Walking Dead

by the half dozen we’d downed. Suzy screamed and blasted it, and I jumped on top of it to chop its head off. Rapiers weren’t really meant for chopping, but I did a damn fine job even so. After a couple seconds I realized Suzy’s screams had words in them: “Can’t you do something about these things?”

Sheer mindless irrationality rose up in me and I flung my hands in the air. “I’m sorry! Somehow I forgot to pack the scarab launcher into Petite’s trunk this morning!”

“The what?” Suzanne dropped the shotgun’s barrels toward the ground and stared at me.

“The scarab launcher! You know! Scarabs eat flesh, zombies are flesh, so you fill a bazooka with scarabs and launch them and poof, no more zombies?” I sounded hysterical. Well, that stood to reason. I was hysterical. I was doing better than Doherty, though, who was crawling toward the gate, sobbing. Okay, now I felt sorry for the poor bastard. Not even an insurance adjudicator who was trying to screw me out of my claim deserved zombie attacks or the other peculiarities that were part of my life. I didn’t envy him the upcoming therapy bills.

Suzy, on the other hand, came to a full stop and gaped at me, far from looking as if she needed therapy. In fact, she looked like a young Norse goddess of some kind, her hair all tangled around her face and real strength in her slim body. Her green eyes glowed with admiration, which seemed all wrong, under the circumstances. “Scarab launchers,” she said with great sincerity. “That’s the most awesome idea I’ve ever heard.”

I said, “Thank you,” breathlessly, and then, because for once I felt a little too honest for my own good, I added, “I read it on the Internet.”

“I am totally getting a scarab launcher when we get out of here.” “She shot a look toward the zombies, then toward the gate, and said, “Which I kinda think we oughta do now.”

I picked Doherty up by the belt, and we ran for the gates.

Doherty stayed in Petite’s backseat where I threw him. Suzy, with whom I was growing more impressed by the moment, snatched up the bag of rock salt and poured it across the cemetery’s gated entrance as I slammed the gate itself shut. “Iron and salt,” she said with astonishing satisfaction. “That ought to keep them in.”

I wailed, “What, you just know that? I had to study to learn that! Does everyone but me just come pre-programmed with weird esoteric knowledge?”

Suzy, grinning, jerked a thumb toward Petite and Doherty. “You’re not the only one. He’s doing a lot worse than you are.”

Somehow that didn’t make me feel much better. Trusting Suzy and her shotgun and the salt-lined iron gate, I ran back into the chapel to discover I’d left the water bottle somewhere on the wrong side of the gate. Feeling like a complete moron, I stuffed my rapier through a belt loop and sank my cupped hands into the font, scooping up as much water as I could hold. There wasn’t much left by the time I raced back outside, but it was enough to throw through the gate and watch what happened to the zombies who’d made their way toward it.

Unfortunately, what happened was “absolutely nothing.” Apparently holy water did the trick on the mist, but once the zombies were risen, they were happy to stay that way.

“Right,” I said brightly. “Time to go.”

“What if the salt and iron don’t hold?”

I was certain there was a heroic answer to that, but instead of searching for it, I grabbed Suzanne’s arm and hauled her back to Petite. “Then we’ll be really, really glad we’re gone.”

She whispered, “Fair enough,” and a minute later we peeled out of there, leaving a cemetery full of cranky zombies behind.

CHAPTER 21

My cell phone rang before we got back to the precinct building. I dug it out of my pocket and flung it at Suzy: driving while talking on the phone was one of my major pet peeves, even if the state hadn’t introduced a law against it. She fumbled the phone, surprised, and looked uncertainly at me.

“What,” I said under my breath, “you didn’t think I was giving it to him, did you?” “Him” was Doherty, who had graduated from screaming to making these thin, bubbly whines of terror that were now turning to disbelief. I hadn’t yet figured out what to say to him, so I was doing my best to ignore the nasally tones from the backseat.

Suzanne looked over her shoulder and a complicated expression that more or less translated to “yeah, I see your point” danced over her pretty features. She answered the call with a surprisingly steady “Detective Joanne Walker’s phone.”

Billy’s voice shot up loud enough to be heard through a crappy cell-phone receiver and over the rumble of Petite’s engine: “Where the fuck is Detective Joanne Walker?”

“She’s driving,” Suzy said calmly.

Billy’s response was a lot more subdued; I couldn’t hear it. Suzy grinned and said, “That’s okay,” and then, “Suzanne Quinley. I’m—oh.” She whispered, “He knows who I am,” to me. I nodded and she went back to the conversation, reporting, “He says the holy-water brigade is under way, he wants to know where you are, he says to come back to the station and pick him up,” in little bursts.

I glanced toward the west, where a last few glimmers of sunshine faded over the horizon. The zombies at Crown Hill hadn’t waited for the actual sunset, only for the sun’s rays to no longer be touching it. I hoped the holy-water brigade was in time. I hoped we were all in time. “Yeah,” I finally said. “Tell him I’m coming back to the office because I gotta take five minutes and think. In the meantime…”

“In the meantime,” Suzanne picked up briskly, “you should get police officers out to the cemeteries and have them ringed with salt. And issue a citywide warning to stay indoors. Detective Walker’s sword can kill the zombies, but we don’t know what else can, so if you can get people to stay inside it’s better.”

I did a double-take at her and she shrugged. “It’s like a disaster movie. I’m just following the rules for survival.”

“Man. Remind me to have you on my side when the zombie apocalypse comes.” I squinted at the road. “That was funnier in my head.”

Suzy grinned anyway. “I know what you mean.”

“Oh, good.” We made the rest of the drive in relative silence, accompanied only by Doherty’s hysterical whimpers. I wanted to throttle him as much as I felt sorry for him. I’d be just as happy to hide in the backseat sniveling, myself. I didn’t like zombies. Of all the things I’d faced, zombies just creeped me out on a visceral level, and I’d have done pretty much anything not to have to deal with them. Sadly for me, the only way I’d be able not to deal with them was to deal with them so they’d be gone, so I stuffed my own whinging terror into a box and dragged Doherty out of Petite’s backseat when we got to the precinct building. “Go home, Doherty. Go home and lock the doors.”

“How? You left my car at the cemetery. Wh—” He was a little guy. It probably wasn’t his fault he looked like a miserable hobbit from my perspective. Still, with tears welling up in his big blue eyes and those pretty, chiseled features, I couldn’t help thinking he was turning it all on in hopes of securing a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. “What was all that?”

Half a dozen snide answers leaped to the fore. I mean, really, it seemed like a dumb-ass question, but a year ago I’d have been asking the same thing, because I wouldn’t have let myself believe my eyes. I sighed and propelled him toward the precinct building. “What do you want, Mr. Doherty? Do you want the truth? If I tell you it’s what you want it to be, an incredibly well-realized film production, are you going to go home and write up our madcap race out of there as a liability and refuse me my insurance claim?”

His jaw dropped. So did Suzy’s, for that matter. Apparently when faced with zombie attacks, I wasn’t supposed to be petty enough to worry about my insurance. Well, they weren’t paying premiums on vehicles older than they were, and I’d done the end of the world a couple times already, so I got to choose my priorities. “I’ll get you the Miata back tomorrow morning. If you want to stay at the precinct building overnight, that’s probably safest. In the meantime, how about you sit and consider the trouble we might’ve been in if I wasn’t driving a 1969 steel- frame race car?”

Doherty reeled out from under my hand and wobbled to a wall, which he slid down, and laced his fingers behind his head. I dropped my chin to my chest and sighed. “It was a film, Mr. Doherty. They asked me to play a