by Alex P. Berg
I swallowed back a lump in my throat and spoke with far more confidence than I felt. “In case you haven’t noticed, Bellamy, there are four of us and only one of you, and no amount of freaky resurrection magic will change that.”
Bellamy laughed a grim laugh, and I realized how stupid that last statement sounded. But despite whatever power Bellamy might possess, I didn’t think he could raise an army of the dead before I introduced Daisy to his skull.
I took two quick steps in his direction. Bellamy skirted to the grave’s side, over near the shovels, but thanks to his limp, he didn’t move quickly. I smiled. Ending this would be easier than I’d thought.
“Ah, but Detective,” said Bellamy as he inched toward the mist. “You didn’t think I dug this hole myself, did you?”
Three shovels. One middle-aged man with a limp. I’d curse myself for missing that later, at a more pleasant time when there wasn’t a snarling zombie lunging at me from out of the mist.
42
A big guy, shabbily dressed and cut from the same cloth as Lanky and Burly, hit me square in the chest with the force of a donkey’s kick, knocking me into a thorny bush that tore at my coat as I fell. I grunted as my back hit the earth, and again as the man landed on top of me. His long matted hair fell in my face, bringing with it a strong unwashed odor and the same scents of decay I’d smelled on Burly’s corpse and underneath the residual incense in Bellamy’s basement quarters.
I heard Shay scream and Quinto roar, but all I could see from the confines of my bush was a collection of tiny thorns and the bearded face of my homeless attacker, staring at me with cold, dead, unmoving eyes.
Thanks to my occasional dabbling in classic horror fiction, I knew what to expect from the soulless husk. He’d moan and drool all over me, bellyache about his insatiable hunger for brains, and try to bite me in the neck. Fortunately, I’d be able to outwit him and avoid his chompers and molasses-slow blows through my superior intellect and speed.
Unfortunately for me, everything I’d ever read about zombies had been written by ignorant hacks. I cocked a shot at his face with Daisy, but he avoided it with alarming speed—the same speed as a living man’s. Then instead of biting me, his hands shot to my neck, and he pressed his fingers into the soft flesh around my windpipe.
I clawed at his mitts with my free hand and whacked him in the back with my truncheon with the other, which produced not so much as a grunt. I tried again, harder this time, with the same result.
The pressure around my neck increased, so I focused my labors to dislodge the man’s fingers, and I found some success. I pried a few of them off me for a split second—long enough for me to take a ragged gasp—before he slapped my hand away and redoubled his efforts. I kneed him in the groin, hoping that might have some effect where the blow to his ribs hadn’t, but he didn’t even flinch.
Gods, the guy was strong! Blood pounded in my temples as spots danced in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t help but think of Vo. He must’ve lain there, thrashing as blackness enveloped him, stabbing Lanky over and over with the letter opener, hoping each subsequent puncture would break off his attack in a way the previous dozen hadn’t.
I couldn’t make the same mistake Vo did. My attacker wouldn’t feel pain, wouldn’t care if I broke his ribs and flattened his testicles into pancakes. Only the fundamentals of anatomy and physiology could save me.
With my vision blurring and my lungs burning, I reached up and hooked my elbow over my attacker’s shoulder. Either because of hubris or a lack of functioning brain cells—perhaps the horror writers had been right about that part—the zombie didn’t move to stop me, focused as he was on my suffocation.
I gripped my wrist with my free hand and yanked with all the might I had left. A reassuring pop greeted my ears, and the pressure from one side of the zombie’s grip disappeared.
With one arm dislocated, Rotface became a more manageable assailant. I rolled, tore my neck out of his remaining grip, and shot to my feet. Blood rushed to my head and I staggered, but thankfully the zombie hadn’t discovered the extent of the damage to his arm. As he tried to leverage himself up with an arm that wouldn’t hold weight, I slammed Daisy into his kneecap and followed that with a hefty stomp. His leg crunched and popped in sickening fashion, but I figured he’d have a hard time following me without functioning knee ligaments.
I tried to orient myself as I turned back toward the grave, which glowed with a renewed fury. Before me, Quinto roared and bucked like a bronco as three undead vagrants of varying size clung to his arms and back and tried to choke him into submission. His bellows echoed off the trees, but they couldn’t quite drown out a low-pitched sobbing off to my side—Chester, who’d curled into a ball and tucked himself between a pair of tombstones to avoid the melee. Apparently, the undead didn’t view him as a threat. That, or Bellamy had ordered them not to attack him unless absolutely necessary.
I swung my eyes desperately around the scene. Someone was missing.
“Shay!” I called. “SHAY!”
“Over here!” she called, followed by a shriek.
I turned toward the sound, only to be staggered by the force of a body slamming into me from behind. An arm wrapped itself around my neck—that of another homeless zombie, based on the accompanying smell—and squeezed.
I muttered “Not again,” except thanks to the pressure of the rotting flesh around my neck, it came out more as, “Nurgurgh agah!”
My new assailant’s point of attack put me in a compromising position, one without ready access to his joints and sockets, so I called upon my nonexistent martial arts training to save me. I reached up, grabbed the guy’s coat collar, and pitched forward as I bent at the waist. The zombie sailed over me, wrenching on my neck with so much force I thought he might break it, but at the three quarters mark of his arc I slipped free and he collided with the ground, bouncing off it with a thump.
“Daggers!” Shay’s voice reached me through the carnage, but I couldn’t tell from where. “Are you ok?”
If she was asking me, I assumed she was, too. Perhaps, as with Chester, the zombies were largely ignoring her, seeing Quinto and me as the bigger threats—which, literally, we were. I aimed a kick at the undead dude at the ground and opened my mouth to answer yes when another unwashed body slammed into me.
“Do something, Steele!” I yelled as I grappled with the new interloper.
“Do what?” she said.
I tried to locate her voice. Where was she? “I don’t know. You may not be psychic, but you know more about magic than any of the rest of us. Think of something!”
Something grabbed my ankle and yanked, and I fell onto my posterior with a bone-shaking thud. The newest zombie rolled on top of me as the one I’d deposited onto the ground crawled toward me. Quinto stumbled through my line of sight, bellowing and spinning as he tried to dislodge a pair of drifters clinging to his back.
I heard a swish, as if from a sword whistling through the air, and a voice I’d forgotten about. Bellamy’s. “Come out, come out wherever you are you, sneaky little half-breed.”
Another swish. Steele’s frightened cry. I had to help her.
I slapped a zombie hand away from my throat and kicked out, trying to dislodge the guy on me, but the second of the walking—or in this case crawling—undead brought his weight down on my arm, giving the first guy a new opening. Strong hands clamped back on my throat.
Still another swish through the air. Bellamy’s voice again. “Come here, you little bitch.”
The pressure on my throat intensified. Where was Quinto? Why wasn’t Chester doing anything? I tried to reach for the zombie’s shoulder, but his pal lay on my arm. I could barely move.
I heard a meaty whump, followed by a pained “Urnghh…” Then Steele’s angry voice. “Who’s the bitch now, Bellamy?”
The fingers around my neck loosened. Whatever Shay had done had worked. I tried to call out for her to continue, but I still had a thumb jammed into my windpipe, so it came
out as another choked warble.
Steele figured out what to do without my advice. A ringing, metallic twang filled the air, and both of my undead attackers went limp—which of course meant the one on top of me tried to smother me with his weight.
I groaned and pushed the rotting corpse off me as I stumbled to my feet. In the fading orange glow of the open grave, I spotted Steele, perched over Bellamy’s still form, one of the shovels gripped in her hands and raised overhead. She looked ready to whack him again should he move.
Quinto approached the grave, dusting his tweed jacket and rubbing his neck. He looked around nervously, his face ashen. “Ugh…thanks Steele. But how’d you know taking out Bellamy would stop his minions?”
Steele took a deep breath. Her arms shook, likely from the adrenaline shooting through her veins. “Well, what Daggers said sparked something inside me. These men… These dead men—” She shuddered. “They’re not zombies or revenants or whatever you want to call them. They can’t be, despite whatever Bellamy might’ve believed. If they were, we would’ve had to invent a whole new branch of magic to explain their presence. But they could be golems—of a sort, anyway. And while golems can be infused with commands and weighting structures to give them a semblance of intelligence, they can’t think for themselves. They require active concentration to manipulate. So…”
“So you decided to end that concentration with a hearty shovel whack to Bellamy’s head,” I said.
Shay nodded. “That’s right. Although the initial kick to his balls didn’t hurt, either. Well…it did for him. But that was the point.”
I took a deep breath and rubbed my own neck, which along with my tailbone would be inordinately sore in the morning. My heart, which beat in my chest as if I’d attempted to run a marathon, finally started to slow. Chester’s soft cry hovered at the edge of my hearing, and the encroaching mist, which earlier felt cold, now felt delectable on my sweat-soaked brow.
“Guys,” said Quinto in a soft voice. “Can we, uh…talk about what happened here? It might help me sleep better at night if we did.”
“Save it for the psychiatrist’s office,” I said. “Right now we have an unenviable mess to clean up. But…something tells me we should take care of Bellamy first.”
Believe it or not, nobody disagreed with me.
43
I leaned against a brick wall—the side of an apartment building in the process of being remodeled. The workers refinishing and cleaning it had long since gone home, likely with the light of day still at their backs, but now a new workforce swarmed around it. At least a dozen bluecoats, manning the torches and lanterns they’d set up, shooing errant spectators, guarding the back of the paddy wagon they’d brought with them from the precinct and keeping the horses that drew the thing calm. At least another dozen lent their intermittent presence to the mix as they shuffled back and forth between our current location and the Lowgate Cemetery three blocks to the north, bagging and tagging the bodies of the murdered vagrants—after wrapping them in tight coils of rope.
I took a sip of coffee to warm my gut. Someone had been smart enough to fill my thermos and bring it with them on route from the station. Of course, we’d need about a barrelful to sate the thirst of all the bluecoats who’d come to help, which was why I’d requisitioned the thermos for my own purposes.
Shay stood at my side, staring at the paddy wagon with her arms crossed. She looked cold.
I offered her the thermos. “Coffee?”
She gave me a distracted glance. “You know I don’t drink that.”
“It would warm you up,” I said. “I know it’s not tea, but once you get over the bitterness, it’s not that bad. Heck, it even grows on you after a while.”
“That’s called caffeine addiction, Daggers.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. So long as it’s cheap, readily available, and legal, I’m not sure what the problem is. Besides, the only adverse side effects from it are lack of sleep and increased cognitive ability, and the first one’s never been a problem for me.”
Shay gave me a subdued wave of her hand. “It’s ok. But thanks.”
I heard a crunch of gravel and looked up to find the Captain, clad in a heavy liver-colored trench coat, approaching. As usual, he looked happy enough to dance a jig and break into song.
“Daggers, what the world is this carnival?” he said.
“Not a carnival,” I said with a shake of my finger. “I like to think of it as a mobile command center, where I’m the ring master and all these bluecoats are my faithful employees.”
“You mean your carnies?” said the Captain.
I tipped back the last of my coffee and returned the thermos’s cap to its rightful throne. “Yeah, come to think of it, that was a carnival analogy, wasn’t it?”
“You know, Daggers,” barked the bulldog, “as much as I love large, unscheduled police expenditures that you call in without prior authorization thanks to your immeasurable ability to bluster people into submission, you still haven’t explained what the hell is going on or why we’re standing out in the cold in the middle of the night instead of warm in our beds, or in the worst case scenario, back at the precinct.”
“Well, to be honest, Captain,” I said, “I decided it wasn’t a good idea to bring our captive into close proximity of the station’s morgue.”
The old jarhead narrowed his eyes. “Say what?”
“Our murderer,” I said. “We caught him. He’s a necromancer. Although he doesn’t think of himself as such. He calls himself an ‘agent of divine rebirth.’ It’s…beyond creepy.”
The Captain shifted his granite-like gaze to Steele. “Did he get knocked in the head?”
“Possibly, sir,” said Steele. “It got hairy at times. But he’s not pulling your leg.”
“No,” I said. “Though that did happen to me. Literally. A zombie did it. Bruised my tailbone.” I pointed for emphasis.
“I’m telling you, that word isn’t accurate,” said Shay. “Husk or golem would be more appropriate.”
The Captain blinked and shook his head. “I think you two had better back up. Preferably to a point in the story that doesn’t include any shambling, mindless brain eaters.”
I lifted a finger. “Actually, they don’t eat brains—”
The Captain glared at me and ground his teeth.
“—but I understand what you’re getting at,” I finished. “The point is, we captured the man behind the homeless men’s murders. A pastor by the name of Julian Bellamy. And, unfortunately, the situation was far worse than we realized. It appears he murdered at least eight transients, including the two we found over the past thirty-six hours.”
“So the man’s a serial killer?” asked the Captain.
“No, sir,” said Steele. “Apparently most of the murders—and subsequent resurrections, if you can call them that—were for practice purposes. With the exception of the last couple. He had other plans for them.”
“I’m not feeling any more enlightened than I was thirty seconds ago, detectives,” said the Captain.
“Then bear with me as I give you a little backstory,” I said. “Once upon a time, our murderer, Julian Bellamy, was married to a woman by the name of Tabitha. She shared the same ideals as him, including her belief in their shared religion, that of the Divine Rebirth. It’s a complicated thing focused on reincarnation of souls and trees and whatnot. Don’t ask. But apparently a couple of Tabitha’s relatives died, one after another in close succession, and her faith weakened. What was the point of reincarnation if someone you cared for, or you yourself, came back as a tree or a sea snail? Did you retain any of the memories that made you the person you were? Or were those memories, those experiences, gone forever?
“These were the sorts of questions that eventually made her lose her faith in the Divine Rebirth entirely. She divorced Julian and promptly joined a new congregation, that of the Holy Oblivion, a religion that espouses the concepts of fatality and nothingness after death. There she met a
deacon by the name of Cornelius Vo, whom she married.
“But her ex-husband Julian wouldn’t leave her alone. He followed her, harassing her at every opportunity—although he doesn’t see it that way. He was trying to convert her back to his religion, and in the process, he hoped to win back her love. But his efforts didn’t succeed. If anything, they deepened Tabitha’s depression, as did Vo’s own fierce rebuttals of Julian’s creed. She no longer knew what faith to believe in. So she decided to test the true path of the soul after death for herself. Following a violent argument between Bellamy and Vo, Tabitha killed herself by jumping out a window at the Church of the Holy Oblivion.”
“At first,” said Steele, “we thought Tabitha had been murdered, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Elmswood investigated her death a year ago and ruled it a suicide, and after revisiting what we’ve learned since, we haven’t found anything to contradict that. And Bellamy is adamant she committed suicide, for what it’s worth. Once he broke, he seemed perfectly willing to tell us the truth about everything. I don’t know why he’d lie about that.”
“You already interrogated him?” asked the Captain.
I nodded.
“And where is he?” asked the bulldog.
“In the paddy wagon,” said Steele. “Don’t worry. He’s bound and gagged. And he needs to be within a reasonable distance from his, err, victims should we say to be able to manipulate them. At least…we think so.”
“Very well,” said the Captain. “Now can we pick up the pace? Why did this man murder all those hobos?”
“I’m getting to that,” I said. “After Tabitha’s death, Julian couldn’t stop thinking about her religious quandary, but he remained as pious as ever. More so, in fact. See, he knew the Divine Rebirth was the one, true religion to be trusted in, mostly because of his unique talent. He’d never mentioned it to Tabitha, or even put much effort into it, but he’d seen the divine rebirth with his own eyes. Organisms—bugs, mostly—had come back into life in his presence—infused with new souls, or perhaps their original ones. He considered himself a conduit for his religion. He learned and experimented, first on rodents and small animals before moving on to people. So when Steele says his murders of the transients was practice, it was. Practice for the eventual resurrection of his wife—who he couldn’t wait to convince of the veracity of his religion.”