“No—and I’ve no intention of becoming one.” Not for a human and not for S.M.
“That’s good. Why take chances?”
I nodded. I didn’t give blood either. Whatever had infected me, was staying with me. Except for Ninon. She was my one exception, and I didn’t think there was any danger of her wanting to pass this disease on either. If anything, she was more repelled by it than I was, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. I had no illusions. She had asked for vampirism because it was expedient—she had changed me for that reason too—but she found what had been done to us morally reprehensible. She probably thought we were damned. I hadn’t a clue how to address this notion, or if I even should. I couldn’t really reassure her because she might be right.
“You don’t know for sure why the Dark Man let you live?” Or why Saint Germain wants you dead so badly? But I didn’t ask this last question out loud.
“He didn’t ‘let’ me live. At first, I was proof that his experiments had finally worked. But later…” I half expected her to say that Dippel had grown fond of her, or perhaps he saw her as a sort of Bride of Frankenstein for his son. Her next words surprised me. “Later, after he began to get crazy, he tried to seduce me and failed. In a rage, Dippel made an attempt to kill me—some sort of ritual to take back his power, I think. When that failed, he sent his son after me. The son-of-a-bitch almost got me too. I didn’t know who he was at the time, just an adviser at Court. And Saint Germain is so…beautiful. So charismatic.” She shook her head. “But the longer I looked into his eyes, the colder and more frightening he seemed. He had me half-naked on a settee when I finally realized that he would prefer to fuck me, then kill me, but he would have been fine with doing it in reverse order so long as I eventually ended up dead.” She smiled a little. I could hear it in her voice when she said, “I jammed a hat pin into his heart. He was more surprised than hurt, but it gave me a chance to get away.”
The woman can chill my blood even when she excites me.
“You jammed a hat pin into his heart—and he wasn’t hurt?”
“Nope. You don’t have to worry about garden-variety stakes anymore either.” This time I lowered my binoculars to look at her. She went on, “Unless your heart or brain is burned, vaporized, or ripped from your body, you will not die. You might hurt a lot, but you’ll eventually recover.”
“Sounds great. So what’s the catch?”
“You sure you want all this now?”
“Yes.” I wanted to know what made us different from the zombies we were hunting.
Her face was serious, even grim. But I still wanted to kiss her, to tangle my hands in her hair.
“We suffer. Terribly. Every few decades your body is going to need a little lightning. If you don’t give it a shot of this ‘divine fire,’ old age will come on you with a vengeance. Any diseases you have will come back redoubled, and new ones can set in. We become the portrait of Dorian Grey. It happens fast, too—in me. Worse, it affects the brain as well as the body. However, I’ve known others who can wait months to get a tune-up once symptoms appear. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
“But for you? How long do you have when this weakness sets in?” In other words, how long might I have before I had to find an electric chair of my own? She was probably right that this wasn’t the best moment for such questions, since my mental upholstery, though overstuffed, wasn’t exactly full of calm, rational thoughts and it would take little to tear open. Still, I felt compelled to ask. Given our present activities, it wasn’t beyond the realm of the possible that we might not have another chance for a talk. I had to know what I was facing.
“How much time? Only weeks after the first symptom—and a shorter time each cycle. Or it was that way. I don’t know what the vampirism will do. I’m hoping it buys me more time. It isn’t always convenient to electrocute oneself.” She laughed. “You’d be surprised at how many places never have lightning storms. Or only get them at certain times of the year. I can draw the St. Elmo’s fire if there is a storm, but I can’t alter weather patterns.” She raised her binoculars. I didn’t think that she needed them, either, at least not to see. “I almost died during World War One. I was in Belgium and the only storms we had for weeks on end were German artillery. I was badly wounded. I thought for a time I might die, but that mercy was not granted me.”
“Can we die? I mean of disease or age?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to find out.” She stiffened suddenly.
“What?” I asked. “Do you see something?”
“I smell something. I believe that Hell is empty and all the Devils are here,” she said, quoting The Tempest.
“Devils?” I never knew when she was kidding.
“Zombies at the least. How unpleasant to be right about this,” she said, looking annoyed. She pulled her pistol from the small of her back and checked that it was loaded. Her hands didn’t tremble. This was good. We were almost twelve hours into her conversion, but she seemed to be exhibiting none of the symptoms that had plagued me. She wasn’t sweating blood and hadn’t mentioned any urge to tear my throat out or suck my brains. There was no sign of any stinger growing on her tongue—I’d checked a couple of hours ago when we stopped to eat and answer the call of nature. I felt fine too. If this deal of ours had consequences, they were being delayed.
That suddenly made me nervous. As the saying went, if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. This had to be Fate tempting us with false hope that all was well. The next full moon we’d probably pop out enormous fangs and suck the life out of everyone in Tijuana. Or Tacoma. I wasn’t sure where we were going. “North” covered a lot of territory.
“At least we know we’re in the right place for a firefight. I haven’t seen anyone else around. We won’t have to worry about human bystanders getting hurt,” I said as I walked back to my SUV and reached into the backseat, doing my best Gary Cooper. I always liked him more than John Wayne.
I lifted out my shotgun and a box of ammo that I opened with one hand. I slipped shells into my shirt pocket. I carry a Mossberg pump-action, twelve-gauge, six-shot, if you care. It has a modified pistol-grip stock. Usually it feels more than adequate for any job. That day, I was wishing I had gone for a nine-shot model.
Passing the Jeep, I could see that Corazon didn’t look happy with what he was smelling through the cracked window, but he wasn’t frightened either, unless his continued contribution of feline graffiti on the old seats was a sign of nervousness. I didn’t think it was, since he stopped periodically to admire how sharp his claws were.
So, Ninon’s cat wasn’t afraid of zombies either. That suggested he had run into them before. If Corazon could talk, I’m betting he would have some strange stories to tell.
The cat looked up and met my gaze. His head cocked, and I swear I could hear a voice in my head say, What makes you think I can’t talk?
I almost dropped the shotgun.
Understand, I am not completely anthropomorphic. I had a lovely terrier called Buster who was my closest childhood friend, and I was always fond of sheep and Mrs. MacTavish’s old mouser, Gordon. I’m from Scotland, land of second sight and wee people, but I’ve never shared a psychic connection with an animal. Being in the presence of this creature who appeared to be telepathic left me feeling wary and perhaps a bit jealous: This animal knew Ninon better than I did.
Ninon came closer. She wasn’t wearing sunglasses. Before I could ask about the cat, who had gone back to polishing his nails, she said, “Yes, the town’s empty except for zombies. We’ll have to clean out this nest completely before we go on. We don’t want enemies coming up behind us with sneak attacks.” Moving beside me, she opened the Jeep’s door and rolled the window all the way down. She and the cat stared into each others eyes for a long moment of communion. When she looked away I could see that her naked gaze was as cold as vodka in a freezer, and when she’d spoken her voice was calm and confident. You have to admire a woman who can look so good, so utterly
female, and yet say something so ruthless. This was someone you wanted backing you up in a fight.
It also—strange as it sounds—gave me hope that maybe she and I could have something long-term and perhaps romantic. If zombies didn’t do more than annoy her and she had a psychic cat, them a boyfriend who was the appropriated son of a death god and a vampire was probably just a bagatelle. And after that, the everyday trivia of survival would be nothing. Deciding who would take out the trash and who did the dishes, how you squeezed the toothpaste—that was a walk in the park.
In spite of everything that was happening, my spirits felt lighter. I was also made aware of just how tired I had become of constantly dreading the future, of the chronic worry about what I was becoming, which crept closer every night when I closed my eyes and the dreams started, and every morning when I woke up with a desire to kill my neighbors, the security guards at the plant, and every colleague unwise enough to address me before ten A.M. Whatever else happened, now I knew I wasn’t alone.
I know Ninon had some moral reservations about turning me—she probably believed in a literal Heaven and Hell and had a clear definition of sin that would include not offering innocent men the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. But I wasn’t innocent, and I was already standing with one foot in the worst of Hells. Sin or not, I’m grateful for what she did. I see our problems as ones of science and disease, not God and Devils. Though she might not think it mitigation, her version of mouth to mouth had pulled me back from torment—from maybe committing murder, which would be a far worse sin.
And what had she asked of me in return? Only to do the vile thing that I had secretly wanted—and she’d said that it was okay because it would help her as well. And it really seemed to have. I had found the one woman, perhaps the one person, that I could attack and not have die. I killed without killing. Almost, I could believe in a merciful God.
God—I hadn’t thought of him in years, though I had been raised attending the local kirk. Yes, a Protestant church. My father had loved Mamita, but not her Catholicism. Still, I had not actually considered the subject of God and the resurrection of His son from the dead for a long, long time. Back then, I was into science. The Bible was metaphor and nothing more. But I was learning, and there were indeed more things in Heaven and earth than I had dreamed—a blasphemous thought, but I was in the select club of Resurrectionists now. Of course, frankly, other than Ninon, I didn’t think I was going to like the membership. At least not in Mexico. The Risen God…The implications were terrifying. But just as there were no atheists in foxholes, I don’t think too many people could stand where I was that morning and not wonder what else was out there and what it might mean.
I told Ninon about the idea of a Resurrection Club—minus any reference to Jesus. She didn’t smile.
“You can still opt out,” she said softly. Her dark eyes shone eerily, but she demonstrated all the worry of a napping cat on Prozac. The sun had finally forced its way into the sky. I could feel its heat on my back and welcomed it. I had always liked the sun, even when it burned. I always felt like it was destroying the virus that lived in me. “Miguel, nothing that has happened to you has been of your doing. No blame attaches to you. You’ve killed no one, and I can probably handle this alone. You can even go back home now, take your life back.”
“No way. It’s not that simple and you know it.”
Besides, I was too curious. And it seemed our chances of survival went up if we each had someone else to watch our backs while we slept. For we would need to watch our backs. She was being optimistic if not naive. This wasn’t over. S.M. would hunt me to the ends of the earth, and so would this Saint Germain when he found out about me. I accepted this even if Ninon did not.
Besides, though Miss Manners had never covered the delicate nuances of this situation—or if she had, I’d missed that column—I felt sure that the etiquette of exchanging blood and spinal fluid, not to mention sharing a bolt of heart-stopping lightning, said that you should stick around for a while and see if the other person was really okay and not going to turn into a bloodsucking berserker at the end of the three-day incubation. It was the gentlemanly and civic-minded thing to do.
Another whiff of bad air and the skin of my neck tightened. I was rethinking my idea that I could have kinship with something smelling that rotten. This was way worse than Mamita, and she fell squarely into the unpleasant category of what Shakespeare had termed “a little more than kin but less than kind.”
“Okay, then. I want you to have this.” Ninon handed me a peculiar spike. It might have been some kind of gardening tool, but I knew it wasn’t.
“What’s this?”
“A trench spike. I got several in Belgium. It’s a weapon of last resort, but the best for hand-to-hand combat. It will stab through a metal helmet and skull without even slowing.” She paused. “The only drawback—aside from the zombies being so close that they can bite—is that it takes a certain amount of will to use the spike. This kind of combat is very…personal.”
I eyed the weapon with respect and then tucked it into my belt. It had about a seven inch steel spike fitted into a set of brass knuckles. The heavy weight was reassuring.
“Thank you,” I said finally. “You have another?”
“Yes. And they work. I promise. Not that we’ll need them today. But just in case.”
Suddenly, the dead were there, stumbling out of the church.
“Holy hell.”
“Oui.”
I looked at the zombies and felt like I had dislocated my eyeballs. My brain insisted that I had to be looking at something that was a trick, a distortion. It couldn’t be real. The things came shambling down the middle of the town’s only street, a lumbering funeral procession, or perhaps a small dia de los muertos parade. None were actually skeletons, but there wasn’t a whole lot of flesh and bone left to go with the sinew. Gender would have been hard to determine without the tattered clothing that clung to the corpses.
Ninon had warned me, but I hadn’t really believed. My brain dropped into a psychic blender and someone hit the pulse button. My perception wasn’t completely pureed, but once again reality had spun around and I was facing the wrong way. This couldn’t be happening. I had accepted vampires and a death god, but this…Funny what the brain sticks at, isn’t it?
It was alarming to see that the dead had armed themselves with farm implements—pitchforks, hoes, shovels, picks…a machete? They hadn’t been buried with these things, which answered the question of where they were and what they’d been doing since we pulled into town.
“In spite of the hay forks and shovels, I don’t think they’re going to a hoedown,” I said, proud of my calm. I counted them. Only fourteen. There must have been more corpses in the graveyard, but perhaps the others had been too far gone for reanimation. I hoped so. There had to be some limit to what this Saint Germain could do. After all, there were a lot more dead people in the world than live ones. We’d be overrun if he summoned them all.
“No, they’re headed toward us. They have our scent now and won’t give up until they’re fully dead. Good thing the sun is up. They’ll be slower, easier to destroy.” Ninon raised her handgun and sighted down the barrel. “It usually takes two shots to bring them down. One to the brain, one to the heart. Even then, you need to avoid them because if the brain isn’t completely destroyed, the hands will grab at your ankles and they will bite if they have any jaw left. Don’t worry, we’ll burn them later. That will take care of the loose ends.”
Don’t worry, she’d said. We’ll burn them later.
Reality clicked back into place. It was horrible, but I didn’t doubt anymore. I also understood why Ninon did not consider these shambling creatures to be anything like us.
I pulled up my shotgun and pumped it. It would do more damage than one to the head and one to the heart. The things shuffled on, moving closer, uncaring of our weapons or perhaps not comprehending what they were. I chose a man, a peasant in black pants a
nd what used to be a white shirt. As I watched, a rat scrambled out what used to be his stomach and dropped onto the ground, where it scurried away with a bit of dried intestine. It hit home then that these really were rotting corpses, and I had to swallow hard against my rising gorge. These were zombies, the walking dead. And they were looking at us like we were a free all-you-can-eat buffet.
I had some range with the shotgun, but I waited. When my target was close enough, I looked into the creature’s blank, dusty eyes and felt relief. The soul had already departed from this thing. I was destroying flesh, but it wouldn’t be murder. You can’t murder what’s already dead. At least, that’s what I told myself that morning. I’ve since wondered if someone would ever look into my eyes and think the same thing.
Ninon pulled the trigger. The zombie in a wedding dress standing next to my entrails-challenged target snapped back, a small bloodless hole appearing in her head. She managed another step, but Ninon fired again, putting a second round in the heart. Quick, clean, and efficient. The creature crumpled to the street with a small puff of dust. I thought about complimenting Ninon on her shooting, but what she probably wanted to hear was my shotgun dealing with our problem.
I swallowed again and then let fly. As I had hoped, my gutless target and the creature behind him both fell over, blown back by what looked like a violent wind but was in fact lead shot. There was no blood from either, though an amazingly awful smell filled the air.
Aim, fire, reload. Repeat as necessary. It was actually over quickly—two minutes at most—and yet I spent an eternity there in Purgatory. I’d had bad nightmares before that day, but as Ninon had said, those dreams weren’t my fault. I had no guilt for the things that had happened to me or my family. But any new nightmares that kept me from sleep—and they would come—would be what I’d bought and paid for with my own free will.
There’s always a price, isn’t there?
“Killing zombies. What a way to start the day.” It seemed surreal that the morning should be so beautiful when we were wading through twitching corpses. They died hard, but guns had made the fight unequal—not that I was complaining. The scene was a whole lot creepier than the last act of Hamlet, or even a Jim Jones punch party. There, dead was dead. Here, we were standing in the Twilight Zone, where the unthinkable could happen.
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