Author: Dick Wybrow
Date: 2022-08-22 07:00:00+00:00
Description: Painter Mann and Julius enter the most dangerous realm yet. The animals, the insects, even the vegetation is deadly. Often rageful. A place founded by the worst elements of humanity, forged by punishing heat and twangy, yet culturally monolithic pop artists. They are in Australia. After they took out Voodoo Cher’s world-ending machine in Scotland, an antipodean device has now ramped up. It’s fully functional and threatens every living soul on the planet! There is one problem. They can’t seem to find it. And to make matters worse, Hell inc operatives are back in the mix. Helping the agents of V

The Hangman

(Hell inc Series Book 8)

Novels by DICK WYBROW

THE HELL INC SERIES

Hell inc.

Hell to Pay

Hell Raisers

The InBetween

The Night Vanishing

Past Life

Ride the Light

The Hangman

If you’d like a free copy of Dick Wybrow’s humorous semi-apocalypse novel The Swordsmen and get free stuff and the latest updates from the author, click here.

“Loved this book... Fabulous!”   -- Natasha Schmidt“

Too funny. Laughing just thinking about it!” -- LadyP

“Brilliant.” -- Jack White

Copyright © Dick Wybrow 2022
www.dickwybrow.com

Edited by Red Adept

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemble to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.

The Hangman

a novel by

Dick Wybrow

CHAPTER ONE

Ron Wakefield awoke to the sound of a train, which made no sense.

He’d been a light sleeper his entire life. It’s why he moved to this part of the outback over twenty years ago now.

The town of Leonora had appealed to him because it sounded exotic. Like some fancy Italian lady working in a bordello. However, the name was just about where all the exotic stopped.

The town boasted five hundred residents, even during tourist season, but mainly because tourists didn’t go there. The only visitors they seemed to get were middle-aged white guys wearing white socks and sandals, enormous hats, and waving around what Ron called “one of those beep-boop machines.”

People would whisper stories about someone stumbling across a vein of gold, but the only yellow rock of any value in the area had come from the old Anaconda Copper Mine. But that had closed more than a century ago now. The first time it was closed was in 1904. A group of folks raised enough money to inevitably go bankrupt by the place, and it closed again in 1908.

Ron rubbed his rubbery face, grabbed his half-drunk glass of whiskey off the kitchen table, and downed it by the time he hit the screen door. After he stepped outside, he spat whatever poor critter had crawled up into the glass off the porch. “At least you died not carin’ about much,” he whispered, in the only funeral rite a bug could ever hope for.

Out here, late at night, Ron would sometimes sit on his padded bench and listen to the cicadas. He found their song soothing, and it gave him a little hope that, way out in the bush, there were those who were still getting laid.

Tonight, the cicadas were quiet, their chatter replaced by the faint rumble of a train in the distance. He’d heard that rolling thunder a lot as a teenager growing up around the Territories back in the 1970s. On a few occasions, he even rode that sound north to south from Darwin to Port Augusta when looking for work.

Those days were behind him and, if nothing else, he’d moved to Leonora because it was quiet. There were no theme parks, no busy highways. No local rugby team and the only cricket noise he heard was the chatty little bastard that had lived beneath the floorboards of his bedroom for going on three years.

But the notion that had pulled him from bed, enough to step out onto his front porch wearing nothing but a smile and a bit of bug on his lip, was that the town of Leonora also did not have a railway.

So hearing a train rolling past the house—

“Sounds like a steamer.”

—when the closest tracks were easily hundreds of kilometers away, was what Ron would describe as “mighty peculiar.”

And it was.

CHAPTER TWO

Officer Tara Jeffreys looked up at the clouds bullying the clear blue sky and cursed. It was going to rain. Not that she didn’t like rain, she just wasn’t used to it. And one look at the Aussie flatlands around her and she knew these parts weren’t much used to it either.

Pulling out her phone, she opened the map application and dragged two fingers across the screen, like fleshy fangs nipping into the cartoony rendition of the Queensland bush. She saw the Aramac Tramway museum nearby, but little else.

She dropped the device back into her pocket.

Tiny, cattle-shaped creatures dotted the horizon, but all the land from where she stood to the milk-filled dots looked like the mottled fur of a fat orange tabby cat. Two years dead. “What the hell are they even grazing on?”

She heard an odd snort, then a man’s voice called out from behind her, “You Constable Jeffreys?”

When she turned, she saw a middle-aged man perched on a horse that clearly wanted to be anywhere else but here.

“Mr. Overton.” She forced a smile. “Appreciate you taking the time to meet me.”

“And I’d appreciate it if you got your business done and got gone quickly, if that’s all right,” Overton said with a tip of his hat. “And you can call me Dirt. Nobody calls anybody mister around these parts unless that person is a banker. Or that person is about to get shot, but, once again, that’s usually a banker.”

“That happen a lot?”

A smile bent his wizened face. “Not so much anymore. Don’t have any bankers left out this way.” He nodded toward her long skirt. “You don’t dress like a cop. Or is this one of those undercover operations?”

“Just dressed for the weather, but looks like she’s gonna rain now.”

“Ya reckon?”

She reached into her coat and lifted out the smartphone. “There’s a tiny box on the screen here that’s got a black cloud with little yellow jagged lines coming off it,” she said. “I’m not a meteorologist, but I think that means rain.”

“Ha. No,” Dirt said and slowly turned his horse to the small outcropping of trees. “Ain’t gonna rain, but I would admit that reflects the general nature of the town. At least the black cloud bit.”

She followed him to a small circle of sorry-looking trees shading a patch of dirt and stone. A wooden cross hung off the low wire fence.

“This sort of thing happen a lot out here?”

“Happen a lot?” Dirt laughed. “The only thing that happens a lot out this way is nothing.” The laugh dried up and blew away. “But, no, can’t say I remember the last time we had a grave robbing.”

“Had any new people in town recently? Strangers milling around?”

“Oh, we get the occasional straggler wander in. Some stay for the night, but the smart ones get some petrol and keep moving.”

“You lot don’t care for visitors then.”

“Oh no, I reckon Petra, who runs the diner, appreciates making something different now and again. People around here get into a routine, order the same shit every time. When fresh faces pass through, that’s the only time she gets to experiment with new recipes.”

“Anything good come out of that?”

“Only that nobody ever comes back,” Dirt said and smiled. Without another word, he eased off his horse and tied it to the rusted and busted fence that surrounded the small graveyard. He glanced at her in that way so many others had since the shooting the previous year. The “I’m not looking” look.

Obviously, he’d read up on her before she arrived. Of course, there probably wasn’t much more to do in town.

She could see he wanted to ask about it, but he didn’t. Either he was being kind or he was the sort of man who knew better than to get into other people’s business.

As Dirt worked the small chain off the fence, she scanned the surrounding area. For as far as she could see, this small clutch of scraggly trees was the only one for miles. The surrounding fence was a misshapen square that wouldn’t stand a chance against grave robbers. Hell, this fence wouldn’t stand a chance against a wandering toddler, she thought.

Dirt didn’t cross over the graves but walked in a straight line, down a path inside the fence. It looked like a backyard garden, long forgotten—gnarled roots and broken stone. Most of the markers had long since crumbled away and joined the dead.

“I’ve seen a few graveyards recently,” she said. “Not to be rude, but this is probably the saddest I’ve ever come across.”

Dirt nodded, his eyes trained on the open grave.

Tara got an uneasy vibe from the guy. Maybe he was just spooked to be around dead people. “You get a name yet?” she asked.

The man stepped to the next plot over, crouched down, and brushed aside the dirt covering the headstone. He pulled his hat off, wiped his sweaty bald head with his wrist, and put it back on. “All these graves here—well, most of the inscriptions have worn away. Closest marker to the one that was disturbed is this one.”

She stood next to him but could barely read the two or three letters still visible. When she went to step closer, Dirt lifted a hand.

“Don’t step on the graves,” he said, almost shouting, then softer, “Wood’s all rot by now, and you could drop in. I know you’ve seen your fair share of bad luck, but… no use in making it worse.”

“What’s that one say?” She leaned forward, reaching up and steadying herself with a low branch. “I can see a T and… looks like an upside-down L.”

Dirt laughed and pulled out a small, ringed notepad from his shirt pocket. “That would be T.D. and that’s not an upside-down L. That’s a seven.”

“T.D. seven?”

“Yeah,” he said, casually tossing a few handfuls of dirt into the hole next to him. “Means theft and debt. And that there’s the seventh one in this area with that designation.”

Then it clicked. “It’s a potter’s field,” she said. “So these people were criminals.”

“Well, either criminals or people who wound up dead with no family to claim ’em. But yeah, I reckon most would have been designated criminals.”

“Designated criminals?”

“This site goes back a few hundred years,” Dirt said and rubbed his hands, wiping the dirt away. “Before cars. Before TV. Before people cared much about the law, not that they do today. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“But back then, justice was swift and loose. All it took was an accusation. A few people saying someone did something, and they were guilty as charged.”

Tara smiled. “So they had Twitter?”

She got a laugh out of the man. “The one who got buggered with, we don’t have a name for yet. That one next to him—Mr. T.D. seven—was a man named James Power. He’d been a transfer like a lot of people back then, mid-eighteen hundreds.”

“Would they have known each other?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” The crouching man grabbed another clump of dirt and moved it from hand to hand. “You could check old ship manifests. They’ve got them online, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

She nodded. “Well, if this was a robbery, any idea what they took from that one?”

“Maybe you got special police superpowers,” he said.

She thought he’d glanced, once again, at the hem of her long skirt.

“But I don’t have any idea how you can look at an empty space and know what was in it.”

The cop let a slow breath escape her lips. “You’re a local. He’s a local—was a local.” She drew up a smile. “Got any wild guesses?”

“Anything of value. Could be a pocket watch or a ring, some other jewelry.” Dirt nodded to the nearby grave. “But ol’ mate was probably in the same boat as the rest, no pun intended. So if he was a debtor or a thief, anything of real value would have been stripped off his body before burial.”

“So why would someone come all the way out here to steal from a dead man who had nothing?”

Dirt dropped his hat back on his head and stood. “That is, constable, one of the reasons why I even bothered to report it in the first place. It’s strange. And we like our days around here to look a lot like the day before, only a few hours later. We’re not keen on strange.”

She looked out at the horizon where the tiny dots of cattle had been earlier. She couldn’t see them anymore. From horizon to horizon, they were the only two people there. Well, the only two living people.

Overton took a few steps back and walked behind her, gripping the fence as he did.

When Tara looked down into the hole, she saw exactly what she’d seen at a half dozen other sites she’d visited the past few weeks. The clothes he’d been wearing had turned to tatters; the remaining strips wove in and around gray bones.

She’d seen bodies on examining tables for years, a part of the job she always dreaded. But without all the stuff that makes folks distinct from one another—hair, skin, eyes—it was eerie but, strangely, less unsettling than the freshly dead. It was like all the stuff, the meaty bits, had been stuffed into some custom-built framework. And once people died, they eventually rotted away, leaving behind the foundation. As if it were waiting for someone to pile on new bits of meat for the next person.

Tara smiled. I don’t know if that’s deep or macabre.

Before turning away, something caught her eye. That is, the lack of something. “His lower jaw is missing.”

“Might be in there somewhere,” Dirt said. “I wasn’t keen to go digging around.”

She knelt on the other side. “Maybe he had, I dunno, some gold teeth.”

“This guy? Nah. A man like this one had two types of teeth: rotten and rotting.” He looked up and down the grave, head to toe. “Could be that the jawbone was taken after our man here was disinterred. Animal might’ve come by and scavenged what they could.”

Tara frowned. “You’d expect to see a bit of gnawing on the other bones then.” She stared for another minute, but whoever this guy was, she decided his days of giving up secrets were long over.

“You said stealing from a dead man with nothing was ‘one of the reasons’ you called it in. What’s the other?”

Dirt walked back to the fence gate, pulled off his hat, and then motioned with it to the rest of the plots. “This is the only grave they dug up. Nothing else touched.”

“Maybe, as you said, they dug down, found nothing, and figured that’s all they would find.”

Dirt smiled. “Could be. Don’t know how it all works. I’m not a grave robber myself.”

“Helpful. I can take you off my list of suspects.”

“Much appreciated.” He gave her a playful nod. “But I reckon grave robbers are a bit like prospectors. If you’re digging for gold and don’t find it, you dig another hole. Whoever did this did not do that.”

“And that seems strange?”

“The records I have don’t say who that man is. Just the man next to him. And there’s probably a half dozen plots between James Power and the next identified body in those records.”

Tara shrugged and shook her head.

“Whoever came here in the middle of the night and started digging,” Dirt said, “they picked this exact spot. Dug this hole and did or did not find something. But they left without touching anything else.”

“Okay,” Tara said and sighed. “So?”

“Well, if they did get what they wanted,” Dirt said, gazing across the small field of the forgotten, “how did they know where to dig?”

CHAPTER THREE

We were a couple of ghosts standing in an Aussie airport hangar, pining over a cup of cold coffee. We were pathetic, and we both knew it.

“What I would give to have just a small sip of that,” Julius said, licking his lips as he stared down at Uncle Jerry’s cup. “I mean, can’t smell it, and I can tell that it’s shit. But, Painter, I’d guzzle the whole thing in a gulp.”

It had taken us ten hours to make the trip from Scotland to Australia in Uncle Jerry’s uber jet. Hell, maybe it had taken fifteen. I don’t know. You lose track of time when you’re dead.

After sitting in place for all those hours on the plane, it felt like there should have been something to do upon arrival. Something ritualistic. Like going to the bathroom or getting a burger or anything. But of course, ghosts don’t have any of that. We go from just being in one place to being in another. It can get a bit monotonous.

That might explain why some spooks get up to no good. Doing something, anything, just to feel they’re still there. That we still mattered.

We were waiting on Uncle Jerry to settle things with the woman who ran the private airport outside of Melbourne. Before he’d gone to chat with her—leaving his coffee sitting there—he’d been cagey about how we were going to take down this next machine.

“This’ll be different than Scotland since we have a bit of what they call a ‘forwarding team’ already on the ground.”

I gave him a withering frown, which was wasted. Because, you know, ghost. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There are already some other players in the mix on this one here in Australia,” he said. “Which has, you know, brought in some other players.”

Julius looked over at me. “Why’s he being so weird?”

“I ain’t being weird,” Uncle Jerry insisted. “Just a lot of information to process and pass on, so I’m just, you know… processing.”

He had been acting strangely for the past few hours. Back in the plane, I could see he was corresponding with someone via his tablet computer but didn’t know who. He was up in the cockpit while we were stuck sitting on a stone bench in the cabin. If I’d stepped over to see his screen, I would have fallen right through the body of the plane.

The bench had what we call “grain.” Meaning, it was solid to ghosts because at some point someone—or someones—had died there. Violently.

When I’d asked him who he was talking with, he closed the program down and pretended not to hear me.

He hadn’t cleared it up even after landing. At least, not yet.

“What aren’t you telling us?” I asked.

He gave me a smile. Well, he gave a mop in the far corner a smile, since he didn’t have any idea where I was standing. “With William Hare’s machine out of commission, it’s one down, three to go.”

“Check,” I said.

Uncle Jerry said, “The reason we pulled that off so easily—”

Julius interrupted his flow. “Far from easy.”

“Well, the reason we knew where to find him was all ’cause of the white streams of light in the sky y’all can see. But you said you ain’t seen them out this way yet, so we don’t know where to look.”

“It’ll be here,” I said. “I saw it when I got tossed in and ended up here.”

The old pilot frowned. “But where here?”

“I don’t know, man. It just looked kinda deserty; I was only here for a few seconds.” He looked back to the jet, where the crew was securing its wheels with big wood blocks tied together with rope. “So the machines, they’re like some sort of transport system.” He jammed his hands into his flight suit. “Thought they were supposed to make the dead live again. Then the voodoo woman points it to her dead army so they can kill everybody.”

“They don’t make spooks alive, it just gives them grain. Form to interact with the real world,” I said. “The transport stuff. I never knew about that.” I did my best to describe what I’d experienced when Hare had tossed me into his machine back in Scotland.

Voodoo Cher’s machines needed one hundred and forty-four spooks to power them. And since it had become fully operational and didn’t need me to fuel it, I instead ended up “riding the light” as one of Hare’s spooky kids had called it. I’d ended up here in Australia at another machine. Like some sort of spook express elevator that lets you pass from one to another.

But as we’d flown closer and closer to the continent, I didn’t see any telltale ribbons of light in the sky. Nothing.

When I’d made my brief light-ride stop here, I hadn’t exactly asked the spook I’d seen where here was.

I’d seen the movies and read stories over the years about Ned Kelly. Maniac, cop-killer, folk hero. A bit like Jesse James but with “the people’s villain” in him. Apparently, when the Kelly gang used to rob banks, they’d burn the financial records, too, turning all the loan documentation to ash. That made the man in the metal helmet a bit of a hero.

The farmer’s farm was now his, free and clear.

The bar owner now owned her saloon outright, while the local house of ill repute no longer had a lien. They could pass along venereal diseases to customers with no concerns about mortgage payments.

But Kelly had a killer streak. And most of it pointed at cops. Or anyone in his way.

When I’d seen him in his upside-down trashcan hat during my ten-second visit, I never asked for directions.

So, after we stopped at the private airfield near the Gold Coast—which is about as far east as you can get in the country without running into Kiwis—we would have to circumnavigate the country, looking for the telltale streams in the sky. That could take days, which normally wouldn’t matter to me because I got time to burn. The difference was a few minutes after Hare’s machine in Scotland had gone active, we’d taken it off-line again. This new one was already up and running. It was an active threat.

If Voodoo Cher was ready to start her war against the living, she could do that right here, right now.

However, this time, we’d have some sort of help from the start. At least, that’s what I’d assumed this “forwarding team” would be. Whoever they were.

“They are here on, um, another matter,” Uncle Jerry said. “It is adjacent to our particular, you know, action plan, but while, on the whole, our end goal is the same, our matter is not the same as their matter. But our matters cross paths.”

Julius crossed his eyes and shook his head. “Okay, so what is their matter?”

“I don’t think that matters, Julius,” our pilot said.

“It matters to me!” Julius yelled.

“Their matter is another matter, as a matter of fa—”

“Can you both stop saying matter, please?” I stepped between them. “It’s unsettling.” I couldn’t let them get started. They were both a bit off, and I knew the conversation they were gearing up for would drive me insane.

Uncle Jerry smiled. “Sorry, Razzie.”

“Don’t call me that, man.”

“It’s your name, boy. You need to get used to it.”

“It’s who I was when I was alive,” I said, “but I no longer suffer from that particular affliction.”

Uncle Jerry said we’d have some answers shortly then headed over to the hangar’s office to make a quick call.

Of course, I could have followed him and kept my trap shut. Maybe I should have, but he was a good friend, and the Raz part of me, I knew, loved the guy. I still had no memory of any past we’d shared, but I could feel he was someone I once cared about.

Sneaking around and listening to his private conversations, as much as I wanted to, wasn’t something I was going to do. Yet.

“Who’s he calling, Painter?”

“I dunno. He’s being cryptic about it,” I told him.

Julius picked up the rebar from the coffee table and grinned, spinning it between his fingers. “Just kinda nice to touch something, you know, real.”

Watching him twirl the metal that existed in two worlds,metal, I was impressed. “Were you a drummer or something?”

“Marching band.” He smiled, proudly. “Had a baton and a cool hat with a silver chinstrap.”

“Maybe don’t tell people that. Not as cool as you think.”

“It had a tassel!”

I shook my head. “Not getting cooler.”

A few minutes later, our livie friend returned, casting his eyes around. He seemed to enjoy the cloak-and-dagger bit of the current operation. He blanched when he saw the spinning rebar. “Jesus H. Horsefeathers! Don’t do that.” He snatched the bar and dropped it into the pocket running down the leg of his flight suit. “You’ll scare the living people ’round here to death.”

“I was in a marching band,” Julius said.

“No kiddin’? That’s pretty cool.”

My friend grinned at me, looking down his nose. I “booped” it and got a frowny face in return.

“What’d you find out?” I asked our livie friend.

“Our contact says she can give us the lay of the land, so to speak. Where our, you know, matt—err—projects intersect and how we might help each other out.” Despite his whispering, his voice was echoing off the surrounding walls. It wouldn’t have made a difference if anyone had heard us—he was talking to us, and we had no clue what was going on.

I looked around. “Is she here?”

“She’s riding out this way from somewhere around Perth but won’t be long. Give me just enough time to partake in a bit of ol’ herbal tea,” he said, pinching his fingers and holding them to his mouth.

“You can say ‘pot,’ man.” I grinned. “Nobody around here would care.”

“Ah, Razzie, it’s a lot more fun when it’s a little bit bad, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t remember.”

Part of me really wanted to again ask him to stop calling me Rasputin, Razzie, or Raz because, while that’s who I was before I was killed, I’m still Painter Mann. Not sure why I was so stubborn about it, especially because, so I’m told, I had agreed to be killed by the Devil.

Now as a resident of the InBetween—a realm made up of victims of unsolved murders—I could do what the Devil and his minions couldn’t: take down the woman who created this place, Voodoo Cher, and destroy all four of her machines.

As our pilot stepped away for his “tea,” Julius waved me over to a faded paper map on the wall of the hangar.

“Knew I saw this earlier. Lookee here. This is where we are, right? East coast.” He held a finger on the spot and, with the other hand, traced it across the map. He tapped a spot on the west coast. “Perth.”

“Right. It’s a big damn country—continent,” I commented, watching his fingers.

“Man, it’s gonna take half the day for them to fly here,” Julius said. “By the time this contact shows up, it’ll be more than a day wasted.”

“She ain’t flyin’,” Uncle Jerry called back as he started up the steps of the jet. “She’s taking Highway A1 all the way and will be here in about ten minutes. You’ll hear her before you see her.”

Something in the back of my brain flickered then went quiet on me. I said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

CHAPTER FOUR

Sally Scull watched as the world around her tripped through the colors of the rainbow. If that rainbow had been, say, a blood rainbow. Oranges, deep reds, burnt yellows.

Her Hell-born motorcycle would take care of the driving. All she had to do was hold on, and her bike would get her where she needed to go faster than any car, truck, or fighter jet. She had a slight worry about errant cruise missiles, of course, but they were few and far between in her experience.

However, it had been a missile of some sort that had once forced a lightning-fast course correction that had thrown her from the bike and into the middle of the Atlantic. At the time, she’d harbored a quiet doubt over whether the machine had gleefully shaken her off. A doubt she’d tucked away in a dark, dusty cupboard of her mind. That’s where she put all of her doubts, insecurities, and those moments in which she questioned her purpose.

Said cupboard was now more of a walk-in closet. The sort Imelda Marcos once used to hold her shoe collection.

In the years before she’d met Rasputin Frewer, Horse had been unflinchingly faithful to her. Despite the fact she’d stolen it from an idiot who worked for the other side, Hell inc. But ol’ Digger didn’t need any sort of ride anymore. Last time she saw him, he was in a deep well somewhere in the Mexican desert.

The eighteenth-century gunslinger was only a few minutes out from the Gold Coast. She’d never admit it—another item for that cupboard-closet in her mind—but she missed Rasputin. Sure, he’d signed on to be just her driver when she went out on runs to target Hell inc’s crew, but he’d grown into something more than simply a coworker. He was a good coworker.

Not a friend, though, she assured herself.

Sally Scull didn’t have friends.

And it had been Raz who had, she was sure, bewitched her beloved Horse whether or not he’d intended to. He’d even had a pet name for the bike: Boo, short for Bucephalus. She hated it and had, occasionally, shot Raz when he’d said it in her presence.

However, that had been when he’d been working for the Old Man, as she did now. Not exactly working, he was always keen to point out. More of a freelancer. Contract stuff. But even that had afforded him some of the more mortal protections, e.g. not dying when someone shot him for calling their motorcycle “Boo.”

Technically, Raz still worked for the Devil, as it had been explained to her (several times because it seemed all sorts of crazy) he was now dead. And he had no recollection of being Rasputin.

He was now a ghost private detective named Painter Mann.

“What the fuck does that mean?” she’d asked the Old Man when he’d explained it to her. It had been the only time he’d invited her to what he’d called his “summer home.” Not in Hell, not on Earth, not really anywhere.

The Devil seemed pleased with her unease over the revelation. “Do you want the short version or the long version?”

“How ’bout a version that makes any sense?”

“Hmm. I hadn’t listed that among your options.”

Her boss explained that he’d tasked Rasputin with taking down another ghost called, of all things, Voodoo Cher and her three associates. That they were in a place neither Devil nor Angel could get to, the InBetween, and the only way to pass into that realm was for Raz to be killed. Even if just temporarily.

“How is it you can’t get there? You’ve found a way to get around the rules about going to Earth?”

“I’ve never set foot on Earth, Sally,” he said. “I employ a pocket of the All Time that doesn’t exist in any one place because it always exists at all times.”

That had elicited a slight growl from the gunslinger. “Is this supposed to be the version that makes sense?”

“The InBetween is an aberration. A world on top of this one populated by those wronged in life—people who were killed, murdered, with no subsequent justice. Their murderers walking free.”

“And you put Razzie there?”

The Devil walked to the fire in the hearth and, with barely a thought, it grew brighter. “He’d agreed to it as part of his big plan to ‘do good.’ We both get something out of it.”

“After you killed him,” she said, not able to get comfortable in the wicker chair. Then she nodded to herself. “This is about Razzie getting back to his girl.”

“Cassie, yes.”

Since she had a virtual God at hand, she took the opportunity to ask, “So is she, you know, up there? Did she die and go to—”

“Nah-ah! Not a fan of that word,” he said, holding up a finger. When a tiny flame burst out of the top of it, he frowned at it and blew it out. “And I have no idea if she is there. It’s not a place that throws its doors open to me.”

Or me, Sally couldn’t help but think. She’d been working for the Old Man for more than a century. Eventually, she’d piss off the wrong person, get filled with hellfire bullets, and her time on Earth would be done. After that, she had one place to go. Despite herself, she chuckled. “So, as I understand it, Razzie—well, this Painter Mann guy—he is in this other place.”

“The InBetween.”

“Right. And spent the better part of a year not doing the job he let himself get killed over?”

The Devil nodded, staring out the window.

Outside, it was totally black. A void.

“My sources have informed me that from nearly the moment he arrived, he was being pursued. Hunted down.” He pursed his lips.

She grinned. “By sources, do you mean Twitter? You mean Twitter, don’t you?”

“I do not mean Twitter. That’s one of theirs, you know.”

She did know. Hell inc. was the “new blood” in Hell. Corporate types and those who controlled most of the newer tech, including social media. It had been a good move on their part—in the past decade, they’d caused more misery on the planet than many of the Old Man’s old standards:

Half-full potato chip bag you couldn’t open.

Junk drawers full of screws that fit no nut.

Sun visors in cars that, no matter how much you adjusted them, never actually blocked out the sun.

But Hell inc. had upped the game and was now a genuine threat to the Old Man, partnering with Voodoo Cher.

“I’d told Rasputin to keep his very existence a secret from her. But he failed to do that and spoke to her at that job he did in New Orleans. I suppose it was going to happen eventually. Always does.” He smiled and raised his eyebrows. “Such a funny word, always.”

“Whatever,” Sally said and was able to briefly cross her legs. But her foot started to get all prickly, and she let it fall back to the floor. “So, he became Painter Mann to hide from this Voodoo Cher person?”

He nodded. “He had help. You’ve got to hand it to the guy, he’s on the whole quite incapable but seems to always find people who can help him pull off what should be impossible.”

“I’ve seen that. He’s got a small crew of folks here that are chaos, but put them together and… they do surprise.”

The Old Man looked at the double bands of Swatches on his wrist. “Right, so in a nutshell, while I put his body in storage for when he returned, he’d found someone in the InBetween to help him, essentially, hide his memories, his very identity, from himself. And he manifested as this Painter Mann.”

“And became a dead private investigator.” Sally lifted her cowboy hat and scratched a small spot on the crown of her head. “That doesn’t seem, you know, on task. I mean, didn’t he at least tell someone what he was there for?”

“I have no idea what went wrong,” the Old Man said. “But I know this, and it’s why I called you here. That kid, the pilot, found him. Actually found a ghost no one could see and virtually no one could hear.”

“Kid?” Sally wrinkled her brow. “You mean Uncle Jerry? He’s hardly a kid. Dude’s old as dirt.”

“Younger than you, Sally Scull. By about a hundred years.”

“Point taken.” She shrugged. “How’d Uncle Jerry find him?”

“There is a familial connection there, but who knows? That doesn’t matter,” the Old Man said, fire rising in his eyes. “What does matter is that Rasputin is finally back on task. He’s already taken out one of that blasted woman’s machines. And he’s heading to Australia to take down number two.”

“Australia?” The chair groaned as she stood. “Is that why you sent me there weeks ago to chase down Hell inc operatives digging up gravesites?”

The Old Man walked to the door and opened it. When he spoke, his voice fell to a whisper. “Steven Janus is working with Voodoo Cher. He wants my throne while she wants every living person on Earth dead.” He turned and looked at Sally as she approached. “Neither can get what they want.”

“That’s stating the obvious.”

“We’re running out of time,” the Old Man said. “Help Rasputin, Painter, any way you can. But your assignment is paramount. We need to know what those Hell inc agents are up to.”

As the colors of the world shifted from red to blue once again, Sally felt the motorcycle slow. Gingerly, she arched her feet on the footpegs and stretched her fingers. It hadn’t been a long ride—it never was—but holding on for dear life tensed the body.

Finally, the bike pulled in front of an airport hangar and stopped. The Aussie heat hit her like a dragon’s belch.

Hopping off, she called out, “Uncle Jerry, you about?” Sally heard the bike pop out its kickstand, putter for a moment, then go silent. Cautiously, she approached the single jet in the large hangar, her hands at her hips so she could draw quickly if she even saw a mouse look at her the wrong way.

Of course, this was Australia.

She’d found it a strange place. The most innocent things often turned out deadly. Deadliest spiders. Most venomous snakes. If she did see a mouse, it would probably be flying through the air on bat wings, brandishing razor-sharp teeth and venom-tipped claws.

As she entered the hangar, she could feel the hairs on the back of her neck stand. When she snapped her head into the shadows, she saw nothing. But she felt something.

She’d taken a step toward a small seating area with ratty, threadbare couches when she heard a familiar voice.

“Sally! Darlin’ it is a real treat to see your smilin’ face after all this time.”

She hadn’t been smiling but did now. The old man had a way about him that did that to everyone.

“Uncle Jerry, how’s it hanging?”

“At my age,” he said, dropping down the steps of the jet, “lower and lower every year.”

He made a beeline to her, and she took a half step back, but as a man who was wholly capable of ignoring social cues, he wrapped her in a bear hug anyhow. Sally wasn’t a hugger but if she would admit to herself—which she did not—his embraces were always welcome.

“You look awful,” she said.

“And you don’t look a day older than when I saw ya last.”

“Well, working for the Old Man keeps me young, I reckon.” She forced a smile, but her expression looked a bit like someone fighting a fit of gas. “I ain’t got a lotta time for pleasantries.” Sally explained that she’d been rolling up and down the countryside chasing reports of disturbed gravesites. Supposed robbers who appeared not to take anything. “I’m here to find out what the hell they’re up to.”

“And once you do?”

“I get to shoot ’em.”

He slapped her shoulder a few times and waved her over to the sitting area. “Good. Ya found your happy place. Nice to hear.”

When he turned back, he saw she wasn’t following. He watched her briefly scan the place and noticed her hands were hovering just above her holsters.

He said, “Ah, this place is—”

“Making me anxious. Who else is here?”

Uncle Jerry laughed. He tilted his head for a moment then nodded. “He says it’s really great to see you again.”

* * *

“I did not say that!” I didn’t recognize the woman at all. And she was the sort you wouldn’t likely ever forget seeing. If Wyatt Earp and Ripley from the Alien series had a kid, it would look like Sally Scull. And they would likely both be dead from the effort.

Julius was grinning ear to ear. “She’s very sexy. Makes me wish I was still livin’.”

I shuddered. “Dude!”

Admirably, Uncle Jerry was doing his best as an intermediary, trapped between two worlds. When we all started talking at once, he lifted his hands in surrender and laughed. “Hold on, hold on,” he said. “I can’t work out what everyone is saying if y’all talk at once.”

That made the gunslinger’s face go cold. “How do I know he’s even here? I don’t hear anything.”

“Well, you wouldn’t,” Uncle Jerry said, choosing his words carefully. “As Razzie—er, Painter—explained it to me, very few people ever do. And only, you know, under certain conditions.”

Like the fact that this man was dying. Julius had been the one to point that out to me. I had enough of Raz in me that this thought made my heart hurt.

Sally squinted into the space and shook her head.

“If he don’t remember anything, what good is he? I mean, he can’t even make no antipasto salad or nothin’ no more, I bet.” She looked away for a moment. “Could use it too. If I gotta eat one more pie filled with meat, I’m gonna shit barbecue sauce.”

I turned to our go-between. “This was a friend of mine? I don’t see it.”

“A very good friend,” Uncle Jerry said, his voice uncharacteristically stern. “You may not recall all that, but out of respect for the part of you that still is Rasputin, I will ask you to remember that.”

That was a gut punch. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Thankfully, Julius got us back to business. “Ask her if she knows anything about where that machine might be.”

Uncle Jerry nodded and explained to the woman what we were doing in Australia. Halfway through, she raised a hand and waved his words away.

“I got a debrief from the Old Man,” she said then looked in my direction. “Our employer, if you can remember that.”

“Did she just look at me?” I asked.

Sally dropped into one of the cracked leather chairs. “I’ll ask around some, but as far as I understand it, all the hoodoo-voodoo InBetween shit like those machines can only be seen by ghosts.”

Julius chuckled. “She ain’t entirely wrong about the voodoo part.”

“And I ain’t had no heart-to-hearts with the dead recently—”

“Count yourself lucky,” Uncle Jerry said, interrupting her.

“—but if I do, I’ll be sure to ask ’em.”

As best he could, Uncle Jerry described the scene I’d briefly visited when I’d traveled here “on the light,” between the machine in Scotland and here. Dry, dusty, flat.

She laughed. “You’ve just described what folks around here call ‘the outback.’ And there’s about six million square kil-o-meters of outback. I reckon that’s a lot because there’s the word ‘million’ in there, but I don’t understand all this new-fangled metric stuff. Makes no sense.”

“That’s over two million square miles,” Julius said matter-of-factly. “Around ten times the size of Texas.”

“Fuckin’ Mr. Wizard,” I said, my chin dropping. “How’d you know that?”

Julius scowled at me. “I was a teacher, Painter.”

“Didn’t know you were a math whiz. You’re like that guy who decoded the Enigma machine.”

“Alan Turing,” he said and flashed a double row of teeth then pointed a thumb at his chest. “Teacher.”

“Former teacher,” I pointed out. “Formerly alive. Be quiet, ghost.”

When she drew a blank on the location, Uncle Jerry brought up Ned Kelly—the guy I’d seen wearing the upside-down trash can for a helmet.

That set her teeth on edge. “If you find that guy, you tell me! I wanna piece of him before anyone else does.”

“Sal, he’s dead, remember,” our friend explained. “He could be standing right next to you and you’d never know it.”

Instantly, she had both of her pistols out, pointed in different directions.

Shit, she is fast. Here’s the crazy part—the moment she did that, I flinched. Just a natural reaction maybe, but I mean, I’m dead. She can’t shoot me. But something told me that this woman, standing in front of me, had triggered the very response in me before. Um, sort of a puckering and un-puckering sensation. As it were.

Uncle Jerry motioned his hands downward. “He ain’t here. Put those away before you shoot me.”

She shrugged and did as he’d asked. “Still could happen.”

“You ever had a run with the guy?” Uncle Jerry said. “You know, back in the day?”

“Nah, but a hundred an’ fifty years ago, I’d heard about him running his mouth, saying he was the baddest gunslinger and all that. But a good friend of mine—they got history.”

Julius stepped forward. “I taught history for a while.”

“Hush,” I said. “Did she say one hundred and fifty years ago?”

Uncle Jerry put his hands on his hips and sighed. “Yeah, she’s immortal or something.”

“I ain’t immortal. Just damn hard to kill.”

The old pilot put his hand on her shoulder, a warm gesture that got an ice-cold stare. He removed his hands. “We gotta track down some of the local ghosts to help us find that machine,” he said. “Any idea where we might find a bunch of dead folks around here?”

She raised her pistols and smiled. “I usually leave a trail of them behind me. You could start there.” Sally Scull spun them on her fingers and dropped the six shooters back into their holsters. “I got work to do, so good luck to y’all with your ghost shit.”

Before she left, they exchanged mobile phone numbers, but she warned there were vast swaths of the country in the outback where we’d get “bugger all”—yes, those are the words she used—for cell services. Either way, if we heard about grave robbers or she heard about an ephemeral machine that could make the dead alive again, we’d drop a dime.

Then she walked out onto the tarmac, fired up her bike, and headed out.

I turned to our pilot, but then stopped when I saw Sally loop back around in a tight circle. Strangely, the bike was now pointed in our direction. Even stranger, the gunslinger didn’t look thrilled about it, as its headlight swept back and forth over the hangar.

She barked at it, “Cut that out. We gotta go!”

A moment later, she turned and sped off. We actually heard a sonic boom.

Julius let out a low whistle. “That there is a fast motorcycle.”

Uncle Jerry jammed his hands into the pockets of his flight overalls and sighed. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun.

“You all right, man?” I stepped toward him. “You look like you’re gonna fall asleep like that.”

“Could do,” he said, grinning as the rays hit his face. “Horses can sleep standing up. Cows, too, I think.”

“Maybe cows just got a lotta bad dreams.” Julius slid up beside me. “So they’re standing to stay awake.”

Uncle Jerry opened his eyes. “What would cows have bad dreams about?”

“People with big, rough hands, I bet,” Julius said. “Or milkmaids who just had a bad break-up.”

“Okay, okay.” I waved my arms in the air. “So, where should we find us some ghosts?”

It looked like sun was draining the life out of the old pilot. He stepped back into the shade of the hangar. “Maybe we check around some graveyards.”

“Grim,” I said.

Uncle Jerry looked around the hangar, spotting the waiting room. Hands still in his pockets, he leaned his head toward a man on the other side of the glass, pastry in one hand, coffee in the other. “Need some intel. Let’s go.”

We followed him into the small room, and I watched our man change his demeanor with each step. A moment earlier, he looked like he might have to lie down and sleep for a week. Now he was transforming into his happy-go-lucky, aw-shucks mode. This was a guy who knew how to turn on the charm when he needed to. Or he was bipolar.

Uncle Jerry threw the door open, and the man jumped, splattering his coffee onto his shirt.

“Just came in here for a bit of quiet,” the Aussie said. “Never thought I’d need a change of clothes.”

“Sorry about that, brother.” Uncle Jerry laughed good-heartedly and plopped down into a folding chair across from the local. He rubbed his palms on his pants and grinned. “Ah, so I’ve got some time to kill in town, and I was hoping you might help me out.”

“You leavin’ will probably save me on some dry cleaning.”

“Great,” our friend said, searching for his words. He shrugged and blurted out, “So, where do you find, you know, ghosts around here? I love all that haunted house stuff.”

The man slowly shook his head as a smile crept onto his lips. “You don’t really believe in all that rubbish, do you?

Julius gave me a quick look, and in unison, we lifted our hands, dangling our fingers in the air. “Boogity boogity boo!” we both sang.

To his credit, Uncle Jerry didn’t even flinch. But I caught the tiniest flicker at the edge of his lips. Poker face, this guy. “Ah, it’s a way to pass the time. Um, my kid’s really into the stuff, so when I travel I like to send photos.”

The guy put down his coffee cup and leaned forward. “Pictures of ghosts? All ya see is empty hallways and deserted rooms, yeah?”

“I dunno. Sometimes, you know, when you take it, there’s a little blob up in the corner… some hazy bit hovering over a lamp.”

The guy laughed. “I reckon that’s just bad exposure.”

Julius shook his head. “Nah, I’m not into that. Mixed some of my meds with Jell-O shots one night and that happened.”

“You will relax,” I growled at him.

“Spent twenty-four hours in a Minneapolis lockup. Place smelled like urine and old Chinese food. Or Thai. Couldn’t tell the—”

“Anyway,” Uncle Jerry said loudly, which got an eyebrow raise from the other man. “You know of any, um, local haunts?”

He thought about it for a moment, then quietly shrugged. “How do you feel about gaols?”

“I, uh… with your accent, I’m not really sure what that word means.”

“You’re the one with the accent, mate.” The guy laughed, then dropped his voice low, “Gaol is a prison.”

“Dammit,” Julius said. “I knew going down this path would mean ending up in jail.”

CHAPTER FIVE

They built old Melbourne Gaol in the 1830s and, aside from a fresh layer of paint, it looked exactly as I thought a spooky old jail would look.

Large framed pictures, like movie posters, lined the front of the building, showing what lay beyond its hallowed walls. It was three stories high with an empty corridor down the middle, so if you stood at the top, you could look across to an identical set of cells on the other side and then down to the lines of others below.

“Says here the place was closed in 1929,” Uncle Jerry said, reading from a glossy pamphlet. “It was called Wintie’s Hotel, but they decided the first part of the construction was too small. They built a second cell block to expand.”

Staring up at the bluestone building, Julius put on his teacher’s voice and said, “Well, this was a country full of criminals. Cons sent over from Britain.”

“By 1850, it was bursting at the seams with prisoners.” Uncle Jerry flipped a few pages. “Guess it was too much to control because they had a bunch of them escape.”

“Like that Steve McQueen movie,” Julius said. “Or maybe it was Clint Eastwood.”

“That the one with the bird, man?” Uncle Jerry asked, his interest piqued.

“Nah, I don’t go for them superhero movies.”

“No, one of the guys”—the old pilot rubbed the scruff of his chin—“I think, had like birds in the cell.”

“No wonder they had so many escapes.” Julius chuckled, shaking his head. “You can’t put birds in prison cells. They fly right through the bars!”

I put my hands up. “Enough with the birds! We’re burning daylight.”

“You’re right, Razzie,” my livie friend said then tapped the brochure. “Something else in here I reckon might interest you. Melbourne Gaol housed a very famous prisoner.”

“Steve McQueen,” Julius offered.

Uncle Jerry popped his bushy gray eyebrows. “No, a famous ‘bushwhacker’ by the name of Ned Kelly.”

* * *

“How much?” Uncle Jerry stared through the glass of the ticket window.

The woman there, in a mock jailer uniform, impressively kept a smile on her face despite the question that sounded more like an accusation. “Thirty-two dollars and eight cents,” she said, then smiled wider. “But if you’ve got your concession card, I can give you a seniors’ discount of twenty-six dollars, ninety-one.”

“Y’all don’t believe much in rounding off prices, do ya?” He was trying to be good-natured, but it only made her smile flicker. Uncle Jerry dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of American bills and handed over two of them. “All I got, sorry.”

“All good,” she said. “Love to have Yank tourists join us. Big spenders.”

Julius leaned into his ear. “Ask if they got the birds here.”

Uncle Jerry flashed her a grin. “Uh, do I get a discount if I bring my own ghosts in?”

She warmed up again. “Sorry, mate.”

“Ask her about the birds, man!”

“What if I leave one of them behind when I go?” Uncle Jerry said as she handed him his change and ticket.

The woman casually pointed to the doors. “Don’t need anymore. This here’s the most haunted place in Australia,” she said and leaned forward. “You’re in for a real treat.”

Just inside the front doors, there was a stanchion holding up a placard with times for the guided tour. The next one was more than an hour away, but we didn’t need to burn hours learning about the history of the place. We weren’t here for fun.

“This is gonna be fun,” Uncle Jerry said.

“Can’t spend a lot of time here,” I said. “Let’s find some locals and see if anyone can tell us where Kelly’s machine might be.”

The old pilot gave me a thumbs up. “Gotcha.”

There was a gift shop inside where you could buy all types of trinkets to remember your tour. T-shirts that read I was locked up in Melbourne Gaol. You could put a picture of your face on it. Black bars coming down the photo, that kinda thing.

I also saw a bunch of Ned Kelly stuff. Tiny figurines, big ones too. All of them showed the guy I’d seen: Armor that looked like an old wastepaper basket over the head. A garment with metal on the chest and arms, which looked a bit like one of those rubber butcher’s aprons but with iron plating riveted into it.

Uncle Jerry picked up a walking guide with a map of the place—$11.34—and went deeper into the jail. He grinned like a little kid as he flipped through the guide, and I had to remember he was still alive. After all the trouble we had in Scotland—because of what I needed—he deserved a few moments to just chill a bit.

As our pilot shuffled up the paint-chipped stairs to the next floor, he never once looked down at his feet. He’d buried his nose in the pamphlet.

Julius followed right behind him, looking around. “You see any spooks around here, Painter?”

“So much for this being the most haunted spot in the country,” I grumbled.

“Fine by me,” my friend said. “I’m all for getting some info from the local dead folks, but if there’s anything to this ‘haunted’ thing, that could mean there are spooks around here that have gone apeshit. Not interested.”

I wasn’t either.

That did happen now and then. If a ghost got into some downward spiral and kept going, they could go full poltergeist. I agreed with Julius—I had no interest in coming across anyone like that.

As we got to the second floor, Uncle Jerry held the book by his side and gaped at how big the place was. It was a sunny day outside, but the windows in the roof poured a gloomy pall over the rows upon rows of cells. They painted the cold stone walls industrial yellow like they hadn’t gotten a fresh coat in fifty years. There were mottled black markings, about a foot and a half high, just up from the floor. I wasn’t sure what had caused that—it looked like there’d been a fire many years earlier, and they only wiped down the upper two-thirds of the walls.

The light cast in the stairwells was the same burnt yellow bleeding out of the skylights. Obviously, those who’d repurposed the jail for spooky tours had gone to extra lengths to set a grim mood.

Uncle Jerry’s voice echoed off the walls. “The entire place had been a bit of a hodgepodge of inmates, not all of them criminals.” He glanced briefly at the book as he walked. “They even tossed in homeless people and the mentally ill.”

“A dumping ground,” Julius said softly.

At the first open cell door—thick wood, not bars—we saw a display behind Plexiglas.

They’d bisected the case down the middle, both sides of which tapered out toward the door so the glass made a sort of upside-down V-shape on the wood slat floor. On the left was an old trunk—or a trunk made to look old. It was impossible to tell. Thrown open, the weathered black box showed the items inside.

Julius read the description aloud. “The Hangman’s Box.” He let out a long sigh that broke apart and rolled into a low chuckle.

“What?” I said.

“We are a strange species, aren’t we?” Julius bent down and looked into the case, reaching through the glass and passing his hand over the items. “Thick twine ropes. A jailer’s baton. Rusted manacles and, hmm, what might be a hood to cover the face of the condemned.”

Uncle Jerry was staring into his pamphlet again. “Everything a hangman needs, I reckon.”

“Right,” Julius said, standing again. “I bet they were damn proud of their swift justice. Sort of thing that probably won a bunch of elections when the numbers were high enough.” He stepped through the glass, coming nose to nose with the figure on the right side of the case.

Uncle Jerry tucked the skinny magazine under his arm. “Doesn’t say who that was.”

“Would it matter?” Julius said.

The figure was facing away from the door, dressed in a snug gray jacket, gray slacks, and gray shoes. All the same gray too. I watched Julius examine the face of the dummy, which, from this side of the glass, I couldn’t see.

“They gave him just two drawn-on eyes.” Julius’s voice was soft and distant. “Guess it’s the eyes that sort of define a face in the end. No other features.”

He knelt back down at the box on the other side of the exhibit. “Ironic, maybe.” He pointed at the contents. “This would have been the last thing a guy like that would have seen, so you might as well give him eyes. No mouth to protest. No ears to hear any comforting words.”

“Julius, these people were criminals. Thieves, murderers, rapists.” I stayed outside the glass enclosure, happy where I was. The place was eerie.

“People who didn’t or couldn’t pay their taxes, too, maybe. Or somebody who complained a bit too loudly about what someone in the city was doing. Or, hell, man, someone who was just really goddamn hungry and stole a loaf of bread just to eat.”

I wasn’t entirely sure why the place saddened my friend as much as it did. When he was alive, he’d told me a bit about his past. After he died and joined me in the InBetween, we’d hung out a lot. But I never got the impression there was any criminal history there. Maybe an uncle or brother or wayward granny.

Out of respect, I didn’t ask. And really, I suppose, I didn’t want to know. I was trusting this guy to help me save the world. And I did. Completely.

When I saw the small cloud, I did a double take, wondering what the hell I was looking at. Then I turned to see Uncle Jerry puffing away. “Pretty sure you can’t smoke dope in here, man.”

In a pinched voice, he said, “Whadda they gonna do? Arrest me and put me in with the gray dude?”

The three of us walked back out into the hallway once more.

Julius shook his head and smiled. “It’s weird that this is entertainment for people, you know, a century later. They probably take school kids through here on tours. I guess it’s not so bad if our little folks can learn something from all this.”

“Sure,” I said and started moving down the hall. “And it serves as a warning.”

“Right, like Scared Straight circa 1885. If you wanna stay outta jail, don’t break the law.”

“Nah,” I said. “The warning is don’t get caught.”

We wound around to the other walkway, and as we passed over the yawning gap that lead to the bottom floor, I thought I caught sight of something passing through a beam of sunlight down below. Then it was gone.

Could have been a few more tourists, but I hadn’t heard footfalls. And in this place, made of hard steel and concrete, everything echoed like a drum.

Julius let me know he had caught it too.

I gave him a Whaddya think? expression—corners of my mouth turned down, eyebrows up—and he shrugged, pointed at his eyes, then put a finger to his lips. I took that to mean, We should keep a close eye on our surroundings and keep quiet.

Okay, maybe I was reading a bit too much into his gesture. For all I knew, he had interpreted my eyebrow raise and frown to mean, Sir, I have befouled my trousers. His response could have then meant, I see that, perhaps you could Shout it out?

But I’m not wearing trousers, so I was going with the “keep watch” meaning. And he was right. We had to be as silent as we could until we knew who—or what—might lurk in the corners.

“This is cool!” Uncle Jerry shouted from a small room at the end of the line of cells. “Come take a look, guys.” He read aloud as we entered, “The Art of Hanging.”

Julius let out a low whistle. “Look at all these names.”

I frowned at him. So much for being quiet. Maybe there was a big bell nearby. We could just go ding-ding-ding, we’re up here!

Joining my friends, I saw that the room was clean with brightly painted white concrete. In the middle was a glass-covered display case with a photo and write-up about a guy named Ronald Ryan. Even had his noose on display. Blechy.

In the corner, another gray figure facing the wall, rope around its neck but the hands unbound. I guess some folks got to wave on the way down.

There were signs on two walls. One was about the size of a small dining room table with The Art of Hanging at the top, a few paragraphs of large text, and what looked like hand-drawn, old-timey instructions describing how the process was to be carried out. I wondered if that how-to guide had been posted in the jail all those years back. The nineteenth-century equivalent of a YouTube tutorial.

The adjacent wall held another sign, this one with a list of all the people executed at the prison. A much larger sign.

“Hanging is a fine art and not a mechanical trade.” Uncle Jerry read the large, bold caption in a professorial voice. “Is not a man an artist who can painlessly and without brutality dispatch another man?”

Julius turned from the names and scanned through the rest of the script. “So much for painless and without brutality. Says here that sometimes it took five minutes or more for the person being hanged to die.”

“Crooks,” I said. “Crooks being hanged to death. Maybe some of them deserved a little pain and brutality.”

I stepped up to the prison dummy facing the corner of the room. Like the other, it had been dressed in that single bland color. The only difference was the noose around the neck, the rope trailing down its back like a braid. “They must have a bunch of these gray mannequins in a warehouse somewhere.”

Julius walked over, examining it. “I bet you a dollar they got key chains with these guys in the gift shop.”

“You don’t have a dollar, ghost,” I said.

“Well, if I did, I wouldn’t be buying any key chain with some tiny, fake dead man hanging off it.” Julius smirked.

They’d put a bit more effort into this mannequin since people could walk right up to it. As I stared at the neck where the rope was hanging, I saw they’d even darkened the gray skin underneath.

“More detail on this one,” I pointed out.

Julius went around to the other side and looked at the face, leaning in. “Woah! They went all out. Must be a deluxe model.”

“What the hell are the two of you going on about?” Uncle Jerry said, placing a bent finger up on the wall text so he didn’t lose his place. He scanned the room.

“Come take a look at this one,” I said then took a half step back. “It’s kinda gruesome.”

“Razzie, you know I can’t see you.”

Stupidly, I actually pointed at the gray figure. “No, look at—”

“Oh, shit!” Julius shouted.

My head snapped back toward him. He had his hands wrapped around the wrists of the “dummy,” which was now choking him, rocking my friend back and forth.

“Hey!” I shouted and stepped forward. “Let ’im go!”

With his hands clamped around Julius’s neck, the ghost of the hanged man turned his head and hissed at me through broken gray teeth. With eyes sunken deep into his head and scars crisscrossing his face, this was a ghoulish man.

Uncle Jerry squared his stance, unsure where to look in the room. “Fellas! What can I do?”

“Nothing, man,” I said, trying to work out a way to free Julius from the ghoul’s grip. If I touched the guy, I’d get sucked into his private home movies. His past. The way he looked? Not fucking interested.

Uncle Jerry, fists raised, took a step in one direction, then another. “What’s going on?”

“Julius is being choked by a dead inmate,” I said.

“Choked? Help him!” Uncle Jerry hollered.

“Yeh,” Julius squeaked out, his lips pulled back and teeth bared to speak. “Hep me. Dra—draining.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. I hadn’t been worried about the guy choking Julius to death because—duh—my friend was already dead. But the ghoul was squeezing hard enough to suck energy out of Julius.

“He’s a goddamn vampire ghoul,” I whispered and shivered.

Uncle Jerry dropped his arms and stumbled back. “Vampire? Vampire? There’s a vampire in this—”

“Just an expression,” I said, trying to calm the old pilot.

He’d dropped to a knee, winced, and clutched his chest.

“It’s all good. It’s just a crazy ghost choking Julius to death,” I said.

“A luddle hep, pleez . . .” Julius struggled.

The spook leaned into Julius’s face and hissed again.

“His breff… gunna puke.”

As he struggled with the chokey ghost, I knelt in front of the livie. “Jesus, man, are you okay?”

His face was blotchy, and he was sweating buckets in an instant. But he looked up and waved me away. “I’m fine. Just help Julius.”

“You don’t look fine.” My gaze swapped from man to man.

He smiled weakly. “Says the dead guy.”

Both my friends were in distress, but there was nothing I could do for Uncle Jerry. So, for now, I had to sort out our crazy-ass ghoul problem, which meant likely bashing the guy in the back of the head. I’d deal with the images as they came.

Before I could even react, another spook burst out of the wall and hit me square in the chest.

CHAPTER SIX

Sally wasn’t heading back to Perth. She hated the entire scene there and got looks everywhere she went. When she’d first been given the assignment, Sally had been looking forward to it and the business class seat on the airliner on the way over.

It was much better than her previous ocean crossing, when she had gone after a pair of Mexican twins on a Horse outfitted with fins and bits of pontoon to keep it afloat. She’d ended up on the bottom of the sea for a short time after an Aussie ship captain had fired a missile at them. The bike had made a rapid course correction, and because the idiots who’d repurposed the bike had neglected to reattach both foot pegs for the rear passenger, she got tossed into the water.

Remembering this, she smiled. Worked out in the end. Kinda.

She’d eventually made friends with the sea captain, who discovered her, despite him being Australian. They even went out on a sort-of date, her first in more than a hundred years. He’d gotten some leave, and they met up in a small town in Alabama, which had a shooting range with a pass-through to a bar.

It seemed that all Shots! required as an establishment to keep on the right side of the law was to install a door between the two venues. Each year, they pulled the door out of storage and rehung it for about an hour, which was how long the inspection for their permit recertification took. Apparently, they made a day of it. Bar food specials, free ammo. Sometimes, there was a band.

Sally admitted to herself she enjoyed the time she’d spent with Captain Hamish Clark, but there had never been a date two.

He was the captain of a secret, high-tech Australian warship, always on maneuvers on the high seas; she was an agent for the Devil battling operatives of Hell inc. that was working with some voodoo ghost to end humanity. It was tough to line up their schedules.

What she hadn’t admitted to herself was that she might have taken the job in Australia because it reminded her of Hamish.

As she rode, the colors once again shifted from red back to blue. They’d arrived. The smartphone in her pocket buzzed again—cell reception was dodgy traveling faster than the eye could see—and once Horse pulled to the side of the dusty road, she hopped off and checked it.

“Another one,” she said to the bike. “Less than four hours apart. Don’t mean much, though.”

She’d set up alerts on several social media platforms to ping when certain keywords were triggered—

Grave robbers

Broken graves

Thieves, graves

—and similar variations and combinations. She had deleted the term Grave Buggery, which had been a suggestion from another operative who “spoke Australian.” However, the results she got back were less helpful.

The bike had released the stabilizers on both sides, keeping it upright on the pockmarked road. The engine off, it now quietly pinged in the dusty, dry heat.

Sally glanced at her backup phone, which was strapped between the two handlebars. It was older but waterproof—perfect for the mapping software. Reading the screen, she saw she was a few miles (she had switched it back to miles after the program made the territorial change) from the center of a town called Aramac.

Scanning the flat land on both sides of the barren road, she noticed one vehicle, a pickup truck, pulled off to the side about a hundred yards up the road. Someone else was here.

The Australian sun was high in the sky, and it felt like the damn thing was trying to burn a hole in the top of her skull. She lifted her hand to shield her eyes and caught sight of a small clutch of trees. Squinting, she could see a low, uneven square fence that wrapped around the tiny oasis. Just above the fence line, a handful of broken stones leaned at awkward angles. “Tombstones,” she muttered.

Two people were coming down the dusty footpath that led to the road. One walking, one on horseback. Sally had little interest in chatting with local yokels, but they had been walking down from the gravesite.

Glancing back at the pickup on the side of the road, she patted Horse on its seat. “They didn’t come together. Which leads me to believe they ain’t workin’ for those fakakta shit eaters.”

As the two strangers made their slow approach, she pulled out her phone and looked at the mentions that had brought her here:

Oh, wow! Scumbags digging up graves in a town over from me. How awful! #graverobbers.

Cemetery out by Aramac, Qld. broken into by thieves. Who steals from a grave? #AramacStrong

Mom told me I’ve got a great uncle up there. Or great, great. Or great, great, great. If they busted into his grave, I don’t think it’s great. Probably some corpse buggery going on!

Sally rubbed her chin. “I tell ya, Horse, that word does confound me some.”

The two Aussies were close enough now she could see they were staring at her while exchanging quiet words. Sally waited for them and couldn’t help but notice the woman’s hitched gait.

“Anything I can help you with?” the man on the horse said as the two of them stopped a few yards away.

“Do I look like I need help from the likes of you?” Sally responded.

For a moment, that appeared to have swiped away the next words in his mouth. His jaw hung open, but nothing came out.

The woman stepped forward.

Sally glanced down at her long skirt then glared back.

“One grave up there was disturbed recently,” the Aussie woman said.

Sounds like a cop, Sally thought.

“Might have been overnight or a few days ago. Know anything about that?” the woman continued.

Sally crossed her arms. “I was gonna ask you the same question.”

“Oh, um . . .” The woman looked the gunslinger up and down. “Are… are you, uh, an investigator or something?”

“More of an ‘or something.’ Any idea where whoever did that went?” Sally asked.

“No, not—”

“Hold on.” The man on the horse interrupted his companion, leaning forward. “You have some I.D. or anything? You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

Sally stepped forward.

The man flinched. So did his horse.

“No, no, darlin’,” Sally said and made a clicking sound with her tongue. “I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

The man scowled. “You’re right about that!”

“I was talking to ya horse.” She made the sound again.

The horse lifted its head and trotted toward the gunslinger.

The rider pulled the reins up and barked at his ride. “Hey, whoa. Stop that!”

When the horse approached Sally, it lowered its head, and she rubbed the creature between the ears. Behind her, the motorcycle made a trilling sound.

The other woman frowned. “Did your motorcycle just grumble?”

“Probably,” Sally said. “It gets a might bit jealous sometimes.”

The man on the horse looked down at her. “I reckon you should get off this land and head back to wherever you came from.”

She leaned forward and put her head next to the animal’s. It nuzzled her once again and let out a low, throaty nicker. Her eyes closed, and she spoke low, so she didn’t spook the horse. “Where I come from you don’t exist no more. Only place I’m from now is wherever I just left.”

When she opened her eyes, she saw the woman standing next to her. Sally had been a bit surprised by how quietly she’d walked up.

Extending a hand, the cop said, “That man’s name is Dirt Overton, and I’m Tara Jeffreys. I work for Federal Police, investigating a string of sites like this.”

Sally took the hand and shook it.

For a moment, Jeffreys appeared to size up the strange woman dressed like a cowboy from a forgotten era.

“I been to a few of these, um, grave robbin’s,” Sally said. “All the same: one grave that’s been, um, buggered with.”

Tara knit her brow. “Whether they’re robberies isn’t clear yet.”

“Why ain’t it clear?” he asked.

“Many are old, so there’s almost no record of what might have been on the deceased to take. A few of the, erm, fresher ones—these so-called robbers leave some valuables behind. But we’ve had living relatives insist things had been taken. Small items, random it seems, but with little or no value.”

The man on the horse spat in the dirt. “Officer, why are you even speaking to this woman? You don’t even know—”

“Hush,” Sally said, not bothering to look at Overton. “Grown-ups talkin’.”

The American gunslinger stepped past the woman and looked up at the site. She pulled her hat off and wiped her brow with the back of her hand. “What’d you find at this one?”

“Oh, that’s interesting . . .” The woman turned and forced a smile. “I didn’t get your name.”

“Because I didn’t give it,” Sally growled then dropped the hat back on her head. She blinked at the woman then looked away. “Apologies, it’s been a long few weeks. And your vittles confound me some. Kinda bound up, which sours the book.”

“Still didn’t tell me your name.” Tara grinned wider.

“Sally.”

Dirt, the man up on the horse, leaned down again. “Don’t have a last name?”

“Had a lot of last names. Eight of them.” She looked down at her hand for a moment, silently counting off with her fingers. “Maybe nine. Hard to keep track.”

“Nine?” The woman balked.

“So you’re an identity thief,” Dirt said.

“No, just terrible at picking men.” Tired of all the chitchat, Sally started up the trail toward the gravesite, leaving the other two behind. “But they’re all exes now, so no use in getting into it.”

“Nine.” Tara mumbled then called after Sally, kicking up dust, “Ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands?”

“Ex-tinct,” Sally deadpanned.

Tara looked up at Dirt, who slowly shook his head. He said, “I don’t trust her. She’s dangerous.”

“If you’re married to her, yeah.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

When I finally became aware of my surroundings again, after getting sucked into some spook’s past, I was very disoriented. But it was a welcome bit of reality after the strange, hallucinatory trip down someone else’s memory lane.

Not this time.

It was dark, and the rotting stench around us was strong enough that I could actually smell it. Had to be very pungent for ghosts to pick up on it, and it was turning my stomach. Not that I had a stomach anymore, but if I did, I’m pretty sure I’d have thrown up.

“Where the hell are we?”

Blinking the real world back into focus, I could see Julius about fifteen feet away from me, his hands up like he was washing windows with both hands. He’d wipe a spot of the dirty cement wall then move on.

“Julius?” I asked.

He sighed. “Yeah, well, we are not doing great, Paint. Best I can tell, you and I went two different directions but both ended up here.”

I stood, shaky on my feet. “Where’s here?”

Julius turned at a right angle and continued his wiping movement, now heading back in my direction. “About four floors below the one we were on.” He dropped his hands, spun, and leaned up against the dark wall. “And while you’ve been lying there twitching and all that, I’ve been looking for a way out.” Julius folded his fingers behind his head. “There isn’t one. Just like she said.”

“Like who said?”

He pointed a glowing finger to the pitch black.

When I looked in that direction, I jumped back, banging my head against the concrete wall. I hadn’t seen the woman sitting there, legs up, arms resting on her knees. She was in prison grays with short-cropped hair. Pant cuffs came up to about mid-calf and below them was a pair of feet so dirty they looked black.

“Paint, this here’s Jayne,” Julius said. “She’s been down here a while.”

“How long?” I asked.

“I look like I carry a calendar around?” Jayne lolled her head toward me. “For a while, I counted the sunrises. You can’t really see the sun, but down here it goes dark, then it gets a bit lighter.” She pointed to my right. “Up there.”

I squinted to see what Jayne was referring to but saw nothing at first. Is it night already? How long was I out?

Then I spotted it.

In the total black around us, there was the tiniest sliver of light. Hard to tell how far away it was with no reference to mark distance, but it couldn’t have been any bigger than a pen or pencil.

“Kept track of the days for a while. When it got too high for me to count, I just didn’t bother anymore,” she said in an accent I thought sounded British. “Not that I was very good at maths.”

Before I could clarify whether she meant weeks, months, or years, I saw Julius hitch toward the far corner.

His gaze jumped to a spot just above my head. “Paint!”

About twenty feet above my head, I saw the faces of at least a dozen spooks staring down at me. They were all lined up, all jockeying for the best position to see the two new guys. Except for the shortest one. He stood in the middle, while the others gathered around him.

“Welcome to the hole,” the little guy said with an intensely deep voice that sounded like he’d swallowed a mouthful of broken glass and it got stuck halfway down. When he spoke, several others around him chuckled. “I hope you enjoy your stay.” The guy blinked at me, then leaned in, adding, “Not!”

This sent the others into fits of laughter like it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. The guy was doing humor, circa 1994—or maybe 1894— and killing it with his crew.

“We’ve got no beef with you, man,” I said. “I’m sure we—”

“Beef?” he said, confused, nodding. “Ah, so you lot are cattle rustlers!”

“Scoundrels!” one shouted.

“Miscreants!” another said, even louder.

A third said, a bit more quietly, “Oh, I do miss steak.”

This sent all of them laughing again. They were a jolly group of really awful people.

Julius stepped up next to me and furrowed his brow, giving me an expression that I read as “Da fuck?”

“We’re not criminals, man,” I shouted over the gales of laughter above. “We were, you know, just on the tour. I mean, listen to our accents, right? We’re American.”

“American?” Short-round said like I’d asked if he wanted beets on his pizza. “Don’t get many Yanks in here.”

“We had one, but that was yonks ago,” a spook standing close to their leader said. He called back through the small crowd, “Guillaume, wadn’t one of your cell mates an American bloke? This the same guy?”

A huge glowing face came into view above us. This Guillaume could have been Andre the Giant’s stunt double. When he rubbed his jaw, I saw that his hand was about as big as the lead guy’s head.

“No, not the same. I remember the man’s face very well,” Guillaume said, nodding. “That was the tenderest part. His cheeks tasted like those tiny tomatoes.”

“Cherries,” the leader said.

“No, like tomatoes, not cherries!” Guillaume bellowed loud enough everyone else seemed to be blown back half a foot. Then he seemed to reconsider. “But his eyes were a bit like cherries. More like grapes. Especially the way they popped on the tongue.”

Blechy, I thought and held back my gag reflex.

“But he doesn’t look like that guy?” the lead man asked.

Guillaume took one last look. “Not before eating, no. But maybe after,” he said and raised his arms. “Because he was my excrement after!”

More laughter. The leader rocked forward with his hands on his knees, open-mouthed gut-busting howls. “He… he just said you look like excrement!”

“Heard that,” I said and looked at my friend. “Weirdly, that doesn’t bother me.”

“Well, I suppose if you were from the nineteenth century,” Julius said, “a diss like that would probably sting. But let’s not teach them any new words. That doesn’t always work out.”

I smiled at the thought. He was referring to when we’d first met Sally Scull and taught her some curse words. Her favorite, by far, were the Yiddish ones. But hearing an Old West gunslinger whip out Jewish bad words was, at best, unsettling. Wait, what? Where did that memory come from? I never met that . . .

But I had.

When I was Rasputin Frewer. I put that thought aside for the moment, trying to get a grip on how the hell we were going to get out of there.

“So, if I can . . .” I was trying to explain our situation, but they were still laughing about the poop slam.

“These guys like jokes, man,” Julius said. “I dunno, try one out on them.”

I scrunched my eyebrows together and gave him a quick shake of my head.

He pushed me again. “Uncle Jerry says you were a radio deejay, right? Just give ’em some of that low-brow rock humor.”

“I don’t know any—”

“Try anything, man!”

As their laughter died down, I cleared my throat and went with something simple. “Um, so I’ve got a joke for you. Why did the chicken cross the road?”

Above, I heard murmurs as they discussed this. Next to me, I saw Julius put his hands over his eyes.

“Okay,” the leader said. “We don’t know. Why?”

“To get to the other side!” I shouted.

Nothing. Just a booming, echoing silence.

Finally, one man in the back offered what one might call a critique.

“Come on, it’s a classic,” I said. “That’s funny.”

Short-round shook his head. “But that punchline doesn’t offer a resolution contrary to expectations, which is one of the elements necessary in a proper joke.”

The rest nodded, agreeing.

“No, you misunderstand—”

Julius put his other hand over the first. “You’re not going to explain the joke, now, right?”

“Hush!” I hissed.

“For example, in your setup,” the man from the back of the group said, “it would have been far more surprising and thus humorous if you said the chicken wanted to get to the pub or to get to the theater.”

“Or the butcher!” another called out.

“No, no,” their leader said. “Despite the obvious juxtaposition of a chicken actually choosing to go to the butcher, the humor lies in the shock and surprise of his incongruous destination.”

More mumbling agreement from the crowd.

Julius grinned wildly and shouted, “Why did the squirrel cross the road?”

The group looked wary.

After a moment, Short-round gave in. “Okay. Why?”

“Because . . .” Julius said, hitching his shoulders, giddy, “because he was stapled to the chicken!”

There were gasps and mutters, and one of their crew turned away as though he might vomit.

Shouts of disdain rained down upon us:

“That’s horrible.”

“Cruel!”

“What’s a squirrel?”

“You hear that?” one of the mob, a guy in a piss-stained T-shirt, said. “That fella said he stapled a squirrel!”

The cheerfulness in my friend snapped away in a heartbeat, and he frowned. “Tough crowd.”

The leader stood straight, shaking his head. “This is what we can expect from cattle rustlers. I think the hole is too good for you,” he said, getting a chorus of shouts in agreement.

“We’re not cattle rustlers, goddamn! I mean, we’re decades into the twenty-first century,” I shouted up, frustrated. “I don’t even think there are cattle rustlers anymore because, I dunno, they put those tags on their ears and stuff.”

The leader knelt down and put an elbow on his knee. “Tags? What do you mean by tags?”

“They’ve got little plastic, um, tags that they”—don’t say staple, I told myself, don’t say staple, don’t say staple—“affix to their ears, man. Might even be electron—”

A voice from above called out: “Whoa, whoa, whoa! You put earrings on a cattle?”

Julius shrugged and scratched the top of his head. “Does sound like that. I’ll give ’em that.”

The group of spooks moved closer together, eyes all locked on us.

The leader shook his head slowly. “Dressin’ up bovine as women is what they been doing,” he said, then darkened. “Unnatural. Deviant!”

A skinny guy leaned forward and said in a squeaky voice, “What else did ya put on ’em?”

“Shut up, Kiwi!” Short-round said, dismissing the other.

“Listen, listen!” I shouted, trying to get their attention. “We’re looking for a machine. That’s why we’re here.”

Whispers rumbled through the group.

“What sort of machine?” a man dressed in tattered leathers asked.

“It’s—well, you would have seen the ribbons of light in the sky,” I said.

Some of them quickly traded glances.

Ah-ha! I pushed further. “Probably shooting off to the north. They would, um, look like skinny white rivers, intertwining and pulsing. The machine emits them because—”

“The woman’s machine. We want no part of her devilish nonsense! You’re with her?”

Julius turned and flattened his back against the wall and whispered to me, “They know about Voodoo Cher.”

I nodded. I could tell by the looks on their faces they were afraid of her. And… something more. Maybe I could use that. But I would have to choose my words carefully. “We are here because of her. And if we don’t get back on the road, she will know.”

Short-Round seemed to consider this, as the others waited for his response. He rubbed his lips, thinking over what I’d told him. His expression told me I’d made the wrong move. “You will never leave this place.”

“It’s not like that!” Julius protested, but it was wasted on the guy.

“Jayne’s shit for company.” The leader raised his hand slightly, waving his fingers forward. “So we’re gonna leave you with some company. To pass the time.”

A moment later, a blur of rags and bruised skin dropped into the hole next to us. Julius saw it first and started sliding down the wall away from it. Slowly, the ragged creature stood. Dressed in grays with a noose hanging like some unholy necklace.

It was the ghoul.

* * *

Sally made a wide arch as she approached the small ramshackle cemetery.

More than anything, she wanted to get out of the blazing Australian sun. She’d spent many years with God’s eye glaring down on her—as a ranch hand, rustler, thief, and a bounty hunter. It was a life thrust upon her by putting her faith in men who didn’t deserve it.

No, that ain’t entirely true.

She had embraced that darkness within. Horrified by it at first, she’d come to realize it had always been there and made peace with the black heart beating in her chest. And for more than a century and a half, she had reveled in it.

Then, when she was finally comfortable in her own skin again, a man had screwed that up. A fucking man!

Rasputin.

Not a lover. Not a husband—she’d had enough of those to last a lifetime. Three lifetimes. Maybe four. No, Raz was something new. Something unusual.

A friend.

But now he was gone. He went along with the Old Man’s batshit plan to end his life and take on some crazy voodoo ghost woman trying to raise an army of the dead. What a shvantz!

She remembered why he’d done it: the love of a woman.

“Cassie,” she muttered as she approached the small field of broken gravestones.

“Who’s Cassie?”

Sally spun around and saw the cop, Tara Whatsername, walking up behind her. She cursed herself for getting caught in her thoughts. How hadn’t she heard the woman’s footsteps?

Ah, right.

“Why you followin’ me?” Sally squared her stance, hands at her waist. “I didn’t ask for company.”

Tara Jeffreys gave her a small smile and breezed right past. Sally could see she was unarmed, which seemed odd since she said she was some sort of police. Maybe she had one of those girly guns that strap to the thigh. Or in a clutch purse.

When Tara got to the shade of the largest tree, she turned. “You’re going to want to get out of the sun. You’re from the American West, yeah?”

Sally frowned then nodded.

“I’ve been there,” Tara said. “Hooned up and down your coast after uni. Part of my OE.”

“You know, I am aware you are speaking English, but hell if I can understand what you Aussies are saying half the time.”

Tara laughed and waved her over, making room in the cool spot. Sally grunted and trudged over to the far side of the shade. She felt the sweat on her skin instantly cool, and she let out a sigh.

“Chilly in the north, too cold for me,” the Aussie cop continued. “Beautiful, though. I preferred the bit down by L.A. and out into the desert. Did a few walks with mates until we came across some nudists. You’re not one of those, are you, Sally?”

“What?” Sally balked.

“You’re from California, yeah? I don’t know, maybe you like—”

“I am not a nude-ist!” Sally hiked up her britches, then considered the prospect, if only briefly. “I ain’t been nude in more than a hundred years, I reckon. Don’t see the point.”

“Like bathing?”

“Same thing,” Sally said. “Don’t see the point.”

“Ah, well, what I’m trying to say is most of us try to stay out of the sun down here. Might be a hole in the ozone layer, but they say that’s closing up.” Tara leaned out from the shade and turned her face to the sun. “Coulda fooled me, though.” Tara retreated farther into the shade and leaned against the tree. “You’re not used to it, though. And the way you’re dressed—you’ve got to be roasting. Denim, leather vest, long coat—your layers have layers.”

Sally raised an eyebrow. “You got a thing about how other people clothe themselves? You’re not pervy, are ya?”

“No, I—well, no more than the next person, I reckon.”

Talk about someone dressed in layers, Sally thought.

Tara twisted her mouth and pointed at the gunslinger. “Why are you smiling?”

“What? Didn’t realize I was.” She rubbed her mouth. “Used to hang out with a fella who liked to overanalyze others. Philosophize and all that. So, um… layers. That was a pretty good one.”

“Is that why you’re out here? Because of this fella?”

“No, I ain’t out here because of him. He’s dead.”

Tara put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Sally said. “Brought it on himself. But temporary maybe, since he’s wandering around all ghost-like and the Devil’s got his body on ice somewhere.”

The Australian woman grinned. “You know, I am aware you are speaking English, but hell if I can understand what you Yanks are saying half the time.”

That got a half smile out of the gunslinger. Sally turned to the site and cleared her throat. “Anything you can tell about who they went and dug up?”

“No clue.” Tara stepped over the low fence and cast her hand over the square of dirt, dead grass, and stone. “Most of the long-term residents here had nothing. Less than nothing.”

“Why rob a grave with nothing in it?”

“We don’t know if there was nothing.” Tara crouched down and stared at the gaping wound in the upturned soil. “All that’s left are bones and scraps of clothes. Must’ve been something of value. Take a look. Maybe you can see something I’m missing.”

Sally stiffened. “I can see just fine from here.”

Tara stood and crossed her arms, studying the strange American. “Share for share, then. You said you’ve a few of these—anything useful?”

“Don’t see no pattern to it, if that’s what you mean,” Sally said, scanning the site. “Some had money, some didn’t. Some old, some young—women and men.”

Tara cocked her head back and raised her eyebrows. “How many gravesites have you been to?”

“Why? How many you been to?”

The Aussie cop sighed. “This will be my seventh.”

“Seven?” Sally chuckled. “Amateur.”

“Fine, how many—”

“More than twenty.” Sally slapped her thigh and chuckled.

“What do you mean ‘more than twenty?’ Haven’t you been keeping track?”

Sally’s smile fell. “Yeah, I just ran outta . . .” She quickly glanced at her hands and feet. “It don’t matter. Point is unless you Australia types make a habit of digging up the dead—”

“We do not.”

“—then somebody’s up to something they shouldn’t be up to. Looking for something. Or somethings.”

When Tara shifted her feet, Sally blinked twice, but in the middle of that, she snatched a peek at the dirt.

“There’s nothing more we can find out here,” the cop said. There was a buzzing from her pocket, and she pulled out her phone and read the message. “Ah, great. My supervisor says there are reports of another disturbed grave just east of here.”

“I know of it.”

“You do? This report just came across the wire.”

The gunslinger pursed her lips and nodded once. “I got my sources.” #graverobbers

Tara stepped back over the low fence, tapping at her phone. Pocketing it again, she nodded toward the pickup down at the side of the road. The man on the horse was nowhere to be seen. “I’ve got my truck down there if you want to join me,” Tara said. “Two heads better than one and all that.”

“I got my bike.”

“Fine, you could—I mean, I could just follow you.”

Sally grinned. “I, uh, ride kinda fast, I reckon.”

“Don’t worry, I got a bit of a lead foot,” Tara said, giving her a sneaky grin of her own.

“Can’t be lead because you’d be dragging it a bit more,” Sally said. “My guess is it’s some fancy steel.”

To Sally, it looked like Tara had thrust her head back like some bird.

The woman then blinked and said, “Stainless, yeah.” Tara took a step forward then hiked up her long skirt about halfway. At the knee was a coupling and some straps. From there, a black steel shaft was affixed to a piece of shiny bent steel. “They call it a transfemoral prothesis,” she said and twisted it back and forth in the dirt. “But the much cooler term is a blade.”

“How’d you get it?”

Tara dropped the skirt, and the fabric fluttered back to the ground, the blade hidden underneath. She squinted at Sally. “I’ll tell you once you tell me who you really are.”

Tara shook her head when Sally began to open her mouth.

“Nuh-uh. I want the real answer.”

Sally grumbled.

“Fine!” Tara said and walked away. “We’ll keep our secrets, then.”

“Where you goin’?”

“To my truck.”

“Yeah, but,” Sally said and looked back toward the small cemetery. “Ya can’t leave the man like that. Uninterred and all. It ain’t right.”

The Aussie turned slowly, chewing on a nail. “It is a crime scene,” she said. “You really shouldn’t disturb it until you’ve got the okay from the local authority.”

Sally stood with her back to the woman, gazing into the open grave. “You really think that ass on a horse is gonna come back and take care of this?” She lifted her foot toward the low gate then dropped it again, sending up a small spit of dirt. She quietly cursed herself, balling her fists.

“What’s wrong?” Tara said, her tone softer.

“What? I ain’t superstitious!”

“Which is exactly the sort of thing someone says when they are superstitious.” Tara put her hand to her eyes then dropped it. “Sorry. That sounded mean.”

“I got no love for superstitions or religions or any of all that, and I reckon the feeling is mutual. None of it ever done me no good.” Sally leaned forward, lifted her foot like it weighed a thousand pounds, and stepped gingerly into the graveyard. “But once you in the ground, whatever debt you had is paid in full.”

Tara watched the woman creep along the fence line toward the hastily dug hole, avoiding the other graves. “Not everyone would agree with that.” Tara stepped back into the shade. “This is a cemetery of crims. Some would say that debt can never be repaid.”

Sally knelt at the unmarked grave and put her fists in the dirt. “Could be,” she said, panting in the heat. Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “They took their shot and got a lot of it wrong, maybe. I expect they know that now, so the folks lying here are just people now. What’s left of them.” Sally pushed the dirt back toward the gash in the ground. “Life is a sonuvabitch. Death shouldn’t be.”

Tara watched as the strange woman took a moment to make things a little more right for the man in the hole. “We should team up, Sal,” she said. “It would help me a bit, I suppose. I’m used to working on a bigger team, but those days are behind me.”

Sally’s eyes flickered for an instant at the blade hidden beneath the skirt.

“I’ve got some resources. Not much,” Tara continued. “Enough for meals and grubby hotels. But I’ve got access to records you don’t, and I’ll share what I can.”

Sally pushed larger and larger clumps of earth over the skeletal remains, saying nothing.

“To be frank, I doubt my bosses give a damn about grave diggers who steal nothing,” Tara said and let out a long sigh. “I think if something like this starts blowing up in headlines, they want to be able to say, ‘Yeah, it’s all good. We sent the cripple girl to take a look into it weeks ago.’”

Sally sat back on her heels for a moment, wiping the sweat from her cheek. “How’re you a cripple?”

Tara choked out a laugh. “Well, you know . . .” Nervously, she pulled at her skirt. “Point is, this is one of those government CYA assignments. But it would burn my arsehole bosses if I can find out who did this. That’s really what I want.”

Sally smiled. “Arsehole. That’s a new one. Gotta keep it in mind.”

“See? I can teach you proper English. You know, Aussie English.”

The gunslinger ran her hand over the re-covered plot and patted twice lightly, almost tenderly. She lifted herself from the ground and brushed the dirt from her hands. “Fine, we’ll keep in contact, but I ride alone.”

Tara shrugged. “Great. Maybe we can work out what all the people in these dug-up sites have in common.”

Sally started to say something but then ever so slightly hitched her head to the left. A very small move. A moment later, she retraced her steps back out of the cemetery. “I know what they all got in common,” she said, stepping over the fence.

“You do?”

The gunslinger breezed past her and started heading toward her strange motorcycle at the roadside. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught something fluttering in the wind and turned. When it slapped up against her boot, she reached down and peeled it off. “Yeah,” Sally said, staring down at the piece of paper in her hands. “They’re all dead.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Julius and I wedged ourselves into adjacent corners of “the hole,” staring at the ghoul, waiting for it to decide who it might eat first. Well, okay, it couldn’t eat either of us.

At least, I didn’t think it could.

“Paint, there’s something that ain’t right about that one,” Julius said.

Well, that’s an understatement, I thought.

Since getting tossed into the InBetween, I’ve seen all different kinds of spooks. All genders, all ages, all races. None of that mattered, of course. The only thing that made one ghost different from another was what I’d heard the Professor describe as their “tilt.”

In simple terms, as my mountain guru had explained, “Did they tilt toward good or bad?” At first, I thought that word, tilt, was tryin’ too hard to sound cool, but now it made sense. Everyone, alive or dead, is a mix.

Even the “good” spooks might have to do something “bad” just to get by. Like if they were low on juice—energy—they might take a swipe at some other ghost passing by to top up. Not to be an asshole, but if you got too low, you were a target.

Even the baddies sometimes did something good, right? Frankenstein’s monster played with the little girl and her flowers. So sweet! Of course, he did end up tossing her in the drink, and she sank like a rock. Maybe that’s not the best analogy.

Point is, most ghosts shaded left or right from the middle. Into the gray areas.

But I had come across a few, um, outliers. A handful of full-on poltergeist types who, for the most part, were harming themselves more than anyone else.

When a ghost turns inward too much and spins down into a manic spiral, that can happen. That’s why you need friends around. You watch each other's backs and make sure no one gets swallowed by that kind of darkness. I wonder if that has something to do with the jolly inmate routine we saw earlier?

A few times, I’ve seen those full-on spooks get riled up, really riled up. They’d been erupting with enough juice they actually manifested things in the living world. Tables knocked over, windows smashed. A woman at a police station who went full noise, screaming constantly, and livies would hear it.

No one hands you a rule book when you end up in this realm, so I don’t understand it. The Professor knows more than I do—more than she’s telling me, that’s for certain—but even she gets surprised now and again.

I thought I’d known most of the “rules,” though. However, Julius insisted that when yours truly arrived a year ago, my presence here caused some sort of fissure or tear. His theory is that because I’m not technically dead—if I can believe Uncle Jerry that the Old Man has my body tucked away somewhere—it broke something in the InBetween and that’s been fracturing our reality here. What is and what is not possible.

But whether or not that’s true, I couldn’t fathom that anything I may have caused had anything to do with the ghoulish creature crouched before us, legs at impossible angles, twisting and flinching, as it appeared to be deciding which of us it was going to attack first.

“Hold on there,” I said, raising my hands, trying to be calm. “No one wants to hurt you.”

The creature grinned at me, hissing, spittle dripping from jagged, blackened teeth.

Right. He—er, it—wasn’t remotely worried we’d hurt him. Or it. “My name is Painter.”

Its eyes grew wider as it stepped toward me, all of its limbs flinching and snapping. As it got closer, I realized its ghoulish face hadn’t been darkened with dirt and grime. It looked burnt.

“Uh, this here’s Julius,” I said, pointing, feeling a bit unreal like I was the host of the worst dinner party ever conceived.

“Howdy friend,” Julius said.

The ghoul locked onto me, creeping closer.

I fought against a chorus of voices in my skull screaming at me to run. But where would I go? The hole was a twenty-foot open-air cube. Nowhere to go. Unsure what to do, I fell back into hostess mode. “The chatty one sitting over there. Her name is Jayne.”

“Leave me outta this!” Jayne hollered.

Julius bristled. “In a space this cramped, I think we’re all in this, ma’am.”

For the first time, I saw the sitting woman shift her foot. Then, slowly, she shifted it back to where it had been. “I get the feeling if I don’t move, he won’t see me,” she said. “Like dinosaurs.”

Something flickered over the ghoul’s face, and he momentarily halted. Then, the scowl returned, and he was moving again. His gray prison clothes hung loosely, flapping against blue and black limbs. His hands clawed at the air—bloody, frayed pulp sprouting from where his fingernails had once been; arms, elbows, and shoulders spasmed as if each muscle were being piloted by a mind of its own.

“Dinosaurs? That’s only in the movies,” Julius said, his voice steady. “I bet dinosaurs ate everything and anything they came across; not so picky. Probably why they all died.”

Jayne spoke without turning her head, “I thought I heard somebody say a comet did that.”

“That’s what I mean. You don’t go eatin’ comets. They—”

“Will you cut it out!” I yelled.

My friend had the uncanny ability to take perfectly sane people—not vouching for the sanity of the prison woman, mind you—and drag them down a rabbit hole of thought. Like googling at three in the morning after a long night of bad whiskey and ending up on sites insisting they’d faked the moon landing, that Boba shot first, or Ed Sheeran should do more acting.

My outburst had triggered something in the ghoul. It leaped at me.

“No!” I screamed and shot my arms out to stop it.

As its hands reached for my neck—bloody stumps for fingers—I could hear Julius shout “Paint, look—” Then the world melted away.

Whoosh—

Bakit tumatakbo pa rin ako sa tangang kalsadang ito? Naririnig ko the sirens! They’ll be coming right down this road. I’ve got to—a house! I could hide in there! If I can just—hold on. All the lights are on. Every room! Why would . . .

Oh, Jesus, people know. It must be on the wireless by now.

Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus.

I have to get out of these clothes, get this blood off of me! Then head to… where?

Where will I go?

If my sister has heard, oh God, please don’t let her know. She would never take me in. She loved Eleana! I loved Eleana! But no one will listen to me. I saved her from that—that… Devil of a man! But she had been bewitched by him, yes, yes.

My Eleana was under his spell. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her fault! But even after his throat spilled all that blood—so much blood!—she was still pining for him. FOR HIM! I had to do it! Her very soul was being corrupted and if I hadn’t (I had to!) it would have been so much worse.

So, so much worse.

I saved her!

But they won’t believe me. How could I possibly make them believe me? If only—

—whoosh

I blinked and felt hard ground at my back, staring up at the gaping void above the prison hole. Above me, the ghoul’s black, gaping mouth was snapping at me like a starving dog, its arms yanked tight behind its back.

“Leave him be!” Julius shouted, struggling to hold the creature, his face distended by the exertion.

The strange creature must have slammed into me full force because I was dazed, a big gulp of my energy stolen away by the impact. Just lifting my head filled my brain with stars, blurring my vision.

“Move outta there, Paint!” Julius howled.

Fighting the strain, I rolled onto my side. I tried to slide out from beneath the ghoul. Not happening. The ghoul dropped a few inches toward me and I flinched, but he only hissed louder—hissed!—and the stench was awful. Like a long-dead, diseased animal left in the embers of a fire to rot.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the creature get an arm free and spike an elbow into the face of my friend. Before I could cry out, it fell upon me again.

Whoosh—

Nakatitig sila sa akin na parang ako monster. They don’t know me. They don’t know me, who are they to judge! Don’t they know what I did? I saved her. I destroyed him, but she was… she was gone. Spell unbroken, but I saved her!

This is what a savior gets? A prison cell?

Traitor priest get out of my face!

I don’t want your words. They mean nothing to me now, you liar. Confessions are sacred! Sacred, and you said you understood. You did not understand! Liar!

No one understands. But it doesn’t matter. Throw the switch. It doesn’t matter.

I saved her. I knew it would come to this, strapped in a chair, as the fat, stupid warden makes a show, looking between his pocket watch and the clock on the wall. Tick, tick, tick! Is he waiting for them to snap another photo?

Pathetic. All of your fake faces, staring at me. If you really knew what I had done, what I had sacrificed to do… that. Would you be scowling? Ha! Are those tears for me? No! Of course not because YOU DON’T KNOW HOW HARD THAT WAS. How much it hurt. But I had to.

Enjoy the show.

Enjoy the show.

No, I don’t want to say anything to you, to them, to anyone! I only hope to see her. Yes, I will see her on the other side! She will know what I did. And she will love me for it. Finally, she will see my sacrifice and she will love me.

Look at… coward! Why is your face covered, hooded man? Part of the show? Waiting for the photos, the flash bulbs to snap, snap, snap again? Ha! “No more pictures, no more pictures,” Fatty Stupid says. So, you’re out of luck. No more pictures. That part of the show is over.

Only one more flash coming, and you’re all looking at it! Me!

Fuck all of you.

You don’t understand what I—no, no, WAIT. Don’t thr—

CHAPTER NINE

Julius grunted and stumbled back. “Jesus, what was—” he said, pinwheeling backward, as the ghoul’s limbs and his interlocked. His head spun, and he felt his legs go rubbery. He began to fall. Eyes wide, he saw the dirt floor coming fast—but then stopped. Suspended in midair.

When he turned his head, he saw the creature was back on top of Painter. Wrenching his neck further, he saw the woman had gripped his shoulders, breaking the fall.

“What the in the blazes was that?” she said, helping Julius to his feet.

The moment he was upright again, he stepped toward the scuffle in the corner.

Jayne held him firm. “Leave it. There’s nothing you can do.”

Julius opened his mouth to protest, but the words got caught in his throat. Then he did something he never thought he’d do again. Wincing, he trembled as he spat on the ground. The dollop of liquid was black and milky. A moment later, it fizzled away and disappeared.

Jayne also did something she never thought she’d do again. She made the sign of the cross. Then she finally let go of the man and retreated several steps. “What—what came out of you? How did that come out of you?”

Hands on his knees, Julius shook his head. “Dunno. Tasted like, um, it tasted like ash.”

Across the cement cell, they watched the struggling men, one trying to free himself from the other. The ghoul’s hiss took on notes of vocalizations. Not words. Somewhere between a moan and a scream.

* * *

PAINPAINPAINPAINPAAAAIN!

Stop! S-s-s-s-stop, you don—d-d-don’t un-und… it, this—stop!

I feel the muscles of my body release, go slack. There are gasps around me, someone is crying out. Everything, all of it, up and down, it’s hot. It hurts! Oh, God, it hurts, all of everything.

What is that? A trickle, something wet, sliding across my cheek, oozing down from the blindfold on the right side. I try to move my tongue to touch it, but it’s stuck to the roof of my mouth. Not stuck. Burnt. Seared and shriveled.

The screams and cries are now joined by the shouts of men. Angry men. The chorus of the confused, ha! You can’t kill me! You can’t—

AAAGGNAAGGNPTTTHH— n—n-npptt

Uggnnnnptttzzz… it-it-st—st— it!

Oblivion. The embrace of oblivion, an icy shiver. The sweet, sweet quiet, but there is… smell? Does the darkness have an odor? Burning. Charred.

No. Just blacked out. Blacked out but… why b-b-bring me back?

The screams are louder now. The shouting too. Ha, their chaos chorus! You should all… Did I speak? What did I say?

Oh. Oh! I can see you through the blindfold, the hole there, smoldering and split. Your faces are flat! Scowls, tears, and finger-pointing. I see all of you. All of you.

I flick my eye over to the man at the wall. Except you, the hooded man. Hiding from me. Standing like a statue, meet my stare you coward. No, no, no! Don’t…

I didn’t mean— GGGGRRRNNNP-P-P-P-Pfnnnn.

Aaaff… ssss… hisssss… hisssssssss!

Hissssssss!

Gone and not gone, here, not here. Swirl blood spin eyes knife knife in in in more in in in crackle, crackle— yes, in ME NOW— crackle and snap, light. Hissss! Blood ooze, ooze, oozing through dirty toes. Ha! Hahahaha! Squishing, squish, squish, make more squish. Hiss! Hiss! Hissssss!

where am i

Blood and the crack of bones beneath bare feet, shattered sky, lightening and lightening! Feel it, sour taste, more, p-p-pain and panic rolling around my mouth, sliced by broken pointy, pointy teeth.

wait am i here

Blacks and purples and press, press— reds, yes! The reds, deep, deep—
are you me or am i you

It’s all so per— shut up! You are not me, and I am not you! This is mine, my prison within a prison but of my making AND I DID NOT LET YOU IN. I DO NOT!

i get it now i get it

No you don’t get it. Get out! GET OUT OF MY MIND!

this is what you see where you live

IT IS MINE! My p-p-place. Where did you come from I didn’t invite you, go back to where you came from devil thoughts, I won’t be bewitched like she was. Not like she was, not like her! I saved—
yes yes i saw that i saw you loved her

GOOOO!

and got only hate in return hate and hurt

I said g-g-g-g— yes, hurt. Only hurt and pain and the swirling skies of black now, no warm light. Must keep them all away, must hurt all so, so, so—
so they can’t hurt you

YES! YES!

so they cant hurt us

Ye—NO! Not us, who is us? I am me and the dark and the glorious sizzle, sizzle pain… not you! I never wanted you here. Why, why, why did you come to my place, our place, AGGH! No, no, MY PLACE!

its okay. im here now.

WHAT? No. No, no. I don’t want you here! This is my place, my secret place!

it is ours.

Ours? No, why? WHY? I won’t share it, I built it. Safe. Yes safe here. I don’t want you.

You brought me in. You pulled me in and I am here. With you.

NO! I… why would I? Ha! You are FALSE. Liar! Why would I bring you… here?

That doesn’t matter now. Not anymore.

WHY?

Do you feel me?

Why?

I am here. Do you feel me?

It—yes. Yes I feel you. Feel you here. Who, though? Who IS you?

My name is Painter Mann.

You are not me, then! You are Painter Mann. I am not

Yes.

YOU are Painter Mann! Not—

Yes. Who are you?

Me? ME? I am pain and darkness and sizzle-sizzle and—

My friend. You are my friend. Who are you?

But, I d-d-d-don’t know you, how—

Who are you?

Me? I’m, it… I told you!

What is your name, friend?

Friend?

Yes.

Me? Me. My name is… my name is Juanito. Yes. Strange sound it is now. But, yes, Juanito is me.

Good, Juanito. That is a great name, a strong name. Names are very powerful, Juanito. Did you know that? Not just labels or something to pin on your Walmart uniform.

What? What is… Walmart?

Ha, what is…? Well, Walmart, right? They got everything. Anything you want. Get a snack, have your tires changed, taxes done, hair cut.

No hair. Singed. All gone.

Well, I bet they’ve got wigs too.

don’t want wig.

What do you want, Juanito?

want? want. i want pain to stop. sizzle-sizzle pain to stop. yes light but not pain, not pain people. i want my eye again. and Eleana! yes Eleana!

Okay. Okay, then. None of that is here, so it’s time to go.

where where are we going is it to walmart

Ha, maybe. But it’s time to leave, okay?

okay what do i do

Just follow me, Juanito. I’ll show you the way.

CHAPTER TEN

The man burst over the rise, dirt and bits of scrub chasing him like a villain, riding toward his boss, who was waiting for word about someone poking around at one of their previous digs.

Digger leaned back on his motorcycle, regretting the black leathers he’d strapped on days before. Been too long since I been home. This isn’t California. He squinted up at the Aussie sun. God’s got a grudge against this place.

He wasn’t sure if that was poetic or ironic or… some other “-ic.” Never really was the artsy type. Digger had never read a poem or gone to any fancy art show where some guy in a black tux walked around with tiny food on a big white plate.

In his nearly four decades working for Hell inc., he never found art to be of much use.

At least the approaching rider knew enough to ease off on the clutch slowly—you don’t jam the brakes on trails like this. Not unless you liked busted bikes and road rash.

When Ronno slid up next to him, facing the opposite direction, Digger pushed his sunglasses farther up his nose and stepped forward. He felt sweat roll down his pant leg like he’d pissed himself.

Digger asked, “Anything? What was—”

He winced as the dust cloud caught up and rolled over them, temporarily blinding the boss man. After it blew past, he hocked out a wad of spit and dirt. “Fucking outback,” he mumbled.

The rider dropped the bandanna from his face to his neck, revealing a bent smile. “Thought you grew up out this way, mate?”

“Out west, where they’ve got proper green. Only water out here is whatever you’ve got on your hip,” Digger said, taking a swig from his canteen as if to make a point. “But I know dry, Ronno. That crazy shiela dropped me in a bloody hole in Mexican nowhereville. Down there for the better part of a year.”

“Why didn’t you, you know?” the other man said. He held up a middle finger, referring to the colloquially named “FU Mobility,” which was, in simple terms, a mobile service that let Hell and Hell inc agents on Earth talk to their bosses Downstairs. No need for a device. It worked by putting the middle finger in your ear and speaking into the cup of your hand.

“Did that. Nobody answered my call for months,” Digger said. “Musta had bad reception.”

The other man threw down the kickstand and stepped off his bike. “Doesn’t have reception. You could be in a steel vault and get through,” he said. “Maybe they just don’t like ya.”

“Maybe.” Digger nodded slowly. “Could be why I’m out here on this shit detail working for a goddamn ghost.”

“Crikey, he ain’t just any ghost!”

Digger kicked at the ground, his boot tip spitting silt. “I didn’t get into this business to be a fucking grave robber, so some spook can have his trinkets. Up and down the outback. Pulling bits off skeletons, handing them off like we’re goddamn delivery boys!”

“Aw, they ain’t all skeletons. The fresher ones are a little, I mean, juicy,” Ronno said. “Could do without those.”

“Could do without any of it!” the other man shouted, then cursed himself quietly. “All for a dead man in a metal rubbish bin. Fuck this.”

Ronno laughed then slapped him on the shoulder. “Mate, it’s Ned Kelly! Goddamn Ned Kelly. What a legend, yeah?”

“I don’t care if we was working for Kylie Minogue dressed in lingerie made of bubbles!” Digger said, spitting again. “Don’t want any part of it.”

Ronno folded his arms and drew a small circle of dirt with his boot heel. “Well, Kylie . . .”

“Right, too right. If it was Kylie—”

“Yeah, with the bubbles.”

“Sure, couldn’t say no to that.”

“You really couldn’t.”

“But this… this… I suppose I can’t say no to this either.” Digger sighed and closed his eyes. “Okay, enough whinging from me. What’d you see back at the site?”

Ronno snapped his fingers, all business now. He pointed back the way he’d come. “There were two of them at first, a guy and a girl, then a third person rolled up. Looked like she stepped off the back lot of Yellowstone, roaring up on a crazy-looking motorbike,” he said. “The male left on his horse, and the two women poked around the cemetery for a few minutes.”

The other man stared out at the dead brush, nodding along. Then he snapped his head toward his crewman. “Wait, what? What was that about the motorcycle woman?”

Ronno threw his hands up. “Shoulda seen her. Cowboy hat and duster, six-shooters—bloody six-shooters—hanging off her belt. And she did the strangest thing to that grave we dug, right?”

Digger nodded, a smile creeping to his lips. “She reburied the bugger.”

“That’s right! It’s hotter than Hell’s fryin’ pan out here and, dressed like that, she’s huffin’ and puffin’ over some dead bloke she didn’t even know. Craziest damn thing.”

“Wasn’t crazy to her,” Digger said. “Bat shit, sure, but Sally Scull has ways that only make sense to her,” Digger said and felt a buzz electrify his scalp. “Sally fucking Scull.”

“Hold on! She’s the one who dropped you in that…” Ronno finished his sentence by pointing at the ground, whistling through his teeth.

“Yeah, mate. This gig just got interesting. I got payback coming to me on this now,” Digger said. “Let’s get movin’ to the next site and put a bit of distance between us and Scull until I can come up with a plan. Where to from there?”

The other man dug into the pocket of his coat then frowned. He dug into his other pocket and spun around to look behind him. Again, he rechecked his pockets.

Digger frowned. “Where’s the list, Ronno?”

* * *

The sun, high in the sky now, peered through the large windows in the ceiling, but the tinted glass only cast a dull orange light throughout the prison.

Uncle Jerry threw a quick smile at the family of four as they passed by him on the skinny, raised walkway. He had to back against the rail to make room for them and did his best not to look frustrated as the youngest of them—a boy with a mop of messy hair—took his time, peering open-mouthed into the open cell doors nearby.

When the lad stopped, the old pilot said, “Watch out for the ghosts.”

The boy spun around and stared at him, eyes going wider, then ran off to rejoin his family.

Uncle Jerry turned, put his hands on the long cool rail, and stared down at two floors of cells, stretching left and right. Razzie, where the hell are you?

Ever since his two invisible friends had gone silent a half hour earlier, Uncle Jerry had circled the walkway of each floor, whispering into every cell. Where did they go?

He heard a queer wailing coming from somewhere deep below him.

Hitting the stairs, he took the steps, some two at a time, trying to keep an eye out for any other visitors who might come up.

Uncle Jerry couldn’t pinpoint the source of that strange, warbling scream and stopped to think. On the ground floor, he put his hand up on the wall and spun around the corner, leaving a damp smear on the chipped concrete.

More cells down here, the ones he saw from above, long rows on either side with displays in the middle. But he’d checked all of those. The eerie sound seemed to bubble up from deeper in the building.

“Excuse me,” he said, approaching a thin man in the gift shop. “I’ve been all through your museum, and it’s great. Any more to it? Y’all got a basement area. It’s facin—”

“No, sorry,” the man said with a practiced smile. “You’ve already seen all of those cells? Mate, you must have been running through the place.”

“I’m a big history fan because, you know, I’m old.”

The man put down a wood and rope kit where kids could make a tiny gallows in the comfort of their home. “There are displays all through the gaol. You likely—”

“But no, um, creepy basement?”

The man’s smile dimmed, slightly. “Not finished. Gotta put a lift in because the back entrance isn’t handicap accessible. Next year, maybe, if we get the council funding, but if you can come back, it would be worth it.” He dropped his voice, now tinged with excitement. “I’ve seen the photos, though. You’re right. Creepy as! That’s where they had the solitary confinement.”

Uncle Jerry leaned in to match the man’s demeanor, despite it making him feel uneasy. “I bet there’s tons—er, heaps—of stories that place could tell.”

“Yeah, it weren’t a room like you see in the movies. This place had a giant hole in the floor where they’d toss prisoners in then chuck down food and water every other day.”

The American blanched. “Gruesome.”

“Isn’t it?”

He thanked the man and searched a display table, nonchalant, to buy something. He caught sight of a small metal statue, toting a rifle and with its metal helmet tilted to the side. Nope. Had enough trouble with tiny figurines. Instead, he found a large, fat pencil with a removable eraser in the shape of Ned Kelly’s infamous headwear. “It’s for my kid,” he explained.

“Your kid?” the clerk said, ringing him up. “You’ve got a child young enough for—I’m sorry, that was so rude. Apologies.”

“Nah, totally cool. I’ve, uh, got a young bride, trophy wife, really, and we got a whole mess o’ kids. I need a house with as many rooms as y’all got here!” Stop talking, stop talking. “But without, you know, the torture devices and manacles and all that.”

The man handed him his small paper bag. “Wait until they’re teenagers. You might need ’em.”

Uncle Jerry flashed a smile and exited the museum. He made a show of crossing the street, stuffing the bag into his pocket. He wove around people on the busy sidewalk, many of them chattering on their phones, lost in worlds far from the one they were in.

Once he felt he was out of sight from the ticketing booth, he crossed again and reversed his path. Just before the building that housed the museum, he spied a sad metal fence linking the neighboring structures. Some bolts holding the barrier to either side had fallen away from either time or rust or despondency. The plastic sign that had surely read something like No Entry Permitted had split, half of it likely snatched away by a gust of hot, dry wind. It now read mitted, which Uncle Jerry assumed, if some kids had broken it on purpose, was probably some local slang term. Probably a rude one that meant jerking off. Aussies had a lot of words for jerking off.

He glanced around and saw no one looking his way, put his fingers through the mesh of the fence, and gave it a push. He’d only wanted to crack it open wide enough to slip through. The entire fence, about six feet of stitched metal wire from end to end, dropped to the ground and landed with a puff of dust. He spun with a big smile on his face, looking sheepish. No one cared.

Again, somewhere deep in the bowels of the building, he heard that strange, warbling scream.

Razzie!

Stepping across the fence, he winced at the jing-jing, jing-jing each step made but didn’t bother looking back to see if that had attracted any interest. The two tall buildings had created a narrow passageway, which was littered with broken boxes, rotting pallets, and various bits of debris that had floated in there, trapped in the swirling eddies of wind.

Around back, a long sidewalk led to a parking area, which he assumed was for the staff. A small blue shipping container took up nearly half of the small courtyard. It was locked.

Storage.

He’d been told that construction supplies in Australia were at such a premium price that developers routinely filled home and office buildings with as much living or working space as possible. It left little room for closets and cubbyholes.

The result was a big market for sheds and upright containers.

But the wailing hadn’t been coming from there, so he scanned the back of the museum. The walkway led up to a glass door. Further down the wall was a set of ancient double doors. Metal. Heavy.

He ran toward them, only slowing to a casual walk as he crossed the glass door, in case someone was looking out, then sprinted the last few steps. His heart sank when he saw they had wrapped the handles with a massive iron chain.

No padlock, though.

However, when he tried to dig his fingers between the links, the chain was either wrapped too tight or had rusted together. It wouldn’t budge.

Again, he heard the plaintive wailing. And it was coming from behind the door.

Uncle Jerry spun around and searched the ground for something, anything, he could use to wedge between the links. Then he remembered.

Pulling the paper bag from his pocket, he took out the oversized pencil and jammed it into the chain. A moment later, it came free and fell to the ground with a thunk!

“Aussies ain’t worried too much about security,” he muttered to himself and stepped through the door, swallowed by the darkness.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When I opened my eyes, a wave of relief washed over me. A familiar face.

“Welcome back to the land of the liv… uh.” Julius smiled. “Happy to have you back, Painter.”

He stepped away and revealed a starless night sky above me; just one tiny comet, a sliver of light, had endured, broaching the absolute black.

Right. Back in the hole. At least the small tear of sunlight above assured me it was still daytime. Then I panicked. “What day is it?”

“Day?” Julius said, standing straight and placing his hands to his hips. “It’s the year 2137. July twenty-fourth. Why, when do—”

“WHAT?” I bolted upright and jumped to my feet. “What? When did—what?”

Jayne, still leaning against the hard concrete wall, broke before my friend—my friend—did. She laughed and shook her head, shooting a hooded glance at Julius. “You’re not right, mate. Funny, yeah, but not right. Remind me to not be your friend.”

Julius chuckled. “Not going to do that. I can tell already we’re going to get along just fine.”

She shrugged and looked at me. I think she was enjoying the show.

“Julius, how long was I, uh, out?” I asked.

“How long do you think?” Julius said with a smirk.

I lifted myself and put my hands on the dirt floor to steady myself. When I did, I saw the ghoul was huddled in the corner of the sunken room, facing the wall. He had wrapped his hands over his head, rocking slowly.

“We walked for a very long time,” I said, staring at the shivering man. Something about him looked strange. “Can’t really say it felt… immeasurable. But when you said that date, to be honest, it didn’t sound wholly implausible. It felt like an eternity.” Or the All Time? No. No, it wasn’t that.

“You okay?” Julius slid down the wall next to Jayne. “Y’all just sort of seized up on the ground there and went all wiggly together.”

“Wiggly?” I cracked a smile. “Is that your educated opinion, teacher?”

Former teacher Julius agreed with me. “Perfectly valid.”

“How long?” I asked.

He looked at Jayne. “What? About a minute or so?”

She nodded then stared down at her stubby fingernails.

“A minute,” I said and looked back to the ghoul shivering in the corner. No, not ghoul anymore—I knew his name now. “Juanito? You with us?”

At first, the man wrapped his arms tighter around his skull. I wondered if he was trying to pull his head down between his knees. A neat trick, sure, but probably would have been more useful if he’d been alive. Ahem.

Then he tipped to the side, rolled onto his backside, and leaned up against the wall. Sitting there, I finally noticed his stained gray prison uniform was gone. He was dressed in a heavy work shirt, dark-blue denim. The cuffs had no buttons and flared at the wrists. His pants, made from thick brown material, looked like they’d been cut from an army tent.

When he lifted his head, I scooted back.

Gone were the sunken, tortured eyes. His face was no longer mottled and scarred. It took a moment for his eyes to find me, and when they did, he stiffened and shuffled his feet closer to his body. His lips parted, but no sound came out.

“It’s okay, man,” I said, holding my hands up. “It’s me. Painter.”

He squinted at me for a moment, then his face went slack. “Painter Mann?”

“Yeah, you got it.”

Shuffling to his feet, Juanito stood, never taking his eyes off me, and walked my way.

I heard Julius behind me, back on his feet, “Hold on, now, man.”

“It’s okay,” I assured him. “We’re friends.”

“Friends?”

I turned my head toward him. “Yeah, we spent a long, long time walking that dark desert. Felt like a lifetime.”

When I turned back, I nearly jumped. Juanito was there, on his hands and knees, face-to-face with me, staring into my eyes like he was searching for something. Something familiar. After a few seconds, he smiled. Satisfied.

“Was that a desert?” He stood again, walking around me. “I didn’t see a desert. It was… it was a road. A very, very long road like the one that leads to my village.”

“Coulda been a desert road,” Julius said. “In that case, you’d both be right. Very metaphorical, desert roads, because despite the name, they can be impassable because of winter snows.”

Jayne chuffed and looked at me. “What is he talking about?”

“Don’t encourage him,” I said. “In a minute, he’ll be talking about hamster baths and Billie Holiday albums.”

“Who’s Billie Holiday?” Jayne said.

“Oh and the ‘hamster baths’ part made total sense?” Julius said, chuckling. “Oh my, Billie Holiday, though. She was sexy. One time—”

“You don’t look like Painter Mann.”

We all turned toward Juanito, who had finished his three-sixty tour of yours truly, back to where he started. He was no longer some ghoulish creature; he was just a man. A man, I knew, who had done terrible things. I also know he, maybe for the first time, had regrets about what he had done.

I could see it on his face.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“You are”—he rubbed his mouth, choosing his words carefully—“thinner than I remember you. From, you know, inside.” He tapped his dark hair.

Yeah, he had hair now.

Shrugging, I said, “Ghost diet.”

“And you weren’t wearing this strange sweater.” He looked me up and down. “Black shirt with lettering I didn’t understand.”

I reached up to grab the drawstrings on either side of my “sweater,” but of course, my clothes, my everything, were just an image I projected of myself. In the end, I just rested my hands on my chest. “It’s a hoodie. Very hip, very modern.”

“Hoodie,” my new friend said.

“Yeah.”

Juanito nodded slowly, satisfied. “You sound like the Painter I know. You talk very fast. English isn’t my first language, so there were many times I just nodded along. Had no idea what you were saying.”

Julius was loving that. “Hear, hear!”

“But my head is clearer.” Juanito ran his fingers over his skull. “Thank you for that.”

I nodded. “You’re welcome.”

“And I can remember now. Oh, I can remember so much of… all of it. Too much, I think.” Juanito turned and walked to the wall. He reached up and ran his hand over the dusty surface. “But your inquiry, yes, I remember now. I can tell you.”

“My… my inquiry?”

He tapped his head. “Inside, on the long, long road. You asked me about the lights,” he said, his voice soft. Then he turned to me. “The ribbons of light crisscrossing the sky. Yes, I have seen them.”

“The machine?” Julius stepped closer.

“Yes, that man’s machine,” Juanito said and dropped his head. “I am so sorry it took such a long time to recall it, but my thoughts were… elsewhere.” A long time or a minute, it didn’t matter. He had seen it.

“Where?” I tried not to sound anxious because I preferred a calm, sedate Juanito instead of the bleh-bleh-rahr-hiss version of him. “Where did you see the machine?”

Juanito closed his eyes. “It was, um, before. When I was as before. Different.”

My friend said, “The ghouly guy.”

“Julius!” I hissed at him, which occurred to me was ironic. “You saw it when you were the other.”

The man nodded then closed his eyes. “I have been in this place for such a very long, long time. The others here would have me do such terrible things. Such terrible, terrible things.” Juanito dropped his face in his hands and wept quietly. He’d been a murderer. The worst crime there was. But he’d paid his price, and then some.

My heart hurt for the guy. “That’s behind you now, Juanito.”

“Yes, yes, it is behind me.” He lifted his eyes to look at me but then looked away. “At night, sometimes, when they didn’t require me, I would go out. Charging up and down the coastline. I think I was looking for her.”

“Eleana.” I saw a puzzle piece fall into place. “Yes. Eleana. That is what I was screaming, yes. Up and down the coast, sometimes from one coast to the other. Days and days. But I would always return here to what I knew. I never found her.”

“The machine. You saw the machine.” He was lost for a moment, so I leaned down and repeated, “Where was the machine?”

Juanito let out a long breath and again closed his eyes. “Queensland,” he finally said. “Up at, um, the end. The tip. Maybe around Somerset. I think.”

Yes! I spun to Julius, grinning wildly. “Somerset! We’ve got to get out of here and—”

“The first time,” the Filipino man said. “Yes, I am sure it was Somerset that first time.”

“First time?” Julius asked.

“Yes, I’m sure of that,” he said, nodding.

“But, no,” Julius said, standing next to me. “What do you mean the first time? You saw it again.”

“Yes.”

I looked between the two of them. “In Somerset.”

Juanito shook his head, eyes staring off into the middle distance. “No, I saw it once again at the… different place. Near Ayers Rock.”

Ugh, too many weird words for me. “Where’s that, now?”

“Northern Territory,” Jayne said. Her accent was a mix of Australian and something else. British? Made her sound like a fancy person who drank her beer straight out of the bottle. “They call it Uluru now.”

Julius turned to her. “How far away is that from this Somerset place?”

“Halfway across the country.” She pulled her knees close to her body. “Uluru is a massive rock, big as a whole town. Flat at the top, it looks like some giant sliced it in half and ate the top bit.”

Julius nodded. “I’ve seen pictures of that. Beautiful.”

“Sacred site, Uluru.” Jayne looked at me. “They say it’s the resting place of ancient spirits.”

I wondered if that was what had attracted Ned Kelly and his machine. New recruits. Turning to Julius, I said, “Why would he move it?”

“Dunno,” he said. “You said you went and did the ‘ride the light’ thing and that brought you here. Maybe just a few seconds of meetin’ you spooked him. Pulled up stakes and—”

Juanito said, “The third time—”

This time, we both said, “The third time?”

“Yes, it was three times, but I am sorry,” Juanito said. “I don’t know where that was. Near a lake at first, then traveling north. I followed it, chased it for a while, enchanted by the streams of beautiful light snapping at the sky. Eventually, I broke away. I wish I could tell you more, but that is all I know about this machine.”

Julius blew out a breath of air and walked in a circle.

My mind was racing, so I let him do the pacing for both of us.

“Juanito says he followed it,” Julius said, pointing at our new friend. “The damn thing is moving. How is it moving?”

I pursed my lips. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, wait!” Juanito said, eager to please. “There was a man that I saw. More than one but he was, um, connected to the light. He was dressed so strangely is why I remember him, I think. At first, I did not think he was a man because of…” His voice trailed off, searching for the word. In the end, he just waved his hands around his head.

“Right, yeah. The armor,” I said. “Had a big trash can on his head?”

Our new friend scrunched up his face. “Trash?”

“Rubbish,” Julius explained, all teacher-like, and Juanito nodded.

“Okay, okay, Mr. Worldly,” I said, teasing him. “We’ve all been to foreign countries and know weird words.”

Julius smiled at me, leaning against the concrete wall. “So Ned Kelly’s machine is not only fully operational but, somehow, he’s mobile. How the hell are we gonna find it now?”

A strange sound bubbled through the room, and we realized Jayne was laughing at us. We turned to her and just waited.

“Ned Kelly? Ned Kelly?” she said, still laughing. “That wasn’t any Ned Kelly.”

I blinked. “Sure it was. That’s who we’re here to stop! Shut down his—”

“You know the rules of this place, right? The InBetween?” Jayne looked between us like we were morons. “Ned Kelly was hanged, mate,” she said, and for the first time, she stood up. “He wasn’t all ‘killed with no justice and now walks this realm of sorrow and revenge.’ He was hanged and went to wherever all the other proper dead people go. Not this godforsaken shithole.” She laughed then laughed harder.

I struggled to make sense of it and kicked at the dirt floor. Unsatisfying because in this “realm of sorrow and revenge,” I couldn’t really, you know, kick dirt.

“One step forward and two back, feels like,” Julius muttered.

I stepped toward Jayne, and she matched my pace, retreating, her laughter snapping away. “The man in all that… fucking armor and the metal head and that, come on, that’s Ned Kelly! He’s our man!”

“He ain’t here, mate. Not in this place,” Jayne said, scowling. She tilted her head. “But get me out of this hole here, and I’ll tell you who is in that armor. And what he’s looking for.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The young couple had laid out the massive picnic blanket, far from the nearest town. From the desert floor, the man stared up, deep into her eyes, never breaking away, not for a moment, because he knew chicks liked that kinda thing. The light wind that tickled the desert valley floor, the sparkling sand that chased between the rocks, the sky that looked like the deepest reaches of the ocean trapped in glass. Every firing synapse in his brain was imploring him to take a selfie. I must look amazing right now.

“You look amazing,” she said, almost in a purr.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

Still, he did not pull out his phone for a picture. Maybe later. Or, who knows, maybe during when she was lost in the throes of ecstasy. Of course, he would blur her face or cut it out entirely. After all, he wasn’t a cad.

He shifted his weight to make some room on the blanket—and because his abs looked better when there were tiny shadows between each muscle—then smiled and nodded at her summer dress. She grinned wildly, crossed her arms, and reached behind her back, but just as she gripped the floral-patterned fabric, she stopped.

“Wait,” she said, eyes flitting side to side. “No one will come, will they?”

“Here? No, no.” He laughed, being sure to show both sets of ramrod-straight, pearl-white teeth. They’d cost a fortune. But the way he looked at it, if you split those thousands of dollars by the number of times people got to see them, the price of each smile dropped a little more. This one cost around $47.24. He’d done the math and kept a tiny printout folded up in his pocket.

“Are you certain? I don’t want—”

“That dusty old mine’s been shuttered for a long time… probably longer. No one comes out here. Snakes are probably wondering what these two weird but beautiful creatures are doing out here.”

Her eyes widened. “Snakes?”

“Ah, just a few,” he said and grinned again ($46.87), nodding to her dress. “They’re attracted to flowers.”

It took her a moment, then she giggled, broke out in a huge smile. As she lifted the dress off, his eyes flickered to the teeth between her lips.

Hmm. Maybe $1.04? At best.

When she lay back and he looked at the girl stretching in the sun, he forgot all about her teeth. At the sound of some pebbles plinking across the nearby rocks, she flinched and held her hands to her chest. “Are you sure no one will come out here?”

“Mate, there isn’t a soul for miles and miles and miles,” he said, sliding his tongue down her stomach. “Probably farther.”

* * *

The two ghosts stood at the top of the hill, looking down at the naked livies sprawled out on the blanket and rather noisily engaging in their coitus desertus.

“Boy’s got excellent form, I’ll give him that,” the one in the blue cap and overalls said.

The man next to him shook his head, but the other couldn’t see that. The huge metal helmet hid all gestures like that.

“Yeah, but I bet he wishes he had a mirror, that one,” the other said, his voice ringing off the metal. “So he could look at himself.”

“All the blokes are like that these days, Ned. Some of them are prettier than the women.”

The man in the helmet frowned, totally missed by the other. “Prettier than the women, Jakob? Prettier?”

“Yeah, well, there’s a difference between ‘pretty’ and ‘attractive,’ mate,” Jakob said, displaying a furrowed brow, which snapped a pang of jealousy into the gut of the man called Ned. “I reckon pretty is a somewhat empirical term, while attractive is more subjective.”

Ned had never been able to reconcile how a man with a boorish, twangy bush accent like Jakob had gotten his mouth around words like “empirical.” Sure, the guy had to have been somewhat smart, he’d been a conductor in the middle of the last century.

But he could never shake the image, every time Jakob spoke, of an orangutan bouncing from tire swing to tire swing, reciting dirty limericks.

“Noice,” Jakob said, making the one-syllable word two. “Impressive, that. This one, what he’s doin’ down there is what you call a Venus butterfly. Ah, hold on—” He got onto his toes, shifting his head from side to side. “Oh, even better. It’s a winking butterfly. And, she’s just lov—”

“All right, all right.” The man in the amour squeezed some extra frustration into his voice. “Have you seen enough yet?”

Jakob looked hurt. “Come on, you said I could—”

There was a high-pitched squeal from below, and when they looked down, it appeared as though the woman was pointing at them.

“Ah shit, mate. She sees ya armor.”

Ned Kelly took one step back.

Jakob watched the man below turn his head upward, shield his eyes from the sun, then shrug and turn back to the woman. “He’s tryin’ to reengage, but she’s not having it,” Jakob said, bent over and letting out a staccato howl of laughter. “Ha. Mate… oh, this is good. She’s off and runnin’, blanket under one arm, floral smock under the other. Wish you could see this!”

“Can’t.” He pointed at his helmet.

The man in the overalls started hopping, actually hopping, as he laughed. “Crikey, he’s chasing her, but that boy, he ain’t fit for chasing. He’s… he’s butt naked and turgid, mate!” If Jakob had been alive right then, he’d have been scarlet red in the face. “Ha. Oh lordy-lord! If he smacks that thing on a rock, I reckon he’ll crack it in two!”

“Good. Fine.” Ned started walking down the hill. The couple would be running back to the road, in the opposite direction, so he didn’t have to worry about any livies seeing a spooky floating helmet. It was one reason he’d originally conducted most of his searching at night. Far more risk in the daylight hours. But Painter Mann was in the country now, and after the machine in Scotland had been destroyed, there was no question the bastard had set his sights on him.

His boss, Voodoo Cher, seemed far less concerned about that busted machine than she did about Ned speeding up his search.

Stomping down the rubble and silt of the hillside, he reached the bottom and trudged across the path. Ironically, right now, he would have given anything for a bottle of whiskey, but it had been the bottle that had forced him into spending his nights—and now days—scouring the country, searching.

A few minutes later, he looked up to the spot where Jakob had assured him the abandoned mine—another bloody mine!—would be. As he stood on a rocky outcropping, the world around him was a tableau of burnt orange, a color like the fingers of an old man who hacked and coughed from a lifetime of smoking.

A bit of scrub tumbled by, skittering bugs in its wake.

The hard dirt hadn’t seen water since Noah’s flood; the sun glared at this patch of the outback as if it bitterly disapproved. Not that the man in the mask felt it.

He also couldn’t yet see what they’d come for. “Where’s the entrance?” he shouted, his voice ringing off the inside of the hollow metal helmet. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

At the bottom of the hill, the other man had tracked the other direction back toward their machine, which was shooting beautiful, billowing ribbons of light into the sky.

Jakob stopped and turned. “It’s a mine, mate.” The man pointed just to the north of where Ned was standing. “Look for a long ridge. There’ll be an opening at the end.” Jakob lowered his head for a moment then held up a finger. “Might be like that one you searched near Willowra. Boarded up or hidden.”

Ned stepped down from the rocks and walked toward the only ridge he could see.

Jakob had never steered him wrong before, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the county’s mines. He’d been blessed with an eidetic memory and seemed to have wasted that gift on his obsession with abandoned sites where, more often than not, men had gone in to dig for precious stone but had only come out with empty pockets and broken dreams.

“Bloody places are cursed,” he muttered to himself, finally spotting some large stones and rocks piled unnaturally. Jakob had been right—here too. They’d covered up the mine shaft in a half-hearted attempt to keep the public out.

If he could only remember which mine—what town—he’d hidden the damn thing in.

But he wasn’t gifted like Jakob. He’d heard some describe that ability as “photographic”—as if those types of brains captured each moment perfectly, like a photo in an album. His brain cobbled together memories in a matter more akin to a sloppy finger painting by some three-year-old hopped up on fruit juice and ADHD medicine.

At the mine’s entrance, he searched for a way to sneak past the pile of rocks.

The physical “rules” of the InBetween made sense in their own way. Ghosts could pass through wood doors and steel beams, and even stone walls. But not ground cover. Not dirt, sand, water, or rocks.

There weren’t any physicists in this realm to explain the machinations behind all of this to the common lay person. Well, there would likely be physicists amongst them, but Ned felt if they were here, they’d have been murdered. And probably had more pressing concerns than going back to work unraveling the mysteries of the universe.

After a few minutes of searching, he found a gap in the rock his ghostly body could sneak through. What he really needed was an actual opening so that he could take the helmet inside the dark mine. Its metal was connected to the machine, and he could use its energy to give him some light to see.

However, the mine had been sealed.

“Ah, whatever.” He remembered how far inside the mine, so many years ago now, he’d hidden his treasure. Probably because the pain of that experience had etched it into his brain—he had drunkenly banged and scraped his fingers bloody to find a spot to tuck it away.

He looked back to see if Jakob had come up behind him to see the place, but the man had never done that. His love of mines solely fell upon their tragic histories. He had little interest in going inside.

Convinced he was alone, for the first time in days, maybe weeks, he pulled off the helmet, wincing in the harsh sunlight.

Again, Ned cautiously looked to see if any other spooks were around. Because, if anyone ever caught sight of his uncovered face, they would know the man under the helmet was not, of course, Ned Kelly.

* * *

Painter paced around the tight space down one wall, down another, then the next. Over and over again. He scowled at Jayne, who’d sat back down on her original spot, not even moving when he passed, forcing him to step over her.

Of course, he had considered just brushing a foot up against the woman. Then he could likely see what she knew about this Not Ned, as she’d called him. But that felt all kinds of wrong. It was one thing to inadvertently touch another spook and get a front-row seat to their old home movies. And, sure, if they’d permitted him, that was fine too. But just taking those memories, despite that the other would never even realize it, felt like a violation. Immoral and wrong.

So, for now—or until he got desperate and chucked morality—he waited, trying to think of a way out.

Juanito had been no help. The years, decades, he’d spent as, well, a ghoul, were a violent chaos of images and sounds and pain. I’d pressed him on anything more he could tell us about this supposed machine-in-motion, but he’d told us everything he knew.

Julius tapped his chin, staring at the ledge, twenty feet up. “We could pile some stuff up in the corner and climb out,” he said. “I mean, stuff that’s, you know, solid to us. ’Course we don’t have any stuff to do that.”

Another voice said, “I got a better idea.”

My heart leaped, and I turned around to see Julius snap his head up toward the dark void above. A moment later, Uncle Jerry leaned over the side, looking into our hole. He held a lighter next to his head so we could see his sweaty, smiling face peering down at us.

“All right!” I shouted and raised my arms. “How the hell did you find us?” I said.

“Heard some weird racket that sounded all kinda spooky and assumed you probably had something to do with it.”

Juanito looked between me and the livie above. Weakly, he waved. “That was me. I was a ghoul and Painter—hold on—sir, you are alive?”

“So far. But the day ain’t over yet.”

“How is it you can hear him?” Juanito asked the old pilot.

Uncle Jerry laughed and cleared his throat a few times. I noticed his eyes were damp but that smile hadn’t faded. “Yeah, I heard all of yas. Although sometimes I wished I didn’t, if I’m honest.” He looked up at the ceiling. “There’s some group of y’all wandering around a few stories up. They don’t seem like the friendly type.”

“You got that right,” Julius said and shot a look at me. Time to go. “Okay, what’s your better idea?”

The old pilot balanced his lighter on the stone floor above and reached around behind him, the tip of his tongue sticking out between pursed lips. When he brought his hand back, it was holding the rebar from the busted stone bench.

Julius spun toward me and clapped. “That’ll do it!”

“How the hell is that going to help?” Jayne said, still sitting with her arms folded, nonplussed that we were all talking to a livie.

Our livie friend lifted the lighter to scan the surrounding area, the shadow of his head growing impossibly large as it flitted across the wall. “There’s all sortsa construction mess up around. Bit of a dumping ground. I’ll find some rope, tie the rebar to it, and lift y’all up.”

“Genius, man,” I said, then something occurred to me. I pointed at the metal bar. “Uncle Jerry? Where did you just pull that outta?”

“Ah-ha, that’s private.” Uncle Jerry looked down, blushing. “But I will say chafing was involved.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

To the rest of the world, at least the living one, Uncle Jerry was happily trotting down the street. A man, muttering to himself. In a city this big, no one seemed to give a damn. Just another crazy old coot.

The four of us were following on the heels of my friend, close as we could get. That way, when other people went to walk around him, they were less likely to amble right through us ghosts.

Seeing all the innards when you go through people is very blechy.

That was one reason I’d taken up the rear, so if anyone was going to get a meat, bone, and blood show, it would be yours truly. Also, I could keep an eye on Jayne to be sure she was going to stay true to her word. “You’ve got some storytelling to do, Jayne. Let’s hear it.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, as she walked, she was twisting left and right like she was at the Wimbledon finals. In fact, both she and Juanito were gaping open-mouthed at the world outside. A few times, the ex-ghoul had even bent down to press his head inside a flashy car as it whizzed by.

“It’s all so shiny!” Juanito said, delighted.

When he’d been a ghoul, he spent most of his time roaming familiar territory, the prison. The times he left—to search for the woman he’d killed—he hadn’t been window shopping. Or checking out the latest fashion trends. And of course, he’d been totally insane. So this world was new to him.

Jayne seemed like a different story. She’d ignored my query a few times already, so I tried a different approach.

“Jayne, how long were you in that hole?” When she didn’t answer, I tried again. “Jayne?”

She frowned, blinking like I’d snapped her out of some trance. At first, I thought she was simply as enamored by all the advanced technology as Juanito. She wasn’t. “Back when I was, you know, not dead, I wasn’t popular when I was in that place. All the others were real hard cases. Killers and crims. They sort of looked down on a mum who’d gotten caught stealing clothes.”

“Popular. Jeez, sounds like high school.”

She shot a sideways glance at me. “You and me went to different kinds of schools, mate.”

Oh, I wouldn’t know, don’t recall a moment of it.

“I was killed by another inmate. She’d always had it in for me, about a year before they shut that place down,” she said, her eyes still scanning the streets. “A few days later, a friend of mine returned the favor. Out of loyalty, I suppose. Not her fault.”

Julius turned his head back as he walked. “But then you got your enemy right in your face again.”

“Exactly.” Her voice softened, “This woman… she just had a way about her. People listened to her and followed her like sheep. It wasn’t long before she had everyone turned against me again, and I got thrown into the hole.”

We turned a corner, and our leader had to slip between a family walking along grazing on paper cups of French fries. Their smiling faces, covered in ketchup, looked like they’d either been the happiest of cannibals or, I suppose, just really liked their chips.

I was envious and felt some memory of my mouth watering.

The other side of the street was less crowded, so we followed Uncle Jerry as he trotted over. I hadn’t realized he’d been listening as well.

“You ever get a bit of payback, Jayne?” he said. “Stuck down there. I bet you thought about it.”

She looked at him, a quirky smile on her face. I think she assumed she’d always be lost to the living world. And here was some old fella, living old fella, sweating like mad, asking about her life. “You wanna get outta the sun, mate,” she said. “Looks like you’re melting.”

Uncle Jerry nodded and got moving, in and out of the shade of the shop awnings that dotted the Melbourne streets.

“I’d thought about getting even, sure, but mostly just about how to get out of that bloody hole,” Jayne continued. “Every few weeks, they’d chuck down some inmate—living inmate—and they’d come by sometimes and toss down food and all that. One of them had it bad. They forgot about the poor bloke, and he died right in front of me. Took him days to finally give up. But all that cryin’ and beggin’ and shoutin’, it did my head in for a while.”

A car horn blared nearby, and everyone except our livie friend flinched.

A moment later, Jayne continued, “But as the days and weeks dragged on, I ended up missing his company. I would have even taken the cryin’ if I’m honest. Just something,” she said, stopping briefly to peer into a dress shop. She shook her head and got back in line. “Just when I thought I was really going to go mad—or maybe I had, who knows—the strangest thing happened.”

Julius took the bait. “What happened?”

“I got a visit from that horrible woman who’d bullied me when I’d been alive and dead. Annie was her name, and one day—or night, hard to tell down there—she was up top just above me and blubbering. Hell, that’s kinda why I thought I’d gone balmy again like I was hearing that livie slowly dying in my head. But no, Annie was up there. Seems she’d gone to check out her gravesite, just outside of town. Wanted to see just how shit it looked. But instead, there was a wee vase with a burst of flowers out the top. She said she stared at it for hours. For the life of her, she couldn’t work out who’d have left it there. Just as she was about to head back to the prison, she saw a man walk up, eyes red-rimmed, right up to her grave.” Jayne went quiet for a moment.

I prodded her. “Had she been married?”

“She never said. But she watched this bloke gently pull out the wilting flowers and replace them with new ones. Fussing over them to get them just right. He then put his fingers to his lips and touched her small headstone. She watched him leave but was too stunned to follow.”

Juanito had moved to walk next to her by now. He went to put an arm around her shoulder, but saw her expression and decided against it. He asked, “Who was he then?”

Jayne let a dark laugh bubble through her lips. “She didn’t even know! Had no idea who he was, but something about the gesture flipped something in her head. That’s why she was up there telling me her story.” She shrugged. “Guess she couldn’t tell the other spooks in there. They saw her as some real tough chick and wouldn’t suit. But she’d come to tell me”—she turned, and for the first time since we’d left the prison, she looked me directly in the eyes—“she was sorry. Can you believe that? That one moment of kindness from, for all she knew, a total stranger. Changed her head.”

“Sometimes, I guess, that’s all it takes,” I said.

“She told me she was sorry for treating me the way she had,” Jayne said, turning back to the line and speeding up a bit to get closer to Julius. “Finally, I was going to be out of the hole. She needed to get a few more spooks to help release me, all gripping hands, I reckon, and she stood to go find a few to help. Then, the next moment, she flickered and just… vanished.”

I had seen that before—hell, I had made that moment my vocational endgame for the better part of the year. Closing my eyes, I shook my head. “They charged the woman who killed her. Your friend.”

Jayne nodded slowly. “So I was left down there. Now and then, I could hear people, living people, above, but no one ever came. Neither did any of the others. And after that prisoner had died down there, they never sent another. When those arseholes chucked you two down there—well, three—I thought it was some dream,” she said, then her voice turned so soft it was difficult to hear. “It had been so long. I didn’t want to talk to you because I thought… you might disappear. Reckoned it was better to be out of my mind than be alone.”

Juanito finally did put his arm around her shoulders. She didn’t shrug him off. “How long were you down there?” he said. “By yourself.”

She blew out a long breath. Spooks don’t have air in their lungs, of course. But the ticks and mannerisms from when we were alive endure. “I think they closed the place up in 1929?”

Julius piped up, “And they put you down there a year before. 1928?”

“Look at you doin’ the maths. All in your head too,” she said with a wry grin.

“Well, I was a teacher back in the day.”

Jayne had been down in that hole for a century. Alone. No one to talk to. The tiniest flicker of light. Endless days and night in virtual darkness. So walking the city streets, Jayne hadn’t been enchanted by the “new, shiny world.” Or the tech. She saw trees. People. Buildings, cars, birds, cracks in the pavement, dead grass floating through the air. For the first time in almost two lifetimes, she saw… color.

How wasn’t she crazy? Maddened by rage?

We crossed one last road and found a park that was, in the brutal Aussie summer heat, all but empty. Uncle Jerry grabbed a bench in the shade and slumped down with a sigh.

“I expect you lot are heading up to where Juanito saw that machine, yeah?” Jayne said, slowly walking away from us. “Somerset is about as north as you can get. Tip of Queensland. I’m headed another way.”

Juanito took a step toward her. “Where are you going? Whatever was here before is gone, Jayne.”

She looked away, but then slowly a smile grew on her face. Like she’d allowed some thought in for the first time in a long, long, while. “Had a few kids, I did. Maybe they had kids, and who knows, maybe those kids had kids,” she said and then beamed. “I’m going to go check on my family.”

That had been it. That’s what, somehow, kept her going all these years. I didn’t have to ask, because I knew the truth—the clothes she’d stolen had been for her children. She was a mother. And now maybe a great-great-grandmother. Or great-great-great, I don’t know. Me, I’m not so good at “maths.”

And now she would cash in—the reward for not allowing herself the frenzied bliss of falling down some dark, dark spiral into madness.

She was about to leave but then turned and squared herself to me. “Ah, right. I do owe you what I promised,” she said, and I nodded, happy that I didn’t have to be a jerk and remind her. She lifted her arms, looking around. “So, we’re all in this place because we got murdered. But Ned Kelly was hanged, not murdered.”

That had to be wrong. Then, I had an idea. “Hanging is arguably murder, right?”

“Sure, but in the InBetween it’s gotta be a murder without the world knowing who did it. That’s not the case with Kelly—his hangman is in all the history books. Back in the day, he’d been a crim in Melbourne Gaol.”

This perked up Uncle Jerry, and he sat straight on the bench. “They had other prisoners hang the ones condemned to die? Jesus.”

Jayne shook her head. “Nah, story goes that the regular hangman, he had the day off or something. Or maybe didn’t want to be the one to pull the lever to kill a man some people saw as a hero.”

This made little sense, and I told her, “But I saw Ned Kelly. Briefly, but he was there with that big trash can on his head, slits for his eyes.”

“Nah, not Ned,” Jayne said, pointing her toe and drawing a circle on the ground. “But maybe the next best thing. After I died, I only had a short time before I got dropped in the hole, but there was a man there who never stopped talking about Kelly. Seems his life’s greatest regret was pulling the ol’ lever on Ned.”

Julius stepped forward. “Holy shit! The hangman?”

“Yeah.” She nodded and looked into the trees for a moment, thinking. “Elijah Upjohn. Said he was never the same after that day. The warden even had him have a go at more executions after he’d done a ‘good job’ on the cop killer. Heart wasn’t in it, and he botched them.”

“Putang ina mo,” Juanito said and whistled.

“Yeah, that.” Jayne shook her head. “Once he was released from prison, he went from job to job. A drifter and a drinker. Then, in some pub, as he told the story, he meets some posh bloke who’s traveled all over the world. A collector. And in his collection, this guy’s braggin’, a few too many whiskeys in ’im, about the one he’s most proud of. A whistle.” She explained that according to what this collector told Elijah Upjohn—and what Upjohn had told the prisoners once he’d returned as a spook—it had been something used in Mexico, centuries earlier when the locals were warring against the Spanish invaders. Even possessing one broke some international laws, especially with Posh Man crossing borders constantly.

Julius wasn’t buying it. “How the hell is having a whistle illegal? They’d have to lock up every ref in the NFL by that logic,” he said then reconsidered. “Actually, they probably got it coming. Some of the crimes I’ve seen on the field, they—”

“So, what made this whistle so special, Jayne?” I said, trying to get the story back on track.

“Well, it was made from a skull, wasn’t it?”

According to the legend of this so-called “death whistle,” the Aztecs would use them in battle to scare the willies out of the advancing battalions of conquistadors. When held to the mouth and blown through, it sounded like the suffering shriek of a dying man.

The collector had been searching for one but, for years, had come across only trinkets made from wood and some even from animal bone. But he’d paid top dollar—and at great risk—for a very, very rare death whistle made from a human skull.

“After Elijah hears the man’s story, he wants this thing more than anything he’s ever wanted,” Jayne said. “He finishes up, waits outside in the dark, and when the man stumbles out of the pub, he follows him back to his room. Some sleepout behind an inn.” Jayne wrapped her arms around her body. “Guy goes in, but before he can lock up, there’s Elijah. They struggle, and the inn manager comes out to see what the ruckus is about then goes to find the cops. Elijah’s desperate, so he smashes the guy with a rock. Just wanted to knock him out, but it killed the poor fella.”

I closed my eyes. “Jesus.”

“Then Elijah’s got the death whistle, and he’s on the run,” Jayne said. “But it turns out the collector, he had mates who are looking for payback. By this time, Elijah’s deep in his cups and knows he’s gonna get pinched. As he told the story in the prison, he hid the damn thing—some hole or something—and then just started running.”

“A hole?” I said, shaking my head. “What does that mean?”

“Dunno. He was cagey about it. Eventually, the collector’s mates caught up to him. One of them slid up to him in a bar and offered to buy a drink, which, of course, he accepted. Within a day or two, he was dead. Right in the street.”

Julius snapped his fingers. “Poisoned!”

“Too right,” she said, nodding. “And because they thought Elijah was just some drunk who died in the street, his killers walked free.”

“And he ended up in the InBetween,” I said.

“And he’s been searching for the whistle ever since,” Jayne said. “Not sure how he got tied up with that machine you’re looking for, but I reckon if he’s up and down the country like Juanito’s saying, that’s what he’s looking for.”

The puzzle pieces were falling together, but I still couldn’t get my head around it. “Wait, wait. Why the hell is he going through all that for a whistle?”

She smiled darkly. “Because, mate, the collector said them whistles weren’t just used to frighten the Spanish soldiers. They’d done surprisingly well with their crude weapons against an invading force armed with muskets. That was because the Aztecs used the ol’ skull flute to gather special reinforcements. The death whistle raises the dead.”

That sent shivers through all of us, despite the story being told to three dead people.

“That’s why Elijah Upjohn wants it,” Uncle Jerry said. “To raise the dead?”

“Just the one,” Jayne said, waiting, as it sunk in.

“Right, right. Holy shit, okay,” I said, trying to piece it all together. “Elijah wants to right some wrong and somehow bring the real Ned Kelly from the grave. Why in the world would he need his armor, though? That doesn’t—” Then it clicked. “It’s not Ned’s armor. Shit.”

Julius sidled up next to me. “What?”

“The machine. It’s how he’s controlling the machine.” I’d started putting the pieces together. “The helmet is made from the totems of the people inside, giving him unbelievable power.”

“Power to make the damn thing move,” Uncle Jerry said. “If, you know, Juanito is right about that.”

“I am right,” the former ghoul said, bristling.

Julius was less sure. “You were certifiably crazy, bat-shit insane.”

“Okay,” Juanito conceded. “You have a point there.”

Sometimes, thinking was easier while sitting, so I dropped to the grass and mulled it over. “Maybe, but it still doesn’t explain how he can make it move.”

“Or what it’s got to do with Voodoo Cher,” Julius added, and he was right. Each answer just led to two more questions.

I jumped up. “We gotta go.”

“So do I. And thank you, all of you, for what you did to help. I may be dead, but I’ve still got some living to do.” Jayne then made her farewells and bid us good luck.

We all threw her a wave, and then she turned to see the entire world before her. She picked a direction and headed out.

“She gone?” Uncle Jerry said, using a flattened paper bag he’d found to fan himself.

“Yep. We’ve got to get going too,” I said. “Lost too much time already.”

Julius looked at me, then at our old friend on the bench. “Let’s give it a minute,” he said. “Just enjoying this beautiful day for a moment. If nothing else, Jayne's story reminds us we gotta do that from time to time.”

“Yeah, a real ABC Afterschool Special moment for everyone. That’s one to grow on. Learning, right?” I said a bit snarkily, but he was right—our pilot needed to catch his breath and cool down.

“The hell you talking about?” Julius hit me with a frown.

“I dunno, some pop reference that bubbled up into my brain. Weird.”

Uncle Jerry laughed, pointing at me but, well, not pointing at me. He was pointing toward a fire hydrant, maybe. “That’s the Razzie in you coming out. You used ta say shit like that all the time, boy!”

Julius joined him then gave me a once over. “Man, you are looking different.”

“Well, I’ve been working out.”

He shook his head, smiling. “Still look a lot like Painter but, maybe, after a few months of chompin’ down chips and Little Debbies in front of the boob tube.”

“Helpful,” I said.

Juanito was looking at all of us, trying to keep up. “You guys talk weird. Is that all English?”

“Some of it,” I said. “What about you? You want to help hunt down a moving, world-killing machine run by a guy searching for an Aztec death whistle so he can raise the dead and end all life on this planet?”

Juanito rubbed his chin and grinned at us, finally picking up on our groove. “Tempting. But I hope to return to my family too. In the Philippines. If there are any left.”

“Gonna be hard to cross the water, but there are ways,” Julius said and shook his hand. “Be safe.”

The former ghoul stuck his hand out to me, but I only smiled.

“Yeah, the last time we touched felt like years,” I said. “I bid you good travels with a hearty thumbs-up, sir.”

He laughed and returned the gesture. When he got to the street, like Jayne, he looked for which direction he should go. Then, he went in the opposite direction, turning to wave only once.

Julius smiled and waved back. “Does the man know he’s going south?”

“Probably not.” I waved with him. “But he’ll work it out, eventually.”

Uncle Jerry, done with sitting in the shade, eased forward and got to his feet. “Heat like this, you never stop sweatin’,” he said and started walking, and we followed. He’d parked the rental car down the road from the old prison. From there, it was a short drive back to the jet. “We heading to this Somerset place, then?”

“All we got to go on,” I said. “Good a’ place as any.”

Our old pilot pinched the fabric on his drenched flight suit and flapped it to create a tiny breeze. “Maybe I’ll roll the window down in the cockpit,” he said with a smile, then he pulled out his phone and tapped at it as he walked. A moment later, he pocketed it once again. “Sally ain’t pickin’ up. Hope she’s okay.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sally took a rare moment to enjoy the wind in her hair as she glided down the road on her hell-born motorcycle, her long braid whipping back and forth like an angry dragon’s tail. It still bothered her to keep it slow—she could have been at the next location in under two minutes—but she’d made a promise to Officer Tara Jeffries that she would keep it at a reasonable speed.

And it had been Tara who had, after a few calls, discovered the exact location where they were going next.

The page Sally had found blowing in the wind had two columns of block handwriting. The first was a string of names, at least thirty, in a long list all down the crumpled paper. A second column linked each name with a town.

The previous owner had drawn a line through the top third, and Sally had remarked it looked like one of Rasputin’s old shopping lists. Except, of course, these were people, and while she had felt from time to time that the dinner her helper/driver had cooked up had been a might rank, she was sure, despite how it tasted, none of his dishes had contained dead foot.

It only took a few minutes of Tara checking the names to confirm what they already knew.

It was a list of grave sites. The Aussie cop had recognized two of the names as ones she’d visited during her investigation. But one thing bothered her: these “thieves” seemed to know more about the dead than even the official authorities whose task it was to keep such records.

“This last one crossed off, we can assume this Isaac Heywood is the guy you just covered up with dirt,” she’d said back at the site, tapping the name with her fingernail. “There was a record of a man with that name who came over on a convict ship bound for Victoria. He was on a boat called the Amelia in 1832, but there’s almost no record of what happened to him after he arrived. Certainly not where he’d been buried.” Sally looked up from the paper in the other woman’s hands, then back to the small potter’s cemetery. “So how’d the person who had this list know that?”

“Exactly.”

Tara folded the paper neatly, but she blinked, and it disappeared from her hands. She stared at her fingers for a moment and then noticed Sally stuffing something into her rear pocket.

Tara gawked at her. “Did you just take that?”

“I found it.”

“But that… It’s evidence,” Tara said, hands still floating in the air, sans paper. “It… it…”

“It’s mine. I found it.” Sally started heading down the path toward the road again. “And I heard you read it top-to-bottom to someone down the line, so somewhere you’ve got your copy.”

The other woman balled her fists and stormed after her. “I’d like it back, and—and—you don’t even know where we’re going next.”

Sally hopped on the back of her bike, which fired up the moment she got on. That had earned a double blink from Tara. She’d never even seen the key come out. Shit, she’s got fast hands. “A ways up Prairie Road when you hit Tablederry,” the gunslinger said, tapping the GPS mounted between the handlebars of her bike. “It’ll take you just shy of an hour and a half. I can be there in under two minutes.”

“Bullshit.”

“You just watch me,” Sally said, starting to wheel away.

Tara stepped in front of the front tire, hands on her hips.

“That ain’t such a wise move. Horse’ll go right over ya if he’s gotta.”

The bike revved twice.

Again, she’d never even seen her hand move to do that. “Listen, listen,” Tara said, switching up her play. This was not a woman who would ever respond to being ordered around. “These are my people getting buggered with—”

“There’s that word again,” Sally mumbled to herself. “Gotta me something different than what I’ve seen.”

“—and they’re my people. They may be crims or paupers who came here from god-knows-where two-hundred years ago or last week.” Tara stepped forward, straddling the tire with her knees. “But after they set foot in this country, they became Aussies. And I have a sworn duty to all of them, alive or dead.”

Sally parted her lips already bent in a grimace, but then she stopped. Tara watched something flicker across her eyes.

“Fine. I’ll get there and scope the place out while I wait.”

Tara shook her head. “Aw, no. You don’t strike me as someone who likes to wait for anyone. We’ll ride in a convoy, yeah? That’s an American thing, you’ll like it.”

Sally growled in near perfect time with the rumbling of the motorcycle. “You’re a right pain in the keister, you are.”

“Back at ya,” Tara said with a smile.

A moment later, the bike reversed—reversed—and pointed up the road.

Tara had never seen a bike that could back up. Must be some hell of a ride, this.

Sally nodded ahead. “Straight up the nineteen, then bend your tires up, Prairie. I’ll… I’ll keep it under eighty.” This time, weirdly, the bike grumbled.

“Eighty? Crikey, I wasn’t thinking about crawlin’ there, Sal. You can do one-ten without anyone looking twice, so I reckon you could do one-twenty.”

The gunslinger had tipped her hat, gunned the engine, and disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

Tara spun around, arms in the air.

“Kilometers per hour, mate! Not miles!”

* * *

When Tara pulled up and parked behind Sally’s bike, she saw the gunslinger on the far side of the road, hat tilted down over her eyes. The Aussie cop looked through the passenger window of her truck and saw the remains of an old house, broken down and unlivable. Next to it, up the slight rise in the earth, was an old shipping container surrounded by construction detritus. Given the condition of the broken wood and masonry, it was more likely deconstruction detritus.

Only when she noticed the structure’s pointed roof, a broken beam at the top pointing skyward, did she realize it had once been a church. The next grave site would be behind that.

“Took ya long enough,” Sally said through the top of her hat, not moving a muscle.

“Nearly filled me trousers driving that fast. That motor of yours really goes.”

Sally chuckled. “You got no idea.”

“Come on, no more kip, let’s go do a rekkie.”

The other woman sighed. “Christ on a cracker, if you keep slinging around that weird Aussie slang, we ain’t never gonna be able to understand each other. It’s already damn near impossible to understand you with that fakakta accent, don’t need no fakakta words thrown in too.”

Tara laughed. “Fakakta? You don’t look Jewish, Sally Scull.”

“That’s only because my pants are too baggy.”

The other woman squinched her eyebrows together. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I dunno. I heard the Actor say it once, and it got a laugh.”

“Come on, let’s get goin’.” Tara reached out toward the gunslinger.

“I don’t need no hand up. I ain’t an invalid,” Sally said. “Just gimme a moment.”

Tara looked at her fingers for a moment. “How’d you even see my hand through that hat?”

Sally reached her hand up, underneath the brim of her cowboy hat, and poked the tip of her finger through one of the small holes. “Been shot at a lot. Taking its toll. But”—Sally dropped her hand and, close to the ground, pointed with her finger to the derelict church at the top of the small hill—“the important bit is what I been seeing through the holes here. We ain’t alone.”

Tara crossed her arms and spun around, squinting at the scene.

Sally sighed again. “I suppose I should have prefaced that by saying ‘don’t turn around but’; however, it seems like that’s a moot point now.”

“Who do you think is up there?”

“Well, don’t start stalking toward it, now. Only reason whoever is up there isn’t down here or throwing lead this way is because I been resting,” Sally said and slowly leaned forward. She readjusted her hat then got to her feet. “They likely assumed I was a-waitin’ on somebody and now that somebody is here, they’ll be on the balls of their feet, ready to go.”

“Yeah?” Tara said and started walking. “Let’s go meet ’em.”

Sally growled and then scanned the other woman’s belt line. “You ain’t got a pistol, neither. I hope this ain’t one of those soft countries where the crooks are armed to the teeth while all the cops carry a lady-sized pepper spray.”

Once Tara got back to her truck, she peered inside at the gun belt she’d tucked onto the floor on the passenger side. After a moment, she thought better of it, left it behind, and started up the hill. “The problem with a firearm is too often people end up getting shot.”

Sally trotted up to walk next to her. “That ain’t the problem. That’s the reason why you carry the damn thing! So you’re the one not getting shot.”

“Right,” Tara said, staring down at her feet for a moment. “That’s always the plan.” She looked back up at the church. “But if they’ve already seen us, whipping out some hand cannon isn’t going to shift the odds in your favor.”

“Always has for me.”

It took two full minutes to walk up the hill, which got steeper as they went. By the time they reached what was left of the double doors, they were both huffing.

Tara stripped off her black ball cap and wiped her brow with her wrist as she peered through the cracks in the walls. The place was a total shambles.

There were three large windows on the right side of the structure. The top arches of two of them had collapsed, causing the faded black shingles from the roof above to cascade into the gap. The third appeared to be simply holding on out of spite.

The front entrance extended out from the rest of the church. Tara remembered from her years of visiting her nana in the country during the summer that it was called a narthex. This looked like it might have been an add-on, built after the rest of it.

Aside from the double doors, the entire narthex had been constructed from some kind of corrugated steel. In and of itself, the entrance looked a little like a smaller reconstruction of the main building.

“All this tin bit was a smart move,” she said, waving her hands across the front of the rusted entrance. “Out here in the elements, eventually any wood will find its way back to the earth.”

Sally kept perfectly still, only moving to touch her lips with a finger.

When Tara reached for the doors, the gunslinger grabbed her wrist. Not looking at her, Sally only shook her head.

Following the American’s lead, Tara skulked around the side where the parts that had been wood were drooping and rotted from years of sun and, occasionally, rain. The stone columns which fought to keep the roof off the ground were very slowly losing their battle, crumbling to grit and blowing away.

Someone had patched the roof with long sheets of the metal, but in the places without those upgrades, the wood shingles had collapsed and fallen inside.

Sally crouched down as she passed by an open window then did the same at the next. Once again, Tara followed her lead. It would be better if they stuck close to each other, especially because just one of them was armed.

Shoulda brought the bloody things, Tara thought.

In the middle of the exterior wall, between two stone columns, most of the material had crumbled away, falling in and out of the church. Sally looked at the roofline just above the gap and frowned. If a bird landed there, the top would come down before it could settle.

From her spot, she could see the back of the church where the preacher once stood. No stained glass here out in the bush, just two thin windows on either side of the altar. When a stray leaf tumbled through one, Sally wondered if these had always been without panes to allow air to flow through.

The front few pews were all in various stages of decay, some gone entirely, some you could still sit on. A splinter would likely lead to deadly infection, but Sally had already determined that in Australia most things were conspiring to kill you.

The only furniture completely intact was the altar, made from gray-white stone. It was upright and perfectly preserved, save for the dirt and stains. This told her it had likely just been one piece carved from stone. Over the decades, any mortar would have crumbled to dust and the altar would have toppled. Probably cost as much as the rest of the damn church.

She reached under her duster and pulled out one of her pistols, slowly pushing it toward the gap. In the reflection of the silver barrel, she got a distorted view of the rest of the nave.

More rows of long seats, in similar conditions as the ones at the front. She blinked when she saw a bell still up in the bell tower. In the convex reflection, it was hard to tell its size, but it seemed about half as big as her motorcycle.

She had no idea how that hadn’t fallen down.

Her ears picked up the slightest snitch sound coming from the front part of the nav, and she arched her barrel at a sharper angle.

A long balcony, still mainly intact since the roof above it had been covered in metal. She could see broken wood and bits of trash had collected up there over the years.

She caught sight of the figure a fraction of a second before he fired both barrels. One thumped into the decaying wood. The other sent a spark off her pistol. “Dammit!” Sally snapped her hand back and with her other, pulled out her second gun.

“How many?” Tara whispered.

“One,” Sally said. “Which is a problem. Big problem.”

The other woman shot a look back at her truck, but it was too late now. “Means that whoever they’re with will be out here somewhere. Maybe in the bush.”

“I reckon you’re right.” And it meant that they’d known they were coming. Or they’d heard her roll up on Horse, a sound in a low valley like this that could have traveled for miles and miles. Stupid. And stupid’s gonna get me killed one day.

The part she hadn’t told Tara, because it was none of the woman’s business, was that she’d recognized the man she’d seen inside. It had only been for a fraction of a fraction of a second, but it had been enough.

Digger.

She knew he wouldn’t stay trapped down that hole in the Mexican desert forever but had secretly hoped by the time he’d gotten out she would have been long dead and buried. Because he would be looking to settle the score.

Ever since the war over the Downstairs had gone into overdrive, it was open seasons for either side. No more rules about who could kill who and all that. Rank protected nobody anymore. That meant, of course, that hellfire bullets had been in high demand.

And while, naturally, Hell could pump out those bullets easily enough, the one thing that was agreed upon was that bringing the fires of hell up to earth—even in tiny bullets—could eventually draw the attention of the one they called You Know Who.

Ever since the Old Man burst from those paradise gardens in a tizzy eons ago, slamming the door behind him like a petulant teenager and then creating the polar opposite of his onetime home, You Know Who was always waiting for the Downstairs denizens to slip up.

Too much hellfire would definitely do that.

That meant the agents on each side only got a handful at a time. In Sally’s estimation, it had not been a big handful. It was more like a baby handful. A baby ferret handful. Maybe baby hamster.

Either way, she had just the one left.

Digger was an agent working for the other side, Hell inc. Regular bullets wouldn’t do much to him other than put holes in his clothes and leave an adorbs, crescent moon-shaped scar. A well-placed hellfire bullet would do the trick, but if there were more than just one Hell inc lackey, she wouldn’t have the bullets.

And there would be.

Unlike Sally, Digger never worked alone.

“Fuckin’ lily-ass coward,” she muttered, scanning the interior of the church. He’d shot at her with regular bullets because he was probably used to shooting everyday folk. She knew that he’d be reloading now he’d seen her.

Sally could feel her one remaining hellfire slug, tucked snugly into a tiny sleeve in her gun belt, a slightly warm spot at the base of her spine. Not yet. Not ’til I know how many I’m up against.

She heard the clinking of spent shells and knew Digger was loading up his heavy stuff. That was her chance. Sally burst up from her crouch, extending one leg and pushing off with the other, and ran into the church, firing up into the rafters with her right pistol for a bit of cover.

Zing! Ting!

Zeroed in on the stone pulpit, she pumped her legs so fast, each step sent shooting pains up her legs and into her hips. Two more strides and she leapt, heard the shot, and felt the flames of hell pass just under her boots.

She landed in a heap—“Ooof!”—safely behind the preacher stand.

Listening, listening.

As she folded herself as small as she could, she eased up into a crouch and pulled out both pistols and held them in front of her like she was praying.

Two shooters full of lead, but it’ll be like I’m blowing kisses at the asshole.

Sally flipped open the chamber of one of her pistols, dumping the bullets into the pocket of her duster. Carefully, she’d have to reach around and grab the hellfire bullet and drop it into her left pistol. The other, hopefully, would help her line up a shot.

Steadying her breath, she listened for any telltale sign he was moving from his perch. All she heard was the wind whistling through the gaping holes of the church, the scatter of dust shimmering across its rotting bones.

His throaty laugh broke the silence. “As I live and breathe, if it ain’t Sally Scull!”

She hated the way the man spoke. Not that she had anything against Australians, but there was something categorically unpleasant about the man’s accent.

Sally had once told him his accent sounded like the voice of a koala who’d been raised by assholes. Not jerks, but actually wild, feral assholes, puckering their way through the bush and making an asshole life for themselves.

Digger had taken it as a compliment. But, of course, he was Australian.

“Well, if it ain’t, then why don’t you let me get on the hell out of here,” she said, her hand sliding back toward the special bullet. “Got no beef with you, Digger.”

Her fingers snaked toward the back of her belt, reaching, but when she was just inches away, she saw sparks fly from the broken rock and stone behind her, and she snapped her hand back. She felt the small crackle of hellfire burst behind her then fade.

“I was aiming for the middle finger,” he said, chuckling. “Thought of all ya digits, missing that one would break your heart.”

“I got a spare,” she said then quietly cursed herself. The move had left her with just one loaded pistol. In the tight space behind the stone pulpit, she couldn’t risk reloading. Unless she was willing to gamble with her elbow.

She traced her eyes left and right, looking for another spot she might get to. But he’d know she only had regular lead now, so she couldn’t count on him going for cover, giving her time to close the distance. “Never thought I’d see you holin’ up in a church,” she said. Maybe the unbroken pew to her right? It would get her closer. “You looking to confess your sins? Might be a while before the preacher gets back, but I’ll listen. Unburden yourself, my son.”

He was moving, one creaking step at a time.

Where is he going?

“Ha, you first, Sal.”

She was trapped. Not knowing whether he was moving left or right would likely earn her a fist-sized hole through her gut. “Well, if we’re confessin’ our sins… to hold my place in a book, I have been known to fold the corner over, putting a permanent crease in the page.”

Creak!

Left and right were no good. Scooting back would only leave her more vulnerable, wide open. But what other options were there? “Went swimmin’ in a public pool one time—”

“What? I can’t even imagine that,” he said, and she heard him shift his weight.

She knew he had his gun sights on either side of the pulpit.

“It was a job. Some asshole vendor selling Dippin’ Dots poolside, one of yours,” she said then had the strangest thought. Almost a divine inspiration—she looked up. “But took a while and had to relieve myself in the pool. Not proud of it.”

“Um, what about the purple dye? Didn’t it—”

“Total myth. Not a thing.”

“No shit?”

The church bell was blackened and pockmarked on the outside, but on the inside—more hidden from the elements—she saw the reflection of the man in the rafters. Digger was laying prone on his stomach, dead center in the middle, hidden behind some masonry that had tumbled off the wall.

If she leaned out to fire, all she’d see were two gun barrels sticking out from around the block. Sure, she was a good enough shot to hit him with both barrels but not with only one loaded pistol.

Then she had a better idea.

Squinting one eye, she pointed the barrel of her gun up toward the bell. Then smiled and moved just slightly to the right. “And I shot a man in the ass once.” She took a deep breath and held it.

“Now that’s cowardly,” Digger said, and she saw him tighten his hands on his pistol grips. “Why’d you do that?”

Sally cocked the hammer. “’Causin’ he was hiding behind a chunk of concrete.”

For the simple joy of it, she’d watched as he’d realized what she was saying, his head snapping left and right. The moment he looked up and finally saw the reflection in the bell, she fired.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Clannng-zip!

She burst from behind the pulpit, firing with her right pistol as she reached around behind her back, got the hellfire in her fingertips, and tossed it in the air. Still firing with her right, she thumbed open the left pistol chamber and held it out, and the slug dropped into its slot.

With a flick of the wrist, she was locked and loaded.

The right pistol was clicking empty, but Sally didn’t care. She had her left lined up for the moment Digger poked his—

“I wouldn’t do that,” a voice from the window said.

Sally didn’t flinch, still focused on her target. She heard Tara yelp and the sound of a gun being cocked. She slowly closed her eyes then opened them. In one quick move, she spun toward the man holding a gun at Tara’s temple.

“Ah-ah-ah,” Ronno said. “You’d get your shot off, but I’d still have time to put a bullet in this shiela’s skull.”

“Not if I put it in your eye,” Sally said, growling.

To her left, she heard Digger get up from his hiding spot and could feel both barrels pointed at her. The sound of his laugh, so pleased with himself, made her stomach sour.

An Aussie twang filled the air. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a gen-u-ine Mexican standoff.”

Sally laughed. “You’re such a schlub, Digger.”

“A what?”

She sighed, not lowering her aim. “A ‘Mexican standoff’ isn’t just some sorta super standoff. Historically, it’s a scenario where neither side wins, ya moron,” she said, wracking her brain for a way out of this and coming up empty. “And it’s a bit culturally inappropriate. In a nutshell, that makes you a dumb racist koala raised by feral assholes.”

Ronno frowned. “Dumb what… raised by… what?”

“Shut up,” Digger said then burst into a fit of broken laughter. “Jesus, Sal. You sure got a funny way of negotiating.”

Tara frowned and jammed an elbow into her captor’s ribs. He let out a grunt but held tight.

Digger called over to his partner: “She does that again, Ronno, shoot her.”

Sally growled again. “You even twitch that finger, Ronno, and I’ll take it off at the shoulder.” She twisted the butt of her pistol, keeping the aim straight. “I got hellfire bullets in this, so it ain’t gonna just tickle.”

Tara blinked and looked over at the Old West gunslinger.

Ronno squinted then smiled. “I can see that you got just one hellfire bullet,” he said, laughing. “Which means you can only take one of us out. Then we just kill you both.”

She took a step forward, tightening her grip. “Do I get to choose?” She gritted her teeth hard enough to make her jaw ache. “I think I know who I’ll pick right now. You wanna guess?”

“Hold on, hold on,” Digger said, calling out from the rafters. “Let’s work this out.”

Sally slackened her body, never lowering her aim. “Gonna be temporary either way, Digger,” Sally said, staring at his face. She saw him for what he really was—a ruin of flesh. “You ain’t got many sunrises left.”

Ronno glanced through the gap up at his boss. “She’s right. I say we just shoot the both of them, get what we came for, and clear out.”

Finally, Tara chimed in, “Aw, listen, all you weird rootin-tootin’ and shootin’ people can kill one another and nobody will give a damn, I reckon. But you kill a cop? That’ll bring the entire Aussie police force down on you.” She pushed herself out of the man’s grip. Ronno let go but kept his gun pointed at her head. “And for some lowlife grave robbers trying to keep off the radar… you’ll be a goddamn beacon. Only graves you’ll be digging are your own.”

Digger jumped over the ledge and landed with a grunt. He strolled toward Sally.

“That’s close enough!” she shouted, hate blazing in her eyes.

“All right, all right. Why are you teaming up with a cop, Sal? That ain’t your style.”

“Why you digging up dead bodies? Got my hands on your list.” Sally frowned and spit on the ground. “That’s low for even you.”

Digger threw a frown toward the other man. “It’s the job. Orders.”

“That ain’t an answer!”

The two Hell inc. agents exchanged glances. Ronno slowly shook his head, but Digger knew Sally. If he wanted to get out of there alive, he’d have to give her something. She’d die taking him down, he had no doubt.

Digger shouted, “Okay, you give me your pistol—”

“Never gonna happen.”

“Jesus, Sal, you are the most frustrating…” Digger holstered one of his guns. “You’ve seen the list.”

“Yeah, your grave robbin’ shopping list. Seen it.”

He laughed. “Well, technically, it isn’t stealing if you get permission from its owner.”

What the hell does…? Then it was clear to her. At that moment, Uncle Jerry was tooling around the country looking for some blasted sparkle machine with two dead guys. One who used to be Raz. A pinch of sadness hit her at that thought, but she brushed it away. “You’re saying the dead gave you permission? Why?”

Ronno stiffened. “Digger, that’s enough!”

“Sally’s a bumbling wreck of a woman, but she ain’t a fool. I’ll give her that,” his boss said.

Tara put her hands up behind her head. “What are you lot going on about? You’re not telling me you’re talking to bloody ghosts, now, are ya? That you had a cozy yarn with all the names on this list? Crikey, this is all about some occult shit!”

“Not,” Digger said and nodded out to the small cemetery out back, “not them. They’ve got an, um, intermediary. He’s running the show right now.”

“Why?” Sally said.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Digger said, stepping right next to her, putting his gun to her temple. “It’s the job, Sal. No need you dyin’ over it. At least not today.”

There was no way out, so Sally holstered her pistol.

And it did not surprise her when the blow landed on the back of her skull and the world around her went dark.

* * *

I called up to the cockpit of the jet, “Are we there, yet?”

Sitting across from me, Julius snickered. The guy had a real joie de vivre despite, you know, being all outta vivre.

He got in on the fun: “I gotta pee.”

Maybe because we needed to just be idiots for a few minutes—it had been a harrowing twenty-four hours—he and I thought this was the funniest thing in the world.

Uncle Jerry appeared to get a kick out of it and played along. “You ghost kids pipe down back there or I’m turning this plane around!”

We all laughed then.

You can’t make a habit out of being stupid—despite how many people make a vocation out of it—but now and then, there’s nothing wrong with it to blow off some steam.

After going wheels up yet again, we were headed due north to where Juanito had last spotted the machine being controlled by Ned Kelly, or rather, Elijah Underwood posing as Ned. Jayne had said Somerset was nestled right on the coast and that if you stood on the beach on your toes, you maybe could see across the water all the way to Papua New Guinea.

To pass the hours on board the flight, our pilot had been reading to us some mostly trustworthy internet facts about Australia, “the world’s largest island and smallest continent.”

Our destination was at the tippy-top of the state of Queensland. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I never knew Australia had states.

Much like the U.S., I suppose some chubby old white folks in powdered wigs decided that one big overseeing group of legislators wouldn’t be enough to thoroughly screw up a nation. To do that, you needed to have proper and ongoing conflict over which group of powerful assholes has the power to tell the everyday folks what they could do and what they couldn’t.

“Australia is divided into six states and two territories,” Uncle Jerry said.

That was a bit like America, but our numbers were a bit bigger. Fifty states and, from what I could remember, a dozen territories. The only ones that came to mind were Puerto Rico and Guam. Puerto Rico stuck out because somewhere in my very fuzzy memory, I knew they made killer rum and had beautiful women who could sing and dance, especially amid territorial gang disputes on the streets of 1950s New York.

I don’t entirely know why Guam was in my head, but the place sounded just badass. The name of it: Guam! To me, it sounded like the name of a planet of powerful warriors that would circle the sun, exactly on the opposite side from the Earth, always hidden from us. They probably rode dinosaurs or something.

Or, who knows, maybe our Guam was full of powerful dino-riding warriors and the rest of the states, scared shitless of them, peeled off the once-state and shoved it into the sea.

Not sure why Guam or Puerto Rico weren’t states already, but it probably had something to do with idiots worrying it might fuck up the flag.

“You’re lost in your head again, Paint.” Julius snapped his fingers silently in front of my face.

I’d been staring out the window at the country below. Had to admit, Australia was a beautiful country. It was easy to get taken with it. “Ah, just, you know.” I turned toward Julius and blinked to clear my mind a little. “Ever since I’ve been, um, dead, it’s been non-stop. Running from this, chasing after that. I’m tired.”

He grinned at me. “We don’t get tired anymore. No body to get tired.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” he said and nodded. “Life is like that. The older you get, the more memories you carry with you. The failures and the wins too. But all that carryin’ wears you down some.”

I know my friend was trying to cheer me up, or at least console me, but it only reminded me I never got to get old. I was killed. Sure, apparently, I’d agreed to that, but the thought darkened me. “Yeah, well, I guess I’ll never know that.”

“Sure you will,” Julius said cheerfully. “Word is that the Old Man has your body tucked away somewhere. When this is all over, you get that back. You’ll pick up where you left off.”

“Maybe. I must have been desperate to trust a plan conjured by the Devil, for god’s sake.”

My friend thought that over. “You’re on the money to not think he’ll do you right, but once we pull this off, what choice does he have?”

I looked at Julius. “What do you get out of it? You’re risking yourself too.”

“I get to go where I was supposed to, wherever that may be,” he said, eyes distant. “And I know my girl will be there waiting for me.”

You had to love the guy’s heart.

I said, “Unless, of course, she’s hanging out with some other dead ex-boyfriend. Going to harp bars and having a ball.”

He looked at me wide-eyed. “Now, why do you gotta go and do that?”

“I dunno, man.” I shrugged. “A girl’s got choices, right?”

“Done talking with you,” he said, but he couldn’t hide his smile. “You ain’t right.”

Enjoying the chance to unwind and tease him a bit, I was about to throw another one at him, but then I noticed he was staring out the window. When he saw me looking at him, he nodded outside.

I saw it.

Framed by the windows facing west, there was a long, smoky blanket of clouds hanging miles above the ground, as if on a cushion of air. Some parts of it were stained darker, threatening rain. But just to the north, tightly woven spaghetti strands of light pierced through the haze and bent across the sky, heading opposite to us. “Shit, that’s it.”

Julius called out, “Uncle Jerry, we gotta detour!”

Our pilot sat straight in his seat, pulled up the cuffs on his flight suit, dampened his fingertips, and extinguished his rolled cigarette, blowing out a plume of smoke. “Where we headed?”

The excitement had gotten to me. I don’t know what I was thinking. My ghost blood got up or something. But I got up to head into the cockpit to point our pilot in the right direction.

“Hey, whatchu—”

That was the last thing I heard. I’d taken one step off the bench we’d been sitting on and slipped right through the fuselage of the jet and fallen through the floor.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

When Sally awoke, she couldn’t tell if she were alive or dead. It was pitch black and unbearably hot. The latter gave her the willies because if this was death, hot meant things weren’t about to go very well. Staying very still, she tried to work out where she was. She felt something with many legs slowly moving across the top of her head.

She yelped and leaped up to her feet.

This was Australia, of course. Snakes that could kill with a sideways look, jellyfish that swallow you whole, and butterflies? Well, she hadn’t heard much about them but knew, here, they would be beautiful, flappy harbingers of doom.

Spiders were the big fear. In this country, they were as big as dogs. And she was convinced some arachnid had perched on her skull looking to lay eggs that would grow into babies and eat her brain.

She slapped the top of her head to be sure whatever evil spider creature that had been there was now gone.

“That was just my hand,” a voice said.

She recognized it as Tara’s.

Sally exhaled and took in a breath of hot, humid air. “Scared the willies outta me. Thought it was a Franken-tarantula.”

“A what?”

She ran her fingers over the back of her head and felt the lump, wincing as she touched it. The blood there wasn’t flowing, but when she pulled her hand back, rubbing her fingers together, she could tell it had already begun to congeal. “How long was I out?”

Tara’s face illuminated as she checked her phone. Sally looked around and saw that they were in a big empty box. Metal. An immense pile of broken bits of wood, old tires, stained rags, and just trash plugging up most of the space.

And they were locked inside.

“About two hours,” Tara said, touching the phone again, and the device’s flashlight lit up the space more fully. “He clocked you pretty hard. We should get that looked at.”

“It’ll take care of itself. Always does.”

Tara pointed the light toward her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Get that outta my face!” Sally yelled, covering her eyes. She surveyed the small space and felt, in the Aussie heat, like she’d been tossed into an oven to cook. One thing did surprise her, though. “Why are we still livin’?”

“Ha. You sound disappointed.” Tara shone her beam toward the container’s end nearest to them. “They’ve got it locked on the outside, and there’s zero mobile reception. I can push that door and get my fingers through the gap, but the lock’s out of reach.”

Sally walked over and gave the big door a kick, the sound of the impact ringing both their ears. When she leaned on it, it moved just an inch or two. Through the sliver of light, she could see the dilapidated church in the distance.

She leaned her face against the door for a moment, but it was hotter than the interior of the locked container. If she stayed like that, it might give her griddle marks. For the moment, she just slumped against it.

“They took the list of names, but”—she wiggled her phone, strobing the light around the cramped room—“I’d already taken a photo of it, and we still have our phones. Don’t know why that man Digger wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“Ah, he’s old. All this new tech…” Her voice trailed off.

“He doesn’t look old. Thirty-five maybe?”

Sally snorted. “One hundred and thirty-five more like.”

Tara clicked off the light, walked to the wall next to the gunslinger, and put her shoulder against the door. She stared intently at the other woman’s face. “You don’t look like you’re joking,” Tara said but only got an expression of hard stone. “I’ll add that to the list of ‘what-the-fuck’ I’ve heard in the past few hours.”

“Oh, I promise I got a much longer list than you.”

“Because you claim to be, like, one hundred thirty-five, right?” Sally flicked her eyes at Tara and allowed a sad grin to bend her lips but said nothing.

“I’ve heard a lot of rubbish on the job,” Tara continued. “But hundred-year-old gunslingers and all that talk of ghosts? I didn’t sign up for that kind of crazy.”

“No one signs up for crazy,” Sally said, blowing out a long breath. “Crazy is a hitchhiker that sneaks into your backseat when you ain’t looking. When you finally realize it’s there, too late. Damn thing’s eaten the last of your Doritos and shat in your trunk.”

Tara tucked away her phone then jammed her fists into her pockets, flaying the thin windbreaker out like she had wings. “Aaaggh!” She banged her foot on the side of the container, and it clanged like a hammer on a gong.

Sally spun around and put her back to the scalding hot door. “How’d you get the steel kicker?”

Tara sighed. “Raid went bad last year. These bikies were running what we thought was an ice house in Perth, and—”

“Oy vey, you wanna translate that so normal people can understand?”

The Aussie cop shrugged. “I don’t see any around here. But, fine, my superiors believed that a group of entrepreneurial, motorcycle-riding gang members were selling methamphetamine out of this little shithole on the outskirts of town.”

“Following you now.”

“Well, they weren’t,” Tara said and bent her knee, stretching. “After a massacre in Tasmania decades ago, all rapid-fire guns were banned. Semi-auto, pump-action shotguns, the lot. Apparently, our crims didn’t get the memo.”

“They were running guns.”

A slow nod. “I was on point with a big boom stick of my own. I’d pointed it at some lowlife who’d been passed out on the couch. After my rude awakening, he’s there, hands in the air. I got it sorted, but then one of my mates comes in, head buzzing from the rush, screaming and yelling. The couch surfer yells back, threatening, and gets one in the chest for it.”

“Swift justice, I’d call that.”

“Well, I don’t!” Tara closed her eyes and calmed her breathing. “Trouble is Couchy was wearing a vest. We thought he was down when he toppled over, but when he came back up, he had a semi-automatic. Just did a total Scarface and sprayed us.” Even now, she felt her ears ringing from the sound of the gunfire. “Like he was watering the garden, you know.”

Sally looked down, unsure of what to say.

“Ol’ mate of mine, he’s done. Dead before he hit the dirty floor,” Tara said. “We had our own vests and armor but, all those bullets… some just found a way in. I got it just above the gap in my knee plate, and it turned my lower thigh to tissue paper.”

Something clicked in Sally’s mind. “Which is why you hesitated to bring the gun when we were heading in the church.”

“I never was one who thought the solution to too many guns was adding more to the mix.”

Sally patted her belt line, moderately surprised she was still armed. “Just gotta put them in the right hands, I reckon.”

Tara shrugged. “Long, painful rehab, and ugly-cry story short—I lost the leg below the knee, and now I set off the metal detector before every flight.” She knocked her foot against the wall a couple times to make her point. “Dammit, I shoulda brought my gun in.”

In a rare moment of warmth, the gunslinger put a hand on the other woman’s shoulder. Tara looked at it. Sally looked at it. Then she pulled her hand back.

“It wouldn’ta mattered. You could have unloaded it on them, and all it woulda done was muss up their shirts.”

“Wasn’t planning on aiming for their shirts, Sal.”

Sally shook her head. “They’re, um, like me. Only thing that’ll take them down is the sorta bullet I got in my left shooter here.”

Tara crossed her arms. “Special bullets? Now you’re talking werewolves or something? I don’t want to hear it.”

“Nah, we ain’t werewolves,” Sally said, chuckling. “But I met one once, a while back. Nice guy. Very tall, great teeth, of course. But he was French, so…”

The Aussie cop took a few steps to the center of the container. “I am really worried that I got hooked up with a crazy person,” Tara said. She wasn’t smiling now. “Immortal gunslingers, ghosts, French werewolves…”

“Smelled a bit like maple syrup. Mighta been French-Canadian. Hard to tell.”

She pointed at Sally. “You’re a goddamn nutter. I’m locked in a hot box in the middle of the outback with a goddamn nutter!”

“No, I’m not,” she said. “And I’m not immortal, just hard to kill.”

Tara wiped her hand down her face and flung the dampness to the floor. “Maybe we’ll both roast to death.”

Sally knew she could call the Downstairs with a simple rude finger in her ear. FU Mobility always had full bars. But crying for help would be embarrassing. And she’d heard Digger had done the same when in the hole she’d dropped him in. And was ignored.

She couldn’t handle that type of indignity. “Maybe if we both made a run at the door, put our shoulders into it?”

“Yeah, then we’d be trapped in a box with broken collar bones,” Tara said then held her hand up. “Oh, except you because you’re bulletproof.”

“Not bulletproof.”

Stepping over piles of trash, Sally stumbled to the rear of the container and rummaged around, eventually coming out with a discarded piece of iron fencing. Gripping it with both hands, she went back to the door, leaned on it, and pushed the rusted rod through the gap.

She pulled, and the door groaned. She pulled harder, and it began to bend, tenting around the iron bar. On the other side of the door, there was a ping! A moment later, the bar broke, and she slammed into the side of the container. The bar fell, clanging to the floor. “Dammit! It was about to give.”

Tara had watched, amazing. “You broke that bar with your bare hands! How bloody strong are you?”

“Dunno,” Sally said, returning to the back of the container. “I gotta find something more sturdy than a bit of rusted old fence.”

She spent a half minute digging through busted pieces of wood, smashed stone tables, more fencing, and beer bottles. She’d even found a cross made out of horseshoes. Then she noticed something was… pinging?

Ping, ping, ping, ping.

When she turned, Tara had pulled her skirt up to the knee and was softly banging her shiny foot against the side of the box.

“Carbon fiber,” the cop said, smiling. “Five-times stronger than steel and twice as stiff.”

Sally stood and grinned. “That’ll do.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“I’m just an idiot,” I said as a sailed through the air, staring up at the bottom of the jet, which got smaller and smaller and smaller. “I mean, come on. This is humiliating.”

I didn’t want to look down again, because that threw my stomach into somersaults and shot lightning bolts of fear all through me. To pass the time, while falling like the aforementioned idiot, I briefly wondered if I’d been afraid of heights when I’d been alive.

When I’d been Raz Frewer.

I still struggled to get my head around the very idea of it. Somewhere rolling around my brain was an entirely different person. Or maybe similar. Either way, this other guy had a name and was somewhere inside me. That thought made me laugh, and seconds before hitting the ground, I threw my arms wide and yelled, “I’m possessed!”

When I landed, it didn’t hurt, but my mind convinced me there’d been an impact, and I let out an oof! and rolled a few feet because, I don’t know, maybe that’s what you did when you fell from fifteen thousand feet?

“No, I think you’d go splat,” I muttered.

I looked up and saw the plane moving farther away from me. Of course, I could just skate and meet them in the tiny hamlet of Somerset and beat them there by hours. But with the ribbons of lights snaking into the sky just to the northwest, I knew that was a better choice.

If I had to go it alone, so be it.

Gearing up to make a run for it, I hesitated. There was a strange sound. Some long call of the wild, maybe.

Is that a bird?

Slowly, it became clearer. It was coming closer. Whatever this strange creature was, I could tell by the sound, it was in my realm, not the living one.

The chimera.

I’d seen them briefly before leaving Scotland and knew, eventually, I’d be running from them again. They were the bogeymen of the InBetween, conjured up by some voodoo assholes back in New Orleans.

Cajun Deaux was long gone, but his monsters were still around.

And the more I became Raz, it seemed, the more they got a bead on me. They were horrifying, two-headed beasts, maddened by rage. They’d once just been regular spooks, but the Cajun had done some hocus-pocus shit and now they were horrors.

They didn’t bite or claw, nothing like that. It was far worse.

They were portals to the All Time. Their very touch would wink you away from this world into one where you experience all of time. You perceive all of it, millions, maybe billions of years. I’d been there, and while my stay had been brief, it felt like a literal eternity. Worse than any other hell I could imagine.

And my dearest friend, Gary, was stuck there.

“I gotta get him back,” I said to myself, extending my leg forward. “After I take care of this machine business, I gotta save Gary.”

The primal scream was getting louder, so I needed to get gone and do it fast.

But then, weirdly, I recognized the voice.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaa!”

A moment later, I saw Julius disappear into the treetops about a half mile ahead of me.

“Crazy bastard jumped,” I said, grinning ear to ear.

Launching forward instead of heading toward the tendrils of light, I made a beeline for my friend. He’d take a moment to get his bearings then likely bolt off toward the machine the first chance he got.

Of course, I’m much faster.

But a spook bursting through the trees moving like a bullet fired off a rocket, well, that mighta freaked him out at first.

“What in Willy Wonka—” he screamed, covering his head. Then he peeked through his arms. “Painter! There you are.”

I stopped just a few feet away and nearly buckled over, laughing. “You… you screamed! Bah-ha!” I said, trying to speak through breaths that held no air. “Jesus, man. Oh my god, your face.” I bent at the waist, giggling wildly, and got bopped on the head for it. “Yow,” I said, rubbing the spot where he’d delivered his disapproving bop. “Hey, how the hell’d you get the rebar off the plane?”

“It’s a jet,” he said, all teachery.

“Whatever.”

“Couldn’t leave it behind, so Uncle Jerry handed it to me then went and opened the door. I made a running leap and sailed through.”

“He opened the door to the pl— jet? A moving jet?”

Julius tilted his head to the side. “That man would do anything for you, I bet.” He nodded to the northwestern sky. “We found ol’ Not Ned’s machine, didn’t we?”

“Is that what we’re calling him? Not Ned?”

“I got a grandbaby named Elijah, and I don’t wanna put that name into any ill repute.” He nodded to himself. “Mr. Upjohn is overly formal, but just ‘Upjohn’ sounds kind of nasty. Like you went and soiled your britches or something, and I got no—”

“Yes, good. Fine,” I said, still smiling. “I’m good with Not Ned.”

He handed me the rebar, and I thanked him. “Hey, man, I appreciate, you know, you doing that. Flying the high dive out the open door of a jet going a few hundred miles an hour, ghost or not, musta scared the willies out of you.”

“A bit,” he admitted. “If I’d been alive, I wager I would have upjohned myself.”

* * *

Tara leaned up against the dented container, tugging her ball cap lower to shield her eyes from the sun. Eddies of dust stirred in the dry wind around her as she reaffixed the blade to her left thigh, something she’d done several times a day since that horror show with the motorcycle gang.

A few yards away, Sally was leaning over an open grave.

Tightening the blade’s straps, Tara watched her for a moment. It was probably just the setting—a run-down old church, a sad and forgotten cemetery—but it almost appeared like the gruff old gunslinger was praying over the dead.

Sally lifted something from the grave, dusted it off, and held it up. When the sun's rays hit, it sparkled a rainbow of colors.

Tara jumped up, tested her balance, and spent a few seconds trying to dust the dirt off her long skirt. It was pointless. Some stains would likely be permanent. She walked over to her partner.

“Jesus, I’ve got… I don’t know what I’ve got all over me. How long do you think all the stuff has been in there?” Tara nodded back to the container they’d pried open with her prosthetic leg minutes earlier.

Sally only grunted a reply.

“Must have been doing some reno on the old church and just given up,” Tara said, wiping the beads of sweat off her chin. “They got historical societies who—what’s that?”

“Looks like some old costume jewelry or something,” the gunslinger said and put the brooch between her teeth. She bit down. “It ain’t gold but don’t think it’s cheap. Not worth a fortune, but it’d be worth something.”

Tara sighed. “I suppose your Digger was possibly telling the truth. They don’t seem to be robbing the graves.”

“They’re taking stuff but not for their cash value. Must be something else about them.” Sally was quiet for a moment then leaned forward again. “And he ain’t my Digger. He’s an enemy and always has been.”

“He’s kinda cute for a hundred-year-old cowboy.”

“He ain’t a cowboy, neither. Cowboys is American.”

“You sure you never rode that cowboy even once?” Tara said, playfully tapping Sally’s side with her shoe. “Oh, I bet you did. Probably broke a wild stallion like that.”

Sally used the brooch to push away more dirt from the bits of clothing and bones and said, “You should probably choose your words more carefully around a woman itching to kill somebody.”

Just above the plot was a low, sand-worn headstone about the size of a loaf of bread. All these years later, the only writing that could be identified was two Ns on the first name and the letter B and R from the last.

As Tara crouched low, she pulled out her phone and tapped on the photo she’d taken of the list of names. Reverse-pinching, she found the name connected to the remains in front of them. “Annie Bracken,” she said and looked back at the small marker. “Looks like she passed in 1905. Could be 1906, hard to tell.”

Tara then winced when she saw where Sally was digging, using the brooch to examine the remains. “I don’t think I’ve been this close to, you know, skeletal remains before. A bit, you know, real.”

“Seen tons of dead in my day,” Sally muttered, manipulating the lower jawbone with the tooth-marked brooch. “Not because of me, mind you. Well, not all of them. People dying from the heat, from the cold, from some disease no one never bothered to find out what it was.”

“Is there a reason why you’re feeding jewelry to the lovely dead lady?”

Sally bent low, lifting the brim of her hat, trying to examine the late Annie Bracken from an angle that would let her see deeper inside. Then, frustrated, she tossed the brooch aside and reached into the dead woman’s mouth.

The dull snapping sound nearly made Tara gag. “What are you doing?” When she got no answer, she leaned over to see what the gunslinger was examining. She had an entire row of white-gray teeth in her hand. Tara leaned closer. “They do look odd, don’t they?”

Sally looked back at the body then to the set of uppers in her hand. “They kinda look perfect, ’cept the missing one. Wish I had teeth like these.”

“Well, she isn’t using them anymore,” Tara said then noticed the tiny metal rods. And the pink gum line. “They’re fake.”

“How’d ya figure?”

“For one, if those had been actual gums, they wouldn’t be pink all these years later. And take a look under here.” Tara pointed at the one spot where a tooth was missing. “That metal bit sticking out used to hold on another tooth. All these will have posts like that.”

Sally turned to her. “So like dentures?”

“Used to be called ‘tube teeth’ back in the day. The teeth are likely made from porcelain, but from what I can recall, there’s a good chance the base, those pinkish gums, was made from something called vulcanite.”

“That is a strange thing to know.”

“Not really,” Tara said. “My daddy was a dentist. Made for interesting dinner conversation.

“You and me got a different definition of interesting.” With a grunt, Sally stood and rested her palms on the butts of her pistols. She could think more clearly when touching her guns.

Tara crossed her arms over her knees. “It’s mug’s game, this. How are we supposed to identify something that isn’t here anymore?” She flinched when the row of teeth dropped back onto the threadbare frock of the dead woman.

“Those there are the uppers,” Sally said. “Unless some varmint with a hankering for vulcanite went digging in this here grave, it looks like the bottom set took a walk.”

Tara put a hand next to the hole and looked closer. “Crikey, Sal, you could be right,” she said, peering at the dirt. “But why would anyone want a dead woman’s false teeth?” Tara picked up the brooch and, as the other woman had done, sifted through more of the earth to make sure they hadn’t missed the other set of teeth. When she turned around, she saw Sally had taken her phone. “Hey, how’d you… that’s mine!”

“Why’d you got so many damn kitty photos on here?” Sally said, drawing her fingertip up and down the phone as if she were petting it. “I ain’t seen so many cat pictures in my life. And I been looking when I can.”

“Oi, stay out of my photos, Sal.”

The Aussie cop stood and reached for the phone, but Sally’s free hand came up to block her. She tried again, coming from another angle, but the gunslinger didn’t even look up, and her lightning reflexes were still just too fast. “Come on, leave it be, mate.”

“Good god, woman, how many cats do you have?” Sally continued to scroll through the endless field of photoed felines.

Frustrated, Tara threw her left hand out, then her right, a second later. The left got blocked, but the right clamped down on the phone, and she snatched it back.

The American woman stared at her now-empty hands. “You live in a cat shelter or something?”

“No, those are all mine. Were mine,” Tara said, scrolling back. “Old story. Married to the job, no time for a social life, so until I get around to having kids of my own, for now, I have a cat.”

“A cat?”

“Just the one.”

Sally tried to grab the phone back but got a quick slap on the hand. Normally, that would have infuriated her, but she surprised even herself when she just chuckled. “Hold on now— those are all differ’nt kitties.”

“Yeah, I’m not so good at keeping them.” Tara felt the blood rise to her cheeks as she searched for the picture of the list. She had a lot of cat photos. “I get them from the SPCA. They’re rescues, and I put out plenty of food and water. They just… don’t hang around long, so I get another.”

“You gotta have a dozen on there.”

Tara shrugged and double-tapped the photo of the list to make it larger.

Sally said, “You handle your offspring anything like you do your cats, I reckon you’ve got a lot of visits from child services in your future.”

“Hush,” she said then read the next name on the list. “Clarence Philby. Seems he’s buried near a town called Chilla Well.”

“That nearby?”

The other woman flipped between the photo and her map software, entering the coordinates into the search field.

“Northern Territory, and there is almost nothing around. A Mount Theo just to the northeast, but looks like that’s it.” Tara pocketed the phone and started walking down the dirt path that snaked around the church. “I don’t even have to ring anyone to ask. Remote as that is, there won’t be records.”

The gunslinger followed her. “How far?”

Passing by the church, they got to the crest of the hill.

Tara said, “It’ll take half the day to get there. Unless you are keen to put me on the back…”

She fell silent. Sally came up next to her and froze. Eyes locked on a spot on the side of the road where her motorcycle used to be.

“Sal?”

A low growl slipped from the woman’s lips. “I am… I am going to kill that man. Then I will find some shaman to bring him back from the goddamn dead, so I can kill him again.”

“Sal, I’m so—”

“It is immoral and unconscionable. Man’s gotta be meshuggeneh to think I’m going to let him get away with it! You never touch someone’s ride!”

Tara turned to her. “Didn’t you say you stole it from him?”

Sally opened her mouth, and while her jaw worked, no words came out for a moment. She blinked. “That is just splittin’ hairs, that is,” she said and took a step forward as if the bike might reappear if she only moved closer. She blinked away some dampness. Her shoulders slumped. “Horse is my best friend. He took my best friend.”

Tara then saw that Sally was trembling. At first, she thought it was from sadness. Or maybe even fear. But then she caught the look on the gunslinger’s face. Her eyes were slits. Her mouth a flat line. Jaw tight.

This wasn’t fear or sadness. It was something else. Something dangerous that now had a target.

“Digger,” Sally growled.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Engage!” the Aussie yelled over the rushing wind. It felt good to be back on his old bike, feeling the wind comb his short hair and tickle his scalp. His lopsided hat had blown off his head within a few seconds of the ride; the chin strap now rested against his neck as it fluttered between his shoulder blades. “Tallyho!”

He’d checked his side mirror every other minute to be sure that Ronno was behind him. He was. And while he hadn’t wanted to lose the guy, the fact that the guy was able to keep up—no question, he had the throttle wide open to do so—bothered Digger. “Come on,” he shouted over music he couldn’t seem to turn off. “Pedal to the metal!” The engine whined as the motorcycle split the desert highway in half. But it wouldn’t launch into its hyperspeed. His original command—“Hit it”—hadn’t worked as it had so many times before Sally Scull had taken it. And the succession of random alternatives—“Launch!”—wasn’t doing it either.

He’d been sure, at least twice, that when he’d taken one of the corners on the highway, the bike had shimmied more than it normally did. It could be that Sally had just ridden it too rough and the bearings were all jostled around.

But it had felt like the motorcycle had tried to shake him off.

That made little sense to him. He’d had it for many years before she’d stolen it from him, a gift from the leader of Hell inc., Steve Janus. It had been an incentive to leave the service of the Old Man and join the new crew trying to rip the Devil from his throne in Hell.

In the early days, before anyone had even heard of this new, break-away faction—before it had been given the derisive moniker Hell inc., which it eventually adopted—one of the Old Man’s demons had gone sniffing around, sensing trouble.

Achyls had been a demon from the old days, causing mayhem for millennia. Some had said she could transform into a mist and enwrap mortals, turning day to night and draining their lives. Others claimed she was the Goddess of sorrow.

Janus had told Digger he’d slipped into the Old Man’s Black Library and searched for her name in the forbidden texts it held. The tomes there were hidden away because they’d held universal secrets and powerful incantations written in blood.

In a cordoned-off section, there were also endless series of bookcases, secured by a secondary set of charmed locks, each case with just a year on its edge. The Hell inc CEO told Digger he’d stood in front of the texts and that the shelves extended deep into the library with successive years. “Maybe all of them,” he’d said and laughed.

Near the front, there’d also been a smaller bookcase, one of those vertical rotating ones that let you spin it to see all the titles it held. It was the only collection of paperbacks in the entire library.

All of them John Grisham novels.

It hadn’t been clear if they contained powerful, forbidden knowledge or if the Devil just liked cozy thrillers about plucky lawyers.

“The point is,” Janus had told him as he stood next to the gift he’d brought for Digger, “one of the texts says Achyls was indeed a Goddess but one that represented the quiet before the storm. Like the night before chaos. The dim sum appetizer before a very spicy Mexican dish with a lot of beans and cheese.”

“It… Well, not sure if they’d serve dim sum before, you know—”

Janus waved off Digger’s interruption. “The point is, she is the quiet promise of bedlam and anarchy. But not so quiet now because the mufflers here are for show. She’s loud as hell!”

The boss man laughed at his own joke.

Janus explained Achyls had stumbled onto him and his Hell inc operatives in their secret corner of the Downstairs. Before she could flee and alert the Old Man, they’d caught and imprisoned her. Then, using some knowledge discovered in the Black Library, they’d transformed a goddess into a beautiful machine of black leather and shining chrome.

Digger had been humbled by such a gift.

“Actually,” Janus explained, “just needed more room in my garage after I got the DeLorean. But either way, she’s yours now.”

And she had been until Sally Scull had stolen the beautiful black beast from him.

Now that the beast was finally back in his possession, it was different. Sally had either willingly or inadvertently transformed it further, and now, Achyls, the motorcycle, just felt unfamiliar.

The most frustrating change was she no longer obeyed the command that should have taken him to his next stop, Chilla Well, in the blink of an eye.

Digger reached down and adjusted the pack strapped to his waist. After he’d added the dead woman’s teeth to the collection, it was now bulging. After this stop, they would have to once again meet up with the ghost called Ned Kelly. Thankfully, that was just two stops away in a faraway town called Telfer, an old mining community.

Good, he thought, sliding the bag to his hip. While he considered himself to be a hard man, it still gave him the willies to carry around a collection of dead people’s stuff.

The ride was bumpier than he remembered but was more enjoyable than the bike he ditched by the old church. He might have enjoyed it, had he just been able to find a mute button, or even a volume button, on the device strapped between the handlebars. “Why are you playing that god-awful music?”

* * *

Not for the first time, Tara started to believe her partner-in-crime-fighting had gone temporarily insane. Or maybe the woman was just always insane, and it was like on some sliding scale that not even she was in control of.

For the first half hour of their ride in her truck, Tara watched Sally brooding with rage, staring out the window.

The only music the radio would play was static.

Tara tried to engage the gunslinger in conversation about how, years ago, there had been some mysterious radio station with a ghostly voice. “Numbers, all of it,” she’d said. “Just a woman reading out some numbers. Or a recording of a woman reading out numbers. My grandfather—he lived out this way, and said that when he was a kid, there were rumors about what it was, where it was coming from.”

Sally’s eyes never left the horizon, lost in her own world.

“Cops didn’t really give two shits about it until this area got more stations on the dial and it was bleeding over. Percy Faith with a fuzzy backup singer with numerical lyrics. No one could find where it was coming from, so the best guess is it was one of them pirate radio ships out on the sea somewhere.” Tara tried the radio again, punching the seek button, which just ran through the frequencies, never stopping. “A while later, it stopped. Someone musta found it and shut it down,” Tara said, tugging on the seat belt which had dug into her shoulder. “After that, pops said he kinda missed her. She’d been there for so long. Never knew what it was about, but yeah, even so… missed the woman and her numbers.”

Sally’s breathing hitched, and when Tara glanced over, she saw that the woman was looking down at her phone.

Another series of quick inhales.

“Sal?”

A smile broke on Sally’s face, and the staccato breathing turned to laughter. Then howls of laughter. Still staring at the phone, the gunslinger began slapping the dash with her other hand again and again.

The sliding scale had slid once again.

At first, she was concerned, worried that Sally was losing it. In her experience, it wasn’t good when an armed person lost it. But then, as the laughter only grew more intense, Tara couldn’t help but smile. She caught a bit of that fever and began laughing as well. Of course, she had no idea what she was laughing about. Christ, now I’m sliding down the crazy scale. “Okay, spill,” she said between breaths. “What the hell is so funny?”

Sally wiped her eyes, tears of joy this time, and the giggling died down. She pointed at the phone, started to put it away, but then held it in front of her again. As she stared, her smile grew. “I gotta nuther phone on Horse. It’s mainly for GPS, but every now and again, I got a Spotify playlist I’ll fire up when I got the time for a slower ride.”

“And?”

“Well, far as I can tell,” Sally said, finally pocketing the phone and letting out a huge, satisfied smile, “ole Digger is certainly heading to Chilly Willy—”

“Chilla Well.”

“Right, that. But he’s only going about a hundred miles an hour.”

“Only,” Tara said, then did the calculation in her head. “One hundred sixty Ks? Desert roads aren’t known for being smooth as glass. You hit a pothole at that speed—”

“Nah, Horse knows to weave around stuff like that,” Sally said, and despite wanting to ask about the “knows” comment, she bit her tongue. “If he’s doing a hundred, he’s probably got it wide open, but mah Horse can go ten times after than that. Fifty, maybe.”

“Bullshit.”

Sally smiled at her, the proud mama. “Maybe a hundred times. Never was so good at math. But Horse won’t give it to him, so he’s gotta plod along like the rest of the assholes out there, like he was some Monday morning commuter.” Sally teared up again, still smiling. “Good Horse.”

The gunslinger hadn’t been able to resist and pulled the phone out again, just to revel in it. She stared at the map on her screen, tiny icon in the middle shaped like a motorcycle, grinning as if she were looking at photos of her grandkids.

“And that’s funny?”

“Yeah, a bit, but the best part is that the little dootsa-whatsit map here also tells me any other software running. And…” Sally held the face of the phone to Tara.

“I’m trying to drive here, Sal.”

“Just look at the damn phone and revel in the knowledge my wrath of vengeance has begun.”

“Okay, okay!”

Glancing between the screen and the straight road ahead, Tara read the screen. It showed a tiny bike puttering along Highway 5 headed north. At the top of the screen was a blue circle with the words Chilla Well next to it.

She could see that Digger was close and would likely finish up his desecration of yet another gave, then head out, before they arrived.

Then she saw a tiny window on the upper right of the screen. It was a list.

“Are those songs?”

“Ha! Yeah! Horse done fired up my playlist and I reckon blarin’ loud and proud. ”

Tara squinted, forgetting all about the road now. She recognized some of the song titles but couldn’t immediately remember the artist.

* * *

“Fucking J.Lo,” Digger muttered through gritted teeth.

* * *

Tara joined Sally in her song of laughter, inadvertently crossing over to the other side briefly. That hadn’t mattered—they were the only people they’d seen for miles on the long stretch of road. “That bloke just might give your bike back on his own,” Tara said, sending both of them into another fit of giggles.

“It’s a good playlist, now. Top to bottom J.Lo. And all the hits, which I mean to say is all of her songs. Every damn one.”

“You surprise me a bit. Never would have thought that, you know, J.Lo would be your jam. You’ve got more of a CCR and Foghat vibe.”

Sally, in the best mood she’d been in all day, shook her head. “Nah, she is the queen, and I love her. In a nonsexual way, mind you.” She shrugged. “Mostly nonsexual.”

Noticing that the numbers were still spinning on the radio’s digital display, Tara thumbed the power button. Then she sighed. “Well, despite Horse going mosey-speed—”

“Oh, I like that. Mosey-speed.”

“Right, well, despite that, we’ll never catch up,” Tara said. “They’ll be long gone. But, thanks to mosey-speed, we should be able to beat them to the next site at the next turn.”

Sally leaned forward and stared down the long, long road. “What turn?”

Tara grinned. She said, “This one,” and spun the wheel, launching them off the road onto the hard dirt of the open outback. Sally put a hand at the top of her cowboy hat to hold it steady as they jostled and bumped along, never once slowing.

“To be honest,” the gunslinger said, “this ain’t much worse than the shit roads you got in this country.”

“True.” Tara leaned forward, gripping the wheel tightly. “Can you use the map software and still keep an eye on Digger?”

Sally reached into her duster pocket and retrieved her device. “Destination?”

“Looked it up from the list while you were staring off into space,” she said, her voice warbling along with the bumps in the hard dirt. “Telfer. A few hours’ drive, but I know this area pretty well because of my granddad. We should hit a trail that’ll take us to Yumurrpa Road.”

“Should?”

The driver frowned. “Been a while. But, yeah, we’ll get there. It’s mostly desert, but I got heaps of water and petrol cans in the back. We’ll be good.”

“Right. How long?”

“Oh, it’ll take a while. Like a long while,” Tara said, trying to do some simple calculations in her head. “Maybe fifteen, twenty hours.”

Gripping onto the oh shit handle above her door, Sally thumbed her device again then held it to her ear. She turned to Tara. “You think a plane could land out here on all this?”

Tara furrowed her brow then nodded. “Yeah, I reckon. Why?”

* * *

When Uncle Jerry’s phone rang, he flinched, sending the rolling paper and bits of dried leaves into the air. He snatched the paper before it fell to the floor, but it would take a while to separate his pot from whatever was already on the floor of the cockpit.

However, he had gotten the jet from an organization owned by the Old Man. Might be better to just leave it. “Nah,” he muttered to himself, pulling his phone out and holding it to his head. “It’s good shit.”

“Uncle Jerry, that you?”

“I was just saying it’s good shit, is all.” He leaned over, squinting at the carpet. His eyes weren’t what they used to be. “No use in wastin’ it.”

“You okay? It’s Sally.”

He brightened. “Hey, wow! Am I glad to hear from you, because I’d been heading toward a tiny town in the north, but then Julius said there was a light show going on west, so I’m thinkin’ that after Razzie fell out the plane he headed that way, so that’s where I’m headed, but I don’t really know where I’m—”

“Come on, now, breathe, Uncle Jerry, or you gonna pass out.” Sally’s voice was distant and uneven like she was talking while fanning herself with the phone. “We need a lift.”

The old pilot took a deep breath and smiled. “Where are ya?”

“Well, we were heading to a place called Chilly Willy because that’s where Digger and his asshole partner are going to steal from a dead fella, but when we were locked into some big ol’ container near a busted and rotting church, he stole my damn bike, so I’m stuck in a one-legged Aussie cop’s truck heading into the desert looking for Yumurrpa Road so we can get to the next dead fella before he does.”

Uncle Jerry sat motionless, his eyes briefly flicking down to the carpet then back out his cockpit window. He said, “Need a lift?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Several times, Julius has asked me to slow down. Asked in a begging tone.

I was pulling him behind me with the rebar, but despite all of his attempts to stay upright, he always ended up on his back like a trick water-skier.

Except, he didn’t seem to be enjoying it.

After what I saw the last time I slowed, I had no choice but to pour on the speed.

Since learning the little soul-shaking factoid that I’d once been a guy named Rasputin Frewer, I could feel bits of his memory, his personality, push back through. The more it did, the more I saw the chimera.

Before we’d launched toward the machine, watching Uncle Jerry’s plane putter way in the distance, Julius had once again remarked that I was beginning to, more and more, look like that other guy.

In the InBetween, once you work through the trauma of being, you know, murdered, you begin to appear in whatever image you had of yourself. And now, I transforming, albeit slowly.

From a rather young guy, in relatively good shape but unfortunately dressed in some very casual activewear, to a chubby guy in his mid-to-late thirties wearing a cheap TV shirt and cargo shorts.

“You don’t look horrible,” Julius had said just before we took off. “But you ain’t gonna be winning any beauty contests.”

“Thanks for that.”

He wasn’t done yet. “You know how they used to do those Before and After pictures in those weight loss ads to make people feel bad? You don’t look like either of those.”

“Can we just go now?”

He shook his head and puckered his lips, going, Mnn-Mnn-Mnn. “They’d need a whole new photo that says ‘During’ at the top, but in truth, even that wouldn’t explain what the hell is going—”

“Julius.” I groaned. “Let’s go. Now? Okay?”

He’d held his hands up, nodding, then muttered, “‘During’ just don’t cut it. Maybe ‘Under Construction’ or something. I’ll think of a better one.”

“Please don’t.”

Seconds later, we were rocketing across the Aussie landscape, heading toward the ribbons of light in the sky. But I suppose since I was working through my During or Under Construction phase, becoming more Raz-like, I was attracting more attention. The worst kind.

The chimeras were sniffing me out more and more.

When I’d slowed down from bullet speed to a pace more akin to a high-speed car chase, it had only taken a few minutes before they’d found me. Two of them split the fabric of space-time with a thunderclap, on either side of us, spinning and snarling.

Sure, they’d been about thirty yards away, but they began drawing nearer. Hunting.

When one of them snapped its head toward me, its red-yellow eyes having found the target of their rage, I hit the gas.

A few minutes later, I arched around behind an outgrowth of huge rocks and stopped. The machine’s horrifying tendrils of light washed over the sky above us. I chanced a peek, poking my head out to get a better look.

“You gotta teach me your skating thing.” Julius was lying on his back. “I am not a fan of being dragged behind you like some forgotten dog that got tied to the bumper of the family station wagon heading to Disneyland.”

To the living, the scene before me would have appeared as just a barren bit of desert. Rocks and bits of dead or dying brush scattered around like one of some lesser god’s DIY projects they just never got around to finishing.

However, to spooks like yours truly, it was unreal. Staring at it, I tried to make sense of what I was looking at.

The machine, of course, was the centerpiece, sitting in a large, shallow pockmark carved out of the desert storm of light and chaos. I’d seen a few of them previously, but there was no uniformity to them other than the snaking light bursting from the top and crossing the sky.

The ones I’d seen in the US, they’d looked simpler. Their energy manifested into something that looked a little like a squat radio tower that had grown legs of light. In Scotland, William Hare’s machine had been an upgrade.

Julius lifted himself up from his sulking reverie and came up next to me.

Still unseeable to the living, Hare’s machine looked like something H.G. Wells or Jules Verne might have imagined. The exterior was smooth and almost silvery, like how those old-timey authors might have envisioned the engine of a spacefaring ship.

This one was entirely different.

“That explains, I suppose, why she’s moving,” Julius said. “Is that whole thing one of her machines?”

“Don’t know, but the machine itself looks to be on the middle section.”

My friend shook his head slowly. “Not a section. That’s what they call a flatcar.”

“Right.” I pulled away and leaned back against the tall rocks, shielding our presence. “How the hell did Not Ned construct an entire train from just energy?”

“That’s not an entire train.” Julius leaned forward. “Old steam engine out front, the flatcar with the machine there…” He squinted. “Looks like just the one car maybe, hard to tell from here. Might wrap around the side.”

I recalled the locomotive in my mind.

It was simultaneously both solid and transparent and unlike anything you’d see in this century. The core of the engine looked like a squat grain silo, the sort you see on farmland all across the US but laid flat.

Atop that cylinder were bullet-shaped domes, but instead of ending in a point, they were rounded at the top. They took up the back half of the core. At the front was a fat stove pipe with a single headlight attached to it.

Below that was shaped like the giant dial of a town clock tower; instead of numbers and hands, a pulsating swirl of electric arc light. Fissures of blue plasma snapped as they would coalesce then break apart.

I rejoined Julius, peering my head around the corner again.

Below that unsettling circular swirl of energy was a grill that came to a point. “Jesus, it looks like it’s got teeth,” I said, my own words sending a shiver through me.

My friend pointed at it, holding his arm close to his chest. “That there’s called a cowcatcher.”

“Weird. What would they want with cows?”

He chuckled. “No, man. It’s not for cows so much as for deflecting anything that might be on the track, so it doesn’t hold the train up.”

“Right.” I looked down past the wheels, some of which were connected by a massive metal-looking arm. “I don’t see a track.”

“Probably he doesn’t need one.”

I hated to admit it, but the three-car train was, in its own way, beautiful. Horrifying but beautiful all the same. I still couldn’t fathom how Elijah Upjohn—rather, Not Ned—had pulled it off.

“Hmm. I don’t see him anywhere,” I said. “You think he, I dunno, just parked this here to go hunting for spooks or something?”

Julius shrugged then walked back behind the big rocks again. “He’s gotta know you’d be after him. You think this is some trap or something? He parks it and steps back, waiting for us to show up?”

“I think he’s probably too cocky to worry about me.”

“I don’t know if you’re being humble or just stupid.” Julius crossed his arms. “He woulda heard that the machine in Scotland got taken out. Who knows, that might have been why he went mobile.”

“Maybe.” When ghosts move around, they leave a faint trail, which we call stain. It fades after a short time, but if you want to track some other spook, you can just follow it. Like energy bread crumbs of a fashion. In the daylight, though, it’s much harder to see. “We need a closer look.”

Julius sighed. “Man, I was hoping you weren’t going to say that.”

It took a few minutes to cobble together some sort of plan. I was inclined to split up to circle around either side in wide arcs in case Not Ned was waiting for us. According to Julius, his prior research into such matters warned against this. “Haven’t you ever seen an episode of Scooby Doo?”

I hadn’t. Or, at least, I couldn’t remember seeing a show about a cartoon dog that solves crimes with a bunch of hippy stoners in a panel van. You’d think you’d remember something like that.

But Julius was insistent. “Every time somebody goes, ‘Oh, let’s split up so we can cover the area faster,’ that is just a prelude to at least one of them getting captured!”

“Sounds logical.”

“I’m serious, man,” he said, poking his head out to look at the train once more. “I don’t wanna Scooby this here stealth mission. My vote is Scooby don’t.”

Of course, it wasn’t sound logic. Or logic of any kind. And while I didn’t like the idea of taking investigative directives from dog cartoons, the longer we stayed in the same spot, the more dangerous it likely would be. And I hadn’t watched enough cartoons to offer a counterargument.

So we started walking away from the machine, down the line of rocky outcroppings and behind a giant hill. We walked slowly, which was frustrating, but with Not Ned powered by the fully functional machine, we were grossly outmatched for a confrontation.

Also, after my brief run-in with the chimera, I was keeping an eye out for swirly bits of space that might turn into claws, fangs, and rage. “I shoulda stayed in Minneapolis.”

We traced a dirt path around the base of the hill, eyes peeled, watching out for any threat that might jump out. Julius was going hard-out spy guy, spinning backward every few paces as he walked then spinning back.

However, on the spectrum from James Bond to Austin Powers, I felt he was edging pretty close to the old Mike Myers character. At least, in his tux, he looked more like Bond than Powers. But that’s really where the similarity stopped.

He stopped and whispered behind me, “Hold up.”

I did. But scanning up the hill, then across the horizon, I didn’t see anything. Then I heard it.

Machine works of some sort. A metallic clunk-clunk-clunk was coming from the other side of the big mound next to us.

“You think that’s the train on the move, Paint?”

I frowned. “Maybe, but I doubt it.”

“Why?”

I pointed to the top of the hill. Up in the cloudless blue sky, there were thin wisps of smoke, gossamer threads that, as they lifted higher in the air, dissipated and disappeared.

We weren’t alone.

“Livies,” Julius said then rubbed his face. “I expect that will only complicate things.”

“Maybe not.”

* * *

Elijah Upjohn stood just off to the side of the entrance to the mine, which Jackob had once gleefully explained to him was called an adit. He was cursing to himself.

The mine, the adit, all of it did look familiar. Of course, all the mines looked similar, but something about the configuration of the rock, the shape of the gaping hole there… it felt like he’d been here before.

So far, he’d only seen two men going in and out of the mine, covered in dirt, sweat, and dust.

He could only hear bits and pieces of their conversation but picked up from it that there’d been some sort of collapse. That explained why there wasn’t a huge crew of miners, then.

Elijah was irritated, contemplating whether just to strip the metal helmet off and go inside. But even if he found the old Aztec artifact, he couldn’t just walk out of the mine without being seen. I’m getting ahead of myself.

His excitement stemming from the apparent déjà vu was clouding his thinking. Stripping off the helmet, he could still feel the power coursing through him, now conducting through his hands instead of his head.

He didn’t trust Jakob, despite how much he needed to rely on the long-dead conductor.

His knowledge of Aussie mines was valuable, of course. But it was because of Jakob that Elijah had been able to modify the machine into the locomotive that now sat on the other side of the ridgeline.

That was priceless.

Well, because of Jakob and one other. That thought brought a smile back to his lips.

But he couldn’t simply leave the metal helmet out for the old conductor to find. Now the train-and-machine vehicle had been completed, Jakob could don the helmet and take it for himself.

Elijah bent down and searched for a good hiding place. A few feet back, he spotted one and tucked the helmet into a gap formed by some boulders which had tumbled down off the ridge. Once he let go, the power of the machine above him drained away. He felt weak and cold.

But it would be worth it, if just for a moment!

He took a few steps away then spun back and looked at the hiding spot. He’d been burned by forgetting hiding spots in the past. The image of it clear in his mind, he strode up to the entrance of the mine.

The men’s voices grew louder as he approached.

“ …a few weeks then, I reckon,” the heavier of the two said.

The tall man casually searched his pockets as he leaned against the side of the opening, both taking a moment to enjoy the light breeze and avoid the sun.

“ …few weeks, maybe, I reckon,” the heavier of the two men said.

“Ah well,” Beanpole said, searching his pants pockets. “Probably better if it was a month then, yeah? Maybe two.”

“Sure, but it won’t—”

“Gotta do it right.” The tall man nodded over to the four-story tall rotary drill rig, which was grinding away at the surface. “She’s gonna have to put a few breathers in before it’s safe again. And a month or two of paid work is better than a few weeks.”

The other man grinned. “Too true. But when I’ve got my own outfit one day, remind me to never hire you. You’re a right crooked bastard, you are.”

“Please,” Beanstalk said as he found what he’d been looking for. “You’re never gonna be running your own show. You and me will be digging in holes like this until our lungs are too heavy from bits of rock to breathe. Might as well make some money along the way.”

“Fine by me. Just don’t let—hey, don’t fire up that dart here, mate!”

Beanstalk looked down at the shorter man, cigarette dangling from his lips. “Only Kiwis call them darts, ya sheep-shagger.”

“Whatever. Take it out back or something, yeah?” The man threw a thumb toward the hulking diesel fuel container, twenty feet away next to the churning drilling machine. It was a shiny gray monstrosity with a small patch of Chinese writing on the front neither could read.

“It wasn’t like I was going to walk out there and flick my ash at it, mate!”

“Go around back!”

Elijah, standing in front of the two men, froze.

If he goes around the side, he might see the bloody helmet.

He couldn’t move it now, because if Beanstalk started heading to his hiding spot, he would spot the Ned Kelly armor. If he saw it, he might think a miner had left it behind and pick it up.

Elijah would never get it back then.

The tall man stepped into the sun, tugging the beaten yellow pith helmet lower on his brow. It did little to shade his face. He frowned and made his way around the outside of the opening.

The other side.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Elijah slipped past the heavy man, who was slugging away at a bottle of water. Standing in the opening, for a man without a heart anymore, he could feel his pulse quicken. It did look familiar!

Calm yourself, mate, he chided himself.

Then something caught his attention. The man who’d gone for his smoke break instead flicked the butt away into the dirt. He’d walked up to the massive drill, looking it up and down. And he appeared to be talking to another man, one that Elijah hadn’t seen earlier.

Some foreman?

Strange outfit for a foreman.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Whatchu running on this here? This baby gas or electric?” I said in a low voice, standing just a few feet away from the tall man in the helmet. I pointed up to the pounding driller. “We had one of these beautiful things, called it the Bible Thumper.”

The man, a livie, of course, ignored me. He had no idea I was there.

“Because, you know, it made things all holy. Right? Come on, nothing?” I was keeping my voice low, just enough to look like I was carrying on a conversation.

In truth, I was shitting ghost bricks. I’d been only seconds away from passing right by the three workmen, when one of them entered the mouth of the mine and lit up like Casper during a new moon.

A spook.

And he was now staring at me and my clueless cancer friend.

Desperately, I wanted to get a good look at the guy, but if I’d turned and looked in his direction, he might have thought something was up. But I was pretty certain this was Elijah Upjohn, aka Not Ned.

Why is he going into the mine?

The tall dude was just puttering with the machine, checking some dials and wiggling some wires. I could see Casper was still watching us. My eyes flicked over to the rebar I’d chucked behind the machine, out of sight. From here, no one would see it.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too hard to find in all the dirt and sand.

“Right, sure. Hundy.” I stood there, stared at the same dials he did, nodding as if we were chatting merrily along, but it’s hard to keep up a conversation if you’re the only one talking. “Heya, so, how much you bench?”

A bolt he’d been fiddling with slipped from his grasp, and it began tumbling end over end. The guy flinched and, with lightning reflexes, snatched it in midair.

“Ho, ho, ho, butterfing—”

When he gingerly lifted the bolt again, I realized that he’d thrust his hand right through me when he’d reached for it. Retrieving it, it was like he pulled some inner mechanics from my chest cavity.

I spun toward the cave opening, not worried about the sham anymore, show over, then felt a cool wave of relief pass over me. The spook had gone inside.

Leaving Beanpole behind, I crept behind the driller, the clunk-clunk-clunk clunking even louder around back and making my head a bit swirly. The rebar was right there, lying on a bed of dead brush.

Skirting around the side of the hill, I hoped Julius hadn’t made it to the machine first and begun getting nervous about where I might be. But he knew better than to just start calling out my name.

At least, I hoped he knew better.

It was easy enough to keep a bead on the machine. I just had to look up.

The sight of all that power flowing into the heavens, then crossing the sky to who-knows-where, was both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. I wondered if, with all that juice nearby, I was getting a type of spooky contact high.

An odd thought swished through my mind. I considered my smoker co-worker and his hunger for that tiny squirt of nicotine into his bloodstream. Of course, ghosts can’t smoke. Or drink. Or gorge ourselves at all-you-can-eat meat buffets.

And from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll trifecta, well, we can only enjoy a third of that. Music is one of the few pleasures we still have.

But I wondered if all that power, that rush of juice the machine provided, was a type of drug. Ghost buzz. I’d felt its effects twice now, that tidal swell of energy, but it wasn’t like I craved it afterward.

Or did I?

Rounding the side of the hill, I scrambled forward and hooked left, using the long ridge of raised stone as cover. Elijah Upjohn—Not Ned—had rolled his impossible vehicle to a stop just on the other side.

Of course, unseen by the living, he could park the thing right in the middle of a suburban mall and no one would know the difference.

The fat vein of rock amongst all the other small hills and stone outcroppings looked a bit like a Mohawk crafted from the elements of the Earth. It was, maybe, two- or three-hundred yards long. At one side was the mine’s mouth. The other slopped down and returned to the earth.

Where’s Julius?

If he’d come around the other side of the hill, he should have just stopped her and waited. Turning around, I scanned the side opposite the big driller. Not there.

Would he have gone up to it without me?

Lying low, I crawled up the steep slope, making sure I’d firmly placed my feet on rocks as I went. With bare ground, I’d slide back down and have to climb back up all over again.

A few feet from the top, I could just see the tail end of the machine. I stopped and crouched in my spot. Was it all machine or was Elijah’s device mounted on the ghost train? And, really, how in the hell did Eli—rather, Not Ned—manifest an entire goddamn locomotive from just energy?

Sure, not a big Snowpiercer job—this wasn’t a thousand cars long, just three.

Engine, flat car, and boxcar.

Staring down at it now, I wracked my brain for what purpose it served. And what was in the boxcar? The construction was otherworldly. Well, given my current location, other otherworldly.

A mix of blue electric light and a metal that wasn’t metal. At its bottom edge, I could see right through it and the hardscrabble desert beyond. The rocks, the cracks in the dry earth, the foliage that fought a tough battle on an impossible terrain and lost.

I had to get closer.

Further, I inched up the ridge. When the flatcar can into view, I could see another spook.

He was a heavy guy, tall. He was dressed head to toe in blue. Denim overalls, matching blue shirt, and a jaunty denim cap with a short, rounded bill.

Something about his image clicked. The outfit, that is, not the big chubby bunny inside it.

Is he… a conductor?

That was the word that came to me when I saw him. However, it could have just been my mind trying to fit puzzle pieces together that didn’t.

But if he were a conductor, that could explain how Not Ned could manifest a train using the machine. Similar to what I had done back in Scotland with the African boat builder and an uber-religious guy named Lascar—we’d created a ship in the living world, but that had taken three of us to do it.

If this conductor had been the architect of the ghost train, he’d created the locomotive only in our world. Which would be exactly what Not Ned might need—he’d be free to roll all across this country and never be seen.

But why would he need to do that?

Oh right.

Jayne said that Elijah had been looking for a device to raise the dead. Specifically, raise the real Ned Kelly. Was he still searching for that old Aztec artifact? The phrase “death whistle” starts kinda scary but then falters. A whistle is something for kids, is for refs that screw up football games, and is what old guys in rocking chairs do when they whittle sticks and spit out chewin’ tobaccy.

Could it really raise the dead?

I didn’t want to find out. And, as Jayne told us, the guy needed to search an entire continent for it. Good luck with that.

I had more important matters to focus on.

“Come on, Julius,” I muttered to myself. “Where are you, man?”

It would be risky, but I felt I could get to the back of the train and stay hidden. If I was stealthy about it, ol’ Casey Jones shouldn’t see me. Hopefully.

Working up the courage, I was about to make my move when I saw Casey snap his head around.

What’s going on?

The front of the boxcar undulated, shifting from solid to transparent to solid, then back again. It was… emptying?

I heard grunting just on the other side of the car, then a voice barked out, “Leggo!”

Looking beneath the train, I peered through the rows of wheels—a set of three at the front, another set at the rear—and could see a confusing mass of shuffling feet, ten, maybe twelve of them.

Ghost caterpillar!

No, no, that was stupid. The feet were all pointed in different directions.

Yoga-certified ghost caterpillar!

I roughly shook my head from side to side. Maybe the machine was making me buzzy. Or it could have just been the panic. No question the voice I’d heard below had come from Julius.

“Assholes, just leave me be!”

Other voices chimed in then, chiding and laughing, as the kicking mass of feet moved closer to the boxcar once again. I had to do something! But there had to be at least four or five other spooks down there—bum-rushing a group of them would be a bad idea.

They moved closer and closer to the train as my friend struggled against them.

“I said let go of me!”

I couldn’t wait. They were going to throw him into the machine and—

No, that didn’t make sense.

The machine was already functional. Not Ned didn’t need any more spooks to power it.

Again, there was a change in color at the front of the boxcar. What was transparent was turning solid once more. The more feet that disappeared from the ground between the wheels, the more monochromatic the car became.

Then it made sense.

The car itself was, mostly, see-through. But the spooks inside were not. And there had to be twenty or thirty of them inside now. And they had Julius.

I was out of time. Screw the train and machine and Casey Jones and goddamn Not Ned, I had to get him out! It would be a risk, but if I skated around the side, I might be able to pull him free. Had to get moving!

“You know,” a voice behind me said in a thick drawl. “Around these parts, it’s hard to blend in for someone like you. That American accent is a dead giveaway.”

Shit. He’d seen me and known from the start.

I looked at the man just below me at the base of the ridge. Shooting a glance to my right, I saw that ghost Casey Jones had gone to help the other spooks with my friend.

“Don’t worry about them, Painter Mann,” Elijah Upjohn said, his voice deepened by the helmet as he glided up the hill toward me. “Just you and me.”

I gripped the rebar in both hands and held it like a baseball bat.

“Take your best shot, asshole.”

“I will!” A laugh erupted from his metal skull, pulling tendrils of energy from the machine below, and it rattled me to my core.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Sitting in the cool air conditioning of her truck, Tara tapped the end button on her phone and dropped it on the seat next to her. She eyeballed the gauge just beyond the steering wheel. “Looks all right for now, but if he takes much longer, she’ll overheat just sitting here.”

Sally grunted.

Tara noted this was her favorite form of communication.

“All good on this end, though.” The Aussie cop nodded at her phone. “They’ll get a local shop to come by and pick up the truck. Don’t think anyone will try to steal it, but there’s a lot of petrol back there—these days, it’s almost more valuable than any gold anyone might find in these hills.”

The gunslinger pursed her lips. “I remember the gold fever that took folks back home. It was hard not to get sick with it yourself, with everyone jawing on about it.” Sally pulled one of her pistols out, rubbing it between her hands. “Everybody had a story about a big find. Big score. And I reckon all the stories I heard were total bullshit. I didn’t know nobody who got anything from digging but sorrow.”

Tara turned to her with a small smile. “You’ve got the heart of a poet, Sal.”

Another grunt. “Shot a poet through the heart one time from what I can remember.”

“Ah, well.”

Sally flipped the release on her weapon and spun the chamber. One bullet inside. She slapped it shut. The right one, of course, was fully loaded. But it was this one, with this one bullet, that held the promise of justice. Or maybe just revenge. “So, how old are you, really?”

“Never really counted birthdays, Miss Tara, because I don’t know when my date of birth actually was.”

The cop spun and put her head against the driver’s side window. “You’re joking.”

“You find it funny?”

“No, no, I mean… you don’t know when you were born?”

The gunslinger shrugged. “No, but I imagine that if I’d had offspring who’d had kids of their own and then they had kids… I’ve probably outlived all of them.”

“Sounds lonely.” With the dull whine of an engine growing above them, Tara bent her head to look out the windshield. “That must be your friend.”

“Why? Is there smoke trailing out the back?” Sally chuckled.

“Wait, the aircraft’s on fire?”

Sally yanked on the door handle and said, “Smoke wouldn’t be coming from the plane.”

Tara popped her door and shut it, adjusting her ball cap for the sun. She then flicked her key fob and locked the doors. Resting the keys atop the front left tire, she retrieved some water bottles from the cab and then followed the gunslinger.

Above them, the pilot dipped his wings twice, getting a wave in return.

They watched as he made a wide arc, coming back around behind the vehicle. Then, lined up with the long stretch of road, he began his descent.

Tara frowned. “How good a pilot is your friend?”

“Don’t worry, he won’t hit your truck. He does seem to get a might confounded when cattle are around, always banging into them. But if you’re partial to your radio antennae there, probably best to say your goodbyes.”

They stepped out of the road as the jet nosed down and closed in. Tara looked through parted fingers as it passed over her vehicle, luckily sparing the aerial. But not by much.

By the time they’d reached the awaiting jet, he’d already opened the door and lowered the steps and was waiting at the bottom brandishing two bottles of beer and a big smile.

“Welcome aboard Jerry Air,” he said. “Lord, you’re pretty.”

“No time to flirt with me, and you know I ain’t into corpses,” Sally said, snatching the bottle and stepping onto the plane.

“I was talking about…” he started but realized he was only talking to the woman’s backside. He handed the other bottle to Tara. “I’m Uncle Jerry.”

“Uncle Jerry? Who’s uncle?”

He grinned. “Everybody’s.”

Once inside, he pulled the door closed and secured it. The two women settled into opposite loungers. By the time Tara sat down, Sally had drained her beer. She nodded at Tara. “You gonna drink that?”

The cop shook her head and handed it over.

“Telfer’s about an hour from here, so put your feet up.” He’d left the jet running, and as he eased the controls forward, they began taxing down the long stretch of highway. “Please buckle up for takeoff and return your tray tables in their upright and locked position.”

Tara strapped herself in, making no mention that the woman opposite her did not.

Sally seemed preoccupied with something else. Eyes darting around the cabin. She looked left, right, and behind her seat. Her eyes fell on some busted concrete—with a U-shaped split down the middle.

Tara stared at it. “Is that a bench?”

“You don’t got any ghosts on this plane, do ya?” Uncle Jerry pushed the throttle, and a high-pitched whine filled the cabin. When he pulled back on his steering grips, they lifted off the ground and headed into the deep-blue sky above. “I lost Razzie and his friend east of here,” their pilot said. “I hope he’s all right.”

Sally smiled at that. “Well, for one, he’s a ghost, so there ain’t much anyone can do to him that’ll make much difference.”

“Temporary ghost,” Uncle Jerry clarified. “I hope.”

She pulled her cowboy hat down over her brow, shielding her eyes for a nap. “If that’s the Raz I used to know, he always seems to work it out,” she said. “I’m sure he’s fine.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I was totally fucked.

Standing on a ridge in the middle of the dry, dusty Aussie outback, I had a shit ton of problems in front and behind me.

At my back hummed a trainload of spooks who’d attacked my friend and, it seemed, had squirreled him away into a shimmering boxcar. Of course, they might have been just short of the required number of players for Bridge and had shanghaied him to complete a foursome.

But odds were that he was in a worse situation than I was.

For now.

I was staring down at an asshole with a metal head who was powered by a machine that would give him godlike strength, so it was just me against him, and I was outnumbered.

“So this is the ghost that haunts ghosts?” Elijah Upjohn’s voice echoed within the mask, tinny and thin. He shook his head, an exaggerated and strange move because he sort of shifted his entire upper body to do it. “Painter Mann? Color me not impressed.”

I’m not sure what it is about an Aussie accent, but the way he’d said my name sounded like some local slang for the clumps of dirt and poop that hang off the back of some mongrel dog’s ass.

Sure, that was a bit oddly specific as inferences go. Might have just been more reflective of my self-worth. At least at the moment.

“Bring that trash can a little closer and I’ll ring your bell with this,” I said, trying to sound tough, and held up my slightly bent, moderately rusted piece of rebar.

This only drew another laugh out of him, louder than the first. “Ha-ha!” He shouted at me, “Mup tance de-yun hap againth powaa dah mashee!”

I blinked. “It… what?” I glanced to my right to see if we’d attracted the attention of any others. It would only be a matter of time. “I’m sure that was a threat, a good one even, but you know, with the helmet and the yelling, I can’t—”

The idiot shouted even louder: “U-thee Imma guun—!”

“Whoa, whoa, man,” I said, lifting my hands in the air, the rebar dangling from my fingers. “Really, cool it with the shouting in the trash can. I have no clue what you’re saying.”

Elijah hiked his body to the left and right then cocked his head. His shoulders slumped ever so slightly. “Fine,” he said, his voice even and tinny. “If this is just your infantile attempt to get me to remove my helmet—”

“No, no. That’s much better.”

“You are feeble. You are weak.”

“See, I totally understood that! Feeble and week.” I gave him a thumbs up. “Scary shit. Continue.”

“I can crush you with one hand, Painter Mann. My armor makes me more powerful than a hundred men. A thousand!”

My only chance here was to flee. He wouldn’t be able to catch me once I got skating, and if the spooks that had taken Julius picked up the chase, I could loop back and grab my friend.

I held the rebar behind my back, gripping both ends. “Yes, you’re Mr. Olympus, got it. The helmet links you to the machine,” I said, nodding, looking for the best exit. But something about the scene didn’t make any sense. “Do you think you’ll be more powerful with a second machine? I’ll just take that one out too.”

He shifted his weight again, back and forth, then just pointed his eye holes at me once again.

“All those spooks you’ve got in the boxcar,” I said. “If you’re planning—”

Again, he burst out with that crazy laugh. I wondered if all that ringing inside would give him a wicked case of tinnitus. “It’s almost sad how clueless you are,” he said. Even with the metal helmet muffling his voice, the disdain just dripped off the guy. “They will have the greatest honor! They’ll soon be marching all over this planet, leading her army of the dead.”

My best escape path would be straight ahead—arch down the hill and get a bit of speed, then I’d be up and skating in a flash. Unfortunately, there was a long-dead hangman with a trash can on his head in the way.

“But I have you to thank in some small way,” he said and spread his arms wide. When he did, I saw he had something clutched in his hand. Is he going to throw a rock at me? “I am more powerful because of you.”

“Me?”

“You are an abomination, Painter Mann,” he said, creeping up the hill toward me. I could see he was drawing more and more juice—collecting energy around his body, turning it solid and real, now leaving footprints with every step. “An infection that has distorted the very fabric of her perfect realm, but your corruption has distorted the rules and granted me this beautiful locomotive. This wonderful, powerful machine that will carry her armies all across this continent one day!”

He was too powerful for me, growing stronger with every step.

Screw it. I stepped away from the machine, hell-bent on running then skating down the rocky ridge as fast as I could go. Then I would find a way to free Julius.

But when I looked back for one last look toward my friend, standing there was ol’ Casey Jones. And this time, he wasn’t the fabled train conductor. He was the other one. Casey Jones the slugger.

The last thing I saw was a meat hook of a fist before everything went black.

* * *

My world had become a fever dream.

Blacks and purples flashed of a past life I didn’t know. I’d been sucked inside the conductor’s home movies.

They’re moving too fast. I’ve got to get more power from the engine! I’m running toward the coal men, but they’re in the next car. I throw the door—

Darkness enveloped me, back in the real world, but only for a second.

—almost tripped. I can’t be so clumsy as to fall off my own train! My heart pounds as I stare down at the tracks whipping by below me. I shout as I clamber back to my feet. “More coal! We’ve got bandits! More co—”

The Aussie sun returned for an instant and I heard a far-off, metallic laugh. Then back in again.

Whoosh—

The three of us are shoveling as fast as we can, but I haven’t been a coal man in years. The panic is affecting my rhythm , and as one of the other men pulls back his shovel, I crash my spade into his fingers.

“Christ, Jakob, that’s my fucking hand!”

He’s bleeding, the blade of it having cut through his leather glove. He takes one look beyond me, and his eyes go wide. I spin around—they’ve come up alongside, pushing their frothing horses harder and harder.

When I look back, the coal man is gone.

“Coward!” I shout, but my voice is lost in the scream of the engines.

—Whoosh.

It took a few seconds for the light to return, and I blinked, but my vision wouldn’t clear. Then I realized the strange wall in front of me was sand. Dirt and sand.

“That’s enough. He’ll be down for a good while.” Not Ned was chuckling as he spoke, his metallic voice making my head spin.

“You want him in the car with the other one?”

“Hmm. I reckon he’ll be good for a trade.”

My mind swirled after the blows that stole my energy. I couldn’t even lift my head. Useless.

Elijah leaned close as he spoke. “She’s been looking for you, Painter Mann. Oh, she’s got all kinds of designs for you—but I want something out of it first.”

“Ned, we should get moving if we’re going to meet Digger and the other one in Telfer,” Jakob—my slugger Casey Jones—said.

“Right.” His hollow voice echoed. “Toss him in the car, but we’re going to make a stop.”

“Stop?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a deposit to make.”

I felt Jakob the conductor grip me, and the world flipped on its axis once again.

Whoosh—

I shout at the other man, “Did he just jump off the goddamn train?” but he ignores me and just shovels faster. When I put my hand on his shoulder, he spins around and glares at me, the coal flame dancing in his eyes.

Then I remember—there’s a bridge just ahead!

A shot rings past my head, pinging off the furnace, sending me sprawling to the floor again. I look up and see the remaining coal man’s boots shift— he’s on the balls of his feet, twisting back and forth, now shoveling even faster.

Stop being such a coward!

I jump up and shout, “Keep it up, mate!” and run a few steps into the piloting area of the engine car. I grip both controls and push them forward, but they’re already opened wide. We’re at full speed. I look to my left, and two of the bandits—train robbers!—are matching our speed. But there’s no way their horses can keep up that pace.

Spinning around, I reach up for the rifle.

“It’s gone!” I shout.

Goddamn coward of a coal man must have snatched it when he jumped. Left us defenseless!

I look back down at the controls, and I feel powerless. There’s nothing I could do. The fear making me delirious. I pray for a train that needed no track! If I had one of those right now, I could steer into the desert, pour on the steam, and leave these bandits behind.

The window shatters before my brain registers the rifle crack, and I duck low. But staring out of the other side of the glass, I can see it. I can see the bridge!

I’m thrown back and land on my shoulders, cracking my head on the steel floor. Stumbling back to my feet, I realize we’re moving faster! This one man, this one amazing coal man, moving his body like a piston, is pushing the locomotive faster!

“Keep it up, you’re—”

Something ahead catches my eye. The bridge doesn’t look quite right, but I can’t…

Then I realize we’re not moving faster because of the panicked coal man. I look to my left, and the bandits are nowhere to be seen. But I know where they were. In my head, in my heart, I know exactly where they were.

They’ve climbed about the cars they’d detached from the front of the train, our part that was steaming ahead at a wicked speed now, applying the braking mechanisms so they could slow their prize.

We no longer mattered to the train robbers.

We raced toward the bridge, which I can see now is just a yawning, open chasm. The rails closest to the edge are twisted and shorn, like the gnarled branches of a long-dead tree.

And the moment our front wheel hit that gap, we no longer mattered to any god, devil, or man.

* * *

What was I still doing on the train? It fell over the…

No, that hadn’t been me. Those were the memories of Jakob, the conductor.

“Paint, you back with us?”

Julius. It was my friend’s voice.

“Come on, man. We don’t have much time.”

He was whispering as he leaned over me, and when I cracked my eyes open, I saw the entire boxcar full of spooks, all crammed in together in a huddled mass as if waiting for me to explode. They were staring at me. Some smiling, some scowling.

I sat up and leaned against the wall of the car as it jostled along, my head lolling side to side. Julius reached out to steady me but then pulled his hand back.

“You okay?” I croaked.

“Neither of us are okay, man,” he said and rapped on the strange, glowing door next to me. “They’ve shut us in this thing. We’re in deep doo-doo, brother.”

Strangely, my wrist felt… strange? Sore? I don’t know how it felt, but just the idea that I “felt” anything was queer. I looked down at my hand.

“Damn, I still got the rebar.”

“That’s not going to do any good—they’ve trapped us in here. For now.”

I looked at him, his face coming into focus. “What’s that mean? ‘For now.’”

“It means that they got plans for us. I heard those two talking—Not Ned and the other guy.”

“Jakob.”

He sighed and gave me a small smile. “So you’re on a first-name basis with our new friends, are ya?”

“Nah,” I said. I tapped my skull. “Home movies. Dude was killed by bandits.”

“Now they’re the bandits. From what I heard, this group of fine gentlemen and ladies are headed west. As in way, way west.” He stared at me, unblinking. “They’re going to use the machine to send them to the voodoo woman in New Orleans. She’s up to something.”

“Yeah, man.” Drained as I was, my voice sounded somewhere between that of an insomniac and a drunk. Or a stroke survivor. “Ain’t you been paying attention? End of the world and all that.”

“It’s something else,” Julius said. “Hard to tell because I couldn’t hear all of it on account of all the noise you made with your face.”

“My face?”

“Yeah, when he was slugging you. Your face makes a hell of a racket when it gets punched.”

“Helpful.”

He rubbed his bulbous nose then ran his hands down his tux. Dressed as he was, he looked comically out of place in a train car full of long-dead Aussies.

I looked toward the front of the train, hoping to catch sight of Jakob and Elijah. The only thing I could see through the shimmering wall was the machine, whip-cracking its tendrils of light at the darkening skies above us. From here, I realized why it had looked raised: beneath it was a thrumming and writhing mass of spooks. One-hundred-forty-four souls trapped and powering it.

Instead of fanning out in twelve neat rows, as I’d seen before, they’d been crammed together in a tight coil. Not that they would notice. I looked back to those in the boxcar next to us, but they’d lost interest in the two newbies.

“Why doesn’t he just send them now? If both machines are up and running, they just need to step inside and ride the light.”

Julius shook his head. “Dunno. They’re getting some sort of hand-off first in a town called Telfer,” Julius said, then shot a quick glance at the others, who were muttering to one another. “But they’re planning to send me along with them.”

“What? Why?”

“Not Ned told the other one, Jakob, I would be an offering,” he said then darkened. “And a promise. He’s now got something more valuable to barter for.”

I slumped, feeling the floor of the train car pulling me toward it. She was just too powerful for me and my friends. Voodoo Cher was a god in this place. Why did I ever think I could take her down? What a fool. And now I was just handing Julius to her.

My friend saw my face. “Ah, don’t worry about ol’ Julius, now. She probably wants me for one of them reverse harem things.”

I cracked a smile. “That’s a powerful case of the glass-half-fulls, man.”

“Maybe. But it ain’t me she wants, Painter.”

I felt the car bank, and we made a sharp turn as the locomotive curved around the side of a mountain at a breakneck pace. “Well, at least someone gets what they always wanted out of all this.”

Julius blinked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Looking toward the front of the engine, knowing that somewhere up there Jakob would be at the piloting controls, I said, “He always wanted a train that didn’t need a track.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Jakob never cared for cemeteries, so he watched as Ned worked in the dirt, illuminating his work with the wave of his hand. The Aussie conductor, Jakob, stood under the starry night sky, turned, and stared at his beautiful, ethereal machine.

Sure, it belonged to his boss, Ned Kelly—that is if anything belonged to anyone in this realm—but it had been Jakob who’d created it. When the man in the mask had found him, Jakob was just another spook wandering the vast Australian outback.

And he’d had his share of run-ins over the past decades. Just because you were dead, it didn’t mean you had nothing to lose, and as he’d learned, there were plenty of those in the InBetween more than willing to take it.

Ned had seen something in Jakob and promised he would never be a victim again.

Empowered by the strange and terrifying machine, Ned had briefly imparted some of that mystical energy into Jakob with a touch. Together, they had manifested the locomotive around the machine.

Jakob had spent all those years on the run and in fear. But he’d kept himself going by dreaming up the perfect ride. A train without tracks. Unmatched speed and grace.

No bandit would ever catch it!

In return for seeing that dream come true, Jakob had sworn his never-ending loyalty to the man in the armor. And he didn’t care what ol’ Ned had been accused of back in his living days. This realm was a great reset, and everyone started from nothing once again.

While alive, Jakob had never been a violent man, despite the occasional violence delivered onto him. He’d always warranted that inaction as a devotion to some religious prescription. But he’d always known the truth.

In the past, his choice to not fight back hadn’t been about morality. It had been fear. And in his darkest moments, he allowed another label: cowardice.

With Ned Kelly, he was no longer afraid.

And when his benefactor occasionally required Jakob to embrace violence, he’d dutifully obeyed. He’d taken countless beatings when alive, and it would take an age to settle that score.

However, he would never admit to the man in the metal helmet it never sat quite right with him. But the servitude let him evade any true moral dilemma. Or at least, it was a justification. These were the wishes of a powerful man who worked for an even more powerful woman. And she was a god.

The choices were made for him, and he then was to simply obey orders. Any issues of morality, right and wrong, were theirs, not his.

He glanced around the long-forgotten cemetery, watching the man in the mask, on hands and knees, shoving the clumps of dirt into the hole, covering the cheap wooden coffin inside. “Won’t he just be able to crawl out of that?”

Ned grunted as he shouldered the piles of earth, refilling the hole. After all this time, Jakob was still in awe that this man was so powerful—filled with the energy provided by his impossible machine—that he could once again interact with the living world.

Jakob knew all that juice flowed into his boss through that heavy metal helmet. He didn’t understand all the particulars, but if he ever donned it…

“That should do it,” the man who called himself Ned Kelly said, leaping back to his feet again. “There’s at least four feet of dirt, rock, and clay covering the casket.”

“But he can just push through, can’t—?”

“Not ground cover, no,” the man in the mask said, tilting his head to the side. “The only way he’s getting out of that is after we return and retrieve our deposit. Once I’ve made a deal with the woman for him.”

Jakob nodded. Ned was the boss. He had plans. Jakob’s role was to follow his lead and reap the rewards. “What is it you want, Ned?” The conductor glanced back at the ghost train. “You’re the most powerful being on the continent. You can go anywhere, do anything.”

“I want… I want more.” Ned reached into the pocket of his leathers and pulled out what looked like a fist-sized rock, the color of bleached bone.

Jakob allowed himself a smile. “If nothing else, the machine has given you pockets again. That alone may be worth the enslavement of those powering the machine.”

His boss tilted his metal helmet toward him. “Slaves? Slaves? They have been chosen to serve her and help lead this fight. The last battle the world will ever see!”

Jakob swallowed hard and pointed to the object in the other man’s hand. “Is that it?”

Elijah Upjohn lifted the tiny skull up to his chest as if cradling a beloved newborn. “Yes! I can hardly believe it.” The man spoke reverently, cherishing his reclaimed treasure. “I’ve looked for so long. So long. But now that search is over, and I can right the wrong I committed so many years ago now.”

Jakob knew better than to ask about that matter. He’d done so just the once and Ned had threatened him with abandonment if he were to query again.

His boss extended his arm, holding out the Aztec death whistle in his palm.

Jakob resisted the urge to touch it. “That will raise the dead?”

“A dead army for Voodoo Cher.” The man in the mask nodded to the undulating boxcar. “An army they will help lead.” He returned the artifact to his pocket. “Once we get to Telfer, we’ll send the new recruits to join her ranks. As long as Digger was able to find each of their totems.”

“You gave him the list,” Jakob said, crossing his arms. “All he needs to do is do what he was told.”

Behind the iron helmet, Elijah Upjohn’s smile was lost on the other man. But it hadn’t been a smile for him anyhow. “The woman is eager to start her war.”

* * *

I don’t let pity overtake me very often. When spooks do that, they can spiral down into darkness. That leads to madness, a fever of the mind, which plays out in tons of different ways. None of them were good.

Once the train had stopped, Julius had offered to share some of his energy with me. I banged my fist on the leg of his tux a few times, uneasy about pilfering any juice from my friend. Then he’d grabbed my wrist and whacked it down a few times more.

The boxcar door had been thrown open, but I’d remained still.

There would be little I could do against Elijah, Jakob, and a train full of spooks more than willing to do the woman’s dirty work.

The man who called himself Ned Kelly seemed to know that by touching me, his past, his secrets would be laid bare before me. His biggest secret, of course, was that he was not Ned Kelly.

Instead, once again, Jakob grabbed on with his meat hooks. Memories good and bad played out, jumping from teen years to an apprenticeship, an unrequited love, and finally the bandits from the train robbery.

When the real world returned, everything was dark.

My body glowed, and the light it emitted confirmed that, yes, I was in an even more impossible situation than before. I reached up and pressed against the coffin lid, my hands passing through it easily, but then was stopped by the soil on top.

I could no longer make out the words of the two men above me—their voices muffled by the dirt atop my small prison.

There had been a small window of time where, sure, I could have leaped from the grave. But I was weak—I wouldn’t have gotten very far. And I would need all of my strength to find some way out of the casket.

There was only enough room in the tiny space to turn over.

At least I had company.

“Know any good restaurants around here?” I said to the rotted corpse dressed in dark rags. Odds were that he’d died naturally, not murdered like those who populated the InBetween. He had crossed over.

Had he found peace?

Or something else.

Cassie.

The name had wormed its way into my mind. Uncle Jerry had said she’d been my wife, and I’d taken on the Old Man to save her. Somehow, I’d screwed that up, too, and she was gone.

Before, her name meant very little to me.

Now that one word rolled a wave of emotion over me—sorrow and joy in equal measures.

The more I transformed, becoming more and more Rasputin Frewer once again, the more feelings like that confounded me. They hadn’t come with their source material. I had no memories of my dead wife.

But I felt her.

Maybe it would merely take time for Rasputin’s past to find its way back to me. Trapped in a coffin, buried deep in the remote wasteland of the Australian outback, at the moment, time was all I had.

When I had been thrown into the All Time, I’d felt the entirety of existence, every year from beginning to end all at once. It was a lonely, tortuous hell.

If Elijah forgot where he’d stashed me—like he had with the tiny Aztec skull—I could spend another eternity, this one meted out minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, century by century.

However, that would not be my fate.

It might have been minutes, might have been hours, since I’d been dropped in that hole and buried until I heard something.

Faint.

Something shifted above me.

Then a low noise, like a growl.

Becoming Raz again did more than just flood me with old emotions. I’d become a target of his hunters. Prey, as he had been.

And, I knew, clawing and scratching at the soil above, the chimeras were coming for me.

* * *

Julius looked out the side of the speeding locomotive, watching the desert pass by.

When he shifted his weight, his arms trembled slightly with the strain, and he coughed out a laugh.

He didn’t have a body to get weak. But combined with the energy he’d passed onto Painter and, after leaving his friend behind them, the drain from a few punches from his fellow passengers when he’d asked them questions, he was bordering on exhaustion.

Despite that, he would not be delivered to the woman quietly. He hoped this quiet promise to himself wouldn’t be fulfilled by merely shouting nasty words as he was dragged into hell.

Julius hadn’t been able to see where they’d taken his friend; however, they hadn’t been gone terribly long. Maybe it should have been some small solace to know that whatever situation he was in currently, another likely had it far worse.

But that other was Painter. And the thought of how his friend would despair right at that moment filled him with more dread than if he’d been in his place instead.

All he could do was wait as the train that needed no track bobbed and shook as it rocketed across the Australian outback.

In the crowd of huddled spooks—Julius estimated there had to be at least forty of them—he noticed a woman with a dirty face staring at him. Her mouth was bent into a frown, but her eyes were regarding him. Curious.

A group of men, deeper in the train car, cackled with laughter. The woman paid them no heed, just stared at the new passenger.

He sat forward and, cross-legged, laid his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on loosely clutched fists.

“Dunno what they’re so cheery about,” he said, meeting her eyes.

That earned him a chuckle, but it was blacker than the ruined teeth in her mouth. “Could be they just happy they ain’t you?” The woman grinned her Halloween smile. “Can’t even imagine what she’s got in store for the likes of you, but I know I wouldn’t trade places with you for all the tea in China.”

Julius couldn’t place her accent. It was muddled as if, when alive, this was a woman who was never in one place very long. “How can y’all even sign up for this sort of madness? Haven’t you any humanity left in you?”

Her face went as still as a frozen lake, and when it moved closer to him, the expression sent a chill through him. On her hands and feet, she approached him in an odd feline kind of way. When she reached a spot equidistant between the huddled mass of ghosts and the newcomer, she pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “We gonna be living people again,” she said and lifted a dirty finger toward him. “Not you. Not you, though. You are—”

“Living? You won’t be living again!”

“Closest we’ll ever get. Closer than any of the other hopeless spooks roaming this dying planet. Closer than you.”

Julius frowned. “You won’t have a beating heart in your chest. No blood coursing through your veins, no breath in your lungs. How is that living?”

With an open palm, she motioned around the packed train car. “And this is? World don’t even know we’re here. Hell, that’s like dyin’ twice and every day after. The woman will make it so we ain’t invisible no more. Forgotten,” she said, her voice rising enough to where some of those behind her quieted and turned. “We’ll be able to walk through a field and leave footprints in the grasses. Hell, I can maybe even wrap my arms around the children of my children.”

Julius looked between the woman and the group of faces turned toward him. “What? What?” Julius couldn’t stop a bitter chuckle escaping his lips. “You think this Voodoo Cher person is just going to grant you… form or whatever and let you go on your merry way?”

The woman stared for a moment then dismissed him with a wave. “You don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”

“Oh, I know all about her and the plans she’s got for this world,” Julius said, putting some grit into his voice. It was a habit he’d picked up—a survival instinct—from years of working in classrooms of teenagers who didn’t want to hear what you had to say. “Her one and only goal is to darken every corner of this planet. That woman is filled with hate. Hell, she built our world out of sheer will and revenge.”

“She is a God!” a voice from the crowd called out.

“She’s powerful, I’ll give you that,” he said, standing slowly. “But not any kind of God I know. The pain, the misery she wants to bring to the living people of this world? That ain’t a god—it’s something else.” Julius paced, feeling the eyes trail after him. “She is evil, deceptive. And y’all just wanna go and sign up to join in her fight? I don’t even—”

The boxcar filled with hoarse whispers as those within the group turned to one another, their eyes cutting between Julius and the others around them.

“Whaddya mean join her fight?”

They don’t know, Julius thought. The man in the mask hadn’t told them the whole story. Only promises that they would, in some way, be alive once more. “Voodoo Cher is going to lead an army of the dead from one end of this world to the other,” he said and pointed to the front of the car. “You ever wonder why the man in the mask up there has been searching all around the desert? Up and down and all over while y’all just sit back here on our hands.”

Laughter bubbled out of the small crowd.

“Only been here a few days, most of us,” the woman said. “That man, Jakob, says he already sent heaps of others like us along.”

Julius rubbed his neck, taking a moment to think. How many had already joined her army? Had she begun to mobilize? No, no. She needs all four machines up and running first. “Well, if they’ve been sending all those others along, why are you still here?” Julius said, parting his arms. “Maybe they’ve got other plans for you?”

A hulk of a man pushed forward a few paces, the side of his face folded inward, crushed. Julius wondered what had dealt that killing blow. Whatever it was, he still carried that damage, even in death.

“A man obeys Ned Kelly,” the near-giant spoke in broken English. “We tell of… death place. He collects… a thing. From our dead box.”

“That thing is called a totem,” Julius said, trying to piece it all together. Sally Scull said she’d been chasing some Hell inc agents digging up graves. They were all working together.

When he looked up, he saw the confusion on their faces.

“Things you had a long time, stuff you wore maybe when you were living, they are imbued with… I don’t know, your essence or something. Those objects—maybe a ring, a necklace, whatever—are linked to you long after you die.”

Julius slowly turned and looked at the towering machine between the boxcar and the engine. Below the machine, one-hundred-forty-four writhing souls were being robbed of their energy for Voodoo Cher's war.

Finally, the metal helmet worn by Not Ned— the hangman Elijah Upjohn—made sense: it had a dual purpose.

Many saw Ned Kelly as a hero, an Aussie-style Robin Hood sticking it to the banks, and as the story goes, when he had robbed bars, he rewarded compliant customers with free beer and liquor. If he returned, scores would follow him.

That metal helmet had been constructed from the totems stolen from the corpses of those beneath the machine. It gave him otherworldly power.

He’s probably got it drilled to bolts in his neck, if that’s a thing, Julius thought.

Now if Not Ned was sending this bunch to ride the light, that meant the woman had a working machine on the other side.

She wouldn't need this group for her machine, so it was more likely that if Voodoo Cher possessed a totem from any of them, she would use that to control them.

Julius turned back to the awaiting faces and nearly leaped back—they all just stared at him, eager to hear more. He wasn't arrogant enough to believe it was all about his fine storytelling abilities, despite how fine they were. The secrets about the invisible mechanisms controlling their strange, unnatural realm remained a mystery for most of those in the InBetween.

"The woman will give you a facsimile of life."

The eager faces dimmed.

"It may give you form or grain, whatever. But you won't be using it to go out playing in the grass or hugging baby grandchildren. She's got other plans."

The feral woman he'd spoken to first cocked her head at him. "What sorta plans?"

"That army of the dead? Those thousands upon thousands of spooks she wants to raise from the grave?" Julius said, shaking his head. "She wants you to lead them. Lead a killing machine that will wipe every living man, woman, and child off the planet."

The dozens of faces in front of him froze. Transfixed and unblinking.

Then they cheered.

That was not the response Julius had expected. Or had hoped for. “Now, wait a…” he said, but no one was listening. He’d been sure this news would be a knock-out blow and might even lead to an uprising. Instead, the huddling mass of forgotten souls felt, for the first time in ages, maybe, empowered.

Julius went back to his wall, stumbled as the boxcar jostled and wobbled, then slid down once again. He forced himself to look back at the group, and as painful as it might be, he wanted to burn that image—their rapturous faces hungry for payback—into his mind. In the InBetween, those trying to make things right would always be outnumbered.

But… not alone.

When he caught the face of the feral woman, she wasn’t laughing or cheering. Hadn’t joined in on the celebration. She was staring northward, beyond the strange design of the hangman’s train and, it seemed, even beyond the wasteland outside.

When she looked at Julius, he felt something that he’d thought he might have lost forever.

Hope.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

At the Telfer mine, the two Hell inc agents waited as the sun warmed the sky. The man on the train would come soon.

“How long we gotta wait, Digger?”

“Long as it takes.” Ronno looked over at his motorcycle, waiting for him beneath the shade of a dying tree. Its kickstand out, it listed slightly to the right. But to him, it almost looked like the bike had tilted its head to one side, as if in judgment. “Don’t feel right working for the dead,” he said, chewing on some dried, stringy meat. “We’re supposed to be running the Downstairs. Janus taking the Devil’s throne, so we can remake Hell as we see fit.”

Digger smiled. “Bring back the ol’ fire and brimstone?”

“The Old Man made the place a joke. Who knows, maybe his way generates more misery on the planet, but there should be recourse for the wicked.”

Digger tossed a rock he’d been holding at one of the massive mining machines parked just off the side of the gaping hole in the earth. The stone bounced off a metal panel and thudded into the dirt. “Funny that he turned Hell into some sorta corporate nightmare, while the new blood born from the corporate world wants to turn it back into something out of the Bible.”

His partner checked his watch. “What’s old is new again, I reckon. When’s this asshole going to get here? Hotter than shit out here.”

“He’ll get here when he gets here,” Digger said, ambling over to the mine’s entrance, where it would be cooler. Ronno followed, tossing what was left of his dry, tasteless jerky to the ground.

* * *

Tara rolled the pad of her middle finger across the focusing wheel, staring at the two men below. “I thought they were going in,” she said and lowered her binoculars. “Seems like they’re just getting out of the sun.”

“I don’t blame ’em,” Uncle Jerry said, sitting cross-legged on a rock, holding a bent umbrella over his head. He looked up at it, squinting from the sun breaching the fabric. “I feel like a little lady under my parasol here. A sweaty little lady.”

Sally grunted.

Tara pushed away from the edge, leaving her spyglasses on a flat rock. From up here, they could monitor the makeshift roads and paths surrounding the mine below. During their flight over, she’d learned that the site, like so many others, would open and close in fits and starts.

At the moment, there were no workers streaming in and out, carrying the precious treasures they’d scraped out of the earth. That had been a relief to the Aussie cop because she could tell that impossibly old American gunslinger was ready for violence.

When she looked over at the woman leaning against a dusty rock face, the Aussie cop saw Sally inspecting the single bullet she had in her left pistol. As she held it between dirty fingers, the casing glowed and shimmered. Some of that was from the punishing sun. Some from the hellfire inside.

“Wasn’t there an old American show on the telly where the deputy was given just one bullet?” Tara said, teasing her partner.

Sally casually flipped the bullet in the air, stripped the gun from her belt, and thumbed open the cylinder to let it drop inside. With a flick of her wrist, the cylinder locked into place, and she re-holstered the weapon.

The entire maneuver had taken less than two seconds.

“Don’t think he could do anything like that, though,” Tara said. “How long did it take you to learn that wee trick?”

Sally frowned, smacking her lips as the grit rolled across her tongue. She lobbed a wad of spit onto a flat rock, and it sizzled in the sun. “We’re just sittin’ up here melting while those shavantzes are down there doing whatever the hell they're doing.” Pulling the pistol out of her right holster, she spun the chamber and dropped it back. “I’m tired of waiting.”

“Sal, it’s too risky!”

“I don’t let cops tell me what to do,” she said, gritting her teeth. “I gotta job, and it ends down there with those two being eaten by buzzards.”

Uncle Jerry looked up at the sky. “I don’t think they got buzzards out here.”

“Ya can’t go down there guns a-blazin’, Sally,” Tara said, taking a step toward her. “This isn’t some Old West shoot-out.”

“Not yet, it ain’t, but give ’er five minutes.”

As the gunslinger turned, she felt a hand grip her elbow. When Tara saw the look on her face when the woman spun back, she nearly let go. Nearly.

“You kill those men and it’s murder!”

Sally shook her head, laughing bitterly. “It ain’t murder. This is war! You’re just too damn thick to realize it.”

“If they had buzzards here,” Uncle Jerry said, still scanning the deep-blue sky, “the way Australia does it, they’d have wolf teeth and claws like panthers.”

Tara gripped the other woman harder and pulled the gun from her belt, muzzle facing the ground.

Sally blinked. Then her eyes blazed with rage. “Now you pull out your goddamn gun! When you wanna point it at me?”

“Not pointing it at you, Sal,” Tara said, staring hard into the other woman’s eyes. “But I am a cop, and I can’t let you gun people down in front of me. Not going to happen.”

“You think that peashooter can stop me?”

The Aussie cop slowly shook her head. “I don’t want to find out. Let’s just—”

The gunslinger’s hand came up and gripped Tara’s pistol, but instead of stripping it from the cop, Sally put her thumb on the trigger and fired. “Jesus, don’t—” Sally then flexed her thumb, over and over, until she’d emptied the clip into her own stomach.

The two women stood there, the cordite smoke stinging their eyes and wrapping around them like a specter.

With a grunt, Sally yanked her arm away from the other woman. “You’re out of bullets,” she said, at first walking down the dirt path then picking up her pace.

The two men in the mine had undoubtedly heard the gunfire and would come out to investigate.

Tara looked down at her weapon, still smoking in her hands, then back up at the shrinking figure of Sally Scull.

Uncle Jerry casually stood and dusted off his flight suit. He offered the cop a warm grin. “If you follow her, which I expect you will, I’d recommend keeping around to her rear.”

“How is that…?”

“Sally’s one to hold a grudge, as you mighta picked up,” the pilot said. “Technically, you weren’t the one who shot her, but that doesn’t mean she won’t throw a few your direction to even the score.”

Tara’s mouth hung open, staring at Sally turning the corner on the switchback below, now running at full speed. “What is going on here? That’s not… that’s not possible.”

Uncle Jerry put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a gentle squeeze. “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K,” he said.

Tara tented the skin between her eyebrows and finally looked at the old man. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Heard it in a movie once. Thought it sounded…” Uncle Jerry turned slowly.

Tara followed his eyeline.

But he wasn’t looking at the mine below. He was looking off in the distance, toward the deadened expanse of outback.

When he turned back, he had a smile, but even though she’d only met the man a few hours ago, she knew he wasn’t happy. “You see if you can help our Sally, but keep your head down. Best thing you can probably do is draw their fire, but don’t get dead in the process.”

“What is it?” Tara squinted toward the wasteland. “What did you see?”

“Didn’t see nothing,” Uncle Jerry said, moving in the direction opposite the one Sally had gone. “But I heard something, and that something is headed this way.”

A moment later, Tara stood alone on the crest of a rocky hill. She looked at the settling dust kicked up by the old pilot. Then at the footprints Sally had left in the dirt on the other side.

“What in the devil have I gotten into?”

* * *

“You don’t have a smoke, do ya?” I said to the pile of bones sharing the coffin with me. “I don’t actually smoke because, you know, ghost. But did you know I used to be someone else? Maybe he smoked.”

The guy wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Or the girl. I couldn’t tell because all the baby-making bits had long rotted away. Or were eaten by whatever bugs crawl through the dirt in this part of the world.

I’d spent a full minute panicking, looking for a way out as the chimeras dug way at the soil above me, sniffing out their dinner below.

They wouldn’t take bites out of me—or at least I didn’t think they would—instead it would be far worse. I would get dragged into the All Time. I’d lost my best friend Gary to it back in the US because I had been too slow to stop it.

He was there alone. In the dark, enduring all of time from beginning to end.

Some part of me wondered if, somehow, I might see him there. An irrational part of me thought if I did, we might work a way out and back home.

But the All Time isn’t a place. It isn’t a city or country, continent or planet. It’s just everything, all at once.

It is a Hell worse than Hell, and you spend it alone.

Forever.

The growling above got louder, and I looked over at my cellmate.

“Bones, if that were a livie up there, they’d never see me. Another spook. I might be able to hide behind your rotting corpse.” I could hear the dirt being dug, clawed away. The growling above getting feverish.

There would be no hiding.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Sally ran, huffing, down the side of the rocky hill. It was frustrating as she took another bend, and she felt like a rat in a maze. “Switchbacks are the Devil’s balls,” she said between breaths, spitting out more dirt.

She’d considered making a beeline straight down the slope, but there was too much brush and bramble to push through. And, for now, all that dead or dying foliage was covering her approach.

Another turn, running back the way she came, moving lower and lower as she did. “It’s like… runnin’ in circles, this! Fuckin’ Australia. No wonder everything is mean and mad here.”

With the final turn, she slowed then took a moment. Bent over and soaked with sweat, she gripped both of her knees, sucking in gulps of air. Her eyes drifted over to the spot where she’d unloaded Tara’s weapon into her belly.

The leathers had split and were scored at their edges.

A wave of emotion rolled through her—a mixture of regret, sadness, and anger. But there was always anger.

She pushed the first two out of her mind and straightened up.

The two Hell inc. agents had indeed heard the shots and were now taking up positions just inside the old mine’s opening.

Peering through the brush, she scanned the grounds.

Under a sad-looking tree, she saw a motorcycle leaning against its kickstand. She looked at the next bit of shade over, from another tree larger than the first, but couldn’t find her bike. Where’d that asshole put Horse?

Three hulking machines had been parked and secured with long steel chains to posts hammered into the earth. One looked like a type of loader, with wheels as tall as she was. The other two appeared to be digging equipment. The larger of the drills looked a bit like a giant microscope, where the tube that held the lens was comically long.

If I can get over there, it’d be cover.

But crossing the gap from the foot of the hill to the nestled machines would be suicide.

In any other fight, she could step out from the trail’s end and put both men down before they could even piss themselves. Sally pulled out her pistols, focusing on the faces of her enemies.

To others, they would look like just a couple of Aussie cowpokes.

But agents on either side can see the others for their true nature. To Sally, these faces were ruined, rotting, and gruesome.

Her pistol full of lead wouldn’t do anything but put a hole in their clothes. The other packed a punch, but she only had one hit. And she knew who had earned it.

“Digger,” she muttered, the sound of his name fueling her rage. Sally realized she had one advantage—if they were panicked, they might not realize the shots pinging around them were not hellfire bullets. She could lay down some fire with the right and deliver the killing blow with her left.

A moment before she stepped forward, she took a deep breath, readying herself, but then something tickled in her brain. Sally dropped to one knee and spun, facing back the way she came. “It’s me. Don’t shoot,” Tara said, keeping her voice low.

Sally kept her pistols even, staring down the sights, which were both targeting the pretty face of the Aussie cop.

Her hands in the air, Tara mouthed: “Please.”

With a grunt, the gunslinger swung back. She could see Digger creeping out of the dark cave, both guns loaded with hellfire, scanning the surrounding terrain.

“Where’s the other one?” Tara said, crouching next to the other woman.

Sally flipped her pistol downward and pointed with her finger. A moment later, Ronno came out from behind a massive gray tank just inside the entrance.

Tara kept her voice low. “Listen, I’m strong enough to admit when I’m out of my depth. This is your show. Tell me what I can do to help.”

Sally grunted then nodded slowly. “Where’s the old man?”

“Ran to the east, down the mountain that way.”

“Good. Don’t want him to get shot.”

“Aw, you care about him.”

The gunslinger took a half step forward. “Yeah. He’s the only way we’re getting out of here when this is done.”

Sally had a plan. Or, rather, part of a plan. Tara would stay hidden and, on her signal, pepper the ground with shots from her otherwise useless weapon. That would give Sally the second or two she needed to get Digger in her sights. “Maybe after that, Ronno will hightail it for the horizon.”

They were ready. Sally began counting down, quietly, from five. However, when she hit two, everything changed.

Above the mine shaft, the sky split in two, cut by a ribbon of light brighter than the punishing sun in the sky. Both women froze, struggling to work out what they were seeing.

Out of thin air, an impossible machine of electric blue light snapped into view as if the fabric of space-time had puckered and spat it out. It was pulsating with energy, and when Sally looked at its base, she swore she could just make out people, thrumming rhythmically and all in unison.

The ghost train slowed and rolled to a stop, perched on top of the long stone ridge that led to the mine’s entrance, the peak of its cowcatcher hanging off the edge. Standing on what looked like a flatcar platform was a man in an iron mask, his hand wrapped around the tendrils of light bursting from the top of the machine.

Tara fought off a desperate urge to run or pray or both. She said, “That can’t be.”

“Just got weirder, I reckon.”

“That’s… I mean, that’s Ned Kelly.”

Sally squinted, frowning. “Too tall.”

“That’s Ned Kelly’s armor. It’s Ned back from the dead,” Tara whispered. “Those are words I never thought I’d ever speak.”

The woman next to her grunted. “The way this day is turning out, I’m thinkin’ there’s about to be a lot of that.”

* * *

Digger and Ronno climbed up either side of the mine’s opening, careful not to fall on the crumbling sets of earthen stairs.

At the top, Digger looked back to the nearby mountain where he’d originally thought he’d heard gunfire. He turned to the shimmering blue light of the train. “Sounds like you mighta thrown a piston,” he said, grinning. “Heard you coming from a mile away.”

The man in the mask ignored him.

“Do you have what I’ve come for?”

Despite how many times they’d carried out similar transactions, the ghost’s voice still sent shivers through both men. The words sounded as though they’d been forced from a wide, bottomless chasm on the dark side of the moon. The timbre was unnatural and unpleasant.

Happy to get this over with, Digger began unhooking the sack around his waist. “You got more names for us?”

The man they knew was Ned Kelly turned to the rear of the train where a boxcar shimmied and warbled slightly from side to side. Keeping his hand on the river of light, he arched his massive helmet left and right. “Jakob! See what’s going on back there.”

The man in the mask turned back to the two Aussie gunmen, who watched as a translucent, shimmering something crossed from the front to the back. As it passed Ned Kelly, this something—or someone—was indiscernible, only refracting the light like it had been made out of seawater.

Then it was gone.

“Finish the list you’ve got,” the man in the mask said. “I will know at our next meeting whether your task has been completed.”

Ronno smiled. “So we’re nearly done?”

The helmet tilted slightly. “Yes. Yes, the two of you are nearly done.”

Digger tossed the bag of totems up to the man in the mask. Before it could reach his extended hand, there was a loud crack! and the sack shifted direction and flew down the opposite side of the ridge.

The two Aussies looked at each other then turned.

“Sally Scull,” Digger muttered and grinned. “Time to finish this.”

* * *

Once Uncle Jerry had reached the bottom of the hill, he took a moment to catch his breath. He pulled off his cap and wiped his matted hair, but his hand was soaked as well so he was only rubbing sweat around his head. “I’m gonna need a shower after this. Probably two.”

He’d heard the otherworldly machine before he’d seen it, but he’d never expected to be looking at an actual train, manifested on the ridge above the mine. Only the previous week, he’d seen an impossible craft, a ship, appear from thin air. It had taken him and a handful of others safely from a burning boat to shore, then, as quickly as it had appeared, it winked out of existence.

This was different.

It wasn’t metal or wood. It was a locomotive of pure energy.

That’s what he’d heard coming, its engine echoing around the valley. His first thoughts, as always, went to Rasputin. He knew the boy would be searching for it and could be, at this moment, hot on its trail.

He wanted to be close by if that were true.

“Uncle Jerry!” a voice called out, startling him.

He recognized it. “Julius? Is that you?”

Julius ran up to the man, wishing he could throw his arms around the old-timer. Instead, he stood directly in front of him, despite the livie unable to see that. “They got a bunch of spooks in the back of that car,” Julius said, looking between the ghost train and his friend. “That cowboy up there, he’s got what Not Ned needs to send all of them over to Voodoo Cher. I think she’s going to use them to lead her armies!”

The pilot popped his cap back on and squinted, rubbing sweat out of his eyes. “I don’t follow all of that. Where’s Razzie?” When Julius didn’t answer right away, he worried that the ghost might have run up to the train. “Julius! Where—”

“I’m right here in front of you,” he said, his voice dropping. “Painter got left behind. That asshole stashed him, plans to use our boy for leverage. Get a better deal out of Voodoo Cher.”

The lines in Uncle Jerry’s face deepened, his eyes fierce—an expression Julius couldn’t ever remember seeing. “Where is he?”

“I’m sorry, man. He’s back there, miles away. I don’t know where.” Julius turned and stared at the vast empty before him. “Paint used ta tell me about, you know, wandering around and finding people. People you’re drawn to. If I head that way—”

A shot rang out, and they both turned toward the train.

Moments later, they saw the two Aussie cowboys race down the side of the ridge.

“We gotta go help,” Uncle Jerry said and started running toward the mine.

“What the hell are we gonna do?”

Another volley of gunfire filled the air.

“Don’t know,” the old pilot said, pumping his tired legs. “But let’s make sure part of whatever it is involves not getting shot.”

* * *

Sally knew it had been a gamble.

From below, she couldn’t get a clear shot on Digger. She also knew that whatever the Aussie had been digging out of the graves he was handing over to whoever was on the impossible train. If all of this was about that exchange, she couldn’t let that happen.

But the moment she fired, hitting the bag midair, their position would be given up. “Run!” she shouted, but Tara was already racing toward the digging machines.

Ronno was stomping down the steps and fired at the cop. When the bullet passed by her ear, just inches away, she felt the heat off of it, and dove the last few feet, taking cover behind the giant loader.

So that’s a hellfire bullet, she thought. As a cop, she was trained in ballistics. She knew grains and caliber and what sort of slugs could punch through Kevlar body armor, bone, or steel. Could their strange bullets pass through a truck?

She wasn’t going to wait around to find out and scurried its length to find somewhere to fire back.

Sally crouched behind a boulder, only a hundred feet from the mine’s entrance.

Hellfire bullets whizzed over her head—the handful of those that hit the giant rock buried themselves deep inside. They didn’t shatter the stone, but their heat within was growing. It would only be a matter of time before the rock exploded.

The man called Ronno crouched and balanced his arm on his knee, taking aim.

Another round penetrated the boulder. It glowed, a light orange, and was too hot to touch. Ronno fired again.

To her left, more shots, but these were not aimed at her.

Sally smiled. The Aussie cop, outgunned in every way, was firing, and Ronno dropped to the dirt. Tara’s next shot pinged off a rock, ricocheting with a tiny spark. But no flame.

Ronno’s laugh echoed around the canyon.

“I’ll get to you next,” he said then called across the mine’s opening. “Get the bag, Digger. I got this.”

The other man stood and seemed torn about what he should do. He then ran around the ridge to retrieve the sack. “Don’t shoot Sally Scull dead,” he called back. “That’s my prize.”

Another laugh bubbled across the grounds, and Ronno lined up his shot again. Tara fired off another three rounds—two of them hit, but he’d reacted to them the same as Sally to the slugs. Barely even flinched.

Another round thumped into the rock, and its color darkened.

If Sally ran, she’d be out in the open, but she crouched behind the boulder. Its heat began to burn her face.

He fired again, knowing that Sally had just the one hellfire bullet and that it did not have his name on it. She and Digger had a hate that went back more than half a century. More than anything, they wanted the other dead.

In rapid succession, he fired three hell-born slugs into the boulder.

Then it exploded.

* * *

At the sound of the powerful blast, Uncle Jerry jumped back from the edge of the grounds surrounding the mine. “Jesus, what the hell was that?”

Julius shouted, “Get down!”

The pilot dropped to the dirt as tiny, molten red bits of rock flew overhead. When he looked up through the settling haze, he saw Sally, and his heart broke. She was flat on her back, clawing at her burnt face.

* * *

Tara was trapped.

The explosion had rocked the machines serving as her hiding place, but thankfully, they hadn’t tipped over. They were now askew, leaving sizeable gaps in her cover.

Ronno was coming. “You rest a moment, Sally Scull. We’ll get to ya,” he said, climbing back up the steps to stand above the mine’s opening. Once there, he was high above the Aussie cop’s hiding place. He smiled. “This one’s mine.”

Two slugs hit his chest, the muzzle fire giving away her position. Ronno lifted his pistol as another shot rang out, and he casually aimed, pulling the trigger.

Tara dove from her spot as the bullet pierced a small propane tank that fueled the digger. Its unholy flame grew massive, the size of a hot-air balloon, before collapsing upon itself once again. The force of it threw Tara clear of the machines. She was out in the open now.

The cop lay in the dirt, dizzy. When she tried to move, pain shot up and down the side of her body. Her arm was bent at an unnatural angle.

There was nowhere for her to go.

She called out with the little strength she had left. “Sally! I could use a little help here.”

When she turned toward the gunslinger, she saw Sally had rolled onto her side, trying to lift herself up with her elbow. Her face, though, was blackened and bleeding. She drew hoarse, wet breaths through her mouth, a mess of broken teeth.

But it was the woman’s eyes that nearly made Tara retch.

They were gone, burned away.

* * *

Uncle Jerry had been halfway around the compound by the time he saw the second explosion. Like the first, the burst of hellfire stung his eyes, boiled with heat, and shook his bones.

Sally was down, blinded, trying to get back to her feet, and toppling over with the effort.

The other woman, the cop called Tara, was in a heap, trying to use one hand to pull herself away. Her other arm dragged behind.

“Nothing you can do here, man,” Julius said, chasing him. “They’re gone.”

Uncle Jerry scowled and kept running, unsure what he could do.

Julius pleaded, “They’re beat. Let’s get out of here. We’ve got to find Paint!”

The two explosions replayed in his mind, a horror show he couldn’t stop. Over and over the images surfaced as he ran. But he was an old man and had become an old man by paying attention to what his brain was trying to tell him.

When he turned and looked into the dark mouth of the mine, he caught sight of something large and cylindrical. Then, whether it was instinct or intuition or desperation, he knew what he had to do.

“Sally!” he shouted, running as fast as he could, pumping his legs higher and higher. “Sally, here! Here!”

When he stopped between the gunslinger and the yawning mine, Ronno turned toward the desperate, pleading old man. His smile grew as he turned, lifting his pistol to fire.

Sally lifted her head toward the sound of Uncle Jerry’s voice, the world around her a painful black void.

“Here, Sal!” Uncle Jerry shouted. “Shoot me! Shoot me, goddammit!”

What in the hell is he…? Then she got it. She understood because she had seen it earlier too.

Focusing on the sound of the old pilot’s voice, her friend pleading with her, she raised her left pistol. Then she fired.

Tara watched in horror then turned away at the last second, but before covering her eyes she saw something fall from the train, off the side. No bigger than a cricket ball.

Her hat was stripped off by a shock wave, and then, when the hellfire bullet pierced the gray tank just inside the mine’s entrance, a giant bulb of flame rose, blowing off the top of the mine, the hellfire rising higher and higher.

* * *

Julius covered his mouth, trembling.

If he’d had tears, they would have been streaming down swollen cheeks. The belch of hellfire that erupted when the bullet hit the massive gray fuel tank blew the top off the mine’s opening. Burning, angry blood-red flames engulfed the ethereal ghost train, obliterating everything in their path.

The electric-blue locomotive shook violently in the bath of fire, and like a blowtorch to an icicle, it sizzled away into nothing. Into a fiery void, it dragged the machine and the souls trapped beneath it.

Also gone was the boxcar full of eager spooks and the woman who’d helped him leap from the train a half mile away.

There had been a brief scream from the man called Jakob, the conductor, as he and his engine crackled away into nothing, swallowed whole by the fires of hell.

When Julius looked between the flames and Sally Scull, collapsed on the ground, Uncle Jerry was gone.

The fireball had been so large it would have easily engulfed the old pilot, turning his body to ash in the blink of an eye.

But… Uncle Jerry was gone.

He had been there in the seconds before the explosion, then just as the fire licks of flame burst from the fuel tank, he just disappeared.

As the flames burned away, having exhausted their fuel in a matter of seconds, the air filled with pungent, acrid smoke.

Julius saw Sally pull herself out of the brambles, having been thrown back by the blast. She stumbled around, blinded by the previous explosion, hands extended, grasping at the air.

“Tara!” she shouted, her voice booming around the grounds. “Tara, where you at?”

The fires had all but melted the huge mining machines, which had been bolted to the earth. What was three was now one, still glowing and bubbling from the assault. However, they’d taken the brunt of the heat, sparing the Aussie cop on the other side.

“I’m here, Sally,” she called back, her voice hoarse.

Julius pulled his hands to his chest and swore he could feel his heart swell. Despite himself, he laughed.

The Hell inc agents had burned so fast it was as if they’d never existed in the first place. Digger and Ronno left no smoking husks behind.

They had won.

But at what cost?

Julius walked forward into the blackened and melted tableau, but then stopped dead in his tracks. He slowly turned to the west, beyond the brush that had been spared by the flames. “Was that a growl?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I lay on my back, drained, everything above me black as night. It had all happened so fast, powered only by adrenaline and instinct. Well, that’s not entirely true.

In those last moments trapped in the grave, waiting for the chimera to take its prize as he chewed away at the dirt above, I saw the first hints of daylight trickle under the lid of the coffin. I stared at them, trying to keep the precious image in my mind, something I could carry with me for what was about to come.

The All Time has no sound. No light, no sensation at all. The memory of that sliver of light would be the last I would have for an eternity.

When the chimera had stripped away all the earth, I braced for its talons and teeth to reach right through to take me to that awful place. But it did something else. Something odd.

Thump-thump-thump.

I blinked. “Uh, did you just… knock?”

Then it growled once more, but this time, without being muffled by the dirt, it had been a strange staccato sound.

I pushed through the top of the coffin, and my mind dropped out of my ghost skull. It made no sense. Why was a motorcycle balancing its front wheel on the coffin?

Climbing out, I saw that the shaft that had been dug by who’d ever ridden the bike was deep. Too high for me to reach up and grab the ledge.

“Out of one box and into another,” I muttered.

The strange motorcycle puttered again then revved, likely because at the angle it had fallen in, its fuel had taken in some air. Bikes don’t rev on their own.

I reached up as high as I could stretch, but it was no use. Too far out of reach. I leaped up, my fingertips just grazing the edge, but when I fell back down, I stumbled on the uneven ground below and tumbled back.

When I opened my eyes, I expected to be staring up through the oil pan of the motorcycle.

But that… that did not happen.

Somehow, the motorcycle’s front forks had turned and broken my fall.

Two points about that.

First, they can’t turn their forks on their own!

Second, the bike was solid to me!

Laying across its front fairing, I pushed myself up and spun toward it. I was equal parts horrified and fascinated. Struggling to believe what had just happened, I reached forward to put my fingers through the headlight.

They thunked on the glass.

The light fluttered off and on twice before extinguishing again.

Laughing, I said, “Hell, it looked like you just winked at me.”

The bike trilled, and once again, totally impossibly, the front wheel tilted toward me. No rider. Who was controlling this?

An earsplitting roar filled the cavern as the bike shook, like some desert creature who’d sensed an approaching predator. Obviously, I had lost my mind.

“What’s wrong, boy? Timmy fall down the well?”

When its front tire rolled toward me, its rear balanced up on the earthen wall above, instinctively, I reached out and grabbed the handlebars to hold it back. The engine revved and began pulling me, but I was so startled that all I could do was hold on.

Seconds later, we flew out of the hole.

The bike stopped quickly as I was flung twenty feet behind it.

“Holy shit!” I shouted then landed. Quickly, I got up to my feet to see where its rider was, but it was just me and the motorcycle standing by an open grave next to a pile of dirt and rocks. Are drone bikes a thing, I thought to myself, then stared up at the sky.

The bike’s engine gunned, the front wheel locked, and it did a one-eighty facing me. Could whoever was controlling the motorcycle see me? “I don’t understand any of this,” I said.

Slowly, it rolled up to me, closing the gap, but strangely, I didn’t feel intimidated. Of course, I should have been freaked out that some demon bike looked like it was coming over for a cuddle.

Demon bike? Why had that thought come to mind?

Sure enough, when it reached me, it, um, nuzzled my leg. But when it touched me, images began flooding my mind. The open road, the sky above, shifting from blue to red and then back again. Looking in the side mirror I saw the grinning face of a grizzled woman. “Sally Scull.”

The bike revved once again, its headlight tilting up toward me. I reached out and placed my hand on it, and I felt him. His mind, his thoughts, his love pushing through the cracks.

“Rasputin,” I whispered. “Rasputin used to ride you, didn’t he…” A strange word tumbled across the transom, the yawning gap between who I was and who I had been. “Bucephalus.”

The bike straightened up and gunned its engine in three successive bursts.

It was beyond bizarre.

“That’s you, huh?” I said, deciding to embrace my new-found madness and address the motorcycle directly. “Bu—Bucephalus. Boo for short.”

Once again, the motorcycle shifted and trilled, as if in a panic. It was agitated, but not at me.

“I saw Sally riding you at the airport,” I said. “Do you know where Uncle Jerry and Julius are? Ha! What am I saying?”

The bike flashed its light, blink-blink-blink, then its back tire spun, facing the opposite direction. I stood staring at it, waiting for it to, I didn’t know, shoot away and spit dirt and rock at me. Instead, it slightly turned its front wheel, the headlight, um, staring at me. Waiting.

“I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle, man,” I said and then had a realization. “But he did. Rasputin did.” I lifted my leg over its seat and climbed aboard, feeling the thrill of something other than the ground being real to me! “I’m sitting on a—whoa!”

The bike shot off like a rocket. Jesus, it was fast. But something in the back of my mind—or someone, sure—told me it could go even faster. Much, much faster.

Another word bubbled up into my mind, even more bizarre than the other.

I whispered, “Giddyup.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

As I lay on my back, the black sky above me distorted and wobbled then came back into focus.

Nearby, I heard a voice: “Tara? Tara, where you at?”

Sally Scull was nearby, but I was too weak to move and just stared up at the billowing black smoke blotting out the sky. I felt a nudge at my head and tilted my eyes up to see a beautiful machine, chrome, and streaks of black.

“Hey, Boo, let’s never do that again, ’k?”

The bike trilled, and I knew from all the times it had done that before, the thing was damned pleased with itself.

And it should’ve been.

We had rocketed across the Australian outback at such a speed, we could have traveled the length of the continent in seconds. The bike had barely even slowed as we came up on the abandoned mine.

As we approached, I could see Elijah’s ghost train up on a ridge to our right. On the left, Sally was standing bowlegged and off-balance, pointing her gun at the mouth of the mine. In the middle, Uncle Jerry stood, shouting and waving his arms.

“Shoot me! Shoot me, goddammit!”

Boo was heading directly for my old friend, but if I collided with him, knocking him clear, he would be killed. I had to grab him.

Gripping the bike with my thighs, I drew all the energy I had, dug deep into myself, and willed that juice into my arms so that they would have grain for just a few seconds. It’s a draining process and hard to control.

A muzzle flash exploded to my left.

Sally had fired her bullet, but we were moving faster, and the slug seemed to crawl through the air like a red roach, glowing with the hellfire within.

Leaning to the right, we reached my friend, and I wrapped my sodden ghost arms around him, lifting the man off his feet and out of the path of the bullet. Instantly, Boo slowed, made a wide arc, and dumped me and Uncle Jerry on the desert floor.

It had all happened in just a few seconds. My head was spinning, but not only because I was zapped of energy. I turned to my left, where the old pilot was lying, eyes closed.

Not dead. He was chuckling.

“Hey ya, Uncle Jerry,” I said, and my heart nearly burst just saying the name. My friend. One of my oldest friends. He was here, once again, helping on some batshit crazy idea of mine.

“Razzie?” he said and coughed, spitting out a bit of blood. “Razzie, is that you?”

“Ha. Yeah.”

He sat up and looked around. “Wait. Is that you you?”

“Yeah, Uncle Jerry.” I stumbled to my feet, looking down at myself. Cargo shorts and a black T-shirt with an old radio station logo. It was surreal—like I’d awoken from a fever dream. A long, long dream. I could still recall everything I’d done as Painter Mann.

My encounter with Voodoo Cher. The Cajun.

All my old Temps. A reporter from Chicago who’d helped me take down that first machine.

“Brenda Matthews,” I said quietly, smiling.

Losing Gary to the All Time.

William Hare and the Leanaban. Captain Selkirk, Mutabe, Lascar.

All of it.

But now I also remembered the OG me. Rasputin Frewer. And my Uncle Jerry—my real uncle!—and the Actor. Anza and Sally Scull.

Where is she?

Uncle Jerry tried to sit up. He winced then dropped flat again. “Oh, that hurt. Let’s not do that again,” he said then flopped his head left and right. “Where are ya?”

“Over here, man,” I said and laughed. Sure, I was Raz again, but still dead. A ghost. Wow. Wow, oh wow. “Just… a lot to take in right now.”

The old pilot’s eyes got wide, and this time he did sit up. When he called out for me, I told him he was facing the wrong direction. He spun back, looking somewhere just to my right.

Close enough.

“You sound more like… you know, yourself.”

I didn’t know if it had been the hyperspeed ride on the back of Sally’s bike, or my collision with Uncle Jerry. From Painter’s memory, I knew that when I touched other spooks—that’s a weird word, but anyway—I could see their pasts.

It may have been the touch of an old friend, Uncle Jerry, that had brought my memories back.

Or maybe when part of my body was solid—lifelike—and the rest of it ghost, one touched the other or…? I don’t know.

I remembered everything.

My friends and our trips all over the planet. My deal with the old man and the terrible bargain I’d made. Uh, the second terrible bargain I’d made—the first had been at the Crossroads to save my wife.

Cassie.

The name—foreign to me moments earlier—filled me with warmth. I’m doing this to get back to my Cassie. I smiled when I saw Julius’s face cross over me.

“Painter?” he said, grinning ear to ear. I nodded. “You got kinda chubby, man. You been holding out on me? Got some ghost chips stashed around here somewhere?”

I felt woozy, but it hadn’t been just from the rush of a lifetime of memories. I am low on… juice. Energy, I thought. I knew that if I just banged his foot a few times, I could pull a little of his energy into me. I asked if that would be alright and my friend extended his leg, bobbing his shiny black shoe back and forth.

“Don’t make this weird, now,” he said and smiled wider.

We’d chatted with Uncle Jerry for a moment and then headed over to check on the Aussie cop and my old friend, Sally Scull. We found them sitting up against the side of the ridge, hidden from the smoke still belching out of the mine.

“There’s our hero!” Uncle Jerry said, coming up behind us.

My chest nearly folded in on itself when I saw the gunslinger. Her duster was frayed, its edges scored and black. Her favorite hat was gone, her dirty blond braid snaking around her neck, singed in some places.

The most troubling was the kerchief she’d wrapped around her head, covering her eyes.

Even with all of that, she nearly leapt in the air at the sound of the old pilot’s voice.

“What? How can…? Uncle Jerry?” Pressing the heels of her palms into the dirt and rock, she crawled up to her feet. “How are you not…?”

The pilot rushed to her and held her shoulders so she wouldn’t fall, and this woman, the toughest person I had ever known, an assassin for the Devil who’d killed dozens, maybe hundreds, of men… embraced Uncle Jerry.

“I cain’ believe you’re alive. I just… I could just plotz,” she said before pulling back and wiping her mouth. “How did—wait? Did I miss? I don’t miss.”

“No, no,” Uncle Jerry said, giving her shoulder a squeeze. “I got a ride.”

Bucephalus loved a cool entrance, and on cue, he came around the corner, puttering, and rolled up to Sally. She knelt down, feeling around with her hands, and put her forehead on its front tire.

“You look good, Sal,” I said, a slight tremor in my voice. “I mean, I’ve seen you look worse. You should see her when she hasn’t had her morning coffee. This is nothing.”

Uncle Jerry relayed my words to her, and she slowly stood.

“Wh-where is he?”

“Over there.” The old pilot pointed. In the wrong direction. Julius laughed.

“Is that really you, Raz? You you, not dead you?”

With the cloth tied over her eyes, she waved her hands in the air, searching for me. Uncle Jerry grabbed her hand and held it.

“He’s still dead,” he said. “But that’s only a temporary affliction.” He ran his fingers over the cloth wrapped around her head. “What about this? You gonna be alright.”

She banged his hand away. “Now don’t go pawin’ at me. I’ll be fine,” she said and wandered back to her position by the wall. “I’ll be fine. But Tara here is busted up like the ten commandments.”

“I’m okay,” the cop said, her voice squeaking with a slight wheeze. “Is it over?”

Julius turned to me and shook his head. “Ol’ Not Ned did a runner just before the explosion. We lost him.”

I shrugged. “But without the machine, he’s not a threat anymore.”

“Don’t think that’s the case Paint—er, Raz,” Julius said. “I think he’s got that weird little monkey skull thing. If that thing can do what they say it can, he’s more dangerous now than before.”

I nodded. “I don’t think it’s a monkey scull, man, but yeah.” Turning, I said, “We’ve got to go after him, Uncle Jerry. And you guys need to get to a hospital.”

My old friend tensed. “You shouldn’t be going alone, Razzie.”

“This one is just me and Julius,” I said and stood in front of my friend. “You’ve got a few cracked ribs, and those two look like they got into a fight with a pack of lions.”

“But we don’t know where he’s gone,” Julius said.

I spun around and pointed south. At least, I thought it was south. “He went that-a-way.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Because if he’s got an Aztec death whistle that can raise the dead, we know who his first customer will be.”

Julius nodded slowly, looking in the direction I was pointing. “Ned Kelly. The real one.”

“Right, and after that, entire graveyards of spooks. He’ll have an army of pissed off dead people within a day.”

For the next few minutes, we watched as they all gathered up and got on the motorcycle. Uncle Jerry facing backward, gripping the tiny luggage rack. Tara on the rear part of the seat and Sally, of course, up front. The Aussie cop had suggested—since Sally was blind—that maybe she should drive.

Sally growled, “Horse knows where he’s going. I don’t need ta see!” and that had ended all discussion on the matter.

Uncle Jerry relayed my question about where Ned Kelly was buried to Tara. She didn’t even have to look it up. “In Victoria. A town called Greta, just down from his final shoot-out in Glenrowan.”

Sitting on his perch, gripping with both hands, my old friend looked up.

“You boys be safe now,” he said. “Once I get to the jet and get everyone tended to, we’ll meet up at that hangar back in Melbourne. You know the way?”

“We’ll find it,” I said. “And, hey, I love you, Uncle Jerry. You’re the best uncle anyone could ever hope for.”

My friend opened his mouth to speak, but eyes misty, he only nodded and smiled. Then, finding his voice, he said, “Love you, too, Razzie.”

Then they were gone.

Julius sighed and lifted his arms up to the sky, as if he were stretching his ghost limbs. When he turned back to me, he shook his head, grinning.

“It’s weird seeing you like this. I’ll get used to it, but it’s weird.”

I looked down at my ethereal body. When I’d been full-on Painter Mann, I was dressed head to toe in a ridiculous gray hoodie. What I saw now was a black radio station T-shirt, my uniform for more than a decade.

My chin to my chest, I couldn’t quite read it. “Which one is this?”

“It says ‘WJRR, the cutting edge of rock.’ What does it mean by the cutting edge? And why does it have a smiling buzzard on it?”

I shrugged. “That was the nineties. Good times.”

He nodded lower. “Still got those stupid sweatpants, though.”

“Huh,” I said. “Well, I still got Painter in me. His thoughts and memories are all there.”

“Too bad you didn’t have him on the outside,” he said, stone-faced. “Paint was better lookin’.”

Curious, I took off at a run, and sure enough, a few seconds later, I was up and skating as Painter had before. I looped around and stopped in front of Julius.

“Yeah, but we lost the rebar. I mean, what if I—?” He held his hand out then gripped my arm. He looked at me. I looked at him.

“I feel like you should buy me a drink before this goes any further.”

“Cut it out, now,” he said and pulled his hand away, grinning. “No more home movies?”

I shook my head, my lips bent in a smile.

Then I grabbed his arm, and we shot off like a comet, heading for the town of Greta, Victoria.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

When I’d been a kid, I was a hell of a hockey player.

That’s less a brag than it sounds. I was a chubby, shy kid with greasy hair and few friends. Did fine in school, when I put my mind to it, but had little identity in the real-life stage play that was junior high school.

There’d been the jocks, the richies, the burnouts, the gear-heads, and the dark-siders, who all wore eyeliner and dyed their hair jet-black to match the long coats they’d picked up at secondhand shops in Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota. None of the girls in school would have looked at little thirteen-year-old Rasputin Frewer and said, “Oh look, a jock! Such a powerful young man could one day give me robust babies.”

I’d had little experience talking to women of any age other than my mother, so my then-perception of the innermost thoughts of girls might have been askew. I didn’t know what they were thinking about, but I was sure they weren’t thinking about me.

I know, boo-hoo, little chubby bunny, but it worked out fine. In fact, I think the inattention helped, but that took a few years.

My father had left before I’d ever met him, so it was just me and Mom.

We’d moved around a lot until she found a steady job with an insurance company based in Minneapolis. After school, without a crowd of friends to keep me busy, and with little money coming in, I kept myself occupied with stuff that wouldn’t put a dent in my mom’s bank account.

I never had a Nintendo, and a few years later, when the richies started carrying around the early cell phones, I was contentedly off-line.

But ice? Ice was free.

Mom had gotten me a pair of used skates from a neighbor named Gary McCulloch. He was a kind man who, when I’d thanked him and called him “Mr. Muck-a-luck” because I didn’t know how to say his last name, just laughed and tousled my hair.

I skated on rinks until the big kids kicked me off—peppering the chubby bunny with snowballs as I clomped through the snow in old skates—and then on ponds and lakes until the sun went down. My mother was pleased that I was getting out and that I was making friends. The latter had been a white lie I’d told her so she wouldn’t worry.

In eighth grade, I’d made a fool out of myself when the entire class had to take part in the President’s Awards, where we were judged on basic sporting ability. When it was my turn to throw a baseball, something in my brain said it would go farther if I spun around in a circle really fast and let go.

When I’d finally tossed it, I was so dizzy I fell to the ground. The kids all around me laughed. My gym teacher had needed two stitches and had a knot on his head for weeks, but it was his fault for making me do that damn thing in the first place.

But all that time on the ice had given me a certain grace that I did not possess anywhere else in my life. And out of necessity, my ample girth had given me muscular legs.

The upshot was when I strapped on a pair of skates, the nameless, clumsy chubby could fly.

As I grew older and slimmed—almost imperceptibly, sure—the jocks who had dominated the football fields and baseball diamonds couldn’t catch me.

Sure, I was shaped a bit like a bowling ball. But to a bowling ball on skates, everyone is a pin. And with my stocky legs and heft, my center of gravity was likely six inches below the ice. No one could knock me down. In fact, I’d heard a rumor that a coach on one of the opposing teams had offered a ten-dollar bounty to drop me on the ice.

No one ever collected.

Years later, I drifted away from hockey and came out of my shell. I learned to talk to people, even girls, and discovered I was funny. Or, rather, found that being funny got me out of getting my ass stuffed into a locker.

The funny led me to a job on the radio by the time I was nineteen. When I fell out of love with radio, I found a new one: a perfect woman named Cassie. At least, perfect to me. When she got sick, I’d tried to fix it.

I’d gone down to the crossroads and made a deal with the Devil, as you do when you’re a perfectly rational person out of options.

Ultimately, I’d failed, and it had been Cassie who’d saved me. But before she died, I’d promised to “do good” so that I might see her once again.

Racing through the Australian outback, pulling Julius behind me, on a job I’d taken from the Devil, and trying to stop a dead hangman from raising the ghost of Ned Kelly… man, I wasn’t sure where the “good” bit was in all of that.

Somewhere, but it was certainly muddled amongst a bunch of “not so good.”

“Do you see any of those things?” Julius called out from behind me, his voice higher than normal.

I pumped my ghost legs, and we were moving so fast I really couldn’t see much of anything. “I think we’re fine. Just gotta keep moving.”

He laughed. “Oh, we’re moving all right.”

It had taken him a while, but I think he’d started to get a kick out of the speed. However, we’d had to stop at a visitors’ center, which we’d found on the side of a highway around the halfway mark. Searching the big map display they’d propped up for tourists, we’d found the town of Glenrowan.

It hadn’t taken a lot of searching—the cartoon-style map had local representations on it like a misshapen Opera House near Sydney and a weird smiling squirrel-type thing near the city of Perth. Glenrowan, which Tara had said was near Greta, had a figure with two rifles and a big iron mask, with two slits for eyes.

Ned Kelly made up to look a bit like a Scooby-Doo villain.

From where the map had said we were to Glenrowan, we just had to go directly southeast. By car or caravan, the trip would have taken the average livie a full twenty-four hours of driving. And, the map noted, you’d be crossing time zones.

That’s how far away it was.

We didn’t need to take the roads, of course, and at the speed I could go, it would take maybe ten minutes.

As we had gotten ready to leave, Julius had seen one before I did. He gripped my arm, fingers digging into my ghostly body.

“What the hell is that?”

The beast had spun out of the All Time, twisting and turning. A burst of speed in one direction, then twisted around back the other way, then another turn. It knew something was near but just hadn’t picked up on it yet.

And that something was yours truly.

“Chimera,” I said. “Grab on. We need to get moving.”

When I’d been transformed into Painter Mann, me and a woman named The Professor made sure that I had no memory of who I’d been. We’d had to rush, so the simplest way to do that was to wipe out anything that had come before the InBetween. Change my name, change my appearance.

That had been a necessity, albeit a perilous one.

However, as Julius had surmised, when I’d first appeared in this realm, I was like a lighthouse in the void. I didn’t belong there because I wasn’t exactly dead—the Old Man had promised to keep my body hidden while I searched for Voodoo Cher’s machines.

And like a chubby bunny on a junior high baseball field, I was out of place.

Those first few hours had been a terror because I’d spent a majority of it running away from chimeras. That’s when I’d first learned I could skate, out of sheer necessity and a hell of a lot of fear.

Gary had found me hidden in an alley in uptown Minneapolis.

He’d laughed when he saw me, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Maybe a sort of kinship. He informed me that the worst hiding place for a ghost was in the dark.

“We glow like Casper, man,” he’d said and extended a hand. “I’ll show you the ropes. I got time. All I got is time!”

Eventually, the chimeras had caught up to me again, but Gary had heard about a woman who sat on a mountain down in the Atlanta area.

It had been the three of us, Gary, the Professor, and me, who’d come up with a plan to protect myself from the chimera. The solution was to hide my true identity, even from myself. She’d warned me about trying to rediscover my past because when I did, I would revert back.

And that would bring the chimera once again.

Standing atop Stone Mountain in Georgia, I’d seen one of them materialize by the tree line.

“Where do they come from?”

The Professor frowned. “Hard to answer.”

“You don’t know?” I said.

“It’s complicated, and you really don’t have the—”

“Make the time, lady.”

She’d darkened a little when I’d said that, which, if I’m honest, was what I was going for. Goad this Professor into telling me something, anything, about this weird, weird world.

“A short time from now, they will be created, manifested by a man with a dark heart and darker abilities.”

“A short time from now? But, they’re… there’s one right down there.”

The Professor sighed. “It’s complicated. They’re creatures of the All Time, so—”

“The what?”

When another appeared near the first, she shook her head. “You’ll just have to trust me. Leave, quickly, but as soon as you can, do as I’ve instructed. The only way you’ll not be dragged into their hell is if you become another.”

But now, I was Rasputin once more, and the chimera was on the hunt.

When I’d slowed to get my bearings a little, using the Aussie sun as my guide, it had only taken a few minutes before one of them once again materialized. I wasn’t sure why they didn’t charge right for me. It was like they sensed me there, nearby, but still had to sniff me out.

But I was glad about that. It gave me a few moments to get the hell out before they locked onto me.

Ned Kelly’s burial site was about ten miles south of Glenrowan. I figured we’d stop in that bigger town, and if we found some nice spooks keen to give directions, we could just ask.

Don’t have to do that, just look for the stain.

“What?” I shouted back to Julius, looking under the crook of my arm. He opened his eyes and met mine.

“What, what?”

“What did you say about stain?”

At first, he shrugged, then his eyes lit up. “Ah, we can look for the stain, yeah. Use it to find ol’ Not Ned.”

Elijah Upjohn couldn’t move as fast as I could, but he’d had a head start. We might get there before him, we might not.

* * *

When I was in radio, I used to love strange new towns.

You hit a T in the road, do you go left, do you go right? Roll the dice and one way could take you right into the main square. Little park for little kids and littler dogs. Coffee shops and cafes named after women who’ve long since died: Hattie’s Golden Spoon, Lenora’s Griddle, Alice’s Restaurant.

In those days as an FM deejay I was willing to spin anything from Hot AC (Orlando, FL), Alternative Rock (San Bernardino, CA), CHR pop music (Denton, TX), and even Gospel (El Dorado Springs, MO). The music didn’t matter, because my time as a jock began after one song ended and before the next began. I would have been willing to play Hmong Wedding Favorites just to drop a well-crafted line or joke and get a smile out of some unseen stranger who, at that very moment, could use it.

It was a mutual arrangement between parties that never knew each other. I needed them to listen, so I had a job. They needed a chatty friend who didn’t care they were wearing the same shirt from the day before.

I’d hopped around to towns of every size, wealthy and poor. Despite the shittier pay, I preferred the poor ones. In my experience, people who have next to nothing will share the very little they’ve got. People who have all they want don’t see your needs are any concern of theirs.

Glenrowan reminded me of many small towns I’d seen throughout the US Midwest and Southeast. Compared to the moonscape of the outback, this place bordered on lush—resplendent with big beautiful trees, green hills, and even carpets of green grass.

Sure, there were bare patches here and there where the desert was trying to reclaim its ground, but it seemed the locals were willing to do battle with a garden hose and Weedwhacker when the chips were down.

It reminded me a little of SoCal, except that people drove a little slower.

“I’d kill for a burrito right now,” I said as we walked across the three-track railroad bridge on Beaconsfield Parade, heading into town.

“I’m thinking they don’t eat Mexican fare in this part of the world.” Julius peered over the side of the rail where a couple of kids, squeezing a bit of fun out of the last few minutes of daylight, were kicking a soccer ball against the bridge’s pilings. “Lotta shrimp, which they call prawns. Dingo burgers and koala salads.”

“Ha. No,” I said. “I don’t think these folks eat, you know, salad.”

“Just tryin’ to make it sound unappetizing. No good a couple of spooks thinking about eating because that, to excuse the pun, is no longer on the menu.”

I stopped and looked at him. “I will never excuse a pun.”

Without breaking stride, he shot me a grin. “You’re sillier than Painter, but I can see you still got a lot of him in you.”

At the terminus of the bridge, a large, faded sign told us to head back to find the town’s best blacksmith, which I didn’t even know was a thing anymore. Another suggested our money was best spent at a local “wine tasting” venue, which sounded like one of those places alcoholics in self-denial go under the guise of being cultured.

A crackle of light drew my attention below and down the tracks about a quarter mile away. When I glanced over, I saw the panicked, snarling creature. Sniffing the ground, hunting. “We should keep moving.”

The long-dead Ned Kelly was the unelected mayor of this town.

That is if the metric that qualified you for the office was having the most businesses named after you. Ned Kelly Museum & Homestead and Ned Kelly’s Last Stand. There was even a Ned’s Burger House because all that bank robbing and cop shooting can make a fella peckish.

There was even one pub that featured the man in his armor, brandishing a pistol in one hand and a rifle in the other, promising an “animatronic show.”

Julius blanched every time he saw yet another depiction of the outlaw in his long coat and metal helmet. “You’d think the man was a hero. Guess I heard a different story about it.”

We stood in front of a bakery with the less-Nedish name of Glenrowan Bakehouse. It depicted a cartoon chef holding a cutting board, offering a meat pie with a large dollop of ketchup on top. The charming cook in question, of course, wore a metal helmet beneath his chef’s hat.

He pointed at the sign and shook his head. “Now, that is disturbing.”

“You know what they say about pointing a finger?”

“Sure,” he said in a long drawl, hands on his hips as he searched for any hints of stain. “You gotta wash it real good when you pull it out.”

“What? No, man. What I mean is that everybody’s got a villain they’ve made a hero.”

“Villains is villains, man.”

“Billy the Kid and Jesse James in the US. Cuba’s got Che Guevara. For the Scots, William Wallace,” I said. “Hell, the British celebrate a failed terrorist.”

“Ed Sheeran?”

I smiled. “I said failed. The guy with the mask.”

“Guy Fawkes.” He nodded then met my eyes. “Ol’ boy couldn’t get his lighter to work with all that gunpowder and people celebrate by shooting off fireworks for three days. Like they’re not honoring the dude but rubbing it in instead.”

“Ha!” I put on a terrible British accent and said, “‘Where were you lot when I needed a friggin’ match!’”

We both laughed.

“You’re funnier than Painter is, but you can’t do accents for shit.”

“I’ll chalk that up as a compliment.”

Something caught my friend’s eye, and he stepped forward. His glowing figure extended a hand and, very faintly, I could see it. Stain. It shimmered like a threadbare ribbon trailing from a little girl’s hair in full sprint.

We’d wandered into the heart of Kelly Town hoping that Elijah Upjohn might have swung through to get a look at his hero’s face. Or, at least, the man he believed he’d owed a debt to.

That had paid off, and in a few minutes, we’d cut across some tilled land and were walking down the Glenrowan-Moyhu Road.

“Seems like he came down the road into town,” Julius said, rubbing his chin, searching for the ghostly bread crumb trail. “Sign says Greta’s just a few clicks from here. Wonder why he took the road?”

I pointed upward. “Streetlights to hide his trail. He knows we’re coming.”

Grabbing his arm, I was up and skating, closing the distance in a few seconds. Then, I slowed and hooked left when we saw a sign for the cemetery. Sure, I’m dead, but the places still give me a low-boil case of the willies. “What in God’s pajamas is that?”

Someone was screaming.

It was the most horrifying, pleading sound I’d ever heard. As if someone knowing that they were about to die had lost all hope and wished their throat-shredding yell might echo years after they’d gone.

But it wasn’t someone’s voice making the sound.

It was soul-shaking and filled me with a nauseating fear. And something like, I don’t know, desire? Wanting? It made me want to go to it.

“It’s Elijah. He’s using the Aztec death whistle,” I said, my hands over my ears, which wasn’t helping. “Shit, we’re too late.”

“Maybe not.” Julius pointed at a tombstone and read the inscription. “‘Here within this cemetery in unmarked graves lie Edward Kelly, mother Ellen, sisters and brothers Margaret, Grace, James, Daniel, and Anne buried nearby. Along with their extended family and friends. May they rest in peace.’”

Once again, the call rang out.

“It might take him a while to find where Ned’s buried,” I said, steeling myself. “But, in the process, he’s gonna end up raising the whole goddamn Kelly clan.”

“And their friends. We’re gonna get outnumbered fast.”

As if they’d been standing stage left, waiting for their cue, three ragged, glowing specters came from around a nestle of trees. Their mouths opened wide, and hissing at us through broken and blackened teeth, they raced toward us.

“Hold on,” I shouted, grabbed Julius by the arm, and started skating again. They were hot on our trail, moving quickly but unevenly. When they’d made the turn down the road, one of them tumbled end over end and slid into the adjoining farmland.

Julius had been watching the whole thing. “Damn. Even the dead in this country are drunks.”

I shook my head. “They’re just newbies getting used to running without actually having a body. But it won’t last. They’ll work it out soon enough.”

“Right.” He shouted back, gripping my arm with both hands. “It’ll give us an advantage for a few minutes, but not much more.”

Low belts of fog hung over the burial grounds; dull, white-yellow streetlights flared in the mist. The hot Aussie day’s last gasp before the night chill settled in and put it out of its misery.

Unlike the green grass we’d seen on the way in, the cemetery was dirt and concrete. No grave markers, although there were patches of color, which seemed out of place.

Flowers.

Despite the murderer who lay with them, these people were still loved. Missed and cherished. I hoped those who did answer Elijah’s call would remember who they were and not be driven mad by that unholy siren’s scream.

I hooked around the side of the cemetery where it was much darker, the grounds shaded by trees. We had to find Elijah before he raised a legion of spooks. Ahead of us, a ghostly figure in a bonnet and tattered dress reached over the fence line. Panicked, I struggled to keep my footing.

But she wasn’t charging for us. Then I saw one of her arms extend, and I caught the look on her face. Soft, beautiful features and sad eyes.

Just one word escaped her parted lips, “There.”

I snapped my head in the direction she was pointing and saw a glow sifting through a hedgerow. Banking left, I thanked her, and when I turned my head to see her one last time, she slowly sank back into the earth. There are good people here. Frowning, I nodded my head as a lump grew in my throat. This had to be the end. Ned’s last stand.

I made a beeline, moving faster and faster, right for Elijah.

Julius wasn’t ready for it and let out a “whoa!”

My target had heard it. He held the old, shriveled skull of the Aztec artifact just a few inches from his lips. When he caught sight of us, he snarled.

I lowered my shoulder, trying to anticipate whether he’d dodge left or right.

But he wasn’t moving. And then I saw the grin on his face.

“You bugger!” another voice shouted.

My attacker smashed me from the side, stripping Julius from my grasp. Pinwheeling over the unmarked graves, I could see stars. Not the ones in the dark skies above; they were popping in and out of my vision.

The blow had drained nearly half of my energy, but I had to use a bit of juice in my toes to slow the uncontrolled spin out.

When I finally stopped, I saw three others, hulking men with hate in their dead eyes, running for us. The closest one had an ax blade sticking out of his neck. He called over to Elijah Upjohn, “Find Ned!”

I turned tail, following my friend, who’d slid across the road and looked like he might never stop. When I’d caught up, I only slowed and lifted him to his feet. Still skating faster than the other spooks could catch up to, I turned around and faced Julius.

“This hasn’t gone as planned.”

“There was a plan? I can’t take too many hits like that. I’m feeling swoozey.”

“Julius, make a circuit around here and tell anyone who’ll listen to go back to where they came from.” I released him, and he slid away from me into the darkness. “Then clear out. Fast.”

I could see he wanted to ask me something but bit down on that, his mouth a line, and then just nodded.

“What are you gonna do, Raz?”

I looked back at the half dozen spooks coming at us from all directions. Another two or three stood, watching, by their places of rest.

“I’m going to end this.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

When I was a kid, I used to skate like this.

Despite the fake smiles adults used to wear like masks hoping to conceal their own private shames, I could see right through them. Just from my perspective, but when you grow up as the only child of a single mother, you’re an adult long before the law ticks that box for you.

I’d had to step into roles that my absent father had left vacant.

Yard work, repairs around the house, smashing nosy spiders with slippers. Out of necessity, that quickens those childhood years.

But I remember feeling those pitiful eyes on me. Like somehow, just me and Momma, our little family was broken. The looks on grown-up faces, condescending sing-song questions, “And how is your mother doing?” It was the unspoken, second part of the question that embittered me: you know, by herself, raising a child on her own?

As if I were a child with only half the love I’d deserved.

I’d smile, a real smile, and tell them she was the best mom in the world. Because she was. Even at a young age, I knew many of those who asked that question secretly despised their own spouses. Not all, sure, but a lot. Still, we were the ones to be pitied?

Without some selfish asshole draining her life away, she was full of life and love, and it was all for her little chubby bunny son.

The kids were worse because kids are. The sneering. The jokes. I’d spent half my high school days in a principal’s office after trying to correct their misconceptions about my home life.

By and large, I was happy.

But when the plastic smiles and sideways glances got too much, I had the ice. When you get out on a rink—a frozen lake is better because you can go and go and go—and turn on the speed, the cold air turns your cheeks red and makes your eyes water. No one looks twice at you.

Skating was bliss. And, despite carrying a bit more weight than the other kids, no one could catch me. I was like an eagle! Well, an eagle in a down parka, rusty skates, and a pair of secondhand mittens linked with a long string snaking through my sleeves.

The lights around me turned into long streaks as I skated, picking up speed, rocketing down the Aussie coastline. I smiled at the idea of one day, if there were to be another day for me, maybe even racing Sally’s motorcycle to see who’s faster!

Like I’d learned as a boy, I bent my knees and hooked left, going back the way I’d come. The return trip would be slower because it had to be. I’d gone full tilt for maybe two minutes. Getting back would be twice that.

I’d hoped that Julius had convinced anyone who wasn’t ready to go to war to get the hell out. And that he’d followed them.

At this pace, I got a better look at the country around me. In a few short years, I’d been all over the world with Uncle Jerry, Anza, and the Actor. And, sure, there were differences here and there, but as a brilliant writer once said about foreign countries: they do things exactly the same there.

People in their homes huddling around dinner tables and laughing.

Shop owners working late into the night, trying to make ends meet.

Kids reading under blankets with a flashlight so their parents didn’t see.

A snarling, spinning creature with two heads and gnashing teeth and claws, crossing from its universe to mine. Then another.

“Okay, maybe just slightly faster.”

Two minutes later, I was racing back up the road to the cemetery, going fast, but not too fast. Sodium street lamps, which had up until then survived the technological purge, burst to life above me as I passed.

I’d never seen that before, but it told me I was ready.

Up to my left, I could see Elijah Upjohn standing in the darkened site, his helmet off, holding the ancient Aztec artifact to his lips, and I headed straight for the asshole. It was the first time I got a look at the man.

His wizened face, deep lines cut by time and misery, was probably attractive once. Maybe even kind. Now, it was rageful, menacing. But I saw—just for an instant—the man who he’d been when his eyes widened and he saw us coming.

Bending my knees slightly, I came within a few feet of the man Julius had called Not Ned and juked left, then right, making a tight semi-circle around his frozen figure picking up the same line as I’d been on before the move.

Moving at half-speed across the country, I’d drawn in the chimeras, which had formed a pack behind me. In the moments leading up to seeing Elijah once again, I could hear them closing in. Growling, snarling, gnashing teeth.

I spun around, skating backward now, and saw at least thirty of them leap into the air at their new prey. At that last second, Elijah turned his face in my direction.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said over the fevered howls of the Chimera. “You’ve already lost.”

The last sound I’d heard was his scream, which was snuffed out the same moment the ghost-glow of Elijah Upjohn disappeared from this world and into the All Time.

* * *

I slowed to a normal pace, making an arc around the graveyard and calling out for Julius. When I’d found him, he was walking a half dozen spooks back to their plots. And as per, he was chattering their ears off.

“…everyone’s got one now. It’s like a computer but it can do weather or Twitter and, sometimes, people even use them to call other people.”

The old ghosts, a split of men and women, picked up their pace, casting nervous glances back at my friend.

“You’re not missing much,” Julius said, waving. “Go back and enjoy being dead now.”

When he saw me, he lifted his eyebrows. When I nodded, he tugged at his tux lapels, or tried to, and grinned widely. “Thank goodness. Two down and two to go, man. I’m ready to roll anytime,” he said. “And I’ll be honest. I’m kinda lookin’ forward to seeing those monks in China. They’re pretty cool, man.”

“I don’t think they’ll be happy to see us.”

“No. No, they won’t.”

After a fight, you get a strange buzzy feeling. If you lose, it’s much darker, of course. If you win, you feel invincible, ready for more. I could see that latter in my friend’s eyes. It was time to head to China, the third site of Voodoo Cher’s four machines.

But the big battle would be New Orleans. And we weren’t ready.

“Hey now.” Julius’s voice snapped me out of my reverie.

I looked over to where he was pointing. One spook had not returned to their places of rest. He appeared to be leaning up against a tree, but if he were, he’d fall right through.

When he’d seen that he’d gotten our attention, he ambled toward us.

“Maybe this ain’t over,” Julius muttered, getting into a fighter’s stance. I scanned the dark horizon and let out a breath. The chimeras that had plunged into Elijah had taken the trip with him. For now, we were safe.

Unless this new guy was going to make trouble.

“Impressive show,” he said, in a country-fried Aussie twang. “Seems like whatever you were doing is done. So it’s probably best you went back to where you’re from.”

I stepped in front of Julius, who chuffed at the move and pushed back around me.

“Who the hell…” A light seemed to go off in his head, and he nodded slowly. “You’re the real deal, then. Elijah did it after all with his, whatever it is, death whistle.”

It clicked.

“Ned Kelly,” I said.

He just smiled at me and put his arms behind his back, casually.

“You know, they’ve got a sandwich shop named after you in town. I bet all the salt and pepper shakers look like that.” I pointed to the helmet once worn by Elijah, now lying on its side in the dirt.

Kelly nodded and grinned at us. “I’ve seen it. The big ones they call Kelly’s Heroes, which I don’t really get, but they look tasty.”

It did to me. “It’s a film reference. Movies.”

Ned scratched his scruffy beard. “Mixing up themes. Muddles up the marketing, I reckon.”

He had a point. A weird point, but he was right.

“Hold on, now,” Julius said, stepping closer, ready to go into ass-kicker mode. “What do you mean you’ve seen it? You just now got raised from the dead!”

The old Aussie looked at us, chuckled, and shook his head. “You tweeners think you’re the only ones wandering around, don’t ya?”

He means people in the InBetween. “I know what he means,” I said, only realizing I’d said it out loud when I got queer stares from both of them.

“There are far most ghosts out and about than just you lot,” Kelly said. “All the hangman did was pull me from that realm into this. But this place don’t feel right. Got a stench about it, like rotting animals or something.”

“It’s not right, I’ll give you that,” I said. “But it’ll be gone soon.”

He shot me a smile. “You gonna do that?”

“Yeah.” I nodded at Julius. “With help.”

He shrugged, tipped his hat, and turned to walk away. Of course, my friend wasn’t done yet.

“You know, there are some in this world who think you’re a villain. Others say you’re like some folk hero. Which is it?”

Kelly turned back to us, stared up for a moment, then met our eyes.

“Far as I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot, every villain has a wee bit of hero in ’im and every hero a bit of villain. It’s not black and white. Never is.”

That made sense to me. “So which one are you?”

As he turned, he said. “Jury’s still out.”

Moments later, we were left alone in the dark graveyard, watching the teeming ghosts that Elijah had raised sink slowly back into the earth.

* * *

We watched as Uncle Jerry paced up and down the hangar as a crew was making last checks on our jet. It would be a long flight to China. The thought of sitting on that upturned bench for hours and hours made me weak in the knees.

But no more falling out of planes for me. I would endure.

Plus, we could watch a movie—apparently, the Actor had a third film in his Frank & Earnest series about to be released. Uncle Jerry got an early copy.

“He plays a pirate who’s teamed up with a gritty street cop,” I explained to Julius.

“Sounds awful.”

“Better than staring at you the whole time,” I said. “But, you know, maybe not much.”

“That’s because I am a fine specimen of a man.”

Uncle Jerry pocketed his phone and walked up to us. He stood in front of the worn old sofa-and-chair set which, of course, we weren’t anywhere near. We headed over as he spoke to no one. Then he suddenly turned to us. “Oh, there you are. I thought you were in the sitting area.”

I said, “We can’t sit, Uncle Jerry. Ghosts.”

“Wait a minute.” Julius took a step back and waved his hands. “How the hell’d you see us? Can you see ghosts now?”

“No, but that… thing is floatin’ in the air now.” He pointed at me. “Maybe I should pocket that for now. Somebody sees a tiny floating skull and they’ll turn this hangar into an attraction.”

I looked down at the Aztec death whistle in my hand.

“Why do you still have that?” Julius said. “Gives me the creeps.”

“Can’t leave it behind,” I tossed to our pilot. “We don’t want to have to swing back here in a week’s time to chase down spooks again.”

“Someone oughta bury that thing,” Julius said. “We ready for round three? I’ve never been to China.”

Uncle Jerry shook his head. I didn’t like the look on his face. It was a bad look.

“Just got off the phone with Sal. She’s at the hospital,” Uncle Jerry said.

He had my attention now. I hadn’t spoken to Sally since the madness at the old mine. “How are they?”

“Better, sounds like.” He grinned. “I should clarify, Sal is not in the hospital. She wouldn’t go inside. Told me ‘I’ll step inside a hospital when I’m dead,’ but I let it slide.”

Julius frowned. “Why would you go to the hospital when you’re dead?”

“That’s what I was saying in my head,” Uncle Jerry said, “but I never said it out loud.”

“Morgue, then cemetery.” Julius shrugged. “Unless you’re cremated, then you just go up in the air, and the birds eat ya.”

“The birds eat you when you’re dead?” Uncle Jerry looked horrified.

“Never trusted ’em. Shifty eyes.” Julius was on a roll again. “And you can see them lookin’ at you when you’re walking around. Like they can’t wait—”

“Okay, okay, you two.” I stood between them, but only my ghost friend could see that. “What did Sally say?”

“The cop, Tara, she’s like a bag of marbles down one side after being tossed around, but they’ve gone in and done what they can.” Uncle Jerry shook his head. “Pins through a lot of her. With those and that leg, she ain’t getting into a courthouse anytime soon.”

I held my hand up to Julius and gave him my best “don’t start” look.

“How’s Sally?” I asked.

“Better,” Uncle Jerry said. “Being an agent of the Underworld does come with some benefits, like healing. Taking a while because she really took a blast. Vision’s slowly coming back, but she’ll be wearing shades for a while.”

I laughed. “I would love to see that.”

My friend tapped on his phone and held it out. I looked at it. “She’s taking selfies now?”

“I think she’s got an Instagram account.” He put his phone in a different pocket than the tiny skull. His flight suit had a lot of pockets. “But, more importantly, she was on the horn to the Old Man. Or rather, one of his people. Rude bastard.”

The Advocate. That dude’s a dick. I nodded.

“Seems like we’ve been chasing our tails, fellas,” Uncle Jerry said somberly. “Remember those dishes we got up working again all over the place, Razzie?”

“I do.”

“Their spy network found out that the woman’s got her machine up and running in New Orleans.”

I sighed. “I figured that.”

“Right, but hers is different,” Uncle Jerry said. “Bigger or something. But the troubling part is the machine in Scotland, the one here? That was part of her game—a distraction.”

Julius said, “So she could build her super machine?”

Nodding, Uncle Jerry said, “She don’t need any links. They’re not sure if she’s fully up and running, but if she is, it can blast her army anywhere on the planet. Doesn’t need a machine on the other side.”

Julius shook his head. “She’s like the Kim Jong-un of super ghosts. ‘I can hit anywhere, anytime, bitches!’”

“Okay, weird analogy,” I said. “So what’s the plan?”

Our pilot waved us along, walking back to the jet. “Time to head back to the States. If we can take down her machine in New Orleans, this is all over.”

“If?” I said, a smile in my voice.

“When, Razzie,” Uncle Jerry said. “When we take it down.”

Damn right we’re going to take Voodoo Cher down!

All right. It was time to deal with the voice in my head, so I walked away from my friends so they couldn’t hear. “Great, just great,” I muttered. “What is this now? You’re going to be like my mouthy conscience or something?”

Like an angel on your shoulder, Rasputin.

“Or a Devil, Painter.”

Yeah, but a good-looking devil. Or angel. It’ll depend on my mood.

The crew was done with their checks and pulling the blocks away from the jet’s wheels. We followed our livie friend up the steps, and both me and Julius sighed when we, once again, caught sight of the busted, overturned park bench that would be our seat for the long, long ride back to America.

Uncle Jerry began flipping switches, turning dials, and twisting levers up in the cockpit, and the jet came back to life, whining like it had really been enjoying its nap.

“Man, those monks probably would have looked really cool in their flashy robes,” Julius said, leaning back on his half of the concrete bench, closing his eyes. “They’re big-time baddies, but I wish I coulda seen them.”

I looked out the tiny window, watching the interior of the hangar slide by. A moment later, we taxied into the bright, cancer-inducing Aussie sunshine.

I didn’t know it then, but Julius would soon see his wish come true.

THE END

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Table of Contents

- CHAPTER ONE
- CHAPTER TWO
- CHAPTER THREE
- CHAPTER FOUR
- CHAPTER FIVE
- CHAPTER SIX
- CHAPTER SEVEN
- CHAPTER EIGHT
- CHAPTER NINE
- CHAPTER TEN
- CHAPTER ELEVEN
- CHAPTER TWELVE
- CHAPTER THIRTEEN
- CHAPTER FOURTEEN
- CHAPTER FIFTEEN
- CHAPTER SIXTEEN
- CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
- CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
- CHAPTER NINETEEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY
- CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
- CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
- CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
- CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE