Magnolia Cemetery would be a perfect final resting place, if it weren’t for all the damn zombies.
“Where did they come from?” Teag muttered as we looked out across the moonlit grounds at the staggering, shuffling undead lurching beneath the ancient live oak hung heavy with Spanish moss.
“Offhand, I’d say their graves,” Chuck Pettis remarked with a sidelong look and a grin. No one would mistake Chuck for anything except ex-military, with his sturdy build, thick neck, bald head, and no-nonsense attitude. He’s an Army vet, mid-fifties, retired. His Black Ops unit de-fanged alien and dark magic threats. Now he teams up with us on occasion to fight the good fight against supernatural bad guys, or as he thinks of them, “ectoplasmic terrorists.”
Teag rolled his eyes. “I meant, what made them rise?”
Before Chuck could suggest an answer we all might regret, I jumped into the conversation. “Maybe it’s tied into the other weirdness. You said it yourself: we don’t get coincidences in our business.”
I could hear Chuck ticking from here. Don’t get me wrong: Chuck is a valuable ally, and he’s done us some real solids. He has more than a few tricks—and explosives—up his sleeves for dealing with the preternaturally perturbed. But he’s also a little battle scarred—with good reason—and he believes that if his massive collection of clocks ever wind down and stop, he’ll die. So Chuck’s jackets are all lined with working wristwatches—just the clock part—and you can hear them when he’s standing close. If the watches make him feel better, I’m fine with that.
“Since I don’t think St. Peter’s blown his horn to call the dead to heaven, then I figure some son of a bitch is playing around with magic,” Chuck replied. “And that’s usually trouble.”
We had a heap of trouble shuffling across the lawn. If they’d been smart enough to avoid the headstones, they probably would have been on us by now. But all across the cemetery, I could see zombies stuck behind granite markers like those toys that keep on walking when they hit the wall.
This would have been like shooting fish in a barrel if we were going to go all Walking Dead on their asses. But that would leave a major tourist attraction littered with the rotting corpses of historically-significant dead people, and the fallout from that wouldn’t be pretty.
“Archibald is on his way,” Sorren said, coming up behind us so quietly I didn’t hear him. Of course I didn’t—vampires excel at stealth.
“Can he make them go back into their graves?” I asked, nervously watching one of the zombies bang into a headstone, back up a step, and run into it again, over and over. “Because making them all fall down isn’t a whole lot better than shooting them, and there are too many for us to rebury by the time the groundskeepers get here in the morning.”
“He’s a necromancer,” Sorren replied with a shrug. “I leave the details up to him on this sort of thing.”
Sorren is slender, with high cheekbones and gray eyes the color of the sea before a storm. With his trendy haircut and ripped jeans, he looks like a graduate student, but he’s centuries older. I took comfort from the fact that he wasn’t freaking out about having dozens of shamblers roaming the cemetery. Then again, we’d seen a lot worse.
“Why did some of them rise, and not others?” I asked, then hoped I hadn’t tempted fate. There are thousands of burials at Magnolia Cemetery, dating to before the Civil War. A few dozen zombies we might be able to put down without too much of a fuss, but a cast of thousands would be terrifying.
“I think the right question is—why have any of them risen?”
I turned to see a tall, broad-shouldered man striding across the lawn toward us. With his British accent and his mutton-chop sideburns, Archibald Donnelly looks like he should be wearing a pith helmet. Since he’s the immortal overseer of a time-traveling private club for adventurers-gone-missing, maybe his fashion sense really is left over from the days of the British Empire. All that matters to me is that he does some damn fine magic.
“It’s going to be all over the news if corpses with their heads blown off are strewn around the cemetery,” Sorren pointed out.
“Can’t have that,” Donnelly agreed. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the scene as if he were overseeing a work site. “Do we know who they are?”
I shook my head. “We’ve been focused on containing them. Didn’t want to get too close, and we figured we could find the graves they dug open after we put them back down.”
Chuck and Teag had moved to counter some of the zombies that ambled toward where we stood. Teag had a long wooden staff, and when he prodded a shambler in the chest, the creature stumbled backward, then headed randomly in another direction. Chuck had a rifle with a night scope and used it to poke a zombie in the shoulder to send him back the way he came.
“All right, let’s send them packing,” Donnelly said. “I’d gotten to the best part of the book I was reading, and I’m keen to pick up where I left off.” The idea of sending dozens of undead walkers to their graves didn’t seem to perturb him, as if it were a common occurrence. Then again, maybe for him it was.
Donnelly raised his hands in blessing, drew in a deep breath, and spoke words of power. I don’t know what he said; I tried to listen, but the words seemed too slippery to hear. All across the cemetery, the zombies stilled, raising their heads like dogs listening for a whistle.
Two of the creatures stood about twenty feet from us, and I watched them stop their shuffling and then begin to tremble. I backed up a step, fearing that we’d be caught in a spray of rotting guts if Donnelly accidentally overshot his goal and blew them up. After a few seconds, the zombies began to shuffle again.
Donnelly stared at them, astonished. “That shouldn’t be possible,” he murmured. He raised his hands again, shifted his stance, and spoke words of power that sounded different, with a stern tone not to be disobeyed.
Once again, the zombies stopped, but this time they turned, orienting on the source of the command.
“I don’t like this,” I said, and the look on Sorren’s face told me he agreed. I had a long knife and my athame, with Bo’s ghost at my side. Sorren was old school; he had a sword in each hand. Chuck had a rifle, a handgun, and enough ammo that his pockets bulged. I knew that in addition to his staff, Teag had a short sword, and dagger, and probably that silver whip as well. But usually, all we needed was Donnelly’s necromancy, and the zombies would give themselves a dirt nap.
If the creatures were hearing a dog whistle, it sounded “charge” instead of “retreat,” Every shambler in the cemetery started toward us, giving a new meaning to “dead run.”
“Shit,” Donnelly growled, staring at his hands as if they had betrayed him. “I didn’t expect that to happen.”
“What now?” I asked.
Donnelly raised a bushy white eyebrow. “Now, we fight.”
Before I could ponder how a bunch of shuffling corpses managed to defy an immortal necromancer, the game was on.
Chuck climbed a nearby mausoleum, taking up a sniper position on the roof. Teag and I stood guard beneath him, to make sure none of the shamblers tried to climb. Donnelly pulled out an honest-to-God cavalry saber and waded into battle, and he and Sorren slashed their way through the zombies, who lacked the brains or instructions to try to get away.
The crack of Chuck’s rifle rang out across the garden landscape, a steady staccato beat as Chuck aimed and fired, over and over again. Teag and I had our hands full down below. Half a dozen zombies at a time closed in on us, but I couldn’t tell whether they meant to attack or just started walking this direction and didn’t think to stop.
I raised my athame and loosed a cone of cold white force, catching the nearest shuffler in the chest and throwing him back into a granite obelisk. I must have overdone it, because his rotted corpse split open on impact like an overripe watermelon, splattering the area with formaldehyde-scented gore.
Teag spun his staff, slamming into the skull of a zombie that came in range, and then looked on, appalled, as the head tore loose and flew through the air like a two-base hit at Wrigley Field. Two of the zombies came at me, and Bo sprang at the closer one, knocking it flat with his full weight. He grabbed the corpse’s shirt front with his teeth and shook the body back and forth. It came apart, arms, legs, and head falling away, like a rag doll with its stitching cut.
I didn’t have time to throw up, though my stomach rebelled at the smell. My blast of cold force missed the next zombie who lurched to one side as he tripped at the fateful instant, so I buried my knife hilt deep in his chest as he straightened, then pulled the blade back out and lopped off his head before he could get his balance.
Chuck must have packed enough ammo to stop a small army because he kept shooting. With all our combined efforts, after several long minutes, few of the zombies remained on their feet. Thank God Magnolia Cemetery lies outside of town in an area that’s surrounded by industrial sites, or we’d have brought every SWAT team in the Lowcountry down on us by now. Even so, I knew our luck wouldn’t last forever, that someone must have heard and called the cops. I hoped we were long gone before anyone arrived and started asking questions.
Finally, no more shots rang out. Donnelly and Sorren moved across one side of the huge cemetery, looking for stragglers, while Teag and I worked our way past row after row of headstones, peering carefully around war memorial statues and fancy Victorian angels in case any of the shamblers had gotten themselves stuck somewhere.
Along the way, we spotted the graves where the zombies had dug themselves out; hard to miss with the spray of fresh dirt and an open hole. I snapped photos of the headstone by each open grave with my phone camera, thinking maybe we could make sense of the whole thing later.
“I don’t get it,” Teag said, scanning the next row of gravestones. “Some of the zombies are soldiers, most aren’t, some are really old, but some of those headstones look fairly new. Who woke them? Why those corpses in particular? And what were they supposed to do?”
I shook my head, busy taking pictures before we had to dodge the cops. When the ground gave way beneath my foot, I nearly fell into a half-dug grave, just as its occupant burst from the dirt, late for the party.
“Holy shit!” I yelled, scrambling back and trying not to lose my phone. I really didn’t want to leave evidence at the scene of a crime, since someone would eventually be blamed for desecrating graves and abusing corpses.
The zombie reached for me, and I kicked hard. My boot connected with the creature’s chin, snapping the bone and sending the skull flying into the gravestone with a wet thud. The body flopped on, not quite ready to give up, until Teag sank a knife through its back.
“Watch your step,” he warned, giving me a hand up. I’d been splattered with gobbets of dead flesh, and the graveyard smelled like a high school biology lab on dissection day. In the distance, sirens wailed, heading our way.
“That’s our cue to vamoose,” Teag said, and we sprinted back toward where the others waited. Chuck had climbed down from his perch, and I wondered what the cops would make of long-dead corpses sprawled throughout the cemetery with fresh bullet holes in their heads. I wondered…but I didn’t want to stick around to find out.
“Take the back way out,” Donnelly instructed. “I’ll lag behind and see what I can do to slow down the police to give you a head start.” He always seemed unflappable, but after the way his magic failed to stop the zombies, Donnelly looked perplexed and bewildered.
“Come on,” Sorren said, leading the way to where we’d parked the cars. “We can sort this out later. Right now, we could all use a hot shower and a stiff drink.”
Teag came to my house to get cleaned up, because while Anthony knows the truth about what we do, he’s still a lawyer and having Teag show up looking like he’d been grave robbing when the aftermath was going to be all over the news would be a really bad idea. We tried to leave Anthony as much plausible deniability as we could, and sometimes that meant our own version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Nights like this are why I keep plastic sheeting in the back of my RAV4, so we don’t get blood—or worse—on the upholstery. We rode with the windows down, even though the night air was chilly, because we couldn’t stand the stench. I kept to the speed limit exactly, since we couldn’t afford to be pulled over, not looking and smelling like this.
When we finally reached my house, I’d never been so glad for the distraction spell Lucinda had placed on the parking spot right next to the door to my piazza. It makes other people completely forget about the empty space, leaving it open for me. A godsend, since I didn’t want to traipse down the street looking like an extra from Night of the Living Dead.
My house is a white clapboard “single house,” a uniquely Charleston style that situates the side of the house facing the street, with a door that leads onto the front porch. The porch and the real front door face a walled yard or garden. Back in the old days, that allowed people the privacy to take off their coats or lift the hem of their floor-length dresses without scandalizing the neighbors. Now, with Lucinda’s wardings, the sidewalk door is the first line of defense, and no one but trusted friends could enter without being invited across the threshold. Of course, Teag, Sorren, Chuck, and Donnelly were among those on the short list with permission to come inside.
Once we neared the main door, I heard Baxter, my little Maltese, yipping up a storm. He’s a six-pound bundle of attitude. Heart of a warrior, body of a guinea pig. I knew Maggie had come over to keep him company, and as Teag and I came in covered in zombie-spatter, she scooped Baxter up and retreated to the far end of the foyer.
“Merciful heavens, what the hell did you get into tonight?” Maggie’s eyes watered, and Baxter gave one last yip and buried his nose against her arm.
“Greasy grimy gopher guts,” I replied, toeing off my boots and leaving them on the porch. I debated stripping down right there to avoid tracking awful slimy stuff through the house. Maggie must have read my mind because she came back with Bax in one hand and two old bedsheets in the other.
“Pretend you’re in middle school gym class,” she ordered. “Wrap up and strip down without showing anything. I’ll put on some water for tea. When I leave, I can bundle those clothes into a big garbage bag and take them to my cousin’s place out in the country—he’s got a burn barrel.”
I didn’t intend to argue because I know from experience that some things just don’t wash clean. I hoped a good shot with the garden hose would save my boots.
Teag and I complied, then shimmied inside wrapped in my mom’s old sheets from the 1970s. The big floral prints looked ridiculous, but they let us retain a shred of dignity, and I directed Teag to the downstairs guest bath while I scooted upstairs for a shower. Maggie’s been on hand enough times for the aftermath of bloody battles to know where Teag’s spare clothing is kept.
I scrubbed with soap until my skin turned pink, and promised myself I’d bleach the bathtub for good measure tomorrow. Even after I knew I’d gotten all the gunk off of me, the smell was still in my nose, and several squirts of my strongest body spray wasn’t quite enough to overpower the stink.
Still, I felt a lot better when I came downstairs to find Maggie and Teag already at my kitchen table, with Bax dancing around their feet, shamelessly begging for treats. I scooped him into my arms, and he recoiled, making me wonder whether it was the perfume or the formaldehyde that offended his nose.
“Is it okay if I stay here tonight?” Teag asked. “Anthony was going to be late working on a case, and if he’s gotten to sleep, I don’t want to wake him. Besides, I’m too jazzed right now to rest.”
“Anytime,” I said, and meant it. Teag is my best friend and brother-from-another-mother, and Anthony is a close second. Maggie’s the smart-mouthed aunt I never had. It’s crazy, but it works.
“Thanks,” Teag said and texted Anthony that he’d be staying over. Now that we’d settled that, Maggie got down the good bourbon and three shot glasses. After the night we’d had, I figured we’d earned it.
“What I don’t get is, why were the zombies only in Magnolia Cemetery, when all of Huguenin Avenue is one long necropolis?” Teag asked.
Maggie raised her eyebrows at “zombies,” but didn’t ask.
I sipped my bourbon and considered the question. The street where Magnolia Cemetery is located is home to about a dozen other smaller cemeteries. Bethany Cemetery, down a side street, is still pretty big and has the graves of many of the area’s early German settlers. There’s a Jewish graveyard and several small AME Zion lots, some of which are very old. Yet as we made our escape, we didn’t see any shamblers in those sections.
“That’s a good question. I wonder if there were problems elsewhere.”
I didn’t wonder for long because my phone buzzed. “Father Anne,” I mouthed to Teag and Maggie. “Hi there,” I greeted my caller and glanced at the time. Midnight. That meant this wasn’t a social call, even in our circles. “What’s up? And can I put you on speaker? Teag and Maggie are here. We’ve had an interesting night.”
I put the phone down on the table so everyone could hear. “Hey Cassidy, I wanted to give you a heads up,” Father Anne said. “Lucinda and Rowan and I have been riding more back roads than a bootlegger, putting down zombies at little rural cemeteries.”
We all looked at each other. “Say again?” I replied.
“Zombies,” Father Anne repeated. She’s a highly unorthodox Episcopalian priest who’s also a member of a secret society of ass-kicking warriors against the Darkness. And a great poker player. “Popping up like zits all over the place, in these little bitty old churchyards in the middle of nowhere.”
“Are you guys still out there?”
“Just heading back.”
“I’ve got a couple of frozen pizzas and plenty of bourbon. If you want to do a slumber party, why not come over here and get cleaned up, then we can compare notes? We barely got back from Magnolia Cemetery, and it’s gonna be all over tomorrow’s headlines.”
I heard some mumbled comments as they conferred. “Sure thing. But we’re all kinda nasty right now, on account of the brain bits,” Father Anne warned me. “I think I can rustle up clean sweats for all of us from the bag in my trunk.”
“If you can’t, I can,” I promised and decided to swing by a dollar store tomorrow to pick up more disposable t-shirts and drawstring pants for exactly this kind of occasion. “See you when you get here.”
Maggie begged off on the practical consideration that someone needed to be awake to open the store tomorrow. She headed for the spare bedroom after Teag and I showered her with our everlasting gratitude.
I heated up the oven, got the pizzas ready, and grabbed a two-liter of soda from the fridge. Teag knows his way around my kitchen, so he dug out some chips and a jar of salsa. Then I dragged the big whiteboard out of my office and into the living room, along with one of the gazillion paper maps of Charleston I keep for things like this. If none of us were going to get to sleep for a while, we might as well get something done.
Once everyone had devoured the pizza, we all gathered in the living room. It felt like being back in middle school, except this crowd knew better than to look in the mirror and summon Bloody Mary.
Father Anne’s colorful St. Expeditus tattoo showed in all its glory with her tank top. He’s a patron saint of monster hunters and the founder of a secret society of hunter-priests. With her pompadour haircut, Doc Marten boots, and penchant for black leather jackets, Father Anne isn’t your average parish priest.
Lucinda, our local mambo, looked as unruffled by the night’s events as usual. She’s tall and statuesque with dark hair and dark eyes, and tonight she had her hair done in braids and wound into a tight coil around her head, which accentuated her chiseled profile. When she’s not hunting evil, she’s a professor at the University specializing in folklore and mythology. I wondered if she’d taken the next day off from class.
Rowan had her long blond hair in a messy top knot. She rocks a Hitchcock blond elegance no matter what she’s wearing, even in jeans and a t-shirt. Although Rowan might look like a fashionista, she’s a hella-powerful witch that we’re lucky to have her on our side.
“You’re telling us that Archibald Donnelly couldn’t lay the dead to rest?” Rowan marveled. “Now there’s a first.”
Lucinda shrugged. “Maybe not such a surprise. The Loas wouldn’t answer when I made offerings. It’s not like the Baron to ignore a plea to help souls in trouble.” I knew she meant Baron Samedi, the Ghede Loa who helped the dead pass over, and probably Papa Legba too, the keeper of the crossroads.
Father Anne looked troubled. “We figured out pretty fast that the bodies weren’t possessed when exorcism didn’t work. I actually felt sorry for them. They all acted like they’d been woken out of a sound sleep and had no idea why they were wandering around.”
“The ones in Magnolia Cemetery were the same—until something Donnelly did seemed to piss them off, and then they came after us,” Teag added, nibbling on the last piece of pizza.
“Maybe they weren’t supposed to rise,” Lucinda mused. “Maybe that was an accident, a side effect of someone else doing something somewhere they weren’t supposed to be doing.”
“Helluva side effect,” Rowan said with an incredulous snort. “It would take a lot of power for someone like Donnelly to raise a zombie—not that he would. But I don’t think even he could raise half a cemetery—and not just in one, but in cemeteries all over.”
I frowned. “But it’s not every cemetery, is it? Teag and I didn’t see any other zombies in the cemeteries on Huguenin Avenue, only Magnolia.”
Father Anne nodded. After the shower, her usually spiked hair lay smooth and flat, giving her a less edgy look. “You’re right. We passed other rural graveyards with no zombies at all. And in the places we found some, it wasn’t all the graves.”
“So why some and not others?” Teag asked.
“Did you note the names of the people who were brought back?” I asked, taping up the map to one side of the whiteboard.
“No time,” Father Anne replied. “But I can go back under the guise of ‘saying a blessing’ over the next couple of days and make a list. It’ll be easy to tell from the freshly filled in graves.”
“I got some of the headstones on my phone, but not all. Maybe Sorren can do some recon and find the rest. He’s the least likely to get arrested,” I said.
“Let’s start with the locations.” Teag finished his pizza and took a drink of his bourbon and cola. “Then we’ll start listing the names.” For the next half hour, I marked the cemeteries on the map that Father Anne and the others had visited, then Teag read off the names and dates from the photos on my phone, while I made a list on the whiteboard.
When it was done, I sat back on my heels and looked at the work. “Does anything stand out to you?”
“It’s got to be significant that only Magnolia had zombies, out of all the other cemeteries right next to each other,” Lucinda said. “What’s Magnolia got that the others don’t?”
We brainstormed for several minutes. War dead, famous ghosts, celebrities, notable historical figures, politicians, and shady figures—nothing seemed to fit.
“Landowners,” Teag said. We all went still. “What you said, Cassidy, about it being related to the other weirdness? What if the people who heard this magical ‘call’ were all landowners—people who liked to hunt?”