeah, maybe the White Lady is teaching the Walkers all about technology on top of everything else.” Wendy wrinkled her nose in distaste. “And you saw their faces yesterday, right? More and more of those sorts of Walkers are showing up. You know, mutilated and stitched back together somehow. It looks really sick, if you ask me.”
“Specs said they were taking him to see the White Lady,” Piotr agreed. “That she had the ability to keep him from walking through walls somehow. What if she has some way of enhancing the Walkers around her, too? Not just mending their flesh, but their minds as well? What if she can make them remember how to use machinery? Or could reteach them?”
Wendy whistled. “That would be bad. Real bad. They could go anywhere then, not just hang around the cities.”
“We must stop her,” Piotr whispered. “Not just rescue the Lost, but stop the White Lady herself. Undo everything she’s done thus far. Maybe make the Walkers forget what she’s taught them. Start over from scratch.”
“I agree and I’m there with you, every step of the way,” Wendy said. “But the question is… how?”