Walking Dead

seemed both whole and delicate, which made the rest of the mess that much worse.

The bigger girl was angled away from me, but once my vision adapted to her mother’s misshapen form, I could see that the child’s shoulder and rib cage were smashed in, and I thought her face was turned the other way to hide similar damage to her features. The littler girl was more broken in half, a childish smile on her dead face as she rested her head on her arms against the table. I suspected that was the only way she could sit up at all, given the flatness of her hips and waist. Even frozen solid, her body wouldn’t have the integrity to remain upright.

I rotated another quarter circle or so, and Archie Redding stopped reading the foreign language to smile beatifically at me and say, “Hello,” in perfectly comprehensible English.

I said, “You crazy motherfucker,” except I had a gag in my mouth, so it came out something like “Y’kavee moffaffuka,” which, under the circumstances, I felt got the point across. Redding looked like somebody’s genial grandfather with sparkling green eyes and a sweet old smile, just as he had in his museum security photograph, although he hadn’t been wearing a long black hooded robe in that. “Wwava vuk iv wong wivvu?”

“I’m sorry,” he said very earnestly. “I’m afraid I can’t understand you. I’d remove the gag, but I can’t allow you to start screaming, so we’re going to have to do without clear communication. Don’t worry, though. It won’t last long. I’ll be cutting your throat in about ten minutes. I need a test case for the cauldron, you see. My guide suggests that between midnight and the first minute after, it has the power to actually bring the dead fully back to life, rather than simply make undead warriors like these poor fellows.” He gestured to one side, and I finished my rotation to discover ten silently screaming dead men standing in rank beside me.

I admit it. I’m not proud. I screamed like a little girl. The gag did a decent job of making me sound deeper and more rugged, but in my heart of hearts I knew that the sound that had erupted from my throat was up there with the most soprano of sopranos, a pure ripping sound of absolute terror.

I spent a good fifteen seconds at it before I realized the dead men weren’t lurching to pull my flesh from my bones or eat my eyeballs out or anything else of equal disgustingness. Nor, at a second look, were any of them Cernunnos or his Riders, so I flung my weight sideways and rotated back to Redding. “Whevva vukivva Hhnnt?”

He shook his head with what looked like a genuine affectation of sympathy. “I do wish we could speak. I’d like to know what brought you here, and there’s so little time.” He brightened. “But if the cauldron works as my guide believes it will, then we’ll be able to talk afterward.”

Hopefully, I said, “M mmnt hweem,” and meant it. I’d gotten all my screaming out already. I was sure I could make better use of my time than screaming if he’d ungag me. Like biting his face off, or something.

Redding looked like he’d understood me that time, but it didn’t make him remove the gag.

“Whovvavuk iv vrr ghyyyv?” I was getting better at talking through the gag. At least, I thought I was. Redding didn’t seem impressed. What’s a girl got to do? I ask you.

The obvious answer was keep him talking. If I could stretch my useless interrogation out to one minute past midnight, the dead family would stay dead, I would stay alive, and maybe I could jimmy myself off the basketball hoop and knock Redding out with my body weight as I tried to avoid head-diving into the cauldron. It was a plan. I ran with it. “Vvt hhvvnd voo vr fmmvy, Revving?” I was getting better at talking. My gag was loosening. Apparently Redding hadn’t taken Kidnapping 101 before tying me up here.

Wherever the hell here was. We’d visited Redding’s apartment, and I was pretty sure if there was other property listed in his name, we’d have visited there, too. Either this place wasn’t on the books or we’d done some embarrassingly sloppy police work. Which reminded me unpleasantly of the little army of dead men at my side. Those people had gone missing from somewhere, and they didn’t bear the Redding family’s freezer burns. He hadn’t been keeping them on ice to use for test runs in the cauldron.

The thought that they were, in fact, hordes of undead birthed straight from the cauldron, like in the movie, swept over me, and I swung back around to look more closely at the little army.

They carried short swords and wore leather armor over their cadaverous bodies, which lent credence to them being ancient warriors torn from the cauldron’s heart. Either that, or Redding had murdered a bunch of soldiers from the Society of Creative Anachronism, which honestly seemed less likely than undead killers several centuries old.

“Vve cauvvron vrks,” I said in genuine astonishment. I didn’t want it to, but a tiny part of my brain chalked up a functioning black cauldron as unexpectedly cool. “I vvoght vrr wavvnt an army invvide it. Vrr’d vey cmme frmm?”

Redding, to my dismay, checked his watch before answering. I wasn’t fooling him into losing track of time. Evidently we had enough, though, because he said, “My master gave me the incantation to retrieve ancient souls held captive in the cauldron, warriors who would protect me while I completed the ritual for my family. More were born, but most were too weak after so much time. These are all that are left.”

That suggested the undead could die. I actually relaxed into my bonds, slumping in relief. There was light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I cast a thankful glance upward, except up was down and the tunnel below me was the cauldron. I said, “Crap,” so softly that the gag couldn’t distort it, and, more urgently, repeated, “Vvt did hhvvn voo yrr fmmly?” Keeping him talking could only benefit me.

He sighed, turning a page in his book and finding the text he wanted with a fingertip before answering me. “We ought not have been traveling in winter, but it had been mild, and we hoped we might push through the mountain passes and be in California by spring. We wanted to farm, you see. That was our dream, me and Ida and the girls.” He fell silent again, cheery countenance darkened with old, maddening sorrow. “There was an avalanche. I was thrown clear, but Ida and the girls…their bodies were frozen by the time I retrieved them. Some of the others in the wagon train buried their dead there, but I could never do such a thing. I took them west, all the way west, praying for a miracle that would bring them back to me.” His smile came back, beatific and terrible. “And before winter broke its hold, a miracle came to me.”

“Vervuvvos?”

“A banshee,” he corrected, though I couldn’t tell if he’d understood me. It didn’t matter. His answer stripped the strength from my muscles and I sagged toward the cauldron, eyes closed in something very close to defeat. More or less everybody knew banshees were Irish harbingers of death, that they came to cry on a porch the night someone was due to die.

The one I’d met did a whole lot more, too. Every thirty years or so, when the full moon and the winter equinoxes aligned, it came to kill in the name of its master. If it could do that, I had very little doubt it could do more, like answer the prayers of a desperate man willing to do anything to restore his family. Whatever price it demanded would be unspeakable, but I doubted very much that Redding had cared about or considered that angle of retrieving his family from the dead. Revulsion flowed through me, my power’s answer to a hideous idea, but Redding’s expression remained serene. “It told me how to preserve their bodies in salt and ice and blood, and gave me a charm to chant when I opened my own veins to offer the blood. It offered me an answer to my prayers.”

“Rivvual murvur iv nevvar a good anver.” I felt strongly that this was true. On the other hand, I was a few minutes from dying and very curious. Also, I intended to stage a fanastic rescue just as soon as I figured out how. I’d left the rapier in Petite’s backseat, and I wasn’t sure it’d do me much good for getting out of a hog-tie anyway.

On the other hand, it was a damn sight better than nothing. I fixed my eyes on Redding, doing my best impression of listening hard, and took a long slow breath through my nostrils to steady my breathing. I’d drawn the rapier out of nowhere once before, when the circumstances hadn’t been any more forgiving. If desperation counted for anything, it would materialize in my hand any second now. Redding glanced at his watch again, suggesting my let me explain, Mr. Bond tactic wasn’t working as well as I hoped. He tapped the text he intended to read, checked his watch a third time, then turned his attention back to me. Apparently the timing had to be just perfect, and we were still a little ways out from my impending doom. “The blood had to be my own. Family to family. Nothing else would preserve them through time until they could rise again. But I was already aging, and so the banshee offered me a way to extend my own years so I could tend to my dear wife and children. The death of a child on the eve of the dead,” he said solemly, “at every fiftieth anniversary of the year of my birth. That was the least it would accept, to give me life long enought to see my