Bring On the Night (37 page)

During the day, human Control agents had erected a fiberglass barrier around the perimeter of the cemetery. Its height and emerald green color reminded me of a baseball stadium’s center field wall. Not only would it keep the zombies in, but it would keep out the prying eyes of any curious, curfew-breaking onlookers.

The Control had briefly considered trapping the zombies inside the wall until sunrise. But the resulting fire could burn down the cemetery, and its smoke and stench would attract human attention. Besides, if enough zombies piled on top of one another, they could easily crawl over the wall. It was our job to prevent that.

Sergeant Kaplan had been called in from headquarters to train the civilian vamps. Her experience teaching clueless orientation recruits would no doubt come in handy.

“Remember,” she said, pacing before the ragtag band of amateur sword wielders, “the only way a CA can kill a vampire is by tearing off your head. So protect your noggin at all costs.”

Regina raised her hand. “I thought zombies were after human blood. Why would they attack us?”

“Good question.” Kaplan repeated it so the whole line could hear. “Two reasons. One, you smell enough like us that a CA doesn’t realize you’re not human until after it’s ripped you apart and started to drink. Reason number two.” She shrugged. “You’re in their way.”

I looked up at Shane, waiting for the fear to weaken my knees or make my eyes shift in search of the closest escape route. But between the sword in my hand, the man at my
side, and the new strength of my limbs, I felt invincible. Or at least ninety percent less vincible.

“Listen carefully.” Kaplan looked each of us in the eyes before continuing. “You’ve been trained all your unlives not to hurt humans, to treat us as the fragile creatures we are.” The corners of her mouth quirked at her words.

Then her face turned dead solemn. “Zombies. Aren’t. Human. Some still look human. But don’t be fooled. Not even by the children.”

My stomach knotted as I remembered a Vietnam war movie where a soldier had stopped to help a child, only to be blown up by a bomb strapped to the kid’s body. The next child his platoon came upon was shot on sight.

“They’re dead,” Kaplan said. “Not dead like you. Dead like a rotting log. They can’t think. They can’t cooperate. They’re simply meat puppets, with a necromancer pulling their strings.”

I raised my hand, unable to stop myself. “If they have strings, wouldn’t that technically make them meat marionettes?”

Everyone stared at me. I continued to my second point. “Also, they seemed cooperative the other night with the pyramid.”

“I saw the film you took,” Kaplan said. “They were programmed to do a specific task until it was completed. They didn’t think on their feet. They didn’t improvise.” The sergeant paused, then pointed at me. “But Agent Griffin reminds me of a good point. We don’t know what they’ll be programmed to do tonight, and it could very well look like a coordinated attack. But it doesn’t change our tactics or your role. The ZC and the Enforcement agents will take on the bulk of the
cadaveris
. All you have to do is guard the
perimeter—that means the fence—and clean up any CAs that make it past the first line of defense. Understood?”

We all nodded, with varying amounts of enthusiasm.

Her voice became almost gentle. “You’re doing these things a favor. If you don’t destroy them, they’ll roast come sunrise.” She cast one last gray-green gaze over us. “Now get into position, and good luck.”

We spread out along the inside of the iron fence surrounding the cemetery. Every light in the cemetery had been extinguished, so that not even aerial photographers could see what happened here.

But it was plenty bright for vampire eyes, even with a new moon. I could see the section to our right roped off with orange boundary tape. Colonel Petrea claimed to have undone Tina’s work over those fifty graves. The spell of undoing required much more time and pain than the original spell, so he hadn’t had time to neutralize the entire cemetery. But this at least allowed the ZC to move their forces inward.

We waited. For hours. Midnight passed, and I had lunch. When 2 a.m. arrived, I had a snack. By 4 a.m. a rumor spread through the ranks that Tina had been lying, that tonight’s zombie rampage was a hoax.

“If it isn’t a hoax,” Shane said, “it had better hurry up.”

I followed his nervous glance to the east. “Morning twilight is 6:09. Per union rules, all Control vampires have to be safely underground forty-five minutes before twilight, which would be 5:24. That barely gives us an hour to kill the CAs and clean them up before the humans take over.”

Regina lit another cigarette. “Whoever the hell this zombie master really is, that’s probably just what they want.”

“Why?” I asked her.

“Humans can’t fight these things as well we can, so with
the right timing, the zombies’ll come out of the graves maybe half an hour before sunrise. No vamps to stand in their way but plenty of time to kill humans.” She pointed to the fence. “And when they get over that wall and flame out, they’ll keep running. Bags of burning flesh, booking up and down the streets of Sherwood.” Regina took another drag. “Kinda cool.”

“Cool, except then the world knows that zombies exist. If we can’t contain them, it won’t just mean a few human lives lost. Not that that’s not important,” I hurried to add.

Noah nodded. “It means we could all be exposed. Vampires, the Control itself.”

“You think people would believe it?” Regina said.

Shane looked askance at her. “People believe it now, when they haven’t seen the evidence. Vampires are on TV, in books, in the movies.”

“Fictional vampires,” she said. “They’ve been around since
Dracula
.”

“Not like now. I get calls every night from people who wonder if we’re real, people who are otherwise clearly in touch with reality.”

“They sense something,” Noah agreed.

“Maybe someday we’ll all have to go into deeper hiding,” Shane said, “and the Control will be one big Anonymity Division.”

My throat closed at the thought of living in the shadows in every sense. I didn’t want to end up in a secret vampire coven, unable to work and go to school and see my human friends.

I heard the deep rumble of a diesel engine on the other
side of the cemetery. In a moment, it was joined by another.

I turned to place the sound, but the rumbling seemed to be coming from all directions at once. Another early spring thunderstorm?

But the sky was clear. The stars peered through the branches of the budding trees. My feet turned cold.

The sound wasn’t coming from the sky. It was coming from the earth.

You know those war movies where the troops proceed in orderly fashion, taking on the enemy as a single-minded unit? And then you know those other war movies where the battlefield is complete fucking chaos?

This was the latter. This was the undead
Braveheart
.

The zombies came all at once. The ZC and Enforcement agents struck, severing heads as the corpses emerged from the soil, but there were just too damn many.

The CAs broke through the line.

Shane blew his whistle. “Move!”

We rushed forward in pairs to meet the monsters. I followed Shane to the right, chasing a lone zombie heading for the cemetery’s north gate. The trees, the sky, and the graves blurred in my peripheral vision as my newfound speed and agility kicked in.

We intercepted the zombie twenty feet from the gate, not far from the orange-taped area, where Petrea’s spell of undoing seemed to hold.

I passed in front of the carcass, distracting him with a feint. He changed course to follow me, putting himself in Shane’s path. Shane’s blade arced, and the hairless head tumbled to the ground. I made a silent promise to come back later
and apologize to it.

Shane turned to me. “Behind you!”

I spun around but saw nothing. Then I looked down. An old lady was crawling on hands and feet, her back hunched like a hyena’s.

My sword descended, whooshing through the air in what felt like slow motion. I missed the neck, but the blade swept through her shoulders and slammed the hard ground. The impact reverberated up my arms and shook my whole body. I blinked back the pain and watched the zombie collapse without a twitch.

“You got her,” Shane said. “I mean, you got it.” He pointed to the corpse. “Spine severed, that’s what counts.”

Slowly I extracted the sword from the woman’s flesh, the ache in my elbows fading.

“You okay?” He scanned the graveyard for our next target.

“I’ll live.”

“I’ll make sure of it.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Here comes another one. Do like we did the first.”

The corpse of the approaching man looked fresh and young. I hesitated. “You sure that’s not a vampire?”

The man veered to his left, tripping over the orange boundary tape, tumbling so hard a piece of flesh ripped from his cheek, leaving a dull black gap in his skin.

“Guess not.”

We caught up to the zombie as it struggled to its feet. It leaped straight for Shane, who swiped his sword in a perfect downward arc. The zombie’s momentum carried it forward, so that it fell against Shane, then slid down his body in two pieces.

“Ugh.” Shane leaped back, his light brown shirt
splattered with pink embalming fluid. The strongest formaldehyde whiff yet stung my eyes. This one couldn’t have been dead more than a couple of weeks—he had just begun to rot.

No more zombies were in our immediate vicinity. “Should we join the others?” I asked Shane.

“We should stay in our sector in case any—” He froze, the hair at his temple dripping pink liquid. “What was that?”

I listened, but nothing came through the distant shouts of vampires and thunks of swords through rotted flesh. “What do you hear?”

He held his breath, then whispered one word. “Digging.”

My eyes darted back and forth, resting on the torn orange tape. “This section’s supposed to be safe. Maybe Petrea—”

Something cold grasped my right ankle. My foot sank into the soil.

“Ciara!”

My leg snapped from the pressure. I shrieked.

Pain radiated up my body. The zombie twisted. Shane lunged for me. We crashed to the ground, but still the creature held on. Its other hand seized my left knee.

No.
I flashed back to my childhood, bending a Barbie doll’s legs the wrong way.

The zombie yanked down hard. My scream seemed to fill the universe. Red spots filled my vision, and I was only vaguely aware of Shane roaring in fury as he hacked at the limbs holding me.

The pressure eased suddenly, and Shane dragged me away from the grave, where stumps of two wrists waved. I sat up and saw that the zombie’s hands still gripped my shattered legs.

“Stay here.” Shane wrapped my fingers around the hilt of my sword. “You’ll feel better soon.” As he picked up his
fallen sword, he put his whistle in his mouth and blew the help signal.

I tried to catch my breath, but my lungs were seized with pain. Then I felt a sudden shift.

My right shin healed before my eyes. The ends of the bone, protruding through a hole in my jeans, slipped back under my skin, then clicked together with a jolt.

I exhaled hard and looked up to see Shane whack off the head of the handless corpse as it struggled out of its grave.

The head fell to the side, and Shane drew back his foot as if to kick it.

“No. Ow!” I sucked in a hiss as my broken knee snapped into place. “They’ll need to rebury it.” A pale glimmer moved to my right. “Besides, you need to get that one.”

He dispatched the new zombie as Regina, Noah, and Spencer arrived, swords in hand.

“We relayed your signal,” Noah said.

“But everyone else is busy.” Spencer pulled me to stand on legs that felt miraculously normal. He pointed to the blood on my jeans. “One of ’em bit you?”

“Compound fracture.”

“That explains the screaming.”

“Uh, guys?”

We looked at Regina. “What?”

She stood immobile, eyes so wide they seemed more white than brown. “I think the word is ‘incoming.’”

I held my breath and listened.

Thumping. Scratching. Digging.

Every grave around us was coming to life. Five of us against four dozen emerging zombies.

I took a step backward. “We’re way outnumbered.”

“It’s not about numbers.” Shane lifted his sword. “It’s
about timing.”

We mowed them down as they emerged. I told myself I was whacking weeds. An old childhood rhyme came back to me, taught by a temporary friend in Iowa. We’d sing it as we kicked the heads off dandelions in the fields.

Momma had a baby and its head popped off!

We worked our way down the rows, but each zombie we beheaded was a little further out of its grave, and I knew soon we’d be overwhelmed.

Faster.
Momma hadababy and its headpoppedoff!

Faster.
Mommahadababyanditsheadpoppedoff!
Not people. Weeds. Stop them from growing, running, breaking fragile human bodies that could never heal.

Headpoppedoff! Headpoppedoff!

I arrived at the grave of Robert William Tester. The marker was smaller than the others, and bore a cherub with its head bowed, legs crossed, and wings folded.

I read the dates etched in the pale granite.

“No,” I whispered. “Don’t make me do this.”

The thing that emerged from the dirt, the thing that glared at me with dull resentment and bottomless hunger, had been five years old.

One small leg broke free of the soil, then the other.

“Please.” I pointed to the earth. “Go back.”

It halted as if it understood me, and then it tilted its head, wisps of pale brown hair peeking out under the layer of mud. The sunken pools of black might once have been blue eyes begging for an ice cream cone or one more bedtime story.

From deep inside me, my last vestige of humanity answered. I lowered my sword.

The child took a hesitant step forward, then leaped for my throat.

I stumbled back, expecting to feel its arms tearing off my head. But in the middle of the corpse’s flight, a shadow came between us, then a thud to my left as someone tackled it, wrestling it to the ground.