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After Parker dies, Cib spends a while in a sort of stupor where he doesn't think much at all. He finds his way back into his right mind eventually and becomes, once more, relatively normal. He can tell that Steven doesn't really believe him when he says that he's fine, but Cib has blown all that bad business with Parker out with a cloud of smoke and watched it float away. It really is fine - only sometimes, these new thoughts come. And they come at night, mostly, or when he’s alone in unlit places; Parks and empty roads are to be avoided now.
Because – so goes the common thread in all these thoughts - Parker comes back in the night. He’s a zombie crossing the creaking floor, and Cib recognizes his peculiar gait. The guy can’t even walk normally. Parker hesitates a moment in the doorway before he slinks into Cib’s bedroom, collapsing by the foot end of the mattress. Sighing, he extends one heavy arm across the bed and rests his head on it, so that when Cib wakes at three AM he sees those empty eyes and Parker's forehead, damp and pale. He sees all of it to the smallest detail, even the dirt clinging to Parker’s hair. Perhaps a worm or two crawls across a sunken cheek. Parker doesn’t look accusing. He just looks dead, and that’s bad enough.
Parker comes back as a ghost, too, in a thick cloud of white vape smoke, skin the color of gauze except for where the dried blood paints a rust-brown splotch across his face. When Cib looks for the source of his shivers and chills, a cold hand traces his back; when he turns around, the touch moves to his stomach, his chest, his throat, light fingers placing little pinpricks of guilt until the vapour dissipates.
Parker comes back with the swarm of bats that fly between the bridges at dusk, teeth freakishly long and stomach empty, eager to fill all the hollows inside him – the empty holes where his heart and goddamn brain should've been so that he’d known better than to mess with Cib and Sami Jo. He’s out for blood. He’s a flicker of black and red in the corner of Cib’s eye in the parking lot after work.
All these fantasies.
Cib doesn't know that much about mythology, so eventually his mind runs out of monsters and starts inventing its own. Parker as that thing beneath the floorboards that makes them creak. Parker as that thing that moves Cib’s furniture around while he’s out, just an inch or so at a time but enough that he notices - or thinks that he notices, and second guesses himself in the doorway. Parker as the thing lurking in the park while Cib and Steven are trying to shoot a video. Parker as the eerie presence corrupting the footage on Steven's SD card. Parker as the subject of all Alfredo's cryptic references.
In some of the fantasies, when Cib spaces out in front of his computer, Parker is something to beat again - and again and again. The haunting ghost must be vanquished, or a stake must be driven through the vampire's heart. In those scenarios, Parker looks awful the way he looked awful in life. Weak and annoying. Sometimes they end up brawling on the floor, and Cib always wins in the end.
Other times, they fight and Cib doesn't fight back at all. The scenario plays out in Cib’s head and he sees Parker so clearly, rotting or otherwise decaying because they didn’t treat his body right. Didn’t get him buried well and good. He looks so pitiful, but that’s hardly new - only now it's disarming. He shouldn’t be capable of beating Cib down, but he is.
It's not really Parker's revenge that matters when Cib has that nightmare. What matters is how Cib finally gets what’s coming for him, the kind of punishment there ought to be for killing someone.
Most of the time he can avoid thinking about it. And he can shift the blame with a simple change of pronouns – we killed Parker, so there’s no reason Cib in particular should be haunted. It’s everybody’s fault, really. He walks around his house, around the city, makes videos, watches movies, jokes around.
But every once in a while, he wonders how Parker will come back.