I didn't like the way he said it, not that Rush would make it, but better odds, but we all knew that unless a miracle cure showed up, it was just a matter of time for Micah's dad. He and I had gotten on the plane knowing that, but still ... I shook it off and concentrated on work, clues, we needed fucking clues. If we couldn't save Micah's dad, then maybe we could find who raised the aberrant zombies and kill them. Revenge wasn't a substitute for saving his dad, not even close, but sometimes it's the best you can do, and it beats the hell out of nothing, or that's what I was going to keep telling myself until I couldn't believe it anymore.

'Where are the earlier victims, the ones who died even faster than shoulder-wound here?'

Rogers and Shelley exchanged a look; it wasn't a look you see often between doctors, especially when one of them is a trauma surgeon and the other is a coroner. They didn't want to see the bodies again. Something about them bothered both doctors. What the hell?

'We'll have to go into the other area,' Shelley said.

'Other area?' I made it a question.

'Where we keep the bodies that are so decayed that we, well, we wouldn't want the smell to contaminate everything. No one would be able to work down here.'

'You mean the room for floaters and bodies like that,' I said.

'Yes,' she said, and she gave me a curious look, as if she hadn't expected me to know that.

'These don't smell that bad; in fact, shouldn't the infection make them smell worse?'

'That is one of the odd things about it; it doesn't seem to have the odor to match the putrefaction process. It's a small blessing for the patients and their families, but it is odd.'

I frowned down at the bodies. 'But you put the other dead bodies in the area with the stinky stuff; why?'

'The early bodies decayed more completely. The infection spread from the initial bite site to encompass fifty to eighty percent of the available flesh in just hours.'

'Wait, hours?' I asked.

They nodded.

'These victims died in hours?' I asked.

'The man did; we were able to prolong the woman's life for three days.'

'Did the early victims in the lockbox die from the infection hitting a major organ group?' I asked.

'No,' Rogers and Shelley said together. She motioned to him.

He continued, 'Actually, the infection seemed to spread faster through the flesh until it hit a major organ. It's almost as if as the patient begins to die, the infection slows. It shouldn't, but it seems to, and I emphasize seems to, because we have far too small a sample set to be sure of much with this infection.'

'Understood, you're investigating the disease the way we're investigating the crime,' I said.

He nodded. 'Very much so.'

I shook my head. 'I don't know enough about this kind of disease to hazard a guess, but is there a pattern to the wounds on the other victims?'

'What do you mean, pattern?'

'Well, the neat bite is in the woman's face. The rough bite is a shoulder wound. We know we have multiple zombie whatevers; what I'm asking is, does one zombie bite on the arms and shoulders and the other one bite on the face, or was the bite placement just what they could grab? Do they have a bite preference?'

'Two of the victims had facial wounds,' Burke said behind us.

It was almost startling, as if we'd forgotten the other cops were back there.

'Three of them, including the sheriff, were shoulder, arm, or back wounds,' Al said.

'You said you had witnesses to some of the attacks. Did they report differences in how the zombies attacked?'

Al seemed to think about it and then glanced at the other officers. They all sort of shook their heads and shrugged. 'The witness statements read like a horror movie,' Rickman said. 'I don't mean they're horrible, but more like they're describing a scene from a movie.'

'What do you mean?' I asked.

Rickman looked at the other men, and it was the first sign of insecurity I'd seen in him. I wasn't sure if it made him more human and likable or if it should have worried me.

Burke said, 'My guys were the first on the scene for one attack, and I know what the detective is saying. Zombies are the shambling dead, slow relentless, but slow. One thing all the witnesses agree on is that these zombies are human-fast, at the very least, and maybe a little faster, which is movie stuff, not reality.'

'The one flesh-eating zombie I dealt with was more than human-fast,' I said.

'Why does eating flesh make them faster?' Rickman asked.

In my head I thought, I've seen zombies after they've eaten flesh and they haven't been faster, but I can't say it to a roomful of policemen, because I was the one who had raised the zombies and used them as defensive weapons. I'd done it every time to save my life and the lives of other innocent people, but none of it had been sanctioned by the police, and in fact I wasn't entirely sure the police would have okayed it regardless of circumstances. Technically as a marshal with the preternatural service I could use my psychic abilities to do my job; there were no caveats on what psychic abilities I used to finish my job, and since my job was to execute people ... technically I was now covered if I did it in the future. In reality I wasn't sure the police would be able to overlook it. At best I'd lose my badge; at worst I might be up on charges of using magic to kill people, which was an automatic death sentence. It was a gray area for the law, but the price was a little too high for me to want to test the limits of it.

'Marshal Blake, Marshal, can you hear me?'

I blinked and realized that Burke had been talking to me for a while, and I hadn't heard. Automatically I said, 'I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I think I was thinking too hard.'

'Too hard about what?' Rickman asked.

'The dead,' I said. I left the statement there for him to make what he would of it: the dead in this room, zombies, vamps, the victims what dead?

'Why does eating flesh make them faster?' Rickman said, and I realized he was repeating himself.

'I don't know, but I do know that fresh blood allows zombies to speak and helps them be more "alive."'

'What do you mean, fresh blood?' he asked.

'Have any of you ever seen a zombie raised from the grave?'

They all shook their heads. I thought about explaining the whole ritual to them, but it was more information than they needed, and if they didn't have a background in some sort of ritual-based religion it would be way too much. 'We usually kill a chicken at the grave, or some animators cut their own body to get the blood, but either way you need fresh blood to do the ritual.'

'What else do you need?' Al asked.

'A blade, salt, and most use an ointment with herbs in it; the mix is usually unique to each individual animator, because it's homemade. Some animators feel they can't raise the dead without their own mix of herbs and ointment; it's usually partly based on the ointment their mentor used when he or she trained them.'

'Is that all you need to raise the dead?' Rickman asked.

'You need the psychic ability to do it, which is damn rare. You need a buried body that is at least three days dead and you need to know the name of the body you're trying to call from the grave.'

'Why three days dead?' Al asked.

'That's minimum time for the soul to leave the body,' I said.