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Hernando stood, brushing grass and dirt off the back of his pants. He seemed to have had a dandy childhood, or at least he’d turned out well. Congrats to his parents. Someday he’d bring home a nice girl and have nice children in a nice house with yard work on the weekends, and every Sunday dinner at one set of grandparents or another. A nice life if you can get it, and he still got to solve murders. Talk about having it all.

What did I have? What did I really have? I was too young for a mid-life crisis, and too old for an attack of conscience. We started walking back towards the cars. I was hugging my arms again, and had to force myself to stop. I lowered my arms to my sides and walked along beside Ramirez . . . ah, Hernando, like nothing was wrong.

“Marks said that one of the first cops on the scene had his throat nearly bitten out. How did that happen?”

“I wasn’t here for the first rush. The lieutenant waited to call me in.” There was a trace of harshness in his voice. He was gentle, but not if you pushed him. “But I heard that the three living victims attacked the cops. They had to subdue them with batons. They just kept trying to take pieces out of them.”

“Why would they do that? How would they do it? I mean you skin most people and rip off pieces, they aren’t going to feel like fighting.”

“I helped pick up some of the earlier survivors, and they didn’t fight. They just lay there and moaned. They were hurt and they acted hurt.”

“Have they ever traced down Thad Bromwell, the son of the first scene I saw?”

Hernando’s eyes widened. “Marks didn’t call you?”

I shook my head.

“He is such a shithead.”

I agreed. “What? Did they find the body?”

“He’s alive. He was away on a camping trip with friends.”

“He’s alive,” I said. Then whose soul had I seen hovering in the bedroom? I didn’t say it out loud because I’d forgotten to mention the soul to the police. Marks had been ready to chase me out of town. If I’d started talking about souls floating near the ceiling, he’d have gotten matches and a stake.

But someone had died in that room, and the soul was still confused about where to go. Most of the time if the soul hovers, it hovers over the body, the remains. Only three people lived in the house, two of them mutilated, and the boy somewhere else.

I had an idea. “These new mutilation victims, they kept fighting, kept trying to take bites out of the officers?”

He nodded.

“Are you sure about the bites, not just hitting, but like they were trying to feed?”

“I don’t know about feeding, but it was all bite wounds.” He was looking at me strangely. “You’ve thought of something.”

I nodded. “I may have. I have to see the other body, the one behind the door first, but then I think it’s time to go back to the hospital.”

“Why?”

I started walking again, and he grabbed my arm, turned me to face him. There was fierceness in his eyes, an intensity that trembled down his arm. “You’ve only been here a couple of days. I’ve been dealing with this for weeks. What do you know that I don’t?”

I looked at his hand until he let me go, but I told him. He was having nightmares about this shit, and I hadn’t gotten to that point yet. “I’m an animator. I raise zombies for a living. My specialty is the dead. One thing that the living dead have in common with one another from zombie, to ghoul, to vampire, is that they must feed off the living to sustain themselves.”

“Zombies don’t eat people,” he said.

“If a zombie is raised and the animator that raised it can’t control it, then it can go wild. It becomes a flesh-eating zombie.”

“I thought that was just stories.”

I shook my head. “No, I’ve seen it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that maybe there are no survivors. Maybe there are just dead and the living dead.”

He actually went pale. I touched his elbow to steady him, but he stood straight. “I’m all right. I’m all right.” He looked at me. “What do you do with a flesh-eating zombie?”

“Once it’s gone amok, there isn’t anything anyone can do except destroy