Kill the Dead (29 page)

Even with my eyes closed, the flash leaves me seeing spots. The Drifters are a pile of crispy, twitching Manwich meat. I look around for Brigitte. She’s on the floor where she dropped. She shoots me a sooty killer’s smile. She never sees the little girl coming up behind her.

The girl looks like she’s around five or six. She’s in a long pink-and-yellow party dress and there’s a wilted pink rose in her tangled hair. When Brigitte pushes herself up to her knees, she’s just level with the princess’s head.

I’m running, but I know I won’t make it. The princess is too close. She opens wide and digs her rotten teeth into the back of Brigitte’s neck like a dog trying to break a rat’s spine. Brigitte falls and screams with the little girl on top of her.

I swing the na’at like a baseball bat. The princess rears up growling and the na’at slams into her mouth, snapping her head back and shearing it off at the upper jaw. The top of her head rolls away, but the rest of her hangs on to Brigitte. That doesn’t work out so well for her. Brigitte braces her legs against the floor and slams her back into the wall, pinning the headless princess. She spins and pulls her CO
₂
gun, locks the kid’s writhing body against the wall with her knee, and fires a bolt straight down into the baby Drifter’s spine. Her back blows out and she stops moving.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that more Drifters are stumbling out of the basement. Some trip over their friends’ burned bodies. Some fall to their knees and gnaw on them. Some of the crispy critters on the floor start to move. Charred arms and legs pull away from the pile of scorched bodies and haul themselves across the floor like spiders. This is why fighting corpses sucks. They’re too dumb to know when they’ve lost and dead enough not to care.

“She bit me.”

It’s Brigitte.

“She fucking bit me, James. She’s killed me.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

I say it really reasonably, but Brigitte’s mind has gone bye-bye. She wades into the Drifters, kicking and pistol-whipping
the ones walking point. She catches others as they come out of the basement, blasting bolt after bolt into their heads. I let her blow up a few skulls figuring it’ll calm her down, but the falling bodies just make her crazier, so I grab her shoulders and pull her to the door. She shoots until her gun is empty.

I get her as far as the living room before she faints. She’s bleeding bad. There’s a kind of shawl on the back of an old chair. I tear off a long section, wrap it around Brigitte’s neck like a scarf, pick her up, and head for a shadow. But there’s no door there. Just wall. Fucking Springheel must have put an antihoodoo cloak on the house. I carry her out through the kitchen.

Extra-crispy and original-recipe Drifters shamble from the back into the living room. Most of them get lost in the furniture and bounce around like pinballs, but some of the smart ones that can follow a straight line stumble after us. Eventually, the pinballs will bounce their way out of the front door, too. Nothing I can do about that now. I get Brigitte to the Lexus, put her in the passenger seat, and buckle her in. I get to the driver’s side cursing Kinski for being gone. We could use you and your magic glass right now, you prick.

Maybe a dozen Drifters are wandering around the vacant lot and there are more behind them. This neighborhood is all warehouses and pretty deserted even in the middle of the day, but it won’t take them long to wander into populated neighborhoods. Someone left them there like a land mine. It was going to go off sometime and I’m the asshole lucky enough to have set it off. How many more bombs
did whoever spray-painted behind the door leave around the city?

Brigitte moans. I hit the gas and point the Lexus in the direction of Vidocq and Allegra’s.

I
BEACH THE
Lexus half on the curb outside the building, run to Brigitte’s side, and pull her out. The streetlight casts a fat shadow on one wall. I step through and come out in the apartment.

I don’t know what time it is. Probably three or four. All the lights are off. In my head, the room is still the same as when I left it eleven years ago, but it’s not my place and Vidocq has changed everything. I want to put Brigitte down on the couch, but I keep stumbling over chairs and piles of books. Fuck it. I start kicking anything that makes noise.

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

A light comes on in the bedroom. Allegra wanders out in an extra-extra-large Max Overload T-shirt. Vidocq follows, tying his robe.

“What time is it? What’s going on?” asks Allegra, rubbing her eyes.

Now that I can see, I carry Brigitte over to where they’re standing.

“She’s hurt and she’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Who is she? If she needs blood take her to an emergency room.”

“She isn’t hospital hurt. She’s Kinski hurt, but he’s gone, so you’re Kinski tonight.”

“What happened to her?”

“There was a metric assload of Drifters. One of them bit her.”

“What the hell? What’s a Drifter?”

“A High Plains Drifter.”

Vidocq clears his throat.

“He means revenants. Zombies.”

Allegra’s forehead creases in a frown.

“There really are zombies? Why doesn’t anyone tell me these things?”

“They’re extremely rare. I’ve only seen an outbreak once in this country and it was put down quickly.”

I say, “History later. A chunk of her neck is missing.”

Allegra points past me.

“Put her on the kitchen counter.”

She and Vidocq grab plates, utensils, and a cutting board and toss them on a nearby table. When there’s a clean spot, I lay out Brigitte, facedown. Allegra pushes the hair back from Brigitte’s wound. I put a kitchen towel under her so her face isn’t right on the tile.

“Eugène, get the first-aid kit from the bathroom. And the pharaoh grubs.”

He leaves. Allegra turns on a metal desk lamp she keeps there for reading cookbooks and potions. As she tentatively runs her fingers around the edges of Brigitte’s wound, she holds the light by her face.

“Who is she? Is she from the store? I swear I’ve seen her somewhere.”

“She’s Brigitte Bardo. You two probably watched some of her movies together.”

She pauses for a few seconds.

“Right. That’s it.” Her tone is slightly embarrassed. “What’s she doing here?”

“She’s in Lucifer’s movie.”

“Lucifer is making a porn movie?”

“She’s a trained zombie hunter, but she stays dressed for that, so there’s not that much money in it.”

Allegra hands me the lamp, goes to the sink, and washes her hands. By the time she’s finished, Vidocq is back with a canopic jar and a small white metal case stamped with a red cross. She opens a plastic bottle of Betadine and squirts it all over the wound, then takes a couple of big gauze pads from the first-aid kit and gently cleans it out. When she’s done she presses her ear to Brigitte’s back.

“It looks like the bleeding has stopped, but you’re right. By her color and heartbeat she’s lost a lot of blood. I can give her a general healing potion for the wound and a restorative for the blood loss.”

“She was bitten by a damned zombie. How about something for that?”

Allegra ignores me. She takes the lid off the canopic jar and I get hit with a smell that reminds me of the Drifters at Springheel’s. She upends the jar and a pile of fat, wriggling worms falls out. Each one is the size of my thumb.

“What are those?”

“Pharaoh grubs. They’re like maggots. They eat dead skin and leave clean, healthy tissue and they’re about ten times faster about it than maggots.”

Allegra puts several of the grubs on Brigitte’s wound. They go right for her discolored flesh. Vidocq puts his hand
on my arm and raises it so I’m holding the lamp at a better angle for Allegra to work.

“Thank you, dear.”

“Of course.”

I look at Vidocq. Lit from below by the lamp, he looks old and tired.

“You’ve been around two hundred years, man. Tell me you know something to fix this.”

“I do know something. But I know that what you want doesn’t exist. There is no cure for the bite of a revenant.”

“You have all these books. How do you know there isn’t something you’ve missed?”

“I’ve read all these books many times and more besides. I’ve traveled the world hoping to cure my own involuntary immortality. I learned from magnificent alchemists, witches, and magicians. The few times the subject of revenants came up, all were in agreement. There is no cure. The best you can do is leave the afflicted in the Winter Garden.”

“No way.”

“Where’s the Winter Garden?” asks Allegra.

I say, “It’s not where. It’s what. He wants to put Brigitte into a fucking coma. Like suspended animation in a science-fiction movie.”

“It will stop the infection from consuming and killing her. It will halt her transformation.”

Allegra picks up a couple of the grubs.

“How long can you keep her like that?” she asks.

“In theory, forever. It will give us time to look for other possibilities.”

“You just said there weren’t any possibilities,” I say.

“There aren’t. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look.”

“I don’t like it.”

“No one ever does, but there’s nothing else to do. Unless you want to do nothing, wait for her transformation, and release her yourself.”

As Allegra packs the wound with cotton, Brigitte opens her eyes. Allegra gently holds her shoulders so she doesn’t try to get up.

“James?”

“Brigitte.”

“Where are we?”

“With friends. You’re all right. They’ll fix you up.”

“Bullshit. I’ve been bitten. Kill me, James. You can do it.”

“No I can’t.”

“I would do it for you. Please. Do it before I change.”

“No.”

“How many people have you killed? I’m going to be much more of a monster than you soon. Kill one more. Please.”

“Maybe. But not right now.”

Brigitte closes her eyes. I look at Vidocq.

“Do it. Freeze her.”

“Stark?”

It’s Allegra. Her voice is odd.

“What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

I look at my hands. Both are bitten and scratched. There’s a sliver of skin missing from my left palm. All the wounds are closed and scabbed.

“How ‘bout that.”

Vidocq says, “Jimmy, we must do it now. Both of you must go to the Garden.”

“Look at her and look at me. Her skin’s going blue. Her eyes are bloodshot. She’s dying. Look at me. Do I look any different from when you saw me earlier?”

“No.”

“I feel fine.”

“For now,” says Allegra. “What if you’re wrong and you change later?”

“Then you have my permission to kill me. You’ve got to kill the central nervous system. You don’t have the right tools, so the easiest thing for you would be to cut off my head and burn it and my body.”

“That’s what’s easiest? Great.”

Vidocq takes the lamp and shines it in my eyes. Checks my face.

“There might be a simple reason you aren’t changing. The Cupbearer’s elixir.”

“You think it’s keeping his body from changing?”

“It’s possible. There are accounts of similar occurrences. During the Great Plague there are stories of people who drank the elixir for various ailments. These people survived while whole towns died around them. You might be all right.”

Allegra goes to the shelves lined with potions and alchemical mixtures and brings a few bottles back to the counter. She looks at me and shakes her head. I don’t know if it’s because I won’t let Vidocq put me to sleep, because I dropped a half-dead woman in her lap, or because who knows what the devil’s kid is really up to?

“My offer still stands. If you think I’ve gone bad, take my head. But I’m not lying down for this right now. Someone told me that any spell cast can be broken and any spell broken can be put back together. Someone is making all this happen and I bet they can unmake it.”

“What if you can’t?” Allegra asks. “What if Brigitte is stuck like this forever?”

I look her in the eye.

“What would you want? Would you want to be Sleeping Beauty for the next thousand years until maybe perhaps pretty please someone figures out how to fix you or do you want to get it over with fast?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you think about it. You’re a woman and about her age, so you think about it and tell me what you’d do.”

“I don’t want that responsibility.”

“Too bad.”

I head back to the wall I came through earlier.

“Allegra, I might need you to come with me later and play Kinski one more time, but just to look. Not cut anyone up.”

“Whatever. Eugène and I will plant your friend in the Garden for now.”

“Text me when she’s under. And don’t leave the apartment for anything. It’s going to get dangerous outside. I’ll talk to you later.”

When I’m back on the street I dial Carlos.

“Hola Hula. You’ve got the Bamboo House of Dolls. Talk to me.”

“Carlos, it’s Stark. You need to listen to me.”

“What’s up, man? A buddy just brought me fresh
sesos
straight from the butchers. Swing by. You gringos don’t know shit about food till you’ve had
auténtico
street-style brain tacos.”

“Shut up and listen. Something’s happened. Close the bar. I don’t know if things are going to completely melt down out here, but there’s a real good chance.”

“It’s the fuckers from the other night, isn’t it? Those dead motherfuckers.”

“Yeah. There’s a lot more of them and I don’t know exactly how many. Until I do, stay off the streets. When you close, if any of your friends want to go home, let them. But once they’ve gone, lock up, barricade the place, and don’t let them back in.”

“Ay Dios mío.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

I
COME OUT
of a shadow by the anime section in Max Overload. It startles two kids pawing through the cutout bin where the used and extra discs get dumped for a couple of bucks each. They look at me, more surprised than scared. I grab a couple of handfuls of movies and give them to each kid.

“Take ’em and go home. Stay there and don’t let anyone in. Things are going to get weird.”