Chapter 19

Drip.Drip.Drip.

“I need to go check a temperature gauge,” Jibben said.

Well, shit. Up until this point, I’d successfully avoided telling Jacob about Chance’s body. But now my time was up. “Agent Marks and I will take care of it,” I said.

“But—”

“It’s not like you can climb up on that step stool anymore, now—can you?”

Alisha rose as if she was getting ready to come with us, but when I said, “And you stay put,” in no uncertain terms, she settled back down. Not gladly, mind you. But she settled.

My light was thankfully steady when we stepped out into the hall, but my resolve wasn’t. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” I said with no small amount of chagrin as I cocked my head toward cold storage, “…but we know one of the occupants in there. A little too well.”

Jacob searched my eyes for meaning, hoping I wasn’t saying what he thought I was saying.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He turned away. “When did they send her back?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Recently. I just found out today.”

“Dr. Chance is here. And all this time, you’d just let me go along like nothing’s wrong—?”

“Hey.” I settled a hand on his shoulder. “Whatever’s in that vault isn’t her. It’s just a shell.”

Though I’ll admit, even having that particular shell within spitting distance was bad enough. Our last physical encounter with Jennifer Chance had her jerking around in her corpse while poor Jacob held it down. And whenever he woke with a start in the middle of the night, I’m pretty sure the dead body flailing in a tank of antiseptic liquid was exactly the scenario he was trying to escape.

I caught Jacob’s hand and gave it an earnest squeeze. “Power will be up again before you know it. Crews are hard at work even as we speak. Besides, think about how long it takes to thaw a freaking twenty-pound turkey.” Not to mention the horror show you slice into if you leave the giblet bag inside the cavity. We may never eat turkey again. “We’ll be fine. I promise.”

With a tug, Jacob pulled me up against him and cupped my face, running his thumb along my jaw. “Somehow, I manage to forget how brave you are.” Maybe brave, maybe stupid. “But then you remind me.”

Between the research lab, the basement and the thawing cadaver, this fucked up scenario had plenty of nightmare fuel for both of us, but losing our heads wouldn’t do anyone any good. “We both know Chance is beyond the veil—and we both know a dead body is just a dead body. Even on the off-chance her ghost should find her way back to her cadaver, I doubt she can take it very far—”

“Are you shitting me?”

We both whirled around, flashlight beam bouncing, to find Alisha lurking in the shadows. Then we caught the sound of Jibben desperately wheeling himself along behind her.

“Ma’am—” Jacob began….

Alisha was having none of it. “What in the hell do you people study in this lab? And if anyone says it’s classified, I will make you sorry you were ever born—”

Jibben said, “It is highly classified, but there’s protocol in place. You’d have to sign an extensive non-disclosure agreement….” He paused, out of breath from the one-legged scoot up the hall, then craned his neck around her to look to Jacob. “But it’s not my decision.”

No, it was the decision of the ranking agent.

Jacob wanted to keep her in the dark. I could tell by the set of his jaw. And, frankly, I understood. Big Brother doesn’t like anyone catching him with his pants down, and sucking someone into the FPMP machine was not a thing to be taken lightly. Once you were in on the secret, you could kiss your normal life goodbye. And the day might very well come when a couple of black-suited agents show up on your doorstep and make you disappear for your own “protection.”

But given the circumstances…. “Bring her in,” I told Jacob. “She’s stuck down here, same as us. She should know exactly what we’re up against.”

And if she was a fed, same as us…at least we could say we’d followed protocol.

“Okay, lemme get this straight,” Alisha said, once she’d signed away her future and heard our spiel. “Y’all believe in ghosts, and Agent Blue Eyes here is some kind of expert—but you still think I made up that poltergeist?”

I said, “It’s just that I’ve never—look, forget about your poltergeist for now. We have a real noise to worry about, and it’s coming from cold storage. So we’d better check it out.”

Alisha said, “So you got dead bodies in there—one of ’em you think might get up and walk its ass around—and your big plan is to open up the door and let the cold air out? Fool, you know the first rule when the electric goes off is to keep the fridge shut.”

Well, when she put it that way.

“What you need to do,” she went on, “is stuff a towel under that door to keep the cold air in, then put a chair under the doorknob so nothing gets out.”

We all stared down the dark hallway for a moment, then Jacob said, “Sounds like a solid plan to me.”

The door to cold storage, turns out, opened in—so, the chair idea wasn’t happening. But we crammed a spill mat across the threshold, just to be safe.

Alisha said, “So one of the people in there is the evil Dr. Chance who’s got y’all freaking out. Anyone else we need to worry about?”

“Evil is such a reductive—and inaccurate—term,” Jibben muttered, then said, “The other subjects are documented psychics who’ve voluntarily donated their bodies to science to further the research.”

“And what about the doctor?” Alisha asked. “Was her ‘donation’ voluntary?”

The awkward silence that followed her question was answer enough.

Alisha said, “And you’re worried about the ‘off-chance’ her ghost can find its way back to her dead body and come kill us all.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” I said.

Alisha looked at me, deadpan. “But it could.” She waved me off like she was fanning away a really bad smell. “I knew it. I knew it. Folks don’t hear even half the fucked-up shit the government’s doing.”

To be fair, I’ve only seen corpses move on a couple of occasions—so I’m pretty sure it hardly ever happens.

“So how do you keep a dead body from coming after you?” Alisha asked in all seriousness. “Like the movies? Shoot ’em in the head? Is that why you wanted your guns back?”

“It’s just protocol,” I said. “No one needs to shoot anyone.” And frankly, now that I gave it some thought, I wasn’t sure a head shot would even work. The last time Jennifer Chance reanimated, there was no blood in her veins, and she’d been dead so long that her nervous system couldn’t possibly have been firing. She was literally a hunk of meat.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say Alisha was a telepath…but she seemed to guess what I was thinking from nothing more than the look on my face.

She nodded once decisively, then said, “Well, if a shot in the head won’t kill ’em, y’all can just cut off their legs and slow ’em down.”

“No one is dismembering anything,” Jacob said, sounding like he’d just cut into a big bag of turkey guts. “We keep the door shut, and that’s that.”

Since we were actually discussing tactics from zombie films…too bad there wasn’t a handy armoire to drag in front of that door. Or maybe some random lumber to hammer haphazardly across the doorframe.

Then again, we’d all been stupid enough to go down in the basement. And everyone knows, those characters are the first ones to die.

Alisha nodded toward cold storage. “Are you sure those dead folks signed over their bodies on purpose?”

“Positive,” Jibben said. “The test subjects were fully aware of what they were doing. They were proud to leave a legacy—and they signed a plethora of legal forms stating they wished to be studied.”

I said, “At any rate, even if they did change their minds, I doubt they’d have the dexterity to…uh…” I registered the look of horror on everyone’s faces. “Never mind. No one’s coming back. And we all agree, the door stays shut.”

Alisha recovered first. “What if these folks aren’t the ones you gotta worry about, anyhow? Even if they soften up, they’re trapped in their vaults, right? But the stuff from Argus Institute is just piled in the middle of the room.”

Jacob said, “I thought Luther Hinman was your hero.”

“I never said that—I said I knew who he was and what he was all about. That doesn’t mean I think he was a saint. All those years people treated him like some kind of weirdo for studying telekinesis—and then once he’s dead, someone comes along and proves it’s all true. I don’t know about you, but if that was me, I’d be pretty salty. And then there were those rumors about his lab assistant. The way the guy was all PTSD from Nam. The way he suddenly disappeared and no one would give a straight answer about what happened to him.”

“Another episode of Psychic Mysteries?” Jibben asked.

Alisha narrowed her eyes. “No. YouTube.”

Jibben scoffed. “Then it must be true.”

Now, normally, I’d agree—with the lab manager’s sarcastic tone, that is, not that the wild internet speculation about some lab assistant held any water. As far as I was concerned, YouTube was only good for looking up recipes I had no intention of ever making, or maybe a quick chuckle when I wanted to watch random people fall down. The so-called exposés were nothing more than clickbait.

But then Alisha said, “The video was gone less than an hour after it went up. And the usual page you see when a video is taken wasn’t there. Just nothing. Nothing at all.”

Which sounded exactly like the type of thing the FPMP would do.

Attempting to steer the conversation away from the agency censorship that most definitely did happen, Jacob said, “We’re all on edge, but our original plan is still sound, and containment is the safest spot. Alisha, you and Dr. Jibben wait there. Agent Bayne and I will do another brief sweep of this level to assess the water situation and rejoin you in fifteen.”

I could tell Jacob was less worried about the leak than he was about the dead bodies that might be floating around, but he did a fantastic job of getting everyone on the same page—and out of my hair so I could do a perimeter check of the metaphysical kind.

The whole time we’d been arguing in the hall, my flashlight beam was steady as can be, so I was on board with the idea of doing just one more sweep. It was my job, after all: a job that had gone to shit—spectacularly—when the delivery showed up, the storm bore down, and my old pal Darnell met the wrong end of a lightning bolt.

As Jibben struggled to make a U-turn in his office chair, Alisha clambered past him and strode back to containment. Maybe she was exactly who she claimed to be. She didn’t seem to be fishing for classified information beyond what we’d volunteered. Though the tradecraft department taught me the best way to elicit information was by not pressing too hard, so….

A scream pierced the darkness—Alisha. Jacob shoved Jibben out of his way down a side hall, then took off to her rescue while Jibben spun around helplessly in his office chair. I was hot on Jacob’s heels, sucking down white light for all I was worth. I might not put much stock in YouTube, but I’d seen more than enough spirit action in this facility to take any ghostly threat seriously.

We caught up with Alisha running towards us, away from containment. She shoved past Jacob—and latched onto me.

“What is it?” I demanded, but Alisha was making noises that bordered on hyperventilation. A few wild gestures were all I could get out of her as she used me for a makeshift human shield. I crept around the corner and found Jacob standing there in the containment doorway with his phone held high and the flashlight app aimed into the room.

He looked puzzled.

“What the hell—what the hell?” Alisha babbled as I scanned the hall for anything dead, but there was no one there but Jacob. He turned to look at me, face grim, and cocked his head for me to join him in the doorway. Alisha was holding my clean suit so hard I could feel her shaking…but she followed.

Jacob made room for me to come look without brushing up against him and losing my white light. He wasn’t freaking out, but that didn’t mean anything. After all, if Jennifer Chance’s ghost had come back for a repeat performance, it’s not as if he’d be able to see her.

Alisha, though? Who knows.

Anyway, I braced myself for something bad...and found that in our absence, the contents of the file folder—clippings, notes, photos—had been scattered from one end of the room to the other.

Gooseflesh prickled my forearms as I swept my flashlight beam toward all four corners, floor to ceiling, triple-checking to make sure there was no one dead lying in wait.

Thankfully, all clear.

As Jibben caught up to us and Jacob filled him in, Alisha pressed her forehead into my back and said in a small, scared voice, “I don’t wanna split up—I wanna stay with you.”

If something screwy was going on, that was probably for the best.

Although…it was also entirely possible that Alisha had strewn those papers around herself and started screaming, and this whole damsel in distress thing was all just an act to get deeper into the lab.

I felt like a grade-A jerk even as that thought occurred to me. She was still shaking, and I could feel her tears soaking through the clean suit. Yet, a small part of me was still thinking, If our spies are good, National’s must be even better….

And then my flashlight flickered.