The twins exchanged knowing glances. “Here they come,” Tian said.

“I don’t believe it,” their female companion said.  Her words came in clouds in the doorslam cold of a midwinter Albuquerque right-around-midnight.

“This isn’t as weird as it gets, Missa,” said her boyfriend Trey, with a glance at their host and hostess. “But it sure is adequately weird.”

It probably was.  There were no cars on the street but there was traffic.  A dozen men and women in traditional Chinese garb, the men – one enormously tall – wearing little square hats with tassels, walking north on Broadway in a line.  Or not walking:  hopping. With their arms out stiffly in front of them.  Even at this distance the onlookers could see the hat-tassels flapping in time to their hops.  Their hands and faces were blue.  Maybe it was a trick of the streetlights.

An elderly Chinese man with a short staff tucked under one arm and bundled in a thick coat trotted up and down the file like an Australian sheepdog.  He wasn’t blue.

Maybe it wasn’t a trick of the streetlights.

Missa cocked an eye at the twins, Wan and Tian Wu.  They were a year or so older than she and her boyfriend, who were just nineteen.  The four were on the roof of the two-story Broadway Metal Recyclers, in the light-industrial zone a few blocks north of downtown, with a couple bottles of wine and some reefer.

“And they are – ?” she asked.

“Dead,” said Tian.  She sat on the housing of an evaporative cooler shrouded in blue plastic against the winter, gently drumming the heels of her Nikes on its sides.  She was compact, with a young-looking, almost insipidly pretty face:  an easy sort of person to dismiss.  She liked it that way.  She had on one of those currently-fashionable poofy sectioned anoraks, which made you look as if you had the Michelin Tire Man perched not too many branches above you in your family tree.  Her name meant Day in Cantonese.

“The corpses of traditionally-minded Chinese,” Wan said.  Wan was short for Wanshang, meaning Night, although he was nowhere averse to having it spelled as the locally appropriate Juan, as in Don.  He had extremely long black hair drawn into a topknot that hung down past the shoulder-yoke of his black leather greatcoat like a horse’s tail.  He was tall for an Asian kid, maybe five ten, an inch or two shorter than Trey.  The somewhat sinuous length of him was stretched out on a folding lawn chaise; he had Mad Dog shades ostentatiously on and heavy black boots crossed before him.  Beside him on the flat graveled roof lay a Chinese straight-sword in an ancient leather scabbard, with an old copy of the weekly local throwaway Alibi, open to Devin O’Leary’s movie reviews, spread beneath it to keep off the tar.  He sipped at a wine cooler in a plastic cup from Whataburger with a lemon wheel impaled on the rim.

“Every year the Necromancer Ling rounds up as many of them as he can find and hauls them back to China so they don’t become hungry ghosts and wander around causing trouble.”

Tian took a long swig from a bottle.  She wore an Orioles cap backwards on her head. “Couple of them look pretty rough,” she said. “Maybe Originals.”

“Originals?” Trey asked.  He was a good-looking kid whose skin was the color of cream with a little coffee in it.  He had a wisp of goatee and a furze of coarse and curly black hair that in better light showed auburn undertones.  A long thin queue hung down the back of his black London Fog trenchcoat.

“Chinese who came over to build the railways in the 1870s or ’80s,” Wan said. “That’s how our mom’s family got here.”

“They’re ghosts?” Missa asked.  She was actually named Michelle, but insisted everyone call her by her childhood nickname, for obscure reasons.  A computer hardware wizard, she currently worked onsite PC repair for a local firm.  She was a very thin woman, with striking narrow features, a broken nose, and the kinky cloud of honey-colored hair of a pre-Raphaelite maid.  Except she had none of the wispy wimpy quality of your true pre-Raphaelite, despite her skinniness; her eyes were dark and intense as a kestrel’s.  She wore a black leather jacket, jeans, and biker boots.

“Uh-huh,” Tian said.

“They hop.”

Wan smiled. “That’s why they call them ‘hopping ghosts.’ Gyonsi or jiangshi.”

Missa looked from Wan to Tian and back again, suspicion in her eyes.  Until very recently she had known the twins only as a couple of reasonably cool kids who taught gongfu and taijiquan at the Red Dragon Institute of Chinese Martial Arts (a storefront) to the likes of her and her boyfriend, and whose Dad, a retired Los Alamos scientist, had just hired Trey to build the family business a network and do sysadmin stuff.  Now it was turning out they either led a very peculiar life Missa knew flat nothing about or were full-on crazy. Unless she were full-on crazy.

“I thought you said they were corpses.  They look pretty substantial to me.”

“Whole concept’s a little slippery,” Wan admitted.

“Basically the ghosts of the departed have been called back temporarily to re-animate their bodies,” Tian said.

“Doesn’t that piss them off?”

Wan shrugged. “Well, that would be a major reason there aren’t a lot of practicing necromancers in the world today.”

“Steep learning curve,” Tian added.

“So what’s with the little pieces of yellow paper stuck to their foreheads?”

“Those are sutras,” said Trey.  He did not usually suffer from know-it-all-itis, but he was a bit out of depth here, even though he had a better idea of what it was the twins did than his girlfriend.  He was just trying to claim a patch of relatively firm footing. “Sayings of the Buddha.  Also Taoist charms.”

“Which aren’t technically sutras, but that’s what we call ’em,” Tian said. “They keep the corpses under control.  If they fall off, the stiffs might get cranky and start biting people’s throats.  This would be bad for Necromancer Ling’s business.”

“What does he do with them?” Missa asked.  Her tone suggested she had not yet made up her mind which would bother her more, not knowing or hanging out with the sort of people who would know what an aging Chinese gentleman might find to do with twelve hopping corpses.

“About this time each year he makes a pass through the Southwest, um, resurrecting them,” Wan said, digging a plastic Wal-Mart jug of pre-mixed wine cooler out of the green and white plastic chest they’d lugged along. “Then he herds them up this way.  He’ll stash ’em in a warehouse just south of I-40, packing them in ice to keep them from getting too ripe and with sutras all around to make them stay put.  Then he’ll go off and spend the rest of the evening at one of those trailer massage parlors up the street north of Candelaria.  In the morning he’ll meet our father for menudo and coffee at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory downtown.  Then he’ll pack his charges aboard a freight car and ship them off to California, where they’ll be put into a refrigerated-cargo container, again well stocked with sutras written in red ink.”

“On yellow paper,” Tian added with cartoon gravity.

“They’ll then be put on board a freighter owned by the People’s Liberation Army that probably just offloaded a hullfull of illicit Type 56 rifles – that’s Chinese AK-47s, full auto – so they make it back to the old country in time for Chinese New Year.”

“Which is coming up February the 5^th,” Tian said, “so Ling better make it snappy.”  It was early January, 2000, just a few days after the celebrated Y2K nonevent..

“You have got to be shitting me,” Missa said at length.

“Not a word of it,” Wan said.

“Menudo,” Trey said. “Gack.”

“They eat worse back in China,” Tian said. “Trust me.”

“A Chinese necromancer has a taste for Mexican food?” Missa asked.

Tian pondered.  She was unsure yet how much she liked Missa.  Tian had more than a little bit of an eye for Trey, who was very pretty.  Missa was not the sort inclined to share.

 “New Mexican,” Tian corrected. The twins were native born to the state, still a minority. 

 “Some of the finest New Mexican cooks in the Southwest are relatives of ours,” put in Wan, who was something of the diplomat.  Also he visibly did not deplore the sight of Missa. “Necromancer Ling’s, too, for that matter.”

“How long has this been going on?” Trey asked.  Being a guy, albeit a very good guy, he would have been fine if both twins got their way with him and Missa, respectively.  But Missa was the exclusive type, and he was the loyal type, so there it was. “The, ah, the corpse drives, I mean.  Not Chinese Mexican restaurants of the Southwest.”

“Decades,” Tian said.  She took off her cap and shook her pinned-up hair as if to rearrange it and just accidentally shifted a little on the air-conditioner housing so her blue-jean-encased haunch pressed against Trey’s arm where he stood leaning next to her.

“Maybe longer,” Wan said. “Nobody’s too sure how old Ling is.  I always wondered if he might know a few life-extension kind of tricks, being a necromancer and all.”

“I remember when we were kids,” Tian said. “Every year we’d come out to watch the corpse drive.  Used to love it almost as much as Halloween or Christmas.  OK, not Christmas.” Tian was a noted Christmas fan.  Especially the lights.  And the presents.

“This was a big childhood occasion,” Missa asked deliberately, “coming out in the cold to watch the blue dead people hop by?”

Down on Broadway the blue dead people were doing just that.  Wan laughed quietly. “What you have to keep in mind is, we were raised to this from the time we were born.”

“If not before,” Tian said. “I wouldn’t put it past Dad to have irradiated us in the womb in hopes we’d turn out to be some kind of super-mutants.”

Wan frowned.  That was tender territory.  Their father had been a famous physicist, famous among other physicists anyway, an authority on quantum mechanics who worked on top-secret projects at Los Alamos and Albuquerque’s Sandia Lab.  Their mother, also an LANL physicist, had died of uterine cancer when they were three.  Tian’s little joke was in hideous taste.  If it was a joke.

“Wait one,” Missa said, scowling. “Corpses a hundred and twenty years old would be just bones, wouldn’t they?  Gnarly mummies at best.  These look, well. . . .”

“Well fleshed-out,” Wan supplied.

“I asked Necromancer Ling about that when we were kids,” Tian said. “My brother wanted to know too, but he was too big a chicken to ask.”

“I was respectful of my elders,” Wan said.  His dignity was sadly impaired by the fact he’d just taken a protracted toke, and squeaked and fumed when he spoke.

“That’s what I said.  So I asked, and old Master Ling told me he had some means of partially reconstituting them.”

“ – just add water – ” Wan said.

“When I bugged him about how, he said a necromancer had to keep some secrets.  He threatened to switch my backside.  Crusty old bastard.  Although these days, if he weren’t so old, I must just consider – ”

“Anyway,” Wan said, “there does seem to be only so far he can bring them back.  And he can only do it the once.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Trey, sipping from a plastic cup, “is how come nobody freaks out, or even reports this to the cops.”

“And says what?” Tian asked brightly.

Wan shrugged. “People see what they expect to see.  They are not prepared to see a dozen deceased Chinese being herded down the street like something from a zombi Rawhide.”

He and his sister broke suddenly into singing a few bars of the Rawhide theme song, he in a startling deep bass, she in a clear alto.  Neither of them had seen an episode of the television show before their teens.  They had picked up the song from the movie The Blues Brothers.  They were of a generation raised not by wolves but by VCRs.

“So their minds can’t really assimilate what they’re seeing, and convince them they’ve seen something else,” Wan continued, as if nothing had happened. “The wonder isn’t that people report seeing so many strange and inexplicable things, but that they see so little of what really goes on.”

“And what would people see a zombi drive as, exactly?” Trey asked.

“Oh, bums on their way to the midnight mission over on Second,” Tian said.

“Tian, that’s not nice,” her brother remonstrated.

“Screw that.” She took a defiant jolt of wine. “Screw political correctness in general.  Being Chinese is politically incorrect, unless you’re a failure.”

“Well . . . it’s still not very tactful.”

“Wan, we’re professional ghost hunters.  What’s the point of speaking in lame-ass trendy euphemisms?”

He gave her a look.  The point (he didn’t say, or have to) was that it probably wasn’t a good plan to risk flipping out the friendly outsiders so they ran screaming to the cops.  Thus far the success of the family enterprise had depended heavily on staying invisible to the minions of the law.

There was also, of course, the issue that if the friendly outsiders decided you were too scaly, they wouldn’t go to bed with you. 

“That’s really what you do?” asked Missa with new narrow-eyed interest. “I know you let Trey in on some of the joke.  He’s been about to bust for weeks, knowing stuff he can’t tell me.”

“Our business cards would read, ‘destructive hauntings dispelled,’ ” Wan said.

“If we had business cards,” added Tian.

“There’s money in that?” Missa asked.

“Oh, very much yes,” said Wan. “For one thing, a lot more destructive haunting goes on than generally gets reported.  It’s the sort of thing people usually aren’t too keen to make public.”

“We’re very discreet professionally,” Tian said.  She showed Trey a big wide smile. “If not always in other areas of our lives.”

Missa cocked her head, which made her look more falcon-like than ever. “All right.  But what does this – ” She waved a blue-mittened hand at the blue-faced corpses now hop-hop-hopping away down the asphalt bunny trail, “ – have to do with your family enterprise?”

“Nothing directly,” Wan said. “We think Dad met Ling in the course of researching ghosts and traditional Chinese approaches thereto, back in the late Seventies when he was getting ready to go into the business.  They got to be pals.”

“Plus Ling does some of our sutras and assorted charms for us,” Tian added. “Your traditional Taoist necromancer knows a lot of useful things.”

Missa held up both hands as if to catch a basketball aimed at her face. “All right.  I am now at the point where smoke is about to come out of my head.  If I ask anything else, just kill me, OK?”

“Speaking of cops,” said Trey, still mulling over what the citizens might make of the corpse drive going right up the street in broad moon, not to mention street, light, “shouldn’t we be getting down from here?  Or at least keep it down a little?”

“No worries,” Wan told him. “The owners know us.  We de-gaussed the shop for them a couple of years ago.”

“ ‘De-gaussed’?”

“Toasted ghosts,” Tian said. “Ghost-chaser jargon.  One way of looking at spirit manifestations is as self-sustaining electromagnetic phenomena.  Which they are.”

“You can even construct a model in which that’s all they are,” said Wan. “Just sort of will-o’-the-wisps or ball lightning.  Nothing paranormal involved at all, at all.”

“Is that how you think of them?” Missa asked.

 “Not on your life,” said Tian.

#

But in the morning Ling the Necromancer did not join their father, Dr. Frank Wu, for the customary cup o’ steaming Joe and bowl of chile-marinated cattle guts.  Instead Dr. Wu, seated in his powered wheelchair sipping his first cup of the day, looked up and out the Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s tall steamed-up windows to see his countryman gesticulating wildly at him from the sidewalk.

Wu drove the chair to the front door, which a trim-bearded elderly white man coming in with a copy of the Albuquerque Journal folded under his arm obligingly held open for him.

“My corpses!” the necromancer exclaimed, unmindful of how heads turned in the restaurant (and how heads did.) “Somebody’s stolen them!”

#

Wu and Tian surveyed the interior of the derelict storefront.   They had erred slightly telling Missa and Trey that Ling cached his corpses in a warehouse.  It was the south-end unit of a miniature strip mall in fading, flaking fake adobe, east across the street from all the actual warehouses.

“It’s certainly empty,” Tian said.

It wasn’t exactly.  The twelve plastic containers Ling had used in lieu of coffins lay strewn about, the dry ice intended to keep the bodies cool long returned to air.  Necromancer Ling had dropped by to look in on them on his way to meet Dr. Wu from the massage parlor where he had passed a putatively diverting night.  It was purely prudent reflex, since it wasn’t as if his charges were going anywhere.

Except they had.

“I’m not sure I want to know what these crates were really intended for,” Tian said.  Her nose kept twitching.  This stretch of Broadway was still light-industrial, and there was a peculiar sweet smell to the air, like bubble-gum with an unidentifiable chemical taint. “Tupperware coffins?”

“Stock tanks, of all things,” said Wan, studying the label stuck to the bottom of an overturned tub. “From Costco.  Looks as if he duct-taped garbage bags over them to seal them.”

“Frugal, is our Necromancer Ling,” said Tian.

Her brother turned to the Doctor, whose chair sat in the open door, melodramatically silhouetted against the bright if not particularly effectual January sunlight. “This isn’t really our line of work, Dad.  We’re not detectives.”

“Has Necromancer Ling thought about calling Missing Persons?” Tian asked.

“I suppose it is too late to begin instilling proper respect for your elders in you,” their father said crisply.  Though he had been born in the People’s Republic his English was immaculate, almost without accent.  Dr. Wu was nothing if not anal. “So I must appeal to whatever compassion your generation of spoiled American youth might be able to muster.  If Master Ling fails to recover his clients, he will at the very least suffer disgrace.  Also, he has agreed to pay.”

Wan looked at his sister and sighed pale mist. “Where do you suggest we start?”

“By using your brains,” their father said waspishly. “For instance:  how do you think the corpses got out of the store?” Other than out the back door, which they had already discovered the intruder or intruders had popped with a wrecking bar, the real-world lockpick of choice.

“Well, it isn’t easy to envision somebody tossing them over their shoulder and schlepping them out to a truck in the alley one stiff at a time,” Wan said.

“No blood stains or spare body parts,” Tian said, “so they weren’t snagged by standard numbnuts vandals or burglars, who wouldn’t know not to screw with the sutras.”

“The obvious inference being they got up and left under their own power.”

“Which means another necromancer rustled them.”

Wan hoisted an eyebrow at his sister. “ ‘Rustled’ them?”

“What other word would you use?  Ling’s a corpse wrangler.  He got ripped off by a corpse rustler.  It’s the Wild West.  Yippee-ki-yay.”

“So now you engage in at least in a semblance of thought,” their father said.

“Great,” Tian said. “All we have to do now is trot back to the van, grab the Yellow Pages and look under Necromancers.  Then we’ll have our list of suspects.”

#

The back alley, as was usual in this part of town, wasn’t even nominally paved:  just graded dirt which, as was also usual in this part of town, was a nasty refractory hardpan called caliche.  While about as easy to dig as Portland cement it did tend to weather into dust.  There were plenty of prints indicating that a number of people had moved the short distance south to the crossing side-street on foot.  Whether walking or hopping the twins couldn’t tell.  Observant they were.  Trackers they weren’t.

At the alley mouth, beneath a greyish swatch on a brown adobe wall where graffiti had recently been painted out, the tracks tracked left.  The twins straightened and turned as one to peer the way they pointed.

“Toward the mountains?” Wan said. The cliffs of the Sandias loomed like a blue-grey wall above the city scattered so carelessly along the Río Grande valley.

“Freeway’s in the way,” pointed out his twin.  The hiss of traffic running north and south along I-25 a quarter mile distant was clearly audible. “Only so many places to cross.”

Wan’s cell phone rang.  He answered it, spoke briefly, tucked it back in its holster on his belt.

“Who was that?” Tian asked.  She was staring glumly down the block.  The Broadway industrial park was mere veneer, a strip running between the alley and the railroad tracks a couple hundred yards to the west.  Eastward lay established neighborhoods, green and well-shaded by local standards, when the trees had leaves, anyway.

“Trey.  He wondered how things turned out with the corpse drive.”

“What did you tell him?”

Wan shrugged. “The truth.”

Tian frowned. “You sure that was wise?”

“No.  But we’re bringing them both in on our operation anyway.  What can it hurt?  It might even be of some use – he said Missa knows some people who live in the area.”

“Great,” Tian said without conviction.

The phone rang again.  Wan spoke even more curtly and snapped the instrument pointedly shut.

“Dad, huh.”

He nodded.

“Complaining about having to wait in the van, huh.”

Wan nodded again.

So they returned to the van.  Wan drove up way north on Fourth Street to Garduño’s New Mexican restaurant, whose Margaritas the Necromancer Ling savored almost as much as he did the attentions of the pale compliant ladies in their trailers on Edith.  Dropping off their elders, brother and sister set forth on their Great Hopping Ghost Hunt.

#

“We found your stiffs,” Tian said.  She had her forearm on the checkered tablecloth, her chin down on it, and was pitchforking up salsa from a dark brown crockery bowl with tostadas and shoving it in her mouth in a languid fashion.

Their father frowned at them.  His birth name was Wu Yun-biao.  Upon coming to America, after escaping the Cultural Revolution – and the Red Guard mob that lynched his college-professor parents before his eyes, and beat him with sufficient brutality to induce the degenerative spinal-cord injuries which bound him to his powered chair today – he had taken the name Francis.

Now-Dr. Frank Wu’s eyes swam a little woozily behind his thick heavy-framed glasses.  There were four dead Margarita soldiers on the table plus two walking wounded.  The twins didn’t care to guess how many casualties had already been removed from the battlefield.

“You are disrespectful of your elders, young lady,” the scientist said sternly.

Tian traced the ideogram for Red Dragon on the tablecloth in water condensed from her glass. “Yep.  Don’t you want to know where?”

“Of course, of course,” Necromancer Ling said hastily.  Proper comportment was essential, but finding his wayward corpses was paramount.

“The cemetery,” said Wan.  He had his sturdy wood chair turned sideways so he could rest his left elbow on the back.  His knees were crossed.  In his black jeans and black jacket over black shirt, Western style but not far from traditional Chinese dress, he looked like Hollywood’s conception of a rising young Sino-American drug lord.  The resemblance wasn’t vitiated by his black pointy-toed cowboy boots.

“I wish you wouldn’t sit like that,” his sister told him. “It makes you look like Oscar Wilde.”

“Well, aside from the fact I’m thin, straight, and Chinese.”

“Oscar was thin for a while.  When he was young.  Never Chinese that I’m aware.”

The two old men were staring at the twins with cocktail-onion eyes. “What?” Tian said.

Her dad sputtered like a lawnmower trying to catch. “Are you making fun of us?”

Tian raised a brow at her brother. “Are we?  Maybe it’s gotten to be so little challenge I don’t even notice any more.”

Wan uncrossed his legs, turned his chair right way to, and folded his hands on the table before him. “What do you mean, Father?” he asked with Confucian earnestness.

“You know what I mean!  ‘The cemetery,’ indeed.  A likely story.”

Both twins stared at him.  Necromancer Ling cackled and kept repeating, “The cemetery – the cemetery,” to himself in Cantonese.  He seemed to have struck a rich vein of humor in the phrase.

“Isn’t that a customary repository for dead people?  I humbly beseech your elder wisdom,” Tian said.

“These are not just any dead people,” Ling announced. “They are gyonsi.”

“Well, they’re down for a dirt nap now,” said Wan.  There were limits to his Confucian guilt.

“How well do they keep when they’re not on ice?” Tian wanted to know.

Their father was glaring from one to another.  Either he could not compound the depths of his offsprings’ perfidy or he’d lost track of the conversation and was faking it. 

Ling had sobered pretty much completely.  “Do you mean to say they are actually buried in a graveyard?”

“That’s right,” Tian said. “Go figure, huh?”

“The air is cool, the earth is cooler.  They should keep a day or two at least.” He adjusted his wingless spectacles on his button nose and peered at them intently. “How did you find them?  Which cemetery?”

“The old Golgotha cemetery at Edith and Indian School,” Tian said.  “Before Edith and Broadway become one, about half a mile from that storefront where you stashed ’em.”

“You remember we saw the prints turn east,” Wan said. “And we mentioned at the time there weren’t many paths across I-25.”

“Indian School being one,” Tian said.  “We drove past Golgotha about five times going through the same reaction you two did just now:  Naw.  Who’d hide a pack of rustled stiffs in a cemetery?”

“Mixing metaphors, sis.  Wouldn’t it be a herd, if they’re rustled?”

“Stay on-topic for me, Wan.  We finally parked the van on Edith and went inside.  The southern section is older, not so well-to-do.  Didn’t find anything up front, so we headed toward the back, east up the little hill that overlooks the freeway.  The graves get older and barer and weirder the farther up and back you go.”

“Except we found some new ones,” Wan said, unable to avoid a trace of smugness. “Twelve mounds of fresh-turned earth.”

“We figure the perp brought some shovels and got the stiffs to dig their own graves,” Tian said. “He knew how to herd ’em, and obviously he knows how to make ’em work.”

Necromancer Ling tried to jump to his feet.  It was beyond his advanced state of arthritis and inebriation.  He got to about half-mast and stuck tight between table and chair.

“But we must go at once!  We must recover my corpses!”

“Hold your horses,” Tian said, and –

“Please calm yourself, master,” said Wan in Cantonese.

“But.  But,” said Necromancer Ling.  Dr. Wu watched all with a detached interest, like an attendee at a sporting event he wasn’t a huge fan of.

“We can’t,” Tian said.

“But we must!”

Dr. Wu patted his friend’s silk-sleeved arm lightly. “Sit down, my friend.  The twins are rebellious and undisciplined, but they seldom say things totally without reason.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve said about us in weeks, Dad,” Tian said as Ling sorted himself back into his chair. “Maybe ever.”

“It’s a public cemetery,” Wan said quickly, before the conversation began brawling its way down another side alley. “Lots of people visiting, especially on a fine day like this.  There are houses right across Edith.”

“Plus Indian School’s a major street, and there’s the freeway right there, and a big apartment complex right across that.  If we try to recoup your hopping dead friends by daylight we’ll be surrounded by cops quicker than you can say, ‘desecration of graves.’ ”

“But I must get them back!  The train comes soon!  The New Year comes soon!”

“Relax, Necromancer,” Tian said. “They aren’t going anywhere.”

“That’s what I told myself,” the Necromancer said, “last night before I went to visit my ladies.”

“Touché,” Wan said. “But nobody else can disinter them by day for the same reasons we can’t.  We’ll have to wait until well after dark to mount our rescue.”

“Why so late?” their father demanded.

“This time of year, when the sun goes down rush hour’s just getting going,” Wan pointed out.  “Then there’s plenty of traffic until nine or ten.  People heading downtown to hit the bars.”

“The freeway’s not so much a problem,” Tian said. “Drivers are going fast enough they won’t see us unless we build a bonfire.  But we should probably also wait until at least eleven so that the people in the apartments are all in bed watching Conan instead of peering out the window looking for Satanic rituals.”

Ling made a funny squealing sound in his throat.  Dr. Wu, who had begun to track the here-and-now somewhat better, murmured to him soothingly in Cantonese.

“Very well,” the Necromancer said at length with a nod. “We cannot afford the intercession of the authorities.  If we must wait, we must.”

“That’s the spirit,” Tian said.

“Now,” Master Ling said, “there are certain things which must be understood.  First, you must not disfigure the corpses in any way.”

 “Say what?” Tian said.

“Don’t use such sloppy language!” her father said.  The twins ignored him.

“You mustn’t harm the corpses,” the Necromancer Ling said with exaggerated precision. “At least not significantly.  They must be presentable for burial.”

“So if one of them tries to gnaw our heads off, we can’t just blow off his,” Tian said.

Ling waggled parchment-skinned hands in terror. “No!  No!  That is the last thing you must do.  Not only must they not be mutilated, they must be able to hop.  How can they hop if they have no head?  Impossible they should hop without a head.”

The twins sat and stared at him through the afternoon gloom.  The lunch rush had subsided; they enjoyed a booth in the first dining hall, with its dark ceiling-vigas seeming to hang low overhead, in virtual solitude.

“You must understand, children,” their father said, “perhaps the one thing on Earth more stringent than the Triads’ interpretation of their contracts, is their approach to enforcing them.”

“And they contracted for twelve stiffs a-hopping,” Wan said.

Ling bobbed his head. “Just so,” he said. “And one more thing.”

“One more thing?” Tian exclaimed, rearing back.  “Why is there always ‘one more thing?’ ”

“Let’s hope it’s the last ‘one more thing,’ ” her brother said.

“Oh, it is, it is,” the necromancer said, nodding eagerly. “One of the relicts is that of a sorcerer who was also a powerful necromancer – one of my colleagues, as it were, although lamentably he lacked the scruples of a gentleman, and dabbled in the most malignant arts.”

“An evil magician,” Tian said. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

“His name was Xa Xe.  He liked to be called ‘the Golden Scorpion.’ ”

“You can just tell he was a people person,” said Wan.

“He was a prominent if shadowy figure among the Chinese laborers in the West,” Ling said. “A forest of rumors grew up around his name.  One of the most persistent is that he was assassinated by agents of the Dowager Empress at the time of the Celestial Fist Rising.  My researches, however, proved his demise to be less melodramatic, if still not precisely prosaic.”

“In short,” Dr. Wu said, “Ling discovered that he actually died of a stroke in a cathouse in Silver City in 1907, aged 103.  Master Ling found the former necromancer buried on the outskirts of town.”

“They let Chinese into bordellos in Silver City in 1907?” Wan asked.

“They did if they had as much gold to spend as Xa Xe,” their father said.

Ling folded his hands piously. “Sad to say, unscrupulous and even malignant sorcery often brings substantial monetary reward.”

“So this Golden Scorpion had enough loot to get his ashes hauled, but not all the way back to China,” Tian said.

“You are very disrespectful of the dead, young miss!” Ling said briskly.

“I’m disrepectful of everybody.”

 “Alas,” the necromancer said. “As a member of the underworld, he was compelled to employ assistants of less than sterling honesty.  On learning of his death they looted his belongings, most particularly the gold, and decamped.  He was forced to undergo the indignity of interment as a pauper in Potter’s Field.” Ling shivered in an ecstasy of horror at the thought of a gentleman, even such a one as to call himself Golden Scorpion, suffering such a fate – among white devils, no less.

“Contrary to Hollywood,” their father said in the unctuous tones he saved for those occasions when he could wallow in blissful pedantry, “good henchmen are hard to find.”

“One must consort with low persons,” Ling agreed.

“Another popular culture lie exposed,” Tian said. “I’m so shattered.”

“Master Ling,” Wan said, “I’m kind of getting the feeling here, and set me straight if I’m wrong, that you’re not sharing this charming vignette with us just to help us better understand the rich history of the Chinese people here in the American West?”

It was the old men’s turn to trade glances.

“Well, actually,“ their father said, “no.”

“Xa Xe’s spirit remains exceptionally powerful.  The spark of life-essence burns more strongly in Xa Xe’s lich than all the rest combined.” Ling hesitated. “He may therefore be capable of escaping the control of all but the most potent and experienced necromancer.”

“So our nameless corpse rustler might get rustled in turn by one of the very corpses he rustled,” Wan said. “Sartor resartus.”

Ling nodded. “Possessed by Xa Xe.  Although I do not believe Xa Xe strong enough to do so.  Yet.”

“I’m happy,” Wan said.  He looked around at his twin. “Are you happy?”

“A mig’s a mig, Wan,” Tian said, employing family slang derived from her attempts to pronounce the term malignant spirit at the age of three. “He gets crosswise with us, we follow SOP:  kick his ass, take his name, drink our beer.”

Ling started to flutter up toward the big round roofbeams. “You must not speak so!” he shrilled through his pinched old nostrils. “You must not take lightly the menace of the Golden Scorpion!"

“Wasn’t that a Doc Savage title?” Tian asked.

“I’m with the Necromancer on this one, sis,” Wan said. “We’re talking a very powerful member of the dead, here.  Who’s currently at large.”

Tian conceded with a sigh: “And ready to take charge.”

She pushed back from the table. “Let’s hit the highway, bro.  You old guys gonna be all right here for a while?”

“Where are you going?” their father demanded.

“To do some research,” Wan said. “We’re not the only ones looking to dig up Master Ling’s lost little gyonsi.  Whoever swiped them did not plant them up Golgotha expecting them to sprout come springtime.”

He stood up. “It might be helpful to have an idea of who the competition is.”

#

“Zombis,” repeated Stuart the noted connection. “Funny you should bring up zombis just now.”

It was early night on Albuquerque’s main drag, Central Avenue, and already nose-numbing chill.  Tian wore her poofy particolored parka and her Orioles cap turned around mostly backward.  It made her look insufferably cute.  Wan was in his greatcoat and Keanu shades.  He looked very cool and slightly sinister, and the sorority women tended to let their eyes trail over him as they promenaded past.

 “You’re a laugh riot as usual, Stu LaNu,” Tian said.  Stuart had thus far successfully resisted the best attempts of the Albuquerque Police Department and other organs of officialdom to elicit his last name.  His profuse arrest record, which he would show you on demand or if you didn’t refuse quickly or emphatically enough, listed him as “Stuart LNU,” for Last Name Unknown.  Tian, naturally, took things a step too far.

Stuart for his part was never sure what to make of Tian Wu.  He wasn’t the only one.

“You came to the right place,” Stu said. “If it has to do with bizarre subcultures in the greater Albuquerque area, Stuart’s your man.  Also – ”

He flicked his bulbous blue eyes down to the far end of downtown and back.  It wasn’t a long throw.  Albuquerque’s central business district was very much the size and general demeanor of that of a small town in the 1950s, despite the best efforts of the politicians to make it as sterile and indistinguishable as a normal modern American city’s.  The best they had been able to do to “revitalize” the area in the interests of politically-contributing property owners was issue lots of liquor licenses.

This worked.  Despite the temperature the street was thronged this night as most nights with the mostly white, mostly affluent, and mostly young, in search of brewskis and their concomitants.

“ – by odd coincidence, the dude I bet is the very one you’re looking for happens to be in a line of work similar to my own, if you catch my drift.  Or was.”

“But you’ve got to be mysterious about it,” Tian said.

Stuart smiled blandly. “Naturally.  Part of the perks.  After all, you came to me.  How many purveyors of fine recreational pharmeceuticals-cum-PhDs in sociology can you name?”

If they ticked down their list of potential informants – and indeed they had – the twins would have hit on Stu LaNu first in their discreet inquiries into possible corpse rustlers.  But Stuart only came out at night.  Their other contacts, meanwhile, had come up dry.

 “None with your charming personality,” Wanshang said.

“Well, there you go.  Now, as I hinted earlier it’s funny you should come to me at this point in time asking about a crim with an interest in zombs.”

“Go easy on all the dope street idiom, Stu,” Tian said. “You’ll lose us.  It’s not politically correct for Asian-Americans to be down.”

She elbowed her brother in the short ribs. “Quit watching chubby white Goth-chick butts and pay some attention here, Wanshang.  I think Mr. Personality may be getting ready to disgorge some insight.”

Wan gave a last tragically romantic and winsome smile to the trio of plump and pale young dark-clad women (one with hair dyed jet black, one purple, one green) sauntering slowly by, and reluctantly returned his attention to the situation at hand.

In temporary vain.  Now Stu was bobbing and weaving and jabbing the air at random like a skinny unathletic white guy who occasionally stumbled onto “Boxing After Dark” on HBO.  He interspersed the air-boxing with grinning and waving to what he evidently sized up as a passing covey of potential customers. 

He had stationed himself for the evening’s labors on the sidewalk by a vacant lot at downtown’s western extremity, across Central from El Rey Theater, which was throwing a no-alcohol concert of local bands and therefore an attractant for that significant segment of Stu’s customer base which was debarred from the liquor-serving clubs by age and lack of resourcefulness in obtaining false ID.  The youngsters avoided him.  Most ignored him; others cast him looks of black suspicion.

“Off our game tonight, are we, Stu?” Tian asked sweetly.  “You’re doing a swell impression of a narc.  Now, recall that we are paying cash on the line here.”

“Huh?  Oh.” He flashed her a quick and patently phony grin. “Yeah, so anyway, back in the Eighties, when Miami Vice ruled the airwaves of Reagan’s America, and sweet sweet cocaine ruled the hearts and minds, not to mention the noses, of millions of young overachievers, for one brief shining moment the Jamaicans dominated the Albuquerque coke scene.  Chief among them was a rude-boy going by the name King Natty.  He was by repute a powerful sorcerer.”

 “What does a Jamaican know about zombis?” Tian demanded. “Vodoun is mostly Haitian and speaks French.  Jamaica has Obeah instead, no?”

“Yes indeed.  But don’t forget, my perceptive and sharp-tongued little Chinese spitfire –”

“I’d boot your shins for that, Stu, except I halfway like the sound of it.”

“ – they’re pretty similar.  Vodoun, Obeah, Santería, Palo Mayombe, they’re all a mixture of West African religions with Christianity.  The Jamaicans, it seems, have their own form of zombi, even if the Haitians get all the ink, what with Wade Davis and all.  Our good King Natty, in sum, was into zombis.”

“So he was screwing around with Plan Nine from Outer Space:  the reanimation of the dead?” Wan asked.

Stu blinked. “Plan Nine?”

“From Outer Space,” agreed Tian. “That really is what it was, what the movie was about.  You know, if you work backwards, maybe Plan One was actually pretty good.”

“It still didn’t work,” her brother pointed out. “Or they’d never have gotten all the way to Ed Wood, Jr.   But to return to business before our man Stuart drifts too far out to sea:  we have King Natty doing zombi work the way New Agers do angel work.  To threaten competitors?”

Tian frowned ferociously. “Don’t tell me he was using the stiffs to package drugs!  That would be so made-for-TV.”

“Since, as you so charmingly remind me, you are paying for this, I have to tell you:  yes.  And yes.  The King was using the threat of zombification to intimidate his rivals.  And street word is he was experimenting with the undead as a source of cheap labor.  Braceros from across the River Styx.”

Wan held up a sudden hand, reached to his waist with the other.  His beeper was evidently buzzing him like a bee in his pocket. “What happened?” Tian asked Stu.

“It didn’t pan out.  Maybe the Haitians know something.  And the next wave of foreign drug criminals that moved in – I think that was the Russian mafiyas, Part One – didn’t believe in zombification and weren’t scared.  Now, if he’d only been able to hold out until the Cubans made the scene. . . .”

Wan stuck his beeper back in its belt carrier beneath his coat. “Missa and Trey are still wondering if we’ve got any leads,” he told Tian in Cantonese.  The pair had called periodically throughout the day, to be met with noncommittal responses. 

He made no move to call them back now.  Instead he waved airily at their informant.  “Sorry.  Please continue.”

Stu drew breath. “Then the feds started leaning on the King.” He said it as if speaking of Elvis.  “The ubiquitous and omniscient they say he spilled his guts, then had to make himself most scarce most rapidly lest his erstwhile associates soak his dreads in gasoline and make one of Winnie Mandela’s favorite kind of sparklers out of him.”

Wan blanched behind his Mad Dogs. “You’re a poet at heart, Stu,” Tian said. “But what does this mean for suffering mankind?”

“He’s back.”

“King Natty.”

Stuart touched the gold ring depending from one pink and blue ear. “So I hear.”

“What’s he up to?”

The dealer shrugged.

“Don’t hold out on us, Stu,” Tian said. “We will hurt you.”

He smirked. “I think I’d like that too much.”

Wan stepped between them. “We’re kind of on a tight schedule here.”

Stuart’s ears perked.  They really were almost pointed, in an oval sort of way. “Involving what?”

“Triad biz,” Tian said.  Since they could not wholly hide from Stuart the fact that they engaged in some sub rosa occupation, they had long since allowed him to draw the inference they had links to mainland-Chinese gangs. 

For once it was literally true.

Stu nodded with immense satisfaction. “You’ll have to tell me all the juicy details.”

“Not a chance,” Wan said. “Later we’ll drop some hints.  Now, what is King Natty doing back in Burque?”

Stuart shook his head. “So sad.  But I truly do not know.”

#

Dr. Frank Wu disliked getting in and out of his powered wheelchair.  It was a custom job, heavier even than a usual power chair, the seat and arms encased in fluffy ivory fleece slipcovers.  It had, as he liked to brag, everything but a wet-bar.  He had designed it himself – and paid – to make his enforced occupation of it as congenial as possible.  He had succeeded so well that he could hardly be dislodged short of bed and the discharge of various bodily functions (he’d contemplated accounting for those too; but the twins resisted.)

He had accordingly gotten some of his contacts from his Los Alamos National Lab days – machinists and welders, or what his offspring thought of as his “non-sinister” cronies – to yank out the van’s left rear seat and install brackets into which his chair’s wheels could be locked once the power-lift had winched him in.  The other rear seat had been replaced by more conventional van customizers with a swiveling swoopy pedestal-style chair, suspiciously Sixties In Effect.  It was likewise made to be locked into place or removed quickly; when Dr. Wu rode by himself it was stowed behind his wheelchair. 

The seat placement served to prevent guests having to clamber across the Doctor to sit.  This was not so much out of consideration as the elder Wu’s concern they might jostle him or trample his feet, which were fragile with desuetude.  Dr. Frank’s wheelchair mount was itself inset in a turntable, so that he could pivot to face a guest.  Or turn the other way to snub him, as occasionally happened, given the nature of Dad, and for that matter, his pals.

Necromancer Ling occupied the non-wheeled seat tonight as Wan drove them south on

Second.  He was turning himself around and around on it with his rope-sole slippered feet and tittering fit to bust.  He and Dr. Wu had still been at Garduño’s punishing the margs and the chips and salsa when the twins had called and announced that it was showtime.

“Whee,” the ancient Master said.  Triads and their nasty bullets behind the ear were the last thing he had on his mind.

It was past eleven o’clock.  Little traffic was abroad.  The streets were clear of ice.  As he turned left at the light onto Menaul Wan gave Tian a look.  She shrugged and did Groucho Marx things with her eyebrows.

They turned right again onto Edith, a block from Broadway.  They passed one cemetery, crossed beneath the freeway, and then Golgotha opened upon their left.  This north end was upscale, with a lawn lush and well-tended even in the gut of winter, and polished granite headstones glistening in the moonlight.  Across the street lay houses, neat and dark.  A few showed late Christmas lights.

Despite what his twin considered his customary exaggerated regard for the State’s law, or at least its minions, Wan switched headlights off and ran with just the amber fogs. At Tian’s direction he rolled down his window, ignoring querulous complaint from the rear.  Every fifty or sixty yards they passed a gate through the ornamental iron fence around the cemetery.  At the third, where the houses fell back on their right to give way to a little park with a softball diamond, and the graveyard grass looked less manicured and the monuments not quite so monumental, Tian went, “Whoa-whoa-whoa!”

The van stopped.  Dr. Wu leaned forward.  His eyes seemed huger and more owlish than usual behind his industrial-strength prescription lenses.

“Why we stop?” He spoke by custom excruciatingly correct English, and got his Underoos in a giant wad when the twins so much as used slang.  But under the influence of either Master Ling or Sifu Joe Crow he’d started sounding like Warner Oland whenever he wasn’t yammering on in triphammer Canto with the Necromancer.

“Got a hit,” Tian said.  “Check the gate.”

Their father squinted out his side window.  “I see nothing.”

“Of course you don’t,” Tian said.  Normally the twins approved the deep window tinting, which after all kept the idly curious eye from chancing upon some of the more overtly unusual tools of their trade they carried stashed in the back.  But now it was a pain, hence Tian’s insistence on Wan rolling his window down and letting in the knife-edged night.

 “What do you see, O sharp-eyed one?” Wanshang asked.

“Look close at the lock.” The simple chain securing the iron gate was held by an equally simple lock, of the sort you buy at Wally World – hardly primo security. 

But it wasn’t even locked.  The hasp was turned around and just hooked through both ends of the chain.  To the casual glance, by night anyway, nothing looked wrong.

“We have a winner,” Wan said.

“What’s that?” Dr. Wu leaned forward to demand querulously.

“Somebody’s broken into the cemetery, Dad,” Tian said. “Probably not to loot a fortune in rubies and gold from among Pharaoh’s grave goods.”

“Rubies?  Gold?” All those margs had dulled Dr. Wu’s wits, and no surprise.  They had taken no edge off his cupidity, though.  Necromancer Ling took his sleeve and sorted him out in Cantonese.  To the effect of, those disrespectful kids are being facetious again.

Down the block, just up from Indian School, a car flashed yellow lights from the street’s far side.  Tian spat a curse and reached under her jacket.

“Easy,” Wan said, albeit frowning as he did. “I know that Yugo.  It’s Trey.”

“He drives a Yugo?  And here I thought he was attractive.”

“What’s this?  Are these friends of yours?  You must send them away.”

“Might not be so easy, Pop,” Wan said over his shoulder. “It’s the couple we’ve been trying to talk into setting up our computer network, wiring the house and van.  They work cheap.”

It was the right button to push: “Ahh.  Cheap is good. . . .” Muttering into his limp collar made their dad sound like David Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China.  It beat Warner Oland.

“Somebody’s getting out,” Tian said. “At least they’ve got the damn sense to turn the dome light off.”

“Let me talk,” Wan said, shucking out of his shoulder belt.  Tian glared at him. “Come on, sis.  You know how you are:  way too ready to rumble.”

“But somebody’s way past due for a good ass-kicking.”

“And if you can figure out a way to bestow it without rousing the neighborhood,” he said sweetly, “don’t do it anyway.”

He was out the door and it closed behind him before she could snap back.  She hated the fact he was as smooth and eel-agile as she.  Sometimes.

Wan was pleased to see it was Missa walking toward him.  She had the sleeves of her coat pulled over her hands and was flapping her arms in slo-mo before her.  The air was cold enough to be chewy and tanged with piñon smoke like some new kind of mint..

“Hi, Missa,” he said softly.  Behind her Trey unfolded himself out the Yugo’s driver’s door. “Trey.  I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but this is kind of a private party.”

“No way,” Missa said. “You brought us into this.  You think you can just tease us and leave us hanging?”

Gears started to grind in Wan’s head.  He liked hearing her talk that way.  Plus she was turning out to be the fiercely assertive kind.  The kind of woman who’d walk all over him, given the chance.  And he’d gladly give her that chance, should opportunity knock. . . .

“You want us to work with you,” Trey pointed out in reasonable tone.  “So we need to know how you work.”

Wan stuffed a muted sound out his nose, not quite a snort, not quite a grumble.  It was roughly the same line of argument he’d handed his dad.  Which didn’t mean he liked being fed it back.

“How did you make us?” Tian’s voice asked from behind.  Wan turned his head.  She had slipped out of the van and up close without making any noise.  It shouldn’t have surprised him from any direction.

Missa gave her a flat look. “Missing dead people.  Old cemetery not half a mile away.  We get the ‘Duh’ channel on our cable hookup.”

“And it’s not even digital,” Trey added.  The others glared.

“I don’t mean to be crass or anything,” Tian said, “but there’s a difference between field work and support.  What we do happens to be highly dangerous.”

“We really are professionals,” Wan said. “And we literally have trained for this since we were toddlers.  It’s no accident we teach martial arts as cover.”

Trey looked dubious. “Against ghosts with gongfu?”

Wan showed a lopsided grin. “You’d be surprised.”

“My brother doesn’t like to be rude,” Tian said, “but it’s no skin off me.  We don’t need to be tripping over amateurs and looking after you if things get nasty.”

“They’re a bunch of hundred year old dead people,” Missa pointed out.

“Didn’t you ever watch any Living Dead movies?”

“I saw that one with Linnea Quigley,” Trey said. “Except I read somewhere she wasn’t really naked in that grave-dancing scene.” He sounded crushed.

“You mean Hollywood’s an accurate guide to the supernatural?” Missa said.

“Well, in this case, more like cheesy Italian zombi movies,” Wan said.

“HK hoppy-ghost flicks,” said Tian. “If who we think has Ling’s stiffs has actually got ’em, he has just about enough sense not to have gotten in any trouble so far.  But he’s pressing his luck every second.  Screwing around with Chinese hopping ghosts, it’s but a matter of time before he dislodges the sutra from one’s forehead.  And then hell is out for noon, kids.  Gyonsi’ll eat your brain soon as look at you.”

“If one slips the leash and approaches you,” Wan said, “remember one thing:  hold your breath.  They can’t see you, but they can smell that.”

Trey and Tian simultaneously demanded to know if that meant Wan had given in. “Do we want to stay out here all night freezing our parts off and arguing?” he returned.  “How long before we start shouting and the bad guys hear us?  If we’re going to do it, screw it, let’s do it.”

“It may be a fool’s errand, anyway,” Tian said.  She and Missa gave each other hard eyes.

“We’re going to pull the van inside the gate and park it so it’ll look like a groundskeeper’s vehicle to passersby,” Wan said. “Then we’ll walk back up the hill to the really old section.”

“Old section?” Trey asked.  He was wearing his trenchcoat and knit cap and looking like a floppy puppy.

“Probably old as the Spanish settlement of Albuquerque,” Wan said. “Two-three hundred years at least.  Indians may’ve used it before that.”

“Back in the late 1800s, early Twentieth Century they brought the people they hanged down by Old Town Plaza here to bury them,” Tian said with unconcealed relish.

“Don’t try to freak out the tenderfeet,” Missa said.  She had fallen into step with Tian as the shorter woman walked back toward the van.

“No such thing,” Tian said. “It’s true.  There are old markers whose dates just happen to match execution warrants on record at the courthouse.”

“If Tian was really trying to scare you guys,” Wan said, “there’s another truth she’d tell you.”

Missa cocked him a skeptical eye.  She did it most fetchingly, he thought. “And just what truth might that be?”

“Whether it’s because of the hanged crooks or something else,” Tian said, “plenty of the spirits here are restless.  And they display what Walt Whitman called ‘adhesiveness.’ ”

“And that means what?” Missa asked.

“If you don’t watch out,” Wan said evenly, “they follow you home.”

“Holy crap,” said Trey.

#

Tian stayed out breathing steam in the cold while Wan drove the van in through the gates with their spike-tipped bars.  She pulled them to behind it, herself, and Trey and Missa, who didn’t look anywhere near as bold now as they had when casting defi at the twins scant moments before. 

Tian looped a strand of chain around the gates where they joined and strung it back over itself.  Then she hung the lock-hasp – which had been sawed-off with some neatness just above the body – back on a single link, so that it did not join the two chain-ends, and turned it around.

“This way,” she explained, “if we need to make a quick getaway we just hit the gate and off it’ll slide.”

“But it looks locked,” Missa said. “Neat trick.” Her tone was just this side of grudging. 

The road headed straight in between leafless trees, flower beds, the neat but winter-brown grass, then curved left after about twenty yards.  Wan took the van around the curve, parked it, and got out to rejoin the crew. 

Toward the east and the freeway noise the ground rose and grew barren, until it became a raw ridgetop showing sparse growths of spiky weeds, twig crosses, and sticks bearing little square holders for faded death-notices.  The sky was clear, the stars sharp and hard as fragments of broken glass; between their spare uncompromising light and the light-haze from the Northeast Heights beyond, it was just possible to make out some kind of activity just over the rise.

Wan looked to Missa and Trey.  Trey’s eyes were huge and his skin ashy-pale beneath his black chin-fuzz.  Missa’s face likewise was lighter than normal, and her thin lips had almost disappeared into a line.  But her posture spoke defiant determination.

Wan held a long thin finger across his own lips, pointed first to Missa and then to Trey, then down into the shadowed lee of the van, indicating they were to remain here, concealed.  Tian drew her finger across her throat.

Wan rolled his eyes.

Tian opened her ski jacket.  She wore a Gallagher-pattern shoulder harness with a Ruger GP100 .357 Magnum revolver under her left arm balanced by two speed loaders beneath her right.  She drew the weapon, keeping her finger out of the trigger guard and the barrel pointed down and away from the others, undid the cylinder catch with her thumb, swung the cylinder out to confirm there were six undimpled disks of cartridge-heads in place, quietly closed the cylinder again.

Trey’s eyes were really big now.  He fell back a step at sight of the handgun. Missa’s brows rose questioningly.

Wan meanwhile had produced a Beretta 92 from inside his own black leather greatcoat.   He gently drew back the slide to check the chambering, closed it up again, pulled out a second identical piece from beneath his other arm and went through the same brief routine.  As he tucked it away he noticed their companions’ expressions.

He smiled a thin smile and shrugged.

Missa, who now resembled a Rosetti sketch essaying the emotion of skepticism, mouthed the words, for ghosts?

“Some of them,” Wan replied in a low voice.  As a child he and Tian had learned from talking to each other after their father decreed lights out that it carried less and was less distinctive than a whisper. “And not only them.  It’s a bad old world out there.”

“Not all the migs have passed over,” Tian said.  She holstered her revolver decisively. “Yet.”

Trey blinked.  His mouth worked.  Alternating waves of thrill and scandal coursed blatantly through his skinny body.  Manifestly he ached to ask if either of them had ever shot anybody.  Equally obviously, he knew asking would only get him quelled, regardless of what the answer he got – or the truth – might be.

With the quiet sure-handedness of long practice the twins opened the van’s rear doors.  They hadn’t neglected to shut off the interior lighting either.  Wan took out his sword with its tasseled hilt and straight, age-cracked black scabbard, and then a packet of fresh sutras, just in case.  His sister meanwhile took out a spear, uncased the short sharpened-leaf tip, then turned it around to check and switch on the cattle prod fixed to the butt with turns of wire and electrical tape.

“Remember,” Necromancer Ling called back, twisting around in his captain’s chair. “Be careful with the corpses.  You must show respect for the dead!”

He spoiled the effect by pushing himself around in a circle and giggling wildly again. “Shh!” Tian hissed, and shut the doors shaking her head.

“Old, drunk Chinese guys,” she murmured. “Great.  How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?”

“Forget it,” her brother said. “It’s too late to get adopted.”

 “I have to ask,” Missa said, courage bolstered by the twins’ quiet badinage.  Her own voice was hoarse with the effort of keeping it down. “Guns and traditional weapons?”

“Ghosts are conservative,” Wan said.

“Like crooks,” his sister added.

Missa pointed. “But that’s a cattle prod, no?”

“It’s a cattle-prod, yes,” Tian said. “Remember, spirits of all kinds are free-floating self-perpetuating energy systems.  You can disrupt ’em if you goose ’em right.”

Trey gestured up the hill. “But those – ”

“To all practical purposes are ghosts called back to possess their own former bodies, just as we said last night,” Wan said. “We want to be ready for everything.”

“Now pipe the hell down,” Tian said.

Missa’s eyes flared.  Tian leaned forward quickly and kissed her lightly on the cheek.  Missa jumped back as if Tian had hit her with the prod.  The twins turned and started up the hill.

“That was cold,” Wan said when they were thirty feet away.

Tian’s shoulders shook to the rhythm of suppressed laughter inside her ski jacket. “She’s a well-socialized white girl.  She’ll be at least five minutes sorting out the guilt of possible homophobia.  Keeping them both out of our hair.”

They piped down themselves then.  They moved steadily up the slope, not hurrying, hunched forward more out of reflex than because it might aid concealment.  There wasn’t any, to speak of, unless they wanted to belly-crawl among the stones and goatheads, which they did not. At least the moon was at the wrong angle to jacklight them.

Wan stopped.  He touched his sister’s arm.  She halted as well.  The stir of motion ahead had resolved itself into a head, shoulders, and at regular intervals a shovel, pitching dirt.  The head wore a long queue and a little cap.  The slice of visible face had a blue cast in the dimness.

“He’s got the stiffs digging again?” Tian asked.

Wan shook his head and mouthed, Do I know?

Onwards and upwards they stole.  Wan carried his sword undrawn in his right hand.  Tian held her spear both-handed, ready to go into action with either end as needed.

As they neared the top the freeway noise grew louder.  So did the rhythmic crunch of digging.  A murmur came from the far side, not sticking its head far enough above the traffic sibilance for words to be distinguished.

Now the twins went to hands and knees, quadrupeded the rest of the way, and peered over from ten feet to the left of the digging gyonsi.

Four hopping corpses spaded at the sandy soil.  Six oblong holes of suggestive size and shape already lay open.  Six similarly-dimensioned mounds made a second row.  Two of the temporarily reanimated and reconstituted corpses stood to the side, stiffly erect, hands to sides, as if at attention.  Sutras, somewhat soil-stained, were visible still pasted to their foreheads.

“Come on, ya heathen duppies,” a tall, lanky man was saying from beneath a mop of thick grey-twined dreads.  He stood in the midst of the excavation, gesticulating. “Dig fasta.  Ye t’ink we got all night, ya?  De sun come up, ye catch a fire, sure.”

Wan and Tian stood up without even glancing at each other. “Or you might catch a fire a tad ahead of schedule,” Wan said. “King Natty, we presume?”

The dreadlocked man turned and stared wildly at them.  In an instant his expression shifted to one of peevish impatience, like a mural artist subjected to unwelcome criticism from gawkers.

“Foolish blood clot and China bwa,” he said scornfully, “d’ye t’ink this dread be out here in dis ya boneyard by midnight wit’out he got de Power by him side?”

Tian’s and Wanshang’s eyes swiveled toward one another.  A dreadful cold suspicion bloomed within them, congealing quickly into certainty of the presence of a dark and menacing force.

“Freeze, motherfuckers!” a voice screamed.

The twins duly froze.

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