Chapter 34
Get up, you worthless meat.
Alfie’s eyes shot open. A wave of searing pain crashed over him, but it began to recede almost immediately.
Those words lingered in his mind as he pushed himself up, sliding through the puddle of his own blood to prop his back against the wall.
His breathing evened out, slowing along with his heart as he discovered that his wounds had begun to clot.
He’d pressed a hand against one of the leaking holes in his body and somehow managed to keep the pressure there when he’d passed out.
“That’s a lotta blood,” he murmured, as if he’d needed someone to say it aloud.
Get up, the voice came again.
In his head.
He didn’t have the strength to ask if that was some sort of joke. There would be no getting up. Shot three times, bleeding, he’d be lucky if he ever managed to get up again. Odds were he’d be dead before sunset, maybe even before the next time the town’s church bells rang.
Worthless nothing. You heard me—
“Shut your mouth,” Alfie rasped.
The voice might be in his head, but he recognized it anyway.
Root, of course. The name felt ironic now.
The creature had planted its roots deep inside him, in his brain and bones.
With so much blood lost and so little strength to act, he found himself thinking more clearly, yet the monster’s influence still drove him. Even now, his muscles wanted to obey.
Up!
Alfie felt the command yank him up like a marionette.
As he slid himself up the wall, dragged to his feet by something unseen, the exertion pumped fresh bubbles of blood from his wounds.
Sweat beaded on his face, and he felt nauseous.
Despite his fury and disgust, his legs moved, then promptly collapsed beneath him.
He slid down the wall again, whimpering. Alfie had once mocked his twin brother, Joe, for the noises he’d made after the one time Joe had been shot. Now he understood, and he’d taken not one but three bullets.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he rasped.
In his mind, he felt Root release him. Useless trash.
Alfie felt the evil slither out of him, leaving its taint behind. He turned and vomited onto the floor. The strings were cut. Root’s influence had retreated.
He wept. The last time Alfie had cried had been in 1934.
He’d been thirteen years old, and both his legs had been broken when his mother’s boyfriend had pushed him out a fourth-floor window.
He’d always told himself the tears had not been born of pain but from anger and grief.
His broken legs hurt far less than the sight of what the bastard had done to his mother, and the way she’d forgiven him through a bleeding mouth and broken teeth.
Now, his tears were from relief. Dead or alive, he was free now, and that was all he’d wanted.
Root’s hijacking of his mind had left a filthy stain inside him that would remain always, but even that he could endure, as long as his mind and body were his own.
For as long as he had.
A voice issued from the gray shadows. “Alfie.”
He blinked, trembling from shock. “Who … I thought you were all dead.”
The police station had been so quiet. A telephone had rung and rung, and he could hear the rain on the roof and the way the building groaned against the wind, but there were no human sounds. Nobody left alive.
“Alfie.”
He narrowed his eyes. His vision had dimmed, and not only from the gray, rainy-day gloom. “Who the hell is that?”
But he knew the voice. In the gray, the man stood well over six feet tall. His orange curls and beard seemed to have their own illumination.
“You’re dead, Joe,” he said.
Joe Hannigan took a step nearer, or what appeared to be a step. His legs were not fully formed, just a coalescence of shadow. He smiled down at Alfie.
“One of us has to stick around. You have a lot more mischief to make in this life, Alfred. Hold on.”
The ghost took his hand. He inhaled sharply, catching the tobacco-and-ginger scent of Tabarome, the cologne Joe had always favored because legend claimed it as Humphrey Bogart’s favorite.
He felt a bit stronger then.
Footsteps and voices drifted in from the front of the police station. Wary, worried locals, about to stumble into a bloodbath. Everyone in the building was dead except for Alfie, or so he believed.
The ghost of Joe Hannigan sat on the floor opposite him, watching hopefully, an encouraging smile on his lips. He faded in and out, but Alfie felt Joe there even when only a trace of him lingered.
Alfie wondered if he might live.