by Angela Henry
****
At almost midnight Desi West planned to go home and finally get that good night’s sleep Morel had been nagging her to get, when her old friend stopped her as she buzzed for the elevator to the parking garage. The headquarters for the Equinox Agency was located underneath the Superdome, a vast improvement over their old location underneath St. Louis Cathedral, where Father Antonio de Sedella had founded the agency shortly before his death in 1829. They’d only been in their new space for a year. No one else knew that the Superdome’s recent multimillion-dollar renovations included the EA’s new underground facilities. The agency was growing, having added several new departments, including the mage and alchemy units, in the last decade.
“We got big trouble.” Morel’s hair looked even more messy than usual.
“What’s wrong?” Desi rarely saw the unflappable old man looking so upset and felt a shiver of apprehension down her spine. He gestured with a nod of his head for her to follow him. Once they were back in his lab, he pulled her over to a microscope that had been set up, with a blob of tissue smeared on the glass plate underneath.
“Take a look.”
Desi gave him a questioning look but did as he told her. Under the lens of the scope she saw two types of cells. They were roughly the same size as blood cells, but most were reddish black in color. Desi watched as the dark cells devoured the red blood cells, doubling their size before instantly multiplying into smaller cells. There were hardly any healthy cells left.
“What am I looking at?”
“A tissue sample from that finger we found in the alley.”
“I thought you said it was from a body that had been dead a year? What made you take another look?”
“It never reanimated.”
“What?” Desi’s head whipped up. Even dismembered, body parts from a zombie are still animate unless they’re burnt or the owner’s brain is destroyed, cutting the signal between it and the rest of its body.
“So this isn’t from a zombie?”
“The owner of that finger was still very much alive when it got ripped from their hand. Alive, not reanimated.”
“Sorry, you lost me. I saw that finger. How could the owner have still been alive?”
“I’m still running more tests, but the preliminary report on the blood indicates that there are at least three different types of brain matter in that sample you’re looking at. The normal red blood cells belong to the owner of the finger.”
“Brain matter?”
“As you can see, it’s cannibalizing the living cells.”
“So we are talking about zombies after all. Isn’t that what happens when a person is attacked by a zombie—they pass their virus to their victim?”
“They pass their virus on, Desi, not their brain cells.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Think about it,” he said, getting impatient, which he rarely got with her. “Zombies don’t attack and eat each other. So, the only way zombified brain matter could have possibly gotten into the owner of that finger is if it was ingested or injected. So I did a test on the brain matter and found it had traces of a common filler used in gel caps attached to it.”
“Good God.” Desi covered her face with her hands.
“That’s right,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “Someone is making some kind of drug using dead human brain tissue that’s been reanimated. I’m betting that the owner of the finger was the one who attacked the man in the alley, meaning the users of this drug eventually develop an appetite for human flesh and brain matter as the zombified cells devour their living tissue, which makes them the worst kind of zombies, Desi, the kind that are still alive, aware, and can think and act on their own even as their bodies are rotting from the inside out.”
“How can we be sure that this isn’t just an isolated incident?”
“There’s more.” He handed Desi a sheet of paper. “I ran the finger’s print through our system, and you’ll never guess who it belongs to.”
Desi looked at the piece of paper and groaned.
EIGHT
I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I’d taken the tablet Crystal Sneed had given me home and used a razor to slice it open. All of the red liquid had oozed out onto the plastic I’d laid out on the counter. The gel capsule itself had collapsed around what was left inside. I leaned down to get a better look. Tiny, about the size of a pinhead, it pulsed and throbbed much like a heartbeat. I didn’t want to touch it and was cutting away more of the gel cap to get a better look when I accidentally sliced my finger with the razor.
“Shit!” I put my finger in my mouth and looked down to see drops of my blood had dripped onto the counter right on top of the deflated gel cap. The pulsing matter instantly started absorbing my blood.
“So that’s how this shit works,” I whispered aloud. Whatever was inside the gel cap devoured living cell tissue until there was nothing left. The bigger question was, who was making it and what, or more importantly, whom were they using to make it? It was time I had a little talk with Alastair Duquesne, and it couldn’t wait until morning.
I arrived at Duquesne’s house well after midnight. Not exactly a good time to be visiting, but this wasn’t a social call. I tried calling first but wasn’t surprised to get no answer. And no one answered when I rang the doorbell numerous times and followed it up by pounding on the door. Duquesne wasn’t a well man, and I seriously doubted he’d be out on the town. The lights I saw on in the first-floor windows where his office would be only confirmed my suspicions. I walked around the perimeter of the house and tried to push the window open. It wouldn’t budge, so I looked around to make sure no one was watching and broke it out with my elbow. I reached through the broken window to unlatch the window from the inside. The fact that no alarm sounded told me Duquesne was not only home but must also still be up. I hoisted myself up through the window carefully to avoid the broken glass.
There were two whiskey glasses on Duquesne’s desk. One was empty and the other looked barely touched. He’d had a visitor. Was that person still here? I went to the door and listened. I couldn’t hear anything and turned my attention to his desk. I saw that the middle drawer hadn’t been closed all the way and pulled it open. Inside were the usual pens, paper clips, letter opener, and a brass business card holder. But it was a small, round, sterling silver pillbox engraved with Duquesne’s initials on the top of the lid that caught my eye. I opened it and inside found a half dozen of the same red gel caps Crystal had given me. Something black was painted on the bottom of the box. I shoved the pills aside with my finger, revealing a pair of black wings. Well, this explained Duquesne’s condition. The dumbass must be taking this shit, too. Didn’t he realize what would happen to him?
I pocketed the pillbox. I didn’t find anything else of interest and looked through the rest of the drawers. I found file folders containing reports on Duquesne’s investments and saw that he owned large shares in several local businesses, including hotels, restaurants, and a couple of casinos in both Louisiana and Tunica, Mississippi. He was also heavily invested in various oil companies. He had an impressive portfolio, but I found nothing that would help me track down the maker of NeCro. I supposed they could be making it in back-alley labs like they do meth and crack. But I doubted it. Crystal said Duquesne had a partner who had big plans for the drug, which could only mean mass production on a large scale.
A loud crash caused me to drop the folder I was holding. I quickly picked it up and stuffed it back into the drawer and hastily wiped off everything I’d touched. I put my ear to the door but didn’t hear anything else. I opened the door and peered out into the hallway. I didn’t see anyone and wondered if Duquesne could be upstairs. I headed out into the hallway, about to head upstairs, when I heard another loud noise. It sounded like scraping, and it wasn’t coming from upstairs. I stood in the foyer and tried to gauge where it was coming from. I didn’t hear anything else, but I smelled something. It was foul like decay.
The same scent I’d caught a whiff of when Crystal Sneed had pulled the scarf from around her face, the smell of rotting flesh. And it was coming from the living room. But when I got in there, I found the room empty, except for the smell.
An ornate chandelier illuminated a huge room decorated with heavy antique furniture and walls hung with portraits of more grim-faced Duquesne ancestors. A pair of dueling pistols sat in a glass display case on top of a table with a large globe as the base. A gold couch with an ornate tufted back faced a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf with a pair of matching chairs on either side. I looked at the floor, thinking maybe the noise I heard was something that had fallen. But a large oriental rug covered most of the floor and would have muffled most of the noise. Then I heard it again. This time it sounded like scratching from behind the bookshelf. I tried to pull the bookshelf from the wall but couldn’t. I felt around the edges of the shelf, but it was smooth, with no hidden levers or latches. The scratching got louder, like someone trying to break through.
“Duquesne? Is that you?”
I leaned against the bookshelf and felt one of the raised, carved rosettes decorating the trim depress, causing the shelf to swing out. But the rug on the floor kept it from opening all the way. Putrid air, which smelled like it was coming from a cesspit, wafted out. My stomach roiled and I gagged. I took a step forward, then something slammed against the shelf from the other side. I jumped back just as the heavy shelf cleared the edge of the carpet, swinging open all the way. I didn’t have time to move as a blur of white came flying out of the passageway behind the shelf straight at me. It was a woman or at least what was left of one. Underneath the crooked blonde wig on her head, I could see a patchy scalp and white strands of hair. She had no nose, and the bottom part of her face dripped with blood and gore that had stained the front of her white silk dress all the way to the hem. But that wasn’t what scared me the most. It was her eyes. They were clear, blue, and still very alert.
Thick, black, putrid-smelling phlegm ran out of her mouth when she laughed. The stench overwhelmed me and I tried to shove her away, but my fingers sank into the slimy rotting flesh of her upper arms. It was like squeezing a rotten banana. She tried to bite me, and I slugged her in the face. Her cheekbone crunched beneath my knuckles, which deterred her for all of a second before she came at me again. She was much stronger than I’d have thought someone who was essentially a walking corpse would be. Her hands were around my neck digging into my skin. I slammed her against the wall, knocking down pictures and managing to loosen her grip, then repeatedly punched her in the stomach until she let go.
But I only managed to get a few steps away before she came at me again. Channeling a wrestling move I’d seen on TV, I dropped to the floor right before she reached me and stuck my feet out, planting them into her chest and launching her over my head. I turned just in time to see her land on the couch, knocking it on its side. But she quickly leapt over the couch onto my back. I twirled around as I struggled to get her off and managed to fling her against the wall, but in the process I lost my balance and stumbled backward over the fallen couch onto the globe table, shattering the glass display case. I lay there too stunned to move as the pain of a shard of broken glass bit into the back of my arm. She knocked the remains of the shattered table out of the way to get to me, grabbed my ankle, and tried to take a bite, but I kicked her in the face, breaking her jaw this time and booting her back about a foot. I scuttled away like a crab, cutting my palm on the broken glass in the process, when my fingers encountered a familiar shape. I looked down to see one of the dueling pistols that had been in the display case. I grabbed it, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, which shouldn’t have surprised me since the damned thing had to be more than a hundred years old. I threw it at her instead, thwacking her in the chest and pissing off corpse bride even more.
In an act of sheer desperation, I grabbed the other pistol. When I pulled the trigger this time, I heard a loud bang like a firecracker. The recoil nearly broke my wrist. But when I looked at my attacker, I was relieved to see a small, black hole in the middle of her forehead. She actually looked surprised and even touched the black goo that ran from the bullet hole in confusion before falling on her face. Not taking any chances, I put another one in the back of her head for good measure. Much as I didn’t want to, I knew I had to check out what lay behind the bookshelf. It didn’t take me long to find what was left of Duquesne’s body inside a bronze casket that had fallen off its stand onto the floor. That must have been the crash I’d heard. But what I heard next made my night go from bad to worse.
“Police! Put your hands in the air!”
Here I go again.
****
All of the strange noises coming from Duquesne’s house had caused one of his neighbors to call the cops. And the window I broke to get in only made me look more busted when a pair of NOLA’s finest caught me in Duquesne’s little secret room behind the bookshelf, where he’d undoubtedly been getting up to some pretty freaky shit. I’d been caught in the home of a wealthy and prominent New Orleans businessman with two savaged corpses, gunshot residue on my clothes and hands, and blood on my clothes. The two baby-faced cops that showed up were too busy puking to hear my explanation that I’d been working for Duquesne and broke in ’cause I got worried when he wouldn’t answer the door. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have believed me, either. I was beyond fucked and I couldn’t even call Minx. Not that even she could have gotten me out of this mess. They read me my rights, then dragged me down to the station, where I got strip-searched by a fat bastard with cold hands and dirty fingernails, and was now attired in a spiffy institutional green jumpsuit and handcuffed to the chair in a beyond-bleak interrogation room.
“Still not talkin’, huh?” Detective Lou Gentilly could care less if I said anything. I’d already been convicted, as far as he was concerned, and was headed for a date with the needle.
“I told you what happened. You don’t want to hear it. Now get me a lawyer. I know my rights.”
“Gonna take more ’n lawyer to get ya off, son. Duquesne’s place looks like a fuckin’ slaughterhouse. You’re a goddamned butcher.” He jabbed a meaty finger in my face. He had jowls like a bulldog, a gin-blossom nose, and a voice that sounded like he gargled with rocks.
“And I told you he was dead when I got there. The crazy woman who killed him attacked me.”
“Yeah,” he said, getting up to stretch his legs. “You were attacked and Duquesne killed by a woman who looks like she’s been dead a week and dragged up from the bottom of the bayou. You’re one crazy fucker.”
“Your lack of imagination is starting to get on my nerves, detective.”
“And your smart mouth is gonna get you in a world of hurt, son.”
Gentilly knocked me backward in my chair. But the chair was attached to the table by a short chain, which stopped me from falling and jerked me back up, slamming my chest hard into the edge of the table and driving the air from my lungs. I could tell it was his favorite trick. I glared at him as I gasped in pain and struggled to breathe. This bastard was really starting to piss me off.
“We got ya dead to rights in the victim’s house with the victim’s blood on your clothes and an expensive sterling silver pillbox on your person. You better start talkin’ now, and don’t gimme no more bullshit about no dead woman being the perp.”
“A lawyer. Now,” I said, finally catching my breath. “Or I’m not saying another word.”
Gentilly came back two hours later and wordlessly unlocked my handcuffs.
I rubbed my chaffed wrists.
“Is my lawyer here?”
Gentilly scowled at me.
“You’re free to go. You can sign for your shit at the front desk.”
I stared at him. Was this a joke? Would he pop me for trying to escape if I walked out the door? Just looking at Gentilly I knew he had all kinds of old-school cop tricks up his sleeve.
“Get the hell out before I find something else to c
harge your sorry ass with.”
Ten minutes later I was signing for my wallet and keys at the front desk, dressed in the same bloody foul clothing I’d been brought in wearing. You could have heard a pin drop as everyone stared at me.
“Might be best if you take the back way out, Mr. Knight,” said the female clerk who I’d handed my paperwork to. She gestured down the hall, where I saw a glowing exit sign.
I headed down the hallway to the sound of my shoes clicking on the linoleum and a nagging feeling of doom that stiffened my spine. Once outside, I walked across the lot while a million questions swirled through my head, not the least of which was whether or not Minx’s Range Rover was still parked in front of Duquesne’s house or sitting in the impound lot. As it turned out, the vehicle I should have been worried about was the black van parked right outside the lot’s entrance. I walked past just as the side panel slid open, and two pairs of strong hands dragged me inside. I couldn’t see who’d grabbed me but managed to land one good punch before something was sprayed in my face. I briefly felt the sting of it in my eyes and a burning sensation in my nose and mouth before I was out cold.
****
Desiree West sat in the EA’s interrogation room across the table from a very scared young man. And for once she wasn’t interrogating some random supernaturally inclined criminal. Instead, the young man in question was Vic Buchard, the clerk and mage in training. At least that’s who he had been pretending to be ever since he joined the Equinox Agency. Turned out his real name was David Granger, and he had a juvie record. He’d bought his identity from the real Vic Buchard, whose finger they’d found in the alley with Anton DePreist.