The cadaveris moved, slowly at first, and entirely without rampage. They milled about like people at a party where no one knows each other.
Two skeletal males bumped shoulders, then froze. They aimed their hollow eye sockets at each other’s skulls. I wondered if a challenge had been issued. Would we see a duel?
As I watched them, my eyelids grew suddenly heavy. I placed my hand on the truck’s interior wall to steady myself.
The two zombies turned away and walked deliberately toward the others. Each collided with a new one, who stopped and “stared” for a few seconds before setting off to touch another.
“Reminds me of a game kids used to play in the neighborhood,” Shane whispered. “Like freeze tag, but the opposite. I always thought we made it up.”
I rubbed my eyes as the dizzy feeling cleared. “How do you win?”
“I don’t remember.” His camera clicked and whirred. “It was just an excuse to run around shoving each other.”
When all twelve zombies had been touched, they turned as one toward the path. I held my breath as their pace increased to a stumbling jog. Their speed didn’t approach the full-fledged gallop I’d seen last Friday or on the film tonight. But they moved with a sense of purpose that chilled my bones.
When they stopped together, I muted the video camera. “Something’s weird.”
“You still have a baseline for weird?”
“Zombies don’t cooperate.” My pulse sped up as the ramifications hit me. “What if this is a different kind of zombie? What if they’ve evolved? Wouldn’t they be a lot more dangerous if they could think and act together?”
“All we’ve seen them do is rub against each other and shuffle in the same direction. Not exactly Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller.’” He sucked in a quick breath. “What the hell?”
I looked through the video camera. Four of the male zombies had dropped to their hands and knees, side by side. Three more males climbed on their backs, also on their hands and knees.
My eyes widened so hard they hurt. “Is that what I think it is?”
“It can’t be,” Shane whispered. “That’s just…”
“Weird.”
The zombie pyramid was shaky but held steady—until two female zombies attempted to climb aboard to create the next level. Their added weight made the formation sway and shudder.
My head filled with clouds again, like my blood lunch had been spiked with sedatives. I tried to remember who’d prepared my meal and realized it was me.
An arm snapped off one of the first-level zombies, and the pyramid collapsed. They tumbled into a pile of heaving, writhing bodies, limbs sticking out in all directions. If they made a noise, I couldn’t hear it, but their mouths spread wide, their expressions as garish as clown faces.
They tried again, arranging the pyramid in as random a fashion as the first time.
“They’re doing it wrong.” My voice sounded far away, as if I were listening to myself from the back of a lecture hall. “The bases should be working together to lift the mid-bases so the flyer has a stable structure to work with. And they don’t have any spotters.”
“The huh?” Shane said.
“Someone should show them how it’s done.” The compulsion tugged hard at my gut, like someone had hooked one of my intestines.
I rubbed my stomach and got to my feet, hopping off the end of the van.
Shane grabbed my arm. “Where are you going?”
I turned to him, and a fog seemed to lift from my brain. “I don’t know. What was I saying?”
“Something about bases.”
I glanced at the zombies trying to reassemble their pyramid. “Must’ve sparked high school cheerleading memories.”
I climbed back into the van and checked out the zombies’ progress. The one with the broken arm—which seemed to cause no pain—was hanging back while the others formed the first two levels.
My thoughts slowed to a crawl again, worse than ever. It was like those chunky-peanut-butter moments trying to get out of the white place. It was like being dead again, except this time there was no music to call me out. No thread, no lifeline. Just… nothing.
“I can’t believe you were a cheerleader,” Shane said, startling me.
I rubbed the heel of my hand against my temple. “It was a small school. They weren’t very selective.”
“No, I mean I can’t believe you wanted to be a cheerleader.”
I knew I should bristle at his comment, but the conversation seemed like my only link to sanity. “My foster parents gave me two years’ worth of normal life. I was going to milk it for all it was worth.”
The corpse in the middle disintegrated, the foot of the man above him plunging through his back. The pyramid collapsed again.
“I know cheerleaders are an auto-uncool in your grunge-boy book,” I told Shane, “and you never would’ve looked at me twice. At football games you would’ve been too busy getting stoned under the bleachers with your ironic friends, making fun of everyone with school spirit.”
He didn’t answer at first, and I worried I’d driven home too hard the painful truth that we were different.
The CAs had picked themselves up, dusted themselves off (in a manner of speaking), and started all over again, with dogged, unthinking determination. These were no highly evolved creatures.
As I watched, I felt my own brain devolve back into a bug.
Say something, I begged Shane without speaking. Say anything. Or zombie cheerleading coach will be the last job of my unlife.
“I would’ve looked at you,” Shane said finally. “A lot more than twice.”
I sent him a smile, but he didn’t see it, so I took it back and saved it for later.
The zombies had finally completed the third row of the pyramid. All that remained was the top person, and if I recalled correctly, the placement of that person didn’t involve climbing.
Oh no. The broken-armed zombie backed up, then stumbled full speed toward the two who remained on the ground behind the pyramid. When he reached them, they caught him up and tossed him to the top.
Where he sailed over, about ten feet too high, then landed on the ground with a splat that even I, with my infant vampire ears, could hear from two blocks away.
Shane gave an audible wince.
“They don’t feel pain.” I was reminding myself as much as him.
As if to prove my point, the zombie wrenched himself off the ground, looking much the worse for his misadventure, having broken his fall with his face. The other members of the pyramid, who had had no reaction to his belly flop, didn’t watch his excruciating journey back to the launch point. They stared straight ahead, empty as marionettes waiting for the show to begin.
The image made me wonder: was the person—or people—who controlled them sending them signals now, or had they preprogrammed the zombies? And why?
“What’s the point of this?” I had to focus extra hard to get the words out, as the brain fog set in again. Definitely needed more blood. Or sleep. Or—I don’t know—maybe my goddamn maker in my life.
“Warfare practice?” Shane said. “If someone can make them do a complicated maneuver like a pyramid, maybe they can coordinate them into a synchronized attack. Maybe the necromancer is perfecting his zombie-controlling techniques.”
“Or her. Or…” A thought was forming, but it was crazy. Maybe it’s not about the zombies.
“So ten years ago, you were doing your splits and twirls and pom-pom shakes, and here you are, ready to wield a samurai sword against a plague of incompetent zombie cheerleaders.”
“That I would not have predicted. I sure as hell thought I’d have my bachelor’s degree by now.” I bit my lip, but it didn’t stop my final thought from coming out. “I also thought I’d be alive.”
He gave me a sympathetic glance, but it turned gloomy. “When I was seventeen, I was already so fucked up, I knew I’d be dead in ten years.”
“And so you were.” I fought to keep the bitternes
s from my tone. At least he’d had a choice.
The broken-armed, flat-faced zombie shambled toward his launchers at a speed an old lady with a walker could have outpaced. They waited for him, arms outstretched, and when he arrived, they boosted him up, up, up.
He tumbled cartwheel style through the air. The zombies on top snagged his legs and yanked him back down to land on their shoulders, limbs splayed.
For a moment, the entire pyramid wavered under the shock and sway of the new weight. Then the top zombie spread his arms, broken and whole, in a macabre simulation of exultation.
I wanted to cheer. Or cry. Or both.
“Well.” Shane clicked his tongue. “That’s something you don’t see every day.”
After a few triumphant seconds, the zombies on the bottom of the pyramid gave way, and the whole structure came down in a silent cascade of flesh and bone and rags.
This time, when the zombies picked themselves up, they did not brush themselves off and start all over again.
They ran.
Rampaging in all directions, they seemed to have forgotten one another and the odd directive from their mysterious pep rally coordinator. They had returned to form.
The ZC agents were ready for them. They fanned out, encircling the zombies and wielding long, gleaming katana swords or heavy battle-axes. A few held weapons that looked like giant hammers with stubbled surfaces, like those found on meat tenderizers.
One-on-one, the zombies might have put up a fight with their speed and strength. Certainly against humans they’d be a tough match. Against unarmed humans they’d be unstoppable.
But the vampire ZC agents had them outnumbered four to one. Their weapons made short work of them, hacking off heads or slicing bodies in half.
I’d seen humans die, killed in a battle with vampires. No one ever really “dropped dead,” falling by pure gravity. No matter how they died, for a few moments their muscles remained rigid, resisting their body’s plummet to the earth.
Not these bodies. They went down as heavy and unresponsive as bags of laundry. Fluid spilled from their cavities, leaking like a toppled milk carton, not spurting like a human would.
They weren’t even animals. They were just animated objects, with no more feeling than a windup doll.
Or at least I tried to tell myself that as I watched the ZC agents close in on the last few zombies, the ones whose pyramid mishaps left them unable to run. They crawled through the mud, the ground sloughing off the last remaining rags of what was once their Sunday best.
The agents acted with brutal efficiency, reminding me of videos I’d seen as a kid, of hunters clubbing baby harp seals.
The broken-armed guy was last. He couldn’t even crawl, only slither on his belly, using hips and elbows to drag himself toward the distant scent of blood. His neck could no longer support his head, so he lay facedown, oblivious to his approaching annihilation.
Two agents stepped up to him. One pressed on the man’s back with the end of his giant hammer, holding him still. The other agent raised his sword.
A moment later, it was all over.
Silence shrouded the cemetery. Shane turned off his camera and set it beside him. We didn’t speak. It felt like that moment just before the credits roll at the end of an emotional gut-punching movie. But this was no movie.
My hands shook as I picked up what was left of my second lunch. My head spun from what I hoped was only thirst and not a complete emotional breakdown.
“What are you doing here?” said a man with a light foreign accent.
I turned to see Lieutenant Colonel Petrea approaching the van, with four human agents flanking him.
“Working,” I said. “For Lanham.”
He stopped a few feet away—which was far too close for my tastes—his dark eyes raking my frame. “You were made only two days ago, correct?” When I nodded, he said, “You should be resting.” He turned to Shane. “Is this your maker?”
“No, he’s my—um, this is Agent Shane McAllister.”
Shane folded his hands under his arms. “You’re the one who told her she would die.” He glared at Petrea. “Still think she has no future?”
The IC commander swiveled his head to meet my gaze. “The future is always in flux.”
Shane scoffed. “Then you can never be wrong. How convenient.”
“I saw darkness and death on your path,” he told me in his ethereal voice. “Was I incorrect?”
“You saw her file,” Shane interjected. “You knew she’d never had chicken pox, that she had Aaron Green as a professor, and that she’d probably be dead in a few days. Brilliant deduction.”
Petrea turned his whole body to face me. “I need no powers to know that you should not be out at your age. I only need memory. You should be with your maker.”
I looked away, partly because the angles of his face hurt my eyes, but mostly because it seemed like it would soon become impossible. He seemed to have me in some sort of prehypnotic state. “I’ve been activated. I have a duty to perform.”
Petrea stepped closer, and I could feel his gaze sear my face. “Your maker has left you, hasn’t he?”
My mind raced for an answer that wouldn’t reveal too much. How did he know my maker was a man? Was he bluffing, or had the details of my turning already been added to my file?
Shane shouldered his way between us. “It’s none of your business,” he told my commander. I pulled in a sharp breath at his insubordination. He had a lot to learn about Control agent conduct.
“You are dismissed.” Petrea’s gesture encompassed Shane and his own agents. “Now.”
The others obeyed instantly, but Shane stayed where he was.
“Go,” I told him. Much as I disliked Petrea, I didn’t want Shane to get punished for pissing him off. Besides, his overprotectiveness was getting on my nerves.
With a heavy sigh, Shane picked up his camera and the video assembly. “I’ll take this to the ZC commander and then start helping them clean up. The sooner we do that, the sooner we can leave.” He gave Petrea a glower before stalking off.
“Sit,” Petrea told me, as controlled as ever despite Shane’s behavior. “Are you getting enough to drink?”
“I think so.” I sat on the tailgate of the truck, confused by his sudden concern. But he wouldn’t be the first vampire to treat me differently now that I was one of them.
“You have other vampires in your support system, besides this—” he waved his hand in the direction of Shane “—friend of yours?”
I nodded. “They take good care of me. Keep me out of trouble.” I scratched the back of my neck, feeling like I was talking to a high school guidance counselor. “If that’s all, sir, I should probably go see—”
“My maker did not care for me either.”
I blinked, taken aback by his sudden change in demeanor. “They didn’t feed you?”
“He fed me too well.” Petrea’s gaze went cloudy. “As soon as I was made, he took me home to help him kill my family.”
“Oh. Wow.” That put my troubles in perspective. “Did you—go through with it?”
“I was crazed with thirst. I drank them all.”
I didn’t know what to say. Would I have devoured my own family in those first moments of insatiable hunger? If Spencer hadn’t tackled me, I would’ve killed Jeremy, who in one hour had gone from friend to prey.
“When I woke later,” Petrea continued, “and the bloodlust had faded, I saw what I had done to my father and mother and”—he bowed his head —“and my wife and daughter. My rage and grief drove me to stake my maker through the heart.”
I gasped, imagining the pain he’d brought on himself.
“I did not know, of course, the agony it would cause my own flesh.” He touched his chest, brushing the edge of the rows of rectangular metal ribbons. “But I would have done it nonetheless. It was a righteous act.” He adjusted the already straight jacket of his midnight blue uniform. “My survival, however, was an act of cowardice. I should
have had the courage to destroy myself, to pay for my sins.”
“It wasn’t your fault. Your maker took advantage of your weakness.” My con artist info-digging instincts kicked in. “Why did he want to kill your family?”
“Vengeance. My father was a vampire hunter. He’d killed my maker’s wife. Or so the monster claimed before I pulled the stake from his heart.”
“How did you survive without your maker?”
“Like you, I found a coven that took me in. Vampires who band together like us, they live longer and kill fewer humans.” His face hardened. “It is the rogues like my maker whom we must guard against.”
Why was he telling me this? Petrea struck me as the type who didn’t give away anything without expecting something in return.
“Why do you think your maker left you?” he asked.
Ah, there we go. “I never said he did.”
“Perhaps the Control can help find him. We have many resources at our fingertips.”
I’ll bet. No doubt they had entire squads devoted to hunting down rogue vampires. Not that Monroe was rogue.
“That’s not really necessary,” I said.
“Of course. Unless he’s been taken captive. We know where the unlicensed vampire hunters have their nests.”
My throat tightened at the memory of the torture I’d once witnessed, the ashen faces crisscrossed with holy water burns. The thought of Monroe in the hands of the latest band of sadistic zealots made me squirm.
But still I told Petrea nothing. If the details of my turning were in my file, he already had enough information to make me feel vulnerable. My life of secrecy and subterfuge had ended when I signed that contract with the Control.
I wouldn’t let it go without a fight.
25
Breaking Us in Two
An hour before morning twilight, Shane and I headed back to the station—muddy, exhausted, and reeking of putrid flesh.
I reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a fast-food napkin to blow my nose. “I’ll never get this smell out of my nostrils.”
Shane grunted a reply and clicked on the radio. Before I could conjure a tension-lowering topic of conversation, the wild surf-jam song ended.
Bring On the Night Page 22
