All my devotion,
Rosamund
I drop the letter and pick it up. I read it and read it again until I have to force myself to put the letter aside.
A baby? Jackson’s wife was expecting a child. One that most likely has either been born or devoured by the dead.
My heart pounds, and I reread it again and again. That was why Jackson was so hot to find his sister, beyond the obvious reasons. He really was starting a whole new life, a life he used me to rebuild. I want to be angry at him, want to scream out my frustration, but instead I’m just heartbroken all over again.
Jackson had a chance at a real future, one full of love and family, and all he got was dead.
“Now you’re reading my personal correspondence. That’s a new low, Janey-Jane.”
I nearly fall off the bunk at the voice, and my heart thunders in my chest. Under my shirt my lucky penny has gone to ice, and when I stand and move toward the bars my eyes refuse to believe what they see.
There, with his arms crossed and a hip propped up on the sheriff’s desk, is Jackson, smiling his smile, looking no worse for wear.
I rub my eyes, and a terrible gladness comes over me. “Jackson?”
He laughs, a sound I would recognize anywhere. “None other.”
I grip the bars so hard that my hands ache. “But you’re dead.”
“So I am, thanks to you.”
The simple sentence wounds me to the quick, and I take a stumbling step back. “You here for revenge?” I ask.
Jackson shakes his head. “I need a favor.”
“You always did,” I snort.
Jackson laughs again, and I cross my arms. I have read many a weekly serial featuring ghosts, and the one thing I know about them is that they’re supposed to visit the living in the dead of night. Leave it to Jackson to be contrary even in death, showing up with sunlight streaming in the windows. “You for real?”
“You tell me, Janey-Jane. Am I here? Or am I just the manifestation of your guilty conscience? I would urge you not to dwell on it. Would it change anything that’s about to happen, either way?”
I shake my head. “I suppose not.”
He grins again. “Questioning the truth of things doesn’t change them. Whether I’m a true haint or just your addled brain trying to make sense of your grief and remorse, that doesn’t alter the fact that you’ve got unfinished business to attend to. Mine, specifically.”
“So what’s the favor?”
“You have to get Lily out of this rotten town. You know as well as I do that guns and walls ain’t never saved nobody. At least, not forever.”
“There is a way past every wall, and all guns eventually run out of ammunition,” I say. It was a common argument between Jackson and me. He’d never much trusted walls, and he didn’t much care for guns. I thought the right kind of walls could keep a body safe, and I feel no shame in saying I quite enjoy firing a weapon, even though I am nowhere near as deadly accurate as Katherine. But now, I have to agree with Jackson, haint or no. There is no way the walls of Nicodemus can keep that horde out forever. Eventually it will grow large enough to push the walls down, and when that happens there won’t be enough bullets in all of Kansas to save our necks.
Jackson laughs. “Funny I have to die to get you to see things my way. In either case, promise you’ll keep Lily-bird safe.”
I sigh. “You see that I’m trapped in here, right? Not a lot I can do behind bars.”
Jackson purses his lips and then sucks his teeth like he always used to do when he was annoyed. It cuts right through me, the heartache as fresh and sharp as the moment I lost him. “You’ll get out of there, no worries about that. I need you to promise me you’ll keep the vow that I can’t.”
I take a deep breath, wipe away the tears that just keep coming despite my best efforts, and sigh. The stink of the dead filters in the window, carried on the hot breeze, heavy and redolent. Whether it’s from the pile of dead that the rail gun is leaving outside the walls or the undead hordes continuing to assault us, I cannot know—but either way, we don’t have much time. Maybe that’s why I’m getting visitors from beyond the grave. Perhaps the situation is desperate enough that Jackson gave up his eternal rest to ensure that I was vigilant.
And maybe Jackson is just as much of a pain dead as he was alive, bossy and obstinate.
“I already told you I’d take care of Lily,” I say. “But if you need to hear it again, I swear, I’ll keep her safe.”
Shouting comes from outside my tiny window, along with the commotion of running feet. I turn to spy folks hurrying this way and that, panic writ large across their movements.
It’s just a heartbeat’s distraction, but when I turn back to the desk, Jackson is gone.
I take a deep breath and collapse onto the bunk. My penny slowly warms, and my heart pounds from both fear and excitement. Was that truly Jackson I just saw?
Back at Rose Hill, one of the other aunties, Auntie Eve, used to talk about how a haint led her to freedom in the early days of the dead rising. “He was a fine-looking man, tall, with pale skin and long blond hair. He appeared at the foot of my bed one night, just standing there. Now, mind you, this was when I was just coming into bloom, and my first thought was that the master must’ve been having guests over, and I’d unfortunately caught one’s eye. So when he gestured for me to follow him, I went because I figured it couldn’t be as bad as the whip. He led me clear through the woods and across the river, walking until the sun came up.”
The story from there would change depending on the mood Eve was in. Sometimes that white man’s ghost looked into her eyes and tried to speak but couldn’t because his voice didn’t work. Other times Eve gave up and sat down, too scared to continue running and even more scared of going back. In those times the man’s ghostly touch gave her the strength to keep moving.
Either way, the ending of the story was always the same: Eve’s haint had saved her life, since the undead swept through the plantation that same night. Only a handful of souls were spared.
Aunt Aggie, however, had a different theory about Eve and her ghost.
“She didn’t see no ghost. The girl’s got guilt weighing her down. That’s what happens when you go on living while so many folks you knew died.” Aunt Aggie said this to another one of the aunties while shelling peas. A little ways off, Eve was telling her ghost story yet again. As Eve got to the part where the ghost led her through the dark woods and west to something like freedom, Aunt Aggie shook her head. “Sometimes, when the world doesn’t make sense, it’s easier to pretend like there are other forces at work. But there ain’t. That’s just life.”
Now, I’m sitting in my jail cell, wondering if my guilt—over killing Jackson, over the pain I caused Lily, and over the future I stole from Rosamund—is provoking me to visions, or if it was something like what Auntie Eve said she saw. I can’t help but think about my penny, warning me whenever danger is near. That’s pretty darn unexplainable. I suppose I ain’t as skeptical as Aunt Aggie would be.
The door to the sheriff’s office opens, letting in light and heat and a large colored man with a full beard fashioned into mutton chops. I scrub my face as the man saunters in with a politician’s smile.