Dead Ice

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  MacDougal turned and looked at me, face shocked. "I must really protest the word being used for Tom."

  I smiled harder. "I understand that he passes for human, which is really cool, but legally if the health department finds out that a zombie has been in a restaurant, then they have to close the place down."

  "But surely not in this case."

  "I know that he looks good enough to pass, but the law doesn't differentiate between a rotting corpse that could potentially carry disease and . . . Tom here."

  MacDougal looked around the restaurant. "I didn't know."

  "If I'd dreamt you'd take the zombie out for a meal, I'd have mentioned it."

  The zombie said, "Miss Blake, can I thank you again for this unexpected reprieve?"

  I looked into his face, the clear hazel of his eyes, brown and green all mixed together. His longish blond hair looked freshly washed and dried. Had he showered the grave dirt off himself? If so, he was holding up very well; most zombies begin to disintegrate if you add water. "Reprieve is an interesting word."

  "The appropriate word, though, I think, Ms. Blake."

  I studied his face, and finally just looked into those brown eyes with their edge of green. I tried to see beyond the color, the smile, the energy, and into his soul, if he had one.

  Manny came up beside me. "Anita, introduce me."

  I introduced him to the ones whose names I remembered. The others offered their names. I threw Warrington in the middle somewhere, and Manny never blinked at him. It was only when he shook his hand that I saw Manny's shoulders shift, ever so slightly. I doubted anyone else noticed it.

  Justine was the name of the woman who was holding hands with Warrington. Manny raised an eyebrow at me, widening his eyes a bit at them. I gave a small nod, letting him know I'd seen it. We'd worked together for years, so that was enough. Again, I doubted anyone at the table saw what passed between us. Nicky was the only one who might have followed it all.

  I hadn't bothered to introduce Nicky and Domino. First, because they hadn't asked, and second, because you didn't introduce security. You wanted them to be grim and unfriendly; if you gave them names it humanized them and took some of the threat factor away. They were just waiting to be sent to the car for more firepower, or to go outside with the zombie and us, and for that they didn't need to be anyone's friend.

  "Mr. MacDougal, Mr. Warrington, could I speak with you outside for a minute?" I was still smiling as I asked.

  MacDougal got up immediately, but Warrington didn't. He put a hand over Justine's hand where it rested on his arm. It was a possessive gesture, and I didn't like it one little bit. Had they already done more than hold hands? God, I hoped not. There was no way for this to end that wouldn't be bad.

  "Mr. Warrington, come outside with us."

  "I'm fine here, Ms. Blake, or should I say, Marshal Blake?"

  "Either will do, Mr. Warrington, but we really do need a few minutes outside to talk in private."

  MacDougal touched the other man's shoulder and said, "Come outside, Tom."

  He looked from one to the other of us, and finally stood up. It didn't seem to be because he had to obey either of us, but then I hadn't given him a direct order. I felt Nicky shift at my back like a small mountain flexing its shoulders, probably to get rid of built-up tension.

  Justine stood up, wrapping her fingers through the zombie's hand. "I'll go where Tom goes."

  "I don't think that's necessary," I said.

  She wrapped her hand around her other one so she had a two-handed grip. "I do."

  Warrington didn't shake her off, just stepped away from the table with her still clinging to his hand. "I would like Justine to come with us, if she wishes to."

  She smiled up at him with one of those beatific smiles that usually requires serious dating, or good sex, or at least years of semiserious flirting. "I wish to."

  I hoped she just had a crush on him. If it was more, she was going to have a very bad time, because Warrington was going back in the ground tonight. Whatever was happening with this zombie, I had to pull the plug as soon as possible. His finding true lust didn't change that.

  Most of the rest of the group wanted to come, too. "We don't need a crowd."

  They protested.

  "If you make me wave my badge around I'm going to be unhappy with you."

  Warrington turned to them all and said, "There is no need to threaten my friends. We will go outside and speak with you in private." His calm voice did what my threats couldn't.

  Domino led the way, checking and holding the door like Nicky had on the way inside. Nicky brought up the rear this time. Our client, the zombie, and his girlfriend walked ahead of me. The guy who had been recording things at the cemetery with his phone now had a small handheld video recorder. His name was Bob, and he followed us in case we did something worth recording. I'd let Bob come along for two reasons. One, his recording everything so the rest of the historical group could see it later helped them be happier with us going outside without them. Two, I was going to have to confiscate everything he'd recorded. Proof that I could raise something this lifelike could not get out on the Internet. I'd had a government element interested in me for raising a certain dead world leader, and that zombie had been much less alive than this one. If they saw this one, I'd be lucky if they didn't show up before the night was over. Keeping Bob close to me seemed like the best way to ensure I could bully him out of the "evidence" later.

  We stepped away from the doors to find a little privacy near some shrubs, close enough to the light to not be in the dark, but Nicky, Domino, and I didn't stand under the light. Manny kept to the light with MacDougal and Justine. Warrington kept her hand in his, but he moved toward the shadows, so that their arms were held wide between them, as she tried to keep standing in the light the way modern women are taught to in a parking lot, and he tried to stay more hidden. Maybe it was being a soldier in life, or maybe it was the instinct of the dead to hide from the light. Or maybe I was being too poetic; I was so far out of my comfort zone I didn't know anymore.

  I told the zombie what I'd told MacDougal, that the restaurant would be closed down and fined if anyone found out he'd been inside. "But Miss Blake, surely such laws are meant for those poor creatures that look like rotting corpses."

  "How do you know what other zombies look like?" I asked.

  He flinched a little, as if the way I'd phrased it bothered him. Justine stepped closer to him. "My new friends showed me images on their handheld devices."

  I looked at Justine and Warrington, and Bob the tech guy.

  "One of us said he didn't look like a zombie and he wanted to know what we meant," Bob said, shrugging.

  "But look at me, Miss Blake." The zombie held out his hand toward me. "I am not like those poor creatures."

  "You are a very lifelike zombie, if I do say so myself."

  He frowned. "If the pictures and movies online are what I am supposed to be, then I am something else, Miss Blake."

  It was really hard to argue with him as he looked at me, his face alight with force and emotion.

  "However lifelike you appear now," Manny said, "it won't last."

  "What do you mean, it won't last?"

  Manny gave the zombie his best I'm-sorry-you're-grieving face. "No matter how alive you look and feel right now, you will begin to . . . rot, just like the zombies you saw on the Internet."

  "I don't believe that."

  "Of course you don't," I said.

  "It is still true," Manny said.

  The zombie frowned, and squeezed Justine's hand. "No zombie we saw on the . . . computer looked like me."

  "Anita is a very, very powerful necromancer. I don't believe that anyone else could have brought you back in this state of completeness."

  "Completeness," the zombie said, "yes, that's a good word. I feel complete and whole, and quite myself. Why am I not simply alive, rather than dead?"

  "You're undead," I said. "It's not the same thing."
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  "You are engaged to marry a vampire, Ms. Blake. Is he any more alive than I am?"

  I frowned at MacDougal.

  "He had questions for us about how he got here, Ms. Blake. The Internet was the easiest way to explain, and when your name is typed in, the engagement story is the first thing to come up in the feed."

  I sighed. "Of course it is."

  "I ask you again, why am I not as alive as this Jean-Claude you love?"

  Staring up into his so-alive face, I didn't have a good answer. Saying Because you're not didn't sound good enough, as he stood there holding hands with Justine.

  "Because Anita isn't Jesus," Manny said.

  "I don't understand what you mean by invoking our Lord and Savior," Warrington said.

  "Jesus brought the dead back to life, but we can only raise zombies," Manny said.

  The zombie shook his head. "Blasphemy isn't going to convince me that I am not alive."

  "Isn't it blasphemy to think that I can raise the dead just like Jesus?" I asked.

  "Lazarus was dead only a few days. You've been dead a lot longer than that, Mr. Warrington. Do you truly believe that Anita can do what our Lord and Savior never dared?"

  Warrington, I mean the zombie, didn't have a comeback for that, but he was thinking of one when a funny look came over his face. He went pale, and then a little green, and then he stumbled to the bushes and started throwing up. He fell to his hands and knees, still puking up all the food and drink he'd consumed. Justine held his hair back for him, which meant maybe it wasn't just lust. You usually have to love someone to do that.

  "Should have started with something lighter, like broth," Nicky said.

  "What?" I asked.

  "His digestive system couldn't take the heavy food."

  "That's like treating his being dead for hundreds of years like he had the flu, or something," Domino said.

  Nicky shrugged as much as the development of his shoulders would let him. "Why not?"

  I didn't know what to say, so I turned to MacDougal. "And if he'd started doing that inside the restaurant, that would have been bad."

  He looked very serious, and a little pale. "I see your point."

  "What's wrong with him?" Bob asked.

  "He's been dead for a few centuries," I said.

  The vomiting had slowed down, and was into that dry-heaving phase. Justine asked Bob to go get some napkins from inside.

  Warrington muttered, "What's wrong with me?"

  "You're dead," I said. "What does that mean?"

  "The dead can't eat solid food," Manny said.

  "I don't feel dead."

  "I know, and I'm sorry for that," I said.

  He blinked up at me. "Why are you sorry? This is a gift."

  "Because it will make other things harder."

  Bob came back out with napkins and the zombie wiped his mouth clean. Justine wiped the sweat from his forehead. Zombies didn't sweat. "What other things?" she asked, staring at me.

  I debated on what to say, and how to say it.

  Manny helped me out. "You've just seen his body reacting to food, but without being able to consume something he will begin to rot, Justine."

  She shook her head over and over as if denying it enough would make it untrue. Warrington stood up and swayed. She reached out to steady him, and MacDougal came closer in case he was needed. It wasn't just Justine who was bonding with the zombie. Apparently Warrington was a very likable guy. This all would have been so much easier if he'd been a mean bastard.

  "Is that what happened to all the zombies you have raised, Ms. Blake?" Warrington turned his now-pale face to me as he asked.

  "All the ones that I've seen aboveground long enough have rotted, Mr. Warrington. Not just my zombies, but everyone's. There is no known way to keep the body intact once we raise a zombie from the grave. I'm sorry."

  "I will end like one of those poor souls we saw images of?"

  I nodded. In my head I thought about the female zombies in the FBI videos. They never looked this alive, though the soul capture was a way of preserving the body. But since I didn't have Warrington's soul in a magical container somewhere, that wouldn't help him. That thought led to one other: If it wasn't his "soul" staring back at me from his eyes, then what was it? My magic animated him, but was that what filled him with personality? I'd expected him to be able to answer questions about historical events, but this level of aliveness . . . I'd never seen anything like it. The zombies that Dominga Salvador had shown me years ago had looked alive, but the shell had been the most lifelike thing about them. They had still been zombies, standing around waiting for her to order them to do something. None of them had this level of . . . personhood.

  "I would not want . . . Justine to see me like that."

  She clung to his hand with both of hers again. "No, Tom, no."

  He put his big hand against the side of her face and gazed down into her eyes with a look as real as any I'd ever seen. Shit, he was in there, really, truly in there. What the fuck had I done?

  "I would not want to see this look in your eyes turn to horror as I fell away, piece by piece."

  "I would never look at you that way."

  "I have seen friends turned into horrors just by battle injuries, so that their sweethearts could not bear to look upon them. I would not have my last glimpse of you on this side of the grave be you turning away from me like that. I would rather remember you gazing up at me as you are now."

  Justine turned to me. "How long?"

  "How long what?" I asked.

  "How long would he look like this?"

  "It varies."

  "What does that mean, it varies? Hours, days, what?" She came to stand next to me, her body nearly vibrating with emotion.

  "Tomorrow he'll probably be about the same, but the day after he won't be. Sometimes the mind goes before the body, and that's a mercy."

  "What do you mean, that's a mercy?"

  "I've seen zombies whose body went before the mind, so they were trapped in a rotting shell, but totally aware and in there. You don't want him to go through that, you really don't."

  She gripped my arm, and normally I would have told her not to touch me, or jerked away, but there was too much emotion in her. I understood some of the pain and it made me let her hold on to my arm. I'd have liked to think this was just a crush mixed with lust, but whatever it seemed like to me, it was more than that to her.

  "That's not true, you're just trying to scare me."

  "I swear to you that I am not lying about this. I have seen zombies rot in a lot of different ways, and it's unpredictable. I can't guarantee how it will happen for him."

  "Darling girl," Warrington said, "you can't want to watch the process regardless of how it happens, and I do not wish to be trapped in a decaying shell while my mind stays intact."

  Her grip tightened, her eyes almost fever bright. "But he'll be like this . . . intact until tomorrow night when you planned to put him . . . back, right?"

  "Probably," I said.

  She turned back to him. "We have until tomorrow night. I'll call in sick to work."

  I didn't know what to say to that, but Manny did. "No, Justine, he has to go back tonight."

  "No!"

  I decided for partial truth. "Are you hungry again, Mr. Warrington?"

  He said, "No," and then stopped. A look I couldn't quite follow came over his face, and then he nodded. "I am. Ravenous."

  I nodded. "I was afraid of that."

  "Afraid of what?" Justine said. "Everyone gets hungry."

  "People do, zombies don't."

  Her face lit with a smile. "Then Tom isn't a zombie; see, I told you so."

  "There's one kind of zombie that feeds, but cooked meat and coffee doesn't satisfy them."

  "We should have done soup, or something, like the other man said. It was just too heavy a meal for him tonight," Justine said.

  I shook my head. "There's only one kind of zombie that eats things."

  "Tom
's kind," she said, and went back to holding his hand.

  "Flesh-eating zombies," Manny said.

  "What are you talking about?" MacDougal asked.

  "It's very rare, but an occasional zombie rises with a craving for human flesh," I said.

  "That's ridiculous," MacDougal said, "movie nonsense."

  "I wish it were, Mr. MacDougal, I truly do, but I've seen it. I've hunted them down after they started killing, and helped destroy them."

  Justine clung to Tom. "You're just trying to scare us again. Everyone knows that's not true."

  "Did you see the news reports from a few months ago out in Colorado?" I asked.

  "That was a flesh-rotting illness, not real zombies," she said.

  "There was a disease, but there were also real zombies involved. They were all flesh eaters."

  "They were all just the walking dead; none of them were as alive as Tom."

  She was actually right, but I needed to win this argument. "He didn't say he was hungry, he said he was ravenous."

  "What?" she asked, as if the topic had changed too fast for her.

  I looked up at the tall zombie. "Tell her how you feel. How hungry are you?"

  He frowned at me, and seemed to think about it. "I feel empty, as if I'll never be full again. It's like this pit inside me needs filling, and . . ." He stared at me. "What is a flesh eater, Ms. Blake?"

  "It's a rogue zombie that attacks and eats the flesh of the living."

  His nice hazel eyes widened. "Are you saying that I could go mad and attack Justine, and my other friends?"

  "There's enough left of you inside your head right now that you might attack strangers at first, people you don't have an emotional attachment to, but eventually you'd be a danger to everyone." In my head I thought, vampires and wereanimals will go after their nearest and dearest first, usually because of proximity, and some vampires are attracted to people they love when they first wake, thirsty for blood. I didn't add any of that, because it would just muddy the waters and I did not like how Warrington was describing his hunger. It sounded too close to bloodlust, or the flesh craving that new wereanimals get. It's a hunger that must, MUST, be satisfied.

  "Tom would never hurt me," Justine said, wrapping her arm around his waist. She fit under his arm the way so many men seem to prefer, though she was tall enough that her head still came up over his shoulder, which made her about five-eight. She was taller than I'd thought, or maybe she just seemed smaller; whichever, they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle when you find the corner pieces and can finally start making progress.