Psychopomp: A Novella (8 page)

The dusky light of a full moon filtered through haze cloaked our figures as we stole down the hill. The night-white asylum loomed above us, both watchful and unseeing. Gabriel had left his lab coat behind and carried two shovels. He strode ahead of me, relaxed and confident, purposeful but not eager. I trailed after him with quick steps to keep up, my feet skidding over the dry, sloping ground. My heart hammered in the back of my throat.

The worn headstones sprawled all around us, toppled and broken. There weren’t so many. Gabriel approached one and stuck the blade of one shovel into the ground. He handed the other to me.

I stuck it in next to his and we began to dig.

It wasn’t easy, not by far. The muscles of my forearms began to burn almost instantly. We dug and we dug, our shovels striking the earth and flinging dirt behind us in tiring, repetitive motions. Walls of earth rose around us. I gasped at the ache in my shoulders each time I raised my shovel. My teeth hurt from gritting them so hard. My eyes stung with tears of exhaustion.

Gabriel seemed disappointed by each hole we excavated. Only soft splinters of wood remained of the coffins, and nothing of the bodies that had been in them. Undeterred, Gabriel kept going. I threw tarps over the dirt mounds and wanted to cry out in frustration.

This was never going to end, this labor, this violation, this disinterment. We would spend forever here beneath the moon-glowing haze, just digging and digging, aching, sweating, dying.

Finally our shovels hit the rotting wood of a surprisingly solid coffin in what I thought would be the last grave we dug up. I uttered a strangled cry of relief and weird, mad joy. My fingers sprang open and the shovel clanged onto the coffin. I sagged back against the edge of the hole. Tough roots, no longer connected to any plant, poked out and snagged in my hair. Chunks of dirt tumbled over my shoulders. My legs ached.

“Let’s open it,” Gabriel said.

The lid sprang off in his hands, the latches long rusted away. He tossed it outside the hole and it cracked in half as it hit the ground. A soft smell of decay wafted out and vanished into the night air.

“Dios mío,” I whispered, staring down at the gray, skeleton-like figure. It looked like it was screaming in its bed of dirt and moldy satin.

“Just what I was looking for,” Gabriel muttered.

I shook my head, afraid I was going to throw up. “Get me out of here.”

He hoisted me up by the waist. I snatched at the ground, scrambling forward on my elbows as he pushed me up. I rolled away from the edge of the grave and came to my feet. Gabriel had done most of the work, but my hands still trembled with the effort of having repeatedly struck the shovel into the dry ground.

I ran, weaving on unsteady legs, blinking violently against the wind and tears. I didn’t see why he couldn’t just leave the dead alone in their resting places. He seemed to feel no remorse for unearthing a body. I wondered how many times he’d done this and why.

Back inside the apartment, I couldn’t sit down. Sobs heaved in my chest. I couldn’t stop thinking about Gabriel, down among the dust and graves.

Unable to stand the close walls, I burst outside and stood on the hill. I could see him down there, vague in the dark, tireless. The body must not have weighed much because he’d lifted it from the grave on his own. He’d climbed out and had started digging by another headstone. Piles of dirt surrounded him.

He spent the rest of the night out there, digging holes and lifting out whatever he found. I knew because I barely slept. Every couple of hours I stepped out into the quiet night to watch him. I would have watched all night, but my eyes grew heavy. After a while, I didn’t get back out of bed at all.

Gabriel was already awake when I got up the next day, if he’d ever gone to sleep. “Coffee?” he asked. His black pants were worn at the knee and the buttons of his shirt were done up wrong. His lank hair was pushed haphazardly back from his face, leaving his blue eyes brighter and more startling than usual. There was no trace of dirt beneath his fingernails.

“No thanks.” I lowered my eyes.

He chewed on his lower lip, his eyebrows tensed. “We have a big day today,” he said softly, almost furtively.

I didn’t ask why. It was morning, and it could have been any other morning. Last night could have been a dream.

Though I knew I should have after what I’d helped him do, I didn’t leave because I didn’t want to be alone. I still hadn’t learned to rely on myself, not for anything. I had placed myself in someone else’s power, like I’d always done, and it was drawing me under like the tide.

A man rose on the crest of the hill by the asylum. Gusts of wind whipped down toward me, so fierce I staggered backward. Dust fled from the hungry gales, stinging my eyes.

I burst into the morgue, heart pounding. The overhead light blazed starkly down on the mortician. “Someone’s here,” I said.

Gabriel had been distilling something in the sink. He turned and grabbed a cloth to wipe his hands. “It’ll be Ambassador Killering. He’s here for the dirt.”

I thought of all the mounds of dirt I’d covered with tarp to protect them from the wind. “Why would he want it?”

“I have no idea. He came by a while ago and asked for it. I said yes, and he invited me to the party. It was the excuse I needed to dig.” He blinked his black-lashed eyes at me and smiled. “Everything is fine.”

A firm knock echoed through the room. I scurried away toward the machine, feeling faint from the strength of my pulse.

“Good morning, Ambassador,” Gabriel said as he opened the door.

“Good morning,” the ambassador replied in a languid tone as Gabriel stepped outside and shut the door.

That voice.

No.

Suddenly I couldn’t breathe, and yet I breathed too quickly. The room became unfamiliar and my eyes couldn’t find any place to land. If I went to my bed, if I pulled the blanket over my head, I would be fine. Eventually the ambassador would leave, Gabriel would come back in, and we would eat together. Like every day.

But I had to know.

Gaining some control over myself, I went to the door and wrenched it open. I closed it behind me so the dust wouldn’t get in, even though it always managed to find a way. Then I walked around the building until I could see the graveyard and the line of three trucks, ready for the dirt. A loader attacked the piles and dumped bucketfuls into the backs of the trucks.

Gabriel and the ambassador walked down the slope side by side. From behind I could tell the ambassador was slim, and he held himself erect. His hair was dark.

I didn’t want to follow them. But I had to.

When they stopped at the edge of the graveyard to watch the workers, I caught up. I walked up beside Gabriel, who glanced at me. I looked at the ambassador, who wore the gray uniform of all ambassadors, black stripes on the collar marking his high position in the government.

“It’s more than enough,” he said to the mortician, nodding his approval.

Ambassador Killering was maybe in his early thirties, a few years older than Gabriel. He wore a pair of black gloves and held a handkerchief over his mouth. His dark hair was slicked back from his high, smooth forehead.

His eyes were yellow, like light through amber.

I knew him in an instant. He had, after all, promised we’d meet again.

My pulse thrummed and I averted my gaze before he could see me looking, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me from the plasma center. Afraid to retreat for fear he would notice me, I stood with my arms pressed against my sides.

I felt the weight of his cold, humorless eyes.

“Who is this?”

“Marlo, my assistant,” Gabriel supplied.

Risking a glance at the ambassador, I wished I hadn’t. His sharp, knowing gaze lingered on me, making me squirm. I knew who he was. I felt it in my bones. I saw it in his eyes, a certain emptiness telling of a lack of compassion. It was nearly the same thing I’d seen in Verm, though I’d never known it until meeting Gabriel, who wasn’t cruel at all.

“You… have such distinct eyes,” I said.

The ambassador blinked and turned his gaze back to the workers. “The color comes from a high concentration of lipochrome, and very little melanin. It’s unusual, though not quite as rare as blue eyes.”

I raced up the hill and closed myself inside the apartment until I heard all the trucks leave. I could breathe normally again. But he’d recognized me. I knew he had. And so the fear remained.

The road out of Rueville was old and uneven, the asphalt sectioned off by wide cracks. Nobody used roads like this anymore. But Gabriel had an old truck that ran on gas—the same one I’d seen from afar that day on the flats. It bounced over potholes and ridges, knocking us about as we sped toward Cizel. I braced my feet against the dash, half exhilarated, half panicked. Gabriel grinned with mad glee.

Both the side windows were broken and the wind tore into my air. The landscape ahead shimmered in the heat.

It didn’t take long to reach the city. As we came upon it, I could see the magnet roads, concrete and steel structures gracefully arcing over the buildings. The sun glinted dully off the low-profile cars as they zoomed over the highest points. The rail circled the edges and looped through the center, efficient and clean.

We had to stop at the edge since the roads down here were for walking or magnet cars, not this monstrosity he’d revealed from under a dust-covered tarp. The brakes squealed. A few people stared, not used to seeing ancient cars that ran on polluting fuel. Overhead, the slender roads crisscrossed the sky.

Gabriel handed me a vial of clear, slightly yellow liquid. He’d taken a steel box full of organs from the freezer back at the morgue and now hefted it under one arm. “Delivery time,” he said.

“Why do you do it?” I asked. I wiped at the sweat along my hairline and my fingers came away streaked with dirt. The vial in my pocket was cool against my leg.

“There’s a repository near here where human organs are cryogenically frozen and stored until they’re needed.”

“I didn’t know that. Are there a lot?”

“Oh, yes. Enough for everyone, now that we can store organs indefinitely. The government makes sure of that. There are hundreds of thousands of stockpiled organs, enough to save as many lives. More coming in every day. But, Marlo, who do you think benefits from that stock? Not the people in Marshwick or Rueville. Not me or you. People like us—we just get sick and die, and it’s inconsequential. There’s no money to be made from us. We can’t pay for compassion. We just have to hope someone hands it out for free.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I saw them. I used to work there.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Because I decided I would provide healthy, clean organs free of charge. And death, you see, is always a good business.”

I glanced at him skeptically. “You care that much?”

“I don’t have much empathy, if that’s what you’re asking. But I do try to do the right thing from time to time.”

Navigating the low roads angling between buildings, we came to a squat, dark structure full of narrow windows with no light shining behind them. At one time the glass door in front had worked automatically, but now it gaped open. I followed Gabriel inside, nervously eyeing the shadows. I didn’t think I’d ever stop looking for a yellow gaze among them.

We picked our way among fallen sections of ceiling and the remains of broken furniture. The stairwell was dark and stuffy. Six floors up, we came to a loft. Unlike the first floor, there was no debris scattered about. The floors had been swept clean, cloths secured over the windows. A stark light burned in the corner of one room, illuminating the handful of people lying on cots. Some were sleeping and some moaned softly. Their clothes hung limply, soaked with sweat.

“What is this?” I whispered.

“These people can’t just go to hospital,” Gabriel said. “They don’t have the credits for what they need. They have to come here for expensive transplants and other surgeries.”

Horrified, I glanced back at the room. Among the cots I saw several steel carts containing medical instruments.

A man approached us, his shadow stretching long across the floor. “Do you have it?” he asked in a clipped tone.

Gabriel handed the box to him. I expected him to receive some credits in return, but the man gave him nothing except a nod. Without so much as a glance at the people lying about the room, Gabriel swept around to leave.

“What was that?” I asked as we headed downstairs and crossed the lobby.

“I bring organs here every so often. It’s the reason I remove them in the first place.”

“And don’t you get anything out of it?”

“No.”

“Was he a doctor?” I asked, hurrying to keep up with his long strides. We exited the building and moved deeper into Cizel, away from where we’d left the truck. It was already getting dark.

“He used to be. I think he lost his license.”

“And now he helps people?”

“As much as he can. Not everyone is horrible, even though it seems like it sometimes.”

I fell a little bit in love with Gabriel as we walked. He gathered bodies for credits, but he gave away organs for free. He was strange and maybe a little insane, but under it all he was
good
.

And, I realized for the first time, completely dangerous.