James Axler – Starfall

Finding a machinist’s shop, though, was going to be a problem.

And ammo. The footlocker was curiously bare of am­munition. J.B. guessed that Morse had cadged the ammu­nition and sold it, or stored it. Neither he nor Ryan believed that the boat was as defenseless as her captain would have them believe.

He looked up, pieces of the blasters strung across his knees and the surrounding floor. Mildred still sat there. He knew long minutes had passed as he disassembled the weapons, and though he didn’t feel guilty about not talking to her, he knew she needed to talk.

“Krysty?” he prompted.

“Yeah.” Mildred sat across from him, pulling her knees in close and wrapping her arms around her legs. “I’m wor­ried about her, John. What we’re talking about here with this dead woman in her mind is like possession.”

J.B. took off his glasses and cleaned them on the tail of his shirt. He had to work at it because they were still caked with feces. Mostly he kept his mind off of it because he’d been working on the blasters. He nodded.

“Possession,” Mildred went on, “like with a ghost or something.”

J.B. shook his head.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You haven’t ever seen a ghost. And mebbe I haven’t, either, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Shit, nobody back in the 1990s would have figured I could have been stuck in a cryogenic tank for a hundred years and woke up to find the whole world blown to hell. Of course, it’s probably hard for you to imagine the world before nukecaust.”

J.B. went back to working on the blasters. What was hardest to imagine, what he sometimes still dreamed about, was walking into a sporting-goods store. He’d seen pictures in some old vids. Schwarzenegger stories, where the actor had just walked into a store and bought nearly any damn thing he wanted. He saw part of a vid where the man had walked into a military surplus store and picked up enough handheld weps to take out most armored wags.

That had been impressive.

And it was the stuff of fairy tales. Not ghosts.

“Used to be afraid of ghosts when I was a kid,” Mildred admitted. “I went to movies just to be scared. Jason. Freddie. Michael Myers. Hell, we all went to those just to be scared. Poltergeists, they weren’t that big a deal. Invisible for the most part. Just destructive. Rearranged furniture in houses, made shit fly through the air, sucked kids into tele­visions. But some of those movies about ghosts, they had them taking over people. Forcing them to do things they would never have done before. Never really thought about it before, about how bad it would be to be took over like that.”

“And now Krysty,” J.B. said.

“I’m worried about her, and that’s no lie. I guess I told you my daddy was a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher in his day.”

J.B. remembered as he scraped rust free of a .45’s slide with a bit of steel wool he kept in his kit. Mildred’s father had also been the victim of a firebombing, race-inspired violence that had been prevalent at the time, when she’d still just been a baby. She hadn’t known him at all except through pictures and stories her family had told her.

“They said he did exorcisms in his church,” Mildred went on. “Casting out demons and working against Satan himself.”

“Didn’t know he was Catholic.”

Mildred laughed. “Oh hell, no. He’d have probably been pissed if anybody had suggested that to him. But in the South back then, John, they still believed in demons and Satan working through people. Had to be cast out through prayer and fasting.”

“Mebbe that’d work for Krysty.”

Mildred was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know, John. But I do know what she’s going through isn’t easy. I’m going to pray for her and hope my daddy’s looking out for me and my friends just a little these days. Sometimes a little faith is all you need.”

“Ryan isn’t going to let anything happen to her.”

“I know. But until he gets this thing figured out, I’d just like to know everything’s going to be okay.”