Matt turned around and called, “Kitty!”
Sinking feeling confirmed.
I made my own way to the door, shouldering around people. By the time I reached Matt, the woman who’d answered the door had edged away to take shelter in her boyfriend’s arms. Matt turned to me, dumbstruck.
The woman outside was of average height, though she slumped, her shoulders rolled forward as if she was too tired to hold herself up. Her head tilted to one side. She might have been a normal twenty-something, recent college grad, in worn jeans, an oversized blue T-shirt, and canvas sneakers. Her light hair was loose and stringy, like it hadn’t been washed in a couple of weeks.
I glanced at Matt.
“What’s wrong with her?” he said.
“What makes you think I know?”
“Because you know all about freaky shit.” Ah, yes. He was referring to my call-in radio show about the supernatural. That made me an expert, even when I didn’t know a thing.
“Do you know her?”
“No, I don’t.” He turned back to the room, to the dozens of faces staring back at him, round-eyed. “Hey, does anybody know who this is?”
The crowd collectively pressed back from the door, away from the strangeness.
“Maybe it’s drugs.” I called to her, “Hey.”
She didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t flinch. Her expression was slack, completely blank. She might have been asleep, except her eyes were open, staring straight ahead. They were dull, almost like a film covered them. Her mouth was open a little.
I waved my hand in front of her face, which seemed like a really clichéd thing to do. She didn’t respond. Her skin was terribly pale, clammy looking, and I couldn’t bring myself to touch her. I didn’t know what I would do if she felt cold and dead.
Matt said, “Geez, she’s like some kind of zombie.”
Oh, no. No way. But the word clicked. It was a place to start, at least.
Someone behind us said, “I thought zombies, like, attacked people and ate brains and stuff.”
I shook my head. “That’s horror movie zombies. Not voodoo slave zombies.”
“So you do know what’s going on?” Matt said hopefully.
“Not yet. I think you should call nine-one-one.”
He winced and scrubbed his hand through his hair. “But if it’s a zombie, if she’s dead an ambulance isn’t—”
“Call an ambulance.” He nodded and grabbed his cell phone off the coffee table. “And I’m going to use your computer.”
I did what any self-respecting American in this day and age would do in such a situation: I searched the Internet for zombies.
I couldn’t say it was particularly useful. A frighteningly large number of the sites that came up belonged to survivalist groups planning for the great zombie infestation that would bring civilization collapsing around our ears. They helpfully informed a casual reader such as myself that the government was ill prepared to handle the magnitude of the disaster that would wreak itself upon the country when the horrible zombie-virus mutation swept through the population. We must be prepared to defend ourselves against the flesh-eating hordes bent on our destruction.
This was a movie synopsis, not data, and while fascinating, it wasn’t helpful.
A bunch of articles on voodoo and Haitian folklore seemed mildly more useful, but even those were contradictory: The true believers in magic argued with the hardened scientists, and even the scientists argued among themselves about whether the legends sprang from the use of certain drugs or from profound psychological disorders.
I’d seen enough wild stories play out in my time that I couldn’t discount any of these alternatives. These days, magic and science were converging on one another.
Someone was selling zombie powders on eBay. They even came with an instruction booklet. That might be fun to bid on just to say I’d done it. Even if I did, the instruction book that might have some insight on the problem wouldn’t get here in time.
Something most of the articles mentioned: Stories said that the taste of salt would revive a zombie. Revived them out of what, and into what, no one seemed to agree on. If they weren’t really dead but comatose, the person would be restored. If they were honest-to-God walking dead, they’d be released from servitude and make their way back to their graves.
I went to the kitchen and found a saltshaker.
If she really was a zombie, she couldn’t have just shown up here. She had come here for a specific reason, there had to be some connection. She was here to scare someone, which meant someone here had to know her. Nobody was volunteering any information.
Maybe she could tell me herself.
Finally, I had to touch her, in order to get the salt into her mouth. I put my hand on her shoulder. She swayed enough that I thought she might fall over, so I pulled away. A moment later, she steadied, remaining upright. I could probably push her forward, guide her, and make her walk like a puppet.
I shivered.
Swallowing back a lump of bile threatening to climb my throat, I held her chin, tipping her head back. Her skin was waxen, neither warm nor cold. Her muscles were limp, perfectly relaxed. Or dead. I tried not to think of it. She’d been drugged. That was the theory I was going for. Praying for, rather.
“What are you doing?” Matt said.
“Never mind. Did you call the ambulance?”
“They should be here any minute.”
I sprinkled a few shakes of salt into her mouth.
I had to tip her head forward and close her mouth for her because she couldn’t do it herself. And if she couldn’t do that, she surely couldn’t swallow. None of the information said she had to swallow the salt, just taste it. In cultures around the world salt had magical properties. It was a ward against evil, protection against fairies, a treasure as great as gold. It seemed so common and innocuous now. Hard to believe it could do anything besides liven up a basket of French fries.
Her eyes moved.
The film, the dullness went away, and her gaze focused. It flickered, as if searching or confused.
Fear tightened her features. Her shoulders bunched, and her fingers clenched into claws. She screamed.
She let out a wail of anguish, bone-leaching in its intensity. A couple of yelps of shock answered from within the apartment. Her face melted into an expression of despair, lips pulled back in a frown, eyes red and wincing. But she didn’t cry.
Reaching forward with those crooked fingers, she took a stumbling step forward. My heart racing, my nausea growing, I hurried out of her way. Another step followed, clumsy and unsure. She was like a toddler who’d just learned to walk. This was the slow, shuffling gait of a zombie in every B-grade horror movie I’d ever seen. The salt hadn’t cured her; it had just woken her up.
She stumbled forward, step by step, reaching. People scrambled out of her way.
She didn’t seem hungry. That look of utter pain and sadness remained locked on her features. She looked as if her heart had been torn out and smashed into pieces.
Her gaze searched wildly, desperately.
I ran in front of her, blocking her path. “Hey—can you hear me?” I waved my arms, trying to catch her attention. She didn’t seem to notice, but she shifted, angling around me. So I tried again. “Who are you? Can you tell me your name? How did this happen?”
Her gaze had focused on something behind me. When I got in front of her, she looked right through me and kept going like I wasn’t there. I turned to find what had caught her attention.
A man and woman sat wedged together in a secondhand armchair, looking like a Mack truck was about to run them down. The zombie woman shuffled toward them. Now that I was out of the way, she reached toward them, arms rigid and trembling. She moaned—she might have been trying to speak, but she couldn’t shape her mouth right. She was like an infant who desperately wanted something but didn’t have the words to say it. She was an infant in the body of an adult.