“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 23
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 brains, 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.
“This is not what I had in mind,” she said when I got within earshot. “Me, neither,” I gasped. I was pretty sure I had broken a couple of ribs, and while they would heal quickly, they hurt like the devil right then. “But it’s not too far from what I expected. Pop the trunk.”
“The trunk, why?” She looked at me in confusion.
“Are you one of those women who will never, no matter how dire the circumstances, do anything unless you understand all the reasons behind it? I just want to know, because if I’m going to die because of someone’s ridiculous need for exposition, I’ll go flippin’ stake myself,” I snapped. “Now open the trunk because that’s where all the guns are.”
“That’s all you needed to say,” she huffed. But she did reach into her pocket and get out her key fob to pop the trunk. Greg’s cape wasn’t the only thing I’d tossed into the trunk while everyone else was getting their seatbelts fastened. Mike and Greg came out of the police station, but stutter-stepped when they saw the chaos in the parking lot.
I got to the back of the car and yelled for Greg. “Get over here, bro, I need backup!” He hustled over and I handed him a twelve-gauge and an aluminum baseball bat. “Knees and elbows. We want the demons to stay locked in the bodies but be unable to move.”
“Mike won’t be happy.”
“Mike doesn’t get a vote anymore. Th
at was before we realized the zombies can think and react. We have to disable them and get this done in the next couple of hours or we’re going to have a bigger mess on our hands than we’ve ever dreamed of. Imagine these guys wandering through downtown during rush hour. Now, you with me?” I racked a shell into the chamber because Greg always works better with dramatic sound effects.
He took the bait. He cracked his knuckles and said “Let’s do this.”
I think somewhere deep in his brain my partner has a folder marked “clichés” that he accesses every time we’re in trouble. His ability to quote movies in times of extreme stress is impressive, in a sad kinda way.
We came out from behind the car and followed the two unbound zombies, who had abandoned us when we stopped fighting and returned to their original course. They’d managed to navigate more than halfway across the parking lot and almost to the entrance of a fast-food restaurant. The location was problematic. We were about to shoot a couple of walking corpses right in front of PlayLand, but that really couldn’t be helped.
I took out the knees on the woman zombie. Greg couldn’t shoot a woman, not even a dead one, so I didn’t waste time asking him to take her out. Me, I’ll open fire pretty quickly on anything, living or dead, that tries to kill me, hurt me or look at me like it might eat my brain. After the knees, I switched to her arms, and broke both at the elbows with my bat. Greg did the same with the guy zombie, and we quickly bound them hand and foot and tossed them over our shoulders. I hoped the spectators in the window chalked it up to a Halloween party gone wild.
We got back to the car and deposited our cargo, but noticed something was missing—the first zombie. I heard a shouted Bible verse from the back of the strip mall. Our broken zombies wouldn’t be going anywhere, so we headed off to save the night. When we got to the back of the mall the missing zombie had knocked Anna out cold and was choking Mike against a loading-dock door. We couldn’t shoot without hitting Mike, so I tackled the pile of grave dirt while Greg tended to the wounded.
Every year I swear to sign up for a first-aid class that meets at night so I can play medic while Greg plays linebacker. But, once again, I hadn’t kept my resolution so I got the dead guy off Mike and beat the crap out of him with my bat.
The problem with beating on zombies is that they don’t feel pain, so you have to do real damage. Going after joints is best, but if they’re thrashing around trying to kill you, that’s pretty hard. I shattered one elbow, but he got a couple of good shots in before I finally connected with a kneecap. With nothing holding his leg upright, he went down like the corpse he was. I took a couple extra minutes to break his other knee and elbow, then hefted him up across my back and took him to where his buddies were writhing around.
You can’t really knock a zombie unconscious, so they were groaning and biting and being generally annoying—which is off-putting in a dead person. I walked over to the local supermarket and got a roll of duct tape, and before too long I’d made three silver-taped and very lumpy zombie Christmas presents. Greg helped Mike and Anna back over to the car, and grinned every second that she allowed him to help her walk. If he got any more excited I was going to put Xanax in his blood bags.
When they arrived we all stood there, panting and bruised—with more than a handful of graveyard dirt and flaky zombie-flesh clinging to our clothes—and took a look at the mess around us. We had managed to break half a dozen cars or so, which I thought was a pretty good record for us. Most of the people parked in the parking lot still had transportation.
Crap. Transportation. I’d stumbled upon a huge hole in our plan. Anna had said she could perform the spell, but even with her whole coven backing her up, it would be a one-time thing. For everything to work we needed all the zombies in one place at one time. Therein lay the rub. We had neglected to address how we were going to carry eleven zombies around until we could banish them. We didn’t have a paddy wagon, and we couldn’t afford the time to ferry them back and forth to a central collection point after we ran each one to ground.
We needed some way to get these zombies to Marshall Park while simultaneously chasing down the rest of the zombies. And after that fight, we needed all hands on deck to get the job done. None of us had any desire to split up. So I called a cab for our “friends,” the zombies.
Even though it was almost Halloween, the deal took a little explaining, a little mojo and a folded hundred-dollar bill, but I got the cabbie to agree to take our three “drunk friends” to the park and deposit them on the sidewalk away from the police station. I told him that me and my fraternity brothers had plenty of partying planned for the night, and if he’d keep his mouth shut and his cell phone on, he could make almost a grand by the time the sun came up. He babbled something about a mother and father and a sick baby, but I didn’t really care. I waved half a dozen more pictures of Ben Franklin in his face, and he agreed not to take any fares but my “friends” for the rest of the night. Even after all this time I’m often amazed at what people will believe in the name of cash and a fraternity Halloween party.
Chapter 24
The rest of the zombie encounters went much like the first, with the exception of the car chase. The last dead dude actually made us chase him, in the car, with Greg hanging out the window playing mailbox baseball with his spine. We kept the brain-eater alive, and because Mike had fallen asleep in the backseat long before we got to the last zombie, we didn’t get another lecture about defiling the dead.
We tossed Marathon Man in the trunk because I was out of cab fare and I was afraid that even my dreadlocked ganja-befuddled cabbie was starting to think that this was something other than a fraternity stunt.
When we rolled up to join the witches in banishing a passel of angry spirits back to Hell, we had about an hour of night left. Not to mention that a successful banishment would leave us with eleven corpses in Marshall Park, a public space directly across the street from the headquarters of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Of all the places in the greater Charlotte area that I wanted to be when the sun came up, this was nowhere on the list.
We left Mike snoring in the backseat, and I grabbed the dead guy from the trunk. This one was skinny, at least. Some of the zombies we’d bagged that night had been seriously hefty in life, and that made for a slippery, jiggly corpse. If more people toted dead bodies over their shoulders, I’m convinced the obesity epidemic in America would be solved pretty quickly.
There were a dozen witches waiting for us in the dew-covered grass around the fountain in the center of the park. Anna made thirteen. They were arrayed on the concrete steps where countless festival goers and small children have played over the years. I somehow doubted we had the proper city permits for what we were about to do.
Anna explained to us that thirteen was a number of power, like three, seven and nine. I didn’t bother to ask more because I really didn’t care. I was tired, covered in all kinds of things that flaked off dead people, and had broken and healed ribs twice in one night. Once I even had to heal my arm. That left me hungry, grumpy and smelly—not a good combo for a vampire meeting a dozen witches for the first time. But Anna had carried her weight tonight so I tried. I honestly tried.
“Anna,” I aimed to sound cheerful. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friends?” I made what I hoped was a fang-free and friendly smile all around, but the number of glowing pentacles told me that I wasn’t exactly making a harmless impression.
“No, vampire, I am not.” Her voice was cold, and I saw Greg’s face fall. I was less surprised to discover we were good enough to hunt zombies with, but not good enough to take home to the coven. Greg falls in love with weather girls, so I wasn’t surprised that he’d developed a monster crush on Anna in a few hours. Me, I was just interested in a little nibble, and maybe a little something else. But as hungry as I was, a bite to eat would have been enough.
That wasn’t happening. Moving on. “Fair enough, witchy-poo. Where do you want your dead guy so we can finish s
aving the world?”
She had the good grace to blush a little. “Put him in the circle.”
She pointed to where the other ten corpses were arranged carefully in the center of a huge magical circle drawn on the concrete plaza in multicolored chalk, with scribbles and sigils in several languages. I recognized a couple of words of Latin from hanging out with Mike all these years, but just a couple. It wasn’t complete. There was about a three-foot opening in the side for me to enter, drop the zombie and exit.
As I got almost to the edge of the circle, something felt out of kilter, and I dropped the corpse on the ground.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Your witches can put him in there. I don’t want to put his head where his feet should be. I’m all thumbs when it comes to magic, you know.” I took a couple of steps away from the circle and turned so that I could see most of the witches and Greg. His face had gone paler than usual at my sudden change of plans.
I caught a glimpse of him taking a position to cover my left, and I concentrated on the witches to my right. Greg and I have been in a lot of tight spots together over the years, and it’s nice to have someone you don’t have to explain things to when the shit hits the fan. He knew something was up, and went from heartsick to ready to rumble in no time at all.
I didn’t actually know if I could be trapped by a circle. Greg and Mike and I have spent a lot of hours researching what made us this way, and we have no idea if we’re mystical, extra-dimensional, extra-terrestrial, biological or something even stranger. There’s a decent chance the circle wouldn’t have bothered me any more than a jail cell made of toilet paper, but I’m never comfortable taking chances that are only decent. I decided to err on the side of caution for a change and not get locked in a magical circle with a dozen zombies on the night before Halloween. Just this once.
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