magic better than the werewolves. Magic didn’t always work on me, and when it did, sometimes it didn’t work as intended. I could turn into a coyote. And I saw ghosts, which I’d always dismissed as mostly useless.
But over the last few years, I’ve been learning that I could do a little more.
Just then, standing on the verge of a dirt road in the maze of rural roads above the Yakima River, I could feel something both animate and dead, and it was on the other side of a hedge where a small dog was yapping its head off.
I burrowed under the hedge and found the goat-dachshund standoff. I changed to human, pulled on my jeans and T-shirt, and hoped that my faith in the little dog wasn’t misplaced. I’d hate to live with the guilt of the death of someone’s pet just because I didn’t want to run around in late-morning traffic naked as a jaybird.
I did not think, as hard as I could manage to not-think, about the fact that I had felt where it was. Ghosts were one thing. I’d been seeing them as long as I could remember. I was kind of used to my interaction with them. I didn’t want to have the same connection to zombies.
Dachshunds are tough; she held her own just fine until I zipped my jeans. Hard to tell who would have won, zombie or dog. When I snagged the zombie kid and hauled it away, kicking and snapping, the dog pranced off with her tail in the air. Whatever my doubts, that dog was sure she had beaten the nasty intruder.
I jogged back at a pretty good clip despite my bare feet—my carry bag wasn’t big enough for shoes. I met Mary Jo, who was following the same trail I’d picked up—she must have found her last goat faster than I did and come back to help me. The sight of her had a few cars pulling over so that people could take pictures with their cell phones.
Yes, it was a good thing I’d taken time to put my clothes on.
One of the deputies raised the lid on the zombie goat corral, an empty dumpster that had been hauled over next to the damaged goat pen—Salas’s Marine friend’s idea. So far, the big, green, smelly metal box had proven to be escape-proof.
I could feel them in the dumpster without looking. As if I’d become sensitized to the way the zombies felt. I could tell how many of the little zombies were bumping around just as I could tell when there was a ghost around, even if I might not be able to see it.
It wasn’t so bad if I could tell there were zombies around, I thought. I’d made it thirty-odd years before running into my first zombies; it might be another thirty years before I met another.
By now, all of the sheriff’s cars except for two were gone. Three of the original deputies remained, but we’d been getting drop-ins from law enforcement from as far away as Prosser and Pasco, including the highway patrol. Everyone wanted to see the miniature zombie goats.
“It could have been worse,” I told the deputy who opened one side of the dumpster lid for me so I could drop my little zombie in with the rest of the adorable, blood-hungry fiends.
She said, “Right? They could have been full-sized goats and we wouldn’t have any idea what to do with them. Hard enough to keep goats in without them being impervious to pain. This dumpster is picking up a lot of dents that it didn’t have when we started. What do you plan on doing with these things?” She glanced at the dumpster. “You are planning on doing something with them?” And not leave them to us, please; half of that thought was unsaid but not unheard.
“I don’t know,” I told her, not quite honestly.
I wasn’t sure exactly how to kill . . . how to eliminate zombies. But I was pretty sure we could burn them. I didn’t know if real fire would do the trick, but we had Joel, inhabited by the spirit of a volcano dog.
If he couldn’t manage it by himself, we could bring in the big guns—Aiden, my fire-wielding ward. He wasn’t officially our ward yet, actually. We were finding it very difficult to become the legal guardians of a boy who had no paperwork trail. I was sure either Joel or Aiden could reduce the goats to ash—even zombie