Dead Ice

Our business manager at Animators Inc., Bert Vaughn, had approved the expense after he lost me for entire nights while I stayed with my zombies listening to them being questioned about everything from court cases to historical events. We billed per zombie raised, not by the hour, so that much revenue loss had finally convinced even Bert that we needed a different way to keep track of our zombies. But first we needed someone to give the zombie to, which was MacDougal.

Once the zombie was aboveground, the power was fine. I pulled the circle down and the spring night was just normal. Only the zombie was extraordinary, so lifelike that it was a little disturbing. I raised the dead; I did not do resurrection—no one did outside of Bible stories—but Thomas Warrington might have made a believer out of people. Not me; I knew in a few days he’d start to rot, and being this “alive” only meant that he’d be more horrified when it started, like the poor victims in the videos that the FBI had shown me. It was the same principle, except I didn’t have Thomas Warrington’s soul in a magical reinforced jar somewhere, so I could put it back in, or take it out, at my customers’ whim.

To raise a zombie, even a recently dead one, that looked as alive as the women in the videos, the animator had to be damned powerful. There weren’t many of us who had the juice to do something like this, and fewer still who could capture souls. Hell, I didn’t even know how to do that. Dominga Salvador had offered to teach me, but I’d told her I didn’t want anyone’s soul. I hadn’t then, and I didn’t now, but watching Thomas laugh and joke with everyone made me wonder, if it wasn’t his soul in there, what was it? Was it just body memory? The last flickers of personality, caught in the flesh like the traumatic events that get caught in the walls and floors of a house, so they play over and over again—not a true ghost, but the echoes of emotions so strong they leave images behind? Was that all I was seeing in the tall young “man”? I didn’t know and Manny hadn’t known either, because I’d asked him. My grandmother Flores, who taught me how to control my power, hadn’t known either. As far as I knew, no one knew the answer; maybe there wasn’t one.

We made plans for them to bring him back tomorrow night to be put back down. We made the plans quietly while MacDougal asked questions and the zombie answered them, and one of the young guys, whose name I couldn’t quite remember, recorded it with his phone. Ah, technology. The zombie had protested the ankle bracelet, but when I gave him a direct order to let me put it on, he’d complied like he had no will of his own. It sort of comforted me that he reacted like any other zombie, because he was almost unnervingly alive, even to me. His skin was still unnaturally cool to the touch, but other than being a little pale, he looked great; for being dead over two hundred years, he looked amazing.

Nicky, Dino, and I were using the aloe baby wipes I kept in the car to clean my hands. The wipes did well on everything except the blood that always seemed to embed itself at the roots of your fingernails. That needed soap, water, and scrubbing, sometimes with a bristle brush, but for everything else we’d be presentable. Nathaniel held a fresh trash bag so we could throw the used wipes in. Tonight it wasn’t very full, but on some nights the kitchen-sized bag filled up.

“Killing dinosaurs to no purpose,” I said.

“What?” Dino asked.

Nathaniel explained, “A lot of plastics used to be made from petroleum products, just like gasoline, so it’s all prehistoric dead plants and animals.”

“Dead dinosaurs,” Nicky said.

Dino looked at both of us. “That was Anita’s explanation out of your mouth, right?”

Nathaniel nodded. “Yes.”

“Yeah,” Nicky said.

“It’s that couple thing again,” he said.

“What couple thing?” I asked.

“Couples start using each other’s sayings, speech patterns, jokes, and specialized information after a while, because you hear it repeated over and over.”

“Coworkers and military units do it, too,” Nicky said.

“Yeah, but that’s usually more narrowly centered. Couples can go all over the board. I’d like to know someone that well someday.”

“Are you saying you’ve never been part of a couple?” I asked.

“I’ve dated, but no, not really.”

“This is my first real couple,” Nicky said.

“What do you mean, real?” I asked.

“I was told to seduce people for work sometimes, or go undercover. People are less suspicious of you if you have a romantic partner. They thought we were dating, and I went along with what they thought that should be, but it was all pretend for maintaining my cover or gaining information from them.”

“How long was the longest you dated someone like that?” I asked.

“Almost six months.”

“That’s a long time,” Nathaniel said. “And you didn’t care about her at all?”

“The sex was good.”

I looked up at one of the men I was in love with and couldn’t wrap my head around it. “And if the sex hadn’t been good?” I asked.

“She was cover, so I’d have found someone who was better in bed.”

“What happened to her?” Nathaniel asked.

Nicky looked at him as if he’d asked a dumb question or one that he’d never thought of before. “I don’t know.”

“Did anything you do bring her into harm’s way?” I asked.