by C. C. Mahon
Nate, on the other hand, seemed to hardly notice my intervention. Worse, he tried to backhand. I let go of his hair while I was dodging his long claws then kicked him in the family jewels. The blood withdrew from his face, his claws retracted, and he toppled over on the asphalt in the fetal position. The crowd shouted its disappointment at being deprived of the show so quickly.
I turned to the meta-wolf, who I still held by the ear. “Sit, stay!” I ordered. Then to the audience, “Can someone tell me what started this circus?”
Suddenly, the asphalt became exciting, and everyone worked hard to study the ground at their feet. The circle widened, broke. The customers lined up again in a straight line along the sidewalk.
“Didn’t anyone see anything?” I said.
A young girl stepped forward. She must have been fifteen or sixteen years old. Her hair was purple, her clothes black, and her platform boots added a good three inches to her height. I had already seen her at the club. She had just enough power to know the magic world and was too young to drink alcohol. I let her into the club so she wouldn’t fall back on the Take a Chance, the other supernatural bar in town, where wildlife had a much darker reputation.
“Nate assaulted the other guy,” she said. “I don’t know why. I was too far away to hear them.”
I turned to the accused, who did not seem able to defend himself for the moment, busy as he was crying over the condition of his gonads. So I looked at the meta-wolf.
“I joked,” said the wolf, “and he jumped me!”
I stared at him to guess if he was bullshitting me. But he seemed really contrite and quite confused.
“Could you let go of my ear?” he asked. “It really hurts…”
I freed him. “Go home tonight,” I said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
And since my bouncer was still out of order, I took his place at the door and started filtering the entries.
“I didn’t know Nate was so irritable,” Lola breathed to me.
“He’s not,” I said. “Not in normal times. But since the explosion, I find him strange. He is mad at me, and I don’t understand why. He gets into a huff for nothing, and now this…”
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“Not right away. I think he’s a little angry with me now.”
A few yards away, in the middle of the street, Nate was gradually coming to his senses. He had managed to sit down, but his hair fell back on his face, and his lowered head left his expression in the shadows.
“Well,” I told Lola, “I’m not spending the rest of the night here. Can you come down and ask Gertrude to take over for me?”
“About Gertrude,” Lola said. “Is it me, or did she grow up?”
Gertrude came to take over with her magic hammer in hand. Having a troll as a bouncer was already impressive in itself. Having a troll with Mjölnir’s little brother was a luxury. And then Lola was right: Gertrude had grown a few inches recently.
But all the regulars knew that Gertrude had a heart of gold and was sweet as a lamb.
I went back to the bar, where the conversations were going well.
“Hey, boss!” said Johnny. “Is it true what they say? Nate and a wolf turned in the street in front of humans?”
“Of course not. They got into a fight like two drunk guys, and at this time of night, there are only club customers on the street. Where the hell is Lola?”
Johnny pointed to the kitchen door for me. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go in there right away,” he says. “There’s a lover’s quarrel in progress.”
“Why do you say that?”
“An impression, and some sounds of broken dishes,” said Johnny wisely.
9
The kitchen door suddenly opened, and a blond tornado came straight at me. “Ah, there you are,” Lola said, grabbing my arm. “Dale’s waiting for us at the morgue.”
“What… What? At this time of night? Why?”
“I’ll explain on the way. Come on, get off your ass.”
I let her drag me to the exit of my own club. I only had time to warn Gertrude, “Close the doors when you have to leave, and tell Johnny to take care of the rest.”
Already, Lola was dragging me to her car.
It was an old piece of rust that she liked to use when she went to the wrong parts of the city. Despite appearances, the car was in perfect working order.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I asked.
“Trouble at the morgue.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“When I told Dale where I was, he demanded that I take you. I didn’t get an explanation. Well, are you coming or what?”
“Okay, but I’m following you on my motorcycle. My wings don’t fit in your car.”
“I’ll ask for a police convertible,” grumbled Lola.
The Las Vegas morgue was located a stone’s throw from the city center, between the highway and the hospital, which was supposed to reduce travel times for users.
The highway was closed, and if I judged by the number of emergency vehicle lights, there must have been quite a pileup. But that was apparently not what interested Lola; she took a detour and made us zigzag between hangars and outbuildings of the university hospital, up to the parking lot of the forensic center.
It was a group of low buildings, ocher and white, in the middle of a large parking lot. At this more than late hour, I was expecting to find the place deserted, with the possible exception of a few ambulances from the pileup. Nothing had prepared me for the show that was before us.
In the back of the morgue, between a few vans parked there for the night, I discovered a group of about thirty people, naked as the day they were born. In front of them was a handful of uniformed cops. The cops had their guns out, pointing them at the nudist group. A few police cars threw two-tone lights on the stage, reinforcing its surrealist nature.
I stopped next to Lola’s car. “Can you tell me—” I started.
“King!” cried a male voice. “St. Gilles! There you are at last.”
Oliver Dale was fast approaching. Lola nodded at him. She still hadn’t digested Dale stealing her promotion from under her. For my part, I didn’t know how to dance with the old man.
“What is this circus?” Lola said, pointing to the group of nudists.
“The residents of the morgue,” said Dale. “They woke up less than an hour ago.”
“Excuse me?” said Lola.
“You heard me,” Dale replied. “I called Marcellin. He agreed to take care of them, and he sent some of his people with air-conditioned vans. I just need someone to look after this little group until then. The guys on duty tonight are a little overwhelmed right now.”
He indicated the cops behind him, who were pointing their guns at the group of zombies, repeating, “Nobody move!” on a loop, like in a movie.
“Marcellin, he’s the leader of the local zombies?” I said.
I wasn’t very familiar with the undead. They rarely left their air-conditioned offices.
“WHAT?” exclaimed Lola.
“Zombies,” Dale repeated in a dry tone. “Try to keep up, King. And yes, he is their team leader.”
“Is it normal, a breakout of thirty zombies all at once?” I said.
“It happens, but it’s rare,” Dale said.
“Another trick of the magic leak?” I asked.
“It’s probable,” said Dale. “Or Marcellin has decided to launch a recruitment campaign. Customs will clear this up if Becky’s teams have time.”
Lola’s gaze went from Dale to me in increasingly frustrated comings and goings.
“Can you tell me what’s going on? Dale, since when are you a zombie specialist? And since when are there zombies in real life?”
“Oh,” Dale began innocently, “I just jumped on that bandwagon…”
“No!” I said. “That’s enough. It’s time to tell her. She deserves it, and given the way things are going, we cannot afford the luxury of su
ch a secret.”
Lola’s right eyebrow jumped to the root of her blond hair. “Secret?” she said. “What secret?”
I looked at Dale, but he didn’t seem willing to spill the beans. I took Lola by the shoulders to talk face to face. “Remember after the explosion, when you saw my wings?”
“It’s hard to forget.”
“I explained to you that I had become a Valkyrie.”
“And I still haven’t decided what to think of it.”
“I told you who had ‘promoted’ me,” I continued.
“Odin?”
I agreed and pointed to Dale. “Odin…O. Dale.”
“Are you kidding me?”
She turned to Dale, who affected a modest look, which his smile denied.
“But it’s not fair!” exclaimed Lola. “Of course he got this promotion before all the others! How can I compete with my little diploma and my impeccable service record if a god comes to cheat his way up? That’s disgusting!”
She crossed her arms and ostensibly turned her back, still muttering between her teeth.
“Uh…” I said. “Lola? You learn that your boss is a god, and all that comes to mind is that he cheated you out of a promotion?”
She muttered a few more moments before replying. “What else do you want me to say? You’ve already introduced me to metamorphs, witches, and guys with giant spider legs. You went from owning a nightclub to being a Valkyrie. My boss just interrupted my fight with a psychic vampire to call me on a zombie demonstration. When do you think I should set the limit of credibility?”
“King…” started Dale with his reasonable, fatherly voice.
She turned around and waved her index finger under her nose. “You, keep quiet! I haven’t forgiven you for the unfair promotion. Not to mention the constant lies. When were you planning on telling me?”
He had the good taste to look embarrassed.
At that moment, something moved behind him. The cops started shouting contradictory orders, and a gunshot rang out.
“Cease fire!” shouted Dale.
“Who fired?” asked Lola.
A young cop raised a shaky hand. “I thought they were moving…”
In the front row of the zombie group, a skinny old woman looked at the hole that was now opening in the middle of her chest. “I just wanted to sit down,” she said in a plaintive voice. “I’m not so young anymore…”
“Excellent idea,” Lola said. “Everyone, sit on the floor. No, Hendricks, not the police. Only the zombies.”
I let Lola take matters into her own hands and lured Dale away. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Well, you’re Valkyrie. The dead are kind of your core business.”
“My job description is about warriors who died in battle, not freshly resuscitated zombies. And then you told me I had to protect the people of Vegas…”
“Exactly. The zombies are part of your charming little supernatural community. And as you can see, the police cannot ensure their safety.”
I contemplated the group of undead, sitting cross-legged on the ground like a class of schoolchildren on an excursion. The old woman who moved was now looking at the hole in her skinny chest with a sad expression. A little further back, a young man, covered in tattoos, looked nervously around him as if searching for an opportunity to bail. He seemed more angry than scared. The others seemed mostly disoriented. A teenager swung back and forth as if to calm himself. His chest had exploded, probably under the impact of a large-caliber bullet. There probably wasn’t much left of his heart. Poor kid. Men with bodies softened by age tried to hide their genitals. In the same spirit, a young woman with beautiful red hair stained with dried blood sat down not cross-legged, but on her knees, like The Little Mermaid on her rock. She seemed to find the position uncomfortable, perhaps because the parking lot was strewn with gravel, and wriggled nervously while straightening her long hair to hide her chest.
But no one wanted to ogle anyone, and the handful of police officers facing the nudists stared at them with eyes wide with disgust.
“Is Marcellin coming soon?”
Dale checked his watch. “Any minute now. I guess the accident on the highway delayed them.”
“Okay. Lola and I will stay there until the other zombies take care of these ones. But you’re taking your men with you. They need a break and a few years with a shrink.”
10
Alone at last, with Lola and thirty beginner zombies, I started to pace back and forth in the parking lot. This wasn’t how I had planned to end my night, with about thirty zombies who came back to life all at once and police officers as witnesses… Add this to the firemen waking up covered in fur and the fugitive backhoe; the secret surrounding the supernatural world was cracking at high speed.
Half a dozen minibuses entered the parking lot at full speed and stopped by us in a concert of tire squeaks. A guy in jeans with a Donkey Kong T-shirt jumped to the ground.
“Marcellin?” I said.
“No, I’m his mirror.” I looked at him and wondered if he was making fun of me. He ended up specifying. “Consider me his right-hand man. I’ve come to take care of the new recruits.”
“Um…yes, okay. I’m Erica. The jaded blonde is Detective King. And your zombies are here.”
Half a dozen men and women got out of the minibuses and headed for the zombies. They helped them get up and guided them to the vehicles.
“Say,” I said to the “mirror,” “did you decide to prank the medical examiners?”
“Not at all! The team had nothing to do with this case. But we are happy to welcome our new team members.”
“Is that normal, thirty new team members in one night?”
“Not really,” admitted the mirror. “In fact, since I started working for Marcellin, I’ve never seen anything like it. We should investigate where the bacteria came from.”
“What bacteria?” Lola intervened.
“The one that turned these bodies into zombies,” said the mirror.
“Is it a disease?”
“A symbiosis.”
“But it’s contagious?” she asked.
He pouted. “You could say that. But I don’t see how a place as regulated as a morgue could have been contaminated. Marcellin is angry.”
“He won’t be the only one,” Lola said. “The coroner’s gonna have a stroke.”
“And Customs will want answers,” I said.
The mirror shrugged. “Customs is already overwhelmed with these ley lines problems, and I don’t work for the coroner.” Then, turning towards the minibuses, he said, “Has everyone boarded? Great. Let’s get out of here!”
Zombies, mirrors, and minibuses disappeared in the night, and the morgue parking lot was quiet again.
“Let’s have a look inside,” I suggested.
I pointed to the metal shutters, which were opened to reveal a cavernous entrance.
“That’s where the funeral directors come to collect the bodies,” said Lola.
“That explains the smell,” I said as I crossed the threshold.
We were in some kind of concrete garage. There were a few stretchers and empty body bags in a corner. Lola walked through the area to a double swing door leading to the rest of the morgue.
“Strange,” she said, “it’s not closed.”
The corridor was lit by pale neon lights. Not a sound. I followed Lola into a large room with a wall entirely occupied by stainless steel doors.
“The fridge,” said Lola. “That’s where they keep the bodies.”
All the doors were open, all the drawers empty.
“Apparently everyone’s gone,” I said.
Lola stood in front of the empty fridge.
“Are you thinking of the impermanence of existence?” I asked.
“No, I was thinking I liked it better when dead people stayed in their place.”
I led her back into the hallway, looking for a night guard or any other witness who could shed light on what had just happe
ned. But there were no more living people than dead ones in the building. It seemed that all the employees had fled when their residents came back from the dead.
“We won’t learn anything tonight,” I decreed. “Can I buy you a drink to recover from your emotions?”
Lola shook her head. “It’s late, and a long day’s work awaits me in a few hours.”
“Dale can give you the morning.”
“No, I want to get to the bottom of this. The ‘mirror’ is right. A morgue should not be contaminated with such bacteria.”
“Are you thinking sabotage?”
“Sabotage, terrorist act, or proselytism, I don’t know, but it worries me. What if it happens again, but in a school? Can you imagine?”
I tried very hard not to imagine. “I think the bacteria only settles in dead bodies,” I said.
“The hospital is not far from the morgue, and people die there all the time.”
“You say that like it’s a serial killer’s lair.”
“I don’t like hospitals…”
“I know, their coffee is terrible.”
She let out a little laugh, nervous and close to exhaustion.
“Okay,” I said. “What time do we meet?”
As she started protesting, I reminded her that Dale had also put me on the case.
“Eight o’clock,” she said.
“What? But that’s in three hours!”
“Then I suggest you sleep quickly,” Lola said.
I grumbled back to the club and saw Johnny as he was about to go home.
“I just closed,” he said. “I left the money in the cash drawer since I don’t have the key to the safe. Is everything all right?”
“The morgue residents have turned into zombies, and I have three hours to sleep before I get back on track.”
I guess I wasn’t very coherent. Johnny gave me a worried look, wished me a good day, and left without further ado.
11
Even during the day and without zombies, the morgue was not quiet.
I had expected deserted corridors, sanitized autopsy rooms, and of course, a dead silence.