Soul Patrol: Badge of the Forgotten

Wednesday

Elias Thorne died on a Tuesday.

He woke up on a Wednesday, on a steel table, naked under a thin sheet, with a tag tied to his big toe that had his own name on it.

That was the first thing that pissed him off.

The second thing was the cold. It went through the sheet and into his ribs like it had somewhere to be. He sat up too fast, coughed hard enough to see stars, and tasted copper.

Something warm ran down his chin. He wiped it with the back of his hand.

Blood. His blood. Red and wet and very, very alive.

"Okay," he croaked. "That's not right."

The room answered with the hum of a refrigeration unit and buzzing lights. Steel drawers lined one wall.

He turned the tag over with two shaking fingers.

THORNE, ELIAS. Time of death: 11:42 p.m. Tuesday.

Last night.

He remembered rain. He remembered headlights swinging across his windshield on the Corliss Street bridge, too bright and too fast. He remembered a sound that wasn't really a sound, more like the whole world folding in half.

After that, nothing.

He looked down. A long, neat line of stitches ran from his collarbone to his belly button, like somebody had already started the autopsy and then gone on break.

"Oh, come the fuck on," Elias whispered.

He tore off the tag, snatched a lab coat from a hook by the door, and yanked it on. Then he grabbed the door handle and pulled.

Locked.

He slammed his shoulder into it. Pain lit up his whole left side.

"Hey!" he shouted. "I'm not dead! Somebody made a real fucking mistake down here!"

Nobody came.

Then the lights flickered.

One bulb, then the next, then the whole row, as if something were walking down the hallway and eating the light on its way. The hum of the refrigeration units dropped low and turned into a different sound. A slow, wet drag, like a sack of sand being pulled across concrete.

Elias turned around.

Something was in the corner of the room.

It had the shape of a person, sort of. Tall and gray and stretched wrong, with arms that hung past its knees. It had no face. Not a mask, not a hood. The front of its head was just smooth, like skin had healed over the eyes and the mouth and everything else that used to be there.

It was crouched on the ceiling.

And it was pointing that blank head straight at him.

"Nope," Elias said. "Absolutely fucking not."

The thing dropped.

It hit the steel table he'd just left, and the metal screamed and buckled. It moved in jerks, like a film with missing frames. One second it was on the table. The next it was a foot from his face, and the cold coming off it was so deep his teeth ached.

It reached for his throat with long gray fingers.

Elias did the bravest thing he'd ever done in his life. He screamed like a little bitch and threw himself sideways.

The fingers closed on empty air where his neck had been. He hit the tile hard, rolled, and scrambled toward the door on his hands and knees. Behind him, the thing made a sound with no mouth. It came from everywhere at once, a long, dry rasp that crawled up his spine.

Something grabbed his ankle.

Cold. So cold it burned. He kicked, but the grip didn't loosen. It started dragging him backward, his fingernails scraping tile.

"Somebody help me!" he yelled. "Anybody! Please!"

"Well, quit squirmin', you dumb son of a bitch, and I will!"

The voice came from the wall.

Actually, from inside the wall. A man stepped out of the plaster like it was a curtain, one boot after the other. He wore a battered brown duster, a hat, and a gun belt slung low on his hips. His mustache looked like a dead animal had crawled onto his lip and decided to stay. The edges of him flickered, faintly see-through, like a picture printed on smoke.

He had a revolver in his hand, and it was glowing.

"Down, boy," the man said calmly.

Elias ducked.

The revolver cracked, and a bullet of pure white light punched into the gray thing's shoulder. It shrieked, that silent, awful shriek, and let go of his ankle. The man fired twice more, thumbing the hammer, and each shot drove the creature further back until it slammed against the drawers and left a dent shaped like a body.

The man holstered his gun, unhooked something from his belt, and clamped it around the creature's wrists. Iron cuffs, glowing orange like fresh coals.

"Hold still, you ugly bastard."

The thing went limp. The glow crawled up its arms, and the gray began to peel off in long strands, winding into the cuffs like thread onto a spool. Under the gray there was almost nothing. Just a shimmer of someone who used to be a person.

Elias stared. He was pretty sure he'd stopped breathing.

"What," he managed, "the fuck was that?"

"Forgotten," the man said. He tipped his hat back and finally looked at Elias properly. Then he stopped. His whole face changed. "Well, shit."

"What?"

"You can see me."

"Yes! Obviously I can see you! You just shot a thing off my leg!"

"No, son, you ain't hearing me." The man took a slow step closer, eyes narrowed. "Nobody living can see me. Nobody living can see that." He jerked his chin at the shimmering thing in the cuffs. "And you got a pulse. I can hear it from here. It's real loud."

Elias touched his own neck. The pulse thudded under his fingers like a fist on a door.

"I was dead," he said. It sounded stupid out loud. "The tag says I was dead."

"Tag's right. You died last night. Eleven forty-two. Bridge on Corliss. Everything about you is written down, kid, and it says you're done."

"Then why am I standing here bleeding on the floor?"

"That," the man said, "is the best damn question I've heard all year."

He stuck out a gloved hand. It was solid enough to shake. Elias took it, mostly because his brain had run out of better ideas.

"Cyrus Boone. Deputy Marshal, Soul Patrol. Died August of 1887, out in the Arizona Territory, over a game of cards I was winning, thank you very much."

"Soul Patrol," Elias repeated.

"Cops for the dead. Ain't the fancy word for it, but it does the job."

"That's not a real thing."

"You're standing on a morgue floor at three in the morning talking to a man who died before electricity, son. Pick a different argument."

Boone pulled a thick leather book from his duster and flipped through it, muttering, until he stopped on a column of tiny handwriting.

"Thorne, Elias. Twenty-nine. Cause of death, blunt trauma. Processed. Judged. Filed." He tapped the page. "Should be closed."

"But?"

"But look at it."

Elias leaned in. The ink at the bottom of the entry was moving. Slowly, like it was bleeding into the paper, the letters of his name were going pale.

"That's your soul's record," Boone said quietly. "It's supposed to be permanent. Somebody in the Bureau filed you and never finished the paperwork. That's the only reason you're breathing, boy. You slipped through a crack in the whole damn universe."

"Is that good?"

"Depends on who finds out."

Behind them, the cuffs on the Forgotten clicked.

Boone's head snapped around. Elias followed his stare.

The creature had lifted its blank, smooth face. The gray was almost gone now, drained down to a flickering outline of a man, but its head was turned right at Elias. And the smooth skin where a mouth should have been was rippling.

"Impossible," Boone breathed. His hand dropped to his gun. "They don't talk. They ain't got nothing left to talk with."

The ripple grew. Split. A crack opened in the smoothness, thin as a paper cut, and out of it came a voice like nails on a chalkboard, scraped together from a thousand broken pieces.

"Eli... as."

The temperature in the room fell off a cliff.

"Elias... Thorne."

Boone didn't move. Elias couldn't. His name hung in the air between them, and it sounded wrong coming from that thing, like hearing a stranger say your mother's name.

Then the crack closed, and the last of the gray dissolved into the cuffs, and the room went silent again.

Boone slowly turned to face him. All the humor had drained out of his face, and what was left looked a lot like fear.

"Kid," he said, "a Forgotten don't have a name. They don't have a past. They don't have a goddamn thing."

He swallowed.

"So how the fuck does that one know yours?"