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Wrapping his right leg behind Slash’s left and pushing his head back forcefully, Answer tripped him. As they fell, he positioned the chisel beneath Slash’s breastbone. They hit the ground hard and the force of impact drove the chisel into Slash’s chest, puncturing a lung. Blood burbled around the handle, flecking their chins and throats. Slash was not screaming. Answer covered his mouth anyway. Slash bit his fingers. The noises he was making were, for the most part, incomprehensible.

“Shshsh,” Answer soothed. “Shshsh.”

Slash spasmed once, twice, three times in all. Answer rolled off him and tossed the chisel into the bushes. The flayed child remained wound around Slash’s shoulders, a gruesome boa. It was the first time Answer had killed an ally. Characteristically, he felt nothing. Perhaps it was this lack of regret, this utter absence of emotion, that drew the creature to him.

Answer heard rustling in the palms behind him and knew instinctively who, or what, had sought him out.

The creature presented itself slowly, with obvious pleasure: a peacock fanning its plumage. It was injured, and badly: one eye hung down its cheek like a lanced condom, its limbs riddled with leaking holes. Yet it seemed well-pleased, as if the village, with its flayed children and decapitated bodies, dying and dead men, fire and blood, was an element it took to as naturally as a fish to water.

Answer looked at the thing. Close up, it seemed older than he’d imagined possible. Its raw flesh was lined with tiny wrinkles and cracks, like those in granite. It seemed to be smiling, or baring its teeth, both at once.

Hovering above Slash’s corpse, it hooked a pair of talon-tipped appendages on either side of his skull, under the jawbone. Answer watched it tug at Slash’s head, pulling it away from the body, cracking the spine, ripping it off. It hurled the head into the clearing as if it were an emptied peanut shell.

The creature’s voice grated like glass shards over exposed bone. “Sit,” it told Answer. “Listen.”

— | — | —

Northwest Territories

December 7th, 1987. 1:14 a.m.

“Sit,” Anton Grosevoir said. “Listen.”

Zippo leveled a Llama at the little man’s head. “Why don’t I just whisper a little breeze through your skull instead, you lying, creepy little weasel.”

“Then there’s a zero-percent chance you’ll get out of this alive,” Grosevoir said evenly. “And, much worse, you run the risk of meeting death without the foggiest idea of what this place is, the creatures who inhabit it, and how you
might
—” a sharkish smile, “—survive.”

Fingers of light crawled over the eastern horizon, long dim corridors offering no heat whatsoever. What the light did was brighten the campsite, etching the bodies of the twice-dead strewn across the uneven ground. The fact they were now officially
dead had somehow accelerated the decay process: the bodies rotted before the men’s eyes, skin and bones and even teeth melting into puddles of putrescence with the rapidity of Popsicles on a summer sidewalk. The frigid temperatures did nothing to deaden the smell of rot, which coldcocked them like a closed fist.

Edwards moaned. Oddy glanced at Grosevoir, unable to ignore the fact he’d appeared out of nowhere (thinking,
He’s taken a page from Answer’s book
), and said, “Edwards—you hired him?”

“Yes.” Grosevoir perched himself on a rock. “Edwards and many others like him, for several years now.” He regarded the rotting zombies as if they’d been amusing, if hideous, pets who’d unexpectedly kicked the bucket.

“What kind of sick game are you playing?” Crosshairs wanted to know. “Is it true, what Edwards said—no prison?”

Grosevoir cocked his head to one side. “None of you are fools. Do I have to answer?”

“What are we doing here, then?” Tripwire said. “We do something to you?”

“Not exactly,” Grosevoir said, after a moment. “Your role is that of, how should I put it…stimulant.”

“What are you talking about?” Oddy said.

Grosevoir flicked a cocklebur off his jacket lapel and said, “You might think keeping captive creatures alive is an easy task. Lock them up, feed them regularly, clean their cages of piss and shit and they should live long and healthy lives, yes? Not so. Captive animals rarely live as long as their wild brethren, despite a steady diet and absence of natural predators. Why? The reason is simple: they die of loneliness, or apathy, or sheer boredom.

“You see, life in captivity is a most unnatural state of being. No matter how diligently you imitate their natural environment, no matter if you regulate the temperature of their pens to a fraction of a degree, no matter if you feed them exactly what they’d eat in the wild, all captive creatures eventually realize the elemental truth of their situation: their existence is delineated by four square walls, their lives subject to the whims of another. Nobody, beast or man, wants to live that way. Many choose death as an alternative.”

Grosevoir produced a cigarillo from his pocket and lit it with a wooden matchstick. He scanned the men’s faces for signs of dawning awareness. “So how does a zookeeper ensure his charges choose life over death?” he continued. “In some cases, finding a compatible mate does the trick. Other times, human interaction in the form of grooming, hand-feeding, and so on. But, most often, exercises that engage the body, mind, and soul are most effective. The most elementary methods often prove most effective. Instead of scattering fruits and nuts, which requires an animal do nothing more than collect, a keeper might hide them in sealed boxes, forcing the animal to employ its cognitive and instinctive skills—make it sing for its supper, as it were. Other methods can be used—freezing herring in ice-blocks for polar bears, or constructing challenging maze-systems for rodents. The same principal applies in prisons. Inmates aren’t stamping license plates to make money for themselves or the state. It is simply a means of keeping them occupied, and somewhat pacific. Idle hands seek the devil’s work, hmm?”

Grosevoir tapped ash onto the snow. A picture was developing in the back of Oddy’s mind, becoming clearer with every word Grosevoir spoke. Its likeness was that of a Bosch or Dali painting: ludicrous, unbelievable, horrific.

“So you know a lot about animal care,” Zippo said. “Open a fucking pet store.”

“I have, of a sort.”

“What does any of this have to do with
us
?” Tripwire asked.

“Don’t you see?” Grosevoir replied. “You are the fruit slice in the box. You are the herring encased in ice. You are…” a slowly-dawning grin, “…the mice in the maze.”

The words, the manner in which they had been spoken, exploded at the base of Crosshairs’s spine, shooting shards of dread off in every direction. “You’re not making any sense…”

“Am I not? Or is it that you refuse understanding? Look at the ground. What are those things? Don’t answer with your minds, which have been conditioned to reject such realities, but with what your senses show you.”

“They’re zombies,” Answer said.

Grosevoir chuckled. “They are that exactly. The walking undead. That Romero fellow got it right.”

“H-h-how,” Tripwire stammered, “did they get here?”

“I collected them. Four in Haiti, two in Africa, one in an old-folks home in Peterborough, seven in a run-down trailer park in Arkansas. As you can imagine, transportation was a problem: the undead do not take kindly to moving, and many parts were lost along the way. Their numbers were growing steadily until this little fracas.” Grosevoir clapped his hands together briskly. “No matter! Darwinism, survival of the fittest, and all that…
ahem
…rot.”

Edwards groaned. His face had paled several shades.

“Allow me to detail the situation,” Grosevoir continued. “The territory surrounding Great Bear Lake is a preserve. A preserve, as you all know, is a safe haven where endangered species are allowed to exist free from the distresses—poachers, hostile predators, and so on—responsible for dwindling their numbers. But this is not a preserve for the Snowy Egret, or the Duck-billed Platypus, or the Arctic Fox. It is a preserve for monsters.

“I only use the term
monster
because it is the term your society has pinned on creatures of myth and superstition. They are far from monstrous to me. In addition to the undead, other species include lycanthropes, or werewolves in the popular vernacular, and wampyrii. There are others, both large and small, you may also encounter.”

The setup struck Oddy as queer. Vampires were creatures of gothic mystery who dressed in crushed velvet robes and inhabited crumbling New Orleans manors. He couldn’t envision one of them running around in the woods, sucking blood out of squirrels and field mice—it was
undignified
. “Why would they stay here?” he asked. “Must be places they’d rather be.”

“Of course,” Grosevoir agreed. “But the fact of the matter is they’re dying out. Otherwise all of this would be unnecessary.”

“Why are they dying?”

Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but for a moment Grosevoir looked wistful. “I’d like to tell you it has something to do with lack of faith, that modern society’s cynicism and disbelief is slowly killing the creatures that once terrified it. The truth is much more colorless: like the dinosaurs and Dodo bird before them, they are unable to adapt. Their world changes, they do not. They are old and stupid, or stubborn.”

“I don’t get it,” Zippo said. “These things are supposed to be smarter, stronger, quicker than us. How is it possible they’re gonna go extinct?”

“Some, like the undead, lack the awareness to keep themselves from extinction. Others, like the wampyrii, have become arrogant, which has led to carelessness, which in turn has led to death at the hands of those thought too weak or ignorant to pose a threat. Still others, like the werewolves, have diluted their pure bloodlines through mongrel mating habits. Predator has become prey. Or, if not prey, then certainly in need of protection.”

“But how do you keep them here?” Tripwire said. “I don’t see any cages, and how could you cage a vampire, anyway? Why don’t they leave?”

“They could,” Grosevoir admitted. “I’ve set up perimeters, employing certain spiritual totems to discourage escape. But the creatures living here are quite powerful and could leave at any time. Most stay because they realize I am trying to help them.” Grosevoir tipped a knowing wink. “Plus, they enjoy the sport I provide.”

The picture was becoming painfully clear. Oddy shut his eyes against the developing image. Some masochistic impulse prompted him to ask, “Sport?”

Grosevoir smiled in the way you might smile at a particularly doltish child. “Mr. Grant, I think you and your men know the score by now. Emperor Nero had it right: all the masses want is bread and circuses. Dole them crusts and treat them to weekly spectacles of blood and death and they’ll forget all their earthly cares. So here it is, in stark black and white: the denizens of this preserve are the masses. Or the lions. This,” he swept his hand in a wide arc, “is the circus. And you are the bread. Or the Christians. Whichever you’d prefer.”

««—»»

Anton Grosevoir (though this was not the creature’s true name, which was ancient, and guttural, and unpronounceable to the human tongue) had a vision. That vision was to repopulate the globe with the creatures of night and darkness whose numbers had dipped alarmingly over the past centuries. To this end he’d scoured the earth, seeking out those pockets and cubbyholes where such creatures lived, fed, and bred.

Orlock, the once-great vampire, was found dining on mice and bats in a crumbling monastery in Ipswich. The purest strain of werewolves were found in the Congo, preying on water buffalo populating the banks of the Ubangi river. Grosevoir uprooted a quarrelsome family of trolls living under a bridge in Strasbourg and a pair of Yetis wintering in the Altai mountains of outer Mongolia. He captured a clan of mentally-deficient djinn swirling around an office water cooler in Topeka, Kansas and a posse of goblins picking off freakshow performers in Phucket, Thailand. He secured many more monsters, most of whom defied logical description, wherever his dead-on instincts impelled him to search.