The Book of Death

by AnonYMous

  Dante watched open-mouthed as the clown squeezed the trigger. It made a gentle clicking sound and a burst of warm water squirted out into Dante’s his eyes. Typical clown, carrying a water pistol for comic effect. Not waiting for a second prank, Dante punched him in the face again, much harder than before. This time there was a much louder crack as the clown’s real nose broke. Blood sprayed out over his face and left him looking suitably dazed and possibly concussed too. He was certainly in no state to fight back. Dante climbed back to his feet and charged towards Vanity and the two other clowns.

  Vanity had bashed one of them into a state of unconsciousness. The other was clambering to his feet, looking to fight back. Dante charged over and ploughed into him the same way he had ploughed into the other clown, knocking him off his feet and back down into the snow where his head thudded against some ice.

  ‘Quick,’ yelled Vanity, grabbing his arm. ‘Let’s get inside. There’s more of them coming!’

  As they raced into the church, Dante glanced back over his shoulder. A gang of vampire clowns had seen what was going on and were charging towards the church. Some of them were armed with machetes, others just water pistols. Either way, there was no use in sticking around to get sliced up by these unfunny fuckers.

  Dante and Vanity slammed shut the large wooden doors of the entrance, just in the nick of time too. A couple of the quicker clowns crashed head first into the doors as Vanity slid a large metal bolt across locking them shut from inside.

  Dante looked around for Kacy. She was standing in the middle of the aisle half way down the church. On a row of pews either side of her, the faces of around fifteen terrified Sunflower Girls were peering over.

  ‘How many of them are out there?’ Kacy asked.

  ‘About five,’ said Vanity, brushing past Dante towards Kacy. ‘If they decide they want to get in here we’re fucked. I’ll check around the back to make sure there’s no other doors they can get in through.’

  Vanity rushed past Kacy and the girls at lightning speed. When he reached the altar at the other end of the hall he looked both ways before dashing off out of sight down the West wing of the church.

  Dante could see the fear in the eyes of the young girls and attempted to reassure them. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ he said. ‘He won’t hurt you.’

  The little blonde girl who Dante had rescued from the red haired clown spoke up on behalf of the others, her voice a trembling squeak. ‘Are you vampires too?’ she asked.

  Dante looked to Kacy. ‘Can you field that question, while I go help Vanity check for other entrances?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He hurried down the aisle, past Kacy and the terrified girls. As he passed them he heard Kacy attempting to explain. ‘We’re not proper vampires,’ she said. ‘We’re the nice kind. We protect little girls from the real vampires. The clowns.’

  He was admiring her skill and patience with the kids as he reached the end of the aisle. There was no sign of Vanity anywhere.

  The church was cold and dark. The only light (or heat for that matter) was provided by a scant few candles on the walls. As Dante looked around for any sight of Vanity or any open doors that might look inviting to unwanted intruders, he heard and almighty crashing sound behind him.

  It was the sound of breaking glass and it set the girls off screaming again. Dante spun around in time to see five clowns come crashing through the stained glass windows above the front doors. Shards of shattered glass fell from above and crashed down onto the stone church floor, shattering into tiny pieces.

  Four of the clowns landed in amongst the pews that were hiding the screaming Sunflower Girls. The fifth clown landed behind Kacy and grabbed hold of her. He yanked her off her feet and dragged her back down the aisle with him towards the entrance. The four others each grabbed a screaming child and dragged them up out of the pews as the remaining girls ducked down crying and screaming.

  Dante’s instinctive reaction was to charge towards Kacy, but he’d barely taken a step when the clown who was holding her, a freak with a green wig and an evil smile, pulled a machete from up his sleeve and pressed it against her throat. He licked the side of Kacy’s face and spoke into her ear.

  ‘Why are you helping these kids?’ he sneered.

  ‘Because they’re kids,’ Kacy replied nervously.

  Dante felt his stomach tighten. The blade on the machete was pressed tightly against Kacy’s neck. One bad decision here could see her sliced up. It made him feel powerless. Kacy now looked every bit as terrified as the children she had been trying so hard to calm only moments earlier. And where the hell was Vanity?

  The clown with the machete pressed against Kacy’s throat seemed to be the leader. The others, hovering above the pews, holding captive schoolgirls, were clearly waiting for him to give them the signal to start the carnage. He sneered at Dante.

  ‘You’ve broken vampire code by siding with these kids,’ he yelled. ‘And you shouldn’t have brought them here to the church. Goddamn church won’t save any of you!’

  Dante didn’t know how to answer. But fortunately he didn’t have to. From the shadows behind him, he heard a familiar gravelly voice speak out in response. ‘Church won’t save any of you either,’ it said.

  The clown frowned and tried his best to peer into the shadows behind Dante to see the owner of the voice. ‘Who’s that?’ he shouted.

  Dante kept his eyes glued to the machete pressed against Kacy’s throat. A glowing red dot had appeared on it a second earlier. It began moving slowly up onto the clown’s neck and then his face. As it travelled up through his chin and nose, the clown seemed to spot it too. It was a red laser sighter. The moving red dot eventually came to a stop between the clown’s eyes, almost turning him cross-eyed as he followed its journey up his face. And then the carnage started.

  BANG!

  The clown’s head exploded. A bullet had burst through his forehead and completely obliterated his skull. Blood and brains sprayed out everywhere. One side of Kacy’s face was instantly caked in red goo. She ducked down, probably screaming, although it was hard to tell because it sounded like everyone in the church was screaming. Those screams were soon drowned out by four further extremely loud gunshots that rang out in quick succession. After each one, a different clown’s head exploded and a Sunflower Girl fell to the floor screaming and covered in his blood and brains.

  Dante looked back over his shoulder and saw the dark figure of the Bourbon Kid step out from the shadows behind the altar. His face was concealed beneath a dark hood as was so often the case when he was killing folks. In his right hand was a pretty heavy duty handgun. He slipped it into a holster inside his long dark robe.

  Dante let out a deep sigh of relief. ‘You showed up in the nick of time. Thanks, man.’

  The Kid walked past him down the aisle. ‘No problem,’ he muttered under his breath.

  Dante followed on behind him. ‘Gaius isn’t at the Casa de Ville any more,’ he said.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s on his way to the museum in the middle of town. We’re gonna have to go there if we wanna get the Eye back.’

  The Kid stopped and turned around. ‘I gotta go to a couple of other places first. Hang here for a bit. I’ll meet you at the museum later.’

  ‘I’m not sure we can wait. Gaius is supposed to be taking the Eye there to have it cleaned, or somethin’.’

  Up ahead, Kacy was orchestrating some kind of group hug with the girl scouts in an attempt to calm them down and wipe the blood off them. The Kid took a look at her.

  ‘Your girlfriend isn’t ready to leave these kids yet. In about an hour the streets will be clear of vampires. Then you can leave the kids here and head to the museum. I’ll meet you there when I’ve done a couple of other stops.’

  ‘Where else you gotta go apart from the Casa de Ville?’ Dante asked.

  ‘First up I gotta clear the streets for you. Then I gotta stop off at the library and the police station.’

&
nbsp; ‘What for?’

  ‘Gotta find me some books and kill me some cops.’

  Kacy scratched her head. ‘Why kill the cops?’

  ‘Tradition.’

  Without uttering another word, the Kid walked down the aisle past Kacy and the mortified Sunflower Girls. They all backed away from him as he strode through them. The clowns had been scary enough, but this guy was way more dangerous. He walked up to the front doors, slid the huge metal bolt to one side and opened the door on the left. As he stepped through it he turned back to survey the carnage behind him.

  ‘You might wanna secure this door behind me,’ he said.

  Kacy pulled herself free of the girls and hurried down the aisle towards him. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said.

  The Kid vanished through the door and out into the snow covered streets outside. He left the door open for Kacy to pull shut.

  In all the chaos, Dante had forgotten all about Vanity. His vampire buddy reappeared, strolling back from the West wing of the church. He waved at Dante as he approached. ‘I bolted a door to the cellar,’ he called out. ‘The place should be secure now.’ He walked up to Dante and looked around. The church hall looked extremely different to when he had last seen it. There were smouldering corpses of clowns lying around and everyone else was covered in blood. Then of course there was the small matter of the shattered windows above the doors. ‘What the hell happened here?’ he asked.

  Dante shrugged. ‘Clowns flew in through the windows, grabbed Kacy and a bunch of the girls. Bourbon Kid showed up, killed ‘em all and fucked off out into the street.’

  Vanity looked surprised. ‘I was only gone a minute,’ he said. ‘Seriously? The Bourbon Kid was here?’

  ‘Yeah. I guess he just got back from the Devil’s Graveyard.’

  ‘What was he doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know, but whatever it was, it’s made him back into his old self again.’

  Vanity frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  There was no need to answer his question. In the streets outside, the sound of gunshots and screams was clearly audible. At the end of the hall, Kacy was pulling the door closed. Vanity walked down the aisle towards her, with Dante following on behind. Kacy had left the door slightly ajar and was peering out into the streets outside. One of the schoolgirls spoke up.

  ‘Is that man in the hood killing all the vampires out there?’ she asked.

  Kacy looked back at her and then up at Dante and Vanity. Her face, although still half covered in blood, showed great concern. She pulled the door shut behind her and looked back to the Sunflower Girl who had asked the question.

  ‘Stay in here, honey,’ she said. ‘It’ll be safer.’

  Outside, the gunshots were becoming more frequent and the anguished howls of the Bourbon Kid’s victims more vociferous. Voices were pleading to be left alone, then silenced by more gunshots.

  Vanity repeated the girl’s question. ‘Is he killing all the vampires?’

  Kacy was trembling as she slid the metal bolt back into place on the door. ‘No,’ she said, turning back to face the others. ‘He’s killing everyone.’

  Thirty-Seven

  Beth had regained consciousness in the late afternoon. She was in a fairly poky little room with a couple of heavy set soldiers who introduced themselves as Tex and Razor. She recognised them from a brief stop she had made at the Tapioca on Halloween. Her memory of events leading up to how she ended up in a room with them was extremely hazy. And her head hurt as if she’d been hit with a baseball bat.

  They hadn’t given her much information about why she was being held prisoner, only that it had something to do with JD or as they liked to call him, the Bourbon Kid. She was being used as bait in a plot to kill him. She’d tried explaining to them that she and JD were no longer together but her words fell on deaf ears. The soldiers weren’t interested and they weren’t particularly clear about what her fate might be either.

  She sat on a sofa watching the news on a large widescreen television on the opposite wall. Below the television was a bank of CCTV monitors. Tex, the taller of the two soldiers, was sitting at a desk in front of the monitors, watching them intently. His hair was cut almost to the bone at the back and sides and Beth could see an unpleasant collection of red spots on the back of his neck. The other guy, Razor (who had a scar on his face twice the length of Beth’s), was sitting uncomfortably close to her, watching the news with her.

  In the early evening, the news reader caught everyone’s attention with some breaking news. ‘We now go to Sally Feldman who is with Captain Dan Harker of the Santa Mondega Police Department for a live update on the Bourbon Kid case.’

  The screen switched to a picture of Dan Harker sitting at a desk in the news studio with Sally Feldman, a middle aged blonde reporter in a smart red suit. Just before the interview began, a door in the corner of the room swung open and in walked Bull, the senior member of the soldiers.

  ‘What’s up, fellas?’ he asked.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Tex, pointing up at the television on the wall. ‘Got some breaking news about the Bourbon Kid on here.’

  On screen, Dan Harker was answering Sally Feldman’s first question. ‘New evidence has come to light regarding the Bourbon Kid case,’ he said, staring out through the screen with a serious look on his face. ‘I believe I have proof that the Kid did not murder Bertram Cromwell this morning. In fact, it’s entirely possible that he’s not guilty of most of the murders he is accused of. I suspect that in recent times the Bourbon Kid has been protecting this city from a group of corrupt police officials and a large army of what would appear to be vampires.’

  Bull stood watching open mouthed. ‘What the fuck?’

  In front of him by the monitors, Tex snorted a laugh. ‘Whoa, death wish!’

  A smirk broke out on Bull’s face. ‘This idiot’ll be dragged away by the men in white coats before they even cut to commercials,’ he said.

  On the screen, Harker continued with his outrageous revelations. ‘That’s right, I said it out loud,’ he went on. ‘There are vampires in this city. It’s not just a rumour. It’s not a joke. And with the darkness that has engulfed this city in recent days these creatures have now taken to the streets. Vampires are committing the riots and street muggings that are currently being reported all over the city. I advise everyone to lock yourselves insides your homes until further notice. Something or someone is the cause of these dark clouds that are hovering over our homes. And finally I have one last plea. This is for the Bourbon Kid. If you're watching this, this city needs you. Please come and find me. I am on your side. Or if you prefer, just go about your business of killing vampires. I will not send the police force after you. You have our blessing to kill them all. Please, wherever you are, come back and save our city.’

  The news station cut back to the reporter in the studio who was staring wide-eyed at the screen with his eyebrows raised.

  ‘Well, that was interesting, wasn’t it?’ he remarked.

  Beth had listened in stunned bewilderment the same as everyone else when she heard what Captain Harker had to say. So, could it be true that the Bourbon Kid was actually a hero underneath it all? Probably not, but he was killing the vampires. She had judged JD rather hastily in the heat of the moment when she had seen him kill Silvinho. Right now it looked like he was the only chance the city of Santa Mondega had of surviving the wave of vampire attacks. She also now deeply regretted the moment when she had thrown Casper’s cloth back at him.

  Bull looked over at her, as if reading her thoughts. ‘Don’t believe all that shit,’ he said. ‘Your boyfriend has killed hundreds of innocent people, not just vampires. That idiot cop doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s talking about.’

  ‘I believe you’re right,’ she said, nodding at him. ‘But look at you. You’re holding me hostage on behalf of a gang of vampires who intend to kill me once I’ve served my purpose. That doesn’t exactly make you a hero either, does it?’

  Bull looked
somewhat taken aback at the unexpected outburst. He clearly wasn’t used to being spoken to in such a disrespectful manner. ‘You listen to me, you stupid bitch,’ he snapped. ‘Me and my guys have been protecting the likes of you for years. We’ve fought wars to provide the freedom that you take for granted. Stuck our heads above the ground when there’s bullets flying everywhere. Carried out missions behind enemy lines. And for what? A country full of people like you who don’t even bother to thank us. The only reason you’re alive now is because of people like us. Your boyfriend killed a war hero this morning. Silvinho died in a corridor in a shitty apartment block. That’s no way for a soldier to die. Not after everything he did for his country. So when you judge me, and you judge us,’ he pointed at Tex and Razor, ‘remember this, it’s your boyfriend killing folks for fun, not us, and not the vampires. The undead aren’t out there killing innocent people for fun. They kill to survive. They need the blood to live, in the same way that you and I need food and water. They’re paying us a good wage to fight for their survival. And they don’t judge us on how we do it. And if you, young lady, you have to be sacrificed for the greater good, then I can live with that. With you as bait we can kill the Bourbon Kid and I can assure you, it will save the lives of thousands of people who would otherwise have been killed by him.’

  ‘The vampires will kill thousands more people than he ever could,’ Beth retorted.

  ‘That’s true,’ Bull agreed. ‘But the people who die at the hands of the vampires are dying for a reason. It’s all part of the food chain. When your precious Bourbon Kid killed my father he did it out of spite. He’s killed thousands of innocent people without motive. There’s no honour in that. The vampires kill to survive. There’s honour in that.’

  ‘Honour? Is this what you tell yourself to ease your conscience?’

  Bull frowned. ‘You know, you should be a little more careful about how you speak to me, miss.’