Kill the Dead (Sandman Slim 2)

“Don’t worry about it. Nothing is going to happen to me. I’m not human, remember?”

“Part of you is.”>He leaves. Allegra turns on a metal desk lamp she keeps there for reading cookbooks and potions. As she tentatively runs her fingers around the edges of Brigitte’s wound, she holds the light by her face.

“Who is she? Is she from the store? I swear I’ve seen her somewhere.”

“She’s Brigitte Bardo. You two probably watched some of her movies together.”

She pauses for a few seconds.

“Right. That’s it.” Her tone is slightly embarrassed. “What’s she doing here?”

“She’s in Lucifer’s movie.”

“Lucifer is making a porn movie?”

“She’s a trained zombie hunter, but she stays dressed for that, so there’s not that much money in it.”

Allegra hands me the lamp, goes to the sink, and washes her hands. By the time she’s finished, Vidocq is back with a canopic jar and a small white metal case stamped with a red cross. She opens a plastic bottle of Betadine and squirts it all over the wound, then takes a couple of big gauze pads from the first-aid kit and gently cleans it out. When she’s done she presses her ear to Brigitte’s back.

“It looks like the bleeding has stopped, but you’re right. By her color and heartbeat she’s lost a lot of blood. I can give her a general healing potion for the wound and a restorative for the blood loss.”

“She was bitten by a damned zombie. How about something for that?”

Allegra ignores me. She takes the lid off the canopic jar and I get hit with a smell that reminds me of the Drifters at Springheel’s. She upends the jar and a pile of fat, wriggling worms falls out. Each one is the size of my thumb.

“What are those?”

“Pharaoh grubs. They’re like maggots. They eat dead skin and leave clean, healthy tissue and they’re about ten times faster about it than maggots.”

Allegra puts several of the grubs on Brigitte’s wound. They go right for her discolored flesh. Vidocq puts his hand on my arm and raises it so I’m holding the lamp at a better angle for Allegra to work.

“Thank you, dear.”

“Of course.”

I look at Vidocq. Lit from below by the lamp, he looks old and tired.

“You’ve been around two hundred years, man. Tell me you know something to fix this.”

“I do know something. But I know that what you want doesn’t exist. There is no cure for the bite of a revenant.”

“You have all these books. How do you know there isn’t something you’ve missed?”

“I’ve read all these books many times and more besides. I’ve traveled the world hoping to cure my own involuntary immortality. I learned from magnificent alchemists, witches, and magicians. The few times the subject of revenants came up, all were in agreement. There is no cure. The best you can do is leave the afflicted in the Winter Garden.”

“No way.”

“Where’s the Winter Garden?” asks Allegra.

I say, “It’s not where. It’s what. He wants to put Brigitte into a fucking coma. Like suspended animation in a science-fiction movie.”

“It will stop the infection from consuming and killing her. It will halt her transformation.”

Allegra picks up a couple of the grubs.

“How long can you keep her like that?” she asks.

“In theory, forever. It will give us time to look for other possibilities.”