The Laughing Corpse - Laurell K. Hamilton [128]
I felt each grave, each corpse. I felt them coalesce from dust and bone fragments to things that were barely dead at all.
“Arise from your graves all dead within sound of my call. Arise and serve me!” Without naming them all I shouldn’t have been able to call a single one from the grave, but the power of two human deaths was too much for the dead to resist.
They rose upward like swimmers through water. The ground rippled underfoot like a horse’s skin.
“What are you doing?” Dominga asked.
“Raising the dead,” I said. Maybe it showed in my voice. Maybe she felt it. Whatever, she started running towards the circle, but it was too late.
Hands tore through the earth at Dominga’s feet. Dead hands grabbed her ankles and sent her sprawling into the long grass. I lost sight of her but I didn’t lose control of the zombies. I told them, “Kill her, kill her.”
The grass shuddered and surged like water. The sound of muscles pulling away from bone in wet thick pieces filled the night. Bones broke with sharp cracks. Over the sounds of tearing flesh, Dominga shrieked.
There was one last wet sound, thick and full. Dominga’s screams broke off abruptly. I felt the dead hands tearing out her throat. Her blood splattered the grass like a black sprinkler.
Her spell shredded on the wind, but I didn’t need her urging now. The power had me. I was riding it like a bird on a current of air. It held me, lifted me. It felt solid and insubstantial as air.
The dry sunken earth cracked open over Gaynor’s ancestor’s grave. A pale hand shot skyward. A second hand came through the crack. The zombie tore the dry earth. I heard other old graves breaking in the still, summer night. It broke its way out of his grave, just like Gaynor had wanted.
Gaynor sat in his wheelchair on the crest of the hill. He was surrounded by the dead. Dozens of zombies in various stages of decay crowded close to him. But I hadn’t given the order yet. They wouldn’t hurt him unless I told them to.
“Ask him where the treasure is,” Gaynor shouted.
I stared at him and every zombie turned with my eyes and stared at him, too. He didn’t understand. Gaynor was like a lot of people with money. They mistake money for power. It isn’t the same thing at all.
“Kill the man Harold Gaynor.” I said it loud enough to carry on the still air.
“I’ll give you a million dollars for having raised him. Whether I find the treasure or not,” Gaynor said.
“I don’t want your money, Gaynor,” I said.
The zombies were moving in on every side, slow, hands extended, like every horror movie you’ve ever seen. Sometimes Hollywood is accurate, whatta ya know.
“Two million, three million!” His voice was breaking with fear. He’d had a better seat for Dominga’s death than I had. He knew what was coming. “Four million!”
“Not enough,” I said.
“How much?” he shouted. “Name your price!” I couldn’t see him now. The zombies hid him from view.
“No money, Gaynor, just you dead, that’s enough.”
He started screaming, wordlessly. I felt the hands begin to rip at him. Teeth to tear.
Wanda grabbed my legs. “Don’t, don’t hurt him. Please!”
I just stared at her. I was remembering Benjamin Reynolds’s blood-coated teddy bear, the tiny hand with that stupid plastic ring on it, the blood-soaked bedroom, the baby blanket. “He deserves to die,” I said. My voice sounded separate from me, distant and echoing. It didn’t sound like me at all.
“You can’t just murder him,” Wanda said.
“Watch me,” I said.
She tried to climb my body, but her legs betrayed her and she fell in a heap at my feet, sobbing.
I didn’t understand how Wanda could beg for his life after what he had done to her. Love, I suppose. In the end she really did love him. And that, perhaps, was the saddest thing of all.
When