My Friends Are Dead People (29 page)

We weren’t meant to survive. . . .

“
Jesse,” I heard Katie
mutter. “I can’t . . . I can’t breathe . . . Jess–”

“
Please don’t hate me,
Oz,” I whimpered. “I know you hated me when I lost it, but . . .
but . . . you were only worried about me being . . .”
Something rebelled in me.
No!
. . .
You let Katie go.

I held my knees tighter and started rocking
back and forth, trying to clear my mind. The first thing I thought
about was Duma. And right away it felt like he was here beside me,
with his feline poise and mischievous cheer coursing through me. My
laser-sharp mind sped through the events of the past day, searching
coolly and methodically for a clue, a memory, a notion – anything
that would help me rescue Katie.

- A short dark boy wearing
striped overalls was staring at us from the street. –
No, not good
.

- “Come this way, you
two,” said Jacoby. “Much work to be done.” –
No, nothing there
.

- “What is a menala?” I heard myself
say.

“
Not so loud,” rang
Jacoby’s voice. “There are only three menalas living today.
–
No
.

- “He’s the reason for the
pumpkins,” said Katie. “He’s the most feared creature in Halloween
–
Wait. Is this it? Think, think,
think!

- I heard Katie’s voice again: “Because all
he has is a lantern, with a burning coal from the underworld given
to him by Satan. It lights his way through his darkness. A lit
turnip is a symbol of immortality. Irish children, long ago, would
sometimes see the glow moving across the hills. They would light up
carved turnips every Halloween to ward him off. And so Jack–”

- “What are tortics?”

“
The only halloweens who
have the guts to kill humans,” said Jacoby.

“
But they don’t get
caught? What about that bat . . .”

“
Soundrec? Not even four
weegals could stop a young tortic.” –
Not
good!

- Kala took four quick
breaths, held it, and then opened his mouth, letting out a puff of
hot air. The tortic’s face withered. –
No
use. I can’t conjure a smell!

- Cicil flinched,
frightened, as she heard our shoes splashing across the puddles.
She shuffled over skittishly, nearly tripping on her long pants.
–
No, she was just scared of
Jack!

- Katie and I eagerly
watched Lin’s stinky ball come to a stop exactly under the blackian
vampire and emit a trail of bubbly vapor, which coiled up her
stockings. Her face shriveled, and she shot out of her seat,
shrieking, “
Jack is
–” –
No smell!

- The tortic was absorbed
in something very frightening. He apprehensively sniffed the air.
–
No.

- “So, he only killed Kala? Not the tortics?
Why didn’t–”

“
He did,” said Jacoby.
“Five were killed.” –
There’s something
here. I know it.

- “He’s coming,” said a tortic. “He killed
all the yslas.”

- The foulest smell imaginable entered the
stadium. A witch’s scream set off a chaotic stampede.

- “
I don’t want to die!
” cried Meesi.
“
I don’t want to die!
” –
I found it!

- “Jack is here. We have
to get out of here before he kills us all–” Cosqué’s face twisted.
He braced himself against an intense pain. “
Jack is here!
”

Meesi grimaced at the
name. –
That’s it!

- I heard Katie’s words again: “He’s the
most feared creature in Halloween.”

“
JACK!” I screamed down
the dark tunnel, seeing Katie coughing and turning red.
“
I see Jack! No, don’t hurt me, Jack!
Please
–”

I stopped. The tortic had flipped around,
letting go of Katie right away. Even though he only saw me, he
ducked his head and fled.

Katie gave me a trembling smile as she
regained her breathing, and we started back up again, traveling
down the same path the tortic had just taken, the path that led to
the center of the mountain, where I knew Jack was.

Katie handed me the ripped jacket, and I
took it, a little surprised. The jacket was hardly wearable, but I
put it on anyway. I wanted to apologize to her for not helping her
sooner, but it wasn’t important. We had to find everyone else and
get them out of here.

Katie and I had no strength left to run or
jog. She rubbed her wet eyes as we dragged our feet down a rocky
path, looking with dread down the tunnel that seemed to never end
and jumping violently at every faraway sound.

I glanced at Katie’s watch.

11:55

“
Please don’t hurt her,” I
prayed quietly to myself inside a dark cave. “She never harmed
anyone–” We hit the ground as a huge crack split the cave in
two.

“
Jesse,” said Katie
softly, shielding her mouth and nose.

I smelled it, too. There was a new putrid
smell mixed with the one from before. It was hard to know where it
was coming from. The place was dark and foggy.

Katie fell.

“
Are you okay?” I asked,
helping her up.

“
Something tripped me,”
she said quietly.

We looked through the fog together and saw a
mangled corpse. The yslas’s arm was twisted out of place and had a
hole in it.

Katie shrieked, turning away. “Mí mamá . . .
Mí mamá had the same hole. Jack killed mí mamá–” She saw another
corpse with the same hole. As the fog began to clear up, we saw
more. We were standing in the middle of a sea of glowing yslas
corpses. Nearly all of them were grotesquely mutilated, with
cracked skulls, crushed bones, torn-off mandibles, distorted body
parts, and scorched skin.

Katie gasped as we stepped over another
corpse. “Oh, no.”

“
What?” I muttered,
turning around and following her stare up through the fog. Meesi’s
body was hanging in midair, bent backward in an unnatural
way.

“
N-not true,” I stuttered.
“Not again.”

I couldn’t look. An image of Kala flashed
before my eyes. I slowly knelt down, feeling sick. Why did everyone
have to be killed? Why these horrible deaths?

“
I shouldn’t have followed
the writing,” I uttered. “It’s my fault. Katie, it’s all my fault.
I wanted to come out on Halloween.”

Katie stumbled upon another tortured corpse.
It was the tortic we had fought in the tunnel. Its twisted body led
to three more dead tortics. All of them were wedged between two
boulders, and each one had the distinct hole through their
bodies.

The stench suddenly intensified to the point
where breathing became near impossible. Katie fell backwards with a
raspy shriek and frantically scuttled back to me. Her eyes were
desperately fixed on something in front of us. She wasn’t looking
at the tortics, Meesi, or any of the yslas, she was looking at
something else.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

PAST TWELVE
O
’CLOCK

Katie bumped into the crimson bones of an
yslas, still emitting yellowish fumes. I stood behind her, shaking
uncontrollably. I didn’t know if it was because I was scared or
because of the bone-chilling fog flowing through the vast darkness
of the cave. But there was one dark spot out of reach of the yslas’
glow, which filled me with paralyzing terror. The fog didn’t dare
enter it. In that dark spot, someone or something was breathing
heavily.

Katie sat up against my leg as her watch
snapped off her wrist and floated toward the dark spot.

11:59 PM

Wishing so much for one more tick, I started
counting my breaths, but it just wouldn’t come. Katie pressed up
against my leg as the inhuman breathing stopped and the watch hit
the floor. . . . Was Halloween over? All I had to do was look down
at the watch. Instead, I peered back into the darkness, thinking I
had glimpsed green skin and a dot of green light…

And then a haunted hollow voice, unlike
anything I had ever heard before, spoke from the darkness.

“
W-h-o a-r-e
y-o-u?
”

I sprang back and tripped over an yslas
corpse. Katie crawled back to me on her hands and knees. Our breath
quickened in unison as we sat side by side, watching all the fog
come together and swirl around us.

As the watch finally ticked, there was a
great change in the atmosphere.

12:00 AM

All of the dead yslas and tortics
disappeared. Meesi’s body was gone as well. But we were still
there.

The watch ticked.

A light came on behind us, brightening
everything around us, and footsteps echoed on the cracked surface.
I couldn’t tell who it was until they were standing right in front
of us.

“
Jacoby, Meesi is dead,” I
muttered as he examined my cuts and bruises. “I want to go
home.”

Katie crawled over to her watch and grabbed
it. Jacoby and Dorian helped us up, and we closed our eyes. I felt
my lips go numb and my face go stiff from the cold, the crisp
freshness that I had been desperately yearning for. We were back in
Ray’s backyard. The tall grass was still flattened where the welgos
had rested, but the welgos themselves were not there.

Dorian had just taken his hand off of
Katie’s head. The bloody cuts on her ankles and arms were gone. Her
skin was back to being flawless, although her old bruises and scars
were still there and she was still filthy. It was the same for
me.

“
Give me a second,” Jacoby
told us.

Ray sat on his back porch, occupying himself
with a handful of soil. He got up when he saw Jacoby and walked
past him.

“
Jesse, Katie, are you
okay?” said Ray.

None of us replied.

“
I wanted to thank you
before you leave. Without you guys, Jacoby and Dorian would be
dead.”

I didn’t believe that at all. And how would
he know anyway? Katie seemed equally skeptical.

“
No?” Ray continued.
“Jesse, I know you kept Meesi safe and away from Jack long enough
that he couldn’t strike you all. And you, Katie, if you hadn’t
figured that Jesse would follow the writing on the wall, I say, he
wouldn’t be standing beside you. And how you dragged Jacoby to a
safe burrow after he ran into the krianfey curse was incredible.
See, you saved each other! You mustn’t be so sorrowful, when you’ve
done such great things – such great things you will never know how
great they really were.”

“
He gets his information
from a device called the Tolihap,” Jacoby explained to
us.

“
It gives me the newly
received reports from the last Halloween, written seconds after
midnight. So?”

Katie and I worked up faint smiles.

“
There we go. I want you
to visit me tomorrow. If not, at least make sure you come by before
I get too old. Yes, Ray?”

“
Yes, Ray,” Katie and I
repeated.

“
And, Jacoby and Dorian .
. . you know all the things you’ve done.”

“
Katie, Jesse,” called
Jacoby, extending a hand.

I grabbed his hand, and Katie took
Dorian’s.

“
Wait, one question,
Dorian,” said Ray quickly. “Did you see him? … Jacoby? I know you
did. Is he tall or short? Just one detail, that’s all I
ask.”

I closed my eyes.

“
Okay, fine, but I’m going
to keep asking. Oh, my, what did I just step in? . . . Darn it,
Silky!”

Katie and I were smiling back at the
cemetery. The graves we had dug earlier were all covered now. It
felt good to be back and smell the fresh cold air. There was a nice
breeze blowing the leaves across the graves. Two white tombstones
that I hadn’t noticed before sat at the head of the graves Dorian
had dug. The stones looked like they had always been there.

Kala Kel

Died 2001

One of the few to take on
a tortic

I glanced over to the other stone.

Meesi Kel

Died 2001

Took others’ minds off
their hardships

I liked the two engravings, but I was
confused.

“
How did I know?” said
Jacoby. “I didn’t. We don’t know who we dig the graves for until
they’ve passed away.”

I believed Jacoby. I read both inscriptions
twice, imprinting them into my brain. But I felt like someone was
missing.

“
Is there something else,
Jesse?” asked Jacoby.

“
Yes.” I remembered who it
was. “What about the werewolf, Charles? He died. Does he have a
grave?”

“
He does.” Jacoby took us
for a short walk to the far end of the graveyard. “He was supposed
to be transferred to Mollo’s grave site in Ireland–”

“
But?”

“
But I thought he would
want to be here. It is his hometown after all.” He stopped at the
foot of a large mound, twice as big as Meesi’s and Kala’s. The
stone, however, wasn’t as big or extravagant as theirs. It was kind
of humble.

Just as I thought of someone, I saw another
large mound next to Charles’s. The stone was covered with mud and
twigs so I couldn’t make out the engraving, but I knew that it
belonged to Cosqué.