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  Between Life and Death

  Book Three of the Between Life and Death Trilogy

  by Ann Christy

  Copyright © 2015 by Ann Christy

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, nor may it be stored in a database or private retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author, with the exception of brief quotations included in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and events appearing or described in this work are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental and the product of a fevered imagination.

  Dedication

  For Savanna.

  Dancing through the zombies,

  like they’re drops of spring rain.

  Nothing can catch

  our flying girl.

  Other Works by Ann Christy

  The Silo 49 Series

  Silo 49: Going Dark

  Silo 49: Deep Dark

  Silo 49: Dark Till Dawn

  Silo 49: Flying Season for the Mis-Recorded

  Novels

  Strikers

  The Between Life and Death Series

  The In-Betweener

  Forever Between

  Between Life and Death

  Short Works

  Yankari

  Anthologies with stories by Ann Christy

  Wool Gathering – A Charity Anthology

  Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

  The Robot Chronicles

  The Powers That Be: A Superhero Collection

  Today - A Sign of Things to Come

  “I’ll be damned,” I say, then correct myself. “I mean, I’ll be darned.”

  “Veronica, language,” says Matt.

  His tone is flat because he really doesn’t care about my language. But he does care if the kids pick up new and colorful words like that, so he says it. He especially cares when Gloria gets upset after hearing one of the kids use some of that language. He fears her waving wooden spoon as much as I do. I’ve never been swatted on the butt so often in my life.

  He reaches up and starts pulling off the copious amounts of duct tape holding the package onto the back of the welcome sign for our city. It’s got to be from the hospital, from Princeton and Violet. My heart is hammering in my chest just to see the bulky package. It contains more than a note with that much volume, but I can only hope it contains an answer. It might not.

  The ripping sound of the duct tape coming free from the metal is loud in the quiet world. The air is hot and still. Even the birds are quiet, hiding out in the shade while the sun bakes the land. It’s the hottest day I’ve ever experienced if the amount of sweat pouring off of me is any indicator. It almost feels like the air has become too thick for honest breaths.

  We’re pretty sure it’s well into September, and it should be cooling off in readiness for fall and the coming winter. Instead, we’re getting one last blast of killer heat. I polished off two big bottles of water biking out to the sign, and we started early, before the heat of the day really set in.

  “It’s like the tape is melting right to the sign!” Matt exclaims. As if to emphasize his statement, a strip of tape pulls away, leaving gooey remains of itself hanging after to fall like limp strands of taffy against the sun-heated metal.

  “Yeah, it’s hot. I get it. Just hurry,” I say, bouncing on my toes, my fingers itching to tear open the package.

  A sound finally breaks through my focus on the package. I turn to see a deader making its slow way toward us from the other side of the street. I start at the sight, because it’s horrific. This summer has not been kind to the remaining deaders. Whether it’s that the years are finally catching up with them or that the heat is overwhelming their nanite constellation’s capabilities for repair, I don’t know.

  Either way, they are gross. This one almost pegs out my gross-meter and I’ve seen enough to have a pretty wide scale.

  “Hhhhh,” the deader sounds out, its arms rising in little jerks as it gets closer. Given what I know now, I have to wonder if the person that this deader once was might still be inside that slimy, rotten shell. Maybe that person is in there, desperately trying to tell me something. In the end, it doesn’t matter because it’s a hot mess and I’m going to kill it one final time.

  I bring up the crossbow as Matt gives me a look over his shoulder. It’s a look that tells me to quit screwing around watching him and do my job. There’s no way to get a really good aim—I’m not Emily or Savannah, or even Gregory when it comes to that—so I don’t bother trying to sever the spine through the throat. Instead, I go for the lower half of the brain and hope for some luck.

  The thwang of the crossbow letting go of its snugly held bolt sends a little thrill through my chest, as it always does. It’s probably really unhealthy to feel that way, but self-defense is a victory and I’m not going to feel guilty about it.

  My bolt makes impact just beneath the eye socket and slides into the deader’s head all the way to the fletching. It’s a good shot and the deader loses control of its right side, jerking into overdrive and veering off course. That’s all the opening I need. I pull my hammer out of my belt holster and hurry over to bash its head in before it gets control back.

  The jerking is really random, so I sort of feel like I’m chasing a chicken around in a yard for a minute. After a few good hits, it finally falls to the ground and I can get down to business in earnest, but not before I hear Matt chuckling at our unintentional comedy.

  I look up at him between swings, an arc of yuck flinging off my hammer as I bring it up, and say, “Yeah, you try doing it in this heat.”

  He waves his hand in a motion that says, be my guest. The package hangs from his other hand, big and bulky and oh, so inviting. That makes me speed up my swings. With one last tap into a pile of pinkish-gray, spongy material that may or may not be brain, I jog over to the grassy strip—which is now nothing more than waist high brown stems—and drag my hammer head around in it enough to get most of the goo off.

  “Give it to me,” I demand, holding my hand out for the package.

  He whips it away from me and holds it up high. “Nope. Everyone gets to see it at the same time.”

  “Don’t be stupid. We need to leave a note for them to let them know we got whatever it is in good condition,” I say, making grabby motions with my fingers. That’s probably not true, of course. Whoever left this may have left it six days ago, since our last trip to the sign was last week. They’re long gone. No one is going to stick around by a sign in hundred-plus degree weather. Still, I say it and hope he buys it.

  He does. Matt frowns and says, “Oh, yeah. Duh.” He hands it over, though he looks decidedly reluctant to do so.

  I snatch the package, which earns me a look, and plop down at the edge of the tall weeds to rip open this long-awaited envelope. Almost every week since Charlie and I went to the hospital, got detained by psycho Doctor Reed for his breeding project, and then escaped with the help of Princeton and Violet, I’ve been coming here with hope swelling big inside my chest. And on every trip, I have that hope dashed to the ground like the deader I just killed when there was nothing there. Until today, that is.

  Princeton seemed so sure he could do something with the nanite program Emily’s mother created. But seeming sure is very different from actually getting the job done, and I’ve been carrying around these equal loads of hope and dread ever since. Now, there’
s a big package and a big package is a good thing. I think it is anyway.

  The envelope is one of those fibrous ones that are water resistant and also tear resistant, so I’m stretching it and struggling to get the seals open. Matt drops down beside me and rests a hand on the package, which serves to stop my frantic tugging.

  “Let me?” he asks.

  Matt isn’t as invested in all of this as I am, but he—like everyone else—has become a believer. When Charlie and I returned, there was a decided air of skepticism about what we said. It wasn’t as if they didn’t believe we got to the hospital, or doubted that we found people there. It was more like they doubted the solution could really have resided on a disconnected hard drive left by a dead woman in an out of the way warehouse.

  I think what they really found hard to believe was that all of this could end.

  But we brought back nanites that cured Emily’s brain cancer for the third time. Even though she died and then revived into an in-betweener, it cured her tumor. She’s still an in-betweener, but she isn’t like any in-betweener any of us have ever seen. So they believe, though cautiously, as if they can’t bear to invest themselves too deeply and have those hopes crushed underfoot.

  The package crinkles under my hands and I let it go so that he can open it. He flicks open his knife and slips the blade in at the flap, being careful of the contents. He doesn’t peek as the envelope separates, saving that moment of discovery for me. It’s such a nice thing to do that I smile at him and he winks.

  Matt hands the package back to me and I take a deep breath before finally looking inside.

  “Oh!” I say, when I see the contents.

  That grabs Matt’s attention and I can tell he’s itching to see for himself. “What?” he half-asks and half-demands.

  I slide the contents carefully out onto my lap. Inside a cocoon of bubble wrap—where did they get bubble wrap?—are the half-seen shapes of glass vials. I look up at Matt in excitement. We both know that can mean only one thing. A cure.

  Aside from that, there’s a pile of papers inside a plastic bag and a data stick. That’s it. But it’s enough.

  “Should we?” I ask. He knows I’m asking if we should read it all or wait for the others.

  “If we need to leave a response, we should know what we’re responding to. You were right about that,” he says.

  “I can’t sit here in this sun. It’s baking me like a turkey,” I say, wiping sweat from my face. It’s actually slimy feeling, like I’ve run out of water to sweat and my body is resorting to pushing out any other handy substances in desperation. Yeah, it’s that hot.

  Matt looks up at the edge of the city around us. There’s a strip of businesses on one side of the street, long since burnt out. The end unit seems intact, the dark marks of soot present, but not so thick that I can’t read the sign. It’s a dance studio, the pink profile of a ballet dancer still visible on the single pane of glass remaining in the window.

  “What about there?” I ask, pointing to the ballet dancer.

  He nods and hefts his crossbow, his expression already falling into the lines I associate with us having to clear a building. Matt is the hothead of our group, but he has a hatred of deaders that is almost pathological. Whereas everyone else goes grim when the task of clearing deaders comes along, Matt looks like he’s about to face the devil himself.

  Two burned deaders decorate the doorstep of the insurance agency next to the dance studio like a pair of ugly statues, both of them nothing but charcoal from the hips down. Unfortunately, their heads are still attached and one of them moves its jaws when we approach. It can’t move really, but I can’t stand the idea of it laying there for another few years, so I take out my hammer and try to demolish what’s left of its soot-darkened skull as quietly as I can.

  Matt takes a quick trip up the front side of the businesses, looking inside the partially opened structure for residents with his crossbow at the ready. He jogs back without loosing a bolt, so I’m guessing this place has lost its complement of deaders. But those businesses are wide open, doors gone and windows shattered, so I would have expected as much. The dance studio looks pretty sealed up, though. There’s a board over half of the front window—I’m assuming because it got broken early on—and the intact pane has that pretty pink dancer logo.

  After a long look through the dirty window to see if there’s any movement, I nod toward the door. Matt pulls the handle on the glass door like he’s pulling open the door to his own execution chamber. It’s locked, but I hear a faint jingle when he tugs at it. Matt must hear it too, because he peeks in and says, “Keys in the door.”

  That makes goose flesh break out all over me. Keys in the door on the inside can only mean one thing—that someone locked it from the inside and is probably still there.

  We both look around as one, searching for an alternate place to hole up out of the heat. It’s bad out here and the sun is like a furnace, so if we’re going to stay long enough to read what’s in that packet of papers, we have to find shade. There’s no other viable candidate that meets our requirements. The rest of the businesses are complete wrecks and wide open, sunlight streaming through the roofs. Out here at the juncture of our city and the next zip code, there aren’t a lot of choices. This is the only building. All the rest are weeds as tall as my waist, and I’m not roaming around inside those. It could be full of deaders.

  Matt shrugs with his eyebrows and I do it right back. We might as well go for it, but I’ll leave the final decision up to him. Everyone back at the warehouse knows we won’t be back until late and that we’ll wait out the heat of the day somewhere even if we don’t find anything.

  Last week we rode a few miles to the edge of downtown and waited in the bank where I once took shelter with Gloria. But the glass made it into a greenhouse. We would have been better off waiting outside in the building’s shadow.

  Plus, if this place has been closed for the entire time, there might be something inside we can take. I can’t imagine there’s a lot of food in a dance studio, but something else we might need could be in there.

  Matt sighs and pulls out his hammer, going to work prying off the board over the window while I travel around back and see if there’s a back door. There is, but it’s steel and locked up tight, and I see no other interesting points of entry. There’s a small frosted window, but it has bars over it and it’s not worth breaking the window just to get a peek inside.

  The noise Matt is making while prying off that board is ridiculously loud, a combination of cracking wood and the squeal of nails pulling free that advertises our presence. When I get back around front, I see Matt working while trying to keep watch, his head swiveling as he looks over first one shoulder and then the other.

  “Sorry,” I mouth, and take my place at his back. Nothing is coming toward us and I don’t hear the tell-tale scream of any in-betweeners that would indicate one has heard us. They don’t seem to be able to control that scream and it’s a great proximity alarm.

  And even the in-betweeners seem to be avoiding the heat this summer. During our runs over the past few months, all of us reported seeing little places under trees where the dirt had been scraped away, creating a depression like that made by dogs when they hunker down for the night.

  At first, we thought it was dogs doing it. That excited everyone and each of us eagerly kept our eyes peeled for any sight of one. But then Matt and Gregory came back one day all scratched up and said it was in-betweeners creating those little nests. They had walked right past one, huddled up and resting—perhaps even in a state resembling sleep. It was covered in broken, leafy branches, but popped right up and attacked when they passed.

  So, it wasn’t dogs after all. We keep a look out for those nests now that we know it’s where in-betweeners go to get away from the heat. It’s actually pretty smart and if I don’t find some shade soon, maybe I’ll go scrape out a nest for myself.

  The heavy piece of plywood comes free with a final loud snap, and Ma
tt catches it before it hits the ground. When he puts it aside, we both sniff at the boiling air that rolls out of the enclosed space, automatically checking for the scents of decay. It’s there, but old and faded, and the air has that musty quality I associate with a place long abandoned. It’s a combination of off-gassing paints and varnishes, insect and rodent activity, and something else I can’t put my finger on. I’ve tried to place it, but the only name I can put to it is stale. It’s the aroma of air left unbreathed too long.

  “I got nothing. You?” Matt asks, peering into the gloom at the rear of the studio where the sunlight doesn’t reach.

  “Nothing,” I confirm. There’s no indication of movement of any kind.

  We enter, stepping over the sill which has been very neatly cleared of broken glass, confirming for me that it happened early on in this whole affair. Even though this place is hot, it feels twenty degrees cooler the moment I step into the shade it offers. I give a sigh of relief that makes Matt turn and nod at me. He must feel it too.

  Dust motes disturbed from their long rest by the opening of the window float in the new currents of air. They’re almost sparkly. I try not to tell people of my more idiotic thoughts, and this one I’ve kept to myself, but I enjoy the way the dust looks. The whole world is covered in it—and soot, decay slime, and rodent turds—but I disturb dust on purpose just to watch it float around.

  Without television, I take my entertainment where I can find it.

  The dance floor isn’t huge, but Matt’s footprints reveal the golden hues of the wood beneath. My mom put me in dance class when I was little, but I was horrible and she eventually let me shift my efforts to something that suited me better. I was a bumbling ball of awkwardness on the dance floor, but I can swim like an eel. Seeing this floor and this little studio makes me nostalgic for my mother’s distracted form of quasi-parenting.

  I shake my head and take a few rapid steps to close the distance between Matt and I that my distraction has created. The appearance of the package has seriously upset my equilibrium. I’m happy, of course, but still. Some place deep inside me never expected there to be a response from the hospital, or if I got one, for it to tell me Emily’s mother didn’t have the answer after all.