Knight (un)Life - A Black Knight Short Story Collection
Knight (un)Life - A Black Knight Short Story Collection
Midpoint
Chapter 1
Knight (un)Life
A Black Knight Chronicles Short Story Collection
By John G. Hartness
Falstaff Books
Charlotte, NC
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Copyright © by John G. Hartness
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Gone Daddy Gone
A Black Knight Chronicles Short Story
This was originally published under the title “Daddy Issues” in a charity anthology called Twelve Worlds. It featured over a dozen indie authors, including myself and Derek J. Canyon, and raised money for Reading is Fundamental. These events take place before Hard Day’s Knight.
I could tell she was trouble from across the room, but Greg couldn’t. It was easy for me to see through her disguise of the distraught housefrau, all worried about her husband’s immortal soul, but my partner was oblivious, wrapped in the web she was weaving. I could almost smell the deception on her like cheap perfume, but Greg had no idea that he was walking right into a trap. Of course he didn’t - she was the prettiest girl to talk to him since before we were dead, and he was barely listening, just sitting there trying hard not to get drool on his chin.
I watched the debacle from across the coffee shop, pretending to sip a half-caf something or other and idly tapping on a laptop. The laptop wasn’t turned on, of course. I was just using it as something to hide behind while I watched the leggy bombshell entrance my partner into doing whatever it was she wanted to hire us for. I just hoped that his mouth wasn’t writing checks that my butt was going to have to cash. Again.
I perked up my hearing and eavesdropped as the woman yammered on to my partner. Greg, Gregory Knightwood III, was listening with rapt attention until she came to the part where she said “and now my husband is a zombie and I don’t know what to do about it!” She got a little louder than she wanted right there, and then looked around to make sure no one else had overheard. The hipsters in the coffee shop were too busy showing off their battered copies of Siddharta to have noticed anyone except themselves, so I was the only one who was staring. After a few seconds I got up and walked over to the table, ignoring the glare of the gorgeous widow.
“Jimmy Black,” I said, extending my hand to her. “The other half of Black Knight Investigations. Sorry to have been eavesdropping, but we try to vet all our clients before we take a case.”
“I understand completely. I’m Jane Clarkston, hopefully your new client.” She said, looking up at me through a veil of blonde hair. From the pounding of her pulse, she was furious that she’d been deceived, but a lifetime of being the hot chick had taught her to hide it very well.
I sat down and leaned in to make sure no one else in the shop could overhear. “Did you say your husband is a zombie?” I asked.
“Yes, Mr. Black. A zombie.”
“And you’re not talking about the type of Sunday afternoon football season zombie that every woman complains about from time to time?”
“No, I’m talking about the type of dead of a heart attack and then got up and started walking around again zombie that no woman should ever have to have happen!” Her voice went up a little and I flapped a hand at her to be quiet.
“How exactly did you think to call our agency?” I asked. We have a few talents other detectives are lacking, but our Yellow Pages ad doesn’t exactly say “Vampire Detectives - we take the cases that really suck.” At least it doesn’t unless Greg’s been talking to the phone company again.
“I googled ‘supernatural detectives.’ Your website came up and there’s a whole section on the site about Paranormal Investigations. I thought to myself that it doesn’t get much more paranormal than a zombie in the master bedroom, so I called you.”
I glared at my partner, silently vowing to have a long conversation with him on the definition of “low profile” when we were done with this case. But when I spoke, I tried my best to hide my irritation. “Mrs. Clarkston, how long has your husband been a zombie?”
“Ever since his death.” She smiled a tiny little smile, and I could almost hear Greg’s heart melt. If he still had a pulse, I’m sure it would have tripled at that smile.
“And how long ago did he die?” I prodded.
“About a week ago. He was exercising one morning, and he just dropped dead of a heart attack.”
I looked over at Greg. “I told you exercise was bad for you.”
Turning back to Mrs. Clarkston, I continued to probe. “And how long was he dead before he returned to life? Was it a few minutes or a couple of days?”
“It was just a matter of minutes. He was walking around again before I even called the ambulance, but I could tell it wasn’t really Alan.”
“How could you tell?” I asked.
“Look, we can sit here all evening and I can tell you all about it, or you can take my case and come see for yourselves.” She stood up, and I watched as all the appropriate parts bounced into place under her blouse and skirt combo. “Well?” She asked. “Do we have a deal?”
I looked at Greg and shrugged. “Might as well. Tonight’s episode of Castle is a re-run anyway.”
He almost tripped over his own feet standing and holding out a hand to the semi-grieving semi-widow. “We’ll be happy to take your case, Mrs. Clarkston. Should we follow you to your house, or would you rather give us the address and we can meet you there later?”
“May as well go now, unless you’d rather wait until morning?” She asked.
“Morning’s not the best time for us,” I said, holding open the door for her. A slight understatement, but I try not to tell potential clients that we can’t make a lunch meeting without bursting into flames. I followed the rocking motion of her hips out to the parking lot and climbed into the passenger seat of Greg’s 1967 GTO convertible. Our client hopped into a sleek Mercedes and we followed her to the scene of…something. I wasn’t exactly sure what.
*****
She led us to a house on a golf course (naturally) in the Ballantyne section of town. I figured her garage had more square footage than our entire apartment, to say nothing of the three-story monstrosity she called a home. She led us in through a side entrance, presumably so the neighbors didn’t have to lay eyes on the help, and brought us to the study. Even through the thick oak doors, I could smell the truth in her story. There was certainly something large and dead on the other side of that door, and you didn’t need my vampire-enhanced senses to know that.
“You know you’re probably going to have to recarpet that room, right?” I asked with my hand on the doorknob. “I mean, I hate to break it to you, but some smells just never ever go away.” She looked sick to her
stomach, and I motioned for her to wait outside while Greg and I checked out the situation with the dead guy in the library.
Alan Clarkston was sitting in a high-backed leather chair with his feet on the huge oak desk that dominated the room. He was most certainly dead, and about as dead as anything I’d ever seen moving around. Technically, Greg and I are dead too, but we hide it a lot better than this dude. He looked like every horror movie zombie you’ve ever seen, except apparently without the taste for brains. His skin had gone grey, and the vitreous fluid in his eyes had yellowed and was starting to seep a bit. Broken blood vessels splotched across his hands, and it looked like one ear was falling off. The stench was spectacular, the absolute Mona Lisa of stink, a pinnacle of achievement in funkitude. I managed to avoid puking for almost 30 seconds, but when I heard Greg barfing into the umbrella stand, I reached over for the wastebasket by the desk and yakked up the pint of B-positive I’d had for breakfast.
When we were done expelling the contents of our stomachs, I took another good look at the zombie. He hadn’t budged since we’d entered the room, just sat there still as death. I looked over at Greg, who was wiping his mouth on a sleeve. “Okay, now that you got us into this, you got any ideas how to get rid of him?”
He looked over at me, then back at the zombie. “None whatsoever. Can it talk?”
“I don’t know, I was too busy barfing to chat.”
He walked over to in front of the desk and tried to engage the dead guy. He called out “Mr. Clarkston? Alan? Is anybody home?” to no response. He even reached over and touched the thing’s arm and got nothing. Well, nothing except a case of the heebie-jeebies and a little squirt of blood onto the desk blotter where his finger sunk into the flesh of the corpse’s arm.
“Maybe he’s just dead and she was nuts,” I said, sitting on a couch across the room from where Greg was trying to make friends with the dead guy.
“Then why would she bring us here?” Greg asked.
“I dunno, bro. Maybe she was smitten with your boyish charm. Or the way you were panting after her cleavage.”
“I was not!”
“Dude, I haven’t seen you that hot for anybody since you got that Jessica Rabbit poster in high school.”
“We agreed to never mention that again,” Greg pouted.
“We agreed never to mention it for the rest of our lives. And I didn’t. We’re dead.”
“You know I hate you sometimes, right?” He returned to examining the dead guy, doing all sorts of crazy stuff trying to get a response. After a few minutes of watching the show, I had an idea.
“Mrs. Clarkston, could you come in here, please?” I asked as I opened the door a crack.
“Do I have to?” came the muffled reply from the widow, as she stood holding an expensive hanky to her nose.
“Yeah, I think you probably do.” She came into the room gingerly, as though she was afraid she’d break something just by walking in, and the second she crossed the threshold, her zombie husband came to life. He stood unevenly, and shambled around the desk towards her. The dead guy held out both hands in front of him and came straight for her, rocking a little from side to side as he crossed the room in a slow, stiff-legged gait. Jane shrieked and ran out of the room, slamming it behind her. I heard a key click in the lock and Greg and I looked at each other as we realized we were trapped in the study with a now-ambulatory zombie.
The deceased Mr. Clarkston turned from side to side, trying to locate the object of his desires, and started towards Greg in the same lurching walk. “I’m glad this is an old-school slow zombie. If this was a fast zombie, you’d be toast, Porky,” I said, leaning against a wall and watching Greg do laps around the office avoiding the zombie.
“Would you stop smirking at me and do something?” Greg yelled. He finally hopped on top of the desk in the center of the room. The confused zombie stopped, looked around the room and finally settled his gaze on me.
“Thanks, pal,” I said as the undead zillionaire started towards me. I thought for a second, shrugged, and drew my Glock. I aimed at the thing’s head and squeezed off four quick shots right into the zombie’s melon. Brains and congealed blood flew out the back of his destroyed skull and splattered all over my partner where he stood behind the monster.
“That’s just great. Now we’ve got a dead zombie, and I’ve got grey matter all over my shirt.” Greg said as he climbed down off the desk.
I saw the doorknob rotate and the door to the office opened, revealing a very shaken Jane standing just across the threshold. “What in the world have you done?” she shrieked.
“I solved your zombie problem. Now about our fee…” I holstered my gun just as I noticed Jane’s eyes getting big. “Crap. He’s behind me, isn’t he?” I asked. They both nodded, and I felt the squishy decomposing fingers of the zombie wrap around my neck like overcooked sausages. Dead or not, this dude was strong. I twisted as best I could and turned in his grip.
The zombie was there, but there wasn’t a whole lot of face left. There was even less of the back of his head, as a 9MM hollowpoint can make a big hole when it comes out. Obviously the creature was using something other than sight to focus on me, because it didn’t really have eyes left. “Any ideas?” I croaked.
“I got nothing, bro,” Greg said from beside me. We were at a bit of a stalemate, actually. The zombie couldn’t choke me to death, since I drew my last breath more than a decade ago, and I obviously couldn’t kill it the way I usually killed zombies. Admittedly, I usually killed zombies with an Xbox controller, but that’s beside the point. I batted uselessly at the zombie’s arms, and it just kept squeezing. I was starting to worry that it could actually break my neck when Greg had an idea.
“Stay right there!” he yelled and rushed out of the room.
“Urk.” I croaked as he left. Mrs. Clarkston just stood there watching the whole thing. I couldn’t tell if she was in shock or thought we were waltzing. After a couple of minutes Greg came running back in from the back yard with an electric hedge trimmer trailing a huge orange extension cord. He pressed a button and the hedge trimmer whirred to life. Jane came to life and ran screaming through the house as she figured out where this was all going.
“Don’t worry, bro, I’ve got you!” he yelled as he pulled a pair of safety glasses out of a pocket. Safety glasses? Really? Sometimes I wonder if my partner really understands the whole bit about being vampires and almost invulnerable. But he laid into the zombie’s arms with the hedge trimmer, and after an interminable couple of minutes the corpse was just flailing around with his stumps oozing goop onto the carpet, and I had managed to pry the fingers off my throat.
“A hedge trimmer? That’s the best you could come up with? Who cuts up zombies with a hedge trimmer?”
“Did you have a better idea?” Greg shot back.
“Good point. Help me tie him up.”
“Alright. Then we need to find his animation focus.”
I stopped trying to wrestle the creature into a chair and stared at Greg. “His what?” I asked.
“His animation focus.” Greg replied calmly. “There must be some physical token tying the monster to this world. Some piece of his soul is still trapped in this body, and until we destroy the focus, he won’t be able to move on the next life.”
“And you know this how?” I asked.
“The internet. I looked up some information on voodoo on the drive over. I figured if he wasn’t trying to eat anyone’s brains then he wasn’t a viral zombie, so he must be a voodoo zombie. There are a few people around New Orleans that were happy to be of assistance.”
“And what did you have to promise them?” I prodded.
“Nothing that will do us any harm, just a couple of photos.” I shook my head at my partner’s indiscretion.
“That won’t do any harm? Dude! We don’t want to be seen for what we really are, remember?”
“We won’t be. I’ll take digital photos, and just because I can be photographed they’ll assume
that we aren’t real. Remember, vampires aren’t supposed to show up in photos?” Greg looked way too smug.
“How do you know digital photos will work?” I asked. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He pushed a couple of buttons and up popped several pictures of the two of us. I was holding an empty margarita glass and dancing on a bar, and Greg was wearing something that looked suspiciously like a gold sequined jumpsuit. I tilted my head sideways, then remembered where those pictures came from - New Year’s Eve. I had to stop going out on amateur nights.
“Okay,” I continued. “Since we know digital photos will work, why do they work?” I figured that should slow him down a little. Of course I was wrong again.
“Silver, bro.” He said it like there was no other explanation needed. “Early photography used silver nitrate and other silver compounds to take the picture. Just like some mirrors don’t work because of the silver content in the mirror. It’s got nothing to do with capturing a soul in a photograph or reflection, and everything to do with the fact that silver is bad juju for supernatural beings. Like us. The silver nitrate wouldn’t react with the vampire’s image, just like the silver backing in a mirror won’t let our reflection show up. That’s why we reflect in windows and cheap mirrors, but not good mirrors.”
“That makes too much sense. And I don’t really care. Where is this focus thing?” I asked.
“Probably in her possession.” Greg pointed to a series of pictures all around the room of a gorgeous blonde girl from early childhood to her late teens. In several of the pictures she had her arms around the neck of what used to be her dad, before I blew most of his head off.
“Mrs. Clarkson,” Greg called out. “Where is your daughter’s room?”
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