Part 29 (1/2)

”This is stupid,” Big Tim Hawkins's widow said. ”What is this supposed to-”

The swinging door at the back of the dining room squeaked open, and Martha Vickers walked in from the kitchen, wearing the same dress she'd been buried in.

The bullet hole in her right bicep was still open, a dark, winking wound. Above her left eye, the missing part of her skull-the part blown out by the cartel gunman's kill shot-had been covered by a thin membrane of skin like a birth caul. Even from across the room, Zeke could see the pulsing beneath it.

Screams filled the Magic Wagon.

Alan Vickers kept playing the flute, tears streaming down his face. He would not look at his wife. His dead wife, now up and walking, pale and sickly and shuffling but alive, a slow, uncertain smile making her lips tremble.

Zeke felt sick.

”Stop!” Lester shouted, storming across the room to knock the flute from Vickers's hands. ”Stop it!”

The bone pipe-for it was bone, Zeke could see that clearly now-skittered across the floor. Vickers shoved Lester away and lumbered after it, s.h.i.+fting a table out of the way to retrieve it while his dead wife swayed in place, waiting for another note.

”What the h.e.l.l is this?!” Lester demanded, rounding on Enoch.

The little man had still not risen from the stool.

”It's exactly what it looks like,” Enoch said, not smiling, his lip curling with hate. ”Resurrection. Mrs. Vickers has been up and around for three days.Another week or so and she'll be good as new, if I let her stay aboveground that long.”

”What the h.e.l.l do you mean if you let her?” Zeke snarled, feeling his own hate-and his own hope-rising like a cobra.

”It's all or none,” Enoch said. ”I can give this gift to all of you, bring back all of the folks the Matamoros cartel murdered back on October twelfth. If you want it. If you all agree. In exchange, you-and the dead ones, the ones you lost-will help me get my revenge. We will all have our revenge, as long as you all are in agreement.”

Enoch rose and glanced around.

”I'll expect your answer by noon tomorrow.”

”But what do we have to do for you?” Linda Trevino asked. ”What do they-”

Enoch had started to move toward the door, but he paused and turned toward her. Zeke thought he caught a glimpse of the real pain inside the man, the loss and ruin.

”Does it matter?” Enoch asked.

When no one seemed to have an answer, he continued to the exit, people moving aside to let him out.

In his absence, the mourners could only stare at the resurrected Martha Vickers and her strange, lost smile, until her husband collected her and led her back out through the diner's kitchen.

3 Lester drove Zeke home in stony silence. The radio whispered, volume turned down so far that the music was barely audible. The sun had moved almost directly overhead and it felt too warm for February, even in South Texas. Zeke sat in the pa.s.senger seat and watched the fields rolling by, his heart numb and growing more so by the moment. He felt sick and hollow at the same time. Empty, as if he were the one who had died-and wasn't that the truth, in a way? Savannah had died just once, and he had spent the past four months doing the same, a little bit every day.