Bring On the Night (27 page)

“These dummies are made of a special gelatinous compound that approximates the consistency of human flesh. I want you to both find out what it feels like to cut a body in half.” He indicated the space above the collarbone. “In the same way that gunmen are trained to aim for the center mass instead of the head, I want you to swing down and across. Simple decapitation isn’t so simple with a moving target. But it’s hard to miss the entire body.”

Elijah pointed to me. “Ladies first, Griffin.”

I gripped my katana sword in both hands, as I’d been trained, and stepped forward, remembering to put my momentum into the swing without committing so far forward I lost my balance.

Zing! Thwap!

The blade sang through the torso as easily as—well, as easily as a sword through Jell-O. I tried to hide my gasp of surprise, but apparently failed, based on the titters I heard from a pair of veteran agents passing by.

“Perfect,” Elijah said, “except for one thing. While you were admiring your handiwork, another zombie came up and
ripped your damn head off. So slice and search.” He turned to Shane. “Slice and search. Go.”

Shane didn’t hesitate. He blurred forward, and by the time the torso fell into two pieces at his feet, he had returned to his fighting stance.

I had to admit: it was hot.

They stationed the two of us in the back of an open box truck across the street from the cemetery. We were far enough away to have a good vantage point for filming, yet close enough to be deployed as a last resort.

Unfortunately, they left us alone, which at the moment seemed more dangerous than being at the center of a zombie pileup.

“This’ll probably be the only time we get to work together in the Control,” I said as I finished setting up the video camera on its tripod, “since we’re in different divisions.”

“Uh-huh.” He didn’t look up from the digital camera’s instruction book, which he’d been perusing for almost an hour.

“How many times are you going to read that?”

“Until I understand it. These things are after my time.” He flipped it upside down and backward. “Besides, I need to brush up on my Spanish.”

“In case the jackbooted thugs deploy you to Mexico?”

“Yep.” He kept reading.

I sighed and peered down the street. Outside the cemetery, a perimeter had been established by what looked like the Department of Homeland Security but was no doubt the Control in one of its federal guises. They coordinated at the highest levels with the agencies of the United States and
other countries. As long as the Control kept human-vampire peace, governments were happy to spare a few vehicles and uniforms.

The hours crawled by. I ate my lunch early, so Shane wouldn’t have to remind me. To pass the time and keep from thinking about our disintegration, I made a list of four-plus-letter words from the letters in the Sherwood cemetery sign.

I checked my watch at midnight. “You’re missing your show,” I told Shane, who was lying on his back just inside the box truck. “Who’s subbing for you tonight?”

His whole body tensed. “Jim,” he said without opening his mouth.

I knew then for sure that Shane had been awake that morning when the hippie DJ had visited. Maybe Lanham was right—Shane needed combat skills to make up for his youth, skills only the Control could give him.

A shout came from the cemetery. I lifted my binoculars to see several ZC agents waving their arms. They pointed to the ground in the high center section, near the chapel and adjoining mausoleum. The rounded, treeless area held several tall, elaborate headstones.

“Something’s happening.” I woke up the video camera and focused on the earth where the agents were pointing. I heard Shane sit up beside me, grabbing his own camera.

Beside a headstone, a hand shot up through the ground. I stifled a yelp.

Another hand shoved into the air in a geyser of soil. Then, wriggling like a grub, the corpse burst from the ground. Clumps of gray-brown grass cascaded from its head and shoulders.

“Whoa.” Shane gave a low whistle. I pointed at my camera, then put a finger to my lips to hush him.

Another zombie, at almost the same point in its “birth,” left its own grave a few rows behind the first. I zoomed out to see a third, then a fourth.

The earth gave up its dead. One after another they pulled themselves from the ground, their bodies straining, arms flailing, legs kicking. Mouths screamed without sound.

According to the Control, zombies had no souls, no awareness, no pain. They felt less than a bug feels. Yet as I watched them struggle like wounded animals, I wanted to strangle the sadistic bastard who’d raised them from the peace of their graves.

The vampires on the perimeter of the cemetery readied their weapons. Orders were to hold off on destroying the zombies until they could be observed. The IC hoped to discern a pattern that could lead them to the necromancer.

But the zombies didn’t run. Instead they stood, heads lolling on too-flexible necks, clothes mud-streaked and torn, flesh in various states of decay. A woman in a pink dress and pale, scraggly hair touched her face to discover she was missing the lower half of her jaw. My heart ached as I imagined her long-ago beauty.

I knew my sympathy would evaporate the moment the zombies attacked. Any moment now, I thought, their instincts will kick in. They’ll catch a distant scent of human blood.

The
cadaveris
moved, slowly at first, and entirely without rampage. They milled about like people at a party where no one knows each other.

Two skeletal males bumped shoulders, then froze. They aimed their hollow eye sockets at each other’s skulls. I wondered if a challenge had been issued. Would we see a duel?

As I watched them, my eyelids grew suddenly heavy. I placed my hand on the truck’s interior wall to steady myself.

The two zombies turned away and walked deliberately toward the others. Each collided with a new one, who stopped and “stared” for a few seconds before setting off to touch another.

“Reminds me of a game kids used to play in the neighborhood,” Shane whispered. “Like freeze tag, but the opposite. I always thought we made it up.”

I rubbed my eyes as the dizzy feeling cleared. “How do you win?”

“I don’t remember.” His camera clicked and whirred. “It was just an excuse to run around shoving each other.”

When all twelve zombies had been touched, they turned as one toward the path. I held my breath as their pace increased to a stumbling jog. Their speed didn’t approach the full-fledged gallop I’d seen last Friday or on the film tonight. But they moved with a sense of purpose that chilled my bones.

When they stopped together, I muted the video camera. “Something’s weird.”

“You still have a baseline for weird?”

“Zombies don’t cooperate.” My pulse sped up as the ramifications hit me. “What if this is a different kind of zombie? What if they’ve evolved? Wouldn’t they be a lot more dangerous if they could think and act together?”

“All we’ve seen them do is rub against each other and shuffle in the same direction. Not exactly Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller.’” He sucked in a quick breath. “What the hell?”

I looked through the video camera. Four of the male zombies had dropped to their hands and knees, side by side. Three more males climbed on their backs, also on their hands and knees.

My eyes widened so hard they hurt. “Is that what I think
it is?”

“It can’t be,” Shane whispered. “That’s just…”

“Weird.”

The zombie pyramid was shaky but held steady—until two female zombies attempted to climb aboard to create the next level. Their added weight made the formation sway and shudder.

My head filled with clouds again, like my blood lunch had been spiked with sedatives. I tried to remember who’d prepared my meal and realized it was me.

An arm snapped off one of the first-level zombies, and the pyramid collapsed. They tumbled into a pile of heaving, writhing bodies, limbs sticking out in all directions. If they made a noise, I couldn’t hear it, but their mouths spread wide, their expressions as garish as clown faces.

They tried again, arranging the pyramid in as random a fashion as the first time.

“They’re doing it wrong.” My voice sounded far away, as if I were listening to myself from the back of a lecture hall. “The bases should be working together to lift the mid-bases so the flyer has a stable structure to work with. And they don’t have any spotters.”

“The huh?” Shane said.

“Someone should show them how it’s done.” The compulsion tugged hard at my gut, like someone had hooked one of my intestines.

I rubbed my stomach and got to my feet, hopping off the end of the van.

Shane grabbed my arm. “Where are you going?”

I turned to him, and a fog seemed to lift from my brain. “I don’t know. What was I saying?”

“Something about bases.”

I glanced at the zombies trying to reassemble their pyramid. “Must’ve sparked high school cheerleading memories.”

I climbed back into the van and checked out the zombies’ progress. The one with the broken arm—which seemed to cause no pain—was hanging back while the others formed the first two levels.

My thoughts slowed to a crawl again, worse than ever. It was like those chunky-peanut-butter moments trying to get out of the white place. It was like being dead again, except this time there was no music to call me out. No thread, no lifeline. Just… nothing.

“I can’t believe you were a cheerleader,” Shane said, startling me.

I rubbed the heel of my hand against my temple. “It was a small school. They weren’t very selective.”

“No, I mean I can’t believe you wanted to be a cheerleader.”

I knew I should bristle at his comment, but the conversation seemed like my only link to sanity. “My foster parents gave me two years’ worth of normal life. I was going to milk it for all it was worth.”

The corpse in the middle disintegrated, the foot of the man above him plunging through his back. The pyramid collapsed again.

“I know cheerleaders are an auto-uncool in your grunge-boy book,” I told Shane, “and you never would’ve looked at me twice. At football games you would’ve been too busy getting stoned under the bleachers with your ironic friends, making fun of everyone with school spirit.”

He didn’t answer at first, and I worried I’d driven home too hard the painful truth that we were different.

The CAs had picked themselves up, dusted themselves
off (in a manner of speaking), and started all over again, with dogged, unthinking determination. These were no highly evolved creatures.

As I watched, I felt my own brain devolve back into a bug.

Say something,
I begged Shane without speaking.
Say anything. Or zombie cheerleading coach will be the last job of my unlife.

“I would’ve looked at you,” Shane said finally. “A lot more than twice.”

I sent him a smile, but he didn’t see it, so I took it back and saved it for later.

The zombies had finally completed the third row of the pyramid. All that remained was the top person, and if I recalled correctly, the placement of that person didn’t involve climbing.

Oh no.
The broken-armed zombie backed up, then stumbled full speed toward the two who remained on the ground behind the pyramid. When he reached them, they caught him up and tossed him to the top.

Where he sailed over, about ten feet too high, then landed on the ground with a splat that even I, with my infant vampire ears, could hear from two blocks away.

Shane gave an audible wince.

“They don’t feel pain.” I was reminding myself as much as him.

As if to prove my point, the zombie wrenched himself off the ground, looking much the worse for his misadventure, having broken his fall with his face. The other members of the pyramid, who had had no reaction to his belly flop, didn’t watch his excruciating journey back to the launch point. They stared straight ahead, empty as marionettes waiting for
the show to begin.

The image made me wonder: was the person—or people—who controlled them sending them signals now, or had they preprogrammed the zombies? And why?

“What’s the point of this?” I had to focus extra hard to get the words out, as the brain fog set in again. Definitely needed more blood. Or sleep. Or—I don’t know—maybe my goddamn maker in my life.

“Warfare practice?” Shane said. “If someone can make them do a complicated maneuver like a pyramid, maybe they can coordinate them into a synchronized attack. Maybe the necromancer is perfecting his zombie-controlling techniques.”

“Or her. Or…” A thought was forming, but it was crazy.
Maybe it’s not about the zombies.

“So ten years ago, you were doing your splits and twirls and pom-pom shakes, and here you are, ready to wield a samurai sword against a plague of incompetent zombie cheerleaders.”

“That I would not have predicted. I sure as hell thought I’d have my bachelor’s degree by now.” I bit my lip, but it didn’t stop my final thought from coming out. “I also thought I’d be alive.”

He gave me a sympathetic glance, but it turned gloomy. “When I was seventeen, I was already so fucked up, I knew I’d be dead in ten years.”

“And so you were.” I fought to keep the bitterness from my tone. At least he’d had a choice.

The broken-armed, flat-faced zombie shambled toward his launchers at a speed an old lady with a walker could have outpaced. They waited for him, arms outstretched, and when he arrived, they boosted him up, up, up.

He tumbled cartwheel style through the air. The zombies on top snagged his legs and yanked him back down to land on their shoulders, limbs splayed.

For a moment, the entire pyramid wavered under the shock and sway of the new weight. Then the top zombie spread his arms, broken and whole, in a macabre simulation of exultation.

I wanted to cheer. Or cry. Or both.

“Well.” Shane clicked his tongue. “That’s something you don’t see every day.”

After a few triumphant seconds, the zombies on the bottom of the pyramid gave way, and the whole structure came down in a silent cascade of flesh and bone and rags.

This time, when the zombies picked themselves up, they did not brush themselves off and start all over again.