So Brooke’s job was to comb through Nobody’s memory for every scrap of Withered-related information she could find, and once we put together enough of the pieces we’d move to their city, trying to be as quiet and unobtrusive as we could, and set up a temporary office. We interfaced with the police, using Kelly as a liaison, but mostly we kept to ourselves—the mind-wrecking secret that the world was infested with supernatural monsters was not the kind of thing people took to easily, and we’d found it was simpler to work in the shadows than to try to train a different police force in Withered-hunting tactics every few months. We’d settle in, start our surveillance, and then it was my turn: Brooke found the Withered, but I was the one who figured out how to kill them. Albert Potash did most of the actual killing, with Diana as backup, and Kelly, Nathan, and Dr. Trujillo helped out with whatever else we needed.
I probably need to explain how the Withered work. We still didn’t know exactly where they came from—Brooke’s memory was selective, to say the least—but somehow each of them gave something up in return for greater power. The first one I’d ever met, my neighbor Bill Crowley, had no identity of his own—no face, no body—but he could steal the bodies of others. He’d lived for centuries, for millennia really, hopping from body to body, sometimes as a king, sometimes worshipped as a god, but eventually just hanging out in Clayton, trying to get by. I think they got tired after so long, after seeing so much and being so constantly on the fringes of the world. They never really belonged anywhere, and I can tell you that gets old fast, and I’m only seventeen. To spend thousands of years not belonging … it’s no wonder Cody French ended up in a one-bedroom hole with a ragged old dog and a dead-end job. Whatever zeal he’d once had, whatever ambition, had run out ages ago.
Cody couldn’t sleep. It’s not that he didn’t need to, he literally couldn’t do it, not with sleeping pills or even pummeling himself unconscious, and I was fairly certain he’d taken both to a dangerous extreme at various points in his life. Think about that for a minute: all the other Withered were falling apart at the mental seams after so much relentless existence, but they’d only been awake for, on an average human sleep schedule, two thirds of it. Cody had experienced every minute of every hour of every day, day after day after year after century. What do you do with all that time? How do you not go insane? Cody had chosen books, and he was one of the most well-read people I’d ever known, but that can get you only so far. He’d filled the rest of his time with drinking, using alcohol to create a mindless stupor that wasn’t exactly sleep, but filled a similar role. It helped him to forget, to relax, to turn off his brain for just a few precious minutes here and there.
And sometimes he took it a little farther.
“He’s knocking on your door, Cleaver,” said a voice on the radio. Albert Potash—I’d guess you’d call him our team’s muscle—was not a patient man. I enjoyed pushing Nathan’s buttons, but Potash I just tried to avoid altogether. I had no idea how to kill him.
“We’re coming as fast as we can,” said Kelly, keeping her hands firmly on the wheel. “The roads are icy. Keep your shirt on.”