Moon over Bourbon Street - a Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  “You’ll like this even less,” Skeeter’s voice crackled in both our ears.

  “What the hell, Skeeter! I though you woulda figured out what team Detective Big Easy is on by now and be working your way through three hurricanes trying to find the courage to ask him out. Instead you’re firing up the comm without telling anybody and scaring the shit out of me!”

  “For one thing, I know exactly what team Detective Ponté plays for and am heading back to the hotel to get a shower and a quick shave before I meet that lovely bit of gator-bait for sunrise beignets at Cafe du Monde. For another, our corpse was gone.”

  “Gone?” I asked.

  “Gone,” Skeeter confirmed. “But not only was our corpse missing, so were the heads of the two vampires Catherine sent to dispose of the body. But the body snatcher was kind enough to leave a note telling us to get the hell out of New Orleans before dawn or there was gonna be hell to pay.”

  I chuckled. “I don’t think whoever left that note understands the trouble they’ve opened themselves up for. Hell to pay? Shit, if that was all I had to pay, I’d call that a tiny bill. Did Detective Hair Gel get anything off the note?”

  “He let the forensics people do their job. I’ll ask him at breakfast. When are you two heading back? It’s almost dawn.”

  “Yeah, but nobody told these guys,” Amy said, pointing back into the cemetery where dozens of new zombies were making their slow but steady way toward us.

  “Shit, Skeeter, I gotta go. We got more zombies to kill.”

  Chapter 6

  I turned to Amy. “How are you for ammo?”

  “I’ve got fifteen in the mag, one in the pipe, and one spare mag that’s half-full from earlier. My backup piece carries six. What about you?”

  “Pretty low,” I said. “One full mag for Bertha, a couple rounds in another, the Judge loaded with buckshot, and a couple of knives, but those aren’t real good against zombies.” I looked around and picked up a shovel lying next to the emptied grave. “And this,” I said, snapping the handle off behind the head and twirling the impromptu quarter staff around like a demented majorette.

  I leaned the shovel handle against a nearby tomb and drew Bertha. The nearest zombie twitched at the sound of my holster snapping open and picked up speed in his approach. A couple of the other shambling corpses seemed to be shambling a little faster, too.

  “Hey, Amy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do these guys seem to be moving faster to you?”

  “Yeah, maybe a little, but—holy shit!” She squeezed off five shots in rapid succession as the four zombies nearest to her suddenly went turbo, all at the same time. Mine did the same thing, going from regular, staggering slow zombies to holy shit these guys are on meth or something zombies in the blink of an eye. In a couple of seconds, I went from having ten feet clear around me with a few zombies in my line of sight to three right on top of me with jaws gaping and teeth snapping and a solid wall of twenty of the undead bastards coming my way.

  “Get back to back!” I yelled to Amy and felt her slam her shoulder blades up against the middle of my back. I crushed one zombie’s head with Bertha’s butt, then emptied the magazine in a half-circle of fifty-caliber death, dropping ten zombies with head shots. I ejected my magazine and slammed the spare home, squeezing off three more shots before it was spent. I holstered Bertha and drew the Judge, but its buckshot load wasn’t gonna be nearly as effective the big Desert Eagle slugs.

  I heard a pause in the shooting behind me and turned to talk to Amy over my shoulder. “You empty?”

  “Yeah, just my backup left.” That didn’t stop her from reaching back to pull the Buck hunting knife off my belt and jab it through some shambler’s eye socket.

  “Climb up on the tomb,” I said.

  “I can’t reach.”

  “Get on my shoulders,” I said, turning around and grabbing her belt with my off hand. I put a face full of buckshot into the nearest zombie, but it didn’t go down. I swung the shovel handle up under its chin hard enough to decapitate the monster, and it fell back onto its compadres, giving me a little breathing room. Amy scrambled up me, then pulled herself onto the roof of the tomb.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now you stay on the roof while I go all Bruce Lee on a shitload of zombies.” I reversed my grip on the Judge pistol and crushed the skull of a zombie climbing over the one I’d just shot. It went down like a sack of dead, smelly potatoes, and another one took its place. I lowered a shoulder and shoved it back like an old tackling dummy, then shoved off to create some distance and snatched up my new shovel/quarterstaff.

  Now I’ve never trained in any martial arts, but I spent my whole childhood watching Kung Fu Theatre after church every Sunday, and me and Jason used to practice everything we saw on TV, which usually ended up with him not able to move very much on Mondays. So I’ve swung a stick around my head once or twice, just never when my life depended on it.

  This time it definitely felt like my life depended on it. I couldn’t tell if these were magical zombies like High Chief Edgar had talked about, or plague zombies like The Walking Dead, but I figured if they wanted to eat my kidneys, it didn’t much matter. I still needed my kidneys, so we had a problem.

  The first zombie took a hard shot right across the forehead and went down, brains obviously scrambled from the impact. Then I swung the staff back and forth crushing skulls as the zombies got within range. I heard a crack from above and felt, rather than saw, the body of a zombie collapse to the dirt behind me.

  “Keep your back to the tomb,” Amy barked. “I’ve only got five rounds left.”

  “Can you see an end to the walking corpses? My arms are getting tired,” I said, then promptly proved my statement by getting my stick caught under the arm of the next zombie I swung into. I lost my grip and found myself on one knee, surrounded by what was probably four, but felt like a dozen snapping mouths and tearing fingers. The only thing keeping me alive was the notoriously bad fine motor skills of zombies—as long as they couldn’t get their mouths on me, they couldn’t quite figure out how to make their hands work enough to rip me apart.

  I shoved one nasty dead face away and pushed it into the mouth of another zombie, who bit down on the first one long enough to let me stand and shoulder a couple more back. Amy emptied her magazine into the mass of death writhing on top of me and took out four zombies with five shots, but she couldn’t go for the really close ones without hitting me. I felt my shoulders press against the concrete of the tomb behind me and went back down to one knee, pulling a zombie over my head and backwards as I went. This smashed his forehead into the concrete hard enough to make him perma-dead and give me a little cover as the other zombies couldn’t figure out how to get through my once-human shield. But the sheer number and weight of them was starting to be a problem because it was almost impossible to draw a good breath without getting a face full of grave funk and wanting to puke all over my clothes. Of course, given what was smeared all over my clothes, a little puke might have been an improvement.

  I was contemplating which smelled worse—Bourbon Street puke, which has a special air of cheap beer and frat boy horniness, or zombies—when one of the monsters at my right shoulder jerked backward, then forward, then dropped. Half a second later, the flat crack of a rifle shot reached my ears just as another zombie dropped off the pile.

  “You still under there?” Father Joe’s voice came across the comm, and I swear in that moment I found a little religion. I mean, I’ve always known that God exists, I just never thought he had a whole lot of use for his front-line employees, as it were. But in that moment, when Joe appeared from out of nowhere to save my ass, I believed.

  “I’m here, and I am glad to see you,” I gasped under the weight and stink of the zombies.

  Two more fell before Joe replied. “Well, let’s see if this old Remington has enough juice in her to take out a dozen or so zombies.”

  “A dozen? Is that all that’s l
eft?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s it. There’s a good fifty wandering through the cemetery, but only about a dozen in your immediate area.” Another zombie fell off the pile, and I could see a sliver of predawn sky through the animated corpses.

  One more crack, one more zombie hit the dirt, then all at once, everything stopped. The moaning fell silent, the scrabbling at my zombie shield went preternaturally still, and the snapping and biting at my fingers ceased. Even the female zombie, who had latched onto my shin and was persistently trying to chew her way through my calf, stopped, all at the same time. Then, with an almost audible sigh, like a great escaping of breath, every zombie in the graveyard went still at the same time.

  The ones on top of me collapsed, momentarily redoubling the weight on top of me, but then just sliding off to the dewy ground at my feet. I knelt there, surrounded by recently mobile dead people, holding one over my head as a human shield, but once I was relatively sure they weren’t getting back up, I dropped the zombie I was holding, now just another corpse, and stood up.

  Amy jumped down as I was taking inventory of my injuries. I had a bunch of bites and scrapes on my hands and wrists—those were going to need to be soaked in Neosporin and rubbing alcohol before I got infected. One ear was bitten pretty bad and might need stitches, but for the most part, I was in good shape. My Carharrt jacket and Duluth Trading Company firehose work pants proved to be fashionable and zombie-bite-proof options, as that chick zombie left some serious grave slobber on the back of my leg but never managed to get through.

  “What the hell happened?” Amy asked, throwing her arms around me.

  “Well, your incredibly chivalrous boyfriend sacrificed himself on the altar of true love by letting you climb onto the tomb and live while he fought off a ravening horde of flesh-starved monsters, only to be saved at the last minute by his faithful sidekick and something else that nobody understood.”

  “Sunrise,” Joe said over the comm.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Sunrise,” Joe repeated, and his voice was a lot closer this time. He came around a bend in the cemetery carrying a hunting rifle with a scope and wearing a grin. I hugged him, not only expressing my gratitude at him saving my life, but also making sure that he smelled as bad as the rest of us. I wanted him to really feel like part of the team. And in this case, smell like part of it, too.

  “What’s that about sunrise?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joe admitted. “I just know that the second the first beam of sunshine split the horizon, zombies started dropping in their tracks, and now they’re turning to dust all over the graveyard. See?” He pointed at the piles of dead guys all around me, and sure enough, they were burning away like the morning mist.

  Chapter 7

  “And that’s when I decided that some of New Orleans’ world-famous beignets would be the perfect finish to our long and pretty disgusting night,” I said to the table. We were at a far corner outside under the world famous green and white striped awning, and there was a conspicuous lack of seating at the tables nearest me. That might have had something to do with the fact that I hadn’t bathed before coming to breakfast and was still covered in cemetery mud and zombie bits.

  I expected the smell to put my much cleaner companions off their feed, but as soon as the waitress that drew the short straw, and I actually saw two of them play rock-paper-scissors for who had to wait on me, came over with a tray piled high with enough sugar-covered delicacies to fuel a regiment and enough coffee to float a tank, my companions dug in like a bunch of folks that just survived an all-night fistfight with the walking dead. As the only one who actually had been in a fistfight with the walking dead, I took two beignets before I passed the plate and started mainlining coffee right out of the pot. It’s not my fault that a coffeepot in my hand looks like a demitasse cup in a normal person’s.

  “So you decided to join us for breakfast. How thoughtful.” Skeeter’s ironic tone was the driest thing to ever be found in the soggy Crescent City, and I didn’t much blame him. After all, Detective Ponté was looking very dapper in khakis and a pastel green polo, with sunglasses that probably cost more than my boots. Skeeter looked pretty good for Skeeter, which meant he’d put on clean cargo pants and someone had run an iron over his short-sleeved dress shirt. At least he’d left the pocket protector at the hotel, so he didn’t look like the complete stereotype of a computer nerd.

  “What can I say, Skeet? Your call made me hungry.”

  “And my call didn’t make you want to bathe?”

  “Priorities, buddy, priorities. What have y’all found out about the rogue while we were busy fighting our way through all of Z Nation’s season two extras?”

  Detective Ponté leaned forward, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and pressing it over his nose. I snorted a little, I couldn’t help myself. “Our forensics people found nothing on the bodies, which were deteriorating rapidly. As you know, once a vampire is killed, the aging process asserts itself on the remaining tissues, so the older a vampire is, the more quickly the body deteriorates. These were relatively young vampires, only twenty or thirty years dead, but that’s still a long time for a corpse to wander around, so when the laws of physics reasserted themselves on the flesh, it turned to goop within the hour. There were no tool marks on the bones, so we assumed that the heads were severed manually.”

  “Wait a second,” I said, holding up a hand as he drew breath to continue. “By manually, do you mean with a hand tool like a knife or saw, or do you mean—”

  “I mean manually as in by hand, yes.” Detective Ponté nodded. “These heads were ripped from the bodies and left as a message for us.”

  “Well, that’s evidence right there,” I said. “There can’t be that many critters that can rip a vampire’s head clean off, can there?”

  “That’s a good point,” Amy said, sipping her coffee. She had an adorable little trail of powdered sugar running down her chin and onto her shirt, and I was having some distracting thoughts about trying to make sure she was as clean as possible when she caught my eye and gave me her patented “work now, think dirty things later” glare. No matter how good I am at multi-tasking, I’ll never convince my girlfriend that I can stare at her boobs and fight monsters at the same time.

  She turned to Skeeter. “How many things can rip the head off a vampire and still function in an urban environment? I think we can safely rule out trolls and ogres; those would stand out even in New Orleans.”

  “Well, a strong enough lycanthrope could do it, depending on its were-shape and if it had the control to partially shift. An older vampire could do it, some species of Fae could manage it, and still look relatively humanoid. What else?” Skeeter mused.

  “A golem,” I added. “That thing the kid made last year outta rocks was strong as hell. A Sasquatch, and they blend in better than you’d think. A rakshasa could do it, but would be more likely to use swords or claws.”

  “The right type of zombie could manage such a thing,” came a voice from over my shoulder. “And you stink to high heaven, white man.” I turned and saw Edgar leaning on the wrought-iron railing surrounding the cafe’s patio. He straightened up, stepped over the railing, and pulled out one of the empty chairs. “May I join you?”

  “Please,” Amy said, giving him a warm smile that made me growl a little in the back of my throat.

  “Down, boy,” my girlfriend muttered while still grinning at the voodoo priest who we’d last seen butt-naked in the middle of the cemetery where we’d been attacked moments after his departure.

  “Fear not, large white man, I have no interest in your woman,” Edgar said with an accent thick and slow as molasses.

  “Oh cut the shit, Eddie, and tell us why you’re here.” Detective Ponté’s posture had gone rigid the second Edgar appeared on the scene, and his voice was cold enough to freeze my coffee. Obviously the two men knew each other, and just as obviously it wasn’t pleasant.

  “I am here to help, De
tective, whether you believe that or not. This is my city, too, and whatever affects her, affects me. And these new houngans, they affect me more than most.”

  “Because they make it harder for you to get girls to work in your clubs, Eddie?” Ponté’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

  Eddie picked up a beignet with the posture of a man who gave absolutely zero shits what the world thought about him. “I run a number of high-end gentlemen’s clubs throughout the Quarter and New Orleans. Detective Ponté has been investigating me for years to make sure that all my business dealings are scrupulously honest, which they are, and that my girls are not being abused, which they are not. He has never found anything to arrest me, so he remains perpetually irritated with me.”

  “You’re a sex trafficker, Eddie, and one day I’m going to put you away,” Ponté said from behind a coffee cup and a glare.

  “Perhaps, Detective, but today is not that day. Today is the day I wish to help you find these houngans who are upsetting the balance of my city,”

  I leaned over to Skeeter. “I thought a houngan was a witch doctor, or a voodoo priest, kinda like Eddie.” Skeeter elbowed me to be quiet, but it was too late.

  “You are partially correct, Bubba,” Eddie said. “But these false houngans are calling upon bad loa to give them power and wealth. Real voodoo is not about the gathering of money or the comforts of the flesh. We are about honoring our ancestors and making sure all souls have an easy passage through to the next life.”

  “So we’ve got rogue vampires, good vampires, bad voodoo priests, and good voodoo priests. How am I supposed to know which is which?” I asked.

  “I’d start with the ones that aren’t trying to kill you. They’d be what I’d call the ‘good’ ones,” Ponté said. “Now what were you saying about zombies that can rip a man’s head off, Eddie?”

  “Some houngan will imbue their living strength, and even the strength of their followers, into the bodies they raise. This allows their zombies to be stronger and faster than the normal dead and accomplish feats like fighting vampires and decapitating them. But the houngan would have to be very close to control a zombie so precisely, or give something of himself to the zombie to tie them together. Otherwise a zombie would not have the speed or dexterity for a fight with a vampire.”