The next day it was all over the local TV news. The boy who’d died in a tragic accident in a poorly maintained graveyard. When the medics had found Balthazar, they’d taken him to an emergency room at a good hospital. But it was full of civilian doctors. If they’d known to take him to a Sub Rosa clinic like Allegra’s, they might have been able to save him. But I didn’t want that.
I knew the moment Balthazar started crying that I was dead. No matter what he said after that, no matter what he promised or how much he pleaded, he’d never forgive me for seeing him so weak. He’d kill me the first chance he got. So I did the only thing I could do. I left him lying in the wet grass.
Balthazar was the first person I ever killed. I don’t like to think about it, so I work hard at not doing it. Sometimes I see his face on an opponent when I dream about the arena. I looked him up in Hell when I was Lucifer. Found him in Butcher Valley with the other killers. Turns out I wasn’t the first kid he’d come after. Still, remembering him on the ground bothers me, though not so much that I would have changed what I did.
I wonder sometimes if leaving Balthazar in a graveyard is why I’m tied so closely to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. A cemetery was Balthazar’s exit and my entrance into this world. Two fucked-up kids connected forever by a land of bones.
That’s why I hate cemeteries.
The Kill City Cemetery is in even worse shape than Golden Hills. Tombs are slapped together from collapsed concrete and drywall. A few graves were hacked into the floor, but most are just covered with debris. Mini burial mounds. Someone made crosses from old water pipes. Angels are tacked on some of the graves, torn from Valentine candy displays. A Star of David is crudely hacked out of an acoustic ceiling tile.
I pick up a Big Blue World snow globe from the floor and toss it at the nearest cross. It bounces off with a satisfying ping. I get up and tear the cross out of the grave, find another, and tear it out too.
“Stop that,” says a ghost.
“Fuck you, Jacob Marley.”
I bang the metal crosses together, shouting, “Hello. Hello. Hello.”
When I don’t hear anything I toss one of the crosses up and out of the ghost wall into the corridor above.
“Stop that,” screams one of the ghosts.
They swarm around me, pushing and shoving, trying to knock the second cross from my hand.
“Aw. You don’t like that? How about this?”
I push through them and pick up a piece of concrete with some rebar sticking from it. Using it like a sledgehammer, I bash one of the makeshift tombs to pieces.
“Stop him, someone.”
“Please.”
“He’s insane.”
A mummified body lies among the ruins of the tomb. I pick it up by the neck.
“Any of you ever see The Muppets? I loved that show. Let me see if I can do Kermit’s voice and work the mouth at the same time.”
“Stop. Please.”
“Why should I stop? You can only kill me so dead.”
I kick a plywood support from the side of another tomb. It leans to one side and slowly slides to the ground.
“Please. No more.”
“I’m going to pull every single body out of these graves. I figure I can make half of you into lawn gnomes and the other half into ventriloquist dummies. The tourists will love ’em, don’t you think?”
A spook screams in my face, “Do not desecrate our resting place.”
Before any of them can stop me, I pull Mason’s lighter and touch it to the corpse. It goes up like a torch in a Frankenstein movie.
“According to you assholes, this is my resting place too. If it is, I’m going to redecorate it any way I like.”
“Stop. You can go.”
I drop the burning body.
“What was that?”
“Please put out my corpse and we’ll let you go.”
I get one of the beanbag chairs and drop it on the body, smothering the flames.
“Okay. I put it out. How do I get out of here?”
“There’s one more thing you must do. Take our bodies with you so they can be buried in the earth.”
“Are you crazy? What are there, twenty or thirty of you? I can’t carry that many bodies.”
A poltergeist swoops down from the wall and flicks a knucklebone from one of the unearthed corpses at me.
“A single bone will do. One from each of us. Bury them in the ground somewhere. If you promise to do that, you can go.”
“I’m going to have to mess up your little garden even more to do it, you know.”
“Do what you have to, but please don’t be cruel when digging us up.”
“How am I supposed to carry all these bones with me?”
The poltergeist tosses something in my direction.
“Look down. There are shopping bags everywhere.”
It’s a thick plastic bag advertising a 50 percent opening weekend sale at Victoria’s Secret. Pictures of attractive women in panties and bras. I fill the bag with bones, the smallest ones I can find from each body. Yes. This is exactly how I wanted to spend tonight.
“So, what were you? Workers getting shops ready for the mall?”
“And some construction workers.”
“I was an OSHA inspector.”
The others laugh.
“That’s not funny,” says the inspector.
I shake the bag a few times to settle the bones.
“I think that’s it. Did I miss anyone?”
“No one who wants to go.”
“Good. Now point me to an exit.”
“No.” It’s a new voice. “He doesn’t go.”
“He’s alive. He’s an invader.”
“He has to die.”
“We had a deal,” I say.
“Not with us.”
Skeletal arms and bodies shoot up from the trash-covered floor. Grab on to my legs and the waistband of my pants. It’s jabbers. A whole pack of them. The meanest I’ve ever seen. Jabbers are just animated skeletons with a little connective tissue holding them together. They’re not very strong or solid, but I suddenly have dozens of hands trying to pull me down. A few more crawl completely out of the floor and pile onto my back. I’m covered in the stinking mummified remains of pissed-off clock punchers looking for some payback from the living.
I’m still weak from the Shoggots. The jabbers pull and push me down onto my hands and knees. I drop the bag of bones. They get my right hand under the floor debris. They want to pull me under and drown me in garbage. I relax and let them pull. Concentrate everything I have into my hand. The jabbers keep puling me down. I’m almost on my belly when I’m able to manifest the Gladius. I drag it from the ground, hacking through jabber bodies and sending a shower of burning trash all over the room. The jabbers back off fast. I swing the sword, ripping through their bones as the other ghosts and poltergeists dive-bomb them, driving them back underground. Another minute and it’s over. I let the Gladius go out and fall against the wet wall, panting and holding on to my gut. I think I’m bleeding again, but when am I not bleeding?
A poltergeist drags the bag of bones to me. I pick it up.
“Okay. Now. How the hell do I get out of here?”
“That, I’m afraid, is your problem. The ceiling collapsed over the door and there are no windows and no ladders down here.”
“Great. Can I get a small fire going?”
“Why?”
“So I can make a shadow. I can get out that way.”
“All right.”
I wrap some of the old clothes and paper around a pipe and pack it together tight. Using a cinder block as a stand, I stick my MacGyver torch on top and wait for it to catch. When it does, it puts out more smoke than light. But it’s enough. I know the corridor above me, so this should be easy. Right. Because everything’s been so easy down here. I step into the shadow and I’m out of the cemetery. Go through the Room and I’m back in the passage upstairs. I sit and pour the bones from the bag into my coat pockets. I slit the lining of my coat and drop in the handful that don’t fit. I stop and fill my lungs with air that doesn’t smell like an abandoned butcher shop.