PROTECTED. Marcus Calvert

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СКАЧАТЬ as she angrily wiped tears from her brown eyes. “Show me everything.”

      DEATH FACTOR

      Sheriff Dale Reubens knelt by the gaping hole at the center of Catherine Intle’s grave.

      The tall West Virginian was thirty-six with a troubled demeanor on his weathered face. His uniformed, 5’8” frame was a seventy/thirty mix of muscle versus fat. A beige, wide-brimmed hat protected his brown eyes from the sun. Cassie Bueller stood behind him, a librarianesque coroner wearing dirty blue jeans and a red blouse. Her ID badge dangled from a blue lanyard around her thin neck.

      They stared down at a freshly-made hole, which went down into Catherine Intle’s caramel-colored coffin: and through it. There was enough sunlight for the sheriff to see that the coffin was empty. Barely large enough for a person to crawl out of, the hole was too narrow to have been dug up from the outside. The grass around the grave was relatively undisturbed. Still, he didn’t want to believe the obvious conclusion.

      “Are you absolutely sure?” Reubens asked.

      “Yep,” Bueller nodded. “The breach was from the inside. No signs of any tunnels or unusual digging. She fits the DF profile the feds sent.”

      Reubens winced as he rose to his feet. He used to date Catherine in high school. While they were serious, he didn’t make the cut. She eventually married Darren Intle and had four little girls. Then she had a fatal aneurysm just after her thirty-first birthday. Reubens went to her funeral and even let a tear fall. To him, Catherine was the one who got away: that dream girl every man came across at least once in his life.

      But whatever busted out of her locket casket, clawed through six feet of dirt, and walked away wasn’t Catherine. She’ll be the first reported case of a Death Factor (DF) in the entire state. The first recorded DF cases were reported within a few hours of the new millennium. Those strange days were casually touted as the beginning of the Apocalypse. Reubens disagreed with the notion, seeing as it was now July of 2009. “If this is the Apocalypse,” he’d usually scoff, “it’s taking its sweet damned time.”

      Most DFs tended to pop up near densely-populated areas. New York and L.A. had the highest numbers in the U.S. The FBI managed to capture some “live” DFs and interview them. Based on the information gathered, they figured out what it took for a DF to rise.

      According to their profile, there had to be a place with a lot of deceased (a disaster area, cemetery, war zone, etc.). There also had to be at least one fresh corpse - in decent condition - within a five-mile radius. Most importantly, there had to be some restless spirits with unfinished business lurking about with enough ethereal angst to take root within that corpse. If these conditions were met, the spirits could lie dormant within a body for days, months, or even years. They would fuse into one spiritual entity, reanimate the body, and then break loose to resolve that unfinished business.

      The problem with DFs was two-fold.

      One, some of these spirits were downright evil and/or had a grudge to settle against the living. Reubens remembered hearing about a prison in Michigan where an inmate’s body broke out of a fresh grave and slaughtered twenty guards before they could put it down again. DFs were always inhumanly strong. They didn’t breathe, eat, drink, sleep, or even bleed. Unlike the zombie movies, a bullet to the head wouldn’t put one down. Destroying the body was the most common way to deal with a DF.

      The second problem with DFs was a matter of mental stability. In time, even those few DFs with good intentions became violently unstable. Last year, a female DF rose out of a mudslide somewhere in Venezuela, amongst the corpses of a few hundred people killed during a tropical storm. The spirits in her body wanted to see if their living relatives were still alive and say some good-byes. They even helped out with the rescue efforts and initial reconstruction.

      But the effort of keeping the body up and running was too much for the spirits inside of it. Rather than cross over, they poured everything into their host body – even their sanity. Eventually, the DF lost it and killed sixteen people before it was put down. Some of the victims were even close friends, relatives, and lovers. To date, there had never been a case of a DF staying benign for more than thirty-one days.

      Most governments believed that DFs were a threat and hunted them down whenever one was reported. Some countries destroyed the bodies and cremated the remains. Others locked them away until they eventually ran out of spiritual energy. Depending on the number of spirits within a body, DFs could take months to –

      “Earth to Reubens,” Bueller called out. “What’s the game plan?”

      Reubens looked over at her apologetically.

      “Call the FBI. I need a chopper and three SWAT teams with heavy ordinance. Have Dispatch send four cars to her house and evacuate her family. I’ll meet them there after I set up the search parties.”

      “You think she went home?”

      “Maybe,” he shrugged. “It all depends on whether or not Catherine’s spirit is even in there.”

      Reubens started to leave.

      “Anything else?”

      “Run the names of everyone in this cemetery, especially murder victims. Look for any situations where someone would have an axe to grind.”

      “You think they’re evil?” Bueller frowned.

      “I don’t know,” Reubens sighed. “I just know that a man’ll go further to return an injury than he would a favor.”

      “I’ll get it to you ASAP.”

      Reubens gave her a slight nod as he got into his white police cruiser and started the engine. He turned on the siren, floored it, and raced onward deep in thought. He hoped some ambitious Fed would take over this mess and he wouldn’t have to put Catherine down like a rabid dog. Losing her once was bad enough.

      The sheriff was so distracted that he almost drove right past the reanimated corpse of Catherine Intle.

      Three miles from her grave, she stood on the interstate in her black funeral dress with her thumb out, trying to hitch a ride. Her curly red hair ran halfway down her shapely back. Her skin was just as flawless as the night they first –

      Reubens stomped on the brakes and stopped thirty feet away. While he knew that he should call it in, he just couldn’t do it … not yet. He had to know if any trace of his one true love was still inside of this “shell.” Rubens unclasped the gun holster on his right hip. Then he opened the door with a fear-laced sigh. As he stepped out of the car, the DF approached with Catherine’s beautiful one-dimpled smile: the smile that won his heart so long ago.

      Sensing his discomfort, she stopped a good eight feet away.

      “You’re looking good, Dale,” the DF said with her melodic voice. “How’ve you been?”

      “Much better, since I quit smoking. Thanks for asking.”

      “How long have I been gone?”

      “Four years and two-odd months or so,” he replied. “How many of you are in there?”

      “Forty-eight,” Catherine’s shell replied.

      “Wow,” Reubens winced, remembering that the more spirits that СКАЧАТЬ