I remembered those stories. I remembered being glad I had gotten out of school before they implemented that next level of bullshit.
“Not much to the place, but the bathroom works. And no zombies, so really, what can you ask for?” Gloria grinned at us. “What’d you do? The soldiers won’t talk to us, but sometimes I can hear them talking to each other. I hear he’s got some weird arena shit going on where he makes people fight each other. Is everyone outside really eating pastrami and nothing else?”
“You mean you’re not eating pastrami?” Dax asked.
Gloria shook her head. “We have MREs. None of them are particularly good, but no pastrami.”
“We had freeze-dried ice cream this morning,” Vijay offered.
For a moment, Dax looked more offended by the pastrami situation than being unjustly imprisoned.
“Those sons of bitches,” Tony muttered.
“It’s true? All you have is pastrami?”
I nodded. “Pastrami in the morning. Pastrami in the evening. Pastrami for a midnight snack.”
“You should all be way fatter.”
We should all have been dead, too, but I didn’t bring that up. With my luck it would happen sooner rather than later.
“So…why are you here?” Gloria asked. “I still don’t understand what you did.”
We all looked at each other.
“You tell her,” Tony said.
I shrugged. “Keller has talking zombies.”
It was probably the last thing any of them expected.
Gloria blinked. “He…what?”
“What?” Dax demanded.
“I wouldn’t say Keller has them,” Tony clarified. “I mean, they’re on the premises. They’re here and such. I don’t think they’re answering to him, though.”
“It’s just the one so far,” I muttered. “Maybe the others don’t say anything.”
“Talking zombies are what got you in trouble?” Gloria shifted her weight around, no doubt searching for the questions she might have asked during her reporting days. The right questions, the ones that would help us get to the bottom of this mystery. But all that came out was, “Did you…did you make them?”
I suppose it was a reasonable enough question to ask, considering all the rest of the shit we’d managed to get ourselves into. “No, but apparently we aggravated them.”
“How do we have talking zombies?” Dax squawked. “What do they even have to talk about?”
“College basketball,” Tony said.
Dax blinked rapidly. “Really?”
“No, not fucking really. I only saw the one. She asked for a blanket.”
“Talking zombies?” Jay asked. “Are they smart?”
Just thinking about Alyssa and her empty stare made my eyes well up. “She was coherent.”
“She?”
“Did…what’s…how? And why?”
I shrugged. “Maybe Keller’s building an army.”
“I sure as hell hope not,” an older, deeper voice cut in.
We all looked toward the other side of the room, where another cot piled high with what I assumed were extra blankets sat. Those extra blankets were in fact a person, and now he sat up, knocking some of them aside. He wore an oversized button-down shirt and a ratty pair of jeans, and a flak jacket lay on the end of his bed.
He seemed to sense he had our full attention, and offered us a wan half-smile. “The last thing that little shit needs is magical powers over the undead. That’ll be the end of us all.”
“He didn’t seem too surprised about it,” Tony said. “He must have known something.”
“Of course he knew something,” the man said. “He was there when Jacoby began his unfortunate work. It was all such a great fucking idea at the time.” He lifted his hands into the air and spoke in a higher tone, no doubt mimicking some unfortunate dead scientist. “Make the dead fight for us! Why the fuck not? We’ll make them smart!” He lowered his hands and resumed speaking in his usual tone. “We all just assumed it would never work. Until it did. It turns out commissioning a zombie is tricky business.”
“Commissioning?” I asked. “How do you commission a zombie?”
“Very carefully.” He had a cap pulled down low over his eyes, though he nodded fairly politely in our direction. “So you’re the team from Elderwood I’ve heard so much about,” he said. “I admit, I thought you’d be smarter.”
“We get that a lot,” I said.
“Speak for yourself,” Tony muttered. “You know us, but we don’t know you.”
Gloria gestured to him. “Tony, Dax, Vibeke, this is William Durkee.”
Durkee. I knew that name. But from where? Some band I’d interviewed?
No. Something else.
Captain Durkee?
I did a double-take.
“I thought you were dead,” I said. “Everyone says you’re dead.”
He lifted his arms up so he could inspect his hands. “I don’t appear to be. Although if the dead are now walking and talking, I guess it’s possible I missed a memo somewhere.” He pushed the brim of his hat up to look at us better, and his eyes, while tired and slightly sunken, were most definitely human, alive, and a trifle annoyed. “So, Tony, Dax, and Vibeke, why don’t you tell me what that little fuckwit is doing to my city?”
Chapter Twenty-Two