Hard Day's Knight (15 page)

I might have stomped around the room cursing for a minute or two before I said anything intelligible again. “Alright,” I said when I ran out of euphemisms. “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.” And 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 G.I. 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 and followed him up the stairs to Mike’s car. According to my figures we had a pile of zombies to capture and banish, and only about three hours to do it in.

Greg’s math was better than I’d ever willingly give him credit for – we found the first set of zombies just 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 of what I was supposed to do. It pretty much boiled down to hitting things, so 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 all shambling along like, well, zombies, all walking through a strip mall parking lot on the east side of town. With it being a Saturday night, passing them off as drunks might be pretty easy, but the fact that there was a police substation in the strip mall complicated things a little.

Mike and Greg went into 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 just put handcuffs on him, tied his feet together, and that was that. No fight, no attempted eating of brains, nothing. After the first one, though, they apparently got the idea that we were going to try and block them from their destination, so they decided to fight back. I had one handcuff on the second zombie, a middle-aged guy 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, which made it all the worse that she’d been messed up enough to obviously need a closed casket. 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 just 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 screamed 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 them 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. 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 when I went through the windshield of a parked bakery van, and slowly disentangled myself from the gearshift and front seat. I got out of the van and joined Anna back near our car.

“Okay, this is not what I had in mind.” She said as 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 just 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. Mike and Greg had made it out of the police station, but were looking around confused at the chaos in the parking lot. They hadn’t gotten the message that there was nothing simple about our simple little operation.

I got to the back of the car and yelled for Greg “Get over here, tubby! I need backup!” He hustled over and I handed him a 12-gauge and an aluminum baseball bat. “Knees and elbows. We want the demons to stay locked in the bodies but unable to move.”

“But Mike said…”

“Mike doesn’t get a vote anymore. 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. Just 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.

“Let’s do this.” Somehow he can find the cliché in any situation, no matter how freshly ridiculous. I mean, here we are in a strip mall parking lot fighting zombies with a Catholic priest and a witch, and he still trots out “Let’s do this.” The man is simply amazing.

We came out from behind the car and headed toward the zombies, who had abandoned us when we stopped fighting and returned to their original course. Naturally this put them more than halfway across the parking lot and almost to the entrance of a fast food restaurant, so we were about to shoot a couple of walking corpses right in front of PlayLand, but that couldn’t be helped.

I took out the knees on the woman zombie (Greg wouldn’t shoot a woman, not even a dead one, so I didn’t bother making him try. Me, I’ll open fire pretty quickly on anything, living or dead, that tries to kill me and even looks at me like it might eat my brain) and then broke both her arms at the elbows with my bat. Greg did the same with the guy zombie, and we quickly bound them hand and foot and toted them back to the car. I hoped the kids in the window weren’t too scarred by what they’d seen, but that’s what happens when you’re out past your bedtime.

We got back to the car and deposited our cargo, but noticed something was missing. Something like both our friends and the third zombie. I heard a shouted Bible verse from the back of the strip mall and 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 shambling pile of grave dirt while Greg tended to the wounded.

Some year I’m going to sign up for a first aid class that meets at night so I can play medic while Greg plays linebacker. But this obviously ain’t that year. I got the dead guy off of 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 moving fast, that’s pretty hard. I got one elbow, but he got a couple of good shots in before I finally connected with a kneecap. With nothing holding the leg in the right position, he went down like, well, like a corpse. I took a couple extra minutes to break his other knee and elbow, then tossed him over a shoulder and took him back to where his buddies were writhing around.

You also can’t really knock a zombie unconscious, either, so they were groaning and biting and generally being really annoying dead people. I walked over to the local supermarket and got a roll of duct tape to deal with our packages, 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 happier I was going to put Xanax in his blood bags.

So we stood there, panting and bruised, with more than a handful of graveyard dirt and flaky zombie-flesh hanging off our clothes, and took a look around at the mess. We had managed to only break a half-dozen cars or so, which I thought was a pretty good record for us. That’s when I stumbled upon a huge hole in our plan. We had neglected to address how we were going to carry the zombies around until we could banish them. Anna said she could perform the spell, but even with her whole coven backing her up, it would be a one-time thing. So we needed some way to get all the zombies back to our place while simultaneously chasing down the rest of the zombies. And after that fight, none of us had any desire to split up. So I did what you do in these situations – I called a cab.

It took a little explaining 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 we 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 prank.

The rest of the zombie encounters went much like the first, with the exception of one moderately amusing scene that had us chasing the last dead dude in the car with Greg hanging out the window playing mailbox baseball with his spine. I know, I know, we weren’t supposed to defile the dead, but we kept the brain-eater alive, and Mike had fallen asleep in the back seat long before we got to the last zombie. We tossed him 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.

So we had about an hour of night left when we rolled up to join the witches in banishing a passel of angry spirits back to Hell and leave us with eleven corpses in a public park that happened to be less than a block from the police headquarters. 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 back seat, 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, and Anna made thirteen. She explained to us that thirteen was a number of power, like three, seven and nine. I didn’t bother to ask, because I really didn’t care. I was tired, covered in all kinds of things that fell off dead people, and had broken and healed ribs twice in one night, and once even had to heal an arm. So that left me hungry, grumpy and smelly – not a good combo for a vampire meeting a dozen witches for the first time.

“So, Anna,” I tried to sound cheerful but probably failed miserably. “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 the most harmless impression.

“No, vampire, I am not.” Her voice was cold, and I saw Greg’s face fall. Seems like we were good enough to hunt zombies with, but not good enough to take home to the coven. Greg falls in love with the weather girl, so I wasn’t surprised that he’d developed a monster crush on Anna in just 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 nice.

“Fair enough, witchy-poo. Where do you want your dead guy?” I asked, shooting her a dirty look. She at least 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. The circle wasn’t complete, there was about a three-foot opening in the side where I guess I was supposed to go in and drop the zombie. The circle was drawn on the concrete plaza in multi-colored 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. I guessed that once I had put the zombie in the right place, they planned to close the circle and complete the banishing ritual. 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. Your witches can put him in there. I don’t want to put his head where his feet should be, you know.” I took a couple of steps away from the circle and turned so that I could see most of the witches. I saw Greg out of the corner of my eye, and 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.