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Chapter 36

I’m not much of a funeral person. While I’ve learned that funeral homes are nowhere near as haunted as you might expect them to be, the fact that I’m a high-level medium means I’m better off staying home. The bereaved flock to me, hoping to send their dearly departed one final message. And for whatever reason, when I tell people it doesn’t work that way, they think I’m just being a jerk.

But even though I’m more uncomfortable at funerals than most, it wasn’t like I could ditch Darnell’s service. Not only were we co-workers, and not only did we go to the same grammar school, but I’d watched the guy take his last breath. Maybe if just one or two of those things had been true, I could get away with skipping his wake. But with the trifecta in place, if I sat this one out, I really would be a jerk.

At least I didn’t have to worry about what to wear.

The crowd who’d come to see off Darnell Thompson was pretty much what you’d expect. A bunch of black-suited federal agents looking quietly grim, and an equal amount of exuberantly grieving family.

Accidents are hard on families. No time to prepare, and it leaves everyone confused and reeling. I’m not sure if Darnell himself was religious, but his family sure was—and they were keen on trotting out every last Bible verse they knew. It was during the fourth or fifth passage that someone slid into the chair beside me—and not because it was the only available seat.

Alisha looked really different in her Sunday best than she had in a white clean room suit. The fancy church hat was an especially nice touch.

The gangly teenage boy at her side could only be Kelvin. Holy smokes, he was just a few years older than Clayton and he was practically as tall as me. He was exactingly polite, though no doubt he’d rather be doing whatever it is kids these days got up to.

As the current reading concluded and yet another cousin took the stand, Alisha leaned toward me and said, “Look at you and Cargo Shorts in your matching suits. Now I’d finally take him seriously.”

I nodded. “He does clean up pretty good.”

The cousin stumbled his way through a particularly dry passage, and while he did, Alisha whispered, “I wasn’t sure I would get to thank you for everything you did. I tried looking you up. Spelled your name every way I could think of, but no Facebook, no Instagram—not even a LinkedIn page.”

“Guess I’m not very social.”

I don’t think she bought it. Alisha wasn’t born yesterday. “You’re a hard man to pin down—but I’m glad you were there when things got real. Even if you think my poltergeist was all in my head.”

Eventually, the marathon of inspirational readings drew to a close, and Laura Kim took the stand. She’d been working around the clock since lightning took the FPMP offline with 80% of the staff out of town. But she was The Fixer, and getting the place up and running again was right in her wheelhouse. Plus, I had the sneaking suspicion that Laura preferred picking up the pieces after a natural disaster to a silly scavenger hunt.

If you didn’t know Laura, you’d never suspect that she’d been up the last three days straight putting out administrative fires. Immaculately pressed in a charcoal gray suit, she tamped a couple of note cards on the podium, flipped through them, then set them face-down with a sigh and spoke from the heart.

“In this life, it’s rare to meet someone who truly understands the difference between right and wrong and chooses to stand firmly on the side of right—no matter the personal cost. Agent Thompson was that kind of man. He epitomized the type of bravery that makes you check your own moral compass and aspire to be better. Darnell leaves us with a legacy that extends far beyond the walls of our workplace…he leaves us with an example of what it means to be a true hero.”

People filtered up to kneel by the casket and pay their respects. I almost bailed—after all, I’d seen my share of his lifeless body by the flickering light of my flashlight. Amid the milling sea of black-suited coworkers, I probably could’ve gotten away with ditching, too. But I decided I might prefer to remember the cleaned-up, sanitized version of Darnell, and not the image I was currently carrying around, with him sprawled on the elevator bay floor with his eyes half-open while his repeater attacked the security door.

Darnell’s body looked good, I supposed. (That’s what everyone was saying about him, anyhow.) And planting myself on the kneeler in front of it with Jacob wasn’t too weird—even if I didn’t exactly pray. The casket, the flowers, everything was the best money could buy, since he’d died on active duty and Big Brother’s pockets were deep. But the poster propped up on the easel beside the coffin was distinctly homemade.

Photos—so many snapshots. There was Grillmaster Darnell at the barbecue. And Winter Darnell with a snowboard. And Son Darnell with some graying parents. Tons of candid shots, all of them filled with family and friends and evidence of a guy who did so much more than show up at his post, scan you with the naked machine, and hold your gun hostage. But the photo that drew me in the most was Preteen Darnell…standing there in a tracksuit the height of fashion a few decades ago, showing off a pair of red and white Air Jordans that must’ve been the envy of every kid on the block. He stood with his arms crossed, challenging the camera to find him anything less than cool. Even though he was wearing coke-bottle glasses.

“Darnell wore glasses?” I blurted out.

A few people turned to look, and one of the cousins made her way over. “Were the two of you close?” she asked.

“We had a lot in common,” I said. At least, I’d thought we had. Every photo of Darnell where he was any younger than Kelvin, he had on a huge pair of glasses.

His cousin saw where I was looking. “Darnell got contacts. And, once he was old enough, LASIK. Funny, isn’t it, how people change?”

“Ain’t that the truth?” I said, considering how Jacob used to think he was “just a Stiff.”

I stared at that poster for a while longer, scrutinizing all the childhood photos, trying hard to figure out why my memories of Darnell no longer fit. Because Memory Darnell hadn’t worn glasses. And maybe it was just my shoddy, swiss-cheese recollections. But something just wasn’t adding up.

“Vic,” Jacob said, low in my ear. “We need to go now. It’s time.”

Right. I didn’t have the luxury to stick around and piece my thoughts together. Laura had paused in the doorway, just long enough to turn back and give us a meaningful look, so I grabbed a prayer card and headed out to the car to meet her at HQ.

Still, on my way back uptown, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was just “off.” I turned around the prayer card in my hands, puzzling over what it might be, and then my gaze fell to his name: Darnell Isaiah Thompson.

Wait a sec…the kid I’d gone to school with was Darnell Tompkins. No wonder Grownup Darnell hadn’t recognized me.

With a sigh, I briefly considered looking up the original Darnell to see what had become of him. But he was probably better off without me bringing the scrutiny of the whole FPMP down on his shoulders, all for the sake of indulging my own random curiosity.

“Alisha’s son seemed like a good kid,” Jacob ventured.

“I have a feeling she puts up with zero crap from anyone, least of all him.” Judging by the silence that followed, I also had the feeling this conversation wasn’t really about Kelvin. Eventually, I said, “I’m sure we would both be plenty strict.”

“Maybe. But I think we need to admit that what we have—what we do—isn’t cut out for family life. We’re part of something bigger. And we can’t provide the stability, the safety, that a kid deserves.”

Or a dog, for that matter, though I figured I shouldn’t bring it up, just to be safe. “You’ve got no argument from me.” Heck, I never thought I’d have a normal life. So it’s not like I was disappointed.

Jacob reached across the console and grabbed my hand. “And, to be honest, I don’t want to share you. Not with anyone.”

I truly hoped he wasn’t buttering me up to get a dog.

We pulled into HQ and made our way down to the lab. It looked really different with the staff there and the lights on—though containment, I noted, was now sectioned off with orange traffic cones and a stern Authorized Personnel Only sign.

In the hall, Dr. K greeted us with his typical jovial Russian veneer. I supposed it was as good a professional mask as any. “I heard you had quite the adventure while I was gone. My lab may never be the same.”

Speaking of cleanup on Aisle 7… “What about Gordon Tertz? Is whatever’s left of him destined for a file cabinet in the bowels of the FPMP, or will he get a proper burial?”

“The situation is delicate—which I’m sure you understand. Mr. Tertz has a niece, and under other circumstances, we would offer to release the ashes to her—though they’ve never met, he has no estate, and no doubt she would just tell us to dispose of them anyway.”

But these weren’t other circumstances. And the FPMP couldn’t risk the chance of the niece starting to ask questions. Not in the age of the social media they so assiduously keep me away from.

Dr. K went on. “While research is, of course, the entire purpose of this laboratory—we must also consider the safety of our people…which recent events have made quite clear. Director Kim and I have decided that the risk of retaining the ashes outweighs the benefits.”

Jacob said, “So what did happen to his remains?”

“A minister who has performed certain discreet tasks for the Program has given the poor soul a proper goodbye. The final resting place is anonymous. But I’m told it is quite peaceful. If your report is anything to go by, I think Mr. Tertz would be pleased that his contribution eventually furthered the science of telekinesis.”

“How so?” I asked.

“This energy transference between light workers and TKs you theorized holds promise—”

Images of Camp Hell flooded my brain. It must have registered on my face.

“Don’t worry, Agent, we won’t call on you for more than just the occasional test. Between Bethany Roberts and Dr. Jibben, we have what we need.”

Hopefully, Bethany would still have time for the yoga. Not only was my white light more stable nowadays, but my sciatica hardly bugged me at all anymore.

By now, we’d made it to the incinerator room. On my normal rounds, I’d been there plenty of times before. I’d even seen the stuff slated to be burned. Used PPE. Retired test tubes. Dead plants. The FPMP goes through lots of consumables in its quest for knowledge, so there’s always a steady stream of stuff that needs disposing.

But somehow, it never occurred to me that I might’ve been personally acquainted with whatever was slated to be burned.

Laura was already waiting for us by the incinerator…along with a sheet-draped form shaped conspicuously like a body. Over the past few days, I’d thought of a million and one things I wanted to say to my boss, but what came out of my mouth was, “Seriously, Laura? You were gonna let me do my rounds without a word while she was just on the other side of the vault?”

If anyone had a worse track record with Jennifer Chance, it was Laura—whose finger, thanks to that psycho, had squeezed the trigger of the gun that killed Roger Burke.

It’s no small thing to take a life. Even one as despicable as Burke’s.

Laura looked particularly resigned. “When you reported two years ago that Dr. Chance’s spirit had been dealt with, I deemed that her body posed no threat. Was this not correct?”

“You know I’d never blow smoke about something like that. But a heads-up still would’ve been appreciated. In person, or not.”

The incinerator itself was as high tech as the rest of the lab (aside from the copier graveyard.) The hulking metal apparatus was set inside a shell of protective thermal bricks, and powerful ventilation hummed in the background.

Dr. K keyed an access code into a control panel on the wall and scanned his ID. “Everything is strictly cataloged for National,” he said. “I doubt anyone actually looks at the logs, but no doubt an algorithm would alert them if anything unusual had been disposed of.” He winked. “Lucky for us, the cleanup after the storm generated so much waste.”

He looked at me expectantly. So did Laura. And Jacob. And I realized I wasn’t just there for my own sense of closure.

I called on white light with a wince, fully expecting to have come through the poltergeist encounter as bruised on the inside as I was on the outside—but the mojo flowed clean and sure. I had my salt and my Florida Water spritzer in my pocket, but I didn’t need them. Two years ago, I hadn’t just nudged Chance through the veil—I’d escorted her there myself. And when Jacob peeled back the sheet to triple-check that she was gone, we found nothing more than a very mottled cadaver.

All the freezing and thawing had not been kind. The cranial incision was particularly ragged, and the corner of her mouth had sagged in a disgruntled frown. Unfortunately, it was quite possible that some techs in the staging department had constructed this corpse out of gelatin and 3D printing for the sake of making me think the body was well and truly gone.

As I pondered whether or not the cadaver was even real, Dr. K asked Laura, “Would you like to say a few parting words?”

She spared a disdainful glance at the body. “Burn in Hell.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

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