Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice Read Free

“please.” I added the “please” because what I really wanted to say was either
You’re being all wimpy for FBI
, or something more sarcastic. I’d been a little grumpy lately, even for me, so I was trying to monitor myself and only aim the grumpiness at bad guys.
    Brent hit the screen again and the shaky camerawork continued to be shaky so that you could see it was a cemetery at night, but that was about it. It was like the opening to an amateur horror flick where someone had gotten a new camera for Christmas, and then it steadied. I wondered if someone new was holding the camera, or if the holder had just gotten a handle on it. The answer to that question was the difference between one bad guy or two.
    There was a very abrupt jump in the film from empty cemetery to a blond-haired woman clawing her way out of the grave. At first I thought it was an actress who had been buried in soft earth up to about her armpits, but then the camera got a close-up of the eyes, and I knew dead when I saw it. The zombie crawled out of the grave the way I’d seen thousands do before. It had some issues with the skirt of the dress it had been buried in, and the clinging grave dirt, which happened sometimes, and then it stumbled free, standing crooked because one high heel had apparently gotten left in the grave.
    The body was tall, statuesque, with blond hair to her shoulders. Cleavage showed at the plunging neckline of the white dress, which meant the breasts had probably been implants; real breast tissue wasn’t going to be that perky without a woman fluffing them back in place, and the zombie didn’t know enough to do that. The small spotlight or whatever was attached to the handheld camera showed us the hair was blond, the eyes a pale gray that might have been bluer when she was alive. Blue mingled with any color from gray to green or even hazel tended to shift with a person’s moods more than most eye colors. Alive, she’d probably been beautiful, but there wasn’t enough home for that now. So much of a person’s attractiveness is their spirit, their personality. Zombies didn’t have much of that.
    The next scene, if that’s what you wanted to call it, was of the zombie in a standard bedroom except there were no visible windows in the room, and there was just something off about it. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t like the room, but I didn’t. The zombie was wearing the same clothes as in the cemetery; they hadn’t cleaned her up at all, so that she looked horror-movie wrong in the bedroom with its flowered bedspread and tile floor. That was part of the wrong; no one put tile in their bedroom. They did another zooming close-up of the zombie’s eyes, and this time they weren’t empty. This time they were terrified.
    “Fuck,” I said softly, but with real feeling.
    “You see it, too, then,” Manning said.
    “Yeah, I see it.”
    Zerbrowski said, “Why do the eyes look scared? Zombies don’t feel fear, right?”
    “Normally, no,” I said.
    Zerbrowski got up from his chair and moved over closer to where the rest of us were sitting. “Why do the eyes look like that, then?”
    “We don’t know,” Manning said. “What you’re about to see is impossible, according to our own experts.”
    My skin was already running cold, my stomach tight, because I was very afraid that I knew exactly what the “impossible” was going to be.
    A man in one of those all-leather masks where only the eyes and mouth showed walked into sight. The zombie’s eyes followed the movement, but the rest of her stood immobile, probably because she’d been told to stand there, and until told otherwise she had to stand just there, but they hadn’t told her not to move her eyes, so she followed the man’s movements like a human victim who had been tied up. She was tied up, tighter than any rope or chain could ever make her. Fuck, I did not want this little film to go where it was headed. I prayed silently,
please, God, don’t let them be able