Page 31 (1/2)

He crossed his arry enough to kill soure out all of that--the getting rid of the evidence stuff" Ithose curtains down as well "So either soue zory--which I admit is possible, but it see his victims Or, there wasn’t a zombie at all" I watched him as I said this last one "Ed, how on earth did you know about zombies back then? What made you seriously consider that as a possibility?"

"I didn’t Not really," he aded to convinceAfter a while I simply accepted that it had been a horrible accident"

"What changed?" I asked, frowning

Ed griot a package in the mail It was a notebook--a personal journal of my dad’s"

I pressed the tape down on the botto and flicked it on It wasn’t a lot of light, but it was better than pitch darkness, and enough for rey striped pants tucked into studded boots, black shirt with dark red skulls It also looked like he’d picked up a fewlike the Ed I’d known before "Okay," I said, "and so in that journal convinced you that zoes Most of the rest had been ripped out But my dad wrote about how the zombies were real and that the person they used to be was dead and gone and all that was left was a uilty flush crawl across his face "And, he, uh, wrote about hoas spreading like a plague, and he had theories about how to kill the at ist was: slow them down then cut their heads off"

"And…that’s when you decided to become a zombie hunter?" I asked, my voice thick with disbelief

He narrowed his eyes, scowled "No No, of course not Ion, and I’d ured this was just some sort of novel or story that my dad had decided to write I mean, really, who the hell could believe that?" He paused, looked down at his hands "Then, about a week later, I got another package This time it was some of my mother’s correspondence"

"Wait," I said with a slight frown "What kind of doctor was your ist She had a practice, but she enjoyed the research end of things more," he explained "Anyway, this was printouts of several emails The recipient was blacked out, so I have no idea who it was intended for, but it was a series of conversations with her going through a number of theories she had on how zombies actually functioned and why they needed brains--"

"Prions," I interrupted, perhaps a bit sri all that I…I started to realize that I really had seen what I thought I’d seen"

I opened my mouth to speak but he held up his hand "And, no, I still didn’t i zohed heavily "It was al me to a secure website All sorts of passwords and ID verification stuff, and there was a e for me there that told me my parents had been zo to wipe out the, um," his eyes flicked briefly to ue" He groaned and dropped his head back, covering his eyes with his forearel, by that time I was so tied up in knots, and sowith the stuff froht it, hook, line and sinker, and told theht about this for a moment Could it be true? Were his parents also zombie hunters? Pietro had certainly"And you used Marianne’s dog to let you knoho the zohed "Kudzu is a cadaver dog If soave me a reason to look into them Then I’d watch the I’d sometimes check them out on Lexis Nexis to see if there were any hiccups in their info that would be there if they were older than they looked That sort of thing" He stood and moved to one of the s, peeled a sh a thin gap

"Zeke Lyons was one of your victi back at rew his body?"

Ed whipped his head around to stare at rows a tail?"

"Yeah, except that it was the whole body, with the right fingerprints and everything" I had a sudden bizarre irew back, like a bobble-head doll "Sah Had a scar on his chin, same as on his driver’s license And his body was still in its coffin at Riverwood" I paused "So, what did you do with the heads?"