I, Keveny - pt 24

Don't know how I knew it—it was kind of like the first time I saw the word 'renege'. I'd never spelled or read it before, but as soon as I saw it, I knew what it was.

 

"How'd that get in there?"

 

It clamped its mouth shut and stared at me. Low light trickled a window in as the sun began to burn at the horizon. We were back in the basement.

 

"Let's get out of here," I said and turned for the stairs. I wasn't more than five feet away from it when I felt pressure on my chest as if I'd been pushed or tugged by something. I looked at my old body and tried for the stairs again.

 

Another yank.

 

My body shuffled forward a couple steps and all of a sudden I could put my foot on the first step. I was tied to it before, but I was supposed to have more room than this. I thrust my leg up the next step. My body stumbled and fell over.

 

"Crap."

 

The rules had definitely changed. I went back to it and put a hand under its arm before thinking about it. It leaned on me for support, but that scary nowhere-thing didn't happen this time.

 

My mind drifted back to Sue. It had been ten years since I'd seen her last. Climbing up the stairs, supporting my own zombified corpse, I wasn't so sure I wanted to see her again. A decade ago she'd tried to kill me. I could only imagine she'd succeeded this time.

 

She'd been the girl of my dreams and at the time, my boss' daughter. She was sweet and demure and didn't mind a rough-edged lunkhead hanging off her. I'd always been afraid to approach her, for fear of reprisal from her father.

 

But he didn't mind. Well, not after someone shot him in the brain. The culprit turned out to be Sefra's twin sister, Sue. Sefra had asked me to capture her alive. That even if her sister had killed their father, she was the only family she had left and didn't want her killed. I quelled my own thirst for vengeance and eventually caught up with her. Sue had been insane for some time and when I fetched her for my love she'd almost carved my head off.

 

I'd spent the better part of a month recuperating in the hospital. But the groundwork had been laid; what I started, the police finished and Sue had been locked away forever. At least I'd thought so.

 

I grabbed the doorknob and it took on that rubbery feeling. No, I wasn't going to move anything solid.

 

"Door," I said and my body grabbed it and turned, swinging the door open.

 

It was quiet up here. And cold. The air raised goosebumps on my undead arms. Odd. That was a physiological response reserved for the living, so far as I assumed.

 

I'd figured how it worked, but not why. When Daniel and I had stepped off the porch we'd both been drawn back to my body. I resumed my original place—tethered to my dead body. But it seemed as if Daniel had been converted to fuel or something for it to run on. Perhaps that was what zombies truly fed on, souls. It was just too much to think about right now, plus the fact that if that were the case then I'd consumed the only friend I had left in either world.

 

It wasn't hard to figure where everyone had gone. A trail of blood led to the back door, a sprinkling of corpses here and there along the way. Madsen, Hinkley, Gary and Edrick (who I guessed wasn't as dead as he'd originally appeared). Good soldiers to a man, all felled because of her.

 

One way or the other, Sue was going to die by my hands.