by Lynn Red
He laughed, I didn’t. “Erik, he might be old, but from what they’re saying, he’s more of a threat than you’re letting on. Or is this just you playing cool?”
Duggan shuffled up to where Erik sat, and addressed him. “I worry that Jenga might finally have lost his last nut, Erik. If he really has pulled our old alpha up from the ground, what on earth could he be doing it for?”
At that, Jamie stood up and stretched her arms wide, spreading her fingers. That’s the thing about bats – those long bones in their wings are just fingers with skin between them, so Jamie’s got a whole lot of finger to stretch.
“You’re talking crazy,” she said. “I saw him myself. Am I missing something, or is everyone who remembers him going nuts, and jumping off a building onto a bunch of rebar that went right through him forgetting the most important part of all that? Meaning – he was quite a mess. That wouldn’t make a very stable zombie.”
Clay shook his head. His eyes darted back and forth like he was thinking, but like he was also about to do something sneaky. He wasn’t, of course, but that’s just kind of what hyena eyes do.
“Jenga’s been working.” Clay’s voice was halting and quick, just like his glances. “Coulda patched him up, got him running good again.”
Erik raised an eyebrow. “I don’t... is that possible? To make a corpse better?”
Clay nodded. “I don’t see why not, I mean practice makes perfect, right? Surely after all these years trying, that crazy old coot might’ve got it right?”
Erik shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, Jenga’s zombies, even the ones that work correctly, er, so to speak, aren’t exactly stalwart. He uses them to pick fruits around his house, to turn his generator and things. I’m having trouble imagining a scenario where he’s re-animated a ten-year old corpse and has some grand plans with it past, I dunno, having it show up in a drive-through for a prank.”
“Dinna mean he couldna figured out some other way to do it,” one of the less-vocal councilmembers said. I couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he was wearing blue coveralls and was chewing a cigar. “Or maybe he just got better, know what I mean?”
“Not really, Fergus,” Erik said. “Maybe give me a little something more to work with?”
Fergus McDonald – he’s a Scotsman who farms outside of town and a member of the panther troupe. That always entertained me because I can’t think of a single thing less Scottish than a panther.
As he interrogated the old farmer, Erik gave me one hell of a hungry look. I pinched up my lips and shook my head ‘no’, but I’m sure he just took that as a challenge instead of a rebuttal. Sometimes the brash smugness has its advantages. Somehow, even though the tightness between my legs was just as unrelenting as Erik’s naughty mind, I managed to keep my thoughts on the things I was typing instead of the thing in his jeans.
“Ach, what I mean is, well, think of it this way – Frankenstein dinna get the monster right on the first try did he? Imhotep dinna get the first pyramid just so, aye?”
Erik took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh that stretched to the moon. “You’re telling me that old witchdoctor – what – that he fixed up Atlas with spare parts? You... this can’t be serious.”
Fergus twitched his eyebrows which were bushy, unreasonably wild caterpillars that almost joined at the tail. He still had two of them no matter how hard they were trying to become one. “Aye, that’s exactly what I’m meaning.”
The old panther moved his cigar to the other side of his mouth and gnawed as he scratched underneath his chin.
Erik recoiled slightly in disbelief. “Okay then. Well, so, where did the rumors about this even start? And how did it not come to my attention until just now? This isn’t one of Crazy Mary’s stories that got taken too far, is it?”
Crazy Mary – an honest-to-God witch of the woods – was notorious for starting really whacked out rumors and then forgetting all about them when someone caught her in her bullshit. She was so old that her skin was leathery and brown, and not a whole lot different than the bark of the tree where she lived. People say that she’s been alive so long she can’t keep the centuries straight, and so her bizarre stories aren’t exactly lies, they’re just her getting mixed up on the year.
It was Duggan who replied. “No, no, it wasn’t Mary. When we came up to unlock the courthouse this morning – which, by the way is traditionally the alpha’s job,” he said pointedly, shooting a nasty glare at Erik, “someone was waiting by the door and told me they saw him. Said they saw him last night.”
“Who was it?” Erik asked. “Some of the shifters around Jamesburg aren’t exactly mentally competent, you know. Wait a minute,” he rolled his eyes, “it wasn’t Leon, was it? He’s only sane about a quarter of the time, and most of that time he spends plastered.”
“Well,” Duggan began, then trailed off.
“It was!” Erik stood up, balled his fists and leaned heavily on them. “It was that old drunk, wasn’t it? You’re trying to get me all excited over a zombie sighting made by the town drunk. Very good Duggan, that’s excellent. So now that’s taken care of, can we adjourn this meeting? I’ve got something I want to do.”
He punctuated that with an under-table squeeze on my knee. The insatiable wolf man was seriously threatening to wear out my endurance.
“No, no, wait a second.” Duggan stood up, insistent. “He wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t even hung over, which I understand is a minor miracle where Leon is involved, but he was perfectly clear-headed.”
“He is insane, Duggan,” Erik was almost shouting. “You’re worried over the ramblings of an insane lizard!”
The historian puffed out his cheeks and frowned. “Salamander, but that doesn’t matter. I think it’s not a bad idea to have a plan anyway,” he said quietly. “What could that hurt? Being cautious? We’ve got evacuation plans for storms and floods, why not for—”
“Zombies?” Erik threw back his head, laughing. I didn’t like the way he was treating Duggan. His normal werewolf brashness had somehow morphed into pure, main-lined hubris. “A zombie invasion. That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? The town witchdoctor is going to go from using a handful of corpses to run his computer to invading the town with undead? Good lord, Duggan.”
I swear that Duggan was about to punch Erik in the mouth. He was so red-faced and angry that I wouldn’t have been surprised one bit. And to be totally fair, Erik was getting so intense he probably deserved a sock in the jaw.
“Cool off, Erik,” Jamie said, interrupting the exchange. “You both have your different ways of dealing with threats. Yours has worked pretty well so far, but—”
“And what is it you mean when you say ‘my way’, Jamie?”
Jamie lifted her shoulders, popping about eight vertebrae in her neck. “Well, I suppose that I mean your method of waiting for a bomb to drop and then punching it until it dies, hoping that you manage to kill it before it hits the ground. There’s a reason we change alphas every so often and—”
Erik laughed again, cold and cruel. I stared at him to try and read some clue to his behavior, but all I saw was arrogance. I guessed that he’d finally been pushed so far that he had to start believing all his posturing to keep up the act. “Fine,” he said. “That’s just fine. And in the decade since I started this job, how many crises have we had?”
“None,” Jamie admitted. “Of course, we had about thirteen close calls. Ten if you don’t count the ones that fizzled out before you did anything, like when Crazy Mary summoned that golem that overturned a schoolbus.”
“All right, all right,” Erik said. “Fine, okay so you’re right. Wolves are brash, I am brash. I’m probably the most brazen of the entire pack, it’s kind of our thing, you know. But what you’re suggesting is that we... and listen carefully here... we take seriously the idea of a zombie invasion.”
Jamie shrugged. “All I’m saying is that I don’t see any reason to not use the same caution we would for anything else. Like
Duggan said, we do have plans for all other kinds of disasters, so why not this one?”
Listening to them go around and around, I couldn’t help but laugh. My last part time job before I graduated back in Ohio – the other world, it seems like – was to stock shelves at the local small-chain grocery store. When you consider a zombie outbreak, errant witches summoning golems, a necromancer with a hair up his ass getting a skeleton army together to stage a sit-in at the courthouse over a zoning dispute... it makes price changes at midnight a little less exhilarating.
Clearly losing the last of his patience, Erik slammed his fist down on the table. “No!” he shouted. “No, absolutely not, we are not going to waste a bunch of time and money on a bullshit zombie—”
In the midst of all the shouting, the conference room door opened, slowly. Three very frightened looking people stepped in, with Leon was in front, trembling like a leaf. Behind him stood Devin, who still had a purple bruise on his face, and Lucien, whose eyes were darting back and forth.
All three of them stood there for a second looking like they ran out of plans as soon as they walked in the door.
“How did you get in here?” was the first thing Erik asked when he broke the tight silence. “No one’s supposed to be able to get in.”
“We... er, I, uh,” poor Leon was clearly about halfway down the road to drunk-town, but he seemed pretty together, considering. “I’m sorry but I been drinkin’ some.”
“You don’t say,” Erik said with a sneer.
“Yeah, I just... I’m sorry Alpha, I don’t know how we got in.”
Erik’s shoulders slumped. “You just came in. You must know how you got past the guards?”
“Oh, them,” he said. “I thought it was some kinda weird that they weren’t around.” Leon licked his eye with a flick of his tongue, and shrugged. “Weren’t nobody there, we just came in.”
“No good sons of...” Erik took a deep breath through his nose. I reached up and grabbed his hand, which he squeezed like a vice around mine until I let out a pained squeak.
“We just, er, I’m sorry about yesterday,” Devin said with a defeated tone.
Erik waved away his apology. “What is it? All three of you look terrible.”
I was a little surprised at the concern in Erik’s voice even though it was tinged with gruff irritation. He was right, though, they all three had seen better days. Leon was pale with bags hanging under his sunken eyes halfway down his slightly-green cheeks. Devin, aside from the bruise, had a bunch of sweat gathered on his upper lip, and Lucien’s hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t even stop them by holding one with the other.
“I ain’t exactly sure how to say this, Erik... er, Alpha,” Lucien said. “But, uh... we seen something. Seen something that shouldn’t maybe exist.”
Duggan stood up and leaned toward them, mouth open. “What was it?” he asked. “What did you see? Out with it, boys! This is important!”
Instead of answering, Lucien extended his arm with his fist closed around something. Erik, Duggan and Jamie all three moved around the meeting table.
“This sure is dramatic,” Erik said under his breath.
Jamie shot him a nasty glare.
The other seven councilmembers all stood up and pushed back their chairs, leaning over the table to see whatever it was Lucien had in his quivering hand.
“Let us see what you have,” Jamie said in a very calm, soft voice. When she spoke, Lucien looked over at her, and smiled a little.
“Uh, well, we were all three at the bar, you know—”
“As respectable people do at ten in the morning,” Erik said with a sneer.
“Sorry,” Lucien said. “We were too scared to do anything else after what Leon told us about the old alpha coming back and—”
“For God’s sake!” Erik threw his hands up in the air and paced quickly along the table. “First, we have the king of the drunks talking about some zombie bullshit, and then we get his two knight retainers lit up with him and scared about the same thing? How does anything ever get done here?”
“Beg your pardon sir,” Lucien said. “But I found his finger.”
“You... what?”
I’d never seen Erik shocked before, but when the trembling werewolf opened his hand to reveal a stumpy, green-tinged finger, I thought Erik was going just about fall over.
“That’s...” Erik managed to say.
“The ring,” Duggan whispered. “The town crest.”
“But there it is,” Jamie said. “Which means...”
Erik’s eyes were wide open as he stared at Lucien’s hand. “Is that what I think it is?”
Duggan nodded. “It’s rare that I don’t enjoy being right, but... that’s Atlas’s finger. I’d recognize that ring anywhere.”
“I think that means I owe you an apology, Duggan.”
Every head in the room turned to Erik. I guess everyone else was just as amazed at what he said as I was. For all Erik’s good qualities, apologizing readily upon making a mistake was not one that he exhibited very often. Or, ever, really.
“On the bright side,” Duggan said softly, “I suppose you have your alpha’s insignia now, Erik.”
Erik just blinked.
Lucien finally stopped quivering for long enough to string together more than five words at a time. “Like I said, Leon was so upset that we told him we’d go look where he said he’d seen Atlas last night. Out front of that little roadhouse on the way out of town, we wandered around a little and we found this.”
Erik plucked the finger out of Lucien’s palm, removed the ring and slipped it onto his thumb. “Well,” he said. “I guess it’s about time to start planning for zombies, huh?”
-4-
“I've never seen you like this, Erik,” I said as I slid my hand up his back and then down to his waist. “Why are you so upset about all this? It seems like this Atlas coming back with a little gang of zombies is... okay, admittedly that’s pretty crazy, but isn’t it kinda just another bump in the road?”
He laughed, and poured himself another half-glass of whiskey. And by glass I actually mean glass, like twelve ounces.
“I don’t know what he wants, but whatever it is, he’s going to go away disappointed. Still, I think Duggan’s right that there must be someone behind his sudden reappearance.”
“Wait,” I said. “You mean the witchdoctor business? Look, I’m basically totally lost with all this. You left me in the dust about halfway through that meeting. I know there’s a former alpha, and I know he’s after your... uh... I don’t know. That’s about all I’ve got.”
Erik grabbed my shoulder and pulled me close, enveloping my mouth with his and drinking me deep. He pulled a huge breath through his nose, then shuddered as he exhaled. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.
With his shoulders slumped forward, Erik cupped my face in his hands and tilted my head upwards.
“Can’t do what?”
“Keep you a secret. Well, however much a secret you actually are. I’m so tired of parading around like a mateless alpha. Aside from being hard to hide, it isn’t fair to you.”
“Okay,” I said, moving a little closer. “I gotta admit that was a surprise. Did not expect you to put it that way. But I also don’t really understand what this has to do with that other alpha coming along.”
Erik was nodding slowly. “You know how I said there was another alpha who had a human mate?”
I nodded. “Yeah, what about it?”
“Atlas was...” he took another deep breath. “He’s the one with the human mate. The story goes that he was—”
“Hold on,” I said, putting my hands on Erik’s chest. “I thought you said that happened centuries ago. Or was that something else I’m confused about?”
“Creative license,” he said with one of his disarming, devilish grins. “Atlas was an alpha in the last century, so that counts, right?”
“The last century wasn’t even twenty years ago.”
“Stil
l, it was last century.” Erik’s eyes narrowed. “It doesn’t matter. Look, the story about Atlas is a little strange. So it goes that he marked a human, and that made his werebear insanity tendencies worse and worse until finally he blew up and dove headfirst off that construction and into the rebar.”
“You’re telling me that being with a human makes shifters insane?”
“No,” he said. “You’re the one who said that. I said there’s a... okay, yeah. That’s basically what people think happened to him, and that’s why humans are almost never brought here. Everyone’s a little afraid that it drives shifters crazy if they’re around normal people too much. Kinda like radiation.”
At that, I pulled away from him. “You’re saying I’m radioactive? I’m some kind of poison that screws people up?”
“Not you, specifically. All people. Humans, I mean.”
“That makes it a whole lot better, Erik, thanks.”
“Oh, good,” he said.
“That was sarcasm.”
He groaned and reached for me again, but I dodged his groping hands. “It’s like an addiction,” he said. “We get a taste and we just kinda... can’t stop. Anyway, the thing that happened with his mate is that she figured out that she was in control, and she kept denying him until he went off the deep end. By the time anyone figured out what was happening, Atlas was a couple weeks dead, and she was gone.”
“That’s horrible,” I said softly. “So he fell in love with someone, and they ended up using him to steal some money?”
Erik downed another drink. “Not just some money. It was at least a half-million. Right around the time he died, too. Really awful. Once she figured out how much power she had, that was that.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the much needed, and much smaller, glass. “I’m just... I’m kind of in shock. I mean, you guys – you’re just so strong that it’s hard to believe a normal person like her could have that much influence.”
“Strength is relative,” Erik said. “I might be able to throw a car if I get pissed off enough, but when you’re dealing with power like that, it’s hard to...”