Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,148

zombie movie you’d ever seen, except that I knew they got it wrong, so why did this match it? We’d sent a handful of vampires to the morgue, and maybe a dozen zombies in bits, but the room was so full of the walking dead that I couldn’t count them as they huddled over the bodies. Edward had compared them to vultures, but vultures squabble over the dead, fighting for the best pieces, or any piece. The zombies ate in near silence, except for the wet, tearing sounds that I’d been hearing through the door long before my mind wanted to acknowledge them. I hadn’t realized that my hearing might try to protect me just like my vision did; interesting. The zombies huddled around four distinct piles of ‘food.’ There were only supposed to be three dead, so why four piles? I couldn’t see the bodies because the crouched undead hid most of the corpses from view. I got bits of red flesh glinting in the overhead lights, white bone gleaming like polished nightmare pearls, and the shining colors of organs as they were torn from deep within the bodies and consumed by … people.

Some of the zombies were decayed, but the one munching on someone’s heart looked fresh as a newly minted undead penny. None of the zombies we’d sent here had looked that good, and just like that my poor, horrified brain put the impossible together.

‘Oh, shit,’ I said, and I sounded afraid, even to me.

‘What?’ Nicky asked.

‘What’s wrong?’ Edward said. ‘What are you seeing that I don’t?’

‘We sent less than a dozen zombies in pieces here.’

‘There’s got to be more than twenty,’ he said.

‘Yeah, and none of them looked this human, Ed … Ted. They were all decayed, a lot, not fresh like this.’

‘It’s some of the bodies that were in the morgue when we unloaded,’ Al said.

I turned and looked at him, with my fingers holding on to the edge of the window. ‘What did you say?’

‘Far as I can tell it’s every body that was in the morgue when we dropped off the vamp bodies and zombie parts.’

‘Let me down, Nicky,’ I said.

‘You look spooked,’ Gonzales said. ‘That can’t be good.’

‘It’s not,’ I said.

‘Why do you both look like you just saw a ghost?’ Jenkins asked.

‘A ghost wouldn’t spook me,’ I said.

‘It’s a saying, Anita,’ Edward said, as if it mattered.

‘Talk to us,’ Gonzales said.

‘Zombies rise from graves, not morgues. They need to be buried before they can be called from the grave as zombies. Even I couldn’t raise a body that’s just been sitting around the morgue.’

‘What do you mean? Dead is dead, right?’ Jenkins said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘you don’t get it. Zombies don’t rise without a vaudun priestess, or necromancer, to call them from the grave.’ I pointed back behind me to the doors of the morgue. ‘They don’t rise spontaneously just because you put older zombies in the same area, and let me just say that zombies don’t put themselves back together once you’ve blown their legs and heads off. They keep moving and will kill and eat you if they can, but they don’t heal. Dead flesh doesn’t heal, and zombies are the most dead of the undead.’

‘So if all that’s impossible, then what the fuck is going on?’ Jenkins asked.

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, I don’t like that at all,’ Gonzales said. ‘You’re supposed to be the expert on zombies in the Marshals Service. If you don’t know, then …’

‘We’re fucked,’ Jenkins finished for him.

No one argued with him.

Something heavy hit the door, and I screamed like a fucking girl.

43

‘We have to burn them,’ Edward said, ‘we have to burn them all to fucking ash and then scatter it into different bodies of running water.’

‘Burn them how?’ Gonzales asked.

‘I got a flamethrower in my car.’

‘This is the basement of a hospital,’ Gonzales said.

‘Evacuate the hospital,’ Edward said.

‘We can’t order that,’ Jenkins said.

‘We have killer zombies in the morgue, and unless we can use fire we might not be able to stop them. I think that’s an excellent reason to evacuate the hospital,’ I said.

‘Fuck,’ Gonzales said, softly but with feeling.

The zombies were beginning to throw themselves clumsily against the doors, but flesh-eating zombies aren’t like the regular shambling dead. They wouldn’t stay clumsy; they would learn, evolve into better killers, better predators. I’d never heard of a flesh-eating zombie being kept ‘alive’ longer than a few days. They didn’t hide themselves well enough; we found them and killed