Michele Lee

1

    When I met Amy, she'd been back from the dead for four days. She'd been at the facility for three of those days. At that point, I'd only been there two. Not that anyone needed more than a few moments to get the gist of the place. She was more bitter about being at the facility than the being dead part, and honestly I didn't blame her.

    She had a scowl on her face as I walked into the office at the Silver Springs Care Community. She had pale skin graced with freckles, soft chin-length brown hair, and the brightest hazel eyes I had ever seen - they made the attractive, mildly chubby, early twentysomething-year-old woman into something extraordinary.

    "You're dead." I couldn't stop it once I'd thought it. The words fell out of my mouth like something rotten. Her scowl deepened and I felt bad immediately.

    "You know, I hadn't noticed. Thanks for telling me."

    "I didn't mean… Look, all of the zombies I've seen so far have been…"

    "Like them?" She pointed out the window to the grounds, where I could see a keeper leading a train of desiccated corpses on their daily walk.

    The facility employed people with enough skill at raising the dead to keep the zombies' urge to chew on people at bay. Me, I didn't have a talent for commanding the dead. What I had was twenty-plus years of military and security experience, and the ability to look someone's ninety-year-old grandmother in the eyes and shoot her.

    The job called for all sorts of skills.

    "Some of us still retain our own thoughts and personalities. I'm Amy, by the way." She didn't offer a hand. She held her arms across her stomach and leaned forward slightly, those eyes boring into me. She was at once defensive and furious. And absolutely lovely.

    I nodded. "I'm Dean."

    "Which would you prefer, Dean? Being one of those things out there, rotted to mindlessness, or being locked in a dead body, knowing that's the future you'll face? Knowing that someone loved you enough not to let go, but didn't love you enough to care for you themselves? Instead, they locked you in here where they didn't have to see or smell you, but could take comfort in the idea that you weren't exactly dead anymore."

    I thought both options sucked.

    It used to be that death, maybe even a long or violent one, would be the worst thing you'd ever have to face. In the few skirmishes I'd served in, other soldiers had taken some comfort in knowing that. But then, that was before they started raising people from the dead.

    My nephew used to play a video game where the point was to wander around shooting zombies. There was only a little more to it than that: a bit of mystery; a touch of evil corporation or government conspiracy. The games said that zombies were the result of a disease.

    When they started showing up in real life, people assumed the same thing. Government experimentation, biological terrorism, some sort of corporation poisoning the public - the fear and wrath from the living humans caused more damage in those days than the few confirmed zombies. I was privy to a few case reports of homegrown terrorist plots against global corporations who had nothing to do with the occasional walking dead. They were just good targets.

    And there was Black Wednesday, too. Forty-five civilians dead. They never did confirm how many employees of that soda company burned, barricaded inside the building by an outraged mob.

    Then the truth came out, and I still wonder how many people harbor the secret memories of doing violence that day in the name of protecting themselves or their families. Creating zombies, it turned out, was just a matter of will. The first few we caught in public had likely raised themselves - a few assholes too stubborn to die. The problem came when people started to make zombies for fun and profit. About two percent of the general public had the will to force people back from death. It was a very lucrative, unregulated business.

    Places like Silver Springs came in at the end of the line. A loved one coming into our facility was a brutal lesson for those involved. Too many people fell into the category of potential customers, but not enough saw what happened once a zombie entered the gates. I don't doubt that having a place to tuck away your loved one, who turned out to be too much for you to handle, was useful. But if more people saw the end result of never having to say goodbye, they'd damn well learn to say it.

    Amy, yeah.

    "So," she said after I failed to answer her aloud, "if you don't mind my stench, I'm here to help out."

    I declined to add fuel to her little fire. "What can you help with?"

    "I'm good with computers, and organization. I've been an office worker and a nurse before."

    "Good, because I'm not good at any of those things."

    "Why are you here, then?"

    I shrugged. It was a job. "I guess for when things go wrong."

    She snorted. I hadn't killed her the first time. But chances were high that when she finally lost control, I'd be the one to put her down. It was a shame, but we both knew it. In another time, I'd fancy that my old ass might have a chance to enjoy the pleasure of her company, if only for dinner and conversation.

    We were the only ones in the office. It wasn't the office outsiders saw. It was more functional than the maroon and white showroom out front. For one thing, there were bars on the windows, as pretty as they were, and the steel doors were magnetically sealed, verified for at least 1800 pounds of force. The front room was unsafe should the facility go all Jurassic Park, but the rest of the building was secured.

    I leaned back in the chair, propped my feet on the desk and watched the security grids on the computer screen. Amy sorted through stacks of paper mechanically. Sometimes she filed things away, sometimes she tapped madly at the keyboard, recording files or transferring them to the home office in the city. Of course, that place did nothing but record what happened here. It was our black box, not our cavalry.

    "How did it happen?" I asked the silence. I was uncomfortable with Amy at my back, but more so treating her as nonexistent, like many of the other employees did. I turned toward her, still keeping the monitors in my peripheral vision. "Is that too personal?"

    "Probably, but believe it or not, no one ever asked. Not here, anyway. It's probably in my file."

    "Don't take offense. It's easier to keep a distance than sympathize with a terminal patient. It's human nature to avoid pain."

    "Stroke." Amy still wasn't looking at me. It bothered me. I guess I thought that since she didn't look dead, something in her eyes might betray her. Not seeing them kept me from reassuring myself.

    "A stroke? But you're so young."

    Amy shrugged. I had the feeling she was hiding a lot of how she felt. "I don't remember dying. I just know what it says on my death certificate."

    "Morbid fascination?"

    "No. My husband threw it in my face before he had them bring me here." She paused and looked to the grassy expanse outside the barred window. "He had me raised because he couldn't let go, but he couldn't find it in himself to touch me. 'You're not my Amy anymore,' he told me. Then he called his new girlfriend over to console him when they took me away."

    "And you didn't fight it at all?" The thought of passively leaving the person I loved was alien to me.

    "Are you kidding me? If I'd showed any emotion other than obedience, they would have napalmed me right there on the street."

    I stayed quiet. No, it seemed unfair. But I'd seen bodies in the morgue that had been savaged by angry or mindless zombies. That wasn't exactly fair, either.

    "What about you? What brings you to our fine zombie herding establishment?"

    I thought about lying to make her feel better, but she'd given me the truth. "Money. This field is so specialized, it pays real well."

    Amy finally looked at me and smiled viciously. "At least my husband is paying for one of us."

    I opened the door to the office and the first thing I heard was a female voice moaning. "Braa-iins."

    I squatted low to the ground and pulled my short sword from its sheath along my back. The most effective way to stop a zombie gone cannibal was to sever the spinal column. Guns were often inaccurate and made tiny, ineffective holes. And no sword ever crafted needed to be reloaded.

    It crooned softly through the room beyond the hall, "Braa-iins."

    I moved carefully forward, ready for an assault. Amy stood between the far desk and the window. Her body was stiff, arms reaching outward, eyes dancing with laughter. "Did I scare you?"

    "Fuck yeah. I almost attacked you." Still, I waited until she sat at the desk before sheathing my sword. "Why the hell would you want to play like that for?"

    "Boredom. I thought you knew better, though. Haven't you ever seen a zombie gone savage?"

    "Not in the wild. Only once they'd been contained."

    Amy met my eyes and I saw a glimmer of the same viciousness from yesterday when she'd mentioned her husband. "They don't moan 'brains' and walk around aimlessly. Without control, either our own or from a keeper, we're just predators. And the brain is hardly the most tender or nutritious part of a human body."

    "Why the lesson?"

    "Because I kind of like you. It would be sad if you died here."

    I couldn't shake her words. Sometimes people said things to intimidate or threaten, or just to bullshit. And sometimes they said things not with their voice, but with someone else's - the voice of someone who knew how things would play out. I hoped like hell Amy was bullshitting.

    "Besides," she continued. "Patrick will be joining us today. To deal with him, you need a sense of humor. Or earplugs."

    "How far gone is he?"

    "Oh, he's not, that's the point. He was killed in a car accident a few years after he came out of the closet. So his parents had him raised to save his soul from burning in Hell. They still come out here every other week or so to try converting him back to straightendom."

    "Christ. I think I'd rather deal with the dead people. No offense."

    "None taken. But who's worse, them for keeping him here, knowing sooner or later he'll be just a pile of animated bone, or him for fighting them when they've promised to put him back if he repents? I think I'd fake it if I was him."

    The door beeped. Amy and I became conspicuously quiet. Dodgeston, a keeper dressed in blue scrubs embroidered with his name, came in with a young-looking blond man. Dodgeston nodded to me and left without a word or a look to either of the corpses in the room. Patrick sat sullenly at the desk with Amy.

    "Hi, Amy."

    "Hi, Patrick. This is Dean. He's the one that'll kill us the day we go rogue."

    "Hi, Dean." Patrick regarded me, then turned to Amy. "Did you try the 'brains' thing on him?"

    "Yeah, he thought it was funny."

    Patrick nodded as if he approved.

    The conversation was strange in several ways. Neither of them seemed to be bothered, or joking, when they mentioned that I might have to kill them. And it didn't help that Patrick had a deep, bloodless gash across the right side of his forehead. It looked more like a fake movie effect than human flesh. It hadn't even been stitched closed by a mortician. Perhaps it was one more punishment Patrick's parents wanted him to endure.

    "So he's decent then?" Patrick asked.

    "Yeah."

    I'd seen the other workers speak casually with each other, treating the residents as if they were nothing more than furniture. But being on the receiving end of it was irritating. "I can hear you, you know."

    "We know," Patrick said. "So what are we doing today?"

    "Nothing," Amy answered. "The place is dead."

    I chimed in with a flat, "Ha, ha, ha."

    Amy smiled impishly at me before turning away.

    Things were tense because we'd all had to pass Sabrina Rosa on the way to the back room. Hers was the heartbreaking kind of case you couldn't find words for. She was a pretty little thing, delicate and well-formed with long black hair and beautiful Hispanic features. She'd died six weeks ago, hemorrhaging during child birth.

    On the advice of the doctor, her husband had her raised and brought immediately to Silver Springs, where she expressed a steady supply of breast milk for their daughter. She begged daily to be allowed to see the child, and as depressing as it was, I couldn't blame the father for wanting his daughter to remember her mother from pictures rather than the undead thing that nursed her.

    "Monitor, west sector fence check."

    I grabbed my radio and keyed the mike. "Confirmed."

    When I turned back to Amy and Patrick, they had dark looks on their faces. I was unsure what had happened in that moment to change the light mood. "What's wrong?"

    Patrick looked at Amy, who avoided looking at me. I was beginning to hate that.

    "You should tell him, if he's that decent."

    "Tell me what?"

    Amy didn't answer. More looks passed between them that I disliked, and it was the bad feeling at the pit of my stomach dislike.

    "Just tell me." My amusement was long gone.

    "Let's just say we aren't the only monsters here," Amy said quietly. The barely-contained emotion in her voice made her sound more human than ever. "The day I go savage, if I have even a bit of brain left, there will be certain people I'm aiming for."

    Amy's words disturbed me. I'd seen nasty things in my life, but truth be told, it wasn't my primary nature to distrust people. I didn't like what I saw in her eyes. The hate bothered me, of course. People didn't think right when they hated. But the fear, and the slight tremble behind it - that bothered me more. People could hate for no reason at all. That tremble was the result of experience. That fear, and the eventual anger it grew, was learned.

    It had started when a certain voice came over the radio. So I started thinking worse of the people I worked with.

    At my next stint on the night shift, I booted up the second computer in the dark office where we worked. I was alone this time. That made it easier. I logged into the camera archives and started watching the history of Silver Springs, one angle at a time.

    Amy's room was a ten-by-ten concrete cell. The only things in it were a caged light bulb, a bed bolted to the floor with a cheap mattress, and a pile of clothes in one corner. And Amy herself.

    She looked bad. Again, she didn't look at me when I came in. She hadn't showed up at the office as usual, and I was afraid something was wrong. There, in the different light, she looked pale. There were shadows around her eyes and in other places that never looked hollow before. She looked more like a ghost than anything living.

    "How often?" I asked. She jerked a little at the sound of my voice.

    "Not too often, I suppose. Three or four times in all."

    I had a hard time looking at her and not seeing her black-andwhite version on the fourteen-inch screen, mostly obscured by another, uniformed, body. "Show me the marks."

    She looked like she was going to protest, but for the first time that I could recall, she looked into my eyes and shut her mouth. She unbuttoned her shirt, leaving it in a heap on the bed, and then removed her bra.

    She should have been beautiful, a woman entering the prime of youth. She should have been in a different bedroom. Someone should have followed the clothes with kisses as they were removed. Instead, her bare flesh revealed dark bruises, several recognizable as hand-shaped. The clearest was over her left breast, a definite handprint, most likely from a slap. She had nail marks in the skin over her collarbone and one mean-looking bite above her right buttock.

    "Patrick is worse."

    "I know." I resisted the urge to trace her wounds with my fingers. "I've already seen his."

    Patrick was farther gone than Amy, his flesh wilting and a mild stench seeping from within. There had been bruises from fists on his torso, long bar-shaped contusions that I could merely speculate on, and small punctures that he wouldn't talk about. Worst of all were the words - slashing letters carved into his thighs, back and buttocks. With more time, the edges of the gashes would peel away, the vessels under the skin would burst and discolor more places on Patrick's body, and all signs of abuse would be lost to rot.

    Tears came with Amy's words. "They say we don't feel pain." She turned back to face me, her arms covering her breasts, and leaned against me as she shook. Maybe they didn't feel pain like living people did, but they obviously felt something. Amy looked like a battered wife, a torture victim. I couldn't heal her, no one could. I couldn't put her back in her grave, or give her true life again. I couldn't do more than fire her abusers, maybe threaten them for good measure. I couldn't do anything that could take away her hurt, but I could hold her. I could comfort her, so I did.

    Watching Patrick and Amy eat made my stomach turn. But they agreed to help me in the monumental task of going through all of Silver Springs' files to ensure I'd cut out all the scum. So I paid them back with what should have been a nice pair of beef roasts. Amy had the decency to cut hers into strips and eat it like jerky. Patrick dove into the raw hunk, tearing chunks away with his teeth alone. Neither had the feral look in their eyes. They looked like two friends sharing a nice meal, their faces smeared with cow blood.

    "Mostly, they just give us chicken," Patrick said with a mouth full of red.

    "Superstition. They think giving you raw beef encourages the blood lust." I was trying not to look but thought it was rude not to face the person I was speaking to. It made the conversation more difficult.

    "Well, that's silly." He waved a fist-sized piece of flesh. "Cow is cheaper than chicken. Usually."

    "Does it really make a difference?" I asked.

    Patrick nodded, his cheeks puffed like a chipmunk's. "Chicken has less flesh, more bone. Not that I can't eat bone, but I like the meat better. Beef has lots more meat."

    Patrick grinned. I hope he wasn't insulted that I looked away. There was no such thing as a well-fed zombie. They were always hungry. But early on, like these two were, regular meals staved off emotions like anger, and it slowed the rot.

    After the mess was cleaned up and my helpers were washed, Amy started pulling files. I was unsure on the ethics of letting them look at private files, but they'd been doing it all along so at least I wouldn't be the only one in trouble.

    Amy gave me the cheeriest smile I'd ever seen from her and set a sizable stack of manila folders in front of me. "Here's your part of the A's."

    I looked from the stack, then back to her. Each folder represented a person like her who had been inside Silver Springs' gates. The facility had hosted more corpses than most funeral homes.

    Events often feed into each other. One thing leads directly to another, maybe not through the initial person's reactions, but rippled through the local society by causing reactions in others. If Patrick had never pushed Amy to tell me about the abuse, the three of us would have never found the missing residents.

    The stack grew slowly, but it was apparent when it reached more than three files high that unaccounted-for residents were a pattern, not an exception. After our first night of going through the files, I had over a dozen folders of missing people. That is, people who had a date of entering the facility but no daily report, no exit date, and no termination date. I put the files in my locker in the main security room.

    All the camera feeds played on individual monitors and originally, it was the only place the guards could access the Secure-NET. When I started, I'd pointed out that in the event of an emergency, there was no guarantee that security could stay in that room to run things. So they changed the network so we could access it from any computer on site or at the backup station downtown.

    After three nights, I had to rearrange my locker to make more room. When we were done, we got the missing files out and counted them. One hundred and forty-eight people.

    The way the system worked was a zombie, raised for whatever reasons, was entered into Silver Springs care by whoever raised them. Technically, maybe even legally - I didn't know because I never followed the legislation and hype - zombies belonged to the person who had them raised. Like a pet or a piece of property.

    Silver Springs worked like a storage facility with cells for each occupant, daily exercise and meals, and that was about it. Zombies decayed; often the unseen bits went first, like the brain. So there was little maintenance. When a zombie rotted bad enough, they stayed in their room, fed and monitored until either their owner paid to have them put down, or until they were a puddle of biological waste. We had jars for those because they were harmless. Some people said they were insentient. I hoped they were right.

    Dates of reburial or release from the facility were always listed multiple times and usually highlighted in case of liability cases later on. Home office drilled into us that we were only responsible while the clients were under our care. If they went savage an hour after their release, it was someone else's problem.

    Not one of those one hundred and forty-eight people had a laid-torest or release date. We knew they weren't still at the facility because we monitored each person electronically, and I had no tracking information for any of them.

    I caught one of the keepers, Madeline Browny, as she came in to clock out, dressed in a white polo and slacks with a black utility belt. Her taser pressed into me as she leaned over to borrow my station's phone. She made a point to swivel slightly so that a gap appeared between the "V" of her collar and her skin. I could see clear down to her navel, and she acknowledged it with a wink and smile. I guess when you spend all your time around the dead, any breathing man will do. I returned a polite, slightly vacant smile and waited until she moved out of my personal space before speaking to her.

    "Hey, Maddy, I found some files missing departure dates when I was cleaning out the cabinet. Any clue what happened to those people?"

    She turned back to me with a brilliant smile and sat on the edge of the desk. "Are things so slow around here that cleaning files is what they've got you doing?"

    She shook her head and tsk'ed at me, making her shiny brown hair bounce. Keepers were paid very well. They had enough will to command the dead, but usually not enough strength to raise them. Madeline's haircut probably cost as much as my entire uniform, including the gun.

    She'd started hitting on me the first day, and made it clear that any time I spent on her would leave me well compensated. She evidently thought that was attractive. I didn't. I guess a lot of people get weirded out by her chosen career.

    "Eh, I'm not one for just sitting on my ass, watching monitors all day."

    She grinned, eyeing me. "I can tell."

    I didn't give her any more openings and after a moment of silence, she gave another toss of her head and stood. "They've probably just been laid back and the office staff was too lazy to update the file. Don't worry about it. If they're not here, they're not here. I don't keep track of why. I do happen to know that you have tomorrow off. Me too, want some company?"

    "Tomorrow is laundry day," I answered.

    "I look good in my skivvies." The look on her face was past carnal attraction and about three steps into skank. I gave her another blank smile.

    "Maybe some other time. I've got too much on my plate for tomorrow."

    She gave me a pouty face. I continued keeping my mouth shut because I found her attitude rather harsh. If she treated other living people so flippantly, I wondered how she treated her charges.

    "Well, see you later then." She offered a reluctant wave.

    I "Mmhmm"ed and nodded, keeping my eyes on the computer screen. After a silent moment, Madeline left, letting the door close heavily - not quite slamming - behind her. I wasn't buying, not the bodily goods she offered nor the drivel she spouted.

    One person unaccounted for, maybe two. But a hundred and forty-eight?

    After my laundry was done, I sat down with a list of a dozen names, a cross-section of the people who used Silver Springs. In fact, I sat there just looking at the list for a good twenty minutes. Somewhere behind each name was a reason.

    There were a lot of things in the files at the office, but the reasons were excluded. I wondered if each family was like Amy's ex or Patrick's parents. Were there any people who raised the dead for the right reasons? Were there even right reasons?

    At the top of the list were Bill and Linda Cochran.

    "Hello?" The voice was female and older, much older. It shook with age and general cheerfulness.

    "Is this Mrs. Cochran?" I was starting to regret this already.

    "Yes it is, who's calling?"

    "Mrs. Cochran, my name is Dean and I work at Silver Springs Care Community. I'm calling you today to ask you a few things about…" I checked the list. "Steven. Ma'am, when was the last time you saw Steven here?"

    "Steven? I'm not sure what you're talking about. Just a moment, please." I heard the soft clink of the phone being placed on a table or counter. Mrs. Cochran's voice became distant but still audible. "Bill, sweetie, there's a man on the phone asking about Steven."

    There were a few unidentifiable noises, then the sound of the phone being picked up again. "Who is this?" a much younger, male voice asked.

    "Mr. Cochran, my name is Dean and I work at Silver Springs. I'm calling in regards to Steven Cochran, who is at our facility."

    Bill sounded hurried as he spoke. "Look, I'm not sure why you're calling. My father died, permanently, over eight months ago. He was in Silver Springs for a bit, but we couldn't afford your fees in addition to my mother's growing health costs."

    "So he's no longer here?"

    "I'd assume not. But shouldn't you know that?"

    "Do you know when he left?" I said. "We're going through paperwork and discovered his file with no notes on when he left."

    "I don't know when it was. We arranged for someone to come in and lay him back to rest, but we weren't told when exactly it happened. And now I have to go tend to my mother, who's sitting in the living room crying thanks to you."

    Bill Cochran terminated the call without another word, leaving me glaring at the phone. I assumed this would be awkward, but the reaction I got from the Cochrans was unexpected.

    I gave it a moment and dialed the next number.

    There was no answer at the Williams' or the Rodriguez's. The Bishop's answering machine picked up, and I had no intention of leaving a record of my calls.

    Finally, Ruth Dickenson answered on the third ring. "Hello, Ms. Dickenson. I'm Dean from Silver Springs Care Community. I'm calling in regards to Randolf Dickenson."

    Ruth cut me off before I could get any further. "Look, I'm sorry, but we just can't afford what you all charge. I know it's not right, but we can't keep him here and my parents would kill me if I told them I had him put back in his grave. I know it's not right dumping him on you like that, but I really had no choice."

    Then she, too, hung up on me. Two calls in and I saw a trend already. The next two numbers were to disconnected cell phones. The third led to voice mail for someone other than the Nancy Keys on my list. The next two to answer told me politely that I had the wrong number and they knew no one by the name I gave. I stopped calling there.

    So, the missing people had been abandoned at Silver Springs, one way or another. It was possible they'd been put down into unmarked graves on the land and no one had noted it in writing. There was no separation between past and current occupants other than exit dates on the top page. Maybe these people had just slipped into the cracks because they never actually left. There'd be no sign of bodies re-laid unless the company had marked the site in some way. I doubt they'd have put much of their own money out for that sort of thing.

    A good keeper could feel the presence of the dead. Maybe it was time for me to take Madeline up on her offer to be alone.

    I'd been building this dark cloud of suspicion for most of my work-free waking moments, bad enough that I expected people to see it around me on my next day back to work. But I heard laughter as I entered through the shatter-proof glass door to the office space that customers saw.

    There were two main secretaries. Nancy was a short, round black woman in cloud-gray slacks and a white Silver Springs polo. Dotty was a taller white woman in her mid-forties, blonde hair graying, and wore black pants with her polo. They were both sitting on the desk of a part-time worker, a redhead in her twenties who hated the polo, using every excuse possible to avoid wearing it. Today, it was on the window ledge with a leather purse while a black, lacy tank top covered her from belly up.

    There were plates on the desk in varying states of fullness. They looked at me and Dotty waved. "Hi, Dean. Slip in the back before it's all gone and help yourself to some snacks."

    "What's going on?"

    "Buffet," Nancy answered. "They always over-order. There should still be plenty."

    "The chicken is great." At that point, they excluded me from the conversation. They were chuckling and chatting again in a tight circle, as if I'd never interrupted them.

    I went through a door to the back. A counter normally filled with a multitude of office gadgets, reams of paper, boxes of folders, and the essential coffee maker, had been cleared and the remains of an impressive buffet was jammed into the space.

    I was trying to figure out a way to balance one more chicken strip atop a pile of potato salad, coleslaw, apple pie and macaroni salad when Patrick wandered into the room, looking paler and gaunter than usual. He shuffled forward, eyes on the carpet.

    "Patrick?" I looked for more signs of abuse. Had I missed someone? Had his parents made an appearance in my off hours? "Patrick, what's wrong?"

    He didn't answer. I watched him move slowly to the second desk. I looked for signs of… something. Any kind of emotion. I found myself scared that something vital inside of him had finally given in, and all that was left was a shell stuck in a routine.

    "Patrick?"

    He sat and looked up at me. Oh, he was there all right, but he was in torment. I steeled myself. I'd missed someone, obviously. Pain, real pain, was in his doughy, paling eyes.

    "Amy's gone."

    I'd steeled myself, but not for that.

    The air rushed out of me in something that sounded like a whistle. "Gone? Did her ex take her back? Or lay her back?"

    "I don't know. I just know that I never saw her yesterday and I always see her. She helps me stay sane, and I help her - you know."

    I nodded when he didn't continue.

    "And today her room is, different. Her clothes are in a dumpster and someone else is in her room. At least, I really hope it's someone else."

    I looked down at the plate I'd sat on the desk. "Just a minute."

    The trio of women were still talking in the office. I heard them, but somehow their words made no sense. "Hey, I forgot to ask, what was the buffet for?"

    "Some investors." Nancy shook her head. "Every couple of months, the upper staff bring in a bunch of investors. They have some sort of presentation, lots of food and we never see any of them."

    "Too good to come see how the place actually works."

    "They just want to say they've been close to the walking dead. Like we're a zoo."

    "Who are the investors?" I asked.

    "Oh, they're not real investors," Dotty said. "They just come in and buy off the contracts that have gone to default."

    "What?" That sinking feeling was back in my stomach as if it had never left.

    "When people just dump their zombies here, or when they stop paying, you know?"

    "They sell them?" I asked. The women nodded.

    "Sad thing, but we're not a charity. So the investors come in, lay down a load of cash and take home a contract."

    "A person you mean? They take home a person?"

    "Oh, sweetie." Nancy shook her head. "They're not people anymore, not really. It's in the contract: if you stop paying, they can sell your property."

    And zombies were the only real kind of property Silver Springs had.

    Every person has a dark place inside them. Usually, thoughts bubble up from this place, catching us by surprise as they slip out. Sometimes, they make it into our words or actions. Usually, they just bounce around in our mind a bit before we drown them in guilt and morality.

    Patrick and I sat in a chilled silence, both of us consumed by our dark places. What it meant for him, I couldn't tell. I didn't even know what it meant for me or where it would take me, but I was fueled by something. Something else I hadn't known.

    I'd grown to really like Amy. We'd had just over a week of working together, but I'd done more actual work with Amy and Patrick than I had with the living employees of Silver Springs. At some point in my mind, the constant thought that some day I'd have to see Amy rot, degrade, dying slowly - not fast and sudden while she was still beautiful - had been replaced by the memory of how she felt crying in my arms and the look in her eyes all the times we'd sat in the office, joking and chatting like friends.

    At some point, she'd become the reason I looked forward to driving through Silver Springs gates, and I hadn't realized it until I knew she was gone.

    The human dark side isn't always evil. Sometimes it's strong, non-compliant and socially inappropriate. Sometimes it's the place where things, big things, get done.

    "Patrick, I need honesty from you. Don't bullshit me because you're bullshitting yourself. How far gone are you?"

    He looked up at me, surprised. I didn't meet his eyes. I sat looking at the plate of food I would never eat. But I saw him in my peripheral vision, looking up at me, startled. "I'm not good. I'm like an apple a few weeks past the freshness date. I have bad spots."

    "And your self control?"

    "Still good. Almost excellent. I'm hungry a lot, but eating meat kills the drive. It's easy to ignore."

    I nodded but said nothing. Instead, I stood and walked through the door. My feet crossed carpet, pulling the rest of me past more offices and out the back door to the lawn between the administration building and the zombie barns. I entered the closest one, knowing finally where I was going. I stopped outside the room that had been Amy's.

    The thing inside was losing skin in large patches. The muscles underneath were darkened with age. Even the visible bones and ligaments were yellowed. It looked up at me, like nothing that could have ever been human. Its eyes were losing their roundness and looked like dark, pitted fruits in their sockets. The mouth was already caught in a sneer but it turned up a bit at the edges as it saw me looking in the little glass rectangle in the door. No, nothing in that flesh was Amy.

    I found Amy's file back in the office, shoved back into the filing cabinet we had cleaned only a few days earlier.

    "What are you doing?" Patrick asked, watching as I gathered my pile of other missing residents with Amy's folder added.

    I stopped and looked up at him. Maybe it was in my face, or in my actions, Patrick's eyes widened. He covered the distance between us with the startling speed that made people like me scared of people like him. "Take me with you," he whispered, the words almost a flat hiss as they were forced between his teeth.

    I said nothing.

    "The first time I so much as bare teeth at you, slice me to bits and put me back in a box. But I cannot stay here knowing this. I cannot sit in a fucking cell all day and not want to go savage on these people. Amy gives me a chance, she gives me something else to focus on. Do not leave me here or I swear I will rend the flesh from anyone who so much as looks at me funny, and I'll make sure the others do so, too."

    Memories of the first days came back, when renegades ran free, and when people sent those they raised to handle their every little irritation, like solicitors and door-to-door preachers. And for a moment, I wasn't sure I wanted to prevent Patrick's threat here, at the rotting ground for people who had once been loved.

    "Out the back door. You will ride in the trunk. You will listen to what I tell you to do, and if you ever, ever think you might be getting too far gone to be helpful to me, you will tell me. No bullshit, Patrick. If you attack me, I can't do this."

    "I know."

    "You're already dead, anyway. They can't kill you again, they can just give you peace."

    Patrick's eyes looked wetter. "I know."

    The guard in the little building at the gate waved happily as I drove up moments later. "Where you off to so soon? Didn't you just get here?"

    I smiled as cheerfully as I could manage. "I've got an errand to run."

2

    Paul Mallery lived in a brick, split-level home accented with cream siding. The grass needed a trim, and there were big bald spots in what should have been flowerbeds between the shrubs surrounding it.

    We waited in the driveway of a house with a "For Sale" sign in the yard until five-thirty, when a small, dark blue sedan pulled into the driveway. A long-faced man with a prominent chin, dark brown hair, and wire-rimmed glasses exited the car. He struggled with a cell phone stuck to his ear, a gym bag, mail, and his keys before he unlocked the door and disappeared inside.

    Patrick and I hadn't spoken much. I was unsure of our strategy, so I didn't know what to tell him. He seemed to understand. In fact, he seemed to have a dark-fueled fire of his own. He was first out of my car when Paul arrived, though I was only a moment behind. We crossed the corner yard of the house we were parked at and into Paul's property. He left the door unlocked, but then, he didn't expect us to come in.

    Inside, the house was sparsely decorated. How long had it taken to sell off or give away all of Amy's things? The bare floors shone softly in the light beaming through the windows. We heard Paul speaking as he moved through the house, then the voice grew louder as he came down the stairs. He froze when he saw us. My mouth opened and Patrick was on him.

    I saw little more than a blur of blue when Patrick spun, using Paul's left side as a pivot point, hooking one arm in Paul's and wrenching it behind his back. He took the phone away as he pulled the right arm up to meet the left. Patrick, an average man at best in life, held both of Paul's wrists in one hand and tossed the phone to me. I disconnected the call, and then turned the phone off before dropping it on an armchair.

    "Let's let that go to voice mail." I layered my disturbance at Patrick onto my fury at the man he held.

    "What do you want?" Paul stood stiff, squared up as much as Patrick would let him. But his voice shook. Male, and as well-conditioned as he appeared, he seemed inexperienced with violence.

    "Why did you stop paying for Amy?"

    "Are you kidding?"

    Patrick's mouth opened into a snarl, leaving droplets of phlegm on the back of Paul's neck.

    "It cost an arm and a leg." Paul tried to watch both of us at the same time and failed. He couldn't turn away from me, but obviously thought Patrick was the bigger danger. "I couldn't afford it, not while keeping up with my other bills. And, she was dead. It took me a while to come to terms with that. My therapist said it would be good to let her go."

    "You didn't let her go. You just stopped paying for her."

    "I let her go. I released unnecessary debts that I was using as justification to keep my attachments to her."

    "They sold her."

    Paul didn't react. I expected him to flinch, to look at me in horror or a little sadness. Patrick twitched and Paul grimaced.

    I tried again, more venomously this time. "They sold her."

    "I know," Paul said with a measure of difficulty. It must have been pain; it sure wasn't regret. "They sent me a notice. It said they had the right to donate her body, or lay her to rest without my permission. I figured they laid her."

    "Why didn't you do it?"

    "Why should I pay a couple grand to put her back when they would do it for me?"

    "Because you're the one who raised her."

    The room went silent. It felt like something should have changed in those moments, but we were at a stalemate. Paul was waiting to see what we were going to do. I was trying to decide what we were going to do.

    "Do you still have the letter?"

    Paul nodded. "It's on the desk. I only got it last week."

    I found a desk with what looked like a few weeks worth of mail thrown on top. The letter was in a torn envelope, printed with our business address and name. I read it in front of him, pushing for time as I figured out what I wanted to do. It did say that the decision would be taken out of his hands, that Silver Springs had the right to donate her body and effects, to continue care and sue him for it, or to lay her back in her grave without his approval. How was a person to know which happened?

    "Donate," I said bitterly under my breath.

    "They donated her body," Paul said, half-question, half-confirmation. "Amy would have liked that. She wanted to be an organ donor, you know."

    "She was still in that body when they took it, or do you not want to remember that part?"

    "That's impossible." Paul was so flippant that I expected Patrick to draw blood with the viciousness of his glare alone. Patrick looked a lot like he had when I watched him eat the slab of cow. Only then he had been cheerful. Now there was nothing but rage on his face.

    "Everyone knows the soul doesn't come back, just the body."

    "Then what's inside?" Patrick had a dangerous edge to his voice. "What brings the light to their eyes and makes them feel love again?"

    "Memories." Paul grimaced again as Patrick moved a few inches. "It's only memories. Imprints and folds of the brain. There's nothing there."

    "Nothing there?" Patrick's mouth was creeping closer to the bare meat of Paul's neck.

    "Leave it be. I doubt that flabby logic lets even him sleep better at night."

    Patrick straightened up, though I doubt Paul noticed. "What are we going to do with him?"

    "Let him rot. In the end, it's all selfish bastards like him end up doing."

    We left Paul Mallery mostly as we found him, hopefully with a little more fuel for his nightmares.

    Well, we couldn't keep storming into people's houses demanding answers. Not only would they figure out what we were up to, sooner or later we'd run into someone with a gun. I glanced at Patrick, who was sitting still, looking out the passenger side window. Guns wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but they weren't good, either.

    And I had to remember what Patrick was. I couldn't take him back to Silver Springs, knowing that if his family stopped paying, he'd be sold off to cover the fees. Knowing that his family kept him locked in his rotting body on purpose, trying to force him to repent for being attracted to men. But to be honest, I was uncomfortable keeping Patrick around me.

    I took him home with me, anyway. There were ways to find answers there. Names and dates that might help me come up with a better plan, and a freezer full of venison a friend gave me last winter that could keep Patrick in the right frame of mind.

    Patrick, to his benefit, proved himself not just obedient, but useful in a myriad of small ways. For two days, I kept us locked in my apartment, television on for any news about our disappearance. Patrick picked up my apartment and kept coffee coming while I stayed up far too long looking through files and making notes. In some of the earlier files, right around the time Silver Springs opened, it claimed that investors hand-picked the first subjects to enter the facility. There were 'referred by' notes and comments on the family and subjects.

    The Internet made the hunt easy: enter the names in a box and click "Search." One doctor plus one entrepreneur plus one lawyerturned-businessman equals a retirement home for the undead.

    That's when I admitted what I'd been thinking for a while. To get more answers, I needed to have a chat with the man in charge. That's also when the microwave beeped and for the first time in our long seclusion, Patrick wasn't hovering over the machine, waiting. The hot, metallic scent drifting into the living room from the tiny kitchen told me the contents were definitely for Patrick and not me. But more time passed and he didn't appear.

    I stood and took two steps before thinking better of it and doubling back for my gun. I kept it cupped in a hand, yet casually at my side in case I was overreacting. The hall was dark, leading back to two small rooms and a bathroom. Sunlight had started to come through the windows of my bedroom and made the doorway glow softly. The sound of shuffling came from one of the rooms. I took the chance of turning my back on the second bedroom because the door was closed and it was easier to check my own bedroom first. It looked as I'd left it, cluttered from too many things jammed into too tight a space. I pushed the bathroom door open and the shuffling continued elsewhere.

    I raised my gun. The silence - save for the arrhythmic shuffling - had me on edge after reading so many zombie case files. My brain was working overtime, sending me dark scenarios and caffeine-laced adrenaline. I pushed open the door to the second bedroom and hazarded a glance inside. Patrick was walking blank-eyed around the room, shuffling with one hand moving along the wall. Once he completed a circuit, his hand rode up the open door and around its edge into blank space. His eyes lit up, looking almost human despite having turned the color of old blood. I hadn't noticed them change and that bothered me.

    "Thank God. I couldn't find the door. I felt like I was in a cell again."

    I tried to hide the strange look on my face. "The door disappeared?"

    "Sometimes I dream about being locked up in my cell at Silver Springs and instead of locking, the door would disappear completely. It's like, when the door is locked, there's at least the option of leaving. But I always thought the door vanished in the dream because I didn't have that opportunity."

    Zombies dreamed. They even had nightmares.

    He was breathing heavy and he caught sight of the gun held firmly in my hand. His eyes widened. "Did something happen?"

    "I'm just tired, I think. Your food dinged and it made me jumpy."

    "Thanks." Patrick shot me a gummy smile that stuck with me for far too long.

    I felt bad about it, mostly because he seemed to be in good spirits. But I locked him in the bathroom with his snack, anyway, before I tucked in for a bit of sleep. I had hoped when I met Patrick and Amy that I would treat them better than the other people. I hoped I could look past their skin and see who they were underneath the slowly decaying bodies. I was disappointed that I wasn't better than that. But I'd rather have to deal with being a prejudiced son of a bitch toward my friend than him ripping my throat out in my sleep.

    If the home office knew I'd gone AWOL, they made no mention of it. Of course, walking into the slick little office with Patrick, with bloodshot eyes and skin that had taken on an unhealthy shade and shape, probably helped everyone keep their mouths shut. I didn't ask how Patrick could still see, because it seemed a rude thing to ask a friend. But I did wonder.

    I was getting worried about Patrick, far more than I was for the shellac-haired secretary who looked at us in absolute shock before waving us through to the offices, rather than letting us sit in the waiting room to disturb other visitors. There was something wrong with him that I couldn't put my finger on. The skin discoloration was obvious, but there were other places on his body, strange hollows where there should have been a smooth line, convexes in parts that were supposed to curve in. He was beginning to look like a corpse I once pulled out of a river, bloated and discolored. The only good signs were that his skin wasn't sloughing off and he didn't stink as much.

    I wondered, not for the first time, but with the worst intensity, if the handlers at Silver Springs did more than keeping the zombies in line. I feared they had enough power to keep them preserved, too, and out here in the wild, they might rot at the speed of a normal body. I forgot how long we'd been in my apartment, how long Patrick had been away from the keepers.

    I put my worries behind me as we walked into the office of Jim Wagner, CEO of the company that owned Silver Springs. They had two more residences in progress, both much nicer judging by the models sitting on a table by the left wall's bookshelves. In front of us was one of those desks that were so heavy it looked like it had been built in the room. Behind it was a wall of windows speckled with green potted plants. Jim stood to our right, pouring a fresh cup of coffee from his machine on a little table. He looked up at us and nothing but polite cheerfulness marred his face.

    It felt fake, one of those polite "I'm listening to you because I have to" expressions.

    "Dean, what can I do for you?"

    The door shut and Patrick turned around. Jim looked startled for a moment before that true emotion was sucked into the bog of his mask. In the artificial light of energy-saving, compact fluorescent bulbs, Patrick looked ghostly, his colors those of dead skin and clotted blood.

    "I'm looking for a girl. One of your investors bought her out of her contract."

    I think Patrick smiled behind me, because Jim took an unconscious half step back.

    "Dean, I'm not sure where you got your information, but there is no buying people out of contracts. These are people we care for, not products."

    "Don't bullshit me. I know what happens when the family defaults on their bill. I've read the fine print in your contracts."

    "The client is then laid to rest," Jim said with a straight face. The level of shit, and danger, was rising in the room. "At the family's expense, of course."

    "Patrick." I only had to say the word and he moved in a sick smear, stopping short behind Jim, close but not quite touching. To his credit, Jim looked ready to follow his lies right into Hell. "I said, don't bullshit me. Tell me what happens when the families stop paying."

    "Like I said, we put them-"

    Patrick snarled and between one blink and the next, I saw he'd gone from hovering over Jim, to holding Jim's right arm up behind his back and breathing hot air from his open mouth across Jim's neck. "We put them up on auction. The investors come and buy out their contracts. It saves the company money. We recoup part of what we lose when an account goes to default."

    "What happens to them after that?" Patrick closed his mouth on Jim's neck. There was no crunch or scream, just a soft sucking sound. I glared at him, but he didn't see.

    Jim had trouble getting words out. "I don't know, dammit. Call him off. I don't know what happens after that. They aren't my problem, anymore. Goddammit make him stop!"

    "Patrick, give him two steps."

    Patrick backed up reluctantly, and unless I'd misinterpreted, he licked the taste of Jim from his lips. "So how would a determined person go about finding where your former clients ended up? Do you keep records?"

    "No, no paper trail here."

    I wanted to say this proved that he knew he was doing something wrong. But there was no point wasting the time arguing with him. "No records?"

    "Not here." Which of course, isn't the same thing as "no."

    "He seems to be more cooperative when I'm chewing on him," Patrick said. "Really, I don't mind helping out."

    "You should probably tell me where the records are, since they're not here. Otherwise, I might not be able to persuade my friend to keep patient." Finally, Jim's concern about our meeting looked genuine.

    "Roger Cade," Jim said, shaking and moving slowly to his desk. Patrick followed him as if waiting for an excuse. Admittedly, I was unsure what was an act and what was real anymore with Patrick. Jim wrote something on a piece of notepaper and handed it to him. "He runs the auctions. He has the records."

    I nodded and Patrick came back over to me. I paused at the door and turned back to Jim. "Oh, and if Mr. Cade can't be found, or mysteriously seems prepared for us, instead of leaving him shaken but whole like you, we'll leave pieces of him for you to find in inconvenient places for a very long time."

    Jim paled. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Patrick smile and blow him a kiss. I guess it didn't matter how much Patrick played with Jim, if we got what we needed with no blood loss - particularly mine.

    Roger Cade was not an easy man to find. He didn't keep an office and his home address was unlisted. The only contact information we had for him was a cell phone number that I suspected was quite disposable. I thought for sure Jim had called Roger as soon as we left his office, and doubted I'd get an answer at all.

    I left Patrick locked in my apartment and called from a pay phone in a nearby mini-mall. If my name was absent on the caller ID, Roger would be more likely to answer. After three rings, he did. Other voices filled the space under Roger's, adding one more immediate level of irritation to his Hollywood-worthy southern drawl.

    "What can I do yew fer?"

    "Mr. Cade, I'm calling on behalf of Jim Wagner and Silver Springs…"

    "What's Jim need now?"

    "He's asked me to review records he says you keep for him as part of the research for a new project he's considering investing in."

    Roger chuckled. "Never enough for him, is it? All right, where do you want me to bring them and when?"

    "I'll be putting extra time in at the office on Saturday. You can bring them there in the morning, 9 a.m.?" It meant I'd have to pick my way into Jim's offices, but I was betting if Jim ever worked outside of his weekday nine-to-five, he'd probably die on the spot.

    "I'll let you look them over then." The line disconnected.

    I stood looking at the phone for a moment, trying to count the lies I'd told and wondering how I was going to keep them all straight.

    "Do you think she's okay?" Patrick asked when I returned with two bags of fresh meat. He was sitting at my tiny kitchen table, looking at Amy's file, the only one open in the pile of manila and papers. He closed it after asking, though his hand lingered for a moment before putting it back in the pile.

    "I don't know."

    "If there's not a keeper where she is, she'll go faster." Patrick looked up at me and I almost cried. His eyes were gone, or completely unrecognizable as eyes in their sockets. His lips, they were still there, but at some point they'd stopped closing completely over his teeth. He had the grimace of a corpse, and it was my fault for taking him out of Silver Springs.

    "I never thought much about what would happen to me. But Amy, I worried about what would happen to her all the time." Patrick laughed and bits jiggled that shouldn't have. It was both painful and fascinating to watch him speak. "Funny how I thought everyone else there must have done something to deserve it, that they could all just rot and no one would mourn them. Except Amy, she was like the embodied example of how life was unfair."

    "We'll find her. At the very least to put her to rest."

    "Do you think, afterwards, we could visit my parents?" A bit of the old humorous tone was in his voice. "It's awfully convenient that they can just lock me away, punishing me without ever having to dirty their own hands or seeing what's really happening. I'd like to give them a wake-up call."

    I didn't say it, even though silence made it hang in the air worse than words, but I hoped Patrick made it that long. I felt, with a dark inevitability, that he probably wouldn't.

    Patrick and I arrived at the home office just after seven a.m. It was one of many offices in a five-story building, so the front doors to the building were both unlocked and unmanned. If Jim had spent a little of his side income on the business rather than himself, he could have had an office with a guard, doorman, or at least more security than basic locks and heavy doors. Instead, he gave off the feeling that he wanted to impress you without investing too much money.

    The office doors were much easier to penetrate than those at Silver Springs. No magnetic locks or automatic fail safes, but then this office wasn't meant to be graced by the ambulatory dead. The front lobby space was small, dark but immaculate, which I hoped implied that we wouldn't be interrupted by the cleaning crew. I'd dressed in a suit to convince people of my lie, but there was no way to hide Patrick. Instead, I opened the offices alone and then brought him through the empty corridors afterward. I checked the smaller rooms while he warmed up another snack. I tried not to worry about the increase in the amount he was eating.

    There were no cameras, unless they were the pinhole types. suppose Jim didn't want any evidence of his transgressions.

    When I stopped at the store earlier to get a roll of beef for Patrick and a breakfast sandwich for myself, I also picked up a self-proclaimed "fun camera." The colorful packaging and optimistic wording didn't have the effect the manufacturers likely wanted. Instead of beach trips and birthday parties, this camera would witness something tragic and terrible.

    And I had thought my life would get easier once I retired to a civilian job.

    "Patrick."

    He joined me in a little space behind the front desk and ahead of the back pair of offices. A line of red ran down from the corner of his mouth as if his lips or gums were bleeding.

    "Look, I don't know if we'll get a chance to visit your parents."

    There was a moment of disappointment, or realization, and then Patrick put a macabre version of his trademark flippant grin on his face. "I know. It's not a big deal."

    I gave him a tight-lipped smile and waved the camera at him. "That doesn't mean we can't send them a message."

    "You'll send them pictures of me?"

    I nodded. He stripped without another word, laying bare the extent of his changes. I had grimaced when he and Amy had shown me their keeper-inflicted wounds at Silver Springs, but not this time. Instead, I used the camera to record every split in his skin, every bloating bit and malformation. Last, I took a picture of Patrick smiling, not the forced grin from his skin receding, but showing a mean spirited cheerfulness, and waving at the future recipients of the prints.

    Roger Cade arrived a few minutes early, right as I was close to panicking. I might have been sitting, near motionless in the waiting area, trying not to breathe too deeply as Patrick paced through the offices and halls. But inside there was a cliff, a sheer edge where all the luck we'd had so far, and all the progress made, ceased and plummeted into some unfathomable murky depth that most people called "the worst case scenario."

    I was waiting, wondering how close to that edge we were.

    Cade didn't knock. He just walked in, a man in his fifties, his face beginning to fold into an origami version of what it had been. He wore a black T-shirt with an indiscernible logo, a short-sleeved green flannel shirt, jeans, a pair of very clean tennis shoes, and a Stetson hat that hid most of his short, graying hair. He looked like someone had cut out pieces of men from magazines and patched them together into one person. I hadn't expected him to show up, or anticipated a knock, perhaps hearing him come up the hall. And while he'd caught me by surprise, Patrick's blooming ripe scent appeared to hit Cade between the eyes like a bullet.

    It was true that the company never had a real live - or dead - zombie at the home office, but Cade didn't even let me mumble a half-assed excuse before pulling a gun from a holster under the flannel shirt. I felt like someone had pushed me off the edge of that cliff, caught in a momentary pause before I realized it and fell. His.38 semi-auto was bigger than mine, not to mention it was actually in his hand and pointed at me, while mine was tucked away with the safety on.

    "Who are you and what are you doing here?" Cade asked. His eyes tried to flick around the room and stay on me at the same time, leaving his back to the door that lead to the offices.

    I raised my hands slowly to show I was unarmed. My mouth opened and a lie wouldn't come. There was little time to get to Cade, anyway. Patrick, either on the front loop of his circuit or having heard Cade talking to me, came through the door. Cade gagged under the assault of stench at the same time Patrick saw him aiming down at me with the gun. I was unsure if I was glad at the defense Patrick offered me or not, but I had no choice.

    The human left Patrick as easily as a piece of skin falling from his corpse. I hadn't even drawn breath to yell a warning, command, or a gasp when Patrick bit into Cade's collarbone. There was a sickening crunch, and a spray of something more than just blood. It was like watching someone bite into a large tomato, if a tomato had bones and screamed. Patrick jammed his hand, rotting fingers first, into Cade's mouth and the screaming stopped. Me, I couldn't utter a protest, verbal or not. I fell to the floor and got busy puking on the maroon carpet under one of the fake leather chairs.

    I tried not to look, not to listen, not to smell the raw meat in the air. At some point in the mushy, tearing sounds and splintering snaps of bone and cartilage, I heard the gun thunk onto the floor. I lay clinging to the chair leg for some time when I realized the room was quiet, other than my heartbeat pounding and my inner voice wailing. I wanted to sit longer, without looking, as long as possible to keep the image of whatever was left behind - of Cade and Patrick - from being seared into my head.

    I wasn't a vet for nothing, though, and my instincts stressed that the monster was coming for me next. I had to move or turn. I had to neutralize the threat before it attacked me.

    I stood, pulled my gun, and wobbled a bit at the same time. I saw Patrick and took a deep breath of relief. It wasn't really that bad. It was messy, but messy in a way I'd seen before, a way I could handle. There was a very unnatural, deep "U" cut into what had only minutes before been a living man pointing a gun at me. The gorge of flesh was enough to make the very tip of Cade's shoulder touch the hairline above his ear when Patrick shifted slightly.

    Patrick didn't look at me, but he didn't appear monstrous, either. He looked lost, a little boy far, far too deep into a cruel life. He should have died a tragic victim of an accident, not a killer or a flesh-eating beast like this.

    "Patrick?"

    "I'm here, Dean."

    "How you holding up?"

    I refused to look at him. I didn't want to see him but in his frenzy, he'd pulled Cade on top of himself, so I knew I'd hear the shifting of meat before I was in danger. I bent down and scooped Cade's gun into my other hand.

    "I'm not doing too good, Dean." I think he tried to smile. "How are you?"

    "I'll be honest, I'm a little scared."

    Patrick shook with sobs. No, it was laughter. A broken, desperate sort of laugh, but laughter nonetheless. "I think… Dean, I think…"

    "It's okay, Patrick."

    "Will you take another picture? Make sure they see that one first."

    "Yeah, Patrick. I'll make sure they see it."

    I cried as I unloaded Cade's clip into Patrick's skull, the tears coming unrestrained for the first time since I'd started firing on other human beings.

3

    The hotel wasn't home, but I was leery about returning to my apartment. Certainly soon, if not already, someone would put two and two together and realize that Patrick had disappeared with me, only to show up dead with Cade in the Silver Springs home office. I'd never find Amy if people were watching me, or worse, arresting me. So I checked into a hotel with the clothes on my back, the laptop in my trunk, and Cade's files securely in hand. I kept expecting to find them speckled with blood.

    A trip to a superstore netted me clean clothes, enough food to last a few days and toiletries that the hotel seemed unwilling to provide. I found myself standing in the medicine aisle, staring at a row of boxes, not because I needed something, but out of a reluctant listlessness, an unwillingness to leave. Being somewhere normal made me feel more normal. Less like my world was spiraling out of control.

    I had the answer - I hoped - in the files on the hotel bed. But I also feared that I was caught in a toilet-like whirlpool that was pulling me down the drain. I wondered if I stopped right now, apologized, and grabbed onto the side until the maelstrom passed, maybe I could climb out of this mess and move on. Move on to a perfect hatred of myself for ignoring what was right for what was easy.

    I shook myself out of it and made my feet carry me toward the checkout lanes. I paid, nodding and flashing a fake smile at the cashier who was doing the same to me. I went to my room and my mouth opened to call out to someone who wasn't there, as if the room itself needed me to inform it that I was home from the store. The silence worried me, as did the files, while I tried to use food to combat the mess of feelings in my stomach. I kept looking up with the same beginning of words that had started when I entered the room. I expected to find someone moving from the bathroom, or wandering into my field of vision while pacing the small space.

    Finally, I tossed half a mini-cake toward the trash and opened up the first fat folder. Cade's notes were just that, long text files, spotted with pictures, not arranged by person but by date. So I got to see it all from day one. One soul sold at a time.

    Amy was little more than a footnote in the story of Silver Springs. She was a contract number and a name with quotation marks around it, as if someone thought she should really be called by an inhuman name. There had only been three people actively bidding on her "contract" that night, according to Cade. Other than the auction, it had been a business party complete with closet drunks, under the table deals and insider trading. He had notes on that too, as if blackmail might become an option later.

    Dr. Adrien Arne, who according to the notes, bought out contracts and used the "products" as teaching tools in his med classes, bowed out at $500. My stomach threatened to expel its meal, then settled down when I saw the name Thomas Gregorich as the second bidder, followed by "dropped out at $800."

    Gregorich was infamous; anyone who worked with the animated dead knew him. At Silver Springs, there'd been a memo about him in the main office, one of those mug shots and police profiles. Employees were warned that Gregorich ran a hardcore porn label, keeping an unidentified person with the power to raise and control zombies on hand. He had a set of actors that could take heavy abuse, even star in true snuff films, only to come back under the power of the keeper for another use next week.

    "But he dropped out," I said into the empty room, because just reading it hadn't helped the nausea in my guts. "She's not there."

    The winner at $850, less than horses, cars, or houses went for at auctions, was Frank Henry, who was nothing more than a repeated name in the files so far. Gregorich I knew from reputation. Arne's use was noted casually in a listing, like one might say, "Steven Tyler, a musician." But there was nothing about Henry, other than contracts he bought and contact information at the very back of the book.

    So I opened the laptop and Googled the name. All I got back was a correction, "Did you mean…" No, I didn't, so I Googled the address instead. I got back gibberish for two and a half pages, partial matches like desperate attempts at distraction. Then on the third page, I found a hit that mentioned the street address and town, and the name "Henry."

    It was too close to be a coincidence, so I clicked on it.

    The page was nothing but black text on a white background. "Midnight Entertainments," it said. "Tired of everything else the city has to offer? Midnight Entertainments presents an event for the bored mind. Tuesday nite, 1am, the old furniture market on West Main Street. $25 at the door." There was a date too, a couple of weeks old. But no web page, no contact email or phone number. Just the advertisement.

    I Googled "Midnight Entertainments" as well, but found nothing other than an electronic pornotica publisher and a few escort services in other towns.

    There were few things I disliked more than going into a situation blind. I could ask around, but I didn't know where to start and I was sure Henry would be tipped off long before I learned anything useful.

    So I sat there, looking at the letters as if they held some secret key to unlock the answers to all my questions. The cursor flickered to busy and the page auto-refreshed as someone updated the flier. And the date changed to tomorrow night.

    From the outside, the furniture market looked like it could barely hold itself up. It was a four-story building that, based on the paint and broken signs still clinging to it, had also held a feed store, a fabric warehouse, and an eatery. Now it was a patchwork of peeling multi-colored paint, scarred windows with glass still in the frames, gated doors, and black bars. There were two streetlights, one on each corner. The opposite side of the street was in better shape with one light in the middle. A one-story building took up most of it, painted black and housing a bar that boasted a silver script sign backlit by purple. There was a deli only a shoulder's width away, but it had closed a few hours ago.

    The setup was rather clever: as the bar patrons stepped outside for air, a smoke, relief from the throbbing music, etc, they spread in a semicircle around the building and across the street. No one would notice if someone opened the gate of an abandoned building and slipped inside.

    I followed a pair of gangly men, barely out of their teens, as they went through the gate and faded blue door. It was hot inside, and under the stench of alcohol, humans, and piss, was a smell that made me move faster, more eager. It was the raw meat scent of zombies.

    "Stop pushing, asshole!" one of the boy-men in front of me said. He snarled at me and turned back to his friend. "Fucking old people. Shouldn't let them out in public, should they?"

    The line grew behind me as well, until the thin corridor we were in, shuffling forward at a snail's pace, was stuffed with the smothering feel of too many people. At twenty-five bucks per person, Henry must have been making more than enough to buy Silver Spring's cast-offs for eight-fifty a pop.

    As the human mass moved farther, I got my first look at the people manning the door. There was a black man, inked darker with tribal tattoos and glimmering with silver studs. With him was a Hispanic man, or perhaps white with a strong tan. He was bent over a laptop with the other standing in a bouncer pose behind him. When he straightened up to take cash and let a person in, I saw black facial hair and a wide nose. They were both built thick as bricks.

    The tan man used a digital camera to take a picture of each person, then bent back over the laptop to do something before taking the person's money. I thought about turning and leaving, but there was no space and everyone between me and the door would notice, potentially taking action against me. They could swallow me up before I could raise my arms in defense. So, alternating between reluctance and excitement, I let the crowd push me forward until it was me who faced the doormen.

    The camera flashed and after a moment, I glanced down at the laptop. My photo popped up onscreen and the man used the cursor to mark my eyes and other facial features with blue crosses. Then with a click, a second box appeared and began running a scan. It only took a moment, and I was somewhat disturbed that they were using facial recognition software against a series of pictures. I guessed they were of local police.

    I passed, paid my money and was buzzed into the rest of the warehouse. It was like the expo center where I'd worked security for a while. Concrete walls and floors, a mass of people in constant circulation, and the smell of zombies, of course.

    I found one in under a minute. The crowd pushed me into a static group gathered around a large metal cage. Inside, there was a zombie in a bad state. He was desiccated with skin pulled tight, making him incapable of blinking or closing his mouth, and covering what little muscle tone he had like thin spandex. He was gnawing on a square gap in the wire mesh, probably where they threw in food. I wondered if he could smell the microscopic particles of blood left behind.

    They were set up at almost even spaces in a circle through the warehouse. There were thirteen cages, all without enough room for a person to stand up, or lay all the way down. Amy was in the eighth one. She looked… well, she looked bad, but beautiful at the same time. She was battered, beaten, and haunted, but animate. Not just ambulatory, she was still there in her eyes.

    I thought for the second time in as many days, that I might cry.

    "Amy, Amy," I hissed. She flinched from the people surrounding the cage. One of them banged on it, much like knocking on the glass of an aquarium housing a reptile or fish. I opened my mouth, but I recognized the look in her eyes. It was the glaze of someone who is physically present, but their mind is miles away. I'd seen that look a lot, mostly in the middle of the desert on the face of camouflaged, war-haunted kids who thought they knew what they were getting into when they signed up. And I'd seen it in the eyes of the people in Silver Springs, the ones being herded about the grounds in a semblance of exercise before they were locked back in their cells for another day of rotting.

    I stepped slowly away and into the flow of people. If Amy was trying to escape, I wasn't going to bring her around to reality with a familiar voice. Especially since I didn't have our escape planned yet.

    An air horn sounded in two short bursts and the crowd condensed into the center of the warehouse floor. I don't know what it looked like before, but in the vast emptiness, someone had erected a large cage made of the same materials as the ones holding zombies, but these mesh sections weren't welded together, just linked. I realized where I'd seen cages like these: at the circus when I was a kid, holding the large cats so the handlers could transfer them into the center ring for the show without giving them an opportunity to cause trouble.

    And the people, the hard press of human on human against the walls of the center cage, were beating on the rattling sections of what could only be the pit. It was an underground fighting ring. A significant slice of the event, viewers were hurriedly placing bets when two men, at least as thick as the door bouncers, slid a pair of outside cages to slots on the side of the pit. They opened the doors to let the corpses inside. Someone on top of the cage opened a hatch and dropped a chunk of bloody meat, which fell with a sick splat onto the concrete.

    Both zombies rushed forward. One got there first and dove, sinking its teeth into the food. The second snarled and mimicked the move, only instead of beef, his jaws found the first zombie. Neither looked anything like human anymore, so I suppose it was easy for the viewers to dismiss thoughts that might make them uncomfortable. Or maybe they never bothered to think at all, their vocal excitement and twitching blood lust a mirror of the fighting corpses below.

    I watched two more fights, feeling like the calm center of the storm. Besides myself, the only ones not screaming or cheering on a contender were the bouncers and bet takers who had seen this all before.

    The third fight ended, and the zombies were baited back to their cages with a decent meal and coaxing magic by the handler. They were rolled off, out of sight, and the morbid equivalent of a stagehand entertained the crowd with a big show of cleaning up the parts left behind, which he mimed attacking and pinching him. Someone on the outside used a hose to spray the area down, droplets of water hitting the floors and rebounding up to the crowd. It was a damn good thing that it wasn't some disease, or everyone in the room would wake up shuffling in the morning.

    Then again, maybe it was a bad thing.

    The gates to the outside opened again, the meat fell, and Amy entered the ring. She was a bruise-colored version of herself, and through tears in her clothes, I could see circular bite marks and bloodless, open gashes.

    I noticed these things, but when I looked at her, warily inching around the length of the gate, I only saw a smiling face, the same that had snarked at me, surprised me with both intelligence and a dark understanding that a beautiful, gentle person like her shouldn't have ever had.

    Amy didn't fall for the meat lure. In the end, some poor schlob risked their arm to yank the meat from the ring to get the second zombie to initiate an attack on Amy. Her eyes flashed and the expression changed from passive and benign to something intelligently savage. Before the other zombie got to her, Amy launched herself off the wall at her opponent.

    She was in much better shape, even after being away from Silver Springs for so long. Patrick had degenerated so quickly, but Amy still had most of her soft curves and stocky muscle mass. I suspected the keeper, or keepers, working for Henry had taken special care of Amy.

    Amy collided into the other fighter, her weight throwing them both down. The other corpse lacked the strength to fight Amy or gravity. Amy put her hands on either side of the corpse's face and slammed its head repeatedly into the concrete. The crowd went crazy.

    "Yeah! Beat him, bitch!"

    "Hell yeah! She's the zombie killer. She's gonna tear him apart."

    "That'll be her third, right?"

    "Yeah, every fucking one of them, she just destroys. Tears them apart, man. She's an animal."

    Good for her, I thought.

    Amy pummeled the zombie's head into the floor until slush fell out, then continued flat-punching it until her hands flattened his nose and cheek bones into a pile of bone shards. She looked up at the crowd and her snarl carried over their clamor. She was one small step from snapping and the idiots cheered her on, the sections of the cage clanging as the audience beat on it.

    She circled in place, her eyes scanning the crowd as if memorizing them. But then the keeper met her eyes and whatever magic there was between them took Amy. Though her eyes portrayed hatred and fight, her body obeyed the keeper's commands and carried her into her tiny, mobile cage.

    I backed out through the crowd, who was only too willing to fill the space I left, and followed the worker moving Amy. They pushed her around the edge of a block wall and behind it, to another chamber of the warehouse.

    I walked nonchalantly, just another curious face in the crowd. The worker exited the area, moving toward another cage without a glance at me. I inched around the corner and saw the penned zombies lined up around a docking bay door. There was one other person there: a short oval of a man sitting on a folding chair and reading a paperback. I approached him and was only a few feet away when he stood, dropping the book, to confront me. "You really don't want to be back here, man."

    "Actually, I do." I pulled my gun. They'd checked faces at the door, but not for weapons. The man raised his hands. I doubted he was carrying anything. There would be a definite danger to spilling blood so close to the undead. He wore the uniform of the event bouncers, black jeans tight enough to tell his religion and a black wife beater. If he was carrying anything long range, I'd see it.

    "Whoa, whoa, you definitely don't want to do that. Trust me man, the money ain't worth what'll come after it."

    "I'm not after the money. I want the girl."

    We both glanced at the row of zombies.

    "Seriously?" he asked.

    "The way I see it, we have two options: you give me the girl and fake that I bumped you on the head or something to get her…" I smiled, trying to let everything I'd been through the past few days to bleed into my face. "…or I shoot you somewhere bloody but not lethal, and let them have a chance to repay you for this kindness." I gestured at the warehouse setup. Some of the zombies still had a thread of human thought. A pair of them pressed against the doorways of their cages. One chittered hungrily from the back.

    "You'd let them out on this crowd just to get one girl?"

    I shrugged. "Is this really a part of humanity we should be proud of? Is this something we should protect?"

    He reached for his waist and I almost shot him right there.

    "Easy," he said quickly. "You won't get her out without a key." He unclipped a key ring off his belt and tossed it to me. Then he sat down and picked up his book. "You better hurry. Sounds like the fight might be over."

    I rushed to Amy's cage and peered inside.

    "I saw you out there." Her voice was dry and raw. "You didn't cheer for me."

    "I didn't know I should have."

    She emitted a dry sob. "It's hard, Dean. I don't know…"

    "If you can turn it off?" I worked on the lock as I spoke. "I know. That's what they want, what they're training you for. It's better for the show if you can't turn it off."

    "Better hurry," the bouncer warned again.

    "Are you going to attack me?" I asked. Amy glanced up at me, moving with speed enough to set me on edge, but looking almost insulted.

    "Of course not."

    "Then come on." I reached in and she took my arm. I pulled her out of the cage and wrapped my arms around her, guiding her toward the door. The ring held another key that fit the back door. I saw the edge of another black cage rolling around the bend as we fled into the welcoming night air.

    At the hotel, Amy showered, dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants that I got her at the superstore, and climbed under the thin quilt. She made me hold her while she cried herself to sleep. Once out, she slept like the dead - like she'd finally found a temporary peace. That's when I wanted to cry.

    Amy slept for almost twelve hours. There were a few times where I feared that she'd never wake. But just after dusk, she started to move again. I let her linger in that half-awake, half-dreaming state and used the microwave I'd also bought at the supercenter to warm up a meal for her. I brought her the meat in a cheap plastic bowl as she scooted into a sitting position on the bed.

    She made a face, not at me, but the meat. "I feel like I should be disgusted. Like I should vomit at the smell, the sight."

    "But you're not."

    "No," she said with an unhappy sigh. "No, my mouth is watering. And I think my hands would start shoving it down my throat on their own if I didn't. Don't look, please."

    I turned away, watching the evening news for signs of a hunt for me. There had been a story about the discovery of Cade's body. But the news had said the police were dismissing it as a tragic accident where a zombie attacked Cade, he killed it, and then bled out before he could get help. The story played a few times too many, always followed by a story on a first draft ordinance that would ban zombies from public places or events.

    The world was getting tired of them, so the second zombie war was brewing. This one would shed just as much blood as the first, though it would be out of the media's eyes. How many people, even happy, safe, law abiding people, would find themselves gathered at a cemetery to lay a loved one to rest again? And how many would just abandon their zombies to the streets, or to places like Silver Springs?

    Amy locked herself in the bathroom to clean up and wash out her bowl. I waited, eyes on the television but unfocused, ears tuned to the sounds of water running, waiting for the lock to click. When she came out, she looked happier. Her eyes were slightly less haunted. The future hung between us, an unasked, unanswered question.

    "We need to go," I said into the silence.

    "Go where?"

    "Someplace that's not here. I have a plan."

    Amy smiled as if I'd proposed.

    The world felt empty and full at the same time. The cloudless, cool night gleamed with stars so far from the main lights of the city. It looked like some of them had come aground and gathered in a long circle in the grass. There were rose petals in the center: white, red, pink and yellow. I was unable to find enough of one color so I had grabbed all the little bags of them that I could find. Around the oval of light, lilies, daisies, and orchids were spread along with roses. The candles filled the night air with a miasma of scent: lemon, vanilla, strawberry, pine and cinnamon.

    Wordless, Amy stepped into the circle and ran her fingers over her own name carved into the headstone. She started crying again and I felt my eyes get wetter. We were doing a lot of that since we met. Our entire relationship had been tears and rage. One long hunt to find something we couldn't have.

    "Dean?"

    I tried to give her a soft smile, but it only moved one corner of my mouth. "It's only fair. And in the end, it's all I can give you."

    None of the keepers I knew would touch the situation, so while Amy slept, I'd found a genuine vodun mambo who had nothing good to say of modern keepers. "Of course the spirits answer their calls," she said when I told her my situation. "The spirits are teachers and sometimes the best learning tool is fucking up. That's a lesson that will be remembered."

    The woman stepped forward now, dressed in crimson and barefoot, with a cobalt bottle in one hand and a woven necklace decorated with feathers and other things in the other. With a motherly smile, she put the necklace around Amy's throat and made her take a swig from the bottle. "It's just rum. It'll help smooth your soul into the next world."

    Amy reached for me. I took her hand. The priestess picked up a bowl of blood and a machete from behind the headstone, and she walked a wide circle around us, drawing an invisible line in the grass with the blood as it dripped off the blade. She returned to the head of the circle, on the opposite side of the gravestone, and flicked a line of blood from the knife onto Amy.

    "Kiss your lady."

    I did. It was far too long, far too deep considering the priestess stood there waiting for us. But in a few minutes, it would be all I had.

    Amy pulled away from my lips, but not from me. "What's the necklace for?" She fingered the braid.

    "It will permanently separate your soul from this body, so that no one will be able to raise you again," the priestess answered.

    "Never again?"

    "Never." The word, the priestess' voice, was weighed down with a tone of finality. Then she threw her face up to the stars, giving us no time at all, and called out to the loa. "Take this child back into your arms. Take her to the peace that this world has torn her from. Return her to the safety of your bosom, bring rest to her soul and heart."

    The ground inside the circle turned to grass-colored liquid. A breath escaped Amy's mouth like a sigh, only more than a sigh - a release. The grave reclaimed her, closing around her battered body until her hand slipped from mine and was swallowed, as well. The grave pulsed for a second and outside the candles, I felt a rush of something too solid to be air, and too vocal. Then the wind's words vanished, leaving the night empty. Lonely.

    The priestess gave me a solemn look. She broke the circle of flowers and candles, using her machete to form a gap she could walk through. Then she poured the rest of the blood at the head of the grave and silently turned to leave.

    There was nothing left for me there, just blood-soaked grass and a slab of granite with a name on it. I blew out the candles so they didn't start a fire, then turned my back on Amy's grave and walked out of the cemetery for good.

    Monday morning, I searched for new employment. Something simple. Something easy. But before I went on my job hunt, I stopped by Patrick's parents' house, left a manila envelope on the doorstep, and rang the bell. A woman in a fluffy pink robe, holding a cup of coffee, picked up the envelope and opened it. Then her cup dropped, the coffee bleeding down the steps, and she bent over vomiting into the bushes. I'd specially chosen the picture I sent them, a full color, eight-by-ten glossy of Patrick smiling cheerfully, blood-covered and rotted, with Cade's body laying on his lap like a sleeping lover.

    I waited until she fled back inside before pulling away.

    The second package I took downtown and had a messenger run to a reporter at the newspaper. Inside were full copies of Silver Springs' contracts, with the insidious bits highlighted, Cade's files detailing what happened to the zombies auctioned off by Silver Springs, and a few select pictures of what Patrick looked like after months of the institution's care.

    In case they chose not to pay attention, I had more packages: one for each television station in the city, and for the nightly network news programs, as well.

    What other outcome did I expect from this whole rescue, I don't know. I think I knew this was what it would come to, but there was a part of me that refused to admit it. There was a part of me that told myself I'd swoop in and steal her away to some better life, some fair world, where she hadn't been dead from the beginning.

THE END