Soul Patrol: Badge of the Forgotten

The Auditor

"Four minutes," Boone said. "Maybe three."

"Until what?"

"Until the Bureau's clerks get here. Somebody upstairs flagged that ledger the second your name started fading. They always do."

He unhooked the cuffs from the Forgotten's wrists. What was left of the creature had shrunk to a smear of gray light the size of a marble, slow and cloudy, like a thought about to slip away. Boone dropped it into a little glass vial and corked it.

"What are you gonna do with that?"

"Try to put a name back on it. Sometimes it works." His jaw tightened. "Mostly it don't."

Elias had about a hundred questions. His mouth picked the dumbest one.

"Where are my pants?"

Boone pointed at a clear plastic bag on a shelf by the door, labeled ELIAS THORNE in black marker.

Elias tore it open. Jeans. Gray hoodie. One sneaker. A wallet and a phone with a cracked screen.

"Where's my other shoe?"

"Probably still on the bridge."

"Fucking great. Love that."

Boone eyed the stitches showing under the open lab coat. "Somebody cut you open and quit halfway. Lazy work."

"Or they got interrupted."

"Or that." Boone did not sound comforted by it.

Elias hopped into the jeans under the lab coat, then thumbed the phone. Six percent battery. The screen lit up, and his stomach dropped.

Eleven missed calls. All from Mara.

The last text came in at 2:51 a.m. "Elias where are you. Call me. I'm serious." Then, a minute later: "Please."

His throat closed. Mara was his little sister. Twenty-four, loud, and a pain in his ass in the best way. Once she had driven six hours just to yell at him for not calling, then stayed the whole weekend and eaten all his pancakes. She was probably sitting in her apartment right now with her phone in both hands, refusing to believe the worst.

"She doesn't know," he said.

"And she can't," Boone said.

"The hell do you mean, she can't? She's freaking out!"

"Listen to me." Boone stepped close, and for once his voice wasn't a joke. "Every living soul who knows you're breathing is a rope the Bureau can pull to find you. Or to shut you up. You call her now, you're painting a target on her back."

"So I just let her think I'm dead."

"You are dead, according to every book that matters." A pause. Softer. "I know, son. I know."

Elias stared at the call button. His thumb hovered. Something in his chest cracked right down the middle.

He locked the screen and shoved the phone in his pocket.

"This is bullshit," he said.

"Yep," said Boone. "Welcome to the afterlife."

"You keep saying the Bureau. Who the hell is the Bureau?"

"Bureau of Final Records. Every soul that ever died gets a file, and they're the folks who keep 'em. Judge you, sort you, send you on your way." Boone kept his eyes on the door. "Patrol is the badge side. We chase whatever slips loose."

"And the clerks?"

"Clerks don't kill folks, kid. They file you. Once your record goes blank, you ain't a person no more. You're one of those." He nodded at the vial. "Gray husks, wandering around, hungry for anything that still has a name."

"That is the most horrifying thing I've ever heard."

"Wait till you meet management."

"Am I a ghost?"

"Nope. You're a glitch." Boone glanced back. "Ghosts don't bleed."

"Comforting."

"Wasn't trying to be."

Ding.

Down the hall, an elevator opened.

Both of them turned toward the door. Footsteps came, too even, too perfect, like a marching band made of one guy. The morgue's lock clicked open all by itself.

Boone's revolver appeared in his hand. "Clerks."

The door swung wide.

Three figures in gray suits stood in a neat triangle. Their faces were smudged, like photographs someone had wiped with a thumb. None of them blinked.

Then the triangle split, and a fourth man walked through.

He was tall and thin and tidy as a paper clip. White gloves. Round glasses. A smile stretched exactly one inch too wide. In one hand he carried a rubber stamp the size of a hockey puck, and the ink on its pad pulsed the color of a fresh bruise.

"Deputy Boone," he said. His voice sounded like a stapler. "Auditor Pell, Bureau of Final Records. How lovely to see you. You are holding an unauthorized item."

"Only thing I'm holding is my patience, Pell. It's about run out."

The Auditor's gaze slid past Boone and landed on Elias. The smile grew.

"Mr. Thorne. There you are. You are a discrepancy, and the Bureau does not tolerate discrepancies. We tidy them. You've caused a tremendous amount of clerical inconvenience."

"Uh," Elias said, because apparently his brain was a coward. "Sorry?"

"Please don't be. The fix is simple. One stamp. Painless, mostly." Pell lifted the tool, and the pad throbbed. "Then you will finally be where you were always meant to be. Which is nowhere."

"Elias," Boone said, not turning his head. "See that drawer over there? Number nine?"

Elias glanced at the wall of steel. "Yeah?"

"Get in it."

"Fuck no."

"Then get erased. Your pick."

"That's not a pick, that's a hostage situation!"

"Move!"

Boone fired.

The white bullet took the nearest clerk in the chest, and the man folded up like a sheet of paper and dropped flat to the tile. The other two lunged. Boone fired again, and again, spinning, and the whole room turned into light and shouting.

Elias grabbed the nearest thing, a steel instrument tray, and swung it like a tennis racket. It rang off a clerk's smudged face with a sound like a gong, and the clerk staggered.

"Nice!" Boone shouted, ducking a swipe. "You got a future in this!"

"I got a future in therapy!"

Elias ran.

He hit the wall of drawers and grabbed handle number nine. It came open with a screech. Inside there was no body bag and no cold steel. Just black. A deep, empty dark, and a wind that smelled like rain and old dust. The drawer itself seemed to breathe.

"You have got to be shitting me," Elias whispered.

"Stamp him," said a calm voice right behind his ear.

He spun.

Pell was there. Not across the room. Right there, close enough that Elias could see his own reflection, tiny and terrified, in the round lenses. The Auditor moved faster than anything that neat had a right to move. The stamp swung up toward Elias's face.

Elias threw up his hand.

The rubber slapped into his palm.

It was cold, colder than the Forgotten, colder than anything. Ink flashed. Something inside him tore, quick and clean, like a page ripped from a book.

He screamed and fell backward, straight into drawer number nine.

Boone dove in after him, boots first, and the drawer slammed shut on Pell's furious face.

Then there was only the fall.

Wind roared. The dark had no bottom, no walls, no up. Far below, a faint gold light was growing, like a city seen from a plane. Elias tumbled toward it with his arms flailing and his heart going a hundred miles an hour.

Somewhere in the black, Boone was laughing. "Hell of a first day! Quit flailing, kid, you'll pull something!"

Elias held up his palm. Cold black letters glowed on his skin, VOID, and as he watched, they sank into his hand and disappeared.

"Boone!" he yelled. "Boone, what did he do to me?"

A hand caught his collar, steady in the dark. The old cowboy's voice came from right beside him, low and rough.

"Stamp takes a piece of you, kid. Always does. Tell me, quick. Your sister. What's she look like?"

"What kind of question is that? She's, she's..."

Elias grabbed at everything else first, fast, like counting cash after a mugging. His address. His birthday. The name of his first dog. All of it came back clean.

Then he reached for her face.

Her laugh was there. Her name was there. The stupid way she snorted when she was trying not to crack up, all of it right where it should be.

But her face was gone.

Not blurred. Not fading. Gone, like it had never been there at all, and where it used to be there was only a smooth, blank nothing.

Elias opened his mouth, and for the first time in his life, no sound came out.