No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,14

bleak gaze, and said something in Korean.

“I don’t speak—dammit! Danny! What’s—” I replicated the sounds it had made best I could, feelin’ like a fool. “What’s that mean?”

He hesitated. “Are you sure you got that right?”

“No!”

“Because if you did, it’s asking for fish soup.”

I stared at him. “I don’t think life-suckin’ ghosts ask for fish soup, Dan. Wait a second. Can you see it?”

“Revenge.” The ghost spoke English that time, and its bleak haggard face started changin’, becomin’ more like a girl than a ghoul. I pinched my fingers against the sidewalk, gettin’ ready to run or tackle or whatever I had to, but she said “Vengeance,” again, and I figured that was communication, not a threat. “So long,” it whispered. The thing’s accent was pure Korean, like it’d learned English as an adult. As an adult ghost. Joanne was just gonna love this one. “My family…dead. For them…I slay.” She gestured to all of us, and I closed my eyes.

“Somethin’ happened in Korea. We, our unit, we killed her family, maybe. Killed her, dammit. I’m sorry, doll. I’m so damned sorry.” That was all explanation to my buddies and half a question to the ghost, but I hardly needed to see her nod to know I was right. “You been with us since then? Comin’ after us since then? Danny?”

“It came back with us,” Dan said miserably. “Fifty years ago, it came back with us. I can’t see it. Why can you?”

“’cause I’m drunk off my ass, an’ I been magicked up a lot lately. You gotta be in an altered mental state ta see this shit. Now stop avoidin’ the topic an’ tell me what you knew.”

“Nothing! I just knew something was there, and I never did know how to stop them. Then it disappeared and I thought…I don’t know what I thought. I never imagined it was coming after us, Muldoon. I had no idea. Heart attacks. Everybody dies of heart failure in the end. And besides, we were spread all over the place.”

The ghost peeled her lips back from black rotting teeth, an’ I was glad as hell she didn’t have enough breath to stink. “Long hunt.” Her ruined face crumpled and she reached out, not to any of us, but toward the sea.

Not the sea. Any idiot coulda seen that, and I wasn’t that much of a fool. Toward Korea. Toward her home. “Last blood.” She came alive all of a sudden, throwin’ off the smoky air an’ insubstantiality to look like a real girl. Just a kid with eyes haunted by death, same way as we’d all been back then. She wasn’t anybody, not a face burned inta my memory, not one of the regular nightmares that came through the long years to remind us what we’d done. She was just a girl, and we’d prob’ly dropped a bomb or fired a bullet and earned ourselves some’a what the brass called collateral damage.

She hadn’t been one of ‘em, though. I could see it now, the bloody hole in her chest an’ the shadow of the knife that had put it there. She’d killed herself to haunt us, an’ there was a kinda horrible sick honor in that. “I am so sorry, darlin’. But you been pickin’ us off slow, when you coulda taken us all at once at one of these get-togethers. Why’s that?”

“Pain.”

A laugh that wasn’t funny came right from my gut. Pain, for alla us who knew each other and had to watch each other die slow over the years. Thank God the ghost was a kid, ‘cause real pain woulda been takin’ us all out at once and leavin’ our families to cope with the shattered remains of their lives. Still, I said, “Guess we got what we deserved,” and a big part of me meant it. “You’re hurryin’ it up now, though, sweetheart. Why’s that?”

Her face collapsed, no more girl, just ravaged wretched spirit. She reached toward home again, speaking in Korean. I ground my teeth an’ did my best to make the same sounds. I’d never managed ta learn Spanish, nevermind a tonal language. But I guessed I got it right that time, ‘cause Danny started translatin’ and what he said made sense: “I need strength to cross the water. I thought I was the last of my family, that all the others had been lost in the war. But I feel it now, even from so far away. My daughter, the baby, she lived, and now she dies.