off the sprinklers, or burn the hospital down,’ he said.
‘Sprinklers, yes,’ I said. ‘Burn down, no.’
‘How?’ he asked, and he was nicely skeptical.
I grinned at him, with my face still covered in zombie bits and blood. Yancey didn’t flinch. ‘We’ll show you,’ I said.
He grinned back, eyes taking in the knee-deep pile of moving corpses around us. ‘I look forward to it.’
I liked Yancey; he was okay.
47
Normal phosphorus, or even thermite, grenades are designed to burn for a short time and then go out. They cause damage that would discourage vampires, ghouls, or even lycanthropes and humans, but not zombies. They don’t get scared, they don’t panic, they don’t give up because you hurt them, because it doesn’t hurt them. Scientists have tried to figure out how the nerve impulses keep zombies able to walk but not able to feel pain. If they could figure it out, then maybe they could use it as a way to get paralyzed humans walking, but so far it is a mystery, because once you’ve cut an arm off a body it should just lie there. They shouldn’t even flop around like cut-in-half snakes, because the human nervous system works differently, and zombies start out human.
The pile of body parts that SWAT had helped us gather into the middle of the hallway burned. They burned because we’d piled the European grenades all around them. They weren’t designed for a quick explosion and a quick burn like the American ones; they were meant to explode and cover whatever was near with fire. Fire that clung and continued to burn until there was no more flesh for it to eat.
Don’t picture orange flames like a fireplace; it’s white-hot flame, so bright that it will sear your retinas and steal your sight if you look too long. We’d warned everyone who had stayed not to stare. The heat was so intense it felt like it was shearing the skin off us, but we had the bodies in the pyre to compare to, and we weren’t close enough to the fire to have our skin sheared. We all stepped back anyway.
Yancey asked, ‘Do zombies always burn so bright?’
‘No, it’s the phosphorus,’ I said.
The smell of burning flesh isn’t always that bad; sometimes it just smells like cooking meat, but hair burning, and some of the internal organs that you normally remove before cooking a big piece of meat, that makes it smell … odd. It didn’t always smell bad, and zombies usually smelled better burning than not, so … I tried to remember, but either I was finally nose-deaf to the smell of rotting zombies or these hadn’t smelled bad. My zombies didn’t smell bad, even if they looked rotten. I’d had an older animator explain to me that the magic that called it from the grave made it not rot for a little bit, and it was the rotting that caused the odor.
I touched Edward’s arm. ‘Did the zombies smell rotten to you?’
Edward seemed to think about it, then said, ‘No.’
I looked past Edward to Dev, who was standing against the wall. His eyes looked too wide by the light of burning bodies. ‘Did they smell like rotting corpses to you?’
He just shook his head, taking too long to blink. He looked shocky, but I’d worry about it later.
I turned to Nicky, on the other side of me. ‘Were you able to smell them rotting?’
‘No, but zombies don’t smell like rotting corpses.’
‘Mine don’t,’ I said, ‘and those are the ones you’ve been around.’
‘True, but you’re scared; why?’
‘Most zombies smell like what they are – corpses; the amount of smell comes from the amount of rot. My zombies don’t smell bad because I’m powerful enough that they don’t rot right away. But rotting vampires don’t smell bad until they want to; they look bad, but they don’t smell. The vampires and zombies in the mountains, they didn’t smell bad, did they?’
‘No,’ Nicky said.
‘I’m missing something,’ Yancey said. ‘Why are you saying that like it’s a bad thing?’
The fire alarm started to scream around us, but with our hearing still recovering from the shooting, it was like hearing it down a tunnel, as if it were echoing a long way off instead of just above us. The sprinklers kicked in, and suddenly it was raining.
Water pounded down on us and helped ease some of the battle fatigue, like a quick, sharp slap of ice-cold water. For the first time I wished I had the helmet I usually hated to