“Something symmetrical.”
“Symmetrical,” he said, and then I watched as understanding crossed his face in the moonlight.
“Very,” I said.
He looked past the waiting dead to Bennington and his pretty dead wife. A look came over his face, and he nodded. “I won’t stop you.”
“Stand near me, both of you. Zombies aren’t particularly smart.”
Nicky moved close to me, and I offered him my hand. Jacob picked up Ellen’s unconscious body and joined us. I spoke to the dead. “Kill him.”
There was a moment when they all looked at us, a moment when I felt them hesitate, and then I pointed toward Bennington and his blond wife. “Kill him.” I thought it at them. I pictured his face and I wanted them to move forward, to surround him, and they did.
He yelled, “Mr. Leon, what’s happening? What are they doing?”
Jacob called out, “It’s symmetry, Bennington.”
Then Bennington screamed, “Ilsa, Ilsa, what are you doing! Oh, my God!” The zombies closed around him and began to feed. Bennington shrieked for a long time, and then there were hands reaching for the dead hooker and Silas’s body. The sounds were not good sounds. The visuals were graphic. It was like every horror movie you can imagine, but worse. Real bone is always both whiter and wetter. Real blood is darker, thicker, and you don’t get the smells on a movie screen. You can always tell when they perforate a bowel by the smell.
One zombie grabbed at Jacob’s pants leg. “Back up,” I said, and it bowed low to the ground, crawling back to the feeding frenzy that had become Silas’s body.
I offered Jacob my other hand, and he took it, balancing Ellen’s body in his arms. I stood there in the midst of the dead I had raised, and the living they were eating. I stood there holding on to the two werelions, and it was to keep them safer, but it was also because I needed to hold on to something warm and alive. I needed to be reminded that I wasn’t just this.
When all the bodies were eaten they turned to me, and I watched, and felt that there was more home in them. There was something in there now that hadn’t been there before they tasted flesh. There are things that wait in the dark, that wait for a chance to find a body that they can walk around in, things that were never human. Sometimes you can feel them on the edge of your mind, the shadows that flit out of the corners of your eyes, and aren’t there if you look directly at them. The dead that stood there in the moonlight with blood decorating their mouths held the shadows in their eyes. I could finally see what hid just out of sight, just out of thought, and I knew that I could keep the dead. I could keep them animated. They could be the beginning of my own private army. An army of the dead that knew neither pain, nor fear. It would be an army that no bullet would slow, no blade could kill, and only fire would stop.
Nicky squeezed my hand and whispered, “Something’s in there now.”
“Their eyes,” Jacob whispered, “there’s something in their eyes.”
“I see it.”
“What is it?” Nicky asked.
“Shadows,” I said, and then I spoke loud, in that ringing voice that you use in ritual. “All of you, hear me, go back to your graves. Lie down and be what you were. Rest, and walk no more.”
Their eyes flickered almost like a television that wasn’t quite on station, like two channels trying to be on screen at once.
“Tell me you brought salt,” I said, voice low and even.
“Bennington wouldn’t let us bring any, because salt is for putting zombies back in their graves and he didn’t want you to do that to his wife.”
“Fine,” I said. I knelt, very carefully, keeping my eyes on the zombies the way I did when I was on the judo mat. You never take your eyes off your opponent because if you do they can rush you. I knelt and found the blade I’d dropped into the grave dirt. The blade still had Silas’s blood on it. Salt would have been good, but I had steel, and grave dirt, and power. It would be enough, because it would have to be.
I stood up, slowly, deliberately, and called my necromancy. I called it in a way I hadn’t before. I called it to use against the shadows in their eyes, the shadows that were promising me power, glory, conquest. Just let us stay , it seemed to whisper. Just let us stay and we will give you the world. I had a moment to envision a world where the dead truly walked, and moved at my will, but I knew better. I could see it in their eyes. I had animated the dead, but I hadn’t filled their eyes with dark power, or had I? Something about them eating human flesh without a circle of power had caused this, and I remembered the third reason for putting up a circle of power before raising the dead. It kept things out. It kept the shadows away.