Free The Dishonored Dead by Robert Swartwood

have understood.”
    “But the boy,” Conrad said, his mind racing now, “he wasn’t a zombie.”
    “No,” Albert agreed, “he wasn’t. He must have just finished digging the Pandora up when Lewis approached him. Not enough time had passed for his body to absorb the energy inside the rock.”
    “But you said—” Conrad paused, took a breath. “But you said they couldn’t be opened.”
    “They can’t, no. Well actually, that’s not completely true, but we’ll come back to that. Anyhow, as I’ve explained, children ten years old are able to sense these Pandoras. And these children, if they find a Pandora, are also able to absorb the energy inside. It’s a remarkable phenomenon, to be completely honest with you. The child needs to hold a Pandora in his or her hand for at least thirty seconds. Most times it takes a minute. After a few seconds, the energy inside the rock begins to fluctuate and the rock starts to glow. Then, if a child has not yet released the Pandora, the energy inside it is absorbed into his or her body, turning them from the dead into the living.”
    This last point was a little too much for Conrad to take. He focused his mind instead on Scott, one of the eight he’d graduated with on that prestigious day so long ago, and asked Albert, “What is a Tracker?”
    Smiling, Albert told him exactly what a Tracker was. How it was a very important employee of Living Intelligence. How every night all around the world, while everyone else slept, a Tracker went out with a fellow Tracker to follow one of the living. That was the purpose of most of the zombies in this facility: besides allowing the scientists to study them, every evening after midnight a few of the living were taken out into the city or suburbs, mostly in parks or woods, and they would walk around listening for the sound of the pulse. They would find where the sound came from, and there the Trackers would mark it for the Diggers who would arrive soon after, dig it up, box it in a plastic container such as the one now on Albert’s desk, and take it away.
    Conrad said, “Where do the Diggers take these boxes?”
    “I’m sure you saw the building you passed on the way in here?”
    Conrad remembered that large white windowless building, the place Norman had called the Warehouse.
    “That’s where we keep the found Pandoras. And before you ask, Conrad, no, we can’t destroy them. The thought has crossed our minds more than once, and a few times we even came close to attempting it, but in the end we decided it was much too dangerous. After all, we can’t guess what might happen to the energy inside them.”
    “So how are the Pandoras stored?”  
    “A long time ago, even before Living Intelligence was formed, the Government had knowledge about these stones. After all, at almost every construction site at least one or two Pandoras would be dug up. The Government found that these rocks couldn’t be destroyed, and so they decided to store them in places that they thought would never be found. There are no doubt places even in Olympus, such as in subbasements, where a handful of Pandoras now rest. In fact, I’m certain about that, but it’s impossible to scour the city looking for something the Government will deny exists, something it does not want the public to know about, even though it is a major threat.”
    Conrad shifted uneasily in his chair. “What do you mean, ‘a major threat’?”
    Albert gestured at the dark crystal cube shimmering on the desk. “This Pandora here? It can only be opened by a ten-year-old child, and only in that month or two when his or her body and mind is vulnerable to it. If a child were to touch a Pandora, that Pandora would somehow become theirs. The energy inside senses that child, and will not be absorbed by anyone else. There have been incidences where we have caught a child right before he or she opens a Pandora.”
    “So that boy from the other night,” Conrad said, and even though his eyes