City of Dust and Ghosts: A James Bond Halloween Story

Better to be Alive

They piled the bodies in the car, locked it, and left it there in the middle of the empty lot amid a field of trash. "Even if it's found, no one will report it to the police soon," Reichlin explained. "Nothing good will come from that for them. And the government will simply be happy N'Gozi is gone and not question it." He snorted a crude laugh. "Probably they will take credit for it."

They parted ways, with Reichlin heading back to his car, and Bond returning to L'Olympia. The party remained in full swing with costumed expats now in a slightly more accelerated state of intoxication as before. The Viking was atop a table drunkenly swinging a cardboard axe, his harem having evaporated. Bond scanned the room, looking for the girl, but she was nowhere to be found. Slightly disappointed, he stayed for another few drinks, but the carousing of Westerners so alienated from their world that they'd run to one of the remotest, bleakest places on Earth hardly interested him, and he returned to the hotel.

The hotel bar was as sparsely populated as it normally was, and Bond wasn't interested in haunting an empty bar. He was suddenly weary of this place and its oppressive emptiness. Instead he went back to his room and took a long shower. When he was done, he called M on the secure app on his smart phone and reported in.

"Well, it's not the most critical mission you've ever undertaken, but you've done a service to a close friend of England."

"I'm sure that fact will keep me warm on many a cold night, sir."

"Undoubtedly," M sounded irritated, but didn't rise to the bait. "Now get on the first flight back here. Don't take a holiday."

"Of course, sir. I'll just have to take in the historic and cultural treasures another time."

He killed the line and read a bit. After an hour or so, he loaded a fresh magazine in the CCP, slipped it under the mountain range of pillows and went to bed.

The sleep he fell into was harsh and fitful, and his dreams were jagged fragments of violence. He saw corpses splayed upon stainless steel tables, disarticulated limbs and digits, haphazardly and bloodily removed and tossed carelessly into stainless steel bowls; bones cracked and wrenched and ripped away; and glistening, pulsing organs lifted from pools of viscera. Amid the visions of brutality and gore, he saw eyes—brown, blue, green hazel—dead stares; fixed forever on the last thing they'd seen.

Bond woke with a start, suddenly aware that he wasn't alone. His hand darted under the pillows and found the textured grips of the CCP, just as the white-clad figure sitting beside him came into focus.

"You need to wake," Linnea said. She still wore her corpse makeup and in the darkness of the hotel room, it seemed deeper and more textured, even disturbing.

"You," Bond said, his fingers still tight on the CCP beneath the pillows. "I came looking for you, but you'd gone."

"I came back," she replied.

"That bit's rather obvious. How long have you been here, and how did you get in?"

"I have ways," she whispered and leaned in to kiss him. Bond waited for the furtive movement, the tensing of her body that would telegraph the attack, but it did not come. There was just her body pressing down on his and the taste of her mouth.

"You most certainly do," he murmured when they parted. She sat up in the bed and pulled her gauzy wrap away in a single, fluid movement, and it seemed to drift away and get lost in the darkness like a puff of cigarette smoke. Bond took a moment to take in the sight of her body, then he placed his hand behind her head amid the bristly coil of braids, and pulled her in for another kiss. As their tongues touched, she viciously yanked the sheets away from his body and threw one leg over him.

"The dead know one thing," she whispered.

"It's better to be alive," Bond nodded.

She lowered herself onto him, and Bond grunted quietly as he slid inside of her. She was felt perfectly molded to take him—more than any woman he'd ever been with. Linnea gasped as she rocked atop of him and ground her pelvis into his.

"It's better to be alive," she whispered with new urgency. She whispered it several more times, and breathed it in Bond's cheek when she came.