Divine Madness (19 page)

Or maybe this was rationalization for the other thoughts that kept cropping up.

It came as a bit of a surprise, but once I looked, it became apparent that I had no firewall in my brain to prevent me from killing S.M. Today had proved that I could kill. Saint Germain probably wouldn’t present a moral problem either. Our run-in with his zombies had convinced me he’d embraced his inhumanity—if he had ever been human. He might have been created by Dippel rather than born. This raising of the dead was an obscenity beyond obscenity. Like his crazy father, Saint Germain had maxed out his right to breathe. They say the acorn never falls far from the oak, and it’s clearly true of other nuts as well.

To be honest, I felt a little bothered about killing these zombies. Or
re
killing them. I still wasn’t completely sure if that was okay. It was expedient and necessary, since we didn’t know any rituals to put them back in the ground, but I still didn’t like it. I still kind of identified with them. They
were just unlucky—and admittedly smelly—dead folk being used by unscrupulous powers. Like Mamita was used by S.M. Left to my own devices, I might have left them alone. Who could they hurt in this abandoned ghost town?

But this was Ninon’s party. She’d had a lot more experience with these things. Maybe the creatures really did want to go back to being dead and we were doing them a favor. If I had any brains left, I would be appalled at walking around in a rotting body and would want someone to put me out of my misery. And maybe they wouldn’t stay in town. They had looked hungry. Starvation might prompt them to hunt.

She had also talked about not fighting a battle on two fronts—which was conveniently forgetting that we already had S.M. on our tails, but I didn’t bring that up. She didn’t mind that we were more than a little strange ourselves, so if these creatures set off her weirdo-meter more than S.M. then there was probably something very wrong and dangerous with them and we needed to make getting rid of them our top priority.

Also, every time she smiled at me, I felt it way down at the base of my spine. And maybe a bit lower. Yeah, I’d do just about anything for her. In fact, I already had. Maybe I should have been troubled about this, but I wasn’t. Probably this was yet another sign of poor mental health, but I had long ago come to grips with the fact that I was going to go through life with a lot of unresolved issues and have to spend my days choosing the lesser of evils in life’s nasty smorgasbord of unsavory alternatives.

“I’ll look in the church,” I called. I thought maybe that going into the building with the intent to kill anything in it would bother her. Even if she had renounced the Church, she had been raised Catholic and the symbols of the Church would have meaning.

“Okay. Just be careful.”

I stopped in my dusty tracks outside the crumbling building and sniffed the air. I didn’t smell any zombies
but…This wasn’t a soaring cathedral. It was a squalid building, painted tan—the color of apathy, fitting for a structure built by indifference and inhabited by sullen despair. It took an effort to push back the door the rest of the way, and not just because the hinges sagged.

The air hung thick and motionless inside the dark room. Though nothing moved, I could see dust suspended in the air, distorting and clouding the view of the fractured pews. I looked about quickly at the overturned altar and shuttered windows, but there was no place for anything zombie-sized to be hiding. Still, the room wasn’t empty. Maybe the place was haunted by ghosts. Whatever inhabited that space, I’d sooner have sucked down cyanide than breathe that air into my lungs. It sounds melodramatic, but my very soul was offended. Ninon was right, this whole pueblo had to burn. Saint Germain had contaminated everything.

For a man I’d never met, I sure bore him a lot of enmity.

I did a quick check of the rest of the buildings. There were only four on my side of the street. I didn’t look into any of the dark nooks and crannies. A professional burglar would have sneered at my efforts. Hell, Corazan would have sneered. But if there were any zombie rats, scorpions, or rattlesnakes about—a new and horrifying thought of the disease spreading into the animal kingdom had just occurred to me—I didn’t want to see them.

When I got back to Ninon, she was pouring gas over the still twitching bodies. It didn’t do much to improve the smell.

“I have another can in the back of the Jeep,” she said. “Douse as many of the buildings as you can. It may not work, but I’d like to try to burn this place to the ground. We don’t want to leave Saint Germain any refuge.”

A woman after my own heart. If it was worth burning, it was worth burning to the ground.

I picked up the other red gas can in the rear of the Jeep and walked back the way I’d come. The exteriors might
not burn enthusiastically, but the buildings had dry, rotting wood for guts.

Now, I don’t mean to be gross, but just in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation, it turns out that zombies burn well. At least the old ones do. We used them as kindling in the buildings that didn’t get gasoline aperitifs. I’m glad we weren’t dealing with anything real fresh—those dried corpses were bad enough. The only really horrid part was the twitching, and after a while I learned to ignore it. Still, the job took longer than either of us had planned and I think we were both emotionally drained at the end.

For the record, I’m not a coward. Life on a farm can mean serious accidents without any real medical facilities nearby, animals have to be butchered, and so on. I was always proud that I had a cast-iron stomach and could handle whatever came my way. But neither am I a sadist. Nor have I ever been into exploding-head cinema, let alone attracted to splattered gore in real life—even when the brains being exploded had withered until they had the IQ of beef jerky. Or maybe it was the smell that got to me. Anyhow, it was time for another meal but I had no appetite. Ninon didn’t seem inclined to eat either. Only the cat acted hungry, and he didn’t do much more than chew on the broken neck of a small rodent he’d caught.

No appetite, but when Ninon offered me a flask and some oyster crackers, I took them. I unscrewed the cap, and my nose became more cheerful as it told my tongue to expect the smoky peat flavor of McCallum’s whisky. I couldn’t get drunk, but it was the flavor of home.

Ninon drank after me, one swallow like I had done, and then laid a cracker on her tongue. I wondered suddenly if she realized that this looked a sort of perverted communion. That used to be common on fields of battle—the priests giving communion or maybe absolution—and then sending the soldiers off to slaughter. What had the song from
The Survival of Saint Joan
said—something
about cannon-fire being holy? That war was the Lord’s machine?

Religion again. I shook the thought off, exhaled for a slow five-count, and then emptied myself of as much tension as I could.

I looked Ninon over carefully. It had been almost eighteen hours since I’d seen her naked. That was too long. Also, as weird as it sounds after what we’d just done, I really wanted sex with her again, but this time exchanging only the usual body fluids. Of course, not here. This was one bonfire that wasn’t romantic.

My early optimism suffered a setback. I wondered if we would ever wander hand-in-hand through a park, feeding ducks from a shared bread crust saved from our picnic basket, or if we would ever tuck into a roast goose with chestnut stuffing on a snowy Christmas day while carolers sang on our porch. At the moment, both these things seemed unimaginable. Our lives could never be that normal. We would never have a cottage and kids and nine-to-five jobs.

My eyes grew hot and the lids stretched tight as the tissues swelled, but I didn’t cry. It wasn’t that I was trying to be macho—not entirely. It was more that the situation was way beyond tears, and I didn’t feel like I could ask for sympathy from someone who needed comfort more than I did. I was mourning a new loss. She’d been living with this deprivation for four hundred years. No, I couldn’t whine about this, couldn’t ask for pity. Buy maybe sex…

Looking down, I patted my clothes and watched the dust puff off them as my eyes drained. I was filthy and knew that I smelled of smoke and gasoline and things far worse. No, it was hardly the most aphrodisiac of odor combinations—unless the woman you were with happened to get turned on by crematoriums. One didn’t want to snuggle with anything that smelly either.

Nope, no sex for me. Not yet.

“Maybe we should have taken pictures,” Ninon said.

“Pictures?” I blinked. Pictures are always the last thing on my mind. True, it would be nice to have a photo of us together, but I don’t photograph well. I’m too ill at ease. No matter how many times I say “cheese” I always end up looking about as cheerful as the dusty taxidermied deer head on the wall of the steak house. For this reason—as well as other more practical ones—I have always refused to do an author photo. I just couldn’t see how it would aid sales.

My father was never a fan of photographs, perhaps considering portraits to be a form of vanity. Or, maybe after Mamita, there didn’t seem any point in family photos. There was only one picture of me from childhood, the only evidence that I was once young and happy. I don’t look at it often anymore because it makes me sad. I keep it though, because it’s proof that I was once normal.

It goes to show how tired I was that this was what occurred to me when she said “take pictures.”

“For proof—documentation. Crime-scene photos. Though I don’t suppose it would help any. Photos are so easy to fake these days.”

For proof of the zombies, not the start of a family photo album. Duh! My brain really was fried.

Ninon turned away, looking about for something, maybe the cat. She sighed tiredly. We were both exhausted, mentally if not physically.

“What are you thinking?” I asked impulsively. Usually I’m good at the cold read—translating body language and facial expressions—plus I’m able to use the vampire stuff to hear heartbeats and to smell the mix of hormones and endorphins in people’s sweat. However, Ninon gave me very little to work with. For the most part, I could see and hear only what she wanted seen and heard. She made a meditating yogi seem wild and out of control.

Normally, this lack of understanding wouldn’t bother me. I like to be in control. To know things. I have enough weirdness in my own head; I don’t need to be dealing with
anyone else’s bent psyches. But Ninon and I had—briefly—taken up residence in one another’s brains. What I had seen intrigued me, and I wanted to know more—much more, and as soon as possible. I felt like I
belonged
in her head, and was even entitled to be there. Also, I wanted to be able to see beyond the horror show of our present circumstance, to know where we were going and why.

“Truthfully, I’m thanking my stars that there were no children in that graveyard.”

“Children?” The words were like cold water poured down my neck. I shuddered. The thought was impossibly horrible. I didn’t know—then—if I could have brought myself to shoot a child, even a zombie one.

“He wouldn’t have spared them, you know,” she said softly. “In fact, he’d probably have sent them first if he guessed it would be demoralizing.”

I wanted to say something but for once words failed me. I still had a lot to learn about evil.

“Did I mention that I was at the Museo de Momias? I’m really praying Saint Germain didn’t follow me there. I don’t think he could resurrect any of those bodies but…” Clearly she had seen something that upset her. “No, it wouldn’t work. They’re too old.”

Mummies. I blinked, my writer’s brain kicking into high gear at the thought of a new story. “Do you suppose…?”

“What?”

“Well, you recall all those curse-of-King-Tut’s-tomb legends? You know, people being attacked by walking mummies who carry out the pharaohs’ curse?”

She nodded, her face more serious than enthused. Ninon doesn’t think like a novelist. “Yes. There was a case in Egypt in 1892 at a place called Hieraconpolis. They supposedly opened the door on a four-thousand-year-old tomb and found a ‘live’ mummy inside. I have always thought it was just Saint Germain playing a joke—he was in Egypt then. Still…” She frowned. “That’s a horrible thought, isn’t it? That someone else knew how to make
zombies and actually left them in those dark tombs for thousands of years.” She shuddered. “It can’t be. They aren’t like us. The risen dead—the revived corpses—they last only a couple of years. Five at the most, and that’s in places like Finland where it’s cold and there aren’t so many exuberant flesh-eating microbes.”

Exuberant flesh-eating microbes. Probably a story there, too, but I didn’t feel like pursuing it.

Ninon glanced up at the sky. When she spoke again, her voice was distracted.

“It’s always bothered me how most people eventually become mere fixtures in our lives, sometimes furniture that is no more than clutter, sometimes just wallpaper stuck in the mind. Even the brightest and best can sometimes be ignored, familiarity breeding indifference if not actual contempt. But, Miguel, I do not see you ever become just more wall covering. I wouldn’t want you to.”

“I should hope not,” I said, surprised into awkwardness by the strange compliment.

Her next words were odd, as though she were following a meandering thought that I couldn’t yet see.

“I’m a loner, Miguel. For many reasons. For a long time I saw the decline in manners as a decline in morality. It isn’t that I miss the nit-picking of class etiquette of my era—well, only sometimes.” Her smile was lopsided, but I was glad that it was back. “But I have for a long while been disturbed by the lack of empathy implied in acts of rudeness of modern postindustrial life. When we remove the social lubricant—the pleases and thank-yous—sooner or later the irritation of proximity with people we don’t trust or like will lead to violence or other antisocial behavior. We will cease to be people to each other, cease to be humans. That is doubly dangerous if you are…different.”

“Yes.”

“And then I met my first zombie. My priorities have changed.” She looked down. “You will find that it is not a simple platitude—one must adapt or die.”