Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

‘Understood, you’re investigating the disease the way we’re investigating the crime,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Very much so.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know enough about this kind of disease to hazard a guess, but is there a pattern to the wounds on the other victims?’

‘What do you mean, pattern?’

‘Well, the neat bite is in the woman’s face. The rough bite is a shoulder wound. We know we have multiple zombie whatevers; what I’m asking is, does one zombie bite on the arms and shoulders and the other one bite on the face, or was the bite placement just what they could grab? Do they have a bite preference?’

‘Two of the victims had facial wounds,’ Burke said behind us.

It was almost startling, as if we’d forgotten the other cops were back there.

‘Three of them, including the sheriff, were shoulder, arm, or back wounds,’ Al said.

‘You said you had witnesses to some of the attacks. Did they report differences in how the zombies attacked?’

Al seemed to think about it and then glanced at the other officers. They all sort of shook their heads and shrugged. ‘The witness statements read like a horror movie,’ Rickman said. ‘I don’t mean they’re horrible, but more like they’re describing a scene from a movie.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

Rickman looked at the other men, and it was the first sign of insecurity I’d seen in him. I wasn’t sure if it made him more human and likable or if it should have worried me.

Burke said, ‘My guys were the first on the scene for one attack, and I know what the detective is saying. Zombies are the shambling dead, slow – relentless, but slow. One thing all the witnesses agree on is that these zombies are human-fast, at the very least, and maybe a little faster, which is movie stuff, not reality.’

‘The one flesh-eating zombie I dealt with was more than human-fast,’ I said.

‘Why does eating flesh make them faster?’ Rickman asked.

In my head I thought, I’ve seen zombies after they’ve eaten flesh and they haven’t been faster, but I can’t say it to a roomful of policemen, because I was the one who had raised the zombies and used them as defensive weapons . I’d done it every time to save my life and the lives of other innocent people, but none of it had been sanctioned by the police, and in fact I wasn’t entirely sure the police would have okayed it regardless of circumstances. Technically as a marshal with the preternatural service I could use my psychic abilities to do my job; there were no caveats on what psychic abilities I used to finish my job, and since my job was to execute people … technically I was now covered if I did it in the future. In reality I wasn’t sure the police would be able to overlook it. At best I’d lose my badge; at worst I might be up on charges of using magic to kill people, which was an automatic death sentence. It was a gray area for the law, but the price was a little too high for me to want to test the limits of it.

‘Marshal Blake, Marshal, can you hear me?’

I blinked and realized that Burke had been talking to me for a while, and I hadn’t heard. Automatically I said, ‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that? I think I was thinking too hard.’

‘Too hard about what?’ Rickman asked.

‘The dead,’ I said. I left the statement there for him to make what he would of it: the dead in this room, zombies, vamps, the victims – what dead?

‘Why does eating flesh make them faster?’ Rickman said, and I realized he was repeating himself.

‘I don’t know, but I do know that fresh blood allows zombies to speak and helps them be more “alive.”’

‘What do you mean, fresh blood?’ he asked.

‘Have any of you ever seen a zombie raised from the grave?’

They all shook their heads. I thought about explaining the whole ritual to them, but it was more information than they needed, and if they didn’t have a background in some sort of ritual-based religion it would be way too much. ‘We usually kill a chicken at the grave, or some animators cut their own body to get the blood, but either way you need fresh blood to do the ritual.’

‘What else do you need?’ Al asked.

‘A blade, salt, and most use an ointment with herbs in it; the mix is usually unique to each individual animator, because it’s homemade. Some animators feel they can’t raise the dead without their own mix of herbs and ointment; it’s usually partly based on the ointment their mentor used when he or she trained them.’

‘Is that all you need to raise the dead?’ Rickman asked.

‘You need the psychic ability to do it, which is damn rare. You need a buried body that is at least three days dead and you need to know the name of the body you’re trying to call from the grave.’

‘Why three days dead?’ Al asked.

‘That’s minimum time for the soul to leave the body,’ I said.

I got owl blinks from most of them, like I’d startled them or overcomplicated their little heads. It’s not a look you get from veteran cops very often. It didn’t make me proud; more crap, how did I explain this?

‘You believe in the soul?’ Rickman asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then how can you …’ Al asked it.

I frowned at him. ‘Finish your sentence.’

He shifted a little as if maybe my look and my request didn’t match up, but he finished. ‘Then how can you use black magic to raise the dead?’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake, don’t you guys read the federal bulletins on religious differences between legal religious practices and illegal ones?’

Al flushed a little, and I didn’t want to embarrass him. He was an ally and I would probably need them. Crap. ‘Sorry, we’re just a little podunk town sheriff department. We don’t get all the federal updates.’

‘Sorry, Al, I’m just a little tired of being accused of black magic and devil worshipping after Micah’s aunt and uncle.’

‘Geez, I’m sorry, Anita, really; they were horrible to you. I should have remembered that.’

‘You mean Bertie and Jamie?’ Gonzales asked.

‘Yeah,’ Al said.

‘Talk to me later and I’ll give you some stories that’ll make her leave you alone.’

‘That’d be great,’ I said.

‘Okay, I apologize again,’ Al said, ‘but if raising the dead isn’t black magic, what is it?’

‘Most people consider it vaudun, or voodoo, but since I’m still a card-carrying Episcopalian, it’s not a religious ritual for me, it’s just a ritual that helps me focus a natural ability with the dead.’

‘Is that what it is to other zombie raisers?’ Rickman asked.

I gave him a look. ‘If I were a practitioner I’d accept voodoo priestess , but since I’m not, the term is animator , from the Latin “to bring life.” I know the Boulder PD gets seminars on what’s insulting and what’s okay to say to various special groups, and animators are about as elite a group as we can get.’

‘Elite, in what way?’ Rickman asked.

‘As in a specialized skill. There probably aren’t two hundred people in the world who can raise the dead, at all. Of those, most can only raise the typical kind of zombies, slow, rotting corpses that can barely move like people; most can’t even speak. Those of us who can raise the dead so they are able to answer questions with prompting are maybe fifty. If you want a zombie that is coherent enough to answer a lawyer’s questions or say the last good-bye to loved ones, well, that narrows it down to maybe twenty-five, thirty. The only flesh-eating zombies I’m aware of have been raised by only the most powerful of us, maybe the top one percent of that. Someone who could raise multiple flesh-eating zombies like this is really rare. There are none in this state that I’m aware of.’