Free Dead Men (and Women) Walking by Anthology Page A

the man by the throat with an unnatural strength. The
man grabbed a hold of Hicks' arms in an attempt to free himself
from death's grip, but it was no good. Hicks began to smile as he
slowly dragged the boy closer. Before long, the boy's face began to
turn an unhealthy shade of purple and Hicks was bombarded with
punches and kicks, but none of them did any good. The prey had been
caught, the predator triumphant.
    Hicks grabbed onto one of
the boy's arms and jerked away hard. In an instant, the attached
shoulder was dislocated. The boy let out a stifled murmur into the
air and Hicks realized that he had to squeeze a little harder to
completely seal off the airway. Hicks twisted the young man's arm
all the way around and held it up, cupping the back of the arm to
his mouth. There, in the sterile autopsy room of the morgue, the
dead had risen to steal life from those who took it for
granted.
     

Part Four: The Willing
Feast
     
    Eric Hicks thought the
Thames River looked so beautiful at night. Its surface was nice and
smooth due in no small part to a lack of wind and, as the lights
shined from Canary Wharf, the water was brought to life by a
plethora of colored lights. The reflection of multiple skyscrapers
was a sight that Eric enjoyed no matter where he went because it
showed that mankind did have a capacity for ingenuity and ambition
–both emotions that Hicks held close to his own moral code. But he
wasn't there to fulfill his moral code; he was there to break it.
He wanted to flaunt his actions to the very police that had tried
to put him away. In Eric's mind, it wasn't revenge in the sense
that most people view the emotional response. No, he felt he needed
to give them a little taste of the impossible. Eric Hicks was dead
to the police. They would think the morgue assistant took his body
and ran with it ...until they found the car a couple of days later.
After that, only one man would really know what happened. That man
was unfortunately on Hicks' to-do list.
    The morgue assistant's car
was parked on the dock near the water. Hicks got into the driver's
seat and rolled the windows down. He'd torn holes in the trunk of
the car to help sink it and the body wasn't going anywhere anyway.
He reversed the car around 30 feet and then raced toward the water.
Right before the car's front tires touched the wooden pier, he
jumped out and rolled with the momentum. As Eric sat and watched
the car bubble down toward a murky end, he thought more about his
own soon-to-be new assistant in life. His delight was all too
apparent is his smile.
    As Eric spent the next day
watching and waiting, he discovered that his body had been reported
stolen by a worker at the city morgue. This had the effect of
amplifying his already considerable presence within the media.
While the turn of events was an inconvenience, it didn't bother
Hicks too much. He'd been avoiding authorities for well over 100
years. The fact that he hadn't been caught after he'd escaped every
time was a testament to his resolve and skill to blend into just
about any western civilization and keep a low profile. He enjoyed
sneaking around to steal the life of those who he deemed worthy. A
battle of the mind was nearly as engaging as a battle of the soul
to Eric, and he did so love to play games of cat and mouse. The
mouse had now become the cat, and it was time to hunt the
prey.
    Detective Wilson was easy
enough to look up through phones books and Library internet
computers; it seems Mr. Wilson has been quite popular with
apprehending a wide variety of unsavory sorts over the last 7
years. The anticipation rose in Hicks who could hardly contain glee
for the night to come. Once he found Wilson's address, he went to
check on the place to see what needed to be done to surprise the
cop and to convert him to a different way of thinking. Since the
detective owned a pricey 2-bedroom apartment, Eric decided to keep
an eye on Wilson's apartment by breaking into the adjacent vacant
apartment