I looked around and nodded to my friends. We were ready to welcome a witch into a vampire lair.
Chapter Twenty-Two
A knock at the top of the stairs announced the arrival of our guest, followed immediately by a trim pair of legs coming into view on the steps. The legs were, as is par for my course, attached to a woman who looked nothing like my mental picture of an overweight gypsy woman with three teeth and a mole on her nose that had its own zip code. Instead, the woman in our living room was medium height, slim, with straight blonde hair that hung halfway down her back. She was younger than I expected and very pretty in a blonde Sandra Bullock kind of way.
She wore Birkenstocks, but they were the closed-toe type and that was her only concession to my mental image of an earth-mother type. She had on jeans that hugged some pretty nice curves, and a bulky tan sweater that looked like it came straight out of an L.L. Bean catalog. “Hello,” she said, her warm voice filling the room with a sense of well-being. “I’m Anna. How are you, Mike? You sounded worried on the phone.”
“I was worried, my dear, but I feel much better now that you’re here.” Mike’s accent had slipped, and a little of the old South he grew up in had dropped into his words as he gave the pretty witch a brief, and chaste, hug. Good to know my old friend was celibate, but not blind. He turned to us. “These are my friends, Jimmy and Greg.”
He pointed to each of us in turn, and I stepped forward to shake her hand. I was surprised when she pulled back, reaching quickly inside her sweater to drop a pentagram necklace out into view. It began to glow, and I took a quick step back. “Hey now, no need to get all magical in my den, lady,” I exclaimed.
“I know you, vampire,” she said, and when I looked up at her eyes, they were a cold blue, staring right into my soul. If I had one left. The jury’s been out on that one for a while.
“Nope, pretty sure we’ve never met. But if you want to get together sometime for a quick bite, let me know.”
I bared a little fang at her, and heard Greg moving up behind me. His pistol cleared the holster and I knew that he had my back. As long as I kept her attention on me, my partner could keep her covered. “Mike, you want to explain to Mrs. Broomstick here that we’re the good guys?”
“It’s true, Anna. These boys have been friends of mine since before I entered the seminary. I’ve known them since we were boys in school together, and they’re good lads. They have their problems, sure, but good lads nonetheless.”
“Mike,” the witch said, keeping her voice level and her eyes locked on me, carefully not looking in my eyes, “This good lad, as you call him, is a vampire.”
“And you’re a witch,” I said. “And by the way, you can look me in the eye, our mojo doesn’t work with your necklace in the way. Now, can we get past our little stereotypes and species bias and work together to deal with a body-snatching demon and the zombie infestation?”
“What does my necklace have to do with anything?” the witch asked.
“The boys have some issues with religious symbols, holy ground, that sort of thing,” Mike said. “I, for one, believe these issues to be more psychological than pathological.” Mike was getting on a roll now, so I went to the kitchen for another beer as he explained one of his pet theories of vampirism to his witch friend.
“The discomfort that they experience around objects of faith is dramatically different from the type of pain that is inflicted by sunlight, and the nausea they experience on holy ground is nothing like the barricade they experience when they attempt to enter a dwelling uninvited. So it’s long been my theory that there is no reason that Jimmy and Greg can’t touch a cross, for example, or enter a church without any ill effects.”
“So why do I feel like barfing every time I go visit you at work?” Greg returned to his spot at the computer.
Mike ignored the interruption and went right on. “No reason other than their own subconscious fear that they may have lost their souls when they became vampires, that is. And after these past years of working alongside them, helping people at every opportunity, I can assure you, they have every bit as much of their souls as you or I have.”
I went back to my spot on the couch and took a seat. Anna followed me with her eyes, then made her way to the armchair and sat facing me. She wasn’t paying any attention to Greg.
“Are we good?” I asked as she got settled. “We wouldn’t have called you over here, to our home, unless we thought we could trust you, and unless we needed you. Mike was pretty convincing on the first count, and the situation pretty much covers the second.”
“What’s the situation?” She pulled a MacBook out of her backpack. “Is there Wi-Fi here?”
“Yes,” said Greg from where he suddenly stood right behind her chair. I almost fell off the couch laughing as Anna jumped about eight feet straight up. His vamp-speed from his desk to right behind her got the desired reaction.
“The password is TruBlood. Capital T, capital B,” he said as she glared at him. I shot him a look, too, but that was for picking a dorky password.
When I looked back to Anna, the exasperation on my face was from real irritation. “Seriously? You’re just going to Wikipedia ‘zombies’ or something? Any of us could have taken that brilliant first step.” I leaned back on the couch, not just to get further away from her glowing necklace, but also because I think she might have caught me checking her out. She’s hot. I’m not dead. Well, I am dead, but I’m not dead and blind.
“I’m not just going to Wikipedia it. I have a group of friends I can contact online that may have some firsthand knowledge in the area.”
“You know people who have their own pet zombies?” I marveled. “Now that’s cool.”
She sat there for a few minutes typing and muttering to herself and generally looking way hotter than any woman that had been in our tomb in a decade. Or ever, for that matter. After a couple of “hmmms” and the odd “mmmm-mmmm,” I got bored and went to the fridge for a snack. Greg immediately plopped down in my seat on the couch and yelled over to me “You keep eating this late at night, you’re gonna get fat.”
“We can’t get fat, dork. You want anything?”
“Yeah, throw me a bag of B-Neg.”
I tossed him the bag and hopped up on the bar that overlooked the living room, my own blood bag in hand. “Either of the humans want anything to drink?” I asked our guests. “We don’t have any food, for obvious reasons, but we’ve got a couple Cokes—”
“Not so much,” Greg corrected.
I tried again, “We had a couple Cokes, but we’ve got beer, ginger ale, and a lot of booze. There might even be some orange juice left.”
“Again, not so much,” my gluttonous partner added.
“Jesus Christ! Do you ever replace what you drink?”
“Heh heh. Nah, I usually count on the marrow to do that for me.” We both laughed, because sophomoric vamp humor never goes out of style. It’s like a fart joke, only different.
When I realized we were the only ones amused, I sobered. “Anyway, either of you want a drink?”
Anna and Mike replied in the negative. Greg and I drank our blood in silence while Anna worked. Mike looked a little unhappy about us drinking in front of his friend, but she already knew what we were. No point in hiding it. Besides we weren’t slurping.
Cold blood is kinda flat tasting, but it’s better than room temperature. Obviously it tastes better at body temp, but I didn’t want to offend Greg or Mike by going off to hunt. So it was O-positive flavored with plastic and anticoagulants for me. Yippee.
While Anna was hacking away, I turned to Mike. “Hey, Dad? Did you ever find anything more out from the possessed girl?”
“Oh yes,” Mike said. “Michelle was her name. What do you want to know?”
“Well, let’s start with how she was planning on cursing Tommy Harris and his whole family into oblivion.”
“Oh, that.” Mike actually sounded amused. “That was actually a mistake.”
�
��What do you mean, a mistake? She didn’t mean to curse him?”
“Oh, no. She definitely meant to curse him, she just didn’t know how.”
“But she did it. I don’t get it.”
“The little girl had dabbled in some witchcraft, but was by no means a skilled enough spellcaster to actually make a curse stick.”
“You’re saying she didn’t curse Tommy?”
“Not with anything meaningful, no.”
“He was never in any danger?”
“Not until you confronted the possessed child with him in tow, no. She was not focused on him any longer, but then you showed up.”
“Great. I love my life. This little girl just happened to be the one possessed, and it really has nothing to do with our case at all?”
“Well, it may certainly be the case that her experimentation with magic made her more attractive to outside influence, but that is generally the case.”
“This was all a mistake, and we were never needed in the first place?”
“Basically, yes.”
“Story of my life.” I went for another drink and sat down on the couch to wait for the hacker witch to finish. I leaned over to Mike and spoke in a low voice.
“What do you think, Dad? Is your witchy woman going to be able to tell us how to send zombies back to Hell?”
“Actually, James, we want to be very careful about that. We only want to send the inhabiting souls back to Hell. The bodies we very much would like to return to their resting places,” Mike told me.
“Fair enough, Padre. But I’m not digging. I not ruining this manicure digging graves.” I was half joking. I’ve never had a manicure. But I was serious about the no digging part.
“Well,” Anna said, finally looking up from her keyboard and stretching her arms over her head. “You’ll have to get your hands dirty if you want this to end. My coven is gathering at the fountain in Marshall Park. If we can get all the zombies there by dawn, we can banish the spirits in a sunrise ceremony.”
I choked a little at the s-word, but she didn’t even slow down.
“Let’s go. Get the zombies, incapacitate them, and drop them at the park with my coven. They can bind the creatures long enough for us to exorcise them, for lack of a better term.” She looked apologetically at Mike, who gave a little nod. No one wanted him to think we were stepping on his theological turf, but he wasn’t terribly well equipped for this sort of thing, dogma-wise.
“That sounds like a plan,” I said. “A crappy one that will probably end up with some of your coven having their brains eaten, but it’s the best one we have. Any idea how to find these zombies?”
“I’m on that one,” Greg piped up. “I’ve been following police dispatches on my laptop.” That really impressed me, since I thought he’d just been messing around on Facebook the whole time. “It seems like the zombies are all converging on one spot. I don’t have enough data yet to figure out exactly where that is, but I think I can use the info I do have to get us within a few blocks.”
I raised my hand. “Hey, Professor Pugsley, do I even want to try to understand how you’re doing that, or should I wait until you give me the signal and then hit something really hard?”
“Let’s all play to our strengths. I’ll do the computing, Mike will do the driving, Anna’s coven will do the banishing and you do the punching.”
“Sounds good to me. Give me a minute to gear up and I’ll be right with you.” I headed over to the coat closet but stopped cold at Mike’s voice.
“No guns.”
I turned around almost slowly enough to be a parody of myself, and looked at him. “Why not, exactly? I understood the whole no-killing-the-little-girls rule you came up with, because regardless of my membership in the Walking Dead Society, I’m not a monster. But Mike, these guys are already dead. It’s not like they’re going to get upset about it.”
“First, you technically are a monster. There are movies to which I can refer you. Secondly, I cannot allow you to defile the dead in my presence. Even though these may be but empty vessels, I am a man of the cloth and cannot allow you to harm the bodies.” He crossed his arms and gave me his best priestly gaze.
The priestly gaze works much better on people who didn’t steal licorice from the corner drugstore with you when you were seven. “I won’t hold your career decisions against you if you don’t hold mine against me. And as much as I love you, Mikey, I’m taking the shotgun for the zombies. Get over it.”
“Then I’m not driving.”
“Fine, we’ll take Greg’s car.” I caught sight of Greg out of the corner of my eye gesturing wildly at me, but I ignored him. Wish I hadn’t. As usual, ignoring him turned out to be a bad idea. Father Mike clued me in.
“Greg’s car isn’t here. You left it at the bowling alley, where it has doubtless been towed to the police impound lot by now.” Crap. I hate it when other people are right. Because it usually means that I’m wrong. And because it happens so much of the time. Now I had to use non-lethal methods to subdue a dozen dead guys, and I had to figure out how to get Greg’s car out of hock without ending up arrested. Again. I might have stomped around the room cursing for a minute or two before I said anything intelligible.
“Fine, you win,” I said when I ran out of profanity. “We’ll do it your way. I’ll leave the shotgun, but can I at least take the cricket bat? I bought it special just in case I ever got the chance to whack a zombie with it.”
“And you have the audacity to call me a dork,” Greg said from behind me.
“Dude, you still wear Underoos. Your geek-fu is so much stronger than mine, it’s ridiculous. You are the Mister Miyagi of geek-fu. You are the geek ninja. You are the first person in history to be granted a P.H.Geek from Oxdork University.”
“I get it. Here’s your bat.” He poked me in the stomach with it as he walked to the stairs. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and gestured grandly to Anna for her to precede him. “To the car, madam?”
“You first, vampire.”
Wow, not only was she a witch, but she was a witch with good taste in men. Greg sagged like a kid who’s just dropped his favorite GI Joe down the well. He trudged up the stairs, head hanging low. He was so disappointed that his gallantry went unappreciated that he forgot his cape. I grabbed it to cheer him up, wrapped a few surprises in the black fabric, and followed him up the stairs to load the trunk of Mike’s car. According to my best guess, we had a pile of zombies to capture and banish, and only about three hours to do it in.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Greg’s math was better than I’d ever willingly give him credit for—we found the first set of zombies about fifteen minutes after we left our place. The nearest church had lost three corpses, all dead less than a month. They were decidedly gross, even with the whole embalming thing. That process is really only designed to make people look good for a few days. After that, it starts to get very George Romero very quickly. At least they had all their parts. I don’t know if I could have dealt with pieces falling off all around me.
Anna had briefed me on her plan on the way, so I had a vague idea what she expected from me. My contribution pretty much boiled down to hitting things. I was okay with that. It had been a rough couple of nights, and I didn’t mind the idea of some mindless violence. As the car stopped I took stock of the situation. We had three corpses shambling through a strip-mall parking lot on the east side of town. On the one hand, it being the Saturday night before Halloween made passing them off as drunks pretty easy. On the other hand, they had picked a strip mall with a police substation. That would complicate things a little. We’d have to distract the cops.
Mike and Greg were dispatched to the cop shop with a couple boxes of Krispy Kremes to make sure they got the undivided attention of the constabulary. Then Greg put the mental whammy on them while Anna and I took care of the zombie wrangling. The first one was really easy. We put handcuffs on him, tied his feet together, and that was that. No fight, no attempted eating of br
ains, nothing.
After the first capture, though, Zombie Number Two apparently got a clue we were going to try and block them from their destination, so he fought back. I had one handcuff on the guy, a middle-aged dude who was a little on the heavy side if I’m being particularly kind, when all hell broke loose. His eyes glowed, and he went from shambling, slow ’70s-era zombie to 28 Days Later butt-kicking monster in a split second.
“Look out!” I yelled to Anna as the dead guy threw a haymaker that would have broken my jaw if it had connected. I got out of the way, and backed into the arms of the third zombie, a woman who was probably attractive in life, at least before she got her face mangled by whatever killed her. She grabbed my arms and the guy zombie put one hand on my throat. He drew back with a huge fist, and I dropped out of the way barely in time to keep him from smashing my face flat. He connected squarely with the woman zombie, and she flew across two parking spaces and fetched up against the side of a Toyota minivan.
“Throw me the bat!” I called as I jumped on the hood of a parked car to avoid the guy’s next punch. He jumped right up behind me, but I had the bat by then and clocked him a solid shot to the left temple. I was trying to heed Mike’s words about not defiling the corpses, but it was gonna be hard if they were this intent on defiling me first. I heard Anna scream and looked over to see her running toward our car with the female zombie in hot pursuit. They were too far away for me to get there before the zombie closed on Anna, so I threw the bat as hard as I could and got a thunk on impact that echoed across the parking lot. The female zombie went down hard, and I looked around to find where the guy I decked had fallen.
Except he hadn’t fallen. He was standing right behind me, and as I turned he picked me up over his head like a bad pro wrestling show from the ’80s and tossed me about twenty feet. I stopped whistling through the air when I went through the windshield of a parked bakery van. The windshield was now one big popped out sheet of rumpled, shattered safety glass, and I now had a close personal relationship with the gearshift. Slowly, I disentangled myself from it and the front seat. I got out of the van and joined Anna back near our car.
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