“You remember, do you not? Madame chased you onto the roof. She had a pistol, no? She stopped there and pointed it at you, her hair all tumbling and looking like a devil from hell.”
Delice nodded. She was trembling. Her mind was so slow, her body so heavy. Her hands throbbed as though she had used them very hard. Ava Ani’s eyes searched her face.
“You ran, petite fille. You ran right off the roof and fell. Fell onto the stones in the courtyard. Fell hard.”
Delice finally understood. She was a zombi. Ava Ani had brought her back to life in order to avenge her own death. Her dark eyes widened in terror.
Now she was enslaved forever, mute and stupid. Ava Ani had stolen the blessed release of death that she had chosen for herself. The one thing she had been able to choose—denied her for eternity.
Delice tried to scream, but all she could do was breathe out a rusty croak. She tried to pull away from Ava Ani, but the mambo tightened her grip on Delice’s face and shook her head.
“Your work is done here, ma pauve. I have no more need for you. Soon you will sing again. This time, with the angels.” She began to chant low, swaying with the rhythm of the song. Delice swayed with her, her hands curled around Ava Ani’s wrists, her eyes shut. A white fog filled her mind and she thought she heard singing.
“Mambo Ava Ani?”
Ava Ani whirled, her white skirts flashing in the darkness. “Who wants to know?” she replied, hiding her fear under anger.
“Philippe LaPlace,” came the response. “Why are you here? Did the . . . information I gave you not serve?” Philippe came forth from behind a tomb.
“It served me very well,” Ava Ani replied, her teeth clenched. She did not like this bokor-man of the Cochon Gris. But she could not be rude. She had come to him, filled with rage and grief for the victims of the DuPlessis. He had helped her in her plan to rid New Orleans of them, and taught her the powerful dark voudou she would need to know. She knew Philippe was powerful, and he frightened her. Still, she did not care to be spied on. She turned away from him in order to place a linen-wrapped bundle into the tomb she had just opened.
“So I heard,” he said. A low chuckle echoed in the deep indigo shadows. “Erzulie is a creative one, is she not?”
Ava Ani shuddered. Philippe came forward and stood next to her. He ran his hand along the open edge of the tomb. “You sent the little girl back then?” he asked. “Pity.”
“Delice did all that was needed. I have no need for a zombi to do my bidding. She spent her life enslaved. No need for her to spend her death there too.” Ava Ani rolled a length of red ribbon, scented with rose oil, into a small tight coil. She slipped it into the gris-gris bag she wore around her neck.
“You are too soft, Ava Ani,” scoffed Philippe. “Join with us in the Cochon Gris and find your true power.”
“Non, merci,” she replied, a bit tartly. Ava Ani leaned her weight against the stone slab. She pushed with every ounce of strength she had, and slowly the slab slid back into place, sealing the tomb. Delice again shared a dead-house with the other dead slaves of the DuPlessis household.
Ava Ani straightened up, wiping the sweat from her forehead. In the faint starlight she saw Philippe scowling at her. Her almond eyes narrowed, but she forced a smile.
“Erzulie liked the fancy white chat I fixed for her,” Ava Ani said sweetly. “Mais oui, she liked it very much. She said to me that she had never had such a fine gift.” She watched Philippe’s shadowed face. A moment passed—and then a flash of white teeth answered her.
“Very well, mambo. I see you made a friend of Erzulie. You go back to your little magic and I will go back to mine.”
“C’est bon,” Ava Ani said, but he was already gone. She turned back to the dead-house.
“No more voudou, ma fille. Now only angel songs.” She got down on her knees and fumbled around her neck. Under the gris-gris bag that hung between her breasts she found her rosary. She pulled the cross out from the neck of her dress and let her fingers slide along the warm smooth ebony beads. “Now I pray to the Catholic gods for your eternal rest, ma petite.” She knelt in front of the dead-house and crossed herself.
“Hail Marie, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . . ”
Trail of Dead
Joanne Anderton
You don’t realize how many dead things there are out here until you walk over them. Hmm, maybe I should rephrase that. I didn’t realize how many dead things there were out here until I walked over them. Yes, that’s better. No one else would have this problem.
Most of them are lizards, poor things little more than dried-out skin and tiny bones. They shuffle—why do dead things shuffle?—like they’re made of cardboard. All stiff legs and flat backs. Snakes too, and they have so much trouble moving on the sand. Then there’s the odd, dusty skeleton. People who’ve been dead for so long they collapse as soon as they’ve pulled their way out, bones crumbling away in the breeze.
They make me sad, those ones. Really, this is my fault. I know it. And here they are dissolving away like they’ve never existed, all because of me.
I stop for a moment, pull a stolen bottle of water from my tattered backpack and drink quickly. Only takes a sec before I realize there’s something buried at my feet. A beak pokes up into the hot, late afternoon air. It’s dark, with two large holes near the tip. A thin skull soon slithers after it, a few scraggly feathers attached, sticking up like a demented mohawk.
Emu. Damn. If that thing’s still got legs, oh how it will run.
I stuff the warm bottle in my bag and start to jog.
There are worse things than emus, to be sure. So the longer I stay out here the better. Away from cities, farms, any kind of human habitation. If I’m lucky no one else will suffer for my mistakes, my damned, drunken pride.
And I just might stay ahead of the old woman and her stones.
“It is conventional wisdom that a bullet to the head will do. Use something with a good amount of kick, like a shotgun.” The Hunter did not draw a gun; he balanced a Japanese sword with a woven green hilt and glinting edge in the palm of his hand. “But you know why we shouldn’t use those, don’t you?”
Chase looked up at him, pimple-ridden face paler than whitewash. “Yes, sir.” His voice broke, and he shook his head. “It’s not their fault.”
“No indeed. And we’re here to give them peace, to be dignified about it. Not to have ourselves a good time.” Grimly, the Hunter tipped up his wide-brimmed, rabbit-fur hat with his thumb. Dark brown eyes surveyed the park, touching on each of the approaching undead in turn. “Hunting is an old art, boy. You need to remember that.” He leaned forward, weight on the balls of his feet, balanced. Fluid. Ready. “A clean cut to the neck, separate head and body. One swipe is all it takes. No mess, no disrespect. No guns.”
The Hunter leaped forward and cut the undead down. He wasted nothing. Each stroke sliced through a rotting neck, each step took him right to the next cadaver. Slowly, the park emptied. The mass of shambling, rotting corpses became a heap of sprawled, rotting corpses.
Chase watched as the Hunter and the undead danced. He glanced down at the small, ugly-looking gun in his hand. An old-school thing, derringer the Hunter had called it, with a smooth wooden handle and a chrome barrel. Just looking at it made him feel sick. That the Hunter had put a gun instead of a sword into his fumbling, unsure hand said a lot.
“Chase!” The Hunter snapped from across the park. “Watch yourself!”
Chase looked up to a reaching, decayed hand. Yelping, he stumbled backward and lifted the derringer with a reluctant arm. The zombie had not been dead for long. She had hair, it tangled into a bleached-out nest at her shoulders, and most of her face remained intact. There was lipstick on parts of her lips.
She still looked like a person, and that always made it hard.
For one thing, they were quicker. The undead woman knocked Chase’s hand to the side even as he tried to aim the gun. She lunged, bloodied mouth snapping in the a
ir like a rabid dog. Chase gave into his shaking legs and fell, leaving her teetering, head swiveling with almost comic confusion.
It helped, in a way. She didn’t look human any more, acting like some deranged animal instead of a woman. Chase scooted back, aimed up at her even as she saw him collapsed on the churned-up dirt, and fired. The first shot took her in the shoulder, pushing her back. As Chase fumbled for the spare bullets in his front pocket, dropped one in the mud and scrambled desperately to find it, she righted herself. She reached down.
He didn’t need the second shot. With a step and a tight swing of his sword, the Hunter cut her down.
Driza-bone coat flapping in a putrid breeze, the Hunter stared down at his apprentice. He did not offer a hand up. “Knives are too short, close quarters fighting only favors the undead.” He pulled a clean, white cloth from his pocket.
Chase had heard this speech before, heard it many times. He guessed it showed just how little regard the Hunter had for him, how much of a disappointment his so-called chosen boy had turned out to be. The man didn’t have anything else to say.
“Foils are no good for cutting through necks; you need to be on a horse or a trail bike to make sabres any use. But this—” the Hunter wiped his sword with the cloth, removing flaps of crackly skin and chunks of dry flesh. There was never very much blood. “—this is perfect.”
The Hunter looked into the distance, eyes shadowed by his hat, mouth set and serious. “Remember this, and when it is your time, treat her well.” Gently, he slid the sword into a lacquered scabbard at his hip. “You will make a Hunter one day. When I am gone.”
Chase gave up on the bullet, lost in the mud, and pushed himself to his feet. His pants were plastered with muck, especially around his backside where it clung with an uncomfortable weight. Quickly, before the Hunter could pick him up on it, he bundled up a handful of his navy polo shirt and wiped dirt off his gun. All the while, he tried to get the image of decapitating the Hunter out of his mind. But when you’re apprenticed to a Necromancer Hunter, that’s part of the deal. The only way to make sure that when they die, they stay dead.
A cold wind whipped clouds into the sky and threatened rain. With the city’s undead put down, it was time to leave. The civilian survivors needed to be getting back to their homes, cemeteries would need fixing. A lot of flowers had to be planted. They always planted flowers after a rising. A reminder of life, in all its beauty? Or just to try and cover the smell?
A thin, reedy melody rang through the park and echoed from gray empty buildings. The Hunter dug in his jacket and pulled out a small, silver phone, as clean as his sword and just as shiny. Its ringtone, slow and creepy in the midst of the dead, sent Chase’s skin crawling.
“Hunter.” The Hunter began to pick his way through the corpses and gestured to the boy to follow. “Another town? Where?”
The streets were sprinkled with abandoned cars, but not as many as other cities the Hunter had cleansed. People were getting warning now. They didn’t know who the Necromancer was, or even what he was trying to do, but they had been able to predict his movements for a week now and get the civilians out. It made things easier. Zombies on their own could be contained, but zombies with a city-load of fresh people to contaminate? Now that was a national disaster.
“He’s still heading west then.” The Hunter frowned. “No, I’ve never seen this kind of thing before. And I’ve been hunting Necromancers since I was a boy.” He glanced meaningfully at his apprentice. “They usually have a goal, concentrate on a particular spot. Seen them raise the dead for revenge, for love. One even tried to make an army out of the things. Damned disrespectful. But raising a city here, a country town there.” The Hunter shook his head. “This is strange, and I don’t like strange. Especially not from a Necromancer.”
Another pause.
“I know. We’ll hurry. Just keep your soldiers out of my hair.” He tapped fingers on the hilt of his sword. “Because they panicked last time, that’s why! Hard enough to dispatch a city of zombies without boys with guns running around screaming. Hunters have always dealt with the living dead. Let us do what we were put on this earth to do!” He snapped the phone together. “That is why you don’t let the army get involved.”
He sighed and glanced over his shoulder. “Time to hurry, boy. The bastard is trying to lose us in the desert.”
The Hunter broke into a run, threading his way around bodies and cars, and Chase struggled to follow.
I can’t seem to get far enough away. They follow me. People; with their houses and their animals and their damned, walking dead. Didn’t think I’d find any out here, where the dirt is a dark orange and the sparse, thicket-y type grass a little gray. But they’re here.
I glance over my shoulder, count three lizards, the hindquarters of a roo and two lonesome, struggling human arms. When I look forward again there’s a farmhouse. Sudden and close.
I stop, just for a moment, to stare at the falling wooden fence that wasn’t there a second ago. At the peeling weatherboard building, half its veranda sunk into dust, wire-mesh door hanging crooked from its hinges. I don’t stop long; I am aware of the shuffling behind me. Doesn’t look like anyone could live in something so rundown, but that’s not really what I’m worried about. Someone lived in this place once. Did they die here? Were they buried here? And what if they had a pet, some cattle-dog mutt buried beneath the looming gum. Undead dogs are quick on their rotting little paws, let me tell you.
The house is oddly familiar, in the way all rundown houses are. But in the end, the sun forces my decision. Out here, it always does. The dead things behind me stink. My water is almost gone, so too the packets of junk food I stole from a screaming petrol-station worker while zombies tried to clamber over her counter. At least the farmhouse offers shade. So I hurry.
The screen door opens with a groan that echoes down the dark hallway. Like the house is a zombie itself. It bangs when I shut it, resists when I try to do a rusted latch. In the end I resort to a piece of stiff wire to keep it closed. There are still gaps at the floor and again near the ceiling; the door doesn’t line up properly. But they’re too small for the roo, the crumbling stairs hopefully too difficult for the lizards and the bony, disconnected arms.
I wonder if there’s any water left in an old, dry place like this. Sunlight splinters in through the door, but the details of the house remain in shadow. I can’t see the color of the threadbare carpet, I can’t make out the photos in frames that hang on the wall. All I can see is an opening at the end, shifting with a curtain of beads that rattle in a warm breeze.
I brush the beads aside, ignoring cobwebs that stick to my hand and shoulder, and step into a kitchen. Dried eucalypt leaves darken the floor, piling up in corners and beneath cabinets. The windows are open, glass smashed and tattered curtains of yellowing lace fluttering.
A long, dark timber table dominates the room; it pushes out over cracked linoleum from a faded green wall. An old woman sits at one end, thin white hair pinned to her head, floral-patterned dress too wide for her skeletal frame. She looks up at me, and she smiles. Unfocused, watery eyes dance, her hands play with sticks and little white stones on the tabletop.
That’s when I realize I should never have stepped inside. It is her house, changed, yes, but hers all the same. Older, wider, spread somehow from a city two-bedroom to a farmhouse. But I know that table; I recognize those lacy drapes.
I try to take a step back. Something presses against my back. Large and solid, but damp. Cold fluids soak through my shirt.
I gag as rot washes over me, ripe, strangely sweet and thick. It runs down the back of my throat.
Hands grip my shoulders. They hold me upright and ooze against my skin.
“So, dearie.” The old woman’s voice still sounds like the rattling of bones. Only now, it’s a sound I know well. “Have you found what you were looking for?”
“Your Necromancer’s a woman. Did you know that?”
The Hunter tipped his hat
back and scowled. The only admission of surprise he was likely to give. “Why do you say that?”
The young policeman shifted on his feet, uncomfortable beneath the Hunter’s scrutiny. “We have reports . . . ah, sir. From civilians fleeing the area, from the emergency service workers sent in to get them out. A woman, probably early thirties. Medium build, blond—”
“Yes, thank you.” The Hunter rolled a cigarette in his hand but didn’t take his eyes from the policeman. He lit it, lazily, and let it dangle from the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “It does not matter what she looks like. I need to know if she is the Necromancer or just some poor girl in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The policeman took off his deep blue cap and ran fingers through sweat-dampened hair. He used the hat to beat at perpetually buzzing flies and leaned back into the shade of the post office’s tin roof. The Hunter did not move, and beside him, Chase tried to follow his example. But whatever it was the Hunter possessed that made even the insects respect him, Chase didn’t have it. He resorted to waving them away.
Replacing his cap, the policeman nodded. “They were following. All of the witnesses were very clear. She had . . . zombies, ah, following her. People from the cemetery.” He gestured back along the dirt road and Chase glanced over his shoulder. There wasn’t much to this town and it had been almost empty when he and the Hunter drove in. Only a few bony cats and half a dozen lizards. The Hunter had dispatched them with ease. “Not only that. Roos and cattle too. Couple of sheep—”
“Yes, thank you.” The Hunter stepped back, into the dirt street and the full blow of the mid-morning sun. Chase followed with reluctance. “I understand.”
“Sir?” The policeman reached out, but didn’t leave the building’s shadow. “We can help—”
“Which way did you say she went?” The Hunter dropped his cigarette and snuffed it into the dust with the heel of his boot.
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