She looped around the block and saw that the entrance to the cemetery had been left open.
Not surprising when the whole city was in panic.
The scraping sound came closer. If she ran straight down the block, she’d be easily seen.
And easily caught….
With all the police cars gone, there seemed to be little choice. She tore into the cemetery and ran quickly behind the old brick style tomb, hunching down behind it. She prayed that the zombie figure would walk on by.
But it didn’t. It paused at the entrance.
Then turned into the cemetery.
Moments later, she saw that it was coming her way, followed by one figure….
And then another.
Almost flat on the ground, Danni crawled away. There was a “stack” tomb just a few feet away. She made her way around it.
Then she heard whispering.
“She is in here; I saw her come in here.”
“No, she ran down the street!”
“Your fault—this got too carried away!”
She knew one of the voices. And the other…She wasn’t sure. Carefully, Danni looked around the cement of the tombs. Straight into the eyes of the zombie.
Somehow, she suppressed a scream. And she ran again, deeper and deeper into the cemetery. She still hadn’t seen the second figure.
In her mind, a question seemed to scream.
Why?
She knew now who was controlling the zombie nuns.
She turned a corner—and she realized that she’d managed to run in a circle—right back into the creature. She stopped, staring at it.
It was just an animatronic. It was stalled. Because the person running the controls didn’t see her yet! Then one of the hands raised.
Out of the corner of her eye, Danni saw a person. A person with a black box that looked almost like a video game control stick.
The zombie started to raise a hand. And Danni prepared to run, but she heard her name shouted—shouted with a thunder that seemed to tear the very air apart.
Quinn.
The zombie doll was moving. She backed away, ready to run, and fell over a gravestone. The zombie nun moved toward her, the skeletal fingers reaching out in the eerie shadows of graveyard.
She couldn’t run; she was on the ground. She could only roll, but could she roll fast enough to escape the razor-sharp fingers?
Reaching for her, grasping out….
And going dead still.
It wasn’t moving; it had stalled again.
Danni rolled and leapt to her feet and saw that Quinn was across the cemetery—over by a row of mausoleums. He was on top of the person wielding the controls.
“Quinn!” she cried, racing for him.
Suddenly she saw the second person; the one’s whose voice she hadn’t quite placed, moving toward Quinn, a massive branch held high with which to attack him….
Danni doubled her energy, leaping angels and cherubs, crying out in warning again.
“Quinn!”
She wasn’t going to make it; she wasn’t going to make it in time.
And then there was something behind her, something coming fast. The zombie-nun, moving again! But then, to her astonishment, the thing moved passed her. It moved past her at high, whirling speed.
And it flew straight into the figure heading for Quinn with such terrible menace. Twirling, flapping, deadly arms and fingers waving.
The person went down.
Danni reached Quinn who was rising then, dragging his quarry up with him.
“The box!” he told Danni. “The control!”
She made a dive for the black box. The zombie nun was wildly spinning and slashing at the second figure in the cemetery.
Danni tried to control it; at first, it went wilder.
Then she saw the off switch and hit it. She moved over to the prone figure.
Vanessa. Vanessa Green.
Vanessa was bleeding from a multitude of cuts.
She wasn’t getting up, not on her own. She lay in the grass, sobbing.
“She made me do it; she made me do it!” Vanessa cried.
And Danni turned to see that Quinn had shoved the woman who had originally been wielding the control box, causing the animatronic to run and whirl and kill.
Tracy Kennedy.
“Hey, you meant when you said you were coming home soon, huh? Had to get into your house, right?” Quinn said, his tone dry and sardonic. He sounded harsh. Of course. He’d been afraid—afraid for her, Danni knew.
“It wasn’t me!” Tracy cried. “It was the zombie nun—from the minute it came into the house, it told me that I had to do kill. It wanted me to control it—it’s evil.”
“Tracy, that’s pathetic,” Quinn said. “This isn’t even the zombie nun that was in your attic. This is one of the others.”
“Oh, don’t be an idiot,” Tracy snapped. “Don’t you get it? My husband had them all; they were in the attic. He managed to bribe a friend to stop the truck with the zombie nuns—he had them all the time. Toys in the attic. They were there…hidden by cardboard, shielded by boxes. They were there—all the time. And….”
She broke off. Danni could hear sirens coming close again. The police. Now, they were coming back to the cemetery.