Walking Dead

CHAPTER 20

I suppose I knew on an intellectual level that graves weren’t especially made for getting out of. I mean, you start with a hermetically sealed casket and then you dump six feet of dirt on top of it. Over time the earth gets compacted, which can’t make it any easier to dig through. So even if you’re a very angry and determined zombie, you’ve kind of got your work cut out for you just escaping from the grave.

Which was, I suppose, why we got hit with an initial wave of zombie bugs, birds and rodents. I bet some people would say if you’ve never picked undead mosquitoes out of your teeth, you’ve never lived. Under that definition, I’d be just as happy to have not lived, thanks.

I drew my rapier, feeling its connection to my armor zot to life with a sound like a lightsaber. I was sure that had to be internal editing, that nobody else heard a funky zwonk! of power lighting up, but I kinda hoped they did. Even zombies ought to be smart enough not to mess with a chick wielding a lightsaber.

Well, human zombies, anyway. A half-rotted squirrel ran at my foot, chittering like mad. I let out a perfectly girlie scream and swatted it away with the tip of my sword. Some fencer I was. I skewered a rat, which was much better in fencing terms, and a lot more awful in real-world terms. It kept trying to get me, teeth clattering and scaly little feet scrabbling in the air. I let out another yell and flung it away, hoping a nice hard smash against a tree or gravestone might end its nasty little unlife.

Something bigger than my head dove at me. I shrieked yet again and ducked, not even trying to strike back. Whatever it was pulled up, rained molty feathers on me, then dived again, this time with an unearthly scree that sounded, well, like the dead crying aloud. I thought maybe it was a goshawk, but I was too busy cowering on the ground, hands over my head, to really get a good look.

Not that the ground was all that good a place to hide from the undead. Half-rotted squirmy things boiled up through the dirt, maybe drawn to my body heat, or maybe drawn to all the noise I was making. For a big tough girl like me, I sure sounded like a fifties housewife encountering a mouse. Worse, I felt like one. My heart was in palpitations and my hands were wet with sweat. I wanted to throw up, but I was afraid the doughnuts I’d been surviving on for the past two days would turn out to have an unlife of their own, too, and would turn on me in bilious disgustingness.

Mice and shrews and robins and worms and myriad other small creatures that lived in city greens all squeaked and charged toward me, dropping tiny body parts and dragging tiny guts along with them. Tears leaked down my cheeks, and my chest filled up, like all the dead cells in my body were coming back to life and trying to suffocate me. Angry gods I could handle. Murderous banshees were fine. The living dead, it seemed, even in comparatively cute and harmless forms, were not my thing. I was going to be eaten alive by rodents of usual size, and the best I could do was sob and gibber about it.

Right beside me, I heard the distinctive double-click of a shotgun cocking. I didn’t think that was fair. Zombies, particularly rat zombies, shouldn’t be able to use shotguns. A blast of rock salt, even at short range, probably wouldn’t kill me, but it would hurt like hell, and make lots of little holes for the zombies to start nibbling at. I wailed and wrapped my arms around my head more tightly. I’d dropped my sword and didn’t even know when.

A huge blast of rock salt peppered the ground in front of me, tinging off my sword and breaking some of the tinier rodent zombies into bits. Suzanne Quinley said, “Get up,” and cocked the shotgun again. “Get up, or next time I shoot you so I have time to run.”

I peeked up through my arms to see her standing above me like a pale god, shotgun riding on one hip and her hair flying in the wind. Her gaze was implacably calm, not at all like a fourteen-year-old girl’s. She was playing the role of grown-up because the actual adult in this scenario was blubbering like a baby. I had never in my whole life been so grateful for somebody else to have her shit together.

Suzy said, “Get up,” one more time.

Stomach in knots, hands trembling, I reached for my sword and got up.

Suzy gave me a severe nod, then lifted the shotgun to indicate Daniel Doherty. “What do we do about him?”

“Let him get eaten.” I didn’t mean it, and being snarky didn’t make my hands any steadier. “We rescue him.”

“You’re the boss.” Suzy let fly another blast of rock salt, and the air cleared of small flying undead things. I watched them fall to the ground, and wondered why my feet weren’t moving. Suzy crashed her hip into mine. “Move. Move!”

“I’m trying. I really am.” A tiny panicked sliver of silver-blue magic shot down my legs, looking for roots growing up from dead trees and binding me to the earth. There weren’t any. It was good old-fashioned panic holding me in place. “Maybe you better go ahead.”

“All I do is see the future!” Suzanne Quinley, who had to weigh at least thirty-five pounds less than I did, grabbed my sweater in one fist and hauled me a step forward. “You’re the one with the save-the-world magic! You’re the one who kicks everybody’s ass! I didn’t come all the way from Olympia to get eaten by bugs! Come on! Save me!”

I couldn’t even save myself. I had no idea how I was supposed to save her. All I had was a sword that wouldn’t kill zombies and magic that fed the undead until they took corporeal form.

All of a sudden I wondered what happened if you infused a killing weapon with life magic.

Smacking Cernunnos with a bolt of blue magic had made it very clear that my power was not meant to be a straight-out weapon. I’d nearly passed out, and that was from just one hit. I had no doubt that sustained blasts would drain my magic and leave me for the worms. Warrior’s path or not, there seemed to be things a shaman just didn’t get to do. But pouring healing power into a weapon, now that was tricksy, and all the gods and creatures of chaos liked trickery. Besides, I was facing the undead. If there was a modicum of fairness in the world, it would agree that going up against hordes of zombie beasties who were trying to eat me wasn’t at all in the same class as fighting a god who hadn’t done anything worse than attack without provocation.

Juxtaposing those two things made it really clear, once more, how humans tended to think choices were between one good thing and one bad thing. In fact, choices could just pile up on the side of suck without any kind of apology for it. Another zombie rat ran at my foot, and all my frustration and disgust exploded in a thin blue line down the length of my rapier. I stabbed downward with a shout and skewered the nasty little thing.

It exploded.

Bits of blue-white-lit flesh erupted everywhere, like a tiny box of fireworks had gone off at our feet. I yelled. Suzanne yelled. Doherty yelled. The attacking hordes of zombie critters didn’t yell, but they did stop their headlong rush and looked around, my sword’s light glowing in their undead eyes. My yell turned into a triumphant shout and I leaped forward, convinced I could scare off our attackers with a show of strength.

Sadly, zombies are not well known for their brilliance, and me and my glowy stick made a nice bright target for them. I swatted at flying things and stabbed at crawling things in what could kindly be called a panicked flail, while Suzanne blasted the shotgun. We backed up a few steps at a time, pausing so Suzy could reload, and we didn’t make it anywhere near the gates before the first human zombies crawled out of their graves.

I was not a horror-film buff. The thing about horror films, see, is that they’re scary. Scary, or gross, and I didn’t much like either of those things. Despite this, I’d grown up in America, and apparently there was a cinematic image of zombies lurching from their graves that was part of the überconsciousness, because in many ways, I’d seen the scene unfolding before me a dozen times before. Slow-moving cadavers in various stages of decay, their skin peeling back, their teeth exposed, their fingernails too long, their hair falling out, all oozed from the earth—it was more of an ooze than an erupt, since eruption connoted speed—and latched on to us with their rotting eyeballs and began slogging toward us in such stereotypical fashion that I actually glanced around for a camera crew and the pretty heroine who was about to get eaten.

Two things caught up with me at once: first, Suzy, Doherty and I were playing the part of the about-to-be-eaten leads, and second, that zombie movies simply could not in any way get across the smell that preceded our encroaching dance partners. Rotted meat and formaldehyde swept toward us on the cool night air, so ripe that tears burned my eyes. Doherty and Suzy both doubled over, retching, but I held sickness behind my teeth through one part willpower and one part practice from four months of homicide investigation. I whispered, “Get behind me,” and tried not to think about climbing into Petite with vomit on my shoes.

The other thing zombie movies didn’t get right was how dirty they were. Filthy, and not just with rot, but with ordinary mud and grit. I’d never tried digging my way through six feet of packed earth, but I could see it wasn’t a tidy endeavor. The very newest corpses looked as if they’d been in a mud fight, nothing worse, but the oldest were little more than black stickiness clinging to disintegrating bone.

Morbid curiosity made me look again, this time with the Sight, and I wished I hadn’t. There’d been something seductive in the dark, deathless—or deathly, I guess—quality of the cauldron. It’d offered a comforting cessation of everything, wrapping around to draw you into a silence that would never end.

Zombies were what happened to the bodies when it ended. Memories flickered around them like the auras they’d once had, but too far out of reach: fireflies teasing at the corners of their undead vision. Like reached for like, scattered memories reaching for the thoughts and recollections that living humans carried with them. That was what drove empty bodies: their hunger, not for flesh, but for all the moments and details and tribulations that made up a life.

Raging spirits like Matilda had a memory, however feeble, of what they’d been. The things crawling from their graves had less than that, only an echo of that memory. If the spirit world had stroke victims, zombies might qualify: they were empty, but they remembered they hadn’t always been, and they had no idea how to become more again. Looking at them was looking into a black hole of desperation and loathing, so thick I could drown in it; so thick they could only move slowly as they struggled through it toward us. Worse, I could feel myself slowing as I watched, their deadly ichor reaching for me and drawing me down.

I shuddered and shoved the Sight away, trusting normal vision to hold out against their insidious encroachment longer than magical vision could. “On the count of three, Suzy, I want you to run like hell for Petite.”

“For what?”

I bared my teeth at the zombies, not wanting to waste time turning to show Suzanne the expression. Besides, it wasn’t her fault. Her set of vast psychic powers included future-tripping, not mind reading. I wondered if anybody actually could read minds, then dragged mine back to the topic at hand. “My car. The purple Mustang outside the gates.” I dipped my hand into my front left pocket and dangled the keys behind me. “She’s solid steel. Hopefully that’ll keep the zombies out.”

“Steel windows, too?” Suzy asked with more sarcasm than I thought a girl about to be eaten by zombies should be able to command. I growled and she cocked the shotgun again, then muttered, “Okay, okay.”

“Bring Doherty with you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to cover your retreat.”

“That,” Suzanne announced disdainfully, “is a stupid plan. We should all run together.”

“Suzy, I don’t know if these things can move faster than they’re doing right now. I’d really rather not find out by turning our backs on them. Don’t you watch horror movies?” The fact that I didn’t seemed supremely irrelevant. You didn’t have to actually watch them to know you should never turn your back on the bad guys.

“Yes,” she said acerbically, “and the first thing that happens is all the idiots in the movie split up so the monsters can pick them off one by one.”

Shit. She was right. I shot a glance over my shoulder to meet her defiant glare, and groaned. “Okay, you win. All together. You’ve got the ranged weapon, though, so I’m staying in front.”

“What about me?” Doherty asked.

I risked another glare over my shoulder. “You can cower and let the hot chicks with weaponry protect you, or you can play bait and run toward the zombies while we run for the car.”

Doherty cowered. I muttered, “Thought so,” and turned back to our opponents under the cover of Suzanne’s scream and a blast from the shotgun.

Zombies, for the record, do not die from a face full of rock salt. They do, however, get blinded by it, which makes it a lot easier to stuff a glowing blue sword into their throats and rip their half-attached heads off. I wasn’t sure if that would stop one for good, but the one who’d attacked fell down, and that was a good start. Better yet, one of the monsters immediately behind it fell on its…corpse, for lack of a better word. I knew better, but I let the Sight come back for a moment so I could watch and confirm my suspicions.

The second zombie snatched and gobbled at the flickering bits of memory that had taunted the first. Apparently they didn’t care much where their psychic food came from, so if we could create even a feeble wall of dead zombies—that was a Department of Redundancy Department phrase if I’d ever heard one—we might win ourselves a little time to make good an escape.

We got busy. My rapier made an absolutely gorgeous slash of brilliance against the fading light, magic pouring through it and burning away any gook or gunk that might have been inclined to darken its glory. Suzy took one step back with every blast of the shotgun, and Doherty…

Well, Doherty screamed like a little girl every time the gun roared and every time another body fell, but honestly, I couldn’t blame him. My own hands were slick with sweat and my stomach was roiling like I’d drunk half a gallon of seawater. The only reason I wasn’t joining him in the histrionics was Suzy’d bitch-slap me but good. That didn’t really make me feel any better about myself.

All of a sudden we’d made a little wall of zombie bodies, and those coming on from behind it were brawling, more eager for the scraps left by their fallen brethren than for us. Apparently the movies had gotten that right, too: zombies weren’t known for their scintillating wit, or one of them would’ve realized we were much tastier tidbits. The three of us stood there, breathless with surprise and relief, for about a nanosecond. Then our own scintillating wit caught up and we turned and ran like hell.

A faceless zombie lurched toward us from the side, too far from the original emptied graves to be distracted by the half dozen we’d downed. Suzy screamed and blasted it, and I jumped on top of it to chop its head off. Rapiers weren’t really meant for chopping, but I did a damn fine job even so. After a couple seconds I realized Suzy’s screams had words in them: “Can’t you do something about these things?”

Sheer mindless irrationality rose up in me and I flung my hands in the air. “I’m sorry! Somehow I forgot to pack the scarab launcher into Petite’s trunk this morning!”

“The what?” Suzanne dropped the shotgun’s barrels toward the ground and stared at me.

“The scarab launcher! You know! Scarabs eat flesh, zombies are flesh, so you fill a bazooka with scarabs and launch them and poof, no more zombies?” I sounded hysterical. Well, that stood to reason. I was hysterical. I was doing better than Doherty, though, who was crawling toward the gate, sobbing. Okay, now I felt sorry for the poor bastard. Not even an insurance adjudicator who was trying to screw me out of my claim deserved zombie attacks or the other peculiarities that were part of my life. I didn’t envy him the upcoming therapy bills.

Suzy, on the other hand, came to a full stop and gaped at me, far from looking as if she needed therapy. In fact, she looked like a young Norse goddess of some kind, her hair all tangled around her face and real strength in her slim body. Her green eyes glowed with admiration, which seemed all wrong, under the circumstances. “Scarab launchers,” she said with great sincerity. “That’s the most awesome idea I’ve ever heard.”

I said, “Thank you,” breathlessly, and then, because for once I felt a little too honest for my own good, I added, “I read it on the Internet.”

“I am totally getting a scarab launcher when we get out of here.” “She shot a look toward the zombies, then toward the gate, and said, “Which I kinda think we oughta do now.”

I picked Doherty up by the belt, and we ran for the gates.

Doherty stayed in Petite’s backseat where I threw him. Suzy, with whom I was growing more impressed by the moment, snatched up the bag of rock salt and poured it across the cemetery’s gated entrance as I slammed the gate itself shut. “Iron and salt,” she said with astonishing satisfaction. “That ought to keep them in.”

I wailed, “What, you just know that? I had to study to learn that! Does everyone but me just come pre-programmed with weird esoteric knowledge?”

Suzy, grinning, jerked a thumb toward Petite and Doherty. “You’re not the only one. He’s doing a lot worse than you are.”

Somehow that didn’t make me feel much better. Trusting Suzy and her shotgun and the salt-lined iron gate, I ran back into the chapel to discover I’d left the water bottle somewhere on the wrong side of the gate. Feeling like a complete moron, I stuffed my rapier through a belt loop and sank my cupped hands into the font, scooping up as much water as I could hold. There wasn’t much left by the time I raced back outside, but it was enough to throw through the gate and watch what happened to the zombies who’d made their way toward it.

Unfortunately, what happened was “absolutely nothing.” Apparently holy water did the trick on the mist, but once the zombies were risen, they were happy to stay that way.

“Right,” I said brightly. “Time to go.”

“What if the salt and iron don’t hold?”

I was certain there was a heroic answer to that, but instead of searching for it, I grabbed Suzanne’s arm and hauled her back to Petite. “Then we’ll be really, really glad we’re gone.”

She whispered, “Fair enough,” and a minute later we peeled out of there, leaving a cemetery full of cranky zombies behind.