But someone had died in that room, and the soul was still confused about where to go. Most of the time if the soul hovers, it hovers over the body, the remains. Only three people lived in the house, two of them mutilated, and the boy somewhere else.
I had an idea. "These new mutilation victims, they kept fighting, kept trying to take bites out of the officers?"
He nodded.
"Are you sure about the bites, not just hitting, but like they were trying to feed?"
"I don't know about feeding, but it was all bite wounds." He was looking at me strangely. "You've thought of something."
I nodded. "I may have. I have to see the other body, the one behind the door first, but then I think it's time to go back to the hospital."
"Why?"
I started walking again, and he grabbed my arm, turned me to face him, There was fierceness in his eyes, an intensity that trembled down his arm. "You've only been here a couple of days. I've been dealing with this for weeks. What do you know that I don't?"
I looked at his hand until he let me go, but I told him. He was having nightmares about this shit, and I hadn't gotten to that point yet. "I'm an animator. I raise zombies for a living. My specialty is the dead. One thing that the living dead have in common with one other from zombie, to ghoul, to vampire, is that they must feed off the living to sustain themselves."
"Zombies don't eat people," he said.
"If a zombie is raised and the animator that raised it can't control it, then it can go wild. It becomes a flesh-eating zombie."
"I thought that was just stories."
I shook my head. "No, I've seen it."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that maybe there are no survivors. Maybe there are just dead and the living dead."
He actually went pale. I touched his elbow to steady him, but he stood straight. "I'm all right. I'm all right." He looked at me. "What do you do with a flesh-eating zombie?"
"Once it's gone amok, there isn't anything anyone can do except destroy it. The only way to do that is fire. Napalm is good, but any fire will do."
"They'll never let us roast these people."
"Not unless we can prove what I'm saying is true."
"How can you prove it?" he asked.
"I'm not sure yet, but I'll talk to Doctor Evans and we'll come up with something."
"Why would the earlier vics be docile and these new ones be vicious?"
"I don't know, unless the spell or the monster is changing, maybe growing stronger. I just don't know, Hernando. If I'm right about there being no survivors, then I've had my brilliant idea for the day."
He nodded, face very serious. He stared at the ground. "Jesus, if they are all dead, then that means that this thing we're after is making more of itself?"
"I'd be surprised if it was ever human but maybe. I don't know. I do know that if it is growing stronger and the skinned ones are growing more violent.
I then the creature may be controlling them."
We looked at each other. "I'll call the hospital and get more men down there."
"Call the Santa Fe hospital, too."
He nodded and broke into a half-run across the gravel, moving through the cars like he had a purpose. The other cops were watching him, as if wondering what the rush was. I hadn't asked Hernando if they'd checked for underground hiding places. Shit. I went to find Bradley and ask him. Then I'd go back into the house one last time, see the last body, and then … off to the hospital to answer the age-old question: what is life and when is death a sure thing?
34
THE MAN'S FACE stared up at me, eyes wide, glazed, unseeing. His head was still attached to his spine, but the chest had been split open as though two great hands had dug into his rib cage and pulled. The heart was missing. The lungs had been ripped, probably when the rib cage gave. The stomach had been punctured, giving a sour smell to the smaller room. The liver and intestines lay in a wet heap to one side of the body as if they had all spilled out at the same time. The lower intestine still curled down inside the lower end of the body cavity. By smell alone I was pretty sure that the intestines hadn't been pierced.
I sat back on my heels beside the body. Blood had splattered the lower half of the man's face, drops of it scattering across the rest of his face and into his graying hair. Violent, very violent, and very quick. I stared into his sightless eyes and felt nothing. I was back to being numb and I was not complaining. I think if I'd seen this body first, then I'd have been horrified, but the remains in the dining room had just used me up for the day. This was awful, but there were worse things, and those things were in the next room.
But it wasn't the body that was interesting. It was the room. There was a circle of salt around the body. A book lay within the circle covered so thickly in blood that I couldn't read the pages it was opened to. They'd taken all the pictures and videos they were going to in this room so I used borrowed gloves to raise the book up. It was bound with embossed leather, but there was no title. The middle half of the book had soaked so much blood up that the pages were sticking together. I didn't try and pry them apart. The police and the Feds had technicians for delicate work. I was careful not to close the book and lose the place the man was probably reading from. For all I knew the book had been on the desk that the man shoved against the door, and it had simply fallen to the floor, opening on its own. But to think that meant we had no clue, so we'd all pretend we were sure that the man had deliberately opened the book. In the middle of being chased by a monster that had just butchered his wife, he went for this book, opened it, started to read. Why?
The book was hand-written and I read enough to know that it was a book of shadows. It was the spell book, sort of, of a practicing witch. One that followed an older or more orthodox tradition than the neo-pagan movement Gardian or Alexandrian, maybe. Though again I couldn't be sure. I'd had one semester in college on comparative witchcraft, though now I'm sure they called it comparative wiccan. Of the wiccan practitioners I knew personally, none of them practiced anything this traditional.
I put the book carefully back where'd I'd found it and stood. The bookshelves against the near wall were full of books on psychic research, the preternatural, mythology, folklore, and wicca. I had some of the same books at home, so the books alone weren't proof of much. But the clincher was the altar. It was an antique wooden chest with a silk cloth over the top. There were silver candlesticks with partially burned candles in them. The candles had runes carved into them. Other than the fact that they were runes, I couldn't read them.
There was a round mirror with no frame sitting flat between the candles. There was a small bowl of dried herbs to one side, a larger bowl of water, and a small carved box tight shut.
"Is that what I think it is?" Bradley asked.
"An altar. He was a practitioner. I think that book is his book of shadows, his spell book for lack of a better term."
"What happened here?"
"There's salt in the floor of the dining room."
"That's not unusual," Bradley said.
"No, but a salt circle is. I think he was somewhere further back in the house. He heard his wife screaming or heard the monsters. Something alerted him. He didn't come running with a gun, Bradley. He came running with a handful of salt. Maybe he had something else in his hands or on his person, some charm or amulet. I don't see it, but that doesn't mean it's not here."
"Are you saying he threw salt at this thing?"
"Yes."
"Why, for god's sake?"
"Salt and flame are two of our oldest purifying agents. I use salt to bind a zombie back into its grave. You can throw it on fairies, fetches, a whole host of critters, and it will make them hesitate, maybe not much more."