Vial Things (Resurrectionist #1) - Leah Clifford Page 0,13

or out of place they look, gauge whether their I survived the Fissure’s Whipp Ghost Tour t-shirt is over the top acting or if they’re actually pathetic enough to wear it. Sweat runs from the bottom of my hairline, down my neck, slowly slides between my shoulder blades. I’m being paranoid, I know that, but I don’t care.

Twenty minutes later, I climb the steps to the library. Details like missing organs don’t go unreported. Brandon might not be the only dead resurrectionist and the deaths will have made the papers. I can’t do much, but I can research.

A blast of air-conditioning hits me in the face, chills my sweat-dampened skin. The librarian glances up from her desk and smiles. I return it as the wooden door thumps quietly shut behind me.

The place is mostly empty. A row of computers sits unoccupied, but I go first for a newspaper abandoned on a table, the sports section scattered across the chair beside it. I check the date to be sure it’s today’s paper and start scanning the headlines. The front page is world drama: an oil spill, a war raging between two far off countries. I read on, looking for deaths, murders, eviscerated bodies. One would think these sorts of things would claim a prominent spot. Instead, all I find about Ploy’s friend is a vague reference to a body found in an abandoned boxcar. There’s no mention his guts went AWOL.

This is going to be harder than I thought.

I start over, scouring until I hit the last page. Not even the obituaries hint at any strange deaths. In lieu of flowers, send information, I think bitterly. It’s time to widen my scope.

I saddle up to a computer carousel and sit. When I open my email, there’s a new one from Talia. It’s been a month since I’ve heard from her, and even then, only to congratulate me on the new apartment and promise we’d hang out. I’d wanted her to be my roommate. I hadn’t been prepared for her to say no and things had been weird ever since. My finger hovers over the mouse. I click the email.

My shoulders slump. It’s two paragraphs long, mundane catch up and a vague invite for coffee ‘sometime soon.’ I don’t know why it makes me sad. Still, she’s the closest thing to a best friend I have, so I tell her about the weird job last night and my aunt’s concerns. I leave out everything about Ploy. I end the email with ‘call me when you can’. Part of me half hopes my phone will ring, but after a few minutes, I go back to work.

Opening the search page, I realize I have no idea where to start. I figure it’s best to cover my bases. Fissure’s Whipp deaths, I type first. The results are a jumble of useless information, everything from old ghost stories to domestic violence. I clear the search bar and try again. Fissure’s Whipp body missing organs leads to urban legends about kidney thieves and then an article I almost think might be promising until I realize it’s some sort of conspiracy board. The article is hours old. Are the dead walking among us? the headline proclaims in bold letters.

I start reading, expecting some sort of zombie tie-in. Instead, it’s an interview with a woman who saw her grandson killed in an ATV accident. She describes seeing him impaled by a tree branch through the chest. I perk up, leaning closer to the screen. She claims the next day her son, the boy’s father, acted as if nothing more than a small collision had occurred. There’s no way he could have lived through what she saw, she’s quoted as saying. I scan the rest of the article, already knowing the boy was saved by a resurrectionist. There’s no other explanation, unless the woman’s insane, which, according to her family, she is. She says she won’t speak to them. That they’re harboring a demon.

“Idiot,” I murmur. As a whole, we try not to bring religion into what we can do. It’s genetics, not a gift from some benevolent god.

Oddly, the most accurate information consistently comes from the conspiracy blogs. Once or twice, they pop up featuring towns I’ve heard of in passing, where families with the blood have lived for decades and formed whispered reputations.

At some point, I wander over to a snack machine and shovel in the change I’d gotten from the librarian for my twenty dollars. A bag