Skeleton Crew (8 page)

I nodded. “We don't need you to be a hero, Terrence. You go to the mattresses. You have to let Mobley come after you, but you don't have to stick your neck out. Stay alive and when we get in front of this thing, we'll put that motherfucker down together.”

“Wasn't planning to stick my neck out. I was planning to let Simeon Wale stick his out. Plus, we got Anton's crew. He already growing that motherfucker, Domino. Got Zeds hooking up with him that ain't even in our game.”

“Zeds?”

“It's what they call the zombies. Anyway, maybe it's just that Anton knows more about eating than anything else but he makes a pretty fucking good zombie. They turning Mobley's hoods into a slaughterhouse and Anton's keeping the peace with the civilians. I figure Mobley will need a couple demons just to keep Anton's hands off his fucking brains.”

I chuckled. “Maybe he's found his calling.”

“Yeah. The rest of it, we'll lock this shit down and see how it goes. I got some of my guys working on wards, maybe give us a couple safe houses the demons can't get to.” He looked at me and cocked his head to the side. “Maybe you got some assets could help with that.”

“I'll send you some warders and I'll get some taggers working so you can draw juice from our blocks. You should be able to keep at least some of the demons out of some of your juice boxes. Truth is, Oberon could have kept the demon out of his club if he'd been thinking ahead. It's kinda nice to know you can catch the motherfucker off guard, I just wish we hadn't been there at the time.”

“Yeah, Mobley can still bring them in somewhere else and put them on us, but it be nice to know a demon won't show up in my bathroom while I'm taking care of my business.”

I stood up and swallowed against the tightness in my throat. “Just stay alive, Terrence. I'm going to make this right.”

“I know you will, D.” Terrence walked over to me and we clasped hands. Then I pulled him in and hugged him. Just a couple slaps on the back, but I had to do it. I wasn't sure I'd ever have a chance to do it again.

 

The Department of Homeland Security's Special Threat Assessment Group had purchased an ashram just east of San Bernardino when the resident guru had been convicted on multiple counts of tax evasion, fraud and sexual assault. The compound was nestled at the base of the mountains, a hidden oasis of landscaped lawns and gardens and brightly painted cottages and bungalows built in the forties and fifties. At one time, before the lawsuits and criminal charges, the ashram had been a favorite destination for spiritualists and New Agers from all walks of life—as long as they could pay the price of admission. Now it had been turned into Area 51, Southern California style.

When I'd called Agent Lowell and told him what I was after, he'd seemed pleased. Maybe it gave him some sense of affirmation in his career choices, or maybe he figured I'd be easier to control if I actually needed him for something. Either way, he was probably kidding himself. But the fact that the Ashram—the Feds were nothing if not creative—was a black operation with no official oversight or budget meant Lowell could extend an invitation to a gangster on nothing more than his personal authorization.

I checked in at the front gate and a soldier in black fatigues with no insignia or identification handed me an access badge. The badge was just a white plastic card with a barcode on it—no name, no photo. It did have some juice, though, and I could smell Lowell on it. I drove the Lincoln along a winding road and parked in a gravel parking lot.

Lowell and Granato had set up offices in a yellow building with white shutters and trim, and flower gardens flanking the wide porch. The whole compound had a Dharma Initiative vibe I approved of, but maybe with a little more style. I slapped the access badge against the card reader by
the front door and walked in. Lowell saw me through the open door of his office and waved, and he and Granato both came out to greet me.

“Couldn't you have found something a little closer to civilization for your secret hideout?” I always felt an irresistible compulsion to annoy Granato, and his scowl didn't let me down. “Malibu Canyon is nice. You could probably pick up something on the cheap, with the foreclosure crisis and all.”

“We had specific requirements for the work we do here,” said Lowell. “And the isolation is convenient.”

The truth was, it had taken me less than an hour with my traffic spell. There was no getting around the fact it was San Bernardino, though. “You can skip the nickel tour,” I said. “I hope you've got something for me now that I drove all the way out here. You mentioned something about zombie experiments.”

“Let's go,” Lowell said, and he and Granato escorted me back outside and along a narrow path that wound its way deeper into the compound. We walked in silence and arrived at a cluster of cottages arranged in a semicircle around a small duck pond. “This is where we're doing the CMI research…uh, that's Critical Metaphysical Instability.”

“I remember,” I said.

“Okay, let's go to Building Thirty-four,” Lowell said, and led the way to one of the cottages. He swiped his badge and then hesitated. “What you're going to see isn't pleasant, Ms. Riley. It's not pretty but it's necessary. We're doing what we have to do to protect the city.”

“I guess I wouldn't be here if I thought otherwise,” I said. “And most of the shit I see from day to day isn't all that pretty, either.”

Lowell nodded and pushed open the door, and we went
inside. The interior of the cottage had been remodeled in sanatorium chic. The front door opened into a small viewing area where a young woman in a white lab coat sat at a metal desk and occasionally tapped on the touch screen of a tablet computer. She looked bored.

Most of the far wall was dominated by a rectangular window through which I could see a large, padded cell. A little girl in a straitjacket huddled in the corner with her knees drawn up and her head down. I drew in a sharp breath, and even to my own ears it sounded like a hiss.

“Runaway,” Granato said, glancing at me. “Multiple stab wounds. Homicide. We picked her up before LAPD found her.”

“I guess it doesn't bother you they won't find her killer,” I said, my voice tight.

Granato shrugged. “Not my job, Riley. What is my job is figuring out why she can't rest, and making sure it doesn't happen to anyone else.”

“How's that going?” I asked. The words had a little more bite to them than I'd intended.

“Cindy,” Lowell said, speaking to the woman in the lab coat, “this is Ms. Riley. Tell her what we've got.”

“This is Subject Number Eighteen,” Cindy said. “She's a Stage One—”

“What's her fucking name?” I said.

Cindy's mouth opened and froze. She looked at Lowell and Granato. “We, uh, find it easier not to think of them as people.”

“Easier for you, right? I guess it's not easier for them.”

Cindy swallowed hard. “Gretchen,” she said. “Her name is Gretchen. She's eleven or twelve years old.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

“She's a Stage One. She died between one-thirty and three this morning.”

“What are you doing with her?”

“We're observing the transition. Ideally, we'd monitor and record vital signs, but…”

“…Gretchen doesn't have any vital signs,” I said.

“That's right. Physiologically, she's dead. No pulse. No brain activity. So there's not much we can do except observe and record changes in her appearance, behavior. When she reaches Stage Two, we'll do some tests, measure her response to various stimuli.”

“Sounds fascinating,” I said. I didn't want to know what kinds of “stimuli” she had in mind. “Have you actually learned anything?”

“Her animation is completely nonphysical,” Cindy said.

“Um, it's paranormal. I mean, there are absolutely no physical processes animating her body—no chemical activity, no electrical activity.”

“She's running on juice.”

“We believe so, but it appears to be a finite source.”

“She's burning it, Ms. Riley,” Lowell said.

“Right,” said Cindy. “They burn it very quickly. We believe this condition is responsible for the cannibalistic compulsions. As they burn up their own, uh, juice, they must feed to survive. It's not a biological process but there are obvious parallels.”

“What happens when they don't feed?” I asked.

“We could show you,” Granato said. “We can show you Stage Three, Four and Five. You probably won't enjoy it.”

“Their condition begins to deteriorate,” Cindy said, “physically and mentally. Their bodies begin to decompose and they begin to present symptoms of acute psychosis. This
acts as a kind of survival mechanism because the psychosis enhances their ability to find food.”

“Problem is,” said Granato, “the hunting and feeding drives most of them bat-shit crazy, too. Either way, they wind up insane.”

“Most, but not all,” said Cindy. “The transition's time-line is different for each subject. Some animate immediately, while for others it takes hours. The original personality is intact at the time of death. Some are more successful than others at coping with their undead state.”

“And the cause of all this is that their souls can't leave their bodies?”

“Their souls
are not
leaving their bodies,” Lowell said, “and that's causing the undead state. We don't know why it's happening. We don't know if the souls can't leave or won't leave.”

“Maybe hell is full,” Granato said, snickering.

“Fuck you, Granato.” I felt like saying more but he pissed me off so much I couldn't think of anything.

“We do know a little more,” Lowell said, “based largely on your reports and our own efforts to control the out break.”

I nodded. “We can free the souls from the bodies. But they still can't move on—the ghost remains trapped with the remains.”

“That's the part we haven't figured out yet,” said Lowell. “We haven't identified the cause. We're not even sure how to go about looking for it.”

“Not for lack of trying,” said Granato.

I glanced at him and narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”

Lowell drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We felt the only way to identify the cause was to observe subjects at the moment of death…”

“You didn't.”

“We have, yes. Hospice patients. Their estates receive sizable settlements and they're all volunteers. By the time we make contact, many of them have already pursued illegal end-of-life options.”

“Do you at least warn them they'll turn into fucking zombies?”

“Not exactly,” Lowell said. “But we're hopeful we can resolve this crisis and give them the rest they deserve.”

“They were going Zed, anyway,” Granato said. “At least this way we might learn something from it.”

“And did you?”

“Not yet,” said Lowell. “The fact is, it's hard to observe a negative. At the moment of death, we observe all the physical changes we'd expect—cessation of life functions, basically. But neither Granato nor I can identify anything supernatural happening. Clearly, something is
supposed
to happen and it's not.”

“So how is your little shop of horrors supposed to help me solve the zombie problem, Lowell?” I couldn't see I'd learned much, and what I had learned didn't seem all that useful.

“We're sharing the information we have, Ms. Riley,” Lowell said.

“We've also modeled the contagion mathematically,” Cindy said. “We looked at multiple scenarios—unconstrained outbreak, quarantine, eradication. The scenarios are complicated by the fact that we don't know why the phenomenon is localized—limited to the Greater Los Angeles area—or whether it will remain so. However, none of the scenarios produced markedly different results.” She tapped the screen on the tablet and brought up a graph. A green line showed human population and a red line represented
zombies. The green line sloped downward, sharply, from left to right; the red line sloped upward, just as sharply. “As you can see,” Cindy said, flipping through multiple screens, “all scenarios end the same way.”

“Zero human population,” I said.

Cindy nodded and tapped the screen again, displaying rows of mathematical equations that meant absolutely nothing to me. “Since all the eigenvalues are nonpositive, the apocalyptic equilibrium is asymptotically stable. At least within the affected environment.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“We're fucked,” Cindy said, and shrugged. “The biggest problem will be population clusters.”

“It will spread fastest in the most densely populated parts of the city,” I said.

“That's right,” Cindy said. “The models depend on assumptions, and one of those assumptions is the reproductive efficiency of the zombies.”

“How quickly they turn humans into zombies.”

Cindy nodded. “This isn't a normal outbreak scenario. A human cannot be infected. Only fatalities will produce more zombies, so we have to estimate the number of fatalities each zombie will cause each day. The bad news is that any fatality produces a zombie, even humans not directly killed by them. It includes death by natural causes and those indirectly caused by the zombies. The bottom line is that reproductive efficiency could be quite high. It will begin in the population centers, as you said, but even in the suburbs there are population clusters.”

“Like what?”

“Stay away from the shopping mall and multiplex,” Granato said.

“This scenario is actually good news,” Lowell said. “Even eradication doesn't work—it just creates more zombies.”

“That depends on the protocol,” Granato argued. “Eradication works if there aren't any bodies left.”