by Bill Blume
He glanced at his cell phone to check the time, just a quarter to nine. Most businesses would be closing, but there would still be enough left open for what he wanted to try.
“Hold down the fort, furball.” Gidion hopped off of his bed and “suited up.” He wasn’t planning to go one-on-one with this freak—not tonight, but if the guy came after him, he needed to be ready.
Gidion took his time locking the front door to his house and getting into his car. Sure he could have timed his exit to slip away without his shadow seeing him, really put him to the test, but best not to play that hand yet. He just wanted to get a feel for how close this guy would follow. If he just wanted to kill Gidion, then he wouldn’t be making himself so obvious. He’d go all stealth mode and go in for the kill.
He saw the Lincoln’s headlights coming up his street as he pulled out of the driveway. Within the neighborhood, the Lincoln didn’t have any cars separating it from Gidion. Only once Gidion turned onto Reams Road did the traffic increase. Courthouse offered a six-lane road and slightly thicker traffic, even at this time of night. The Lincoln never allowed more than one car to come between them, and he mirrored every lane change Gidion made, which was a bit obvious given he didn’t have to go very far along this road.
Gidion drove straight to Chesterfield Towne Center, one of the larger malls in the metro area. The clock on his dash showed it was just after nine o’clock, so the mall itself would be closed. Plenty of the surrounding restaurants were still open, though, as well as the Barnes & Noble.
He didn’t normally worry about getting the closest parking space when he went to the mall, but under the circumstances, he wanted as short a distance between his car and the front of the bookstore. He found a space within sight of the café and parked. As Gidion got out and walked to the entrance, he noticed his shadow parked one row over. That meant his shadow could watch Gidion’s car and the front entrance from the comfort of his driver’s seat.
Gidion didn’t go too far into the store, just down near the information desk. He picked up a book named Shiver by some writer whose name he wasn’t sure how to pronounce and opened it. From here, Gidion couldn’t see the Lincoln or his car, so it was a safe bet his shadow couldn’t see him either. He still had a clear view of the entrance, though. His shadow didn’t appear interested in keeping an eye on him while he was inside the store.
He carried the book with him over to the café. He couldn’t see the Lincoln from where he was standing in the line, but he saw his car. He’d locked it in case his shadow tried to search it.
Gidion bought a café mocha—a big one. He didn’t buy the book but took it with him over to one of the two-seater tables. This spot gave him a perfect view of both cars. He opened the book as if to read it.
Then something curious happened. His shadow got out of the Lincoln. Not looking directly at him proved harder than Gidion had expected. What was fang boy doing?
The guy didn’t head for the front door of the store, though. He strolled over to Gidion’s car and resorted to the old, “Oh, gee, I suddenly have this overwhelming need to tie my shoelaces” routine. A pity Gidion wasn’t in his car. He could have thrown the stupid thing in reverse and flattened the bastard. If the guy was any closer to his car, he could have given the tailpipe a blow job.
Then his shadow looked up at Gidion. The jerk looked straight into Gidion’s eyes and flashed this big toothy grin, the kind a vampire never displays in public. What the hell happened to discretion? Was the guy testing him for his reaction or had he already seen something in the back of Gidion’s car that had outed him for a hunter?
Whatever it was, the vampire stood and walked back to his car, got in and drove off.
“Shit.”
What just happened? He abandoned his drink and the book and ran out to his car. He needed to know where this guy was going. He’d taken too long, though. By the time he cranked up the Little Hearse, the silver Lincoln was gone. Gidion sped onto Midlothian Turnpike, hoping to spot the Lincoln before it might get onto the Powhite and head downtown, assuming that was where he was headed, but he didn’t see it. Gidion plowed through three red lights trying to make up the lost ground, but it was useless. He was lucky he hadn’t gotten pulled over as it was. Better not to press his luck.
Gidion cursed as he drove home. What the hell was that about? Had he done something wrong? He couldn’t begin to guess what that might be. What was it about the back of his car that could possibly have given him up? He circled the block to see if his shadow’s Lincoln had come back here, but there was no sign of it, just the usual cars.
Pulling into his driveway, he got out and looked at the back of his car. None of his vampire hunter gear was visible. His sports gear camouflage was all in place. He kicked the back of the car and cursed. He’d missed something, but what was it?
Page was barking a blue streak of her own as he walked up to the front door. “Oh, shut up, Page!” He flipped through his keys for the one to the front door. “It’s just me.”
Then he realized that Page was flipping out the same way she had the other night when his shadow was across the street. That and a hint of the vampire’s reflection in the screen door’s glass gave him just enough warning. He ducked beneath a fist aimed for the back of his head. Bastard either meant to knock him out cold or take his head off.
Gidion dove into the vampire. They fell back onto the lawn. The vampire took the brunt of the impact with Gidion landing on top of him. He reacted much faster than Gidion had expected, though. The second they hit the grass, the vampire shoved Gidion off and scrambled to his feet. The guy moved faster than a cat dropped in water.
Before Gidion could get to his feet, the vampire was on him. Caught off-balance, Gidion was knocked into the shadows along the side of the house. A large, low hanging tree hid both of them from view. The vampire wanted privacy to make the kill.
The vampire raced at Gidion, fangs bared and going straight for the throat. No time to go for a sword or his box cutter, Gidion stabbed the vampire with the keys still in his hand. They might not be sharp, but those jagged edges delivered plenty of damage. Blood sprayed out of the vampire’s eye. Momentum denied him a chance to retreat. Gidion grabbed the vampire by the shirt and pulled him down, shoving his face into the dirt. Keeping him down took all of Gidion’s strength. Screams were muffled by the ground.
“Shut up!” Could he suffocate this stupid thing? That was one of those details Grandpa Murphy had never answered. All Gidion could do was keep that face pinned in the grass and dirt. He was forced to rely on his left arm. His right was still sore from getting swatted by the frying pan the last time he’d tangled with one of these things.
He couldn’t keep this thing down, and it wasn’t getting any weaker. Gidion stabbed the keys into the throat, but he had a bad angle of attack. The attempt put him off-balance. The vampire shoved him off. A punch to the gut winded Gidion and kept him from getting up.
The vampire’s hands latched onto Gidion’s shirt and flung him back against the side of the house. Gidion wasn’t sure how he kept his head from cracking against the bricks. Damn good thing, because otherwise, he wouldn’t have had enough sense left to defend himself. He threw up his legs to hold back the vampire. Those fangs were going straight for his throat. Two well-placed knees into the guy’s chest were all that held him back. The vampire hissed, his glare all the more horrid with the left socket a bloody mess from Gidion’s keys.
Gidion drew his box cutter and went for the throat. Wasn’t a pretty strike, but he drew blood. His shadow released him as he jerked back from the slice. There wasn’t time to catch his breath. Gidion grabbed the vampire by the collar of his aviator jacket. The fur, soaked in blood, nearly slipped free. He held him long enough to stab the tip of the box cutter into the vampire’s remaining good eye.
He screeched and ran from Gidion, but he didn’t get far. The blinded beast tripped on a protruding root and then slammed his head on a low-hanging branch. Gidion grabbed the vampi
re by the back of his jacket and flung him facedown on the ground.
The wakizashi delivered the next injury, driving the blade straight through the back into the heart and into the ground. He buried the sword to the hilt. A kick to the head knocked the vampire out.
“Dammit.” Gidion gasped as he stumbled back. He needed to keep moving. The vampire wasn’t dead, and if he was going to do what he intended, he needed to move fast. “Move it, Gid,” he told himself.
He ran for his car and popped open the trunk. Grandpa had bought him stuff for just such an occasion. He just never thought he’d get to use it. He threw the bats and other crap into the backseat until he reached the blue backpack.
Just as he was about to run back to the vampire, a woman’s voice startled him.
“What was all that racket?”
Gidion screamed, and much to his ego’s bruising, very much like a little girl.
“Sorry, young man, didn’t mean to scare you.” This time, Gidion realized the voice was coming from the front door of his neighbor’s house. He’d seen the old lady in passing, but he couldn’t remember her name. She was leaning out, dressed in an orange, floral nightgown that made her look like some kind of withered hipster. “I just heard the most dreadful noises.”
“Yeah, I heard it, too, ma’am.” He held the backpack so that it would hide the bloodstains on his hoodie. His car hid his soaked pants. “Feral cats, I think. Found them fighting on the other side of my house. One of them got mauled pretty good.”
“Oh, dear. Is the poor thing still alive? That just sounded dreadful.”
“No, afraid it’s dead. I was just getting something out of my trunk to wrap it up and throw away.”
“We should probably call the police about those cats.”
Gidion fought down the urge to roll his eyes. She didn’t think to call the cops while he was getting his ass kicked? It’s a sad world when even nosey neighbors can’t be relied on to call 911 in a timely fashion.
“I’ll call them as soon as I toss this cat, ma’am. I can let them know what the other cats looked like.”
She nodded in that old lady way that made it look like she might fall over if she wasn’t still gripping the knob to her front door.
“That poor thing. Are you sure it’s dead?”
“Yes, ma’am. I better take care of it before it attracts any other animals.” He waved to her. “You have a good night.”
“Oh, yes, good night.”
She disappeared back into her house, and Gidion ran back to the vampire’s body. He was still there and unconscious.
First thing he did was kick the vampire in the head a few more times. Blood trickled from his ears. If this guy had been human, Gidion would’ve worried he’d gone a little too crazy on him. In this case, probably meant he’d done enough damage to safely do what he needed to next.
The best gag in the world isn’t going to completely silence someone, but the most effective kind requires shoving something in the mouth which isn’t the safest proposition with a vampire. Gidion turned the guy’s head to the side and planted his foot down on the side to limit his ability to move it. A really large wad of insulation foam came next. After that, he applied a liberal amount of duct tape. “Yeah, that’s me, your friendly neighborhood redneck vampire hunter.” The duct tape also bound the wrists behind his back. The last touch was a slice to the tendon in the back of the ankle. For a vampire, the injury would heal fairly quickly, but not before Gidion could get him in the car.
Gidion ran to the front door. He struggled to keep Page from running out when he cracked the door open and reached inside to turn off the porch light. The best “drunk-friend-carry” in the world couldn’t conceal all that duct tape wrapped around his prisoner’s head. Even without any light, he needed to do this fast enough to keep anyone from getting a good look at them. There’s no graceful way to throw a guy into your car, especially when the guy was as tall as this one. That he wasn’t conscious to struggle certainly helped, though. Gidion buried him in sports gear.
Gidion gathered his sword and box cutter, tossed them in the passenger seat and drove off. With any luck, the guy wouldn’t wake up on the way, but he couldn’t risk speeding lest he get pulled over. Even if the guy didn’t scream or move around with an officer at the car’s window, the bloody mess of his pants and shirt were sure to invite an officer’s curiosity.
He wondered what the chances were of Grandpa being at the funeral home. He always called him before going out to hunt, so Grandpa could drive there ahead of time and fire up the cremator once he’d caught a vampire.
“Lord, don’t be drunk.” He called Grandpa’s cell first and got the voice mail. “Shit.”
He tried the landline to Grandpa’s house next. That went to the generic greeting that the answering machine came with (Grandpa didn’t have the patience to figure out how to tape his voice to it). The beep seemed to take forever. “Grandpa! Pick up the phone! GRANDPA!” The machine cut him off.
He called back both numbers. He didn’t bother with the cell’s voice mail. Grandpa didn’t know how to access it anyway. He saved his message for when he got the answering machine at the house the second time. “Grandpa, it’s a little before ten on Wednesday. I’ve got a package, a live one. If you get this in the next few hours, I need you to meet me ASAP.”
This was not good. Sure he’d watched Grandpa operate the cremation equipment lots of times, but he’d never really shown Gidion how to do it. The only time Gidion had asked Grandpa to teach him, the reply had been, ‘It’s a one-step process, boy. You call me.’
“Yeah, that’s working just great, Grandpa,” Gidion said to himself, after getting the answering machine for what was probably the tenth time since he left the house. “One-step process, my ass.”
By this point, he was already getting off the interstate and onto Staples Mill Road. At least it wasn’t after eleven o’clock. No danger of getting pulled over for that curfew nonsense. As long as he didn’t speed, he should reach the funeral home without any problems in less than five minutes.
Then he heard a groan from the back of the car. That’s when it occurred to him that in his haste to get the hell out of Dodge, he’d never bothered to duct tape the legs together. His prisoner might not be able to climb out of the back of the car, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t kick out a window. Body parts sticking out of shattered car windows tended to guarantee calls to 911.
Gidion kept silent. With any luck, his “friend” was too out of it to even realize where he was. Hearing a strange voice would probably guarantee a freak out sooner than later. At least, that sounded good to Gidion. Then he heard a thud.
The hell with the speed limit. He was two blocks from the funeral home. He’d risk it. There were enough speeders on the road anyway. He was just part of the pack.
He contained a cheer as he saw Milligan’s on the left. Cars were coming from the other direction, but he felt safe in saying there was enough of a gap to make the left turn into the parking lot without stopping in the median. A muffled shout from the back protested the sudden lurch as the car zipped into its turn. A car horn from one of the oncoming cars joined his passenger’s protest.
The Little Hearse felt like it went airborne as it reached the curb. That received another muffled screech from the back. A grunt followed as all of the sports gear shifted, probably smacking the vampire in the face and other places. Another thud came from the back as he reached the rear parking lot and hit the garage door opener. Thank God he hadn’t borrowed this guy’s car like the last one.
He didn’t worry about backing in this time. He just zipped inside and threw the car into park. Gidion nearly tripped over his own feet as he scrambled out of the car and threw open the car’s rear door. A baseball glove flew at Gidion as the vampire kicked into the open air.
Gidion grabbed the ankle, jerked the leg taut and slammed his elbow down on the knee.
“Goddammit!” His shout was louder than the gagged scream from his c
aptive. He’d forgotten how sore his right arm was. “Just shut up!” Gidion shouted at the vampire. “Shut up!” He grabbed the bat and smashed it down where the head was buried under the black, plastic tarp. That did the trick. No more grunts or struggles.
With a weak laugh, Gidion sat on the ground against the bumper. “For what it’s worth, my grandpa is probably gonna have a hangover worse than yours in the morning,” he said to his unconscious companion. “You better give me something useful after all the crap it’s taken to get you here in one piece.”
He’d been expecting to have Grandpa here to take the lead for what came next. This was his first chance to interrogate a vampire, and to hear Grandpa tell it, this wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Chapter Twenty-One
The vampire prisoner resembled some kind of West Virginia mountain mummy by the time Gidion finished wrapping his legs together with duct tape. He placed the vampire on the conveyer in the cremator room. The most movement the vampire might manage would be to roll off the conveyer and onto the floor. If he could make his getaway trussed up like that, the jerk deserved to escape.
Gidion made one last try to reach Grandpa by phone, but the call went to the machine again. He’d have to do this on his own. Of course, if this vampire didn’t wake up soon, he’d probably have to just take his head off and leave him for Grandpa to cremate in the morning or whenever he decided to show up. That was assuming Grandpa even showed. What if he was dead? Gidion thought about that arsenal of swords and other weapons planted around Grandpa’s house. Could an old enemy have come calling? Dammit, what if the Richmond Coven had taken him out to send Gidion some kind of message? He knew that last thought was stupid. If the coven wanted to deal with him, they’d go directly for him, not waste time on Grandpa, but being unable to reach him was making Gidion panic.
While he was waiting, he searched this vampire’s pockets. No weapons. He just found his keys and a cell phone. “This is a really nice cell phone,” he said to its unconscious owner. “I guess membership in the coven has its privileges, huh?” This baby was all tripped out with a touchscreen and lots of apps. “Angry Birds? Really?” His respect for this guy hit a new low. He wondered if this moron had been playing games on his phone the entire time he’d been staking out his home.