by C. E. Murphy
I couldn’t even save myself. I had no idea how I was supposed to save her. All I had was a sword that wouldn’t kill zombies and magic that fed the undead until they took corporeal form.
All of a sudden I wondered what happened if you infused a killing weapon with life magic.
Smacking Cernunnos with a bolt of blue magic had made it very clear that my power was not meant to be a straight-out weapon. I’d nearly passed out, and that was from just one hit. I had no doubt that sustained blasts would drain my magic and leave me for the worms. Warrior’s path or not, there seemed to be things a shaman just didn’t get to do. But pouring healing power into a weapon, now that was tricksy, and all the gods and creatures of chaos liked trickery. Besides, I was facing the undead. If there was a modicum of fairness in the world, it would agree that going up against hordes of zombie beasties who were trying to eat me wasn’t at all in the same class as fighting a god who hadn’t done anything worse than attack without provocation.
Juxtaposing those two things made it really clear, once more, how humans tended to think choices were between one good thing and one bad thing. In fact, choices could just pile up on the side of suck without any kind of apology for it. Another zombie rat ran at my foot, and all my frustration and disgust exploded in a thin blue line down the length of my rapier. I stabbed downward with a shout and skewered the nasty little thing.
It exploded.
Bits of blue-white-lit flesh erupted everywhere, like a tiny box of fireworks had gone off at our feet. I yelled. Suzanne yelled. Doherty yelled. The attacking hordes of zombie critters didn’t yell, but they did stop their headlong rush and looked around, my sword’s light glowing in their undead eyes. My yell turned into a triumphant shout and I leaped forward, convinced I could scare off our attackers with a show of strength.
Sadly, zombies are not well known for their brilliance, and me and my glowy stick made a nice bright target for them. I swatted at flying things and stabbed at crawling things in what could kindly be called a panicked flail, while Suzanne blasted the shotgun. We backed up a few steps at a time, pausing so Suzy could reload, and we didn’t make it anywhere near the gates before the first human zombies crawled out of their graves.
I was not a horror-film buff. The thing about horror films, see, is that they’re scary. Scary, or gross, and I didn’t much like either of those things. Despite this, I’d grown up in America, and apparently there was a cinematic image of zombies lurching from their graves that was part of the überconsciousness, because in many ways, I’d seen the scene unfolding before me a dozen times before. Slow-moving cadavers in various stages of decay, their skin peeling back, their teeth exposed, their fingernails too long, their hair falling out, all oozed from the earth—it was more of an ooze than an erupt, since eruption connoted speed—and latched on to us with their rotting eyeballs and began slogging toward us in such stereotypical fashion that I actually glanced around for a camera crew and the pretty heroine who was about to get eaten.
Two things caught up with me at once: first, Suzy, Doherty and I were playing the part of the about-to-be-eaten leads, and second, that zombie movies simply could not in any way get across the smell that preceded our encroaching dance partners. Rotted meat and formaldehyde swept toward us on the cool night air, so ripe that tears burned my eyes. Doherty and Suzy both doubled over, retching, but I held sickness behind my teeth through one part willpower and one part practice from four months of homicide investigation. I whispered, “Get behind me,” and tried not to think about climbing into Petite with vomit on my shoes.
The other thing zombie movies didn’t get right was how dirty they were. Filthy, and not just with rot, but with ordinary mud and grit. I’d never tried digging my way through six feet of packed earth, but I could see it wasn’t a tidy endeavor. The very newest corpses looked as if they’d been in a mud fight, nothing worse, but the oldest were little more than black stickiness clinging to disintegrating bone.
Morbid curiosity made me look again, this time with the Sight, and I wished I hadn’t. There’d been something seductive in the dark, deathless—or deathly, I guess—quality of the cauldron. It’d offered a comforting cessation of everything, wrapping around to draw you into a silence that would never end.
Zombies were what happened to the bodies when it ended. Memories flickered around them like the auras they’d once had, but too far out of reach: fireflies teasing at the corners of their undead vision. Like reached for like, scattered memories reaching for the thoughts and recollections that living humans carried with them. That was what drove empty bodies: their hunger, not for flesh, but for all the moments and details and tribulations that made up a life.
Raging spirits like Matilda had a memory, however feeble, of what they’d been. The things crawling from their graves had less than that, only an echo of that memory. If the spirit world had stroke victims, zombies might qualify: they were empty, but they remembered they hadn’t always been, and they had no idea how to become more again. Looking at them was looking into a black hole of desperation and loathing, so thick I could drown in it; so thick they could only move slowly as they struggled through it toward us. Worse, I could feel myself slowing as I watched, their deadly ichor reaching for me and drawing me down.
I shuddered and shoved the Sight away, trusting normal vision to hold out against their insidious encroachment longer than magical vision could. “On the count of three, Suzy, I want you to run like hell for Petite.”
“For what?”
I bared my teeth at the zombies, not wanting to waste time turning to show Suzanne the expression. Besides, it wasn’t her fault. Her set of vast psychic powers included future-tripping, not mind reading. I wondered if anybody actually could read minds, then dragged mine back to the topic at hand. “My car. The purple Mustang outside the gates.” I dipped my hand into my front left pocket and dangled the keys behind me. “She’s solid steel. Hopefully that’ll keep the zombies out.”
“Steel windows, too?” Suzy asked with more sarcasm than I thought a girl about to be eaten by zombies should be able to command. I growled and she cocked the shotgun again, then muttered, “Okay, okay.”
“Bring Doherty with you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to cover your retreat.”
“That,” Suzanne announced disdainfully, “is a stupid plan. We should all run together.”
“Suzy, I don’t know if these things can move faster than they’re doing right now. I’d really rather not find out by turning our backs on them. Don’t you watch horror movies?” The fact that I didn’t seemed supremely irrelevant. You didn’t have to actually watch them to know you should never turn your back on the bad guys.
“Yes,” she said acerbically, “and the first thing that happens is all the idiots in the movie split up so the monsters can pick them off one by one.”
Shit. She was right. I shot a glance over my shoulder to meet her defiant glare, and groaned. “Okay, you win. All together. You’ve got the ranged weapon, though, so I’m staying in front.”
“What about me?” Doherty asked.
I risked another glare over my shoulder. “You can cower and let the hot chicks with weaponry protect you, or you can play bait and run toward the zombies while we run for the car.”
Doherty cowered. I muttered, “Thought so,” and turned back to our opponents under the cover of Suzanne’s scream and a blast from the shotgun.
Zombies, for the record, do not die from a face full of rock salt. They do, however, get blinded by it, which makes it a lot easier to stuff a glowing blue sword into their throats and rip their half-attached heads off. I wasn’t sure if that would stop one for good, but the one who’d attacked fell down, and that was a good start. Better yet, one of the monsters immediately behind it fell on its…corpse, for lack of a better word. I knew better, but I let the Sight come back for a moment so I could watch and confirm my suspicions.
The second zombie snatched and gob
bled at the flickering bits of memory that had taunted the first. Apparently they didn’t care much where their psychic food came from, so if we could create even a feeble wall of dead zombies—that was a Department of Redundancy Department phrase if I’d ever heard one—we might win ourselves a little time to make good an escape.
We got busy. My rapier made an absolutely gorgeous slash of brilliance against the fading light, magic pouring through it and burning away any gook or gunk that might have been inclined to darken its glory. Suzy took one step back with every blast of the shotgun, and Doherty…
Well, Doherty screamed like a little girl every time the gun roared and every time another body fell, but honestly, I couldn’t blame him. My own hands were slick with sweat and my stomach was roiling like I’d drunk half a gallon of seawater. The only reason I wasn’t joining him in the histrionics was Suzy’d bitch-slap me but good. That didn’t really make me feel any better about myself.
All of a sudden we’d made a little wall of zombie bodies, and those coming on from behind it were brawling, more eager for the scraps left by their fallen brethren than for us. Apparently the movies had gotten that right, too: zombies weren’t known for their scintillating wit, or one of them would’ve realized we were much tastier tidbits. The three of us stood there, breathless with surprise and relief, for about a nanosecond. Then our own scintillating wit caught up and we turned and ran like hell.
A faceless zombie lurched toward us from the side, too far from the original emptied graves to be distracted by the half dozen we’d downed. Suzy screamed and blasted it, and I jumped on top of it to chop its head off. Rapiers weren’t really meant for chopping, but I did a damn fine job even so. After a couple seconds I realized Suzy’s screams had words in them: “Can’t you do something about these things?”
Sheer mindless irrationality rose up in me and I flung my hands in the air. “I’m sorry! Somehow I forgot to pack the scarab launcher into Petite’s trunk this morning!”
“The what?” Suzanne dropped the shotgun’s barrels toward the ground and stared at me.
“The scarab launcher! You know! Scarabs eat flesh, zombies are flesh, so you fill a bazooka with scarabs and launch them and poof, no more zombies?” I sounded hysterical. Well, that stood to reason. I was hysterical. I was doing better than Doherty, though, who was crawling toward the gate, sobbing. Okay, now I felt sorry for the poor bastard. Not even an insurance adjudicator who was trying to screw me out of my claim deserved zombie attacks or the other peculiarities that were part of my life. I didn’t envy him the upcoming therapy bills.
Suzy, on the other hand, came to a full stop and gaped at me, far from looking as if she needed therapy. In fact, she looked like a young Norse goddess of some kind, her hair all tangled around her face and real strength in her slim body. Her green eyes glowed with admiration, which seemed all wrong, under the circumstances. “Scarab launchers,” she said with great sincerity. “That’s the most awesome idea I’ve ever heard.”
I said, “Thank you,” breathlessly, and then, because for once I felt a little too honest for my own good, I added, “I read it on the Internet.”
“I am totally getting a scarab launcher when we get out of here.” “She shot a look toward the zombies, then toward the gate, and said, “Which I kinda think we oughta do now.”
I picked Doherty up by the belt, and we ran for the gates.
Doherty stayed in Petite’s backseat where I threw him. Suzy, with whom I was growing more impressed by the moment, snatched up the bag of rock salt and poured it across the cemetery’s gated entrance as I slammed the gate itself shut. “Iron and salt,” she said with astonishing satisfaction. “That ought to keep them in.”
I wailed, “What, you just know that? I had to study to learn that! Does everyone but me just come pre-programmed with weird esoteric knowledge?”
Suzy, grinning, jerked a thumb toward Petite and Doherty. “You’re not the only one. He’s doing a lot worse than you are.”
Somehow that didn’t make me feel much better. Trusting Suzy and her shotgun and the salt-lined iron gate, I ran back into the chapel to discover I’d left the water bottle somewhere on the wrong side of the gate. Feeling like a complete moron, I stuffed my rapier through a belt loop and sank my cupped hands into the font, scooping up as much water as I could hold. There wasn’t much left by the time I raced back outside, but it was enough to throw through the gate and watch what happened to the zombies who’d made their way toward it.
Unfortunately, what happened was “absolutely nothing.” Apparently holy water did the trick on the mist, but once the zombies were risen, they were happy to stay that way.
“Right,” I said brightly. “Time to go.”
“What if the salt and iron don’t hold?”
I was certain there was a heroic answer to that, but instead of searching for it, I grabbed Suzanne’s arm and hauled her back to Petite. “Then we’ll be really, really glad we’re gone.”
She whispered, “Fair enough,” and a minute later we peeled out of there, leaving a cemetery full of cranky zombies behind.
CHAPTER 21
My cell phone rang before we got back to the precinct building. I dug it out of my pocket and flung it at Suzy: driving while talking on the phone was one of my major pet peeves, even if the state hadn’t introduced a law against it. She fumbled the phone, surprised, and looked uncertainly at me.
“What,” I said under my breath, “you didn’t think I was giving it to him, did you?” “Him” was Doherty, who had graduated from screaming to making these thin, bubbly whines of terror that were now turning to disbelief. I hadn’t yet figured out what to say to him, so I was doing my best to ignore the nasally tones from the backseat.
Suzanne looked over her shoulder and a complicated expression that more or less translated to “yeah, I see your point” danced over her pretty features. She answered the call with a surprisingly steady “Detective Joanne Walker’s phone.”
Billy’s voice shot up loud enough to be heard through a crappy cell-phone receiver and over the rumble of Petite’s engine: “Where the fuck is Detective Joanne Walker?”
“She’s driving,” Suzy said calmly.
Billy’s response was a lot more subdued; I couldn’t hear it. Suzy grinned and said, “That’s okay,” and then, “Suzanne Quinley. I’m—oh.” She whispered, “He knows who I am,” to me. I nodded and she went back to the conversation, reporting, “He says the holy-water brigade is under way, he wants to know where you are, he says to come back to the station and pick him up,” in little bursts.
I glanced toward the west, where a last few glimmers of sunshine faded over the horizon. The zombies at Crown Hill hadn’t waited for the actual sunset, only for the sun’s rays to no longer be touching it. I hoped the holy-water brigade was in time. I hoped we were all in time. “Yeah,” I finally said. “Tell him I’m coming back to the office because I gotta take five minutes and think. In the meantime…”
“In the meantime,” Suzanne picked up briskly, “you should get police officers out to the cemeteries and have them ringed with salt. And issue a citywide warning to stay indoors. Detective Walker’s sword can kill the zombies, but we don’t know what else can, so if you can get people to stay inside it’s better.”
I did a double-take at her and she shrugged. “It’s like a disaster movie. I’m just following the rules for survival.”
“Man. Remind me to have you on my side when the zombie apocalypse comes.” I squinted at the road. “That was funnier in my head.”
Suzy grinned anyway. “I know what you mean.”
“Oh, good.” We made the rest of the drive in relative silence, accompanied only by Doherty’s hysterical whimpers. I wanted to throttle him as much as I felt sorry for him. I’d be just as happy to hide in the backseat sniveling, myself. I didn’t like zombies. Of all the things I’d faced, zombies just creeped me out on a visceral level, and I’d have done pretty much anything not to have to deal with them. Sadly
for me, the only way I’d be able not to deal with them was to deal with them so they’d be gone, so I stuffed my own whinging terror into a box and dragged Doherty out of Petite’s backseat when we got to the precinct building. “Go home, Doherty. Go home and lock the doors.”
“How? You left my car at the cemetery. Wh—” He was a little guy. It probably wasn’t his fault he looked like a miserable hobbit from my perspective. Still, with tears welling up in his big blue eyes and those pretty, chiseled features, I couldn’t help thinking he was turning it all on in hopes of securing a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. “What was all that?”
Half a dozen snide answers leaped to the fore. I mean, really, it seemed like a dumb-ass question, but a year ago I’d have been asking the same thing, because I wouldn’t have let myself believe my eyes. I sighed and propelled him toward the precinct building. “What do you want, Mr. Doherty? Do you want the truth? If I tell you it’s what you want it to be, an incredibly well-realized film production, are you going to go home and write up our madcap race out of there as a liability and refuse me my insurance claim?”
His jaw dropped. So did Suzy’s, for that matter. Apparently when faced with zombie attacks, I wasn’t supposed to be petty enough to worry about my insurance. Well, they weren’t paying premiums on vehicles older than they were, and I’d done the end of the world a couple times already, so I got to choose my priorities. “I’ll get you the Miata back tomorrow morning. If you want to stay at the precinct building overnight, that’s probably safest. In the meantime, how about you sit and consider the trouble we might’ve been in if I wasn’t driving a 1969 steel-frame race car?”
Doherty reeled out from under my hand and wobbled to a wall, which he slid down, and laced his fingers behind his head. I dropped my chin to my chest and sighed. “It was a film, Mr. Doherty. They asked me to play a bit part at a graveyard because Petite’s such a great getaway car, but I won’t let anyone else drive her. Look, I’m sure somebody around here’s got a bottle of booze. Why don’t you hunt it down, have a stiff drink, and tomorrow morning everything will be back to normal, okay?”