Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

‘What would you have gained from finding the grave the zombie came out of?’ Badger asked.

‘A clue to who had raised it might have led us to where it was hiding during the day, or it might have told us why it had turned into a flesh eater. Most flesh-eating zombies are out for revenge of some kind; you give them their revenge and they often go back to being a normal shambling zombie.’

‘Are these out for revenge?’

‘Most violent zombies are murder victims. They rise out of the grave with revenge their prime motivator, and anything that gets between them and that revenge they will kill. Some of them resort to eating people who didn’t harm them in life; again, no one knows why some killer zombies just strangle people to death, or beat them to death but never try to eat anyone.’

‘Are these all murder victims?’ Yancey asked.

I thought about that. ‘Maybe; most of the ones we’ve been able to identify are all missing-person cases, so yeah, I guess they are, but the weird thing is they should all be trying to kill whoever killed them. Once they’ve killed their murderer they become harmless.’

‘But they were killed by rotting vampires, right?’ Nicky asked.

‘Or other killer zombies, yeah,’ I said.

‘So what if you raise a zombie that was killed by another zombie? They can’t kill their murderers, because they’re already dead.’

‘In a more normal zombie it could go one of two ways; either the death of their murderer would negate everything and they’d just not animate quite right, but they’d be peaceful, or they could be driven by revenge that they could never satisfy. Zombies that can’t get revenge because their murderer has died sometimes do go on a killing spree until they get burned.’

‘Are we saying that every zombie this rotting vampire raises is seeking revenge, but because he’s dead to begin with they’re slaughtering everything in their path?’ Yancey asked, frowning as if he were trying to work it out in his head.

‘I think you may have hit on it, but the difference is that these zombies seem to be under his control and murderous zombies are wild cards. They obey no one.’

‘Would it be possible to raise a zombie as a sort of weapon?’ Yancey asked.

Nicky and I said, ‘Yes,’ at the same time. We looked at each other. The night I met Nicky I’d saved myself – us – by turning the cemetery of zombies I’d raised against the bad guys. They’d made me raise the dead at gunpoint and threat of death to Micah, Nathaniel, and Jason and hadn’t thought that giving me a cemetery of my own zombies tipped the odds in my favor.

I looked back at the other two men. ‘It’s pretty standard folklore that vaudun priests can raise a zombie and send it after their enemies.’

‘Vaudun, you mean voodoo?’ Badger asked.

‘Same religion, different words. I usually say vaudun , because people are less likely to think all movie monsters. You say voodoo and people get very set ideas in their head. It’s a perfectly fine religion and most believers are law-abiding citizens.’

‘Does that mean that zombies see vampires, like the rotting vampires, as already dead?’ Yancey asked.

I shrugged. ‘I guess so, or they’d go after their murderers.’

‘Or maybe they haven’t found their murderers yet,’ Nicky said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘If we gave them the two vampires you guys have in custody, and they were able to kill them, would the ones that those two killed go back to being ordinary zombies?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You said that if a killer zombie can’t find his murderer and have his revenge, he can start killing and eating anything that gets in his way, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then shouldn’t giving the vampires over to the zombies quiet some of them?’

‘It might, but we’d be giving two legal citizens over to be torn limb from limb. Vampires are a lot harder to kill than humans usually, which means the vamps would stay alive a lot longer during the process.’

He nodded. ‘Makes sense.’

‘That would be a really bad way to die, Nicky.’

‘Yeah.’ He said it as if to say, So what?

‘If we were just going to execute the vamps anyway, and it would save dozens of lives …’ Yancey let his words trail off.

Badger looked at him. ‘You could do that, give someone over to the thing we saw today?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s a thought; we’re just brainstorming and gathering information, right?’

‘They’re rotting vampires,’ Nicky said. ‘If you can’t teach them how to look human, the woman seemed to want to die.’

‘They should have two forms; one should be totally human and as attractive as they were in life,’ I said.

Dev and Lisandro came over to us. ‘What has you guys all serious face?’ Dev asked, smiling.

‘We’re debating on whether giving the two vampires in custody over to the zombies of their murder victims would make the zombies stop killing other people,’ I said.

Dev’s eyes widened and he went pale.

‘Who came up with the idea?’ Lisandro asked.

‘I did,’ Nicky said.

‘You are a sick motherfucker,’ Lisandro said.

‘Yes, yes, I am,’ Nicky said, totally unbothered by the comment.

Lisandro laughed, as if he couldn’t quite believe it, but he did.

‘You’re not going to actually do it, are you?’ Dev asked.

‘They are citizens with rights, so no,’ I said.

‘Not if Anita thinks the vampires in custody committed some of the murders without being controlled by their master,’ Nicky said.

‘They’d still be legal citizens,’ I said.

‘But they’d be executed anyway; what does it matter whether you stake them during the day or feed them to the people they killed?’

‘It does have an interesting sense of irony,’ Yancey said.

‘They’re either people, with all that means, or they’re not,’ Dev said. ‘You can’t make them legal and fight for the law that gave them a second chance at life and then turn around and lie so that they lose that second chance.’

‘That’s directed at me, I take it,’ I said.

‘Yes, because it’s your warrant and you are the expert on vampires. If you decide that they killed people without being forced to do it, then they’re dead,’ Dev said. He didn’t sound happy, but he was right.

‘And the marshal who holds the warrants has complete discretion on how the executions are to be carried out,’ Nicky said.

‘Is that true?’ Yancey said.

I nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘So you could do anything to them as long as they die eventually?’ Yancey asked.

I nodded again. Olaf, alias Marshal Otto Jeffries, was known to torture his vamps before killing them; of course, torture was his hobby, but the badge and warrant gave him a legal outlet for his passion. It did make one wonder about the job, when a serial killer found it a good outlet.

‘You look like you’re remembering something bad,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘I try to be humane when I kill, so let’s table the idea until we get desperate.’

‘We won’t get that desperate,’ Dev said, looking at me, very seriously.

‘If he’s as powerful a necromancer as I think he is, he could raise dozens of zombies.’

‘What about the zombies in the morgue?’ Nicky asked.

‘What about them?’ I asked.

‘Were they all murder victims?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What would it mean if they weren’t all murder victims?’ Yancey asked.

‘That every zombie this guy raises turns into a killer.’

‘He’s ordering them to kill,’ Nicky said.

I nodded. ‘Yeah, he has to be.’

‘Well, this just gets better and better,’ Yancey said.