“Where’s the vampire?” I asked.
“He didn’t stick around, the little prick. He just dropped me off here, took some money off this idiot, and left.”
“What were they trying to do?” Evangeline asked, and I watched Amy notice her for the first time. A definite chill entered the tomb as my girlfriend registered that I’d brought another woman to help rescue her, and that woman was hot, and now that woman was asking her questions like they knew each other.
I decided to step in and be the voice of reason in the situation, because that always works so well. “Amy, meet Evangeline, the Hunter for New Orleans and the Gulf Territory. She’s here to help.”
“Help with what?” Amy asked. “Looks like we have this pretty well covered.”
“Except for that,” Evangeline pointed at the priestess, who was awake and grabbing at her necklace. She pulled a crystal from around her neck, threw it at the far wall of the tomb, then ran out the open door. The crystal smashed, and all the zombies stopped swaying and turned their attention on us.
“What was that?” I asked, thinking I knew the answer and really hoping I was wrong.
“I’d guess it was her focus, the magical tool she used to keep these zombies under control.” I hate it when I’m right.
“So now what?” Amy asked.
“Now a lot of this,” Evangeline said, turning to the nearest zombie and opening fire. She put four zombies down in as many pulls of the trigger, and I dropped another three with Bertha before I heard the tell-tale whizz of a bullet buzzing by my ear. I looked around, alarmed, and saw Amy on the ground behind the sarcophagus and Evangeline crouched in a corner.
“Watch out for ricochet, you idiots!” Amy yelled at us. “Decayed flesh does nothing to stop those cannon rounds you’re slinging around in here!”
She was right, so I holstered Bertha and drew my new KABAR Hank Reinhardt kukri, over a foot of black high-quality American steel and a razor-sharp blade. It took me all of thirty seconds to down the last few zombies, with Evangeline taking out one by crushing its skull with a funeral urn. I chose to believe that the dust spilling out of the urn was just dust, not a former member of the family.
“That was easy,” I said, holding out my hand to Amy. She took it and stood, giving me a quick kiss and shooting a possessive look back at Evangeline. Then she froze in my arms, and her head sagged to my chest.
“Bubba, you gigantic idiot, when will you learn not to speak?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, looking around the room. All the zombies were dead, the priestess was gone, and all that was left were two voodoo wannabes sleeping off their first encounter with real badness, namely me.
Amy pointed out the door, and I said a few bad words. Then I said a few more. Then I invented a couple and said those. Then I said, “Well, good thing I brought extra magazines.”
There were three zombies all trying to get through the door at the same time. If they were smart enough to come in one at a time, they would have gotten me from behind while I was dealing with the indoor zombies. Thank goodness dead things aren’t very smart.
Chapter 11
“How many of them are out there?” Amy asked. “And who is she, again?”
“More than I can count,” I replied, but before I could repeat my introductions, Evangeline stepped up and pressed a pistol into Amy’s hand.
“I’m Sister Evangeline. I’m the Gulf Coast Hunter, and a Sister of Lupus, an order of militant nuns and priests that operate very discreetly in New Orleans.”
“I’ve heard of the Fellowship of Lupus,” Amy said, taking the pistol and checking the chamber. “I thought you were all lycanthropes?”
I shot Evangeline a look, and she laughed. “At one time we were, but membership in the Fellowship waned in recent years, so the elders opened up the ranks to a few non-shifters. The only thing that happens around me on the full moon is that no chocolate is safe.” She gave Amy a half-smile.
“I know, right, especially chocolate ice cream. That shit is my kryptonite.”
“Ladies, I hate to interrupt the meeting of the Yo-Yo Sisterhood, but could we return our attention to the zombie apocalypse taking place right outside our door?” I pointed back at the three zombies contorting in the doorway just as one shoved his way through, breaking free of the logjam that held back the flood of undead and spilling walking corpses into the crypt. We had about a twenty foot square room to work with, but the center was dominated by a four foot wide, eight foot long sarcophagus. I drew my kukri and decapitated the nearest zombie, taking up a position at the foot of the sarcophagus facing the door. Amy and Evangeline hopped up onto the stone coffin and started firing into the mass of zombies streaming through the door.
Every shot was a head shot, and every bullet found a home in a zombie’s brainpan, but there was a shitload of zombies, and only a limited number of bullets. I chopped important pieces off zombies with every swing of my blade, but no matter how many I sent back to their rest, another two took their place.
I heard Amy’s hammer click empty, so I drew Bertha and passed her back over my head. “Watch out for the recoil, she likes to test new shooters,” I said, just before the fifty-cal roared to life. Not only did the zombie’s head she was aiming at explode like a grape under a boot heel, the round traveled through the decayed flesh, inflicting damage on three more shamblers before its energy was finally expended.
“Damn, Bubba, now I see why you carry this monster,” Amy said from behind me.
“Yeah, let’s see how your wrists feel after a couple dozen rounds, then come see me,” I said. I swung into the zombie throng like an old-school woodcutter—lift, chop, lift, chop. With every stroke, a zombie went down until there was a pile of true dead men and women piled up in front of me like a duck blind made of overdressed corpses. After several minutes of chopping, shooting, and general re-deadening of walking dead people, there was a brief break in the constant onslaught of zombies. For just a few seconds, nothing was trying to get into the tomb with us, and everything already in the tomb was at the appropriate state of dead (them) and alive (us).
“I’m gonna go see what’s out there,” Evangeline said and leapt from the coffin behind me clean over my head and rolled out the door, coming up in a crouch with her shotgun at the ready. I nodded in appreciation; if I’d tried that move, I would have ended up flat on my face with a shotgun pistol grip wedged up my ass.
She fired off three rounds, turning in a semicircle to clear the area in front of the door, then waved us forward. I held up a hand to help Amy down, but she took her cues from the new girl and vaulted me and the wall of corpses between me and the door. She didn’t tuck and roll, just leapt halfway across the crypt like a blonde Lara Croft.
“Trying to prove something, sweetie?” I asked.
“I’ve got nothing at all to prove, babe. You coming?” She raised Bertha and stepped out into the cemetery.
I pushed, kicked, and stomped my way through the mess between me and the door, then stepped out and stopped, my mouth dropping open at what I saw. There were more damn zombies stumbling through that cemetery than nerds at a midnight Call of Duty release. Literally hundreds of undead shambled to and fro in every aisle and walkway of the cemetery. I hadn’t seen that many brainless husks in one place since I ventured into the Clemson-Carolina football game one year on accident.
These weren’t ordinary voodoo-controlled zombies, either. These were dumber than rocks, eat anything in their path, mindless walking stomachs, and if they ever got out into New Orleans, the city would know that everything it suffered in Katrina was just a warmup.
“What the actual fuck is going on here?” I muttered.
“When that bitch smashed her control gem, she didn’t just set her dead free, the stupid bitch let loose a magical backlash that brought every corpse in this cemetery to its feet,” Evangeline spat.
“With no one driving the bus,” I said.
“Exactly,” she replied. “This is every dead
body in St. Louis #1 with enough connective tissue left to walk, and it’s only a matter of time before some of them find the gate and wander into the tourist district.”
I looked at my watch. “It’s about four now, so we’ve got what, three hours until sunrise? That’s too long to wait them out. I think we oughta make for the gate and set ourselves up on the other side, just shoot anything that gets too close.”
“Stand on the sidewalk in downtown New Orleans and shoot zombies at four in the morning where God, the po-po and everybody can see? If that’s your idea of keeping a low profile, it’s no wonder they never let you come to the meetin’s.” Evangeline managed not to laugh in my face, but the struggle was apparent. I reached past her and crushed the skull of a zombie before it took a bite out of her neck, but she was still giggling.
“She’s got a point,” Amy said. “Even with my badge, I can’t close a major downtown area without some blowback. And what does she mean, meetings?”
“There’s an annual Hunter’s conference every year. I was kinda uninvited a few years back after I had a disagreement with a bishop.”
“Disagreement?” Skeeter’s voice rang over all our comms like fingernails on a chalkboard. “Shit, Bubba, you threw the man off a fifth-floor balcony! You’re lucky he didn’t have you arrested!”
“I threw him into a swimming pool, and yes, before you ask, I knew the pool was there.”
“In Boston. In February. Outdoors. That pool was froze over solid,” Skeeter said.
“The ice wasn’t that thick,” I protested. “He broke right through without getting hurt or nothing.”
“Except almost drowning,” Skeeter pointed out.
“Except that,” I admitted.
“And hypothermia,” Skeeter added.
“And that,” I had give him that one, too.
“And that broken ankle,” Skeeter said.
“It was just a sprain, I swear to God!” I said, then took a deep breath. “Skeeter, how the hell are we gonna get out of here? We got wall to wall zombies and only so much ammo between us.”
“I don’t know, Bubba. I’ve got Joe almost at the cemetery, but I don’t know what all he could do except pray over it and bring some more bullets.”
“I don’t think that’s gonna cut it, buddy. And how do you know Joe’s close?”
“He’s got a tracker, too. We all do.” Skeeter’s voice sounded suspiciously nonchalant, and I’ve known him long enough to recognize when he’s faking it.
“What do you mean, we all have trackers, Skeeter? I don’t have a tracker on me.” I said.
“Well, technically that’s true…”
“Skeeter…”
“After the first fight with your brother, we all thought it would be a good idea to be able to keep track of one another a little better, so we all got these little subcutaneous tracking chips implanted in our wrists. They’re tiny. But they power off body heat and transmit up to a mile, so as long as you’re within a mile of a cell tower, or emergency broadcast tower, or basically any radio transmitter or satellite phone, I can find you to within a couple hundred feet.” That explained a lot of inopportune phone calls I’d gotten over the last year right when things were getting interesting at certain gentlemen’s clubs, but I still couldn’t remember ever signing up to be microchipped like somebody’s Cocker Spaniel.
“When exactly did I agree to this?” I asked. “And when did you put the chip in?” I looked at my arms and couldn’t see any scars I couldn’t account for and didn’t feel any lumps under the skin.
“Well…” Skeeter put on his patented avoiding the question voice.
“Talk,” I growled.
“Don’t y’all have zombies to kill?” Skeeter asked.
“Amy and Evangeline have got that covered for now. They been dropping dead dudes the whole time we’ve been talking. That would be the conspicuous sound of gunfire behind me. Now spill it,” I demanded.
“We planted it in the back of your neck under your hairline when you were in the hospital after Jason cut you up.” He said it all fast, like the quicker he got it out the less pissed I’d be. It didn’t work.
“You stuck a tracker in my head? While I was recovering from being skewered like a damn shish kabob with my own damn sword? Skeeter, we gonna have a long talk about this one day soon, but right now I need…aw, shit that’s just what I needed.”
“What happened?” Skeeter asked, his voice going all high and panicky. This time I didn’t blame him. I was starting to think pretty strongly about cutting and running myself.
“Eddie just showed up.”
“Eddie the voodoo priest from last night?”
“In his butt-nekkid glory with a dozen other nekkid folk walking behind him chanting and glowing.”
“Did you say they were glowing, Bubba?”
“Yes, and before you ask, I only had three Hurricanes, they were half-strength and it was a couple hours ago, so yes I am sober, and yes, there are nekkid voodoo people walking through the cemetery glowing like somebody shoved a million candlepower flashlight up their hoo-has. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go talk to a nekkid houngan about how to get two hundred zombies back in their graves where they belong without having to shoot each and every damn one of them in the face. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” Skeeter said, and I clicked off my comm to go deal with the weirdest damn thing I’d seen since coming to New Orleans, and that bar was getting higher by the minute.
Chapter 12
“Eddie, what in the sweet holy hell are you doing out here? And why are you glowing?” I asked as I walked up to the naked voodoo priest and his flock. They walked single file in a line of nakedness down the aisle of the cemetery, all of them carrying bags slung over one shoulder or backpacks, and wearing sandals. I guess even nudists need to be careful of getting their feet cut up. Eddie had about half a dozen men and women with him, a couple of white dudes, a black dude, a grandmotherly black woman who reminded me of Ruby Dee, and a hot Asian girl who might have been twenty or might have been fifty, I couldn’t tell. Each of them was framed with a pale white light that seemed to emanate from their skin, and the zombies never came within ten yards of them.
“We are here to help bring these poor souls to rest, Bubba,” Eddie said, and I was very careful to only look him in the eyes. The last thing I needed was another reason to feel bad about myself.
“And how exactly are you planning on doing that?” I asked. “I thought making zombies was more your thing than putting zombies to rest.”
“My zombies are not like these mindless thralls, Bubba,” Eddie said, and if I didn’t know him to be about half con man and half necromancer, I’d have believed that his feelings really were hurt.
“My zombies are men and women who follow my teachings in life and wish to continue to serve after death. No one is ever raised without permission before death, or the permission of a spouse, or next of kin. My zombies are well cared for, never left to roam like these poor souls. What was done here is an abomination, and whoever committed such an atrocity against the dead should be punished, and most severely.” His voice went hard, and his eyes flashed with power. This was an Eddie I did not want to mess with. This Eddie manipulated the magic of life and death, and he packed a punch.
“Eddie, I think I’m out of my league,” I admitted. “I can kill a bunch of zombies, but there’s way too many of them for me to handle.”
“Don’t worry, Bubba,” the priest said, and the kindly smile I was accustomed to returned. “You worry about finding the evil that brought these people back from the grave. My followers and I will see that they are returned to their resting places.”
“There might be a couple in the crypt there that need some returning, too. And they might not be quite so mobile as these out here,” I said with a shrug.
“Well, we will attempt to send those to a rest as well,” Eddie said. He looked over my shoulder and his smile stiffened a little. “Sister Angel, it is good to s
ee you once again.”
“I told you, Eddie, my name’s Evangeline now. New name, new job, new God. Even got a little bit of a new hair color, you like it? I put red highlights in.” I looked, but couldn’t see anything but jet black hair. Of course it was five in the morning in a dark-ass cemetery.
“You will always be my little Angel,” Eddie said. “And there will always be a place for you with me.”
“Not for a long time, Eddie,” Evangeline said, and there was a melancholy in her voice like bayou blues. “There’s not been a place for me with you for a long time. But if you can help lay these people to rest, I can help run interference with NOLA police department about y’all running around naked in the cemetery. Again.”
“Much appreciated, Sister Angel,” Eddie said, then turned to his followers. “Set the circle, children. Let us work toward bringing rest to these poor souls.” The men and women snapped into motion, placing candles in a circle and scattering herbs and powders all around.
I stood there for a few seconds, then realized that I’d been dismissed. I turned back to Evangeline and Amy, who had stopped shooting when Eddie and his crew showed up, mostly because as soon as Eddie got near, the zombies found someplace else to be.
“You got something you want to share with the class, Sister Angel?” I asked the sassy leather-clad Hunter.
“Nope. Ancient history. Just here to shoot things that go bump in the night nowadays.”
“I’ll let that go for tonight, but we work together again, I’m gonna need to know everything about the Hunter at my back,” I said, looking down at her.
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Does that mean I get the whole story about your brother and daddy, Bubba? Or is this honesty a one-way street?” I didn’t have a good answer for her, and she probably saw that on my face. She reached up and patted me on the shoulder, gave me the kind of gentle smile you only get from priests and nuns, and said, “We’ve all got baggage, big guy, it’s what brings us into this job. Don’t worry. When I say I’ve got your back, you’re covered. Everything else is just noise.”
Moon over Bourbon Street - a Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 7