Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,234

you can bring down a giraffe, and if you have too many lions you need something that big to feed the pride. You said it yourself, Anita. This was the largest group of flesh-eating zombies you’ve ever seen.’

‘Yeah, but they didn’t eat the men – the zombies, I mean. The lions caught the giraffe but then didn’t eat it; why not?’

‘They ate one of them,’ he said.

‘But even the one they killed, they didn’t eat it, not the way they did the others. You saw them, Nicky. They eat all the flesh. They ate enough to disfigure Crawford senior and kill him, but they didn’t eat enough of him for the lion pride to be full of giraffe. It’s like they were thinking more like serial killers than zombies.’

‘Some vampires are serial killers,’ he said.

‘True, but that doesn’t feel like what’s going on. I mean, technically most vampires are serial killers, but it’s because they have to feed on people, not because they want to kill them. Same outcome, but very different motives.’

‘But the person ends up just as dead either way,’ Nicky said.

‘But serial killers get off on the torture, or the method of killing. The bodies down in the basement were just dead.’

‘Throats torn out on most of the bodies I saw,’ Nicky said.

‘I didn’t get much of a chance to see, but the ones near us had intact throats.’

‘Probably tore out other major arteries and veins,’ he said.

‘Probably.’

‘From what you’ve told me, the zombies should have just eaten everything they could hold in their stomach and then left the bodies to be found, or rot, whatever.’

‘That’s typical,’ I said.

‘So what caused these zombies to just kill the people and store them?’

I looked at him. ‘Say that again.’

‘They stored them like groceries, or cords of wood for winter,’ he said.

‘I thought about the pictures in my history books of the concentration camps with the bodies stacked on top of each other in piles.’

‘They weren’t piled haphazardly, Anita. It was neat, orderly stacks. You don’t body-dump that way, and you don’t stack like that for disposal.’

I had a thought for how he knew that, but instead I asked, ‘Why would you pile them up like that?’

‘It was a food cache.’

‘Zombies, even flesh eaters, don’t do that, Nicky.’

‘Do ghouls do that?’

‘If it’s an old pack that’s been around for a few years undetected, they’ll start removing the freshly buried bodies from underneath so that the grave looks undisturbed, and I’ve seen them keep bodies in a crypt for eating later, but it’s rare. I mean, I only know of two cases where ghouls were that organized. They’re usually more animalistic.’

‘A lot of predators store food for later, Anita. They drag it up trees, bury it under leaves, hide it from other predators, but they plan on eating it later, if nothing else finds it and eats it first.’

I thought about it; he was right about animal predators. ‘Okay, if we think of it as just another kind of predator, then why so many bodies?’

‘The group must be larger than we know.’

I shook my head. ‘There aren’t that many people missing. Even if you add up the vampires and zombies that we’ve already destroyed, there aren’t enough missing to need that kind of food. The bodies were the missing, Nicky, if we could have left anything unburned to identify them from.’

‘How many zombies would need that kind of food?’

‘Hell, I don’t know. I’ve never heard of a group that big.’

‘Ghouls then; how many would feed off that kind of stored food?’

I thought about it and tried to figure it out. ‘The largest ghoul pack I’ve ever heard of was more than a hundred, and it was in Eastern Europe. I guess something that big would need that kind of food.’

‘But ghouls will eat badly decayed bodies, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will zombies?’

‘No, they like fresher meat than ghouls.’

‘So, either these zombies are more like ghouls and would have eaten the bodies as they continued to decay, or what?’ he asked.

‘Or the vampire was planning on needing more food,’ I said.

‘There’s only one reason to need more food, Anita.’

‘He’s planning to make more zombies,’ I said.

‘A lot more, but we destroyed his creepy grocery store, so if he still raises that many zombies, where does the food come from?’ Nicky asked.

There was a voice from the bed, hoarse as if he hadn’t been talking much lately. ‘Us, us.’

We turned and found Little Henry looking at us with big brown eyes.

‘Us, who?’ I asked.

‘People,’ he said. His