60

THREE DAYS LATER I was standing in the room where they’d filmed the videos. It was really half a room, with the other half set up with a box of props and even a makeup area, as if the zombies, or their customers, really cared that much. I stood looking down at the bed that had been the main prop for all that horror and thought aloud, “Where are you, you son of a bitch?” Apparently, I said it out loud.

“Did you say something, Marshal?” Gillingham was sitting at the mirrored makeup area in her Windbreaker with FBI emblazoned on it, but then I was in my U.S. Marshal’s version of the same. We were both wearing our body armor, which was standard for most fieldwork.

“Sorry, talking more to myself, just wondering where the hell our bad guy is.”

“We caught a lot of bad guys,” she said, and turned around to face me. She looked more herself somehow in the dark pants and boots than she had in the costume conservative skirt outfit. The only thing still the same was the upper layer of her hair being held back by a barrette, and the lack of makeup, but that part was pretty standard for most female operatives in the field.

“We caught a lot of the guys helping make the videos, but they swear they didn’t know if he trapped the soul at the moment of death, which means they didn’t think they were doing anything illegal.”

“If they didn’t know the zombies might be murder victims then they weren’t.”

“See, that’s the thing, regular zombies always kill their murderer. They are unreasoning, almost unstoppable killing machines until they strangle or tear apart the person who murdered them, but these were as pliable as a normal zombie.”

“And you have no idea why,” she said.

“No, not really. It’s almost as if the soul going into them so soon after death prevented the normal homicidal fixation to kick in.”

“More’s the pity,” she said.

“Yeah, that would have been a short, unpleasant career for him. Instead he’s still out there somewhere able to start all this over, or worse.”

“How worse?”

“He could make the perfect sex slave if he knows how to give control over to a customer the way Dominga Salvador did. Hell, I know how to bind a zombie to a client so they can control it for a day or two. With the soul intact and never coming out, the zombie might be able to pass for human indefinitely.”

“Do you honestly believe that no one would notice it was the undead?”

I thought about Thomas Warrington. “If you could keep the mind and body from ever rotting, and retain the personality, hell, Teresa, the zombie itself might not know it was dead.”

“But it would never age, eventually someone would notice that,” she said.

“That could take decades,” I said.

“Mother of God.” She whispered it and crossed herself. Funny what habits stay with us in times of stress.

The FBI hostage rescue unit, HRU, had been the ones that raided the place once everyone figured out where it was, because they were closer, and though in the movies it would have been just our little band of agents and psychics, in real life you didn’t make potential hostages wait eight hours for rescue, or give the bad guys an eight-hour head start on destroying evidence and fleeing the country. So Manning, Brent, Gillingham, Larry, and I had come late to the party.

They’d found the zombies, including Ruthie Sylvester, in the basement, lying in a heap like someone had swept the garbage up in the center of the room, except this center had been an altar. I’d only seen pictures of the zombies piled up, but they’d left the broken shards of pottery and glass scattered around the bodies, and the chalk drawings that covered the floor and the walls were still there, so that there was only a narrow walkway through it all. The drawings were verve symbols meant to draw and keep power in a place. It was the inner sanctum of a voodoo priest, or priestess, and it was damn near identical to the setup that Dominga Salvador had had almost seven years ago in her basement in St. Louis. She had had extra rooms off of her altar room though, and they had contained more of her creations. She’d learned how to take dead flesh and melt it together like wet clay and make monsters. She’d used human and animal zombie remains so it had been particularly horror-show worthy. The practitioner in New Mexico who could do it had used only human parts, so his haunted me more, but I was still glad that the new guy couldn’t do it.

They’d brought in a voodoo expert, who was still here when we arrived. I’d asked him if the basement setup had to be that way, or was there room for variation. He said there was room for variation, but he wasn’t a follower of voodoo, only an academic, so I didn’t trust him to have real world knowledge, because he didn’t.

I’d ask Manny when I got back home. He’d know. I couldn’t use anything he gave me in court, but the information might help me figure out if having the verve downstairs so close to the same arrangement as Dominga’s was part of how this awful spell was done. Did that mean they had to kill the girls in that room and capture their souls right there? If it did, then the guys in custody were lying, because you’d notice if living girls went downstairs, but zombies came back up. Or was everything below so he could make the bottles that captured the soul? If that was true, then the other men and one woman we had in custody might honestly not have realized they were part of a murder conspiracy. I just didn’t know enough, and the FBI expert wasn’t sure enough to testify in court, so unless we could prove they knew, they actually hadn’t broken any laws. We might have to let them go. I didn’t want to do that. Hell, he wasn’t even sure you had to capture the soul at the instant of death. But did we really believe that they’d just waited for the right type of natural death to occur so they’d get a nice-looking corpse? No, but we couldn’t prove they hadn’t done just that. Damn it!




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