He crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on.”
“Any zombie that was hungry enough to kill someone wouldn’t have had enough…mind to be able to figure out all of that—the getting rid of the evidence stuff.” I moved to the other window and began taping those curtains down as well. “So either someone else did the stuff with the boat, or a rogue zombie was killing people before he was crazy hungry—which I admit is possible, but it seems like he would have done a better job picking his victims. Or, there wasn’t a zombie at all.” I watched him as I said this last one. “Ed, how on earth did you know about zombies back then? What made you seriously consider that as a possibility?”
“I didn’t. Not really,” he admitted. “After the accident and the investigation, I managed to convince myself I’d imagined it. Shock, hysteria. That sort of thing. After a while I simply accepted that it had been a horrible accident.”
“What changed?” I asked, frowning.
Ed grimaced, rubbed at his eyes. “About six months ago I got a package in the mail. It was a notebook—a personal journal of my dad’s.”
I pressed the tape down on the bottom of the curtain, then got the lantern out of the bag and flicked it on. It wasn’t a lot of light, but it was better than pitch darkness, and enough for me to see what Ed was wearing—black and grey striped pants tucked into studded boots, black shirt with dark red skulls. It also looked like he’d picked up a few more piercings somehow. He definitely didn’t look anything like the Ed I’d known before. “Okay,” I said, “and something in that journal convinced you that zombies exist?”
“It was only a few dozen pages. Most of the rest had been ripped out. But my dad wrote about how the zombies were real and that the person they used to be was dead and gone and all that was left was a monster.” Even in the dim light I could see the guilty flush crawl across his face. “And, he, uh, wrote about how it was spreading like a plague, and he had theories about how to kill them.” He gave an uncomfortable shrug, not looking at me. “The basic gist was: slow them down then cut their heads off.”
“And…that’s when you decided to become a zombie hunter?” I asked, my voice thick with disbelief.
He narrowed his eyes, scowled. “No. No, of course not. I mean, I didn’t know what was going on, and I’d made myself forget what happened on the boat, so I figured this was just some sort of novel or story that my dad had decided to write. I mean, really, who the hell could believe that?” He paused, looked down at his hands. “Then, about a week later, I got another package. This time it was some of my mother’s correspondence.”
“Wait,” I said with a slight frown. “What kind of doctor was your mother?”
“Neurologist. She had a practice, but she enjoyed the research end of things more,” he explained. “Anyway, this was printouts of several emails. The recipient was blacked out, so I have no idea who it was intended for, but it was a series of conversations with her going through a number of theories she had on how zombies actually functioned and why they needed brains—”
“Prions,” I interrupted, perhaps a bit smugly. “The parasite needs prions as building blocks.”
A grimace flickered across his face. “Um, right. And after reading all that I…I started to realize that I really had seen what I thought I’d seen.”
I opened my mouth to speak but he held up his hand. “And, no, I still didn’t immediately go out and start slaying zombies.”
“Then why?” I asked in exasperation.
He sighed heavily. “It was almost a month afterwards that I got another letter directing me to a secure website. All sorts of passwords and ID verification stuff, and there was a message for me there that told me my parents had been zombie hunters—part of a secret society that had been trying to wipe out the, um,” his eyes flicked briefly to me, “zombie menace before it turned into an unstoppable plague.” He groaned and dropped his head back, covering his eyes with his forearm. “Fuck, Angel, by that time I was so tied up in knots, and so much of it made sense along with the stuff from my parents…I bought it, hook, line and sinker, and told them I was in.”
I thought about this for a moment. Could it be true? Were his parents also zombie hunters? Pietro had certainly made it sound as if there was an organized cabal-type thing. “And you used Marianne’s dog to let you know who the zombies were,” I said.
“Right.” He sighed. “Kudzu is a cadaver dog. If someone smelled like a dead person, that gave me a reason to look into them. Then I’d watch them for a bit, see if they ever started smelling or rotting. I’d sometimes check them out on Lexis Nexis to see if there were any hiccups in their info that would be there if they were older than they looked. That sort of thing.” He stood and moved to one of the windows, peeled a small section of tape back and peered cautiously out through a thin gap.
“Zeke Lyons was one of your victims, right?” I asked. He nodded without looking back at me. “Did you know that somehow he regrew his body?”
Ed whipped his head around to stare at me. “Regrew? What do you mean? Like a lizard regrows a tail?”
“Yeah, except that it was the whole body, with the right fingerprints and everything.” I had a sudden bizarre image of a full-sized head on a teeny-tiny body as it grew back, like a bobble-head doll. “Same head, though. Had a scar on his chin, same as on his driver’s license. And his body was still in its coffin at Riverwood.” I paused. “So, what did you do with the heads?”
He pressed the tape back down. “I don’t know how he regrew a body, but I had to deliver the heads to a drop point.” He flushed. “I, uh, got points for verified kills.” He groaned and raked a hand through his hair. “I don’t know why I didn’t even think to question it. I actually burned the head of the first one I killed, but they insisted that wasn’t good enough, and I had to deliver the heads in order to ensure proper destruction.”
I could feel my eyebrows climbing to my hairline. “And who the hell is ‘they’?”
Ed shook his head. “No clue. My only contact was through that website. God damn it, I thought I was doing this great and awesome thing, ridding the world of a terrible threat.” He looked over at me, eyes full of guilt and agony. “But then you didn’t kill me when you had the chance. And then you even saved Marcus. That’s not something a monster would do.” He stooped, dimmed the lantern slightly. “I’d gone so far off the deep end, it took me awhile to figure out that whoever these other zombie hunters were, they didn’t have the whole story. And then I started, finally, to wonder about the heads.” He scowled at himself. “And that’s when things really went to shit.”
“How so?”
“I used that secret website. Told them I’d been busted but also told them I thought we were wrong about zombies being monsters. And I also asked about the heads.” He gave a dry laugh that turned into a sob. “I snuck into Marianne’s house while she was gone. Used her computer.”
“Oh, no,” I breathed.
He nodded, a stiff jerky motion. “She came home just a few minutes later. I stayed, had to talk to her. God, I missed her so much.” He paused. “I was going to marry her. We’d already talked about it, knew it was what we both wanted. But I knew I had to leave, for her sake.” He let out a shuddering breath. “I told her what I’d done, told her I loved her. Told her I was sorry. I was on my way out the back, when I heard her answer the door.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Then I heard the shot. I ran back…but it was too late. He didn’t see me, but I saw him.” His expression turned grim. “Same guy who shot you tonight.”
I stood. “His name is Walter McKinney. He’s the head of security at NuQuesCor. But…why did he kill Marianne?” I asked, baffled.
Ed’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Maybe they thought I’d talked to her and told her what was going on. Or maybe they wanted to be sure the heat stayed on me to keep me out of their way.” He shook his head. “Or maybe they simply wanted to fuck with me as much as possible.”
“Those fuckers.” I fell silent, thinking. Pieces of the puzzle were finally starting to settle into place. “Dude. You were used. You gave them the heads, right?”
He stared at me for several seconds, then a grim look settled over his face. “They didn’t destroy them, did they?”
“They’re doing zombie research at that lab, and they needed zombie brains!” I paced in the small living room. Did that mean Sofia was behind all of this? But surely Pietro wouldn’t have approved of the murder of zombies, even ones that weren’t part of his group. “You chopped off Zeke’s head, gave it to them, and they somehow regrew him a body.” And how would that work? Just give the parasite enough brains to fix things up? I guess if it could repair a bullet hole in Marcus’s head…Wow, those were some industrious little fuckers. “But something went wrong,” I continued. “The body we picked up at NuQuesCor was Zeke Lyons, and he was old—at least twenty years older than he should’ve been. And when he fell off those stairs, he died.” I sat, jiggling my legs in excitement. “Oh my god, fake brains! Sofia’s fake brains! She used them to grow a new body for this dude.” Then I grimaced. “But she said the research wasn’t finished. Why would she use fake brains that she knew wouldn’t work right? That part doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sofia Baldwin?” Ed asked.
I nodded. “You know her?”
“Yeah, we all went to high school together,” he said. “She’s fucking brilliant. How the hell does she know about zombies?”
“I guess Marcus told her,” I said, shrugging. “She’s known since right after he was turned, apparently.”