Waking Lazarus by T. L. Hines

paranoia bubbling to the surface. It looked like a dream, with the odd negative colors and burnt tints painting the faces and photos of people he didn’t know ( but did know ) sliding past him. It felt like a dream.
    But it wasn’t a dream. He knew it.
    And, it had been accompanied by that wretched taste of copper. A shiver raced through him as he thought about it. It was, after all, the taste of death—the taste on his lips each time he’d died and returned from the Other Side, a sickening reminder of things he’d tried so desperately to forget.
    He turned down Broadway and drove slowly, taking a small detour on his way home. He wanted to drive by the accident site, to see if he could find . . . something. A connection he’d missed, a key part of the picture he hadn’t seen the previous night.
    Jude pulled over and parallel parked, then opened his door to get out. He walked the whole block, watching, waiting. Nothing happened. No copper in the mouth, no Kodachrome visions. He stopped, looked at the street where the truck had plowed into the hapless pedestrian. The vision played in his mind again: a dark figure, rimmed in light, taking flight and spinning, then landing with a wet thud.
    Jude realized now he didn’t know the man’s name. He had been told, if that was the right word, the names of the wife and daughter— and even the granddaughter—but not the man’s. All those thoughts in his mind weren’t his thoughts, and that disturbed him. Made him think of something deeper than paranoia. But no, told wasn’t the right word. He hadn’t heard any voices, outside or inside of his head. He just knew all those things, as if they were past facts already stored in his memory. Even though all of it, especially that blather about being forgiven, had come from somewhere else.
    He looked up the street to the next block. Rachel’s jewelry store was there, just a few doors from the Red Lodge Cafe. Maybe he could just . . .
    The Red Lodge Cafe. Jude looked up at the neon tipi sign, flickering orange and blue, as a circuit connected inside his mind. A sign. Kristina had told him to look for a sign. Last night, before the accident, the taste of copper had filled his mouth. Yes, it was the taste of death. But maybe it wasn’t just the taste of death for him.
    Maybe he was tasting the deaths of others.
    That would explain, in an odd way, why he’d tasted copper before seeing the accident. But now, as he stared at the bright neon colors of the Red Lodge Cafe, his mind told him what he’d been missing before: He had tasted copper more than once the previous night .
    Jude walked up the street toward the cafe, knowing he needed to talk to a waitress.

13
    LEAKING
    He was leaking. That was the only word he could think of to describe the sensation. Leaking. He had always been so careful to separate the work of the Normal from the work of the Hunter, but now a small fissure had opened between the two, and the only place he felt safe was in his basement root cellar, surrounded by earth and burlap.
    Maybe something organic. A brain tumor, perhaps, eating away at his medulla oblongata and clouding his judgment, blurring the line between the two. It had always been so easy to turn on one side and turn off the other, keeping each side an impenetrable dike to the outside world.
    But not now.
    Earlier that day, for the first time, the Normal had followed a possible Quarry. Hadn’t trapped and taken the Quarry; things had stopped long before that. But the Normal had actually tracked a Quarry inside the grocery store, considering what hunting might be like. That easily, the Normal slipped. That easily, the levee was breached.
    And if you didn’t stop a leak right away, you were just setting yourself up to drown.
    He sat down and hooked the electrodes to his temple. He would need a more powerful shock this time, something more sustained to keep him immune from human emotions and depravations. Something to keep the Normal from becoming