Cameron Haley - Skeleton Crew

“I got this,” I said. “Spread out and clear the place, room by room. Make sure you only hit the dead ones. Some of the victims should still be alive.”

My weapon of choice was my ghost-binding spell. “At first cock-crow,” I chanted, “the ghosts must go, back to their quiet graves below.” My working theory was that the zombie was just a ghost trapped in its mortal remains. Sure enough, the spell pulled the man’s shade from its ravaged vessel and the barbecued corpse dropped limply to the tile.

The piskies used their glamour. I didn’t really want to know what they did to kill the zombies. They just flew up to the victims and dusted them, and the walking corpses fell over and stopped moving.

We moved methodically through the first floor of the hospital and the heaviest work was in the emergency department and triage wards. By the time my kills reached double digits, I’d turned my brain off and stopped registering what I was doing. I saw enough before that happened to realize some of the zombies weren’t victims of the fire. They were nurses, and doctors and candy stripers, and they’d died when their patients fed on them. Some of them were so badly ravaged they were barely recognizable as human. They were still moving, though, and they were still hungry. They dragged themselves along the white tile, leaving smeared blood trails behind them, and they reached for me eagerly before I tore their spirits free.

It took a little over three hours to reach the top floor of the hospital. When we were finished with the zombies, we started back down, floor by floor, glamouring the surviving employees and patients. None of them would remember what had happened and I felt like we were doing them a kindness.

It was a pretty thin cover-up and I knew there’d be an investigation. A lot of questions would be asked but none of them would have any real answers. There were going to be a lot of bodies but in the end it wouldn’t lead anywhere. No witnesses, no leads, no case.

When we arrived at Broadway Hospital for the second phase of the cleanup, Agents Lowell and Granato were standing outside by their black sedan.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “As if I don’t have enough to worry about without these fucking guys showing up. Honey, y’all hang back and let me handle this.”

Agent Lowell spoke as I walked up to them. “Ms. Riley, please tell me you didn’t have anything to do with this.”

“I’m not in the business of raising zombies,” I said. The fact they were here meant they already knew what was going on. No point in lying about it.

“And the project fire?” asked Granato. He always wanted to be the hard ass.

“Not guilty, but I know who did it. We’ll take care of it.”

“And do you know who’s responsible for the zombies?” Lowell asked.

“I was hoping you might know what’s going on. Before this, it was just a couple of gangsters.” Tony and Keshawn hadn’t really been gangsters, but it would have been too fine a distinction for Lowell and Granato.

“It’s not just gangsters and it’s not just the victims of the fire. We’ve gotten reports from all over L.A.-everyone who dies is getting back up.”

“I figured it would go that way. And Stag doesn’t have any intelligence on this thing?” Homeland Security’s Special Threat Assessment Group had compiled a lot of research on the supernatural, even if Lowell and Granato were the only agents with any juice.

“We assume it’s a PNC,” Lowell said.

I’d gotten enough of asking him to explain his fucking acronyms the first time we met, when the sidhe came across in what Stag called an MIE-a Major Incursion Event. I glared at him and waited for the translation.

“Paranormal Contagion,” he said finally. “You know, a zombie plague.”

“Jesus Christ, not you guys, too.”

“I can tell you this,” said Granato, “if there’s anything that concerns the government more than an MIE it’s a PNC.”

“This is extremely serious, Ms. Riley,” Lowell said. “We can’t isolate the pathogen or identify the vector, so we have no way of containing the outbreak. We could lose the city, just for starters. That pushes most of the contingency plans off the table and the decision-makers go right to the unconventional protocols.”

It seemed like every time there was a little supernatural hiccup, someone in the government wanted to reach for the red button. “It’s not a zombie plague, Lowell. I got bit by one of the damn things, and I feel fine-as fine as I can, considering I just had to clear a hundred-plus zombies out of Centinela Hospital.”

“How do you explain what’s happening, then?”

I exhaled slowly and shook my head. “Beats the hell out of me. From what you said, everyone that dies is turning into a zombie-everyone, no matter how they died, no matter where in the city they died. That sounds like a much bigger event than your horror-movie outbreak.”

“A CMI,” Lowell said, nodding thoughtfully. He looked up and noticed my irritation. “Critical Metaphysical Instability. A breakdown in the structure or natural processes of our reality.”

“Yeah, that sounds more like it,” I said.

“If you’re right, this situation represents an extreme threat to the United States.”

“No shit, Lowell.”

“I mean, a CMI…this is End Times stuff, Ms. Riley.”

“Well, I haven’t seen Jesus or heard any trumpets sounding so I guess it’s not all that bad. We just have to figure out what’s causing it and put it right.”

“How do you propose to do that?”

“Fuck if I know. Is it just L.A.? Have you gotten any reports from anywhere else?”

“Just L.A.,” Granato said, “for now.”

“That’s good. Okay, I’ll look into it. I’m not sure how, but I’ll figure something out. I can ask Mr. Clean if he knows anything about it, though I consider it a last resort.”

“Mr. Clean?”

“My familiar. We don’t get along real well but he knows his shit.” Problem was, every time I went to him he was playing another angle, trying to get me killed. It was a hate-hate relationship.

“How quickly can you move?” Granato asked. “We have to submit a report on this. We can try to buy you some time and we can…suppress…the media coverage of the story. But the government won’t stand back and watch L.A. turn into a necropolis.”

“A necropolis?”

“Yes,” Lowell said. “Even in the best of times, more than two hundred people die in L.A. every day. We’ve done some, uh, testing in the last twenty-four hours. Everyone who dies seems to go mad and degenerate into cannibalism, eventually, and that just creates more zombies. It won’t take long for this to become a city of the dead.”

“How does the cannibalism tie into your CNE theory?”

“CMI,” said Lowell. “Based on the experiments, feeding on human flesh seems to be the only way to slow the zombies’ physical decomposition.”

“So they eat people, they don’t degenerate?”

Granato shook his head. “They don’t rot as fast. Depending on how they died, some of these freaks don’t even know they’re dead. Either way, it drives them mad when they start in on the other white meat.”

I nodded and rubbed my ear absently. “Okay, guys, I’ll try to hurry. I have other things on my to-do list, you know.”

“Like what?”

“Well, right now, I’ve got to clear some fucking zombies out of another hospital. Maybe you can help with that, it’ll go a lot faster. Then, I’ve got a gang war that just went hot. I’ve got to make sure that doesn’t blow up and put a lot more zombies on the street.”

“Is that all?” Granato said, smirking.

“No, Granato, it’s not-thanks for asking. I’ve also got a party to go to tonight, and I haven’t even decided what to wear.”