Part 31 (1/2)

I showed him the pulse intercept.

”d.a.m.n,” is all Parker said. He looked at me. ”You'll have to decide what to do, Caleb. They want Jade taken down. Out.” His eyes searched mine.

That wasn't gonna happen.

”We're five miles out, Caleb,” Bry said, intuiting my thought processes, running a hand over his skull trim.

I looked at Clyde, then Tiff. ”Come here, we've got to save Jade.”

”What, like remote, Hart?” Jonesy asked.

I looked at him and nodded as Bry and Mia started up their respective cars to get to the Frazier house.

”We can do it together, Caleb,” Parker said.

”I'll raise every dead thing in Kent,” I said. My eyes bored into his.

”And I'll control them,” he responded.

With my power and his control, we'd stave off the mess that was tightening around Jade like a hangman's noose.

But I'd be using the dead again.

And they weren't a weapon of choice.

I'd made the decision long ago.

They were always a weapon to me.

Bry's car smelled like a noxious and poisonous cloud of fumes, choking us as we piled in the back.

Me, Parker, Tiff and Bry rode with Gramps in shotgun.

The zombies were en route. They were inhumanly strong. The ones we'd raised that were lifelike were just as fast. I tried not to think about the lone person that might see the zombies sprinting toward Valley Keys.

Parker, who had been my nemesis but a scant two years ago, had become a savior of sorts.

A relative. My mind put together that our shared AFTD was less coincidence and more a wedding of genetics than any of us could have realized. Clyde was no accidental raising but a genetic signature that had linked us. When my novice power had stroked the dead underneath the hallowed ground of Scenic Cemetery over two years ago on that fateful night, Clyde had answered.

Predestination.

Parker grasped my hand as Tiff took the other and my power sighed in an exhaustive gasp of intense relief in one tense burst. It made Jeffrey Parker seize in my grip and Tiff rolled her eyes up in her head.

I pushed everything I had toward the dead I thought would respond without hesitation.

As near to Jade as I could get them.

Skopamish Consciousness returned to the chief of the Skopamish like an arrow that had found its mark.

His eyes surged open as dirt filled the wetness therein.

Earth suffused his nose, his mouth... he could not see, breathe.

Yet, he lived.

Because not one, but two Masters called him from his place of rest.

The war cry had been issued as a terse battle alarm and he responded.

His body was torn from the ground and set upright by invisible strings of death, strung to his body from a great distance, the dirt fell away like brown clumps of rain.

He knew the taste of the call, he had felt it upon his tongue before.

It was the Master of Death. He had delivered him up for battle once more.

The call began to wash over him in a sickening cloak of life. The Chief of the Skopamish bowed underneath its power.

When he could finally stand, he looked at his body and found it whole. A pulse beat underneath the flesh at his throat. His warpaint lay bright against his coffee-colored skin, his feathers stood straight and true. He clenched his dominant hand around his knife hilt, and the muscles in his body reacted reflexively.

He opened his mouth and let the shrill war cry sound in the still air of dwellings that lay dark and unused.

He turned and watched as his brethren closed their mouths with a snap, the echo of their cry synchronized with his perfectly. Their tomahawks glinted savagely in the artificial light cast by strange poles which stood high above him, having captured small suns behind a hard surface which was clear like hardened water.

His eyes reflected black in the whitish blue lights cast by the LED street lights, the pulse-activation automated for commencement as night approached.

Twilight came and with it the connection of death and all that death entailed.

The Chief of the Skopamish moved toward the dwelling which housed a female of the tribe who was in danger.

This one had been in danger before. The white man did not honor the women of the tribe.

Honor could be taught.

The Chief was most glad to teach those lessons if needed.

They moved with purposeful stealth between houses that were tended without pride and reverence in accordance with nature.

The disrespect to his Mother Earth was a grinding insult upon his senses.

The Skopamish drove forward, the command thrummed through their brains in time to their heartbeats.

They beat strongly within their newly fas.h.i.+oned bodies.

”Your power is in harmony with mine,” Parker breathed out in the cramped confines of the car.

”Does it matter that we're related?”