Dead Ice

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "SORRY, AGENTS, BUT that's not new. It's sick, but it's not new."

  Brent hit the screen and froze the dark cemetery scene in midmotion. It was shaky and dark, and there were no zombies or anyone else in sight yet. The two agents looked at me as if I'd said something bad.

  "Did we pick the wrong animator?" Manning asked her partner.

  "Maybe," he said.

  "I've been approached for years to help people make sex tapes with zombies. Dead celebrities bring out the creeps the most." I shivered, because the whole thought of it was just so wrong.

  "My favorite of your sickos like that are the ones who want you to raise their high school crush," Zerbrowski said.

  "Yeah, now that they have money and success they want one more go at the girl who rejected them in high school, or college." I shook my head.

  "That's sick, as in seek-a-therapist sick," Manning said.

  "Agreed, and I honestly think they don't really believe it's going to be a zombie. Somewhere in their minds they think she'll rise from the grave and they'll be able to prove they're worthy and live happily ever after."

  "Wow, Anita, that's a romantic take on the sick bastards that just want to boff the girl that rejected them in high school." Zerbrowski actually looked surprised.

  I shrugged, fought off a scowl, and finally said, "Yeah, yeah, one epic proposal and I go all girly on you."

  "Boff," Agent Brent said. "I didn't know people used that word anymore."

  "You young whippersnappers just don't know a good piece of slang when you hear it," Zerbrowski said.

  "Don't listen to him, he's not that old. His hair just went all salt-and-pepper early."

  "It's the last couple of cases, they scared me so bad my hair went white." He delivered it without a grin, deadpan, which he never did. If they'd known him, they would have understood he was lying, but they didn't know him.

  "Hair doesn't actually do that from fear," Brent said, but not like he completely believed it.

  Manning looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  I waved her back to Zerbrowski. "It's his story, not mine."

  Zerbrowski grinned at me, and then at the agents. "Just trying to lighten the mood. That's part of my charm."

  "It is actually," I said, smiling back at him.

  "The sergeant is here because he's your partner when you work with the Regional Preternatural Investigation Squad. Everybody calls it the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team, but officially it's not," Manning said.

  "It's the nickname," I said. "They call us RIPIT, both for the Rest in Peace, and because most of the crimes are violent, things get ripped apart. Other cops and even the media have used RIPIT for so long that people want the T in the actual name of the squad."

  "Are we letting ourselves get sidetracked on purpose?" Brent asked.

  Manning nodded and sipped her coffee. "I think we are, so back on target. One of the reasons that we're talking to you is that you have more official complaints turned in to the police than any other animator about illegal or morally questionable zombie-raising requests. Once you had a badge of your own and were officially an officer, too, the complaints went down. I'm assuming that people didn't want to bring their illegal activities to a U.S. Marshal."

  "You'd be surprised how many people think that just because I raise the dead I have to be evil, with a capital E, but yeah, the requests for zombie one-nighters and zombie sex slaves went down once I could do my own arresting."

  "Disturbance of a corpse was a misdemeanor for years," Manning said.

  "That's one of the reasons that there are tapes of this shit out there, because even if they were caught it was a slap on the wrist. The money they could make from the tape, because it was a tape back when it started, was worth the risk even if they were caught," I said.

  "The penalties are stiffer now, but still not the same as if a real human was involved," she said.

  I shrugged. "I don't make the laws, just help enforce them."

  "You have done your best to enforce the laws as written, and suggested changes in the laws based on your experience, which is one of the reasons we picked you to bring into our little problem," Manning said.

  "We all know it's out there, Agent, so what's the big secret? All the other zombie porn has been either people in good makeup, with no real zombies involved, or one of the zombies that's been raised for fieldwork in California or in other countries. The zombies in those films are little better than actual corpses."

  "These are different," Manning said.

  "Show us," I said, and tacked on, "please." I added the "please" because what I really wanted to say was either You're being all wimpy for FBI, or something more sarcastic. I'd been a little grumpy lately, even for me, so I was trying to monitor myself and only aim the grumpiness at bad guys.

  Brent hit the screen again and the shaky camerawork continued to be shaky so that you could see it was a cemetery at night, but that was about it. It was like the opening to an amateur horror flick where someone had gotten a new camera for Christmas, and then it steadied. I wondered if someone new was holding the camera, or if the holder had just gotten a handle on it. The answer to that question was the difference between one bad guy or two.

  There was a very abrupt jump in the film from empty cemetery to a blond-haired woman clawing her way out of the grave. At first I thought it was an actress who had been buried in soft earth up to about her armpits, but then the camera got a close-up of the eyes, and I knew dead when I saw it. The zombie crawled out of the grave the way I'd seen thousands do before. It had some issues with the skirt of the dress it had been buried in, and the clinging grave dirt, which happened sometimes, and then it stumbled free, standing crooked because one high heel had apparently gotten left in the grave.

  The body was tall, statuesque, with blond hair to her shoulders. Cleavage showed at the plunging neckline of the white dress, which meant the breasts had probably been implants; real breast tissue wasn't going to be that perky without a woman fluffing them back in place, and the zombie didn't know enough to do that. The small spotlight or whatever was attached to the handheld camera showed us the hair was blond, the eyes a pale gray that might have been bluer when she was alive. Blue mingled with any color from gray to green or even hazel tended to shift with a person's moods more than most eye colors. Alive, she'd probably been beautiful, but there wasn't enough home for that now. So much of a person's attractiveness is their spirit, their personality. Zombies didn't have much of that.

  The next scene, if that's what you wanted to call it, was of the zombie in a standard bedroom except there were no visible windows in the room, and there was just something off about it. I wasn't sure why I didn't like the room, but I didn't. The zombie was wearing the same clothes as in the cemetery; they hadn't cleaned her up at all, so that she looked horror-movie wrong in the bedroom with its flowered bedspread and tile floor. That was part of the wrong; no one put tile in their bedroom. They did another zooming close-up of the zombie's eyes, and this time they weren't empty. This time they were terrified.

  "Fuck," I said softly, but with real feeling.

  "You see it, too, then," Manning said.

  "Yeah, I see it."

  Zerbrowski said, "Why do the eyes look scared? Zombies don't feel fear, right?"

  "Normally, no," I said.

  Zerbrowski got up from his chair and moved over closer to where the rest of us were sitting. "Why do the eyes look like that, then?"

  "We don't know," Manning said. "What you're about to see is impossible, according to our own experts."

  My skin was already running cold, my stomach tight, because I was very afraid that I knew exactly what the "impossible" was going to be.

  A man in one of those all-leather masks where only the eyes and mouth showed walked into sight. The zombie's eyes followed the movement, but the rest of her stood immobile, probably because she'd been told to stand there, and until told otherwise she had to stand just there, but they hadn't told he
r not to move her eyes, so she followed the man's movements like a human victim who had been tied up. She was tied up, tighter than any rope or chain could ever make her. Fuck, I did not want this little film to go where it was headed. I prayed silently, please, God, don't let them be able to do this to her. God answers all prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.

  The man slipped his hand inside her dress and began to fondle her breast. The camera caught the flinching in her eyes--she so didn't want him to do it, but nothing except her eyes was able to say no.

  "Did they give her a sedative that keeps her immobile?" Zerbrowski asked.

  "They didn't need to," Manning said. "There's no doubt that she's a zombie, so she follows their orders. Notice she never breathes. A live human being needs to breathe, and she never does in this one."

  "Does she breathe in later films?" I asked.

  "She talks, and you have to take air in to do that, but other than that, no."

  The man was wearing a pair of silk boxers with hearts on them, like a parody of dressing up for a romantic evening, except for the mask, which didn't match the almost silly-looking shorts. Yes, I was concentrating on details that might help me find any clue to finding out who or where this was, but I was already trying to concentrate on the details that wouldn't haunt me as much. The silly heart shorts were almost a kindness, a break in the horror, like whoever was picking out the costumes had goofed.

  I missed the heart-covered shorts when he stripped them off, because then I had to concentrate on his body, looking for birthmarks, or tattoos, or anything that made him not generic guy in a mask. I didn't want to look at his body, didn't want to search every inch of it for identifying marks. I wanted to look away, but if the woman in the film had to endure it, because that's what the eyes meant, then I wouldn't look away. I would not flinch and miss some visual that might lead us to these bastards--though part of me knew that if just watching the films would lead anywhere, the FBI would have found it by now. But I watched it anyway, because most cops believe that they will see something that everyone else has missed; it's the hope that keeps us all putting on the badge and gun every morning. When that hope runs out we find different jobs.

  A man off camera told her to lie on the bed and she did it instantly, even while her eyes showed just how much she didn't want to do it. The naked man in front of the camera slid her panties down those long legs that were still covered in grave dirt, the one high heel still on. Someone had painted her toenails a soft pink, as if it still mattered with closed-toe shoes and a corpse. I expected more of her clothes to come off, but the naked man just climbed on top of her with no preliminaries, except to move her dress a little out of the way.

  Zerbrowski breathed out, "Jesus," behind me.

  I didn't look at him, I didn't look at anybody, and none of us looked at each other, because when watching this kind of shit, no one wants eye contact. You don't want the other officers to know you're afraid, or too emotional, and if anything this awful excites you, don't share that either. None of the other cops want to know.

  The only plus was that the camera had moved back enough to catch the sex, so we couldn't see her eyes. She just lay there like the corpse she almost was, and that was the only tiny saving grace. He ended by taking his dick out of her body and doing the obligatory porn movie end to show that he'd actually gone.

  The film ended there, and I felt my gut loosen a little. I'd watched it all; bully for me. Bully for us all.

  "The production value goes up as the films progress," Brent said.

  I turned and looked at him. "What do you mean?"

  "The almost joke-worthy boxers go away, the camerawork gets better, and they put more personal touches around the bedroom to make it look less like a set and more real," he said.

  "Is it always the same guy onstage?" Zerbrowski asked.

  "For most of the films, but there's a second, younger-looking guy featured in the last two," Brent said.

  "How many films are there?" I asked.

  "More than I want to sit through again," Manning said.

  I looked at her and saw a terrible tiredness in her eyes, as if just watching the one film had aged her. She shook her head. "Play the next one, Brent; let's just get this over with."

  I didn't tell her she didn't have to watch them again; I let her handle her own shit. To do anything else would have been a breach of the "guy code" that all police work revolved around. The sex of the police officer didn't change the code. I only broke it with friends, or when I couldn't help myself, like Manning had when she asked about my engagement. That seemed like a long time ago, and Brent was right; pretty, pretty princess talk was looking a whole lot better.

  3

  THE FILMS WERE relentless. They eventually got her out of her burial clothes. We saw the zombie naked, in lingerie inexpertly put on her, so that I was pretty sure there was no woman on their crew. It was the fourth film where the zombie looked more rotted, which is something that happens to zombies eventually, no matter how good they look at the beginning. Zombies rot; it's one of the things that set them apart from ghouls, or vampires. Not all corpses are created equal.

  I waited for the rot to spread, but it didn't. It just stayed with one eye filmy white, while the other was still clear and grayish-blue. Her skin had taken on a bluish tinge, and the cheeks had begun to collapse inward; the breasts were only perky because the implants held them up, but her body looked different naked now, more skeletal, but that was it. There were no other changes; the rot just stopped in midprocess, and her eyes were still full of terror. Sometimes they let her talk and she begged them not to make her do this, or that, but she seemed unable to disobey that male voice just off camera. I was betting it was the animator who had raised her from the grave. At first I'd thought the animator had raised her, taken his money, and fled, but now I knew he had to be nearby, because the rot had started and then stopped; for that you needed voodoo of the blackest kind.

  "Well," Zerbrowski said, "I'll give the sleazebag props for stamina, but it's a shame that abuse of a corpse isn't a capital crime."

  Brent paused the images; I think any excuse at this point to take a breather sounded good to all of us. "We thought they were just changing clothes on her to make it look like time was passing, too, at first," Brent said, "but notice the calendar on the wall."

  "It's not just there to make it look more homey?" Zerbrowski asked. He made little air quotes around homey.

  "Nobody puts a calendar in their bedroom unless it's the only space they have to live in," I said.

  "Exactly," Manning said. "Did you notice?"

  I thought for a second. "The month changed."

  "Zombies rot, always; that's the rule that Anita taught me. It can't be a month later."

  She nodded. "It's not proof that much time actually passed, but we think it may be their way of showing clients that they've done something unique."

  "Her soul is back in her eyes, that wasn't unique enough?" I asked, and my voice didn't sound neutral the way I tried to sound this early in an investigation. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to pull off neutral with this case; sometimes you can't.

  "You saw it," Manning said.

  "We both saw it," Zerbrowski said.

  "Would you have said her soul was back in her eyes, Sergeant?"

  "I'm not that poetic."

  Manning looked at me. "I don't think Marshal Blake was being poetic."

  Zerbrowski looked from her to me. "I think I'm missing something."

  "Don't feel bad," Brent said. "It took us weeks to figure it out."

  "Figure out what?" he asked.

  "Were you being poetic, Marshal Blake?" Manning asked.

  "No."

  "Enlighten us," she said, and there was something in the way she said it that I didn't like. It was just an undercurrent, but if I had to bet, I think something I'd said, or done, while we watched the films had made her suspicious of me. I wondered, if it hadn't been a male voice ordering the zombie around,
would they have looked at me as a suspect from the beginning? I hoped not, but a lot of people still saw my psychic ability as evil. Hell, the Catholic Church had excommunicated us all unless we gave up raising the dead, because only Jesus was allowed to do that. Biblical scholars had pointed out that four of his disciples had done it, too, but the Pope, at the time, had found comparing zombie-raising pagans to the disciples of Jesus Christ less than amusing.

  "Her soul, her personality, whatever you want to call it, seems to be in the body, except you can't raise a zombie from the grave if the soul is still in residence," I said.

  "So how do you explain it?" she asked.

  "She was just a walking corpse in the first film. Her eyes were empty, she was an it, but between that and the first sex tape, that changed."

  "How?" Manning asked.

  "You've got witches and psychics on the payroll at the FBI now. You even have at least one animator. What'd they come up with?"

  "Nothing," she said.

  Brent added, "They all saw what you see, that she was in there somehow, but no one had a clue how it was accomplished."

  "Do you know how it was done?" Manning asked.

  I nodded. "I've seen it done once."

  "Give us a name and we may have our guy," Brent said, all eager for a clue.

  "It was a woman, and she's dead." I added, "I believe she's dead."

  "Give us a name, we're good at finding people," Manning said.

  "Dominga Salvador; she was the most powerful vaudun priestess in the Midwest."

  "She went missing just after she challenged you."

  I raised eyebrows at Manning. "Challenged me? You mean sent killer zombies into my apartment to kill me? If that's your definition of challenge, then okay."

  "Some of the local law enforcement officers thought you'd killed her in self-defense."

  "The local LEOs didn't trust me as much before I had a badge."

  "I trusted you," Zerbrowski said.

  I smiled at him. "You liked me; I don't know if you trusted me."

  He grinned and seemed to think about it. "I can't remember for sure, but I know that long before you got your own badge you proved anything you needed to prove to me."

  "Aw shucks, Zerbrowski, you're going to make a girl blush."

  He grinned wider and offered me his fist. I bumped it gently.