I decided to try and talk my way out of trouble. It used to work with principals, so why not crazed cafeteria-lady demons? “What’s the plan? You’ve gotten one step closer to your quota tonight, and then what? You turn in the box tops for an iPod?”
“Fool!” shouted the woman. “Do you have any idea the forces you are tampering with?”
“None whatsoever. Why don’t you enlighten me.” The longer I kept her talking, the better the chances Greg would think of something brilliant. I hoped. Boy, did I ever hope. I also hoped that this curry-scented psycho had seen all the same movies I had and knew her role was to provide a soliloquy on her plans and motives, giving me enough time to avoid being killed.
“Foolish vampire, the world as you know it is coming to an end. The reign of mankind is over. When I complete my ritual and bring my father forth, all will kneel before the Dark Lord, and Belial shall be favored among all the Host!”
I had no idea what the “Host” was, and the very sound of “Dark Lord” made me more than a little uncomfortable. And she was yelling. In my experience, supernatural bad guys yell right before they hit you very hard, or at least try to kill you in some unpleasant fashion. I thought I’d pre-empt her hitting me and take the fight to the bun-head.
I hopped down from the tree with a nice cape-billowing move and drew my weapons. With a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other I felt marginally better about my chances of surviving the next thirty seconds. All that good feeling evaporated when Detective Law spoke from behind me.
“Drop the gun, Black.” I heard her chamber a round, and sighed.
“Greg, why is she pointing a gun at me?” I asked without turning around.
“Because I don’t like people threatening the possessed bodies of innocent little old ladies on my shift. Now drop the gun,” Detective Law repeated.
“No,” I said, never taking my eyes off the little old lady, who was the source of much greater concern than the cop with a gun pointed at my back.
“No?” She sounded surprised.
I suppose people don’t typically decline when she points a weapon at them and orders them to disarm, but I didn’t have a lot of time for verbal sparring. “No. Greg, get the nice police lady out of here before she gets killed.” I raised my pistol and took aim at the bun-lady’s head. “Last chance, Mrs. Butterworth. Let the kids go and I won’t ventilate your forehead.”
Bun-head wasn’t impressed. “Your policewoman is right, you won’t shoot an innocent body, and you still have too many of your idiotic human ideals.”
I hate it when the bad guys have a good read on me. Maybe I should start wearing a mask.
“Children,” the bun-lady demon called. “Kill them all.” She waved one hand at the three of us, and the entire cast of Annie rushed us.
Chapter 19
Most nights I have qualms about hitting kids, but this wasn’t one of those nights. I holstered my weapons and kicked the first brat all the way across the clearing, as gently as I possibly could. The second one to get within arm’s reach ended up as a projectile, too. The two of them hit trees and slumped to the ground, momentarily stunned. That only left about eight attacking the three of us for the moment, but I had a sneaking suspicion that Detective Law wasn’t going to be much use in this fight.
A glance behind me confirmed my suspicions, as several of the brats had her down on the ground and were beating the crap out of her. Again. I couldn’t concentrate on her plight for long, though, because there were three of the little ankle-biters swarming me, and the two I’d incapacitated earlier didn’t have the courtesy to stay down for long. As much as I hated it, the gloves were going to have to come off.
“I really hope you’ve got a good idea, bro!” I heard Greg yell from behind me, then I heard a loud oof! and a thud that let me know he was off his feet. I jumped back into my tree to get a second’s breathing room, only to have company on my branch almost immediately.
“Not fair!” I yelled. “No fair chasing me when I’m trying to figure out how to kick your aaaaa—” I was trying to say something witty (and distracting) when the branch broke and dumped me and the kid who had jumped after me fifteen feet onto the forest floor. I could have been hurt if I’d landed wrong, but at the last minute I twisted and landed on the kid instead.
A remnant of morality twinged, but then I remembered that I eat people. It’s not like I was interviewing to be her babysitter, and she started it by invading my tree. She puked a little from my having landed on her, and seeing that gave me an idea. It also made me a little nauseous.
I had to get free of the fray for a second to clear my mind. I picked the girl up by her ankles, and twirled in a circle, swinging her like a hammer toss in high-school track and field. After I’d leveled the three other kids surrounding me, I tossed her at the bun-demon and yelled over to Greg.
“Dude!”
“Yeah?” he croaked. He had a kid in each hand by the scruff of the neck, and one was on his back choking him with one hand and hitting him in the head with the other. I would have laughed if I hadn’t seen four crumb-snatchers running back toward me full tilt.
“What was that crap earlier about salt breaking spells?”
“Salt—urk—disrupts the flow of magical energies. It’ll break almost any spell.” He managed to throw off all three kids for a second, but then two more dropped on him from a tree.
“Will it screw up stuff like summoning and possession?” I asked, jumping and weaving as the little girls closed on me once again. I needed to end this quick, before I killed a kid or before one of them decided that a broken branch would serve as a stake. Or beat the helpless detective to death.
“I think so!” The response came from under the pile of bodies where Greg was lying.
“This would be a good time for you to—oof—tell me you’ve got more in your utility belt!”
The whole pile of possessed bodies flexed, then flew apart as Greg jumped to his feet. The little rug rats immediately headed back at him, but Greg was ready. He reached into a pouch on his belt and tossed white powder into the faces of the girls attacking him, and they immediately slumped to the ground unconscious. Right at that moment I felt a tremendous pain behind my left knee, and looked down to see one of the brats had actually locked her teeth into my hamstring.
“Oh, that is it!” I bellowed. “Biting is my gig, you little urchin!” I snatched her off my leg and threw her over to Greg. “Salinate this little brat, please!”
“I don’t think that’s a word, Jimmy.”
“I don’t have time to call Webster’s, man, just make with the salting!”
“Happy to help, bro,” he called back.
A few minutes later we were panting in a clearing surrounded by eleven unconscious, salty little girls. Bun-Head was gone. She must have decided that discretion was the better part of whatever and hauled ass out of there once we started dispelling the kids. Apparently, all it took was a good dousing with sodium chloride to toss the demons out and turn them back into normal children.
It was probably going to take a lot more work to get Detective Law back to normal. She was sitting with her back to a tree and her gun in both hands. The slide was back and the gun was obviously empty, but that didn’t stop her from pointing the weapon at us and dry firing frantically as we approached.
“Shhhh . . . it’s okay. We’re the good guys. We’re not going to hurt you, I promise.” I kept my voice low and slowly moved to sit down next to her. All I really had to work with was a little experience working with frightened animals, and reruns of Dog Whisperer on Animal Planet. I thought it might be a good idea to get down to her level and look as non-threatening as possible. That was a little tough, since I was fairly bloody. At least it was all my blood.
After a minute I reached out and very gently took the gun from her hand. She resisted for a second, but eventually let go, and I ejected the magazine and put the empty weapon in my coat pocket. “Are you all right?” I asked.
�
��I don’t think so,” she said very quietly.
“I’m not surprised. Most people need a little adjustment period the first time they experience something like this.”
She looked over at me, and I could hear shock hovering on the outer edges of her voice. “The first time? Exactly how often does crap like this happen?”
“Unfortunately,” Greg said as he slid down to sit on the other side of her, “this sort of thing happens all too often. And we’ve observed that once the barriers to belief are removed, that you may find yourself seeing more and more of it. You see, our society erects so many roadblocks to any understanding or analysis of the paranormal that it is almost impossible to truly investigate anything that happens outside the ordinary.”
Greg had the bit between his teeth. This was his subject, and I didn’t have the heart to deny him a good ramble. I’m sure he said a lot more, and I’m sure that it made perfect sense to anyone that would care, but I was most certainly not in that camp, so I did what I’d done for the past two decades whenever Greg started one of his rambles. I had a drink.
Lucky for me, my flask had made it through the fight without any major structural damage. I had a belt of Glenfiddich and passed it over to Detective Law. “Want a belt?”
She took the flask and turned it up for a long slug. “Nice. What is this?”
“Scotch. What were you doing in the woods?”
“The last girl to disappear had her cell phone turned on. I initiated a GPS trace and it led me here. But . . . what was all that?”
“That’s a longer story than we have time for. You think you can stand?
“Probably.”
“Good, because we should be moving along before your comrades in arms show up.”
“Why?” She looked around at the unconscious little girls scattered around the clearing. “We can’t leave them lying here.”
“If experience serves as any guide, and what good are the bruises if it doesn’t, they’ll be out for a couple more hours at least. Your people will find them.” I got to my feet and brushed the worst of the dirt off my jeans and coat. I reached down and helped her to her feet and returned her sidearm to her. “We, on the other hand, have a different task. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re still missing one grumpy old lady.”
“Shit. Where did she go?” She put a fresh magazine into the pistol, chambered a round, and holstered her gun.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be missing her. Now come on, we’ve gotta go after her, and we don’t need to get tangled up in a bunch of—Well, crap, here comes the parade.” All hope of getting out of the woods without a few hours of questions evaporated as the bulk of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s SWAT team surrounded us, assault rifles at the ready. “I hope you have a foolproof plan for dealing with this.”
“I do,” she replied. She stepped forward, badge in hand, and yelled “Lower your weapons, boys! Stand down. We’ve got it under control.”
One of the guys in body armor came over, and she huddled together with him for a few seconds. Whatever she was selling, he was buying, because in no time at all he had guys running back through the woods for stretchers and ambulances. Greg elbowed me and motioned to the cops. I gave him my best hell-if-I-know shrug, and we sat down at the base of a couple of huge oaks to wait. Looked like we were going to be stuck in the woods with the cops while our bun-headed magical psychopath got away. Again.
Chapter 20
“Well, Detective, do you believe me now when I say that we can be useful?” I asked as Greg, Detective Law and I sipped coffee at a small table the SWAT boys had set up.
“You’ve got your moments, I’ll give you that. I haven’t seen martial arts work like that in a long time, and I sure wouldn’t have expected it from you two,” she said.
That’s a pretty standard coping mechanism for people who see us in action. There are so many kung fu movies out there. They just think we’re super black belts or something. I usually don’t bother to correct them. This was another one of those times.
“Do you think we can get a handle on some of that reward money?” I asked, as subtle as I knew how to be.
“Maybe. You were actually investigating, and you did help in recovering the kids, so I guess you’re entitled.” She looked disappointed somehow, and that bothered me a little.
“You know, it’s not a big deal, I was just thinking—”
She cut me off with a wave of her hand “No, you’re right. You guys deserve some recognition for the work you’ve done.”
That set off an alarm bell or two. The last thing we wanted was recognition. Actually, the last thing we wanted was a nice summer vacation in Phoenix, but recognition from any authority was pretty low on our list of desires, too. Really, I just wanted a few bucks to get the new Madden NFL game. I was really tired of playing Brett Favre in a Packers jersey. While I was mentally kicking myself for opening my big mouth, she walked over to a black guy in a nice suit and gestured toward us.
Greg leaned over to me and asked, “What did you do?”
“Something stupid.”
“What else is new? Would you care to be more specific?”
“I mentioned the reward.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know. I think we should leave now before we have to fill out forms or answer questions.”
“The first girl you talk to in fifteen years, and you run her off because you’re a greedy shit. Well done.”
“She is not the first girl I talked to. I talked to that girl at Phil’s the other night.”
“Okay, the first human girl that you weren’t simultaneously chatting up and putting a dollar in her garter.”
“Point to you. Now let’s get out of here.”
We double-checked to make sure Detective Law and her boss were looking the other way and slid off into the night. Greg’s car was still at the bowling alley, and the keys were still in the pocket of a cop who was not in a mood to look kindly upon me. We improvised and mojo’d a cop into giving us a ride. He pulled up in front of our place, and Greg convinced him that he needed to get to the hospital, ASAP.
“What does he think he’s going to the hospital for?” I asked as I unlocked our front door.
“He thinks his appendix has ruptured.”
“That’s a good one. What if he gets there and he doesn’t have his appendix?”
“Then he won’t have to worry about that anymore, will he?”
I plopped down on the couch and tossed my shoes across the room. Greg grabbed a blood bag for each of us, and we started to settle in for a marathon Gears of War session. All in all, it had been a pretty good night. We rescued the little girls, I talked to a human woman, we beat the baddy, and we made it home before sunrise. Then my cell phone rang, and the night went right to crap all over again.
Chapter 21
The display on my phone read “Father Mike,” so I pushed the button and said, “Hi Dad.”
“Jimmy, where are you?” He sounded out of breath, and I was a little worried. Mike’s pretty unflappable most days (might be something about having vampires for best friends), so anything that had him running around breathless was bound to be worrisome at best and more likely not-good-at-all.
“I’m home. What’s up?” I waved for Greg to turn off the TV. I had a bad feeling that we were going to be heading back out. I got off the couch and walked over to my shoes, cradling the phone between my ear and shoulder.
“Is Greg with you?” Mike asked.
I was really starting to worry now. Whenever Mike wanted to make sure we were together, it meant things were not-good-at-all.
“Yeah, he’s here. I’ll put you on speaker. Done. What’s going on?”
“I’m outside. I’ll be down in a minute.” He hung up on me.
I stood there for a few seconds looking at my phone, wondering what had him so rattled. Then I put my shoes on and got the place ready for visitors. I motioned for Greg to clear away the empty blood bags. Mike kn
ew what our deal was, but we tried not to flaunt our bloodsucking ways in front of him.
I was in the kitchen dumping out half-empty beer bottles when I heard Mike’s feet on the stairs. “Want a drink, Dad?” I called out, trying to keep my voice cheerful. I realized cheerful was wasted as soon as I saw how pale he was.
“Scotch,” he ordered. “Make it a double. And you’ll want one, too, I believe.” He sat on the couch and I brought over our drinks.
“Where’s mine?” Greg asked from his armchair.
“Still in the bottle, dork. I might have mad vampire skills, but I still only have two hands.”
He stomped over to the kitchen and made himself a stout screwdriver. “You never would have survived in the restaurant business.”
“Good thing I didn’t survive, then,” I retorted. “Now, Mike. You look like crap. What’s wrong?”
“You really know how to warm a man’s heart, Jimmy. But I’m sure I’ve seen better days. I don’t know if you’ve been outside recently, but it’s terrible out there. I think it might be . . . ,” he hesitated for a moment and I saw real fear in his eyes. “I think it might be the end times.”
“Whoa!” I stood up and went for more scotch. After a brief debate, I came back to the couch with the whole bottle. “Now let’s take this from the beginning. What makes you think that this could be the Apocalypse?”
“Oh, Jimmy, I’ve seen things in my life that no man should see, and you know this.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re the ones that showed you most of them,” Greg piped up. I shot him a dirty look, and he mumbled, “Sorry,” and shut up.
Mike continued. “I’ve seen plenty of terrible things in my time, but nothing compares to what I’ve seen tonight. The dead are walking, Jimmy! The newly buried dead have risen from their graves and are walking the town. I don’t know what to think, but that these are the times of Revelation!” Mike got a look in his eyes that was part fear, part excitement.
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