Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

Tests on the blood around the man’s groin had come back human and female. I was betting it was from the female vampire in custody, but we wouldn’t know until we got the DNA tests back from the saliva in the bites she’d given to Travers. Because the vampires had lawyered up, we couldn’t take DNA samples without them being awake and having their lawyer present. Ares’ body had been considered too hazardous to test because of the lycanthropy. They’d been keeping Little Henry knocked out most of the time, because he’d been pretty hysterical any time he started to come to. They couldn’t keep him doped up forever, but they also couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him mentally and emotionally. Yes, he’d been through serious trauma and his father’s death, but it was almost as if he were having hallucinations when he was awake and horrible nightmares if he slept without the drugs. Henry was a very big, strong guy to have the nurses waking him from nightmares or trying to control him during waking hallucinations.

Dr Bill Aimes was tall, athletic in that I-hit-the-treadmill-and-light-weights kind of way, with short blond hair and steel-rimmed glasses. He was stumped at how to help Little Henry. ‘Is there anything that a vampire could do to him that would cause waking hallucinations and night terrors?’

‘Some vampires can cause terror in a person and feed off it, like a sort of metaphysical snack, but usually they have to be physically closer to do it. It’s usually a touch-distance kind of thing.’

‘Could they be causing the fear and visions so they could keep feeding off him from a distance?’

I thought about it. ‘I’d normally say no, but this vampire has done so many things that I would have said were impossible that I wouldn’t rule it out. I can tell you, though, that if he’s got a connection to a vampire, I should be able to sense it.’

‘How would you sense it?’

‘It’s hard to explain unless you have a background in psychic ability,’ I said.

He smiled and shook his head. ‘No, I’m strictly a touch-it-and-it’s-real person. I don’t even believe in God, because I can’t put him in a test tube.’

‘You’re an atheist?’ I asked.

He nodded.

‘Then you can’t use holy objects against vampires, or faith against the demonic.’

‘I think holy objects glow because of the individual’s faith in them, and I’ve never met a demon.’

The way he said it made me ask, ‘Do you not believe in demons?’

‘If I don’t believe in God, it’s very hard to believe in the rest.’

‘Angels?’ I asked.

‘Sorry, but no.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, before I could stop myself.

‘Sorry about what?’ he asked.

‘Your world is very … narrow, Dr Aimes. I find that sad, and it also means if vampires attack us you have to hide behind all of us believers.’

He laughed. ‘I will hide behind you proudly and keep not believing in all the glowy stuff.’

‘All right, you can hide behind me, but in the meantime I’ll see what I can sense from Henry Crawford.’

‘I hope you can give us some clue, because it’s almost as if he’s continuing to be freshly traumatized in the dreams and hallucinations.’

‘Aren’t night terrors by definition traumatizing?’ I asked.

He seemed to think about that and then nodded. ‘I suppose so, but these seem different. I’ve worked with patients with post-traumatic stress disorder and helped them work through some truly terrible memories, and all I can tell you is that there is something different going on here and I have no idea what it is.’

‘Vampire mind games can fuck with stuff,’ I said.

He grinned suddenly and gave a small laugh. ‘Well, I guess you would be the expert on vampires.’

I agreed with him, gathered up Nicky, and went to see Little Henry Crawford.

Little Henry looked smaller lying down than he had standing up, and hospital gowns make us all look somehow shrunken and weak, but none of it could hide that he was still six foot seven, with a spread of shoulders that was almost wide enough to touch the metal railings of the bed. Who would look at this guy and think, Him, I’ll have him, and I’ll totally fuck – him – up!

Everyone in the search group had been physically smaller, so why him and his dad? I asked Nicky, ‘Why did they take him and his father? They’re both ex-military, ex-special forces, in good shape, and they are both well over six feet tall. You saw the other search team members; would the Crawfords have been your choice of prey?’

‘None of the vampires I saw were ex-military. They’re undead, but that doesn’t give them experience they didn’t have in real life.’

‘You’re saying they couldn’t judge who was dangerous and who wasn’t?’

‘Not like you and I can.’

‘But the two men are still huge; that’s not something you need training to see,’ I said.

‘True.’

‘It’s like a lion pride going after a giraffe when there are plenty of gazelles to choose from.’

‘But if you have enough lions you can bring down a giraffe, and if you have too many lions you need something that big to feed the pride. You said it yourself, Anita. This was the largest group of flesh-eating zombies you’ve ever seen.’

‘Yeah, but they didn’t eat the men – the zombies, I mean. The lions caught the giraffe but then didn’t eat it; why not?’

‘They ate one of them,’ he said.

‘But even the one they killed, they didn’t eat it, not the way they did the others. You saw them, Nicky. They eat all the flesh. They ate enough to disfigure Crawford senior and kill him, but they didn’t eat enough of him for the lion pride to be full of giraffe. It’s like they were thinking more like serial killers than zombies.’

‘Some vampires are serial killers,’ he said.

‘True, but that doesn’t feel like what’s going on. I mean, technically most vampires are serial killers, but it’s because they have to feed on people, not because they want to kill them. Same outcome, but very different motives.’

‘But the person ends up just as dead either way,’ Nicky said.

‘But serial killers get off on the torture, or the method of killing. The bodies down in the basement were just dead.’

‘Throats torn out on most of the bodies I saw,’ Nicky said.

‘I didn’t get much of a chance to see, but the ones near us had intact throats.’

‘Probably tore out other major arteries and veins,’ he said.

‘Probably.’

‘From what you’ve told me, the zombies should have just eaten everything they could hold in their stomach and then left the bodies to be found, or rot, whatever.’

‘That’s typical,’ I said.

‘So what caused these zombies to just kill the people and store them?’

I looked at him. ‘Say that again.’

‘They stored them like groceries, or cords of wood for winter,’ he said.

‘I thought about the pictures in my history books of the concentration camps with the bodies stacked on top of each other in piles.’

‘They weren’t piled haphazardly, Anita. It was neat, orderly stacks. You don’t body-dump that way, and you don’t stack like that for disposal.’

I had a thought for how he knew that, but instead I asked, ‘Why would you pile them up like that?’

‘It was a food cache.’

‘Zombies, even flesh eaters, don’t do that, Nicky.’

‘Do ghouls do that?’

‘If it’s an old pack that’s been around for a few years undetected, they’ll start removing the freshly buried bodies from underneath so that the grave looks undisturbed, and I’ve seen them keep bodies in a crypt for eating later, but it’s rare. I mean, I only know of two cases where ghouls were that organized. They’re usually more animalistic.’