The fact that Sharley had been actively murdered...well. The zombies weren't stupid; they knew this could go nowhere good at all. The Other was a dangerous place--had it been anything else, the Memories or anything that actually belonged here, the reaction might not have been half so severe, but murder was another story. They knew their mother would be pissed, too, and while she wasn't so scary as Azarael when she was angry, she was bad enough.
Arlene, a small girl who unlike the others was not rather disgustingly dead, looked up at him as they walked. Sharley's blood was...all over, sticky and dark now, and though it was too dim to properly see all the zombies knew she had to have some truly awful chest wounds. They were connoisseurs of chest, wounds, after all. Every kind of wound, really. Their Mama, Arlene thought, could fix that, at least--wash all the blood off like she did for all the children when she first made them. She and all the rest kept pace with Spocklar, an odd vanguard accompanying him into the deeper, brighter swamp, beneath the blue lights. In here the wind was little more than a breath below, though the highest branches still swayed almost violently.
Sarah had evidently made good time, for even before they'd reached the central banyan Tanya approached them--a Tanya so torn between pity, pragmatism, and anger that it was a wonder she wasn't completely mad. Her white face had lost its expression of gentle stoner-ness, her manic blue eyes sharp and alert.
"Shit," she muttered, touching Sharley's face--her fingers came away sticky with blood. Those brilliant eyes flicked up to Spocklar's face, appraising. "Come on in with me," she said, her voice a little more gentle even as Sinsemilla's had been. Whatever Tanya's habits with hallucinogens, she wasn't stupid, and a person would have to be completely blind not to see that he was hanging on by a thread. "We'll see what we can do."
She led him to one of her houses--the same one he'd been in when he was sick, in fact. It was warmer in there, warm and bright and smelling of sharp sweet incense. Tanya cleared a few odds and ends off the table, stowing them away on various shelves. "Go on ahead and put her down," she said, somehow keeping her voice gentle in spite of the fact that she was very swiftly becoming pissed as all hell.