She turned the doll over and over in her shaking, worn hands. The doll, though not nearly as old as the aged voodoo queen handling it, nevertheless showed distinct signs of time passing: the carefully attached dark hairs, applied with wax at its making, were limp, broken, or just missing; the shape of the arms and legs were slightly warped, despite its preservation in a silk wrapping; one of the eye-beads was long gone, probably vanished in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

It had been her first gris-gris. She’d never known if it had even worked — at the least, in all her years, there had never been any evidence it had worked. But it could be so hard to tell …

Just a piece of her beloved husband, that was all she’d wanted. A child, a rebirth, some way to be sure he had left something behind in the world.

Phoebe [lastname] glared at the outbreak parameters on the big wall screen, displaying an area topographical map, of the Incident Room. Right between two major metro areas, and in close proximity to two more — this had the potential to shape into a major disaster. The last time anything looked this bad, it had turned out to be a mentally disabled pyrokinetic who had drawn sympathetic fires across acres of Southern California. That area seemed to breed such people.

She hoped the team would be able to shut down this incident before it got that out of hand. The public only found out about the ones that got out of hand, and Phoebe wanted to keep it that way.

She paused in her typing to finger the crucifix around her neck. “Áve María, grátia pléna,” she whispered, continuing to add tracking information to the map onscreen. With this kind of potential for a zombie outbreak, no lesser Saint would do to petition. Maybe she’d stop by the Church on the way home and light a few candles.

Felice Helios drummed her fingers against the desktop, watching the map data flow in. This looked ugly. They were going to have to start out shooting just to clear enough room to find the zero site. At the rate sightings were multiplying, it was enough to make one believe in the movie version of zombies, who could spread by biting.

Fortunately, no voudon or spellcaster or anyone else had ever been able to pull that off, not in hundreds of cases in hundreds of years. Records from before the [group] was sanctioned by church or state or any law down through history packed the archives at the Alexandria Tower, the oldest ones carefully preserved from time’s ravages by means magical and mundane.

Of course, [group]’s activities were much freer now with full governmental backing, and the sanction of several different religions was a major boon as well. Aversion of incidents didn’t count, apparently, but stopping a major incident in its tracks was a major demonstration of worthiness. Felice’s lips twisted. It was hard to accept the fact that [group] would never get good reviews — the ones they stopped vanished in the smoke haze created by news of the ones they didn’t.

And this one shaped up badly. The rate of appearances indicated someone out there with power to burn and a real grudge. Location meant it might be a soldier with PTSD, or a soldier’s child, meaning a struggle with the military over jurisdiction. The local LEO hadn’t reported an increase in violence or the murder rate, though, so nobody on the team could fiigure out where the power was coming from.

Re-animation by itself wasn’t really all that hard. Life called to life. The surprise was that the ability didn’t turn up more often. But the voudons guarded their secrets carefully and tended not to share them with other spellcasters, and the inborn ability /was/ rare. No, the hard part was continuing to raise the dead. Over and over and over. A single zombie wasn’t all that useful, especially if you got an old body (the chances for that were pretty high, too). No, it usually took a group, a shamble, of zombies to accomplish anything. Of course, most of the time re-animation only occurred when information was required, which meant a shamble of zombies wasn’t raised.

When you started getting shambles, you had a problem. Uncontrolled zombies were violent; life called to life, but the souls didn’t often want to leave their afterlives — and those that did were generally the violent type. Controlled zombies were pretty easy to deal with; you just persuaded the re-animator to put them back, which usually wasn’t that hard.

Uncontrolled zombies tended to wander all over the place, wreaking havoc, and the only way to lay them was to either get them back into the physical presence of the re-animator, who then had to re-establish control and THEN lay them — or you had to blow them to tiny bits. Which didn’t go over well with the local LEOs or the relatives.

These were either uncontrolled zombies, or whomever had re-animated them had told them to wreak havoc anyway. Which amounted to the same thing, right now — a huge shamble of zombies, carrying trouble with them like the plague.

Over half the team was going to have to be devoted to round-up and containment, Felice decided. That meant Phoebe and Noel were only going to have one field agent to work with, and it was going to have to be Rico. There was no way the team could spare anyone with more experience, but it was going to be a rough time for the kid.

The room was silent as Phoebe finished marking out the current range of the zombies’ spread. Felice heard an audible gulp and the slap of a hand against the back of a head. “Cut it out,” she said, turning to face the rest of the team. “we’ve got a situation here, right enough, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Rico, you’re with Phoebe and Noel; find me the zero site. The rest of you, you’re with me on containment. Before we go out there, get a refresh of the zombie procs on your smartphone from Phoebe.”

She stopped for a moment to lay a hand on the Catholic woman’s shoulder. “It’s in your hands, this time, Phoebe, yours and Noel’s. Without that zero site, all we can do is stem the tide.”

Phoebe laid her cheek against the back of Felice’s hand, her usual acknowledgement, and continued typing. Code rolled across the focused window, and Felice moved on, satisfied.