Hunter of the Dead

by Stephen Kozeniewski

  The Damned rose, almost releasing their grips on Price’s clothes as an afterthought. He was forgotten. One of The Damned reached out, grabbed the conference table which was bolted to the floor, and flung it through the bulletproof glass windows. It smashed to splinters in the chaotic confusion of the casino below.

  The Hunter tucked his spur into his horse’s flank and it pressed forward, smashing a horse-and-rider shaped hole in the wall like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. With this larger-than-life figure in it and twelve grotesque monstrosities the conference room suddenly seemed dreadfully small.

  Price glanced around, wondering if there was somewhere to hide, wondering, in fact, if hiding would even matter. If the window frame wasn’t still lined with jagged glass that would have cut his hands to ribbons, he would’ve considered sneaking out that way.

  Then again, how often do you get to witness a grudge match like this?

  The Damned who had tossed the conference table so heedlessly growled and leapt across the room, covering the whole distance in a single bound. As bulky and unwieldy as a suit of armor made him, The Hunter seemed to have no trouble snatching The Damned out of the air, impaling it on his lance. The Damned’s own momentum drove it the rest of the way down the lance, until it and The Hunter were practically face-to-face.

  The impaled Damned hissed, its tongue writhing lasciviously in the air, even catching The Hunter’s helm and licking some of the oily goo from it. The Hunter sliced its head off. The rest of The Damned backed up, forming a semi-circle, and Price suddenly realized that he was in the keystone position, directly across from The Hunter.

  Oh shit.

  The Hunter dropped his lance and drew his sword across the gauntlet of his opposite hand, raising a shower of sparks. One of the sparks caught the oily substance coating the sword, causing it to erupt into flames. The Damned shrank back from the fiery apparition, and Price watched as the two nearest the broken window dove out for safety.

  The black knight charged down the center of the room, straight towards him. Price dove out of the way, rolling towards one corner as best he could. The Hunter pulled his horse to the right, and swept in an arc, hacking and slashing at each of The Damned as he came. The fire spread with each step, consuming the knight’s armor and finally igniting the horse.

  Each of The Damned screeched as they struck out futilely at their attacker, their normally devastating blows reduced to a child’s tantrum. Blade cut through flesh and fire caught their sallow hides. The Hunter was transformed into an avenging demon, inferno made flesh. Price had never heard a horse scream, and in a way, the death cries of the Hunter’s mount as it was consumed by fire were even more horrific than the unholy roars of The Damned.

  The Hunter cut the Damned down one by one, even as his horse collapsed and died underneath him. When he fell, only one of The Damned remained, and it watched, transfixed, as the tar-like substance was used up, and The Hunter was reduced to a smoldering pile of metal covered by a mound of horseflesh.

  Price felt his heart racing a mile a minute, and didn’t know if he would be able to bring a word to his lips even if he wanted to. The Damned were monstrosities but the devastation he had just witnessed raised something akin to pity even for them in his heart. The last of The Damned tentatively approached the smoking pile that a moment before had been an avatar of fury, striking down its brothers and sisters in wrath.

  The Hunter flipped the ton of charred horsemeat off of him as though kicking off a twisted blanket. The Damned didn’t even have time to shriek as he shoved his sword up through its missing jaw and into its brainpan. He rose, lifting The Damned off the ground as though he had skewered a shish kebab.

  The last of The Damned struggled in agony, trying to pull itself off the sword which had been thrust through its brain, but when The Hunter raised it off its feet, it no longer had the purchase it required. He reached out with his free hands and pulled its arms off as though plucking the wings off a fly.

  He punched through The Damned’s stomach and pulled out a handful of intestines and let them spill to the floor, where more and more of its guts piled out afterward. The thing practically seemed to be sobbing before he finally reached out and with a pinch of his gauntlet separated its head from its torso.

  Then The Hunter spotted Price.

  Nine

  Kasprzak swung right and left with Nico’s bat, bashing heads in and knocking teeth out. The angry mob of vampires and ghouls was hard to hold back, but they obviously respected strength, and Kasprzak was a powerful vampire. She turned to look at him.

  “This is foolishness, Nico. Surely it’s better to give in. At this point do you have a choice?”

  Nico shook his head and sighed loudly.

  “How could you, Professor? Knowing what you know? Knowing what these things are? How could you willfully join them?”

  Kasprzak shook her head.

  “Knowing what I know? You have no idea what I know, little boy. Let me tell you something: did you know that every choice you make results in the creation of another universe where you made the opposite choice? Everything you could have ever possibly done somewhere out there you did.

  “And that’s not some new age bullshit, either. That’s science. Rock hard fact. Quantum physicists can’t explain the way sub-atomic particles function unless this is true. Every choice you make is a coin flip and every coin flip creates another reality where heads was tails or tails was heads.

  “When you’re young, when you’re a teenager or you’re in you’re in your twenties, the world’s your oyster. Everything’s ahead of you. Stretched out before you are an infinite number of possibilities. You could be the president or you could be a massage therapist.”

  “Or a tenured professor?”

  Her eyes gleamed and she smiled falsely.

  “Or a professor! Yes! But then you know what happens when you start making those choices? You start closing off all those other realities. And then you find yourself in your thirties or your forties and you realize that all those choices you made when you were a goddamned teenager ended up being your path. And there’s no straying from the path. You can rage against it, you can have a mid-life crisis and buy a sports car or fuck a cute TA, but there’s no leaving the path. And you realize that all those millions of opportunities you used to have are now just weights around your neck. Because there’s just this.

  “And maybe you didn’t pick the right path. Maybe you didn’t pick the one true path. Maybe destiny is real and maybe you were supposed to end up a deli manager, Nico. But you were young enough to choose to be a vampire hunter instead. And becoming old and realizing that you’ll never become all those things you could’ve become? It’s a fate worse than death.”

  Kasprzak lowered the baseball bat to the ground. The newborns and the ghouls seemed oddly focused on her, like animals craving the attention of their master. In a lower voice she continued.

  “Then imagine someone comes along and says you can have a new life. And they’re not a huckster and they’re not a Bible thumper or a self-help book writer just after your dollars for a pretty lie. They’re offering you a new life. A genuine chance to become something you never were before. Not just that, but another lifetime. Another lifetime to reinvent yourself and another lifetime after that, and another and another and another. You think you know so much about the world, Nico? You’re twenty. Come back to me when you’ve lived in it a little while.”

  “Yeah. I might be ignorant like you said. And I’m sure not old and depressed yet. And I get it. Everyone gets old and depressed and regrets their youth. And there’re some people like you who’d trade their soul to the devil to change things. But I know somebody else like that.”

  “You mean Carter Price? The man-child who wishes it was still the ‘70s? Who’s never had a real job in his life?”

  “You’re goddamn right. He fucked up his youth just as bad as you. Worse, by the looks of it. But the difference between you two is, no matter how shitty his
life got, he never stopped trying to live it. And I’d rather go out like Price. In any reality.”

  Kasprzak laughed.

  “Well, the matriarch can’t say I didn’t try. There’s no miracle that’ll save you now, Nico.”

  “Yeah, well, God helps those who help themselves.”

  Nico turned and yanked on the red crank wheel behind him. A light spray opened up from the sewer pipe blocking his path, and as he yanked it harder the blast turned into a punishing wall of water, striking Kasprzak and the solid center of her minions and pushing them back.

  Nico stood to one side as the torrent flooded the passageway. In a few seconds the water rose and dampened his pants. The flood rose almost to his knee before the water ran dry, diverted from whatever mysterious path of sewery architecture it had been stolen from. The swarm of monsters before him were drenched and waterlogged, and many of the ones in the path of the pipe had been knocked over.

  Kasprzak clambered to her feet.

  “Impotent,” she growled. “Petty. You’re a poster boy for the whole Inquisition. Rip him apart!”

  She pointed in his direction, as if releasing a pack of war hounds.

  “Oh, woops,” he said, “Forgot the most important ingredient.”

  He unscrewed the cap of his bottle of holy water and let it drop into the floodwater below. Like electricity passing through a current, his faith was channeled through the holy icon…which had become a flood, drenching every vampire and ghoul in the assembled mob.

  The newborns shrieked, pulling at their wet clothes, trying to get them off. Their legs, sunk ankle-deep in holy water, burned, causing them to drop to their hands and knees, which burned them further.

  Nico watched in wonder as every drop of water that touched the skin of every one of the vampires burned, sizzling and smoking. In fact, the passageway was filling with acrid smoke. Much as he wanted to stay, he was pretty confident that the holy water wouldn’t kill the monsters outright, and that its potency was likely to fade as it dispersed. It was best to be gone before that happened.

  He snatched his bat up from where Kasprzak had dropped it and hurried over to a metal ladder leading up to the surface. Suddenly he felt a hand around his ankle. He looked down to see Kasprzak, her body looking like a skinless burn victim’s. She had been soaked from head to toe in the initial torrent.

  “You mortal scum,” she screeched through her dissolving face.

  “Sorry, Professor,” he said, “I’d meant to spare you this.”

  He brought the bat down and lopped her hand off at the wrist.

  “But I hear those ghouls don’t much care what they eat. Maybe you could’ve been a million things, but turns out you’re just carrion.”

  He swung the bat again like a golf club and severed her head.

  As soon as Nico’s body left the water entirely, it was like flipping a switch. The newborns and the ghouls, though not instantly healed, were no longer burning like in acid. And as Nico had suspected, a number of ghouls, including the cop-ghoul Kolchak, immediately spotted the chunky mess that had become of their erstwhile mistress. As he mounted the ladder, he heard the sound of the ghouls tearing away at Kasprzak’s severed hand, head, and the remnants of her body.

  Ten

  Smoke still wafted out from between the plates of The Hunter’s armor. Behind the scorched faceplate his face was inscrutable. Price felt a twitch in his hand.

  You’re getting old, mate.

  “Fuck it,” he spat out.

  He reached into his deerskin jacket and pulled out his flask. He poured what was left into his mouth and, as if by a miracle, the twitch disappeared.

  “You want to tangle, old timer? Why not? You wouldn’t be the first mythical beast to try to fuck with me today.”

  Price grabbed his machete and unsheathed it. Almost as soon as it was clear he felt a sharp pain and could’ve sworn his hand had been cut clean off, but when he looked down he saw that the machete had been simply knocked away so fast his wrist had nearly shattered. The machete flew out the missing window and planted itself in the middle of a roulette wheel, flopping from side to side.

  The Hunter reached out and wrapped his gauntleted hand around Price’s throat. Price scrabbled at the armored forearms of the giant, but could not find any purchase. With his windpipe squeezed shut yellow cigarette burns began to appear in the air, quickly followed by great black splotches.

  As if it was happening to somebody else, he felt the Hunter drag him over to the missing window and push him out, holding him up in the air over the casino. Price pounded desperately against the armored menace, but to no avail. As The Hunter squeezed, preparing to snap his neck, one final thought occurred to him.

  Show him your ink.

  Price raised his arm up into the air, fist balled, hoping that his tasseled sleeves would fall away far enough to reveal his Inquisition tattoo.

  Come on, you son of a bitch. We’re on the same side. Why do you kill Inquisitors, too?

  The world seesawed around him and if the sight of the green cross made any impression on The Hunter, he didn’t let it show. Suddenly the blood came whooshing back into his ears and the air surged into his lungs as The Hunter released his grip. Unfortunately, that also meant that the floor was coming rushing up towards Price at a violent speed.

  Price’s leg caught on the last step of the plastic pyramid, but the rest of him splashed down into the artificial moat below. In movies, water always seemed to make for a miraculously soft landing for heroes, but Price felt the wind knocked out of him as the surface of the water slammed into his back. It was softer than the floor, perhaps, but not particularly soft.

  Why didn’t he kill me?

  The answer came as he surfaced, gasping for air and looking back up at the pyramid from which he had just fallen. Ghouls and newborn vampires were scaling the steps of the pyramid, eager for flesh and viscera. They either smelled the remains of Cicatrice’s dismembered circle or else thought The Hunter was a new target. Whatever the reason, they were pouring into the conference room, hanging off The Hunter’s arms and legs, trying to bite through his charred armor.

  Sucks for them. A lucky break for me, I guess.

  Groaning from the fall which had reminded him of how fucked up his leg had been, he splashed out of the moat and onto the casino floor.

  Two sets of yellow eyes immediately appeared before him.

  “It’s just one thing after the other with you fucking people, isn’t it? If you two want to throw down now, I’m going to need a drink.”

  Price pushed between the two remaining Damned and limped over to the nearest table where a serving girl (her face had been pulled clean off her skull) had collapsed with a tray of drinks. He grabbed the nearest one and downed it.

  “Yech,” he said, making a face, “Mai tai.”

  He turned back to see The Damned, no longer confused by his impertinence, advancing on him. Behind them, staying tentatively back from their masters probably more out of fear than respect, a small army of ghouls and newborns was gathering. Overhead, The Hunter was ripping through their ranks like tissue paper, sending the tide of bodies that had been climbing the pyramid right back down in fear, and straight towards Price.

  “Better stay back,” he said, plucking the cocktail umbrella out of his last drink and jabbing the pointy end in their direction, “I will use this.”

  Judging by her shriveled grey breasts, The Damned on Price’s left had once been a woman. It lunged at him and he immediately dropped to the ground and rolled, hoping that it had gotten a mouthful of felt and wood. He popped back up on the other side, forcing himself to remain spry despite the pain zigzagging through his leg. He was exactly where he wanted to be.

  Well, not exactly. Exactly where I want to be is a beach in Tahiti. Then again, those bastards might be serving mai tais.

  To his delight, the female Damned did indeed headbutt the gaming table to his front. She looked up angrily, her tongue lolling disgustingly out of her throat.<
br />
  “On second thought, maybe I’ll use this.”

  Price grabbed the handle of his machete from the table behind him and recovered it with a snap of his wrist, which sent the roulette wheel flying into the crowd of baby nightcrawlers and also reminded Price of the sprain or strain or whatever that The Hunter had just given him.

  God damn I’m getting old. Well, probably won’t get much older at this point.

  The female Damned tentatively began to crawl over the table with the de-faced waitress. Her partner, a bit less adventurous, slowly followed her lead. The ghouls and the newborns began to encircle him, some crawling under the tables and others flowing down the spaces between the tables like deadly lava floes.

  Hissing at the pain in his leg and his wrist, Price clambered up onto the roulette table. It was no good having his legs taken out from under him while he was concentrating on The Damned. Besides, how many Inquisitors got to make a crazy last stand on top of a roulette table?

  “I’ll tell you what. You want me?”

  Price let his deerskin jacket drop to the table. Not wanting to pull it over his head and blind himself for even a split-second, he sliced through his undershirt with the machete and let that fall away, too. Hisses of pain came in unison from all sides.

  The green cross of the Inquisition was the least of Price’s tattoos. His entire back, chest, one sleeve, and one half-sleeve were covered with liturgical tattoos. Crosses, saints, scenes from the Bible, depictions of Christ and the destruction of evil by the will of God. Price’s entire body was a holy symbol and all the vampires backed away from the glorious vision in fear.

  “Come and get me.”

  The lesser vampires cowered in fear and pain. He slashed and slashed down into them, lopping off heads left and right, trying his damnedest not to let his machete get caught in one of their skulls. Finally the female Damned leapt up on the roulette table. Price tried to take a swipe at it in the air but missed.

  My wrist is really killing me.

  In retaliation, The Damned brought its arm slashing down sideways and gouged four jagged stripes out of Price’s face. Grunting, Price slashed again and again with his machete, but The Damned parried each blow with its forearm. Each time the machete struck the thing’s wrists, the wound immediately began to heal.