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Back Up From the Grave Save as PDF
Chapters (52)
  1. Dedication
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Contents
  4. Prologue
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-one
  26. Twenty-two
  27. Twenty-three
  28. Twenty-four
  29. Twenty-five
  30. Twenty-six
  31. Twenty-seven
  32. Twenty-eight
  33. Twenty-nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-one
  36. Thirty-two
  37. Thirty-three
  38. Thirty-four
  39. Thirty-five
  40. Thirty-six
  41. Thirty-seven
  42. Epilogue
  43. An excerpt from Halfway to the Grave
  44. An excerpt from One Foot in the Grave
  45. An excerpt from At Grave’s End
  46. An excerpt from Destined for an Early Grave
  47. An excerpt from This Side of the Grave
  48. An excerpt from One Grave at a Time
  49. About the Author
  50. By Jeaniene Frost
  51. Copyright
  52. About the Publisher

“Don’t bother playing on my patriotism, Cat. My country’s lost to me now, but if this helps you with something you’re determined to do anyway . . . well, then take me to him. I’ll see what I can do.”

Twenty-six

Twenty-six

Madigan did recognize Don. As soon as he saw him, he let out an excited squeal of “Donny!” My uncle winced, either in sympathy at what his nemesis had become or in aversion to the horrid nickname.

Didn’t matter. Donny he was and Donny he stayed, day and night as Madigan rambled on about nonsensical things, such as how sad he was that the ice cream here was terrible (it wasn’t; Madigan’s taste buds only loved raw meat, a fact his mind hadn’t caught up with yet) or how he wanted to play in the yard (not happening; we didn’t want him to eat Mencheres’s neighbors). After the first few days of skull-numbing inanity, I wouldn’t have bothered eavesdropping except every once in a while, like a flash of lightning into a darkened room, something lucid would pop up.

“I’m very unhappy with their progress, Donny,” Madigan had said the other day. “They should have been able to replicate her DNA by now.”

“You mean Crawfield’s?” Don replied in a carefully neutral tone.

“Hers, too.” Madigan sounded churlish. “But after seven years, nothing! Can’t have all my eggs in one basket . . . heh. Eggs. Have to wait years for more of those . . .”

Despite Don trying to steer him back on topic, Madigan veered from eggs to being hungry again, and once that happened, nothing else mattered. Then when he was done eating, he fell asleep. For all I knew, he now slept while sucking his thumb. I couldn’t tell because I never entered his lockdown room. I’d become synonymous with Bones in his shattered mind, and Bones incited sobbing, incoherent terror.

Don, however, seemed to soothe Madigan, sometimes by the other man remembering past cruelties.

“I stole your job after you died,” Madigan said yesterday in a gleeful whisper. “Stole your soldiers, too. They’ll be dead soon.”

Before Don could respond to that, Madigan was playing I Spy. That shouldn’t have taken long since his room was windowless concrete, but Madigan stretched it out for hours. If Don was solid, he might have banged his head against the wall just to block out the endless chatter. I wanted to, and that was only after twenty minutes.