Affliction ab-22

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  ‘I love you, too, and yes, I will.’

  He didn’t argue, he just did what I needed. I loved him, but in that moment I loved him even more. The next thing I heard was his voice, distant, saying, ‘It’s Anita, she needs to talk to you.’

  ‘Hey, Anita, what’s up? Your boyfriend here has a serious face on him.’

  I explained about the vampire bodies and zombie bits being in the morgue. Deputy Al said, ‘The fire hazard makes burning anything in the forests too dangerous.’

  ‘I accept that, but … Al, Captain Jonas can’t get anyone to answer the morgue extension. He’s trying to get someone in the hospital admin to let him send someone to check on it without panicking anyone. I don’t care about that, I just want someone I trust to see if the dead vampires stayed dead. I’m not sure if the zombie bits will be moving around, but it’s the rotting vampires that I’m most concerned about.’

  ‘We blew them to hell, Anita. Brain, spine, heart, all splattered. That’s dead for a vamp, according to most of you marshals.’

  ‘It is for most vampires, but rotting vamps are different, much harder to kill. Fire is the only sure thing, and even then I’d deposit the ashes in different bodies of running water.’

  ‘Really?’ he said, and sounded skeptical.

  ‘Look, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but if there is even the faintest chance I’m right, then the vampires have been walking around down there for a while. I have no idea how long it took for them to heal the damage we did to them, but by now, if they can heal it and walk again, they will be.’

  ‘Now you’re scaring me.’

  ‘Good, you should be scared,’ I said.

  ‘Shit, okay, I’ll grab a couple of other men from up here and we’ll go check in with hospital security and see if the morgue is full of dead people or not-so-dead people.’

  ‘Thanks, Al, and watch your back.’

  ‘Always,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you back to Nathaniel.’

  Then Nathaniel was on the phone again. ‘I heard enough. So you think they killed everyone in the morgue.’

  ‘It’s a possibility, and I’d rather be paranoid and wrong than reasonable and really wrong. You and Micah be careful. Who’s with you for bodyguards?’

  There was a knock on the door and a uniform finally came through with an ice bag wrapped in paper towels. I took it, because they’d gone to the trouble, but I’d actually forgotten my face hurt. I had to use my right hand to hold the ice in place since I was using my left for the phone.

  ‘Bram and Socrates. Micah sent everyone else home to get some sleep.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Nathaniel said.

  ‘I’d just like you and Micah to have more than two guards with you, that’s all.’

  Edward held up his car keys and just raised his eyebrows. I nodded, and we headed for the door.

  ‘I’m not done with you, Blake,’ Jonas called.

  ‘You can yell at me later, and yell at me more if I’m wrong about the morgue. If I’m right, we don’t have time to wait.’

  ‘They’re sending hospital security down to check,’ Jonas said.

  I paused with my hand on the doorknob. ‘What’s their security armed with?’

  He asked the person on the phone. ‘They don’t know. They say the guns are black. Does that help?’

  ‘Shit, did you have someone who doesn’t know guns at all send security down to the morgue? Do they have any idea what they’re walking into?’

  ‘They aren’t walking into anything,’ Hatfield said. ‘I did my job.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, Hatfield. God knows I hope you’re right.’

  Edward said, ‘Captain, with respect, talk to someone on security personally and warn them, or they’ll just be more bodies.’

  Jonas hung up and redialed. ‘I know an ex-cop on their security; I’ll call him.’

  I opened the door and said, ‘Good.’ I wasn’t sure Jonas had heard me, and I know I didn’t care.

  Hatfield yelled after us from the open door. ‘There’s nothing wrong at the hospital. I did my damn job!’

  Edward and I both ignored her. We’d pick up Dev and Nicky from the front of the station and head to the hospital. If I was wrong, we’d get down there and look silly, but if I was right, people would already be dying, or dead. If I was right, Micah and Nathaniel were just a few floors up from half a dozen rogue vampires and a whole bunch of zombie parts that would do their best to tear people to pieces. God, I hoped I was wrong.

  42

  We were standing outside the morgue with the windowed door barricaded shut, because there were zombies inside eating the remains of two morgue attendants and the security guard who some genius had sent down here by himself after Jonas called them. By the time Al got down there it was all over except the eating part. I’d been worried about vampires, not so much the zombies. I’d never heard of zombies putting themselves back together once you blew them into pieces with guns. We didn’t have to worry about the vampires, because according to Al and the police with him the zombies were eating them, too.

  We had two more hospital security officers with us now. One man looked to be in his early forties, built sort of square, with a high-and-tight haircut that said ex-military as if he had a sign around his neck. He’d introduced himself as ‘Macintosh, yeah just like the apple, but call me Mac.’ The other guard, Miller, looked to be early twenties, a slender, dark-haired kid with glasses. He’d already been sick down the hallway where we made him run when we realized he was going to do it. Throw up outside in the woods, or at a graveyard, and the out-of-doors sort of took away the smell and made things better. In a hallway in an area with no windows the smell of vomit lingered; at least it lingered a little farther away from us. I hadn’t yelled at him; I mean, how many times do you have a coworker, maybe a friend, eaten by zombies? Besides, once he got sick he calmed down. I’d been the rookie once, too. Everyone throws up at least once.

  Have you ever wondered why there are windows in the doors of most morgues? It’s so attendants can look in first and make sure nothing has risen from the dead and is waiting to eat them. Whoever had put the windows in these doors must have a been a tall motherfucker, because Edward had to stretch to see in the windows and he had me by five inches, plus the two inches of his cowboy boots.

  ‘Tell me what you see,’ I said.

  ‘It’s like Nicky described from the zombies in the mountains; they’re just huddled down over the bodies like vultures.’

  ‘They’ll be safe-ish until there’s nothing left to eat; then they’ll try to get out and find something fresh. What kind of zombie can take out a vampire?’

  ‘This kind,’ Edward said.

  ‘Are they eating the other dead bodies, or just the vampires?’ I asked.

  ‘There are no bodies on any of the slabs.’

  ‘Shit, I need to see them,’ I said.

  Edward looked down at me and smiled; even with the sounds coming through the doors, he smiled that Ted smile. ‘Need a boost so you can see for yourself?’

  I scowled at him.

  ‘How can you smile looking at that?’ Al asked; he looked a little green.

  ‘I can smile looking at a lot of things,’ he said, and this time it was more Edward looking out at the deputy. He let his inner sociopath show through more than he ever did on a case, which was a sign of just how much he was bothered by what he was seeing.

  To distract Edward from terrifying Deputy Al, I distracted them by saying, ‘Yeah, I need a boost.’

  Edward moved toward me, but it was Nicky who went down on one knee and made a stirrup of his hands before my fellow marshal could get started.

  ‘You could have picked her up and been all romantic,’ Dev said.

  ‘It’s only romantic if Anita thinks it’s romantic,’ Dev said, ‘and right now she wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘That’s more insight than I’d have credited you with, son,’ an older uniformed officer said. He was abo
ut Edward’s height, but the way he carried his weight made him look shorter. He was mostly bald with a fringe of white hair that looked like it would be soft to touch like baby duck fluff. His eyes were a clear, brilliant blue, like an echo back to when the rest of him was as vibrant.

  ‘I’m not your son,’ Nicky said.

  ‘No offense meant … just giving you a compliment.’

  ‘A backhanded one.’ Gonzales looked at Nicky. ‘Don’t let Jenkins here get your goat. He calls everyone son, and he doesn’t know how to give anything but backhanded compliments,’ Gonzales said. The big sergeant had been upstairs when Al had called for volunteers. I had a feeling he was spending most of his time near Rush Callahan’s rooms.

  Nicky didn’t respond, just stayed waiting to give me a boost. I didn’t know what to say, because Nicky’s dislike of being called son, or boy, probably had something to do with his abusive family background, and that was no one’s business. I ignored it all and put one foot in Nicky’s hand. He trusted me to be able to hold myself steady enough for him to lift me up, and I trusted him enough to lift me smoothly so I could see. The only concession I made was to put my fingertips against the cool wood of the door as he lifted, and that was for balance. He lifted me until I said, ‘That’s great.’

  It was great, sort of, in that I could now see into the room for myself, but what I had to see was awful enough that I wished I hadn’t. I get that a lot in both of my jobs. Like most truly awful sights it took my mind a moment to process it; at first it was just images, shapes, that didn’t want to make sense. I knew what I was supposed to be seeing; the fact that my eyes refused to ‘see’ it meant it was going to be bad. It was the brain’s way of giving you a chance to look away, to not see the awful thing, but it was my job to look when everyone looked away. So I kept looking, and suddenly all the jumbled shapes snapped into focus.

  It looked like every zombie movie you’d ever seen, except that I knew they got it wrong, so why did this match it? We’d sent a handful of vampires to the morgue, and maybe a dozen zombies in bits, but the room was so full of the walking dead that I couldn’t count them as they huddled over the bodies. Edward had compared them to vultures, but vultures squabble over the dead, fighting for the best pieces, or any piece. The zombies ate in near silence, except for the wet, tearing sounds that I’d been hearing through the door long before my mind wanted to acknowledge them. I hadn’t realized that my hearing might try to protect me just like my vision did; interesting. The zombies huddled around four distinct piles of ‘food.’ There were only supposed to be three dead, so why four piles? I couldn’t see the bodies because the crouched undead hid most of the corpses from view. I got bits of red flesh glinting in the overhead lights, white bone gleaming like polished nightmare pearls, and the shining colors of organs as they were torn from deep within the bodies and consumed by … people.

  Some of the zombies were decayed, but the one munching on someone’s heart looked fresh as a newly minted undead penny. None of the zombies we’d sent here had looked that good, and just like that my poor, horrified brain put the impossible together.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ I said, and I sounded afraid, even to me.

  ‘What?’ Nicky asked.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Edward said. ‘What are you seeing that I don’t?’

  ‘We sent less than a dozen zombies in pieces here.’

  ‘There’s got to be more than twenty,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, and none of them looked this human, Ed … Ted. They were all decayed, a lot, not fresh like this.’

  ‘It’s some of the bodies that were in the morgue when we unloaded,’ Al said.

  I turned and looked at him, with my fingers holding on to the edge of the window. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Far as I can tell it’s every body that was in the morgue when we dropped off the vamp bodies and zombie parts.’

  ‘Let me down, Nicky,’ I said.

  ‘You look spooked,’ Gonzales said. ‘That can’t be good.’

  ‘It’s not,’ I said.

  ‘Why do you both look like you just saw a ghost?’ Jenkins asked.

  ‘A ghost wouldn’t spook me,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a saying, Anita,’ Edward said, as if it mattered.

  ‘Talk to us,’ Gonzales said.

  ‘Zombies rise from graves, not morgues. They need to be buried before they can be called from the grave as zombies. Even I couldn’t raise a body that’s just been sitting around the morgue.’

  ‘What do you mean? Dead is dead, right?’ Jenkins said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you don’t get it. Zombies don’t rise without a vaudun priestess, or necromancer, to call them from the grave.’ I pointed back behind me to the doors of the morgue. ‘They don’t rise spontaneously just because you put older zombies in the same area, and let me just say that zombies don’t put themselves back together once you’ve blown their legs and heads off. They keep moving and will kill and eat you if they can, but they don’t heal. Dead flesh doesn’t heal, and zombies are the most dead of the undead.’

  ‘So if all that’s impossible, then what the fuck is going on?’ Jenkins asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t like that at all,’ Gonzales said. ‘You’re supposed to be the expert on zombies in the Marshals Service. If you don’t know, then …’

  ‘We’re fucked,’ Jenkins finished for him.

  No one argued with him.

  Something heavy hit the door, and I screamed like a fucking girl.

  43

  ‘We have to burn them,’ Edward said, ‘we have to burn them all to fucking ash and then scatter it into different bodies of running water.’

  ‘Burn them how?’ Gonzales asked.

  ‘I got a flamethrower in my car.’

  ‘This is the basement of a hospital,’ Gonzales said.

  ‘Evacuate the hospital,’ Edward said.

  ‘We can’t order that,’ Jenkins said.

  ‘We have killer zombies in the morgue, and unless we can use fire we might not be able to stop them. I think that’s an excellent reason to evacuate the hospital,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck,’ Gonzales said, softly but with feeling.

  The zombies were beginning to throw themselves clumsily against the doors, but flesh-eating zombies aren’t like the regular shambling dead. They wouldn’t stay clumsy; they would learn, evolve into better killers, better predators. I’d never heard of a flesh-eating zombie being kept ‘alive’ longer than a few days. They didn’t hide themselves well enough; we found them and killed them, or vampires did, because they drew attention to all the dead. It had been the Harlequin that had told me that they destroyed rogue zombies the same way they had killed rogue vampires, and for many of the same reasons. It was bad for business in that this-will-get-us-chased-through-the-countryside-by-torch-wielding-mobs sort of way.

  The doors shuddered under the next shove. We all looked at the axe handle shoved in the door handles. ‘Whatever we’re going to do, we need to do it before the doors give,’ I said.

  Macintosh Call-Me-Mac’s phone sounded. Everyone jumped but Edward, Nicky, and Gonzales. Yeah, that included me.

  ‘Mac here. We may need to evacuate the hospital.’ He was quiet, and then he went pale. ‘Say again, you have reports of zombies on three different floors.’

  We were all quiet, listening hard.

  He hit speaker so we could all hear and said, ‘I’ve got cops with me, and you’re on speaker. Can you please repeat that, Ida?’

  Ida said, ‘We have reports on three, five, six, and some kind of disturbance in ICU. They called on the hospital line. The line went dead, but I could hear people yelling in the background before the call cut off.’

  ‘What floor is ICU on?’ I asked.

  Mac held up his hand and opened and closed it twice. ICU was on the tenth floor. That was the floor that Micah’s dad was on. I hit Nathaniel’s number, because Micah was probably still in with his dad.


  Nathaniel answered with ‘Anita,’ and there was something in his voice that I didn’t like at all.

  ‘You have a zombie reported on your floor,’ I said.

  ‘I’m looking at it,’ he said, his voice odd, as if he were trying to stay quiet and calm so as not to spook it. That didn’t really work with zombies.

  My mouth was suddenly dry. ‘Tell me there are cops with you.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Bram, Socrates?’

  ‘Yeah, but, Anita,’ and now he was whispering, ‘it’s not a zombie, it’s a vampire.’

  ‘A rotting vampire,’ I said, ‘so people are reporting it as a zombie.’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

  Al said, ‘Mother of God.’

  ‘We are on our way; barricade yourself into Micah’s dad’s room.’

  I heard a man’s voice yell out with authority, ‘Stop, or we’ll shoot!’

  ‘Shoot, tell them to shoot!’ I yelled, and I was starting to run down the hallway.

  Mac yelled, ‘What do we do with the zombies?’

  I realized that Al, Gonzales, Jenkins, and Edward were with us, leaving the two guards by themselves with that fragile door. I slowed, because if the zombies got out … shit!

  Nathaniel said, ‘We’re in the room. Bram and Socrates are on the door.’

  Edward yelled to Mac, ‘Evacuate the hospital. We’re going to have to burn it.’

  ‘You cannot use a flamethrower inside the hospital, it’ll set off the sprinkler system,’ Mac yelled.

  ‘Fuck!’ Edward said.

  ‘What did he say about flamethrowers?’ Nathaniel asked.

  ‘That we can’t use them; the sprinklers will put out the zombies before they can burn.’

  We stopped in the hallway. ‘I’m going for Micah and Nathaniel,’ I said.

  ‘Anita, do what you have to do,’ Nathaniel said.

  There were more shots, muffled because now they were on the other side of the room’s door. ‘I’m coming to you,’ I said.

  Micah was on the phone. ‘Anita, we’re safe for now; do your job.’

  ‘I am coming to you.’