Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [66]
I said, “So you think Darius, er, woke up?”
“Quite possibly,” said Max.
“I don’t like to hear myself asking this,” Jeff said, “but what’s so dangerous and unpredictable about an awakened zombie?”
“Well, instead of an empty vessel just serving the bokor’s will,” Puma said, “now you have a soulless creature trying to exercise its own will, without morality, self-control, or memory. And there’s no telling what it’ll do or what might happen.”
“So now that he’s awake, Darius won’t just go back to his apartment and open a bottle of wine?” Jeff asked.
“No. He may be drawn to places or people that were familiar to him in life,” Max said. “But, as Puma has indicated, he is devoid of reason or awareness. Whatever he does, he will not behave as if he were still alive.”
“Oh, my God,” I said slowly. “Max, I think I know why the baka attacked Darius!” I recalled the way the two little creatures had made a swift beeline across the street that night to the spot where they assaulted Darius. They were hunting him. “If he awakened and, er, wandered away from home—”
“Or fled captivity,” said Puma.
“Then maybe the baka were sent after him,” I said.
“Ah!” said Max. “To retrieve him for the bokor?”
“Yes.”
“Or maybe the bokor wanted to get rid of the evidence before anyone saw his runaway zombie and started asking questions?” Biko suggested. “Maybe the baka were sent to dismember Mr. Phelps and scatter the parts!”
“Okay, what do you say we put away these leftovers?” Jeff said loudly.
I took a deep breath. “So what we’re saying is—”
“What do you mean ‘we’?” said Jeff as he and Puma rose to start packing up the food and throw away our paper plates and plastic utensils. “I’m voting for the robot theory.”
“It’s a stupid theory, man,” said Biko.
“Okay, then I’m voting for the detective’s theory,” Jeff shot back, folding aluminum foil over what was left of the chicken.
Puma frowned. “What’s the detective’s theory again?”
“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “But it’s got to be better than this.”
“Let’s get our theory straight,” I said. “Darius dies of a freak medical problem, and there happens to be a bokor in the neighborhood who decides to raise him from the dead, wanting a slave who’ll be completely obedient to his or her will. Is that what we’re saying?”
“Actually, I think we should consider the possibility that the death was not accidental,” Max said.
We all looked at him in surprise.
Then Jeff said, “It was a ruptured intestine, Max. If there had been anything suspicious about it, the doctors would have told the cops. And the cops would have started sniffing around Darius’ life—including his workplace. But nothing like that has happened.”
Max said, “A bokor powerful enough to raise a zombie from the dead and conjure baka could, I’m sorry to say, commit murder and make it appear to be natural causes.”
This statement had a sobering effect on us all.
“Mr. Phelps might have been killed?” Biko said. “Deliberately?”
“Perhaps,” Max said.
“To make him a zombie?” When Max nodded, I said, “That’s awful! Why would someone do that?”
“I suspect,” Max said, “it may be that someone has been raising a small army of zombies and needed at least one more—and quickly, too.”
“Excuse me?” said Jeff.
“The disturbance in the directional flow of mystical energy that has been building steadily in this locale is consistent with Darius’ reanimation,” Max said, “but not explained by it. Not entirely, that is.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it is too powerful to be the result of one isolated incident. Something more is happening than just the mystical enslavement of Darius Phelps.” With a frown of concentration on his face, as if focusing on the disrupted spiritual flow of this dimension from his folding chair right there in Puma’s Vodou Emporium, he said, “I believe there are more zombies out there. And I believe the bokor has raised them to assist with some devastating