Bring On the Night

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  “‘Pissed’ means ‘drunk’ in England.”

  “We’re in America.” I raised my arms to encompass the glorious nation. “And you’re Canadian. When are you going to start talking like one?”

  “I’m a citizen of the world, and I can talk any way I bloody well want.”

  “Legally, yes, but if you don’t want people to laugh at you, then—”

  My voice cut off. Someone was coming. Fast.

  I pointed past Regina. “Look out!”

  But she had already spun to face the gray-skinned figure lumbering in our direction. Behind me, Lori screamed.

  He—it?—moved with the speed of a vampire but none of the grace. He stumbled toward us in a blur, making no sound but the thwap! of his torn shoes and the swish of his ragged, muddy clothes. Oddest of all, he seemed to be wearing sunglasses.

  My Control training kicked in, and I whirled to look for other attackers, in case he was a diversion.

  Nothing. I turned toward him again and stifled my own scream.

  He wasn’t wearing sunglasses. His eyes were holes.

  “It’s a vampire!” Tina pulled a stake from her inside jacket pocket.

  Regina lunged, punching the man on the left cheek. He stumbled back and almost fell. She flicked away her cigarette and planted her feet, hands up in a fighter’s pose.

  When he straightened up from the blow, his neck was torn, almost broken. Flaps of skin hung over his collarbone.

  I yanked Tina back. “That’s not a vampire.”

  The creature stepped forward, and Regina planted another punch in the middle of its chin. This time the head flew off, as cleanly as a Wiffle ball from a tee. It bounced across the wet grass, eye sockets flashing twin black spots, and came to rest against the back of a tombstone.

  The body toppled forward. Regina stepped out of the way.

  We stood there for a long moment, four of us wondering if the head would get sucked back into the creature’s body as it curled into itself. But unlike a vampire, this thing didn’t disappear, and it seemed to contain no blood. It reeked, though, like the ancient food at the back of my refrigerator.

  “What. The. Fuck. Just. Happened.” Maggie stared at Regina, then at the body, then back at Regina.

  I sighed. Debriefing hyperventilating civilians wasn’t one of my fortes.

  Lori took Maggie’s hand. “Um, Regina’s a vampire. But it’s okay—she’s a nice one.”

  “Hey!” Regina rubbed her knuckles against her Hüsker Dü T-shirt. “I am not nice.”

  “Sorry.” Lori turned back to Maggie. “She’s actually a bitch, but she doesn’t kill people.”

  “Doesn’t kill people!?” Maggie’s voice verged on hysteria. “She just knocked that guy’s head off!”

  “That wasn’t a guy.” Regina knelt beside the body. “Well, it used to be. But he was definitely dead before I hit him.”

  Tina pocketed her stake and brought out her cell phone. “I’ll send a picture to my dad. I bet he’ll know what it is.”

  I scowled at her, wondering who brings a wooden stake to a bachelorette party, then squatted next to Regina, hands in my pockets. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I whispered.

  “Hell, no. People joke about us being walking corpses, but it’s bollocks. We’re reanimated at the moment of death. We don’t die long enough for a coffee break, much less a burial.” She poked at the mud caked on the man’s clothes, then pointed to his hands. “His fingers and knuckles are all torn up. He must have clawed and punched his way out of his coffin.” She looked around the cemetery. “Assuming that’s where he came from.”

  I pulled out my cell phone and plugged my ear to block Tina’s excited chatter: “Daddy, you’ll never believe what I just saw! I just sent you the photo—is it another kind of yoosie?”

  I dialed Colonel Lanham’s office, not expecting him to answer this time of night.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Lanham.”

  “Sir, it’s Ciara Griffin. Something weird just happened here in Sherwood.” I looked at Regina, who was holding the corpse’s head in a Hamlet-like pose. “Weirder than usual.”

  14

  Who Will the Next Fool Be

  Colonel Lanham was the only person I knew who could look parade rigid while hunched over a corpse. Face hidden by a light blue surgical mask and the bill of his black cap, he scoured the putrid ex-human with the quick, methodical strokes of a flashlight beam.

  Around him, black-clad Control agents were securing the area—far away, at the cemetery’s front and back gates, and close by, taping off the path from the creature’s grave to its final-final resting place. All the agents were either vampires or had chicken pox immunity (I made Lanham check).

  A female agent with graying brown hair and a kind smile was sitting on a bench with Maggie, who was still trembling an hour after the attack. I first met civilian liaison Major Ricketts more than two years ago, after a band of fanatics had kidnapped me and Jeremy, who had needed lots of counseling after his hard impact with the truth about vampires.

  Ricketts laid a hand on Maggie’s shoulder and offered her a fresh cup of cocoa. A tough debriefing—Maggie had to accept the existence of vampires and maybe-zombies in one night. It was hard enough for the rest of us to deal with the latter.

  Colonel Lanham straightened his jacket as he stepped away from the corpse. Then he tugged off his mask and placed a call on his cell phone. I inched closer to hear, but a young agent stopped me before I could get near the orange barricade tape.

  If curiosity was killing me, it was carrying Tina to hell and back. She bounced between me and Lori. “This is so amazing! I wish I could’ve been the one to take it down. If only that vampire hadn’t gotten in the way.”

  I glanced at Regina, leaning against a nearby tree as an agent in a gray uniform interviewed her. She cleaned under her fingernails with her thumbnail, as if she’d been gardening.

  “If that vampire hadn’t gotten in the way,” I told Tina, “we’d all be dead.”

  “Yeah,” Lori added. “Regina totally made up for stealing my stripper.”

  I tried to smile at her attempt to lighten the mood. Usually that was my job. But my buzz had faded into a headache, and the corpse was a painful reminder of human mortality. Like poor Aaron’s. Like mine.

  Lanham ended his phone call and spoke to two of the sentries. “A cleanup crew will be here in ten minutes. This is a biohazard, so please continue to not touch it.” He peeled off his latex gloves and stuffed them into a red plastic receptacle one of the agents held out for him, then stepped over to us. “You’ve all given your statements?”

  “Yes, sir.” Tina cut in before I could speak. “We told Major Ricketts everything.”

  He gave her a crisp nod. “Good. Please leave.”

  I smirked before realizing he meant all of us, not just Tina. “You’re not going to explain this?” I asked him. “We just got attacked by a zombie!”

  He winced as he held up a hand. “We call them cadaveris accurrens, Latin for ‘running carcasses’ or, more precisely, ‘attacking carcasses.’”

  I turned the words over in my mouth. “Cadaver whats?”

  “Cadaveris accurrens. CAs for short.”

  “Looks like a zombie to me,” Lori muttered.

  “There are no such things as zombies,” he told her, “not as pop culture has portrayed them. The cadaveris don’t infect the people they attack. They often don’t even bite.”

  “Then how do they kill their prey?” Tina asked, and I could tell she was wishing for a pen and notebook.

  “Their victims most often die from trauma associated with tissue disruption.”

  “Huh?” we all said in unison.

  “They get ripped apart.”

  I took a step back. “Why didn’t we learn this in orientation?”

  “Indoc,” he corrected. “It’s been over seventy years since the last cadaveris walked the earth, so we consider them extinct, like polio or smallpo
x. They’re practically a footnote.”

  “A footnote?” My voice rose in uncontrollable insubordination. “That footnote almost disrupted the five of us! If they’re extinct, then this cemetery is Jurassic Park.”

  Lanham sighed. “Didn’t you ever wonder why we’re the International Agency for the Control and Management of Undead Corporeal Entities, not the International Agency for the Control and Management of Vampires?”

  “I figured it was the bureaucratic inability to be straightforward.” One of my orientation papers had been returned for a rewrite because the language was too “readable.”

  “I can’t believe my dad never told me,” Tina said.

  I snorted. “I can’t believe he didn’t see this coming. He’s supposed to be psychic.”

  Instead of sniping back at me, Tina stared at the corpse and rubbed her left arm—the one with the bandage. I felt a stab of sympathy. Whether someone had cut her or she’d cut herself, clearly things weren’t right in Tina’s world.

  “Sorry,” I told her, but she ignored me, so I turned back to Lanham. “Is this supposed to be a secret? Does David know?”

  “No and no,” he replied. “For all intents and purposes, the cadaveris are nonexistent. The Control keeps a small interdivisional team to handle the rare cases. Most of the time the agents serve in their usual functions in Enforcement or other divisions.”

  Lori cleared her throat. “Um, back to the zombies? If they’re supposed to be extinct, where did this one come from? Where do any of them come from?”

  “From the grave,” he said. “Raised by a necromancer to do his or her bidding.”

  I looked at Tina, whose shoulders hunched at the sound of her father’s alleged power.

  Lanham continued. “Many Control scholars—especially vampires—have argued that CAs shouldn’t even be classified as undead.”

  “Then what are they?” Lori asked.

  “Dead,” said a familiar voice from behind. We turned to see Elijah sauntering toward us in a gray field uniform like the one worn by the agent interviewing Regina.

  Beside me, Tina stiffened and stepped back. When Elijah approached us, he nodded to Lori and me, but his gaze skimmed over Tina’s face without making eye contact.

  Definitely a post-breakup vibe there. Elijah and Tina had surely crossed the human-vampire divide with abundant fluid exchange. Maybe they’d had a blood/booty call this week, and that’s why she needed the bandage.

  Lanham returned Elijah’s salute. “Captain Fox, your haste is commendable.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The vampire rubbed his hands together. “I’m all over my first real live CA.” He looked at me as he pulled out a small notepad. “Well, not real live, but you know what I mean.”

  Lanham turned to us. “Captain Fox leads a trio of platoons in the interdivisional team I spoke of.”

  “The ZC, we call ourselves. Zombie Company.” Ignoring Lanham’s frown of disapproval, Elijah ducked under the orange tape—not an easy feat given his height. “Who killed this sucker?”

  “I did.” Regina swaggered past me, bumping my elbow. “Two punches. It was easy.”

  Elijah’s eyes almost glowed at the sight of her. Tina let out a faint whimper that she probably thought no one could hear.

  “How old are you?” Elijah asked Regina. “In vampire years.”

  “That’s a personal question.” She lit a cigarette and flicked the match into a puddle. “I like personal questions.”

  He bobbed his eyebrows. “I like personal answers.”

  “I’m twenty-three. It was 1987. I was in London, and—”

  “That’s plenty, thanks.” Elijah jotted a note on his pad as he turned away. “So they can be killed by an unarmed vampire of average strength.”

  “I’m not average,” Regina grumbled.

  Colonel Lanham pocketed his phone. “Captain Fox, when you’re finished there, please brief these witnesses on the CAs.” He took a deep breath. “I need to speak to the cemetery manager.”

  A portly man with a mustache the size of a small ferret was arguing with one of the agents and pointing to an open grave several rows over. I could’ve sworn he said something about, “Second time this week.”

  I wondered how much Lanham would pay the caretaker to keep quiet. Cooperation before coercion applied to humans as well as vampires.

  Lori had crept up to stand beside Regina. “So, um, Captain Fox, is it?”

  “You’re a civilian.” He gave her a gleaming grin. “You get to call me Elijah.”

  “Elijah. How do these necromancer people raise—what do you call them—?”

  “Cadaveris, but if you wanna call ’em zombies, go right ahead. The necromancers raise them with blood magic—usually their own blood, but not always.” He squatted beside the corpse and poked its gelatinous belly. I swallowed hard, glad we were several yards away. “Same basic mojo that makes us vampires. But like I said, they’re not undead, they’re dead.” He tapped the end of his pen against his temple. “When a person dies, see, their brain is history. A few weeks later, it turns to liquid and leaks out their ears. So these things can’t think, they just move.”

  I was too busy trying not to retch to think of questions, but Lori thankfully kept her head (and stomach).

  “How do they move without a brain?” she asked.

  He drew an imaginary line along the length of the corpse. “If a body has any nervous system tissue left, even just a few neurons, the blood magic can make it grow a new spinal cord, which lets it reanimate. At least, that’s what they told me.” Elijah put his hands to his head and gave a wide smile. “Wow, a real cadaveri accurrens. I’m so cranked! I’ve trained for this for ten years, but I never thought I’d see one.” He slapped his knee and let out a sudden laugh. “Guess they won’t be cutting our budget now. Dyno-mite!”

  His exuberance was cracking the veneer of timelessness that the vampire Control agents maintained, with the help of the Contemporary Awareness Division. I would have smiled at his use of seventies slang if the reason for it hadn’t been so creepy.

  “How do you kill them?” asked Tina in a cold voice. “Can they be staked like vampires?”

  “No.” He answered without looking at her. “The CA’s life force—if we can call it that—is in its spinal cord, not its heart, so they have to be cut in half or decapitated.” He gently jiggled the corpse, causing a tarry liquid to ooze out of its side. “Lucky for us, they get less dense as they rot.”

  I willed my slice of pizza and the one and a half zombies (oh, I just got that—ha!) to stay in my stomach.

  “Colonel Lanham said they’re not contagious,” I said. “So no zombie apocalypse?”

  “Right. That’s another big difference between vampires and cadaveris. We can both take life.” He looked at Regina. “But only vampires can give it back.”

  She gave him a slow, sad nod, and they shared a moment before Elijah glanced my way again.

  “Plus,” he said, “they burn up in the sun like we do, but they don’t know enough to take cover, so their rampages only last until morning twilight.” He shook his head. “But they can do a hell of a lot of damage in just a few hours. They’re superstrong—hell, they punch through a steel casket and dig out six feet of dirt. And when they’re attacked, they get all turbocharged. So just because they won’t take over the world doesn’t mean they can’t kill a shitload of humans.”

  “But not vampires?” Regina asked.

  “They can’t use weapons.” He toed the zombie’s torn fingers. “So the only way they can kill us is by ripping off our heads.”

  I stared at the zombie despite myself, and imagined it poofing into nothing at the first light of day, the way my vampire friends would. Then again, considering the “life” of a zombie, a quick flameout was probably a blessing.

  Unless… wait a minute. I forced my booze-soaked brain to connect a few dots.

  “Captain Fox?” I raised my hand like a kid in class. “When you say they burn up, do you
mean like vampires do, all flash-papery?”

  Elijah grimaced at the corpse in front of him. “I wish it was that clean. No, if we left this thing here, come sunrise it’d roast like a piece of chicken someone forgot to take off the grill. Look a lot like it, too.”

  “Aaron’s body!”

  Lori gave me a horrified stare. “Ciara, what are you—”

  “Aaron discovered a burned-up body Monday morning,” I said. “That was two days before he got sick.”

  “For real?” Elijah whipped out his notepad. “Where was this?”

  I pointed toward the Sherwood campus. “Past the other side of those woods. And a professor was found killed near the same spot.” I swept my hair back hard against my scalp. “Holy crap, maybe it wasn’t Jim after all.”

  “I assume the police were called?” Elijah asked me.

  “Yeah, but I think they were keeping the details under wraps until they’d identified the body.”

  Lori put a vise grip on my elbow. “Do you know what this means? Maybe Aaron was poisoned by the corpse he found. Colonel Lanham said their remains were toxic.”

  “Which means—” I gasped. “Maybe Aaron didn’t have chicken pox.” Then my hope died as soon as it was born. “But the blood tests said he did.”

  “Maybe they were wrong.”

  “Then what about Turner?”

  “Maybe he was in the same area at the same time as Aaron.” Lori pulled on my arm. “The important thing is that you weren’t anywhere near it.”

  We turned our heads to look at tonight’s corpse. “Near the first one, at least.”

  Lori and I took a long step back from the orange tape separating us from the zombie remains. I bumped into Tina, who had her phone to her ear. She frowned at me when I trod on her foot.

  “Where is he?” she mumbled as she glared at her phone.

  At the moment, even Tina’s Ms. Grumblepants routine couldn’t mute my sudden surge of hope. If Aaron hadn’t been killed by chicken pox, that meant I might not die. As a bonus, one of the station’s star DJs might not be a murderer.

  “Daddy!”

  I turned to see Tina saluting a wiry man moving toward us with the controlled grace and power of a panther. This person she called “Daddy” looked no older than us.