Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (36 page)

“I will end like one of those poor souls we saw images of?”

I nodded. In my head I thought about the female zombies in the FBI videos. They never looked this alive, though the soul capture was a way of preserving the body. But since I didn’t have Warrington’s soul in a magical container somewhere, that wouldn’t help him. That thought led to one other: If it wasn’t his “soul” staring back at me from his eyes, then what was it? My magic animated him, but was that what filled him with personality? I’d expected him to be able to answer questions about historical events, but this level of aliveness . . . I’d never seen anything like it. The zombies that Dominga Salvador had shown me years ago had looked alive, but the shell had been the most lifelike thing about them. They had still been zombies, standing around waiting for her to order them to do something. None of them had this level of . . . personhood.

“I would not want . . . Justine to see me like that.”

She clung to his hand with both of hers again. “No, Tom, no.”

He put his big hand against the side of her face and gazed down into her eyes with a look as real as any I’d ever seen. Shit, he was in there, really, truly in there. What the fuck had I done?

“I would not want to see this look in your eyes turn to horror as I fell away, piece by piece.”

“I would never look at you that way.”

“I have seen friends turned into horrors just by battle injuries, so that their sweethearts could not bear to look upon them. I would not have my last glimpse of you on this side of the grave be you turning away from me like that. I would rather remember you gazing up at me as you are now.”

Justine turned to me. “How long?”

“How long what?” I asked.

“How long would he look like this?”

“It varies.”

“What does that mean, it varies? Hours, days, what?” She came to stand next to me, her body nearly vibrating with emotion.

“Tomorrow he’ll probably be about the same, but the day after he won’t be. Sometimes the mind goes before the body, and that’s a mercy.”

“What do you mean, that’s a mercy?”

“I’ve seen zombies whose body went before the mind, so they were trapped in a rotting shell, but totally aware and in there. You don’t want him to go through that, you really don’t.”

She gripped my arm, and normally I would have told her not to touch me, or jerked away, but there was too much emotion in her. I understood some of the pain and it made me let her hold on to my arm. I’d have liked to think this was just a crush mixed with lust, but whatever it seemed like to me, it was more than that to her.

“That’s not true, you’re just trying to scare me.”

“I swear to you that I am not lying about this. I have seen zombies rot in a lot of different ways, and it’s unpredictable. I can’t guarantee how it will happen for him.”

“Darling girl,” Warrington said, “you can’t want to watch the process regardless of how it happens, and I do not wish to be trapped in a decaying shell while my mind stays intact.”

Her grip tightened, her eyes almost fever bright. “But he’ll be like this . . . intact until tomorrow night when you planned to put him . . . back, right?”

“Probably,” I said.

She turned back to him. “We have until tomorrow night. I’ll call in sick to work.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but Manny did. “No, Justine, he has to go back tonight.”

“No!”

I decided for partial truth. “Are you hungry again, Mr. Warrington?”

He said, “No,” and then stopped. A look I couldn’t quite follow came over his face, and then he nodded. “I am. Ravenous.”

I nodded. “I was afraid of that.”

“Afraid of what?” Justine said. “Everyone gets hungry.”

“People do, zombies don’t.”

Her face lit with a smile. “Then Tom isn’t a zombie; see, I told you so.”

“There’s one kind of zombie that feeds, but cooked meat and coffee doesn’t satisfy them.”

“We should have done soup, or something, like the other man said. It was just too heavy a meal for him tonight,” Justine said.

I shook my head. “There’s only one kind of zombie that eats things.”

“Tom’s kind,” she said, and went back to holding his hand.

“Flesh-eating zombies,” Manny said.

“What are you talking about?” MacDougal asked.

“It’s very rare, but an occasional zombie rises with a craving for human flesh,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous,” MacDougal said, “movie nonsense.”

“I wish it were, Mr. MacDougal, I truly do, but I’ve seen it. I’ve hunted them down after they started killing, and helped destroy them.”

Justine clung to Tom. “You’re just trying to scare us again. Everyone knows that’s not true.”

“Did you see the news reports from a few months ago out in Colorado?” I asked.

“That was a flesh-rotting illness, not real zombies,” she said.

“There was a disease, but there were also real zombies involved. They were all flesh eaters.”

“They were all just the walking dead; none of them were as alive as Tom.”

She was actually right, but I needed to win this argument. “He didn’t say he was hungry, he said he was ravenous.”

“What?” she asked, as if the topic had changed too fast for her.

I looked up at the tall zombie. “Tell her how you feel. How hungry are you?”

He frowned at me, and seemed to think about it. “I feel empty, as if I’ll never be full again. It’s like this pit inside me needs filling, and . . .” He stared at me. “What is a flesh eater, Ms. Blake?”

“It’s a rogue zombie that attacks and eats the flesh of the living.”

His nice hazel eyes widened. “Are you saying that I could go mad and attack Justine, and my other friends?”

“There’s enough left of you inside your head right now that you might attack strangers at first, people you don’t have an emotional attachment to, but eventually you’d be a danger to everyone.” In my head I thought, vampires and wereanimals will go after their nearest and dearest first, usually because of proximity, and some vampires are attracted to people they love when they first wake, thirsty for blood. I didn’t add any of that, because it would just muddy the waters and I did not like how Warrington was describing his hunger. It sounded too close to bloodlust, or the flesh craving that new wereanimals get. It’s a hunger that must, MUST, be satisfied.

“Tom would never hurt me,” Justine said, wrapping her arm around his waist. She fit under his arm the way so many men seem to prefer, though she was tall enough that her head still came up over his shoulder, which made her about five-eight. She was taller than I’d thought, or maybe she just seemed smaller; whichever, they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle when you find the corner pieces and can finally start making progress.

“Everyone thinks that about the people they love,” I said. “Trust me, supernatural hungers don’t care about emotions.”

She hugged him tighter. “I don’t believe that.”

“Why is a vampire able to control his craving for blood enough to be a legal citizen, but zombies cannot?” Warrington asked.

“Zombies eat the flesh of living, screaming bodies. Vampires sip a little blood from two fang marks. They can’t even drink enough blood at one sitting to kill a person. Zombies seem to consume more than a human stomach can hold at just one sitting, and before you ask, no one knows how that works. Zombies seem to have lost that part of us that lets us know we’re full.”

“Like that one genetic disorder?” Bob the camera guy asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, Prader-Willi syndrome. Zombies are eating the living, but same principle.”

“How did you know about Prader-Willi syndrome?” MacDougal asked.

“I know things,” Bob said.

MacDougal and even Justine looked at him.

He looked a little embarrassed and said, “
CSI
had an episode about it.”

MacDougal nodded as if that he believed. “Is there no cure for this hunger?”

“For zombies, eating the flesh of the living cures it until the hunger hits again, but I don’t think Warrington wants to start eating people.”

“No, I do not. It is not a choice that any man should have to make.”

Maybe it was just a longer way of saying no, but something in the phrasing made me look at him. He met my eyes, and when I said, “Can I have a few minutes in private, Mr. Warrington?” he nodded.

Justine had a death grip on his arm. “Whatever you have to say to Tom, you can say to me.” She was pretty much repeating his own words from inside the restaurant back to me, but this time he patted her arm and said, “Miss Justine, there are some topics that aren’t meant for a lady. Ms. Blake here has seen things that most grown men couldn’t have handled from what I saw on the . . . Inter . . . web. I’d rather we just talk soldier to soldier for a few minutes.”

She protested, but in the end she let him put her in the girl box, and we stepped away from the others. Nicky started to follow, and I shook my head. Manny gave me a look that offered to come with, but I shook my head at him, too. I was hoping that Warrington would be more honest with just me, and I needed honest right now.

I put him so his back was to the group so they couldn’t see his face. I was sure I could control my expression, but if he looked stricken then Justine would hound him for why he was emotional, and that wouldn’t go well for either of them.

“It’s just us, Mr. Warrington, so I’ll ask the question and you’ll be honest with me.”

“I will do my best,” he said, his slight southern drawl coming out under stress. The fact that this stressed him more than waking up as a zombie said something about the topic.

“Did you consume human flesh when you were alive?”

“We were trapped in the mountains by an early blizzard that blocked the pass, and then true winter fell upon us. I was young and inexperienced, and it was only after we were well and truly trapped that the senior officer admitted that we had started too late. He thought we could make it out before snow, but that once we were delayed we were there until they found us in the spring. We were able to trap and hunt meat for a time, and we had melted snow to drink, but in the end the animals fled the heights and it was just our small group up on the mountain.”

I watched his face, though he’d looked away into the distance so he wouldn’t have to see the look on mine. I gave him blank cop face, because I’d learned that people will tell you their horrors, but you can’t be horrified by it. You have to be their blank witness, because what they fear most is that you will see them as monsters, or broken, if you know the deepest, darkest stuff in them. I tried to make sure that this man I’d called from the grave wouldn’t feel more of a monster than I’d already made him.

He was quiet so long I had to prompt him. “What happened then, Mr. Warrington?”

“We ran out of food, and the snow was ceaseless. It was like being buried alive.” He laughed then, but it had more bitterness in it than sweetness. “And then Charlie died. We put him out in the snow to preserve him, but some predator that we’d missed in our hunting found him, dug him up, and ate part of him.” He looked at me then. “Have you ever been hungry, Ms. Blake?”

“If you mean starving, then no.”

“That is a blessing for you, then.”

“It is,” I said.

“I’d known hunger as a child, but not like this. My stomach didn’t hurt anymore, there was no ache of emptiness. It was almost peaceful. We were starting to sleep whenever we stopped moving; even talking became too much. We’d be talking to each other and suddenly drift off in midsentence. It was as if we were already partially dead and the sleep was merely a preview, but then we saw Charlie all torn up and . . .”

“You saw meat,” I said.

He wiped a hand across his face, the broad shoulders rounding, and I realized he was crying softly, silently, so that he could only nod. He finally mumbled, “God forgive us. God forgive me.”

I almost said what I was thinking, which was,
You’ve already died once; whatever God thought of your actions has already been decided
, but I didn’t. I so did not want to have a discussion about theology with someone I was going to put back in his grave tonight, because if his soul was here in him, then had I just dragged him out of heaven, or rescued him from hell? Or, if you believe in reincarnation, how could I possibly have ripped him out of whatever body he was currently incarnated in? It was all beyond my pay grade as a Christian. I needed to sit down with my priest and see if he was open-minded enough to talk about it. Or someone’s priest. There had to be some clergy somewhere that I could talk with about all this. I prayed that I’d find the right person to discuss things with, and added an extra prayer that I’d be able to do the right thing by the man, or zombie, standing in front of me.

He was looking at me now with tears still wet on his face. “Your silence speaks volumes, Ms. Blake. I understand your disgust with me.”

“It’s not that, Mr. Warrington; I’m just thinking about other things a little too hard.”

“You do not have to save my feelings, Ms. Blake. I deserve whatever you think of me.”

“It’s not my job to judge your ethics, Mr. Warrington. I have too many skeletons in my own past to be high and mighty about anyone. I’ve never been that hungry in my life; who am I to judge you?”

“You are very understanding, Ms. Blake. I am most grateful.”

I shrugged. “I do my best.”

“I believe that you do.”

I smiled. “You described yourself as ravenous right now, Mr. Warrington. How does that compare to the hunger you experienced in the mountains that awful winter?”

He thought seriously before answering, which I appreciated. “I feel empty. My stomach is beginning to hurt, with that ache you get when you’ve gone too long without eating. It’s early stages, but I shouldn’t be feeling this way with everything I ate tonight.”

“You threw all of it up,” I said.

He shook his head. “It’s not the same thing as going hungry, Ms. Blake. My body should know it ate tonight, and it doesn’t seem to have counted any of that good grub I just had.”

“I’m afraid that there may only be one kind of food that fills the needs of your body now, Mr. Warrington.”