Ordinarily I'd have beheaded a chicken and used its body to help me sprinkle a blood circle, a circle of power, to contain the zombie once it was raised so it wouldn't go wandering all over the place. The circle also helped focus power and raise energy. But I had no chickens at the moment. There was a chance that if I'd tried to get enough blood out of my body to walk even a small circle of power, I'd be finished for the night, too dizzy and too light-headed to do anything else. So what's a morally upright animator supposed to do?
I sighed and unsheathed the machete and heard several gasps behind me. It was a big blade, but I'd found that in beheading a chicken one-handed you needed a big, sharp blade. I stared at my left hand and tried to find a space that was bandage free. I put the top edge of the blade against my middle finger (the symbolism was not lost on me) and pressed. I kept the machete too sharp to risk drawing the blade down my finger. It would be a bitch to need stitches because I'd cut too deep.
The cut didn't hurt immediately, which meant I'd probably cut deeper than I wanted. I raised my hand so the moonlight fell on it, and saw the first dark welling of blood. The moment I saw it, the cut hurt. Why was it that everything hurt worse when you realized you were bleeding?
I began to walk the circle, holding the steel point downward, my bleeding finger flat to the earth, so that occasional drops would hit the ground. I'd never truly felt the machete carving the magic circle through the ground, through me, until I stopped killing animals. It had probably always been like a steel pencil tracing my circle, but I'd never ever been able to feel it over the stronger rush of the death. I felt each drop of blood that fell, felt the earth almost hungry for it, like rain in a drought, but it wasn't the moisture the earth drank, it was the power. I knew when I'd walked the entire circle around the headstone, because the moment I touched the place where I'd begun, the circle closed with a skin-tingling, hair-raising rush.
I turned to face the headstone, feeling the circle around me like an invisible trembling in the air. I went to the headstone, which was at the far end of the circle. I tapped the headstone with the machete. "Gordon Bennington, with steel I call you from your grave." I touched my bloody hand to the cold stone. "With blood I call you from your grave." I moved back to the far edge of the circle, at the foot of the grave. "Hear me now, Gordon Bennington, hear and obey. With steel, blood, and power, I command you to rise from your grave. Rise from your grave and walk amongst us."
The earth rolled like heavy water and just spilled the body upward. In the movies the zombies always crawl from the grave with reaching hands like the ground tries to keep them prisoner, but most of the time, the earth gives freely, and the zombie simply rises to the top, like something floating to the surface of a liquid. There were no flowers to get in the way this time, nothing for the body to trip over, as the zombie sat up and looked around.
One thing I had noticed with not killing the animals was that my zombies weren't as pretty. With a chicken I could have made Gordon Bennington look like his photo in the paper. With only my own blood, he looked like what he was, a reanimated corpse.
He wasn't awful, I'd seen much worse, but his widow screamed, long and loud, and began to sob. There had been more than one reason I wanted Mrs. Bennington to stay home.
The nice blue suit hid the chest wound that had killed him. But you could still tell he was dead. It was the odd color of his skin. The way the flesh had begun to sink into the bones of his face. His eyes left too round, too large, too bare, so they rolled in their sockets barely contained by the waxy flesh. His blond hair was patchy and looked like it had grown. But that was illusion, caused by the shrinking of the meat of his body. Hair and fingernails do not grow after death, contrary to popular belief.
There was one more thing I had to do to help Gordon Bennington speak. Blood. The Odysseyspeaks of blood sacrifice to get a dead seer's ghost to give Odysseus advice. It's a very old truism that the dead crave blood. I walked across the now solid ground and knelt by his puzzled, wizened face. I couldn't smooth my skirt down in back because one hand was full of machete and the other was bleeding. Everyone got a nice long glimpse of thigh, but it didn't really matter, I was about to do the thing that disturbed me the most since I stopped sacrificing poultry.
I held out my hand towards Gordon Bennington's face. "Drink, Gordon, drink of my blood and speak to us."
Those round, rolling eyes stared at me, then his sunken nose caught the scent of blood, and he grabbed my hand with both of his, and lowered his mouth to the wound. His hands felt like cold wax with sticks inside. His mouth was almost lipless, so his teeth pressed close in my flesh as he sucked at my hand. His tongue whipped back and forth on the wound like something separate and alive in his mouth, feeding from me.
I took a deep, steadying breath, breathe in and out, in and out. I would not be sick. Nope. I would not embarrass myself in front of this many people.
When I thought he'd had enough, I said, "Gordon Bennington."
He didn't react, but kept his mouth pressed to the wound, his hands clutching my wrist.
I tapped the top of his head gently with the side of the machete. "Mr. Bennington, people are waiting to talk to you."
I don't know if it was the words or the tap with the blade, but he looked up, and slowly began to pull back from my hand. His eyes held more of him now. The blood always seemed to do that, fill them back up with themselves.
"Are you Gordon Bennington?" I asked. We had to be all formal.
He shook his head.
The judge said, "We need you to answer out loud, Mr. Bennington, for the record."
He stared up at me. I repeated what the judge had said, and Bennington spoke, "I am, was, Gordon Bennington."
One of the upsides to raising the dead with only my blood was that they always knew they were dead. I'd raised some before where they didn't know that, and that was a bitch, telling someone that they were dead, and you were about to put them back in the grave. Real nightmare stuff, that was.
"How did you die, Mr. Bennington?" I asked.
He sighed, drawing in air, and I heard it whistle, because most of the right side of his chest was missing. The suit hid it, but I'd seen the forensic photos. Besides I knew what a mess a twelve-gauge shotgun makes at close range.
"I got shot."
There was a tension behind me, I could feel it over the buzz of the power circle. "How did you get shot?" I asked, voice calm, soothing.
"I shot myself going down the stairs to our basement."
There was a cry of triumph from one side of the crowd and an inarticulate scream from the other.
"Did you shoot yourself on purpose?" I asked.
"No, of course not. I tripped, gun went off, so stupid, really. So stupid."