He looked from one to the other of us, and finally stood up. It didn’t seem to be because he had to obey either of us, but then I hadn’t given him a direct order. I felt Nicky shift at my back like a small mountain flexing its shoulders, probably to get rid of built-up tension.
Justine stood up, wrapping her fingers through the zombie’s hand. “I’ll go where Tom goes.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said.
She wrapped her hand around her other one so she had a two-handed grip. “I do.”
Warrington didn’t shake her off, just stepped away from the table with her still clinging to his hand. “I would like Justine to come with us, if she wishes to.”
She smiled up at him with one of those beatific smiles that usually requires serious dating, or good sex, or at least years of semiserious flirting. “I wish to.”
I hoped she just had a crush on him. If it was more, she was going to have a very bad time, because Warrington was going back in the ground tonight. Whatever was happening with this zombie, I had to pull the plug as soon as possible. His finding true lust didn’t change that.
Most of the rest of the group wanted to come, too. “We don’t need a crowd.”
They protested.
“If you make me wave my badge around I’m going to be unhappy with you.”
Warrington turned to them all and said, “There is no need to threaten my friends. We will go outside and speak with you in private.” His calm voice did what my threats couldn’t.
Domino led the way, checking and holding the door like Nicky had on the way inside. Nicky brought up the rear this time. Our client, the zombie, and his girlfriend walked ahead of me. The guy who had been recording things at the cemetery with his phone now had a small handheld video recorder. His name was Bob, and he followed us in case we did something worth recording. I’d let Bob come along for two reasons. One, his recording everything so the rest of the historical group could see it later helped them be happier with us going outside without them. Two, I was going to have to confiscate everything he’d recorded. Proof that I could raise something this lifelike could not get out on the Internet. I’d had a government element interested in me for raising a certain dead world leader, and that zombie had been much less alive than this one. If they saw this one, I’d be lucky if they didn’t show up before the night was over. Keeping Bob close to me seemed like the best way to ensure I could bully him out of the “evidence” later.
We stepped away from the doors to find a little privacy near some shrubs, close enough to the light to not be in the dark, but Nicky, Domino, and I didn’t stand under the light. Manny kept to the light with MacDougal and Justine. Warrington kept her hand in his, but he moved toward the shadows, so that their arms were held wide between them, as she tried to keep standing in the light the way modern women are taught to in a parking lot, and he tried to stay more hidden. Maybe it was being a soldier in life, or maybe it was the instinct of the dead to hide from the light. Or maybe I was being too poetic; I was so far out of my comfort zone I didn’t know anymore.
I told the zombie what I’d told MacDougal, that the restaurant would be closed down and fined if anyone found out he’d been inside. “But Miss Blake, surely such laws are meant for those poor creatures that look like rotting corpses.”
“How do you know what other zombies look like?” I asked.
He flinched a little, as if the way I’d phrased it bothered him. Justine stepped closer to him. “My new friends showed me images on their handheld devices.”
I looked at Justine and Warrington, and Bob the tech guy.
“One of us said he didn’t look like a zombie and he wanted to know what we meant,” Bob said, shrugging.
“But look at me, Miss Blake.” The zombie held out his hand toward me. “I am not like those poor creatures.”
“You are a very lifelike zombie, if I do say so myself.”
He frowned. “If the pictures and movies online are what I am supposed to be, then I am something else, Miss Blake.”
It was really hard to argue with him as he looked at me, his face alight with force and emotion.
“However lifelike you appear now,” Manny said, “it won’t last.”
“What do you mean, it won’t last?”
Manny gave the zombie his best I’m-sorry-you’re-grieving face. “No matter how alive you look and feel right now, you will begin to . . . rot, just like the zombies you saw on the Internet.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Of course you don’t,” I said.
“It is still true,” Manny said.
The zombie frowned, and squeezed Justine’s hand. “No zombie we saw on the . . . computer looked like me.”
“Anita is a very, very powerful necromancer. I don’t believe that anyone else could have brought you back in this state of completeness.”
“Completeness,” the zombie said, “yes, that’s a good word. I feel complete and whole, and quite myself. Why am I not simply alive, rather than dead?”
“You’re undead,” I said. “It’s not the same thing.”
“You are engaged to marry a vampire, Ms. Blake. Is he any more alive than I am?”
I frowned at MacDougal.
“He had questions for us about how he got here, Ms. Blake. The Internet was the easiest way to explain, and when your name is typed in, the engagement story is the first thing to come up in the feed.”