Walking Dead

just didn’t get to do. But pouring healing power into a weapon, now that was tricksy, and all the gods and creatures of chaos liked trickery. Besides, I was facing the undead. If there was a modicum of fairness in the world, it would agree that going up against hordes of zombie beasties who were trying to eat me wasn’t at all in the same class as fighting a god who hadn’t done anything worse than attack without provocation.

Juxtaposing those two things made it really clear, once more, how humans tended to think choices were between one good thing and one bad thing. In fact, choices could just pile up on the side of suck without any kind of apology for it. Another zombie rat ran at my foot, and all my frustration and disgust exploded in a thin blue line down the length of my rapier. I stabbed downward with a shout and skewered the nasty little thing.

It exploded.

Bits of blue-white-lit flesh erupted everywhere, like a tiny box of fireworks had gone off at our feet. I yelled. Suzanne yelled. Doherty yelled. The attacking hordes of zombie critters didn’t yell, but they did stop their headlong rush and looked around, my sword’s light glowing in their undead eyes. My yell turned into a triumphant shout and I leaped forward, convinced I could scare off our attackers with a show of strength.

Sadly, zombies are not well known for their brilliance, and me and my glowy stick made a nice bright target for them. I swatted at flying things and stabbed at crawling things in what could kindly be called a panicked flail, while Suzanne blasted the shotgun. We backed up a few steps at a time, pausing so Suzy could reload, and we didn’t make it anywhere near the gates before the first human zombies crawled out of their graves.

I was not a horror-film buff. The thing about horror films, see, is that they’re scary. Scary, or gross, and I didn’t much like either of those things. Despite this, I’d grown up in America, and apparently there was a cinematic image of zombies lurching from their graves that was part of the überconsciousness, because in many ways, I’d seen the scene unfolding before me a dozen times before. Slow-moving cadavers in various stages of decay, their skin peeling back, their teeth exposed, their fingernails too long, their hair falling out, all oozed from the earth—it was more of an ooze than an erupt, since eruption connoted speed—and latched on to us with their rotting eyeballs and began slogging toward us in such stereotypical fashion that I actually glanced around for a camera crew and the pretty heroine who was about to get eaten.

Two things caught up with me at once: first, Suzy, Doherty and I were playing the part of the about-to-be- eaten leads, and second, that zombie movies simply could not in any way get across the smell that preceded our encroaching dance partners. Rotted meat and formaldehyde swept toward us on the cool night air, so ripe that tears burned my eyes. Doherty and Suzy both doubled over, retching, but I held sickness behind my teeth through one part willpower and one part practice from four months of homicide investigation. I whispered, “Get behind me,” and tried not to think about climbing into Petite with vomit on my shoes.

The other thing zombie movies didn’t get right was how dirty they were. Filthy, and not just with rot, but with ordinary mud and grit. I’d never tried digging my way through six feet of packed earth, but I could see it wasn’t a tidy endeavor. The very newest corpses looked as if they’d been in a mud fight, nothing worse, but the oldest were little more than black stickiness clinging to disintegrating bone.

Morbid curiosity made me look again, this time with the Sight, and I wished I hadn’t. There’d been something seductive in the dark, deathless—or deathly, I guess—quality of the cauldron. It’d offered a comforting cessation of everything, wrapping around to draw you into a silence that would never end.

Zombies were what happened to the bodies when it ended. Memories flickered around them like the auras they’d once had, but too far out of reach: fireflies teasing at the corners of their undead vision. Like reached for like, scattered memories reaching for the thoughts and recollections that living humans carried with them. That was what drove empty bodies: their hunger, not for flesh, but for all the moments and details and tribulations that made up a life.

Raging spirits like Matilda had a memory, however feeble, of what they’d been. The things crawling from their graves had less than that, only an echo of that memory. If the spirit world had stroke victims, zombies might qualify: they were empty, but they remembered they hadn’t always been, and they had no idea how to become more again. Looking at them was looking into a black hole of desperation and loathing, so thick I could drown in it; so thick they could only move slowly as they struggled through it toward us. Worse, I could feel myself slowing as I watched, their deadly ichor reaching for me and drawing me down.

I shuddered and shoved the Sight away, trusting normal vision to hold out against their insidious encroachment longer than magical vision could. “On the count of three, Suzy, I want you to run like hell for Petite.”

“For what?”

I bared my teeth at the zombies, not wanting to waste time turning to show Suzanne the expression. Besides, it wasn’t her fault. Her set of vast psychic powers included future-tripping, not mind reading. I wondered if anybody actually could read minds, then dragged mine back to the topic at hand. “My car. The purple Mustang outside the gates.” I dipped my hand into my front left pocket and dangled the keys behind me. “She’s solid steel. Hopefully that’ll keep the zombies out.”

“Steel windows, too?” Suzy asked with more sarcasm than I thought a girl about to be eaten by zombies should be able to command. I growled and she cocked the shotgun again, then muttered, “Okay, okay.”

“Bring Doherty with you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to cover your retreat.”

“That,” Suzanne announced disdainfully, “is a stupid plan. We should all run together.”

“Suzy, I don’t know if these things can move faster than they’re doing right now. I’d really rather not find out by turning our backs on them. Don’t you watch horror movies?” The fact that I didn’t seemed supremely irrelevant. You didn’t have to actually watch them to know you should never turn your back on the bad guys.

“Yes,” she said acerbically, “and the first thing that happens is all the idiots in the movie split up so the monsters can pick them off one by one.”

Shit. She was right. I shot a glance over my shoulder to meet her defiant glare, and groaned. “Okay, you win. All together. You’ve got the ranged weapon, though, so I’m staying in front.”

“What about me?” Doherty asked.

I risked another glare over my shoulder. “You can cower and let the hot chicks with weaponry protect you, or you can play bait and run toward the zombies while we run for the car.”

Doherty cowered. I muttered, “Thought so,” and turned back to our opponents under the cover of Suzanne’s scream and a blast from the shotgun.

Zombies, for the record, do not die from a face full of rock salt. They do, however, get blinded by it, which makes it a lot easier to stuff a glowing blue sword into their throats and rip their half-attached heads off. I wasn’t sure if that would stop one for good, but the one who’d attacked fell down, and that was a good start. Better yet, one of the monsters immediately behind it fell on its…corpse, for lack of a better word. I knew better, but I let the Sight come back for a moment so I could watch and confirm my suspicions.

The second zombie snatched and gobbled at the flickering bits of memory that had taunted the first. Apparently they didn’t care much where their psychic food came from, so if we could create even a feeble wall of dead zombies—that was a Department of Redundancy Department phrase if I’d ever heard one—we might win ourselves a little time to make good an escape.

We got busy. My rapier made an absolutely gorgeous slash of brilliance against the fading light, magic pouring through it and burning away any gook or gunk that might have been inclined to darken its glory. Suzy took one step back with every blast of the shotgun, and Doherty…

Well, Doherty screamed like a little girl every time the gun roared and every time another body fell, but honestly, I couldn’t blame him. My own hands were slick with sweat and my stomach was roiling like I’d drunk half a gallon of seawater. The only reason I wasn’t joining him in the histrionics was Suzy’d bitch-slap me but good. That didn’t really make me feel any better about myself.

All of a sudden we’d made a little wall of zombie bodies, and those coming on from behind it were brawling, more eager for the scraps left by their fallen brethren than for us. Apparently the movies had gotten that right, too: zombies weren’t known for their scintillating wit, or one of them would’ve realized we were much tastier tidbits. The three of us stood there, breathless with surprise and relief, for about a nanosecond. Then our own scintillating wit caught up and we turned and ran like hell.

A faceless zombie lurched toward us from the side, too far from the original emptied graves to be distracted