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At a little past midnight, the night was brisk and, besides the alternating beacons of red and blue from the fleet of police cruisers, utterly black as well. A thick envelope of clouds masked the countless stars beyond, and the air tasted of bitter Atlantic salt. Ranks of fog were marching in from the ocean, and billowy columns of vaporized air drifted skyward and disappeared into the heavy, autumn night from the growing crowd that was gathering to watch the police pull body bags from a beached ore ship about a fifty yards off shore.
Standing at the back of the crowd, Father Ian McConnell adjusted himself and hunkered down more into his full-length overcoat to keep from being chilled to the bone.
He felt the inner lining of his coat. The heavy, manila envelope that carried the ancient documents was stuffed securely into an inner pocket. He felt his front trouser pocket for the holy icon he’d found in the tunnel. Safe and sound.
With a growing animosity, he watched as one by one the dead were hauled from the vessel in Coast Guard boats and taken to the three ambulances that blocked the access road onto the beach.
Slivers of red and blue danced across the otherwise shadowed vessel, and even at that distance, it looked disproportionately out of place in its current surroundings. With thick tendrils of fog lapping at it from all sides, it looked like a metal ghost of the great ship Titanic had somehow washed ashore, and a white leviathan was reaching out with its long, sleek appendages to pull the vessel back to its grave in the abyss. In reality it was an iron ore hauler that had left Belfast five days earlier and was due in Boston but ended up on a rocky beach well south of its docking port.
Bits and pieces of crowd gossip were beginning to filter their way back to the priest. There were muffled gasps and tones of shock in the voices as the news traveled through the ranks of onlookers: all crew members were dead; no SOS had been reported; the captain was missing. All else said amongst the crowd was lost in the heavy autumn night.
As he continued to stare with more than just macabre interest out at the incapacitated ship, a chill of helplessness
ran down Father Ian’s back. He knew of only one thing, short of a natural disaster or crew dereliction, that could have put that ship where it now lay. But just the same, he had to be sure.
Police officers stood shoulder to shoulder to keep away the growing masses of curious, as six police officers and eight others in dark suits lugged gray bags passed them through the rocks and sand and stacked them into ambulances. Another of the suited gentlemen was talking to a well dressed Asian woman who had an entourage of TV camera men behind her setting about doing tasks, obviously preparing a live telecast.
With the equanimity of the many investigators that scurried around behind the barrier tape, he ducked under it and walked over to the back of one of the three ambulances that were positioned at the beach’s entrance.
A young police officer, no older than mid-twenties and thin as a stick, stood at the back of it. Before he got face to face with the officer, Ian made sure his priest’s collar was showing through his overcoat, and he groomed his damp red-blond hair back with his palms to make himself at least somewhat presentable.
“Hello, my name’s Father Ian McConnell,” he said, his Scottish lilt as thick as the night. He presented his hand to the policeman for a cordial shaking.
The officer didn’t returned the offertory and said, “Sorry Father, you can’t be over here.”
“Oh I understand, having t’do your police work and all, but it seems that there’s work here for me, too.”
The officer gave him a grimly sardonic smile. “I doubt any amount of praying’s gonna do these people any good.”
He furrowed his brow and eyed the young man. “You’re not Catholic, are you boy?”
“No I’m not, Father,” he said with a glare. “Kinda hard to have any faith when you see what I see day in and day out.”
He began watching with a macabre interest as some more bags were being deposited at the second of the three ambulances.
“Well, in the Catholic faith,” Ian continued, trying to reel back the man’s attention, “we have what’s called Last Rites. It’s too complicated t’go into, and I doubt
you're in the mood for a lesson in theology, but we believe it’s better late than never to administer these sacred rites. If you’ll just give me a wee minute or two--”
“Sorry, Father. I said no dice,” the young policeman cut in, still eyeing the other cop who was now receiving instructions from the men who brought the body bags up from the Coast Guard boat. He turned his attention back to Ian. “You’ll have to get an okay from detective O’Brien before I could even consider it, and he’s definitely not in the mood for seeing priests right now. Now if you’ll please get back behind the line.” He made it a point with the last comment to step a little closer to Ian, trying to be intimidating, but he was dwarfed by Ian’s burly, six-foot-three frame. He probably figured that the badge and the .38 Special he was carrying more than made up for his size.
Ian put out his hands in a calming gesture, “Okay, okay. No need to fret. I won’t go botherin’ you about it again.”
Just then, the officer baby sitting the other ambulance yelled over to the young cop Ian was talking to. Three body bags lay a this feet. “Hey Stevens, come help me with these bags!”
He nodded then turned to Ian and said sternly, “Back behind the line, Father!”
Ian nodded obligingly and slowly started to walk away but as soon as the cop’s attention was focused on the other officer with the body bags, he crept back to the ambulance, looked around to make sure that no one was paying any attention to him, then he unzipped one of the four silver-gray bags that was laid out in the back.
The stench that rode up from the unzipped sack knotted his stomach forcing bile into his throat. This one had certainly been dead for at least a couple of days. He strained back the nausea and looked away momentarily to get a better grasp on his senses and to prepare himself for what he was about to look at.
Then slowly, he returned his gaze to the contents of the unzipped bag. Jellified blood was everywhere, on everything, making it hard to distinguish whether the corpse underneath was Caucasian or otherwise. The head was barely attached to the upper body which in turn was barely attached to the lower. Abdominal contents lay everywhere. The dead man’s one eye stared up at Ian in unblinking accusation, the other socket empty save a congealing pool of red-brown blood, and his face was locked into an eternally disfigured scream.
With a shake in his hand that he couldn’t absolutely attribute to the chilly evening, Ian quickly zipped the bag back up as he looked around warily. The two police officers were putting the last bag into the ambulance.
He made a hasty sign of the cross over the remains and mumbled some Latin under his breath then quickly seeped back into the obscurity of the fog before the young officer noticed that he had not heeded his warning.
Ian adjusted his coat one more time as he turned right at the front of the ambulance and headed down a slightly sloped street dotted with the fog-hazed glow of street lights. His shadow disappeared in the darkness between two of their yellow-white cones.
There was no more time to waste. It was here, and he had to find the Walkers before it did.
4:00 AM that morning on the outskirts of Boston
Walter Lemming lived below the over-pass of a highway a few miles south of the toll road to the Massachusetts Turnpike. He only lived there during the summer months, seeking more warmth in the inner-city shelters only when the nights got to be too frigid to endure. He figured that certainty wouldn’t happen for a few more weeks yet.
He rose from the angled concrete and stretched his aching back. After ridding himself of all his kinks, Walter folded his mildewed comforter into a neat square. Plumes of crystalline suspirations ascended to the cement ceiling above him, and seeing his breath made him shiver. He was getting cold outside his covers.
Once his blanket had been taken care of, he then put his wind-up Westinghouse clock with glow-in-the-dark numbers into one of four brown, grocery store bags. From another, he pulled a tattered gray sweater and a bright-blue knit cap and put these on. Setting about his early-morning tasks soon made him toasty once more.
After slipping on his holey sneakers and putting his pillow (an old chair cushion) into another of the bags, he set all four grocery bags way up into a crevasse at the top the under-pass. The grocery cart he called his mobile home he pushed into the deeper shadows where the street lights could not reach. Even in the deadness of night, before dawn chased away the darkness and brought life to that concrete and steel tunnel, he still feared that he’d lose what few cherished things he had left on this earth.
Finally, he set out on his ritual excursion through the old Presbyterian Cemetery and across a small field laced with old, junk cars of one sort or another to the back of a twenty-four hour truck stop. It was breakfast time.
The third shift cook, Pete Glavine, always left food out for him. No scraps either. Good stuff: scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, sausage, fruits from the salad bar, hot coffee, a can of soda every now and then. Sure, it wasn’t exactly hot off the grill, but it was still good food.
As he climbed over a portion of trampled fence into the cemetery, his stomach began to growl at the thought of the feast which would no doubt be waiting for him when he arrived. He was a great guy, that Petey.
Once Walter had been a proud, middle-aged man with an impeccable appearance: well-groomed jet-black hair, dark eyes full of vive, teeth polished to a mirror shine, masculine tan, tailored suits, nice cars, plush home. Totally upper crust. At least that’s what he’d been told.
Now he was withered, pale, dirty, balding and broke--with cataracts. It’s amazing what ten years can do to a person. It had been ten years, hadn’t it? He couldn’t remember, exactly. Couldn’t remember much of anything anymore, which is why he ended up where he was.
He’d made a lot of money doing something he could no longer recall. The doctors had even told him that he’d had a wife, but he did remember that no one had come to visit him after being transferred from the hospital to the mental care facility. The doctors had told him he’d had a . . . what was it? A brain tumor of one sort or another. They’d cured him, but at a price. The price was partial short- and long-term memory loss with a propensity for excessive and over-exaggerated blinking. Better than dying? He didn’t know.
Soon, all that money he didn’t remember having along with the wife he might have remembered if she’d just visited simply vanished. He was
alone, and that was how he would stay to this day.
Above and to his left, a lone car whistled along the highway. Its subdued image in the blanket of night and fog along with a vague luminosity cast from its headlights reminded Walter of a solitary carriage making its way across a lonely moor.
He stopped to watch it, then continued his trek across the field of dead.
Most people would be afraid to walk in a graveyard at night. Most of his fellow street-walkers were terrified to do such a deed. He figured he probably should be too, but he couldn’t remember why you were supposed to be afraid. The grave markers represented dead people, but they were just that--dead. He at least did know that dead people can’t hurt you.
A night wind disturbed the trees and scattered withered leaves along the narrow road that meandered the necropolis. Their dry rustling as they scooted across the macadam and brushed against the marble tombstones on either side of him sent a chill squirming down his back. Or was the chill simply from a stray gust creeping down his neck-line? He wasn’t certain.
Walter stopped and adjusted himself in his too-big sweater and pulled his hands into its sleeves, reminding himself that there was nothing to be afraid of. Everybody there was dead. Everybody but him, of course. And besides, he was hungry.
A faint smell of grease, carried on the night-wind, came to his nose which warmed him once again, and he resumed his walk to breakfast which was still two-hundred yards off.
A homeless person’s entire day seemed to revolve around where the next meal was coming from: searching through dumpsters, begging for table scraps outside restaurants, asking for change for a cup of coffee--usually then spent on a warm, comforting fifth instead when enough was saved. But Walter rarely gave it a second thought and never had to employ such tactics. Since befriending Petey, he never seemed to go without food and drink. Plus most street-people didn’t live this far away from the guaranteed food and shelter of the inner-city, so he had the entire underpass as well as all the food from the truck stop all to himself. Even as a vagabond, he still must have been considered upper-crust.
In front of him a small, diffuse globe of the mist-shrouded moon hung below a gnarly, bare tree branch protruding out over the macadam like the remnants of a spirit being hung for its transgressions. The breeze continued to purr in his ears for a while as he pondered his morning meal, then as suddenly as the wind came to life, it ceased.
But something still moved. Something behind him. Something surreptitious.
He turned quickly and stared into the sepulchral darkness but saw nothing.
The movement again, this time beside him maybe twenty yards away. Not everybody in the graveyard was dead, apparently.
Walter quickened his pace to a trot and tried to keep his mind more on the food he’d be eating in a few minutes than on the possibility of a dead person walking the cemetery somewhere in the blackness around him.
Could dead people even come back to life? He didn’t think so, but more and more he could not properly rely on his memory for the truths of life normal people of the world took for granted. Suddenly, he felt more like a child than a man of—however old he was.
He quickly walked past two intersecting roads with only one more cross-road to traverse before coming to the fence that separated the cemetery from the junk-car field.
More rustling--no, no, footsteps, no longer secretive in their gate but bold, defiant. Something wanted Walter to know that he wasn’t alone.
He knew. He no longer trotted but ran full tilt.
The stalker gave chase.
Walter figured either he was slow or his pursuer was very fast, because he could hear its strides on the pavement behind him; two or three to every one of his. His heart pounded in his ears, and his chest burned from the cold air.
Who was chasing him? Why were they chasing him? He was a street-walker. He had no watch, no jewels, no wallet with money and credit cards. He used to but no longer. He had nothing worth having, nothing worth killing for . . . except Petey’s food.
That’s it! Some other street-walker had found out about his food source and now wanted it for himself. Self-preservation was more than enough reason to kill. Though he really didn’t want to, Walter figured he could share if it meant not being beat to death by a tire iron or two-by-four, but most homeless shared nothing that was uniquely theirs.
Footsteps pounded like thunder behind him, closing in as fast a shark to the scent of blood. They sounded peculiar, not like regular footsteps. Somehow strangely different, partly because they seemed so fast but more because they didn’t sound like they were being made by shoes at all but by something else. Something odd.
As he ran he yelled out over his shoulder, “I got food! Real good food! Lots of it, every night! I’ll share it if you don’t hurt me! Please! Pleeaasse!”
With that last cry, the footsteps ceased abruptly. The stalker either stopped pursuing or took to the grass. But if he tried to catch him through the grass it would be impossible to not run into tombstones. That didn’t make sense.
As much as he wanted to keep running, Walter had to stop to catch his breath. His legs felt like rubber and his chest burned with a cold fire. As he clutched at his sweater and gasped for air, he warily looked behind him. Sure enough, the road where he could see was empty, as barren of life as the coffins which lay beneath the cemetery’s surface.
Over his labored breaths wind once again stirred the dead leaves and soughed through the bare tree branches around him. Now they held a note of foreboding.
For some queer reason his pursuer just gave up the chase. Did they suddenly get an attack of conscience? Had they taken pity on his frail countenance? If they had then they certainly weren’t the street-people he knew, for those individuals didn’t car about the consequences of their actions. Only if what they did put a shelter over their head or put food in their bellies. Whatever the reason, he was thankful that his would-be assailant had a change of heart.
With more of an appetite now than he’d had in quite a while, Walter turned back around to continue on to Chez Petey’s--but he froze in terror. It was right in front of him. And from the look of it, Walter at last knew for certain that dead people must come back to life.
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