Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (40 page)

“It wasn’t technically a flesh eater. It just wanted to eat flesh,” Domino said.

“Oh, that’s much better,” Nicky said.

“Enough,” Manny said. “We need a judge and a favor.”

“I know who to ask for a favor, and I’m hoping he knows a judge, because I don’t know one who would sign off on this for me.”

“I can’t think of a lie that would work to get us an exhumation order for a grave this old,” Manny said.

“Me, either.” I rested the shotgun on my arm, dangerous end pointed at the ground, and got my phone out with my other hand. I couldn’t leave Warrington down there undead, aware, struggling, starving, afraid for all eternity. There wasn’t a sin bad enough to put someone through that kind of hell, and Warrington had seemed like a good man. He so didn’t deserve this.

“Who are you going to call?” Nicky asked.

“Zerbrowski, he owes me. I just hope a judge owes him, or he knows someone else who owes him a favor who knows a judge.” His number was in my favorites list. I let the phone dial it, and prayed that someone I knew, knew a judge.

“
TELL ME AGAIN
why I’m awake and in a cemetery at the ass end of night?” Zerbrowski asked, as he stood beside me in the dark listening to the backhoe drive closer through the headstones.

“Because you love me like a brother,” I said.

“I never had a brother, and I like you better than I like my sisters, though if you tell either of them that I’ll deny it.”

It made me smile, which was probably why he’d said it; he was good that way.

Manny stepped closer to us as the backhoe got nearer and noisier, and said, “I’m afraid it’s my fault, Sergeant Zerbrowski. Anita brought me in to consult, and I was the one who thought the zombie might be trapped down there.”

“Explain how a zombie can be trapped in its grave again?” Zerbrowski asked.

I answered, “I told you that this zombie didn’t go down like the others. Their eyes should be dead again, just corpses that lie down and wait for the grave to swallow them. This one was afraid and screaming. He went under the ground begging me to save him; I’ve never had a zombie do that.”

Zerbrowski blinked at me behind the faint glint of his silver-framed glasses. “And you’re afraid that this one is alive down there, but trapped.”

“Not alive, but undead and aware and trapped.”

He looked at Manny as if for confirmation, and the other man nodded.

“I’d hoped I’d dreamt that part of Anita’s phone call,” he said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his slacks. He’d apparently put them on over his pajamas, or at least he’d kept his pajama top on instead of getting a shirt, unless he had shirts with little trains all over them. I wouldn’t put it past Zerbrowski, but I knew his wife, Katie, would have made sure the shirt “disappeared” out of his wardrobe. They’d been happily married for a couple of decades, but she lived in hope that she’d get his clothes down to things that would look good no matter what he grabbed. I was pretty sure it was a vain hope, but I’d seen the choo-choo pajamas before at late-night crime scenes. Though I guess technically this wasn’t a crime scene.

“You know that just adding a tie to the train jammies doesn’t fool anyone, right? We still know it’s jammies.”

He grinned. “Hey, I put on a tie and a suit jacket.”

I shook my head at him.

Domino came up to us. “They’re asking if they can move the headstone, or if that will mess up what you need to learn from the zombie?”

I shook my head. “They can move it. They just need to be careful not to damage it out of respect for the family, not out of worrying about the zombie.”

“I’ll tell them,” he said, and hurried back through the tombstones toward the waiting men. He still had the shotgun over his shoulder, like I had mine in its tactical sling. Before we got the grave dug out, I’d be loading up on all my gear in the back of the truck, which would put up my customized AR and leave Nicky with the spare he’d grabbed at the Circus.

Zerbrowski said, “I thought zombies couldn’t feel emotions.”

“Normal ones can’t,” I said.

“But this one wasn’t normal?”

“Not even close,” I said.

“No,” Manny said.

“Any idea what made it go wonky?”

“Actually, yeah, he’d eaten human flesh while he was alive.”

Zerbrowski gave me wide eyes.

“Yeah, it was a first for me, too, but he got trapped up in the mountains during winter, a companion died, and they had enough meat to survive.”

“And you think that’s what made him go weird?”

“We both do,” Manny said.

I nodded. “I’ll write a paper about it for the academic publications, and just put the word out to add that to the list of things that put a big fat
do not raise this corpse
sign over a site.”

The backhoe was at the graveside, so we moved farther back so we could hear ourselves talk.

“What else is on the list?” he asked.

Manny answered and I let him. “Anyone who was a priest or priestess in real life of any religion is a question mark, but if they were voodoo practitioners then you don’t raise them from the dead, ever. Any psychic abilities, a witch, sorcerer, anyone who was involved in a supernatural event while alive is iffy and best avoided.”

I was wondering where Nicky was with the extermination crew. They’d have flamethrowers and the protective suits that went with them; if Warrington came out of the grave still ravenous we’d need them. Nicky had gone up to the main road to lead the crew back to us. He had also made sure that all three of us ate a protein bar from the stash Nathaniel had started putting in my car. It wasn’t dinner, but it helped to keep us from having the blood sugar crashes that could make me drain energy from the people I was connected to metaphysically. The grave diggers had already gotten lost and had to reload the backhoe back on their truck once and drive to the right location, which had taken time we didn’t have. We had to dig the grave up before dawn or the zombie might be dead to the world because it was dawn, and we still wouldn’t know what happened once darkness fell inside his coffin.
His
—there, I’d thought it again; even though he was a zombie, a fleshcraving zombie, there was enough mind left that he was still Warrington to me. He could still be down there thinking and feeling, and I had to know before I walked away tonight; I had to know.

I stared off into the darkness and wondered again where Nicky was, and . . . It was as if the energy had changed in the cemetery just since earlier tonight. It had that feeling that places get sometimes when people have been performing rites that can affect the sanctity of holy ground, or as if something metaphysical has happened between one visit and the next.

“Do you feel it, Manny?” I asked.

“Feel what?” he asked.

“The cemetery had better energy earlier tonight.”

“I haven’t been to this one before, but a lot of the older cemeteries feel like this, Anita.”

“I swear it didn’t earlier tonight.”

“Or maybe you just feel guilty,” he said.

“What do you mean, it feels different?” Zerbrowski asked.

“Sometimes older graveyards can sort of run out of holiness,” I said.

“If they haven’t had a new grave and funeral in a long time, it’s as if the holy ground doesn’t last,” Manny said.

“So this is no longer holy ground?” Zerbrowski asked.

Manny made a waffling gesture with his hand.

“A priest can do one quick ceremony, basically walk the boundaries with holy water, or another funeral could fix it,” I said.

“Ghouls can disrupt holy ground,” Manny said.

I shook my head. “I think the holy wears off and then some of the bodies rise as ghouls.”

“Wait, what?” Zerbrowski asked.

“Ghouls are the most mysterious undead, and there’s a debate even among animators and witches whether ghouls move into a graveyard and somehow damage the sanctity of it, or if ghouls only crawl out of the graves once the holy ground is no longer holy.”

“Sort of a ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg’ debate,” Zerbrowski said.

“Exactly,” I said.

“It’s the one kind of undead I’ve never seen,” he said.

Manny said, “They’re harmless cowards. You say boo, and they hide.”

I looked at him. “If you believe that, then you’ve only seen regular ghouls.”

“Ah, I forgot, you’ve seen them when they turn predatory,” he said.

“I’m sensing a split decision here,” Zerbrowski said.

“Manny’s right about most ghouls. They’re just scavengers that build tunnels underneath the graves and come up underneath to feed, at first. In fact, the first thing that usually clues a caretaker in that there’s an infestation is a few scattered bones, or a grave collapses into the tunnels.”

“Or they dig too close to a gravestone and it falls over, or into the tunnels,” Manny added.

“Yeah, and the main complaint is that people don’t like the idea of their loved ones getting munched on in their graves.”

Zerbrowski made a face. “I bet. Nothing like coming to put flowers on Grandma’s grave and discovering she’s been scattered all over the place like dog food.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Yeah, something like that. They call in an exterminator team to fill the tunnels with fire during daylight, and whoosh, no more problem. Usually.”

“What happens if it’s not usual?” he asked.

“They’re always faster, smarter, and less physically fragile than zombies. They don’t rot. Bullets hurt them but don’t stop them. I’ve heard of them getting hit by big trucks, so they can be killed if you can crush them thoroughly enough, but it’s hard to accomplish without the truck. Set them on fire and they burn like vampires, which means really well.”

“I’ve seen a couple of vamps afterward; they go up like kindling if you add an alcoholic drink to them for a starter fluid.”

I agreed. “But it doesn’t matter how hard they are to kill, most of the time. They seem to be afraid of people, just like Manny said.”

“Drop the other shoe, Anita, I know there is one.”

“Once they’ve cleaned out the bodies in the cemetery and don’t have any food to scavenge, they can start being more active hunters,” Manny said.

“Define
active
.”

“If a drunk passes out, or someone injures himself and can’t get away, then they’ll become a danger,” he said.

“I think they’ll always take an injured or incapacitated person; anything that they feel isn’t a threat to them is food,” I said.

“There’s nothing in the literature that says that,” Manny said.

“I’ve been up against ghouls that were real active, Manny, and I just don’t believe anything that’s that good at killing and eating people doesn’t do it when they get the chance.”

“Those are aberrant cases, Anita.”

“Yeah, but all it takes is one aberrant case to kill your ass.”

“So animators can’t control them like zombies; they’re more like vampires.”

“Yeah,” I said. In my head I thought, I’d known one animator who could control them, but he’d been mostly dead himself, so I wasn’t sure it counted.

“There are legends of those who had enough ability to control all undead, even vampires, but Anita is the closest we have to the necromancers of yore. If she can’t control them, then they can’t be controlled.”

“You’re such a brute,” Zerbrowski said.

I shrugged.

“Wait, you said they’re stronger than zombies, who are already stronger than us. Aren’t there any undead that aren’t stronger than humans?”

We both shook our heads. “Though they did some experiments on zombies, and it turns out they may not actually be stronger than people,” I said.

“How so?”

“Zombies just have no stop on using all their strength at once. It’s like how a baby will use everything it has to kick a blanket off, but as you get older you use the effort needed, not all your effort together. Until by the time you’re grown up you sort of forget you have more strength available to you—until an emergency happens.”

“Like grannies lifting cars off their grandkids,” Zerbrowski offered.

“Yeah, like that.”

“So if people knew how to automatically use all our strength, we could be lifting cars all the time?”

“That’s one theory,” I said.

“Remember before you try lifting a car that zombies will also tear their own arms off trying to lift something too heavy for them,” Manny said.

“That’s true. Zombies, just like babies, don’t seem to understand that even if you can lift something, it doesn’t mean your body can handle the load,” I said.

“Hanging around you is like the Discovery Channel for monsters sometimes; I always learn something new.”

The grave diggers had moved in with tools to help loosen the tombstone, but they were gesturing at the backhoe for some reason, even though they weren’t ready for it yet. “What are they doing?” I asked.

“I think they’re trying to use the backhoe to move the tombstone,” Zerbrowski said.

“How can you possibly know that from here?”

“I speak guy hand gestures,” he said with a completely deadpan face.

I might have argued with him, but Domino came back to report that was exactly what they were talking about doing. The tombstone was solid marble and taller than I was, so it was heavy and unwieldy. The two men they’d sent couldn’t lift it by themselves.

“Can I offer that Nicky and I help them, or do you not want them to know that we’re stronger than the average human?”

“Offer. We’re running out of moonlight.”

“Besides, they’ll take one look at Mr. Muscles and totally believe he could lift it by himself,” Zerbrowski said.

I gave him a look. “Mr. Muscles, really?”

He gave a head nod like he was pointing with it. “Look at that silhouette and argue with me if you can.”

I looked where he’d gestured, to find Nicky outlined by the moonlight and the floodlights that the diggers were setting up. Some trick of the light and shadow made his shoulders look even more massive than they already were, so he was proportioned like some cartoon strongman.

“Okay, I see your point.”

“You know me, I try to make my irritating nicknames accurate.” He smiled at me.