2 Death Rejoices

by A. J. Aalto

  “You, Marnie Baranuik, are closer to heaven than I am?”

  I jabbed a finger at my soft middle. “Well, I'm not inclined to call any souls into this baby-maker any time soon, but according to Harry, it's nearly impossible to push away all that female vitality unless you're one of the primeval ones, the Princes.”

  “Guess that's a blessing.”

  “Not for Anne, it isn't,” I reminded him sadly, as Dr. Murakami returned to join us. “Now she's a knocked-up almost-revenant, bitten by an infectious zombie…when she dies completely, which could be very soon, she'll rise again, but not as a pure revenant. As a zombie, I guess, or some weirdass hybrid of the two. I don't even know what to call her. As far as I know, there's never been such a thing. I'm pretty sure it'll suck for everyone involved, though.”

  “So we get Malas down here to complete the turn?”

  I didn't waste time being stunned that Batten would actually want to help create a healthy mutant revenant. “It's too late. Her third day was interrupted. She's out of time, now. There's no hope of her becoming a revenant.”

  “What, then?”

  “We've got to get the CDC on the phone to discuss what manner of disposal they want to approve for a full-fledged infectious zombie in the ICU. For now, I think it's probably wise for the nurses to put her into restraints.”

  Murakami looked nonplussed, which, given the Chapel-esque amount of self-control he'd shown so far, meant a normal person would probably be shitting egg rolls. I didn't blame him.

  Batten didn't do him any favors by telling him, “Zombies have unnatural strength. So do revenants. She's both.”

  “The best we can do is slow her down if she turns,” I told the doctor, “so, if you have extra-strength convict models or something, those would be best.”

  Wordlessly, the doctor strode off towards the nurse's station, and I was exceedingly glad he walked so fast.

  I dialed Chapel and waited for him to answer. “Agent Chapel, we have a situation at Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs. Victim is Anne Bennett-Dixon, a partially-turned revenant whose visible lesions indicate she's infected with yersinia sarcophaginae and yersinia repens, on her third day of a failed turn. She's got maybe—”

  “Marnie, is that possible?” he said, followed quickly by, “Are you okay?”

  “Eight hours, tops,” I continued, trying to maintain my cool. “ICU has her quarantined. I understand the morgue has been cordoned off until we can be sure it's clean, so site containment is not currently an issue. Please advise.”

  There was a beat of silence, during which I tried to ignore the influx of empathic readings I was being showered with: doubt, horror and no small amount of fear. “Sending CDC team ASAP. Have Mark and Declan remain on site. I want you out of there.”

  I couldn't have been more stunned if he asked me to marry him. My jaw dropped. “Sir?”

  “You heard me. You can consult with chief of special pathogens at the CDC on the phone from the car, or, better yet, from the motel. I'll tell him to keep you in the loop.”

  I opened my mouth to demand why Dr. Edgar should stay and I should leave, but I already knew the answer. Chapel's judgment was clouded; clouded because it was me, and I was Harry's, and despite my attempt to remove the dhaugir bond, Gary remained linked to us with an invisible fiber made entirely of emotion, a thread that lacked logic and insight. I sensed inflexibility in Gary's voice. Remembering what he'd said at the fish camp about the bond being “not exactly gone”, I knew fighting it would be pointless for the time being.

  “Head of ICU is Dr. Murakami,” I reminded him, and he hung up on me.

  My heart sank. You've altered your whipping boy. He's not thinking straight. I put away my phone with a choked-back stress-dissolving giggle.

  Batten's voice startled me. “Something's funny?”

  “Since when do you spy on my phone calls?”

  “Since when do you lose your cool about magic and monsters?” Batten diagnosed. “Ironic, considering what you live with.”

  “Who,” I corrected. “Don't go back to calling Harry an it, please. And it was nothing.”

  “Sure doesn't seem like nothing.”

  “Stress. Drop it.”

  “Fine. You should go,” Batten said, in an irritating echo of Chapel.

  Before I could tell him to bite me, another voice joined us. “Since this is not a simple revenant turning, I will defer to your expertise in this matter, Dr. Baranuik.” Dr. Murakami suggested, striding down the hall toward us.

  “Quarantine officers have been alerted. You should expect a team, but it'll take time for them to get here.”

  Batten asked, “Before you go, Baranuik, best case scenario: how do we minimize the risk to the public here?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to block out the ugliness of what I needed to say. “Sewing her lips shut around a mouth packed with salt should keep her pacified until she can be incinerated, but that's only an educated guess. Salt in a zombie's mouth usually returns it to its grave.”

  “Usually?”

  “Preternatural science doesn't tend to have hard and fast rules. It has maybes, ifs, and usuallys.”

  “She's got no grave to return to, since she's never been buried,” Batten noted.

  “So the salt would at first stun her, before compelling her to return to the place she was last alive,” I finished. “We can't allow her to roam the streets to Malas’ mansion uncontrolled and on the verge of turning like this, infecting people on her way. She needs to be incinerated the minute she's—” I was about to say dead, but she was already in a nebulous state. “Before she rises. I doubt she'd be safe to transport all the way to a crematorium. Doc, do you have on-site incinerators?”

  “The biological waste disposal units operate at eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit,” Dr. Murakami said.

  “That will destroy both yersinia sarcophaginae and yersinia repens. There won't be any risk to the public through the exhaust,” I said.

  “But …” Dr. Murakami's face shadowed briefly. “They take small batches only.”

  Dark Lady forgive me. “Then she'll have to be dismembered.”

  Batten turned away with an unhappy noise, but said nothing.

  I continued, “We should wait until her breathing stops.”

  “Is that how we'll know she's truly dead?” Murakami asked.

  “Dr. Murakami, this is a new beast. From now until the incinerator does its job, she'll never be truly dead. Her heart's stopped, her breathing will stop, but she won't be dead. She'll be the lingering undead.”

  “Will she be conscious?”

  “I'm sorry, I don't know.” I shook my head. “I hope not. Because if she is, I'm not sure she'll have an empty, brainless zombie demeanor. As a half-revenant, she may be perfectly sentient and aware, as she is now, but with an uncontrollable appetite and no off-switch.”

  “How will we know when to…” This, he had trouble with. Even after decades of medicine, the head of ICU struggled with a twisting mouth before getting out the words, “Perhaps it would be best, Dr. Baranuik, if you stayed long enough to advise us on the when?”

  Great. Awesome. I chewed back a dozen versions of “you have got to be fucking kidding me” and forced myself to nod. “Of course. I can do that.”

  Dr. Murakami couldn't walk away from me quickly enough, probably in case I tried to change my mind.

  Batten was glaring at the side of my face. “I don't care what that guy says, I want you out of here,” he said. “Go wait in the car.”

  “Where's my assistant?” I asked. “He's always underfoot but never here when I need him. How long does it take to park a goddamned car?”

  “What do you need him for?”

  “I'd like to punch someone in the mouth. I can't punch you; I'll break my damn hand on your granite jaw.”

  His voice softened. “Marnie—”

  “Oh, please don't say anything reassuring right now. Don't you get it? Don't you know what we have to do?
” I took a deep breath. “Don't make it worse by going all mushy on me.”

  “I'll be here.”

  “Whoop-dee-fucking-doo!” I cried. “No offense, but that ain't sweetening the pot after the giant pain in the ass you've been tonight.”

  He thumbed a text in, presumably to check on Declan again. “I'm going to do you a favor and ignore that.”

  “You can do me a favor and eat me,” I told him, fishing for my cell phone.

  “Deal,” Batten said.

  “Har har.” For once, the prospect of Batten's head between my thighs failed to arouse me even a little bit; the horror of Anne's inescapable future would not allow it. I dialed Malas, somewhat baffled as to why Harry had put him on my speed dial. Do four thousand-year-old revenants answer their own phones?

  When he did, I quelled my surprise to say, “Anne Bennett-Dixon.”

  Malas made a sad, hushed noise into the phone. I thought his sadness was genuine.

  I explained briefly, trying to wall-up against the empathic drift of dismay from Declan, who had finally gotten his ass in gear, and was hovering uncertainly by my side, trying to catch my eye.

  “I think she'd like to see you, sir.”

  Malas did not reply. I wondered if he had been searching for her via bilocation; he was certainly old enough. Even Gregori would have been old enough… and then something unsettling occurred to me. “Malas, if I staked a revenant who was in phantasm form, would the phantasm turn to ash?”

  I felt two sets of eyes bore into me and turned around so I wouldn't have to give Batten or Declan any sort of non-verbal explanation.

  “Might I presume you speak now of the murder of my Younger, Gregorius?”

  I felt my eyes widen until they were too big to blink. “Murder? Wait, what, I—”

  “When you are prepared to throw yourself upon the clemency of my throne, I will hear your pleas and answer your queries on the matter of my Younger. Until that time, DaySitter, you should do right by Ms. Dixon and ease her suffering. We will discuss this matter in the near future.”

  I heard the disconnect and blinked in disbelief, turning to show Declan my phone as though he could see the shit I was in, written on the display. “A four thousand-year-old vampire just hung up on me in a snit.”

  “Revenant,” Declan reminded me gently, “and you know the age is a lie.”

  “Vampire,” Batten agreed, stepping forward and closing our little circle with his crowding shoulders, “and what's this about the age being a lie?”

  Declan shook his head. “When it comes to numbers and revenants, the age is always a lie. It's one of their protective measures: misdirection. I've never met a revenant who didn't lie about numbers. They've always used the number four when they do it. It must have significance.”

  “Marnie once told me there are four princes of the immortal line.”

  “The four is a lie,” Declan said.

  “This isn't the time for this,” I warned, not liking the shrewd, hungry look in the hunter's eyes. “Focus, gentlemen. We have a zombie-revenant hybrid to dismember and incinerate.” Those were definitely not two of my favorite verbs.

  “Harry claims to be four hundred and thirty-five,” Batten continued.

  “The four is a lie,” Declan said, more firmly this time. “If a four were true, they'd add another misleading four. Harry's four hundred thirty-five could mean eight hundred thirty-five or fifty-nine hundred thirty-five. If he were four hundred, he'd say four hundred forty-five, or thirty-four. The only thing we know about Harry's four hundred is that the four is the lie. You'll never know for sure how old he truly is. It helps to get dates and track their movement, find clues that link them to certain time periods, but even then, it's difficult. It's meant to be difficult.”

  I was about to leap to Harry's defense when a nurse's urgent shout cut the quiet of the near-empty ICU ward with Dr. Murakami's name.

  The doctor was closer to the door than we were. Murakami's slight form shot into the room before I could yell at him. My feet scrambled into action before my brain caught up, and Batten was half a step behind. He barked something that I didn't hear, I was too busy watching scarlet stripes lash the wide plate glass. The nurse shrieked. Batten and I hit the door simultaneously, full-tilt. I slapped it open just in time to watch Murakami's trendy oval glasses hit the floor a single blink before his body did.

  CHAPTER 40

  ANNE'S LIPS PEELED BACK from baby fangs, and I had one frozen second to think, She did get fangs. I was wrong. And then, because I hate being wrong, Buggernuggets.

  Her fingers, curled up into trembling fists, twisted against her chest like mice endeavoring to make a nest. The unseeing marbles of her eyes rolled wildly. When she opened her mouth to utter a pitiable echo of the nurse's marrow-churning cries for help, blood poured over her chin, hanging in stringy rivulets like a grim, crimson beard. At her feet, the nurse arched in a final dying spasm, heels kicking the pastel linoleum. Dr. Murakami clutched his throat, but there was so much raw, torn flesh splayed on either side of his small hands; even if we could get him to surgery in time, the creeping plague would kill him. He didn't have a chance, and the fading recognition in his face said as much.

  Anne wailed again. This time, there was absolutely nothing human in the sound.

  “Type C zombie, fast, contagious,” I reminded Batten, my voice shrill through a tightening throat. My breath came in fast, hot puffs. “Don't get any fluids on you.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” he ordered, pointing hard.

  Terror turned me mindlessly obedient to his tone. I turned and rammed face-first into a door that wouldn't budge. The alarm in the hall had triggered a lockdown. I yanked furiously on the handle, banging on the door repeatedly.

  “Stuck,” I panted. “A great muchness of stuck. Oh, that's bad. No matter. I wasn't running like a chicken. I was staying. I'm badass.” To prove it, I turned to face the zombie, and saw stars.

  Batten's stern voice was my lifeline. “Get in that corner behind the chair.”

  “Corner. Right.” I moved there despite the fact that hiding from a berserker zombie behind a flimsy plastic chair was laughably futile. “Man, if I wasn't rock fucking stupid, I'd be safe in the car like Chapel ordered.”

  The zombie retched, took two alarmingly nimble steps toward Batten, and projectile-vomited something viscous and phlegmy, shuddering afterward as if it tasted bad. Having gotten a whiff of Anne's partial-death tongue, I didn't want to imagine what would taste revolting in comparison. Batten, to his credit, didn't flinch; his body stiffened into a ready-to-fight posture that showed no fear. The gun in his hand never wavered. Point: Batten's completely atrophied sense of smell.

  “Gloves,” I said, grabbing a pile out of the box on the supply cart. They fell in a latex cascade as I chucked a bunch in Batten's direction. I snapped some on myself, doubled them, looked at the zombie again, and considered triple-gloving. Some noxious, mucilaginous substance hung in dark, plague-ridden strings from her bottom lip, dredged up from parts of the body expectorants had never dreamed of plumbing. I spent a heart-throttling minute searching the cart for masks before realizing that none of the staff had entered the room bare-faced, and they were on a cart outside the room. The zombie vomited again, making grating, dry-heave noises.

  I only cast my eyes away from the butt-puckering horror that was her rancid mouth for a second, but I missed seeing what made Batten rocket back against the wall with a shout. When I looked up, Anne Bennett-Dixon was halfway up the wall, clinging there like a bad dream.

  “Oh hey, they can do that?” I marveled, barely audible. “Rad.”

  Batten's shock was sinking into a similar area of dark humor. “Ambitious move for a dead chick.”

  “You don't have to be a go-getter to rise from the dead and crack open the living,” I replied, “but that there is impressive.”

  Anne turned her head completely around, owl-like, and gurgled at us. A soupy black liquid dribbled off the stump of her to
ngue. My mouth went dry and my humor fled as I hugged the wall behind the chair, feeling dirty and violated by the sight of her. My calves went hard and my thighs tightened, and I realized they were thinking about taking off without my permission; Hood would be so proud.

  In an eruption of gore, Batten fired off three rounds that took the zombie center of mass. Her chin dipped as she watched the bullets tear through her flesh. Then she dropped to the floor on all fours and loped back to her now-still meal of doc tartar.

  “Marnie?” Batten's focus was on Anne, but he had me locked in his peripheral vision. His gun hand was still steady. “Head-shot?”

  My voice came out sharp. “You'll hit Dr. Murakami!”

  “He's already dead,” Batten said.

  “You don't know that.”

  The zombie pulled her face back to stretch and snap the tendons and ligaments she was chewing out of Murakami's throat.

  “Christ almighty!” I pointed, as if Batten wasn't already fixated on the same sight.

  One of the meatier tendons snapped and licked up wetly at the zombie's face, leaving a juicy red smear like a spaghetti-slurping accident. Lady and the Vamp, my brain supplied unhelpfully . Batten let out a growl of frustration.

  “Don't let her do that!” he shouted.

  I grabbed the nearest thing off the bed — a pillow soiled with greenish goo — and fired it at the zombie's head. “Bad zombie. Bad girl! Don't eat the doctor!”

  “Fuck's sake,” he said, and raised the gun to eye level.

  “Don't shoot! It's a waste of bullets, she's part vampire.”

  “Revenant,” he reminded.

  “What the—? You're correcting me? Now?”

  “Marnie, do something!”

  I grabbed the plastic chair and wheeled it around to face her, holding it up like a lion tamer. “Like what?”

  “Magic!”

  “Oh. Right.” I looked around the room for anything with which I could perform spells and saw nothing useful. “Well, this is a wangdilly of a problem, see? I flunked out of MacGyver's Paper Clip & Duct Tape University.”