Waking Lazarus Read Free

it was time to go home and tell his wife their son was dead.
    When Jude awoke, he didn’t move. Didn’t even open his eyes. He felt the crisp linen of a sheet pressed against his face, pressed against his whole body, and the sensation made him realize his clothes were missing. Buck-naked, as Mom always said when he popped out of the bathtub. And something was tied to his toe. A piece of string? What kind of game was that? Not one he liked, he decided.
    Where was he? He concentrated. He could remember doing something with his dad. Grocery store? Movie? Wait. Ice fishing. Yeah, ice fishing and . . . that was all his mind would give him right now. That, and a sense he couldn’t quite explain, something like the way he’d felt when Mom had dropped him off at kindergarten the first time. Yes, it was that: the feeling of missing —not missing Mom, exactly, but missing all the same—and it tasted like a mouthful of pennies.
    He stifled a gag, trying to swallow the awful taste of copper, and froze when he felt the sheet brushing his face. Yes. He was in a strange place. Maybe an unsafe place. He wanted to throw off the sheet, but he was afraid to move. He had spent many nights under the protective cover of a sheet in his own bed, hiding from the creaks and moans that blew through the farmhouse where they lived. Even now, he told himself that’s where he was: home in his own bed, huddled under his own sheet, just a few feet down the hall from Mom. Yet he knew this wasn’t his bed. The cold metal biting the bare skin of his back said as much.
    A sound came to him from the terrifying world on the other side of the sheet. A repeating sound in a steady pattern: click-click-click-click . Footsteps. Moving toward him. Jude closed his eyes again. No, this wasn’t his home, wasn’t his bedroom. And that meant the person walking across the floor wasn’t his mother.
    Maybe, if he stayed very still, he wouldn’t be seen. He held his breath and listened, feeling the dull beat of his own heart pounding in his head.
    Suddenly the sheet lifted from his face. He felt it but kept his eyes closed, not wanting to see whoever, or whatever, had come for him.
    Silence. No movement, no voice. After a few seconds, Jude ventured a peek, thinking he had perhaps imagined all of it. The harsh fluorescence of the hospital morgue’s lighting attacked his pupils, forcing him to squint against the glare.
    As his eyes adjusted, he saw a woman staring at him. Though he didn’t know the woman, her warm smile seemed . . . safe. He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. Instead, she simply held out her hand. He returned the smile and reached out, guided by a need to touch the offered hand. To make sure she was real.
    Jude Allman was back from the dead.

2
    BECOMING
Now
    The Hunter moved quickly, putting away the chloroform-soaked cloth while lifting the child’s limp body and rolling it into the black Dodge’s trunk.
    In precise terms, the Hunter was not human.
    Certainly the Hunter had once started as a human, but had progressed, evolved even, to a higher plane. Now the Hunter was something much more, a being of a higher order, unconstrained by human emotion.
    The Hunter had simply become .
    Of course, the Hunter still needed to interact with others; that’s what the Normal’s role was. The Normal presented a typical presence to other people, mixed in with them, made them believe it was one of them. Hi, how ya doin’? Nice day, ain’t it? How are the kids? These were the kind of pithy things the Normal had to say, the kind of blather lower beings disgorged in conversation. The Normal was good for that sort of thing, actually seemed to like idle chitchat occasionally. On some levels the Normal perhaps tried to ignore the existence of the Hunter, maybe even feared the Hunter’s roles. Stalking. Trapping. Killing.
    Not that the Hunter really liked killing. Killing was, in fact, the Hunter’s least favorite part. It had been enjoyable once, a very