The vampire pulled the protesting door back into place and spun to say, “Zombies.”
“Zombies? Are you fucking with me?”
“No,” Foxx said, while eyeing the door to the left.
“Are you sure?”
“No heartbeat. Or breathing.”
“Couldn’t it just be an illusion?”
“It…could be,” Foxx said hesitantly, before shaking his head. “I just have this feeling it’s not. And being around Daydric as long as I was…just, you get this odd sense of knowing when one is around.”
Well fuck, zombies…on top of a group of vampires playing mafia.Just what they needed, he thought sarcastically.
“Well, how do you kill a zombie? And can they…hear us?”
“It…depends if the creator is old enough to, or bothered to, give it some sort of consciousness. Or rather, whether they gave it the ability to think in some capacity.
“There are levels of zombies. At the highest, there are ones who look so real that it is impossible to tell them apart from any other living creature due to how perfectly they mimic life. To the point that even if I looked at their threads, I wouldn’t be able to tell.
“At the lowest, there are your stereotypical zombies. They look like zombies, and are basically mindless drones who follow a single order. The second is easy enough to deal with, but the first…is an absolute nightmare to kill, as not only are they smart and strong, but normal fatal wounds barely register to them.
“Though, I supposekillis the wrong word as they aren’t even alive. They are powered through an energy connection between them and the one who rose them up. To render them dead again, you have to sever that connection.”
Harlow frowned, eyeing the door that Foxx was still staring at. “Can you tell from here what we are dealing with?”
“No, and yes? I can’t tell the exact level, but I can tell it’s not the highest. There would be breathing and a heartbeat, as the goal is to be believable and deadly. To be honest, the only zombie I’ve seen of that level was one Daydric himself had created. There are few vampires alive who could pull that off. And the ones who can, well, no one that old would be this dumb.
“Daydric may not police his line as much as Moirai, but then he also hasn’t created as many. And anyone dumb enough to try and set up a mafia would not have lived long enough to get that old.
“To be honest, it’s not an easy power to control. Even a vampire of that line, of my age, wouldn’t be able to create that level of undead.”
He grinned at the slip. “And what age is that?”
Foxx blinked. “A hundred and twenty-five.”
He scoffed. “One day you are going to tell me your real damn age, brat.”
The vampire stared innocently up at him with his large aquamarine green eyes. “But I just did.”
“Bullshit. Now, how do we kill it?”
“You injure it. Hurting a zombie, even if it can’t feel anything, will often be enough to sever the energy connection keeping it animated. How much depends on how well it’s constructed. For the ones that are at least semi-realistic…really, the only way is to incapacitate them, and then set them on fire… Which, I mean overall, the easiest solution is for us to walk our asses back out and just set the building ablaze.”
It would be…and who knows what else they’d have to deal with today with all the buildings they had to check out, yet…
“Fucking hell, we have to at least attempt to find Hanes’ body. It’s protocol,” he grumbled. “We have to both confirm his death, as well as his partner’s, while attempting to retrieve their bodies if we can. We aren’t supposed to risk death over it, but we have to at least try.”
“Fineee. But I'm just going to add…where there is one zombie, there is likely more.”
Harlow sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”
Foxx nodded and headed straight for the left door. They found it unlocked. Pushing in, they were hit with the stench of blood even before they saw it. The room was at first blocked by a row of shelving, filled with products of some kind, but after that first row, it opened up into a big fat nothing, besides…blood, and at least two dozen dead bodies. One of those bodies…was standing.
Foxx had told them they existed, but…maybe some part of him hadn’t really believed it because he honestly felt slightly shocked—interesting. He frowned, eyeing the zombie as it hobbled.
Based on the suit, he was pretty sure it was one of the so-called mafia vampires. Or had been. Its suit was torn in various places from bullet wounds, the thing’s head lolled to the side, its eyes white and completely rolled back. What killed the man was obvious—hard to miss the giant hole in the vampire’s chest. It looked like someone had fired into the man until his heart was destroyed. Either way, Harlow could literally see through the zombie.
