Bring On the Night

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  “Cool, except then the world knows that zombies exist. If we can’t contain them, it won’t just mean a few human lives lost. Not that that’s not important,” I hurried to add.

  Noah nodded. “It means we could all be exposed. Vampires, the Control itself.”

  “You think people would believe it?” Regina said.

  Shane looked askance at her. “People believe it now, when they haven’t seen the evidence. Vampires are on TV, in books, in the movies.”

  “Fictional vampires,” she said. “They’ve been around since Dracula.”

  “Not like now. I get calls every night from people who wonder if we’re real, people who are otherwise clearly in touch with reality.”

  “They sense something,” Noah agreed.

  “Maybe someday we’ll all have to go into deeper hiding,” Shane said, “and the Control will be one big Anonymity Division.”

  My throat closed at the thought of living in the shadows in every sense. I didn’t want to end up in a secret vampire coven, unable to work and go to school and see my human friends.

  I heard the deep rumble of a diesel engine on the other side of the cemetery. In a moment, it was joined by another.

  I turned to place the sound, but the rumbling seemed to be coming from all directions at once. Another early spring thunderstorm?

  But the sky was clear. The stars peered through the branches of the budding trees. My feet turned cold.

  The sound wasn’t coming from the sky. It was coming from the earth.

  You know those war movies where the troops proceed in orderly fashion, taking on the enemy as a single-minded unit? And then you know those other war movies where the battlefield is complete fucking chaos?

  This was the latter. This was the undead Braveheart.

  The zombies came all at once. The ZC and Enforcement agents struck, severing heads as the corpses emerged from the soil, but there were just too damn many.

  The CAs broke through the line.

  Shane blew his whistle. “Move!”

  We rushed forward in pairs to meet the monsters. I followed Shane to the right, chasing a lone zombie heading for the cemetery’s north gate. The trees, the sky, and the graves blurred in my peripheral vision as my newfound speed and agility kicked in.

  We intercepted the zombie twenty feet from the gate, not far from the orange-taped area, where Petrea’s spell of undoing seemed to hold.

  I passed in front of the carcass, distracting him with a feint. He changed course to follow me, putting himself in Shane’s path. Shane’s blade arced, and the hairless head tumbled to the ground. I made a silent promise to come back later and apologize to it.

  Shane turned to me. “Behind you!”

  I spun around but saw nothing. Then I looked down. An old lady was crawling on hands and feet, her back hunched like a hyena’s.

  My sword descended, whooshing through the air in what felt like slow motion. I missed the neck, but the blade swept through her shoulders and slammed the hard ground. The impact reverberated up my arms and shook my whole body. I blinked back the pain and watched the zombie collapse without a twitch.

  “You got her,” Shane said. “I mean, you got it.” He pointed to the corpse. “Spine severed, that’s what counts.”

  Slowly I extracted the sword from the woman’s flesh, the ache in my elbows fading.

  “You okay?” He scanned the graveyard for our next target.

  “I’ll live.”

  “I’ll make sure of it.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Here comes another one. Do like we did the first.”

  The corpse of the approaching man looked fresh and young. I hesitated. “You sure that’s not a vampire?”

  The man veered to his left, tripping over the orange boundary tape, tumbling so hard a piece of flesh ripped from his cheek, leaving a dull black gap in his skin.

  “Guess not.”

  We caught up to the zombie as it struggled to its feet. It leaped straight for Shane, who swiped his sword in a perfect downward arc. The zombie’s momentum carried it forward, so that it fell against Shane, then slid down his body in two pieces.

  “Ugh.” Shane leaped back, his light brown shirt splattered with pink embalming fluid. The strongest formaldehyde whiff yet stung my eyes. This one couldn’t have been dead more than a couple of weeks—he had just begun to rot.

  No more zombies were in our immediate vicinity. “Should we join the others?” I asked Shane.

  “We should stay in our sector in case any—” He froze, the hair at his temple dripping pink liquid. “What was that?”

  I listened, but nothing came through the distant shouts of vampires and thunks of swords through rotted flesh. “What do you hear?”

  He held his breath, then whispered one word. “Digging.”

  My eyes darted back and forth, resting on the torn orange tape. “This section’s supposed to be safe. Maybe Petrea—”

  Something cold grasped my right ankle. My foot sank into the soil.

  “Ciara!”

  My leg snapped from the pressure. I shrieked.

  Pain radiated up my body. The zombie twisted. Shane lunged for me. We crashed to the ground, but still the creature held on. Its other hand seized my left knee.

  No. I flashed back to my childhood, bending a Barbie doll’s legs the wrong way.

  The zombie yanked down hard. My scream seemed to fill the universe. Red spots filled my vision, and I was only vaguely aware of Shane roaring in fury as he hacked at the limbs holding me.

  The pressure eased suddenly, and Shane dragged me away from the grave, where stumps of two wrists waved. I sat up and saw that the zombie’s hands still gripped my shattered legs.

  “Stay here.” Shane wrapped my fingers around the hilt of my sword. “You’ll feel better soon.” As he picked up his fallen sword, he put his whistle in his mouth and blew the help signal.

  I tried to catch my breath, but my lungs were seized with pain. Then I felt a sudden shift.

  My right shin healed before my eyes. The ends of the bone, protruding through a hole in my jeans, slipped back under my skin, then clicked together with a jolt.

  I exhaled hard and looked up to see Shane whack off the head of the handless corpse as it struggled out of its grave.

  The head fell to the side, and Shane drew back his foot as if to kick it.

  “No. Ow!” I sucked in a hiss as my broken knee snapped into place. “They’ll need to rebury it.” A pale glimmer moved to my right. “Besides, you need to get that one.”

  He dispatched the new zombie as Regina, Noah, and Spencer arrived, swords in hand.

  “We relayed your signal,” Noah said.

  “But everyone else is busy.” Spencer pulled me to stand on legs that felt miraculously normal. He pointed to the blood on my jeans. “One of ’em bit you?”

  “Compound fracture.”

  “That explains the screaming.”

  “Uh, guys?”

  We looked at Regina. “What?”

  She stood immobile, eyes so wide they seemed more white than brown. “I think the word is ‘incoming.’”

  I held my breath and listened.

  Thumping. Scratching. Digging.

  Every grave around us was coming to life. Five of us against four dozen emerging zombies.

  I took a step backward. “We’re way outnumbered.”

  “It’s not about numbers.” Shane lifted his sword. “It’s about timing.”

  We mowed them down as they emerged. I told myself I was whacking weeds. An old childhood rhyme came back to me, taught by a temporary friend in Iowa. We’d sing it as we kicked the heads off dandelions in the fields.

  Momma had a baby and its head popped off!

  We worked our way down the rows, but each zombie we beheaded was a little further out of its grave, and I knew soon we’d be overwhelmed.

  Faster. Momma hadababy and its headpoppedoff!

  Faster. Mommahadababyanditsheadpoppedoff! Not people. Weeds. Stop them from growing
, running, breaking fragile human bodies that could never heal.

  Headpoppedoff! Headpoppedoff!

  I arrived at the grave of Robert William Tester. The marker was smaller than the others, and bore a cherub with its head bowed, legs crossed, and wings folded.

  I read the dates etched in the pale granite.

  “No,” I whispered. “Don’t make me do this.”

  The thing that emerged from the dirt, the thing that glared at me with dull resentment and bottomless hunger, had been five years old.

  One small leg broke free of the soil, then the other.

  “Please.” I pointed to the earth. “Go back.”

  It halted as if it understood me, and then it tilted its head, wisps of pale brown hair peeking out under the layer of mud. The sunken pools of black might once have been blue eyes begging for an ice cream cone or one more bedtime story.

  From deep inside me, my last vestige of humanity answered. I lowered my sword.

  The child took a hesitant step forward, then leaped for my throat.

  I stumbled back, expecting to feel its arms tearing off my head. But in the middle of the corpse’s flight, a shadow came between us, then a thud to my left as someone tackled it, wrestling it to the ground.

  “Cut it when I say!” Spencer shouted. He struggled atop the zombie, whose arms were snaking up to circle the vampire’s neck.

  I stepped over and raised my sword. With a yelp, Spencer flipped the child on top of him.

  “Now!” His voice was strangled, air cut off by the zombie’s choke hold. “Ciara…”

  If I sliced, I could cut them both in half. So I changed my grip on the hilt, pointing the tip straight down.

  “God, forgive me,” I whispered as the tears burned my skin.

  I stabbed. Spencer screamed.

  I yanked upward on the sword, and the boy’s body came with it, its back skewered on the tip.

  I tossed the weapon and its victim away and knelt beside Spencer. Blood poured from his stomach where the weapon had pierced him. “Sorry. Are you okay?”

  “I will be in a minute.” He stuffed his hands against the wound and took a halting breath. “Thanks.”

  “No, thank you.”

  We turned to look at the zombie kid. It lay twisted, motionless, like a discarded doll.

  I must have whimpered, because Spencer grabbed my shoulders.

  “It’s not real.” He shook me, then took my face in his mud- and viscera-caked hands. “Ciara, listen. You didn’t kill it. There was nothin’ to kill. Okay?”

  I stared into Spencer’s eyes, as dark as the moonless sky. But my assent wouldn’t come.

  “They’re getting away!” Regina shouted.

  I looked up to see a group of maybe twenty zombies staggering up the hill, near the edge of the orange boundary. Then one by one, they disappeared.

  With no one to order us not to, we followed, Shane in the lead. He lurched to a stop at the top of the hill, waving his arms for balance. I almost crashed into him from behind.

  There was a hole in the ground, the width of a human body.

  I stepped back. “I’m not jumping in there. There’s no way to tell how deep it is.”

  “Yeah, there is.” Shane dropped to his knees and put his ear to the hole. “I hear footsteps going that way.” He pointed toward the fence. “So it can’t be that deep.”

  “They’re heading into Sherwood?” I looked up the hill to the chapel. “The Underground Railroad tunnel! Lori says it used to lead to a church downtown.”

  We looked at each other, a quintet of amateur zombie killers, asking the unspoken question. Did we dare follow?

  Way back in the heart of the cemetery, the ZC and Enforcement agents were well occupied. Based on the screams, a little too occupied.

  “I’ll go first.” Shane slipped his sword into his scabbard, missing it the first two tries. Then he gave me a grim smile and lowered himself into the hole. We heard a loud “Oof!”

  A moment later Shane shouted, “All clear. It’s about a fifteen-foot drop. Ciara, you come next and I’ll catch you. The rest of you are on your own.”

  I sheathed my weapon and hurried into the abyss. I tried not to scream as I dropped into Shane’s arms, and mostly succeeded.

  We stepped aside. Regina, Noah, and Spencer landed lightly as cats.

  The tunnel was nearly pitch-dark even to my vampire eyes. I stepped on something soft and realized it was a broken patch of sod the size of the hole—a trapdoor for the zombies to fall through. No wonder their escape route hadn’t been seen ahead of time.

  I put out my hands to feel muddy walls that seemed to be reinforced with wooden beams. A few steps away from the hole, the tunnel’s height decreased dramatically, brushing the top of my scalp.

  “Watch your heads,” I told them. “Well, not Regina.”

  “See, there’s advantages to being short,” she said. “Of course, this humidity will ruin my hair.”

  “Shh.” Spencer stopped. “What was that?”

  A flashlight flicked on behind us. “It was the sound of me not chopping your loud asses in half.” Elijah stepped forward from the direction of the chapel. In the same hand as the flashlight, he wielded the biggest battle-ax I’d ever seen. “For now, at least.”

  “How did you get out of custody?” Shane asked him.

  “Colonel Lanham sprang me right after midnight. Once he got Tina alone, she recanted the whole testimony, said her dad put her up to it. Lanham brought me here and then left to find Petrea.”

  “How do we know we can trust you?” Regina said. “You could’ve been helping your girlfriend raise those things.”

  “Trust this.” Elijah shone the flashlight beam on his left arm, which was now a bloody stump. “All the zombies in my sector came after me. I couldn’t even see, I was at the bottom of such a thick pile.”

  I shuddered. “Sounds like an assassination attempt.”

  “Felt like it, too. Three of my squad members died saving me. I bet those monsters were just a distraction for the ones who ran away.” He pointed his flashlight at the tunnel’s ceiling, then at the long dark expanse ahead. “Now come on.” Elijah tossed Shane the flashlight and slung his battle-ax over his shoulder. “Time to catch some zombies and the man who called ’em.”

  33

  Under the Milky Way

  The tunnel got taller as we proceeded, until I could run without knocking my head on the ceiling. Ahead of me, Elijah and Shane hunched as they ran, the latter glancing back to make sure the rest of us were keeping up.

  “Some reason why we’re doing this alone?” I said. “Why can’t we call for backup?” It always seemed like the prudent move on TV.

  “Shh!” Elijah stopped and turned. “Who we gonna call?” he whispered. “Who we gonna trust? Someone in the Control is behind this. They want to make it go away quietly.” He handed me the ax, then checked the chamber of his Control-issued Glock. “Fuck that shit.”

  I tore my gaze away from the dull black pistol, then looked down the tunnel. “So we’re all that stands between the town and two dozen zombies?”

  Elijah glanced among us. “Y’all are new at this. I won’t hold it against you if you crap out now.”

  I thought of zombies crushing the doors of my fellow Sherwoodians, ripping apart the bodies of real live men, women, and children. Then I looked at Shane, whose eyes held the chivalric fire of a medieval knight.

  I traded him the battle-ax for the flashlight, then tightened my grip on my sword. “Let’s go.” I charged to the front to light the way.

  While most of my brain was watching out for an ambush, part of it was delighting in the adrenaline pumping through my veins, stretching and strengthening legs that had been shattered only a few minutes ago. I wondered if the same chemical cocktail would give me the nerve to kill the necromancer if it came to that. Sure, I’d dispatched some zombies, but they weren’t alive—or unalive—to begin with.

  We slowed near the end of the tunnel. A wood
en door lay in splinters, bits of gray flesh clinging to the frame. Beyond the door, a dim bulb shone, so I turned off the flashlight.

  Elijah put a finger to his lips and crept sideways through the doorway, his gun raised. Then he beckoned us to follow.

  Lori was right—the tunnel led to the basement of a small church. On the far cinder block white wall, a long paper banner proclaimed HALLELUJAH, HE IS RISEN! in several crayon colors.

  I glanced at the small crucifix over the broken door. Great, a Catholic church, I thought. Now the other vamps will be afraid to touch anything with their bare hands. Not that I could blame them. If this place really was consecrated, maybe even the walls and doors could burn us. Though I had opened the door of St. Michael’s without hurting myself.

  I quickly assessed the size of the basement room. A small Catholic church, within running distance from Sherwood cemetery.

  “We’re under St. Michael’s,” I whispered to Shane.

  Feet thumped and dragged on the floor above us. We crept to the foot of the wooden staircase, which, if I remembered correctly from our last visit, led to the sanctuary.

  Amid the shuffling, a male voice rose and fell while an organ played in the background. If all the zombies we’d followed were in the room upstairs, we were outnumbered more than three to one—and that wasn’t counting any humans or vampires that might be up there.

  Elijah beckoned me and Shane away from the staircase.

  “We can’t go in until we know what we’re dealing with,” he whispered. “Without recon, it’d be suicide.”

  Shane indicated a cellar door at the back of the building. “I’ll go out and around and try to see through the front window.”

  Elijah nodded. “Get their number and position and look for weapons and bystanders.”

  “Wait.” I pointed to a small, high window facing the street, covered by a thick black cloth. “Faster to go out that way, rather than run down the alley to the next block and come around.”