“Are you packing?”
“Always.”
“Can I see?”
I take out the Smith & Wesson and hand it to her butt end first. She weighs the .460 in her hand.
“What are you planning on shooting with this?”
“You never know when Hannibal is going to come back with his elephants.”
She hands me back the pistol.
“Years ago I was a cop. I’m glad I don’t have to carry anymore.”
“With Drifters loose, you might want to reconsider that. At least for the next few days.”
She shrugs.
“I’ll think about it.”
Fiona comes back with a plastic trash bag filled with something wet.
“Johnny is finished and cleaned up. You can talk to him for a few more minutes, but then I think that’s enough for today.”
She means she wants us out of here, but she’s too polite to say it.
We go back to Johnny’s room and sit down. He looks a lot better than when we first came in. Alert and awake.
“I just want to ask you a couple more things and then we’ll leave you alone.”
“That’s okay. I like talking to you.”
“Tracy tells me that you used to live at the Springheels’ house. I’ve been there, too. Did you ever go into the basement behind the wall?”
“All the time. Enoch liked us to play down there.”
I seriously don’t want to know anything about the games an autophagia freak would play with a zombie.
“Last night a group of Drifters came out of the basement. There was a big hole in one wall. It looked new and like it might have led to a tunnel. Do you know where it goes?”
“A lot of the old family houses were built over the caves in case they needed to run away. Of course, they don’t use them anymore. Enoch didn’t have much common sense, but even he wouldn’t go down there. Live people never go into the Jackal’s Backbone.”
“Tell me about the Jackal’s Backbone, Johnny.”
“It’s where the dead people live. It’s where everybody lives.”
“What do you mean ‘everybody’?”
“Everybody who dies in Los Angeles goes into the Jackal’s Backbone and stays there. Unless they find one of the tunnels that leads out or unless someone comes and gets them, like me. I guess it’s pretty crowded down there these days.”
A sick, cold feeling rises from my stomach.
“When you say ‘everybody’ do you mean all the people in the cemeteries? What about the people before that? Before the city was here. Are they there, too?”
“Everybody. The Jackal’s Backbone has been around for a long time.”
“What if someone wasn’t buried? What if they were cremated and their ashes scattered in the ocean?”