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wrong. The stench of death hung around them, and their faces were stiff and unresponsive.
    Zombies.
    There were at least a couple dozen, more than she’d seen Hoodoo Mamaraise up for a long time. At least with Thanksgiving the usual crowds in Jackson Square were sparse, though there were still enough onlookers watching from a wary distance to make Jerusha nervous.
    Joey and Juliet were standing at the makeshift wooden “shrine” that enclosed Bubbles, its planks adorned with ribbons and handwritten testimonials. The thick pipes of Michelle’s feeding tubes stabbed into the white cloth that covered her body, which had sunk so deeply into the soft ground that pumps had to remove the water that would otherwise have flooded the depression. Jerusha could hear Joey shouting into the night. “Fuck them. Goddamn leeches. They stole her fucking money. Now they want to kill her, too? Well,
fuck
that.”
    Ink was standing next to Joey, an arm around her, her voice so quiet that Jerusha couldn’t hear it. Whatever she was saying, Joey didn’t like it. Her zombies muttered and groaned. “I ain’t gonna let that that cocksucker of a father and her cunt mother screw Michelle again. I ain’t.” Her lips were pressed into a tight line. A hardness came over her thin face. She ran a hand through the tangled shock of brown hair, ruffling the bright red streak. “I’ll fucking rip them both into a hundred fucking pieces. I swear.”
    “Ink, Joey,” Jerusha said loudly, skirting the edge of the zombie crowd. “Listen, you can’t . . .”
    She stopped at the sound of sirens, cutting through the low whine of the pumps driving Michelle’s feeding tubes. Along Decatur Street, a small motorcade pulled into the square, pulling up on the far side of Bubbles’s shrine, near a large grey electrical box. Jerusha plunged a hand into the open zipper of the pouch at her waist, fingering the seeds inside.
    NOLA SWAT police officers piled out of the first three black vans, their faces masked by riot helmets, armed with what looked to be shotguns. Ira and Sharon LaFleur emerged from a limousine, accompanied by another phalanx of policemen.
    Jerusha had always pictured them as villains, monsters who would steal money from their child. She’d expected their sins to be written on their faces, but they weren’t. Ira was balding and overweight, looking pudgy and ineffectual; Sharon’s face was drawn and haggard and thin, but the lines were those of a model: like her daughter’s face, what Bubbles might look like in another quarter century. They looked
ordinary
.
    “Motherfuckers!”
Hoodoo Mama shrieked, and her zombies howled with her. Ink had both arms around Joey, clinging to her desperately. Joey pointedat the LaFleurs. “You miserable cocksuckers! You stay the fuck away from her, you hear me!”
    Sharon LaFleur looked at them, hand over mouth. The zombies started to shamble toward them. The cops shuffled nervously, weapons up and ready. “Joey, you can’t!” Jerusha shouted.
    Joey shook her head. “You kill her,” she screamed at the LaFleurs, “and I’ll just raise her up again. She’ll be the biggest fucking zombie in the whole goddamn world. You hear me, you cocksuckers?”
    Ira LaFleur nodded to the officers nearest the grey box, which now had a panel open. The low whine of the pumps driving Bubbles’s feeding tubes suddenly vanished. The silence was more terrible than any sound could have been.
    The zombies screamed as one, wordless. They advanced.
    “Damn it.” Jerusha pulled her hand from the pouch, fisted around the contents there. She flung them wide. As soon as the seeds hit the ground, they were rising, a wriggling carpet of vines that tore through the pavement of Jackson Square. Kudzu. Jerusha guided the growth in her mind, snarling the vines around the zombies’ legs, bodies, and arms, encasing them in living green chains. She coiled them around Joey and Ink for good measure. Hoodoo Mama glared at her, cursing