And when it jerked its head again, something flapped out from its cheek. Loose skin, I realized. Loose, partially unattached skin. What we were looking at was definitely not a Fiend or an Upper Level demon. It was something...
Something that used to be human.
11
My palms sweated as I watched the creature stop in the center of the pool. “Is that...is that what I think it is?”
Zayne leaned in, his arm pressing against mine, and when he spoke, his voice was nearly a whisper. “If you think that’s what happens when a Poser bites a human, you’d be correct.”
“Jesus.” My grip tightened. Now I knew why that poor ghost nurse was hauling butt. That thing down there even freaked out ghosts.
Posers were demons that looked and acted human with the exception of their insatiable appetite, crazy strength and nasty habit of biting people. Their infectious saliva transferred via one nip of their teeth, and three days later, the poor sucker who was snacked on turned into a potential extra for The Walking Dead, complete with a tendency to eat everything, including other people, and with a healthy dose of rabid rage. We called them zombies. Not very creative, but the word zombie and its meaning had existed long before pop culture got ahold of it.
“Never seen one before, have you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I haven’t even seen a Poser. At least, I don’t think I have.”
“They’re rare.” Zayne’s breath stirred the tendrils of hair around my ear. “And as you can see, their bite is bad news, but they don’t chomp on humans often.”
My gaze flickered over his face. “Because they can only bite seven times before they die?”
He nodded as he turned back to the pool below. “What is this zombie doing here, in an abandoned building?”
“Urban sightseeing?” I suggested.
His chuckle was low. “When a human first gets bitten, they’ll go to familiar places. Home. Places of employment. But the guy down there is way past his expiration date of it being a fresh bite. At this point, he should be chasing after anything that’s alive.”
Which was why it was important to put down Posers when they were found. All they had to do to cause chaos was bite one human. Just like in the movies, the infected human then spread the demonic virus to another human through a bite, saliva...any bodily fluid. It had happened in the past, probably more often than I knew. As the demonic infection spread, zombies lost their ability for cognitive function beyond walking and eating.
“I’m guessing the game plan is to take it out.”
“Yeah, but I want to see what it’s up to. There has to be a reason it’s here, when—”
A door at the other end of the room swung open, and the sound of feet shuffling over tile rose until it was a loud hum. My mouth dropped opened.
Zayne stiffened. “Holy...”
“...zombie apocalypse,” I finished for him, staring down at the limping, twitching mess. They weren’t groaning, more like barking harsh, clipped snarls in between snapping their teeth together. “There have to be a dozen down there.”
“And then some.”
I took a deep breath and immediately regretted it. The stench was overwhelming, a mix of sulfur and rotting meat left out in the sun, and it triggered my gag reflex.
“Remind me never to say I’m bored again.”
“Oh, trust me, I will never allow you to say that again.” He angled his body toward me. “Something is up. They don’t flock together like this, especially where there’s no food service.”
That was something pop culture got wrong about zombies. They didn’t travel in groups. The reason could be seen here, as they snapped and snarled at each other below while they stumbled forward and into the empty pool.
“It’s like they’re waiting on something,” Zayne continued. “But that doesn’t make sense.”
Very little of this made sense. Like, how did we just happen to sense a demon and end up here, where an assembly of the dead was waiting and the demon we’d sensed was MIA? Unease stirred. Could we have been led here? “Zayne—”
Cold air blasted the nape of my neck. My head cranked around. The frigid temperature reminded me of when I’d accidentally walked through a ghost, but this wasn’t a full-body blast. This chilly sensation settled in the same spot that burned when I felt a demon, along the bottom of my neck and between my shoulder blades.