Movie Knight
By John G. Hartness
A Black Knight Short Story
The events in this story take place after Back in Black and before Knight Moves.
“Don’t answer that.” Sabrina warned as I reached for my phone. She was on the couch beside me with the TV remote in her hand, popcorn in her lap, and a beer on the table beside her. I had a straw in a nicely chilled bottle of B-Negative and a beer chaser. And a ringing phone.
“I’d listen to her, bro.” My partner, Greg Knightwood warned from his armchair. He had his own beer and blood combo pack set up, and his bare feet were crossed on a tattered ottoman that had survived years of moving since we’d graduated college. I shuddered every time I saw anybody’s bare skin touch that thing, even though Greg was long past catching any diseases. We were all three settled in for a long overdue movie marathon, and after the events of the past few weeks, we deserved it. A trip to FairyLand and back, a cage mage against trolls and evil fairies, and playing matchmaker for a dragon definitely had taken its toll on the three of us. So we were all looking forward to a nice night of mindless entertainment, and then my phone rang. I could see why they were shooting me daggers just for thinking of answering the call, but I’ve never been the brains of the operation.
I ignored them both and picked up the phone. Bobby Reed’s face looked up at me from the screen, frozen in the goofy look he was sporting when I took the picture. I swiped my finger across the screen to answer and said “Sharky’s Pool Hall. CueBall speaking. You rack ‘em, we smack ‘em.”
“Jimmy?” Bobby’s voice sounded weird, thready and high.
“Yeah, Bobby, what’s up? We’re stocked pretty well right now, but if you had anything exotic come in I can come see you tomorrow.” Bobby was a coroner’s assistant for Mecklenburg County, and was also one of my best connections for fresh blood. Having Bobby on speed dial kept the people of Charlotte from a lot of odd cases of iron deficiency and listlessness that vampire victims are known to experience.
“I think I need you down here. I need your help, Jimmy.” Bobby sounded scared. And not “my boss found out I’ve been selling blood to vampires on the side and now I’m fired” scared. More like “there’s a tiger in the morgue and it wants to eat my liver” scared.
“What’s up, man? Did that parakeet’s owners finally find you?” I teased. Bobby’s promising career as a pet undertaker had been cut short following an embarrassing event at a party involving a parakeet, a mountain goat and five cans of whipped cream.
“That ain’t funny, man. Just get down here. There’s something bad going on, and I don’t think the normal cops can help. I gotta go, I gotta hide. When you get here, I’ll be in the top right drawer. I don’t get reception in there, but knock before you open the door. I’m taking my shotgun in with me.” Bobby hung up and I stared at the phone trying to process his last words.
“What’s up?” Sabrina said from the couch. She looked so relaxed, sitting there waiting to watch a science fiction movie with her “favorite dead dork detectives.” She had her shoes off and sock feet propped up on the coffee table. Sabrina was casual today, which meant jeans and a plain red t-shirt, with a dress shirt unbutton over the tee to cover her sidearm. It was a pretty big departure from the tailored look she usually sported as a detective in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, but she wore it well. Damn well, as a matter of fact, and I’d been looking very forward to sitting beside her on the couch and idly playing with her long curly brown hair for a couple of hours.
“Gear up,” I said in my best impression of Mark Harmon from NCIS, which wasn’t very good. “Bobby’s down in the morgue and scared out of his mind about something.”
“Did he tell you what had him so scared?” Greg asked as he levered his bulk out of the easy chair. He waddled to his room for some boots and probably some truly unfortunate spandex.
“No, just that he was going to be hiding in one of the drawers with a shotgun, so we should be careful when we got there.” I went to the closet and grabbed my Glock and a shoulder holster. A Ruger LCP in a paddle holster got velcro’d around my right ankle, and I pulled out my long leather duster. I know, it’s a stereotype that all vampires wear long black cloaky things, but sometimes you need to conceal a weapon or two. I closed the closet door, thought about it for a second, then went back in to grab my sword.
The sword had been a gift from a fairy princess a few months ago, before she got mad at me and threw me out of her kingdom forever. Yeah, really. That crap happens to me. It’s a gift. I wasn’t sure what had Bobby so worked up, but if he was calling me, then bullets might not be enough. That gave me another thought, and I looked back to Sabrina. “You should grab your armor out of the bottom drawer in my room.”
“My armor?” She said, a little confused.
“The chain mail Milandra sent back with you when we got home from FairyLand? It’ll be better against claws or fangs than Kevlar.” She looked at me, evaluated the gear I was sporting, and went to my room without an argument. I made a mental note of the date and time, hoping I could write that down for posterity later.
Less than ten minutes after Bobby’s call, we were out the door and into the night. I checked the time and saw that we still had plenty of time before daylight to deal with whatever catastrophe we were running headlong into, and slid into Sabrina’s passenger seat. Using her flashers we were at Presbyterian Hospital less than fifteen minutes later, and pulled around to the small morgue entrance. The morgue was a mess, several gurneys had been overturned their occupants scattered around the room in various stages of dismemberment. Greg stopped to investigate as I went for Bobby’s hideout. I kicked a stray foot out of my way as I walked over to the wall of stainless steel drawers and banged on the top right drawer.
“Bobby, it’s me, Jimmy. Don’t shoot me. I’m opening the door.” I opened the door and pulled out the sliding tray. Bobby was curled up as tight as he could manage, with a sawed-off shotgun cradled in his arms. The big man was trembling, and I didn’t think it was just from the cold.
“Is it gone?” He asked, head whipping around furtively at the scattered corpses.
“There’s nothing here but us.” Greg confirmed from across the room. “I checked all the corpses, and they all look like they were chewed on.”
“That’s what that noise was! I heard some gross crunching sounds, but no way was I gonna open up until you got here.” Bobby said.
“What happened, man? All I’ve got is some gnawed dead people and a freaked out phone call to go on.” I pulled Bobby’s desk chair over and helped him into it, surreptitiously wiping a clump of something nasty out of the seat onto the floor. Bobby stared at the chair as he heard the glob splat onto the tile, but set aside any fears for the safety of his khakis and sat down anyway.
“I don’t really know. All I know is we got this guy in here sometime today, before I came on shift. He was decapitated and left in an alley, looked like a homicide. So I put him on the table and started the autopsy, but there was something weird going on in his chest.” Bobby’s head was on a swivel the whole time he was telling us the story, like he expected something to jump out at him from a corner at any moment. “So I opened him up, and there was something weird in there.”
“You said that already.” I prompted.
“Yeah, sorry. It’s like there was something in there. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there.”
“Like what?” I asked. “Like a bullet? Like a spatula? Can you be a little more specific?”
“I don’t know what it was, but it was alive. It was about the size of a big chihuahua, only with scales and no hair. And it had a bunch of teeth, and claws, and
it jumped out of that dude’s chest at me.” Bobby kept looking around until I reached over and grabbed his chin.
“Focus, Bobby. You’re saying that there was a scaly chihuahua inside the dead dude’s chest that jumped out at you? And it had a bunch of teeth and claws? And then you did what, exactly? Get him Taco Bell?” I tried to get him back on track while sniffing around to see if there was any hint of whiskey or something stronger on him. I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary, but there were so many antiseptic smells in the morgue it was hard for me to figure out what funky smells belonged there and which ones were out of place.
“That ain’t funny. I screamed, and knocked it off me. Then I kicked it over into the corner over there and called you. Then I hid in my drawer. You gonna go find it?” He looked up at me hopefully, and I felt a little bit of what Sabrina must go through all the time at work.
“Yeah, we’re gonna go find it.” I said, with no idea how to go about that, or what we were looking for. “Bobby, you get back in your drawer and hide again. Can you get out later if you need to?”
“Yeah, I rigged that drawer for naps. It’s got a latch on the inside, too.”
“You’re gross. Sabrina, go up to the front desk, flash your badge and put this place on lockdown. Tell them there’s a prisoner loose in the hospital and nobody goes in or out until we’ve got him located.”
She nodded back at me, then paused. “What about emergencies?”
“Have them reroute anything that comes in to Carolinas Medical Center. It’s a Tuesday, and not a full moon, so it shouldn’t be too bad tonight. Besides, CMC is less than a mile away, so it should be fine. Greg, call The Oracle while I try to sniff out anything from this corner.” I headed over to where Bobby had kicked the critter, and saw a slimy mark on the wall about four feet off the floor. I could hear Greg in the background talking to Anna, a witch friend of a friend who has helped us out once or twice. She kinda hated my guts, so I avoided her every chance I got. For some reason she didn’t mind Greg as much, so I let him deal with her. I started calling her The Oracle after a character in a comic book. Something told me she knew about the nickname, and it was just one more reason she didn’t like me. But it was better than calling her Giles.
The slime splattered on the wall had a pale blue tint to it, a welcome change from the stereotypical green and yellow slime. I leaned in and took a whiff, almost falling back on my butt as I got a noseful of sulfur. Whatever this thing was, it definitely wasn’t from around here, and almost certainly had bad intentions. I didn’t have a lot of experience with things that smell like brimstone, but none of the ones I’d met so far were very nice. As a matter of fact, they all kinda wanted to kill me. I kept my head down as I walked to the door, trying to follow the scent of the thing, but I lost it once I got to the hallway. The other hospital scents were just too strong for me to track through. I went back to where Greg was typing furiously on Bobby’s desktop and muttering unpleasant things about Windows Vista and outdated operating systems.
“What have you got?” I asked, before Greg looked up at me in alarm and made a “be quiet” gesture.
“Is that the moron?” Asked Anna’s voice from the cell phone on the desk. I hadn’t realized he still had her on speakerphone, and now she knew I was there. Great.
“Hi, Anna. How are you this evening?” I always tried to start off polite, just so I could maintain my innocence when we started fighting.
“I was doing quite well until I heard your voice, James.” I love the fact that people who don’t like me always call me by my proper name. It’s an easy barometer, really. Anyone who calls me James, or worse, Mr. Black, either wants money or to kill me. Anna definitely fell into the latter camp.
“Sorry to hear that, Anna. Thanks for helping us out with this.” Still trying to be polite. After all, she was the one with the information. And she could probably cast a fireball into my underpants from wherever she was.
“Happy to help Greg out whenever I can. After all, almost any friend of Father Mike’s is a friend of mine.” Mike is our oldest living friend, and one of the few humans who knows all our secrets. But we grew up together, so it’s hard to keep secrets from the guy you used to sneak into R-rated movies with. I decided my best move was to shut up and let Greg deal with the witch, so I just pulled a stool over and sat behind him at the computer.
“Alright, Anna.” Greg said after a few more seconds of typing. “I’m there. What am I looking for?”
“Click on the link that says ‘Contact Us’ and type in ‘wicca witch of the west’ all lowercase, one word in the email field.” Greg did as she directed, and the innocuous homepage for an online incense store disappeared, morphing into some type of database. I had no idea what I was looking at, but Greg typed a couple of words into a search box, and suddenly an image of scaly creature with a huge snout full of teeth and six legs tipped with four claws each appeared on the screen.
“Bobby, come over here and look at this.” I yelled toward the wall of drawers.
“Hell no!’ He yelled back at me. “I ain’t moving ’til you promise me that critter is dead!”
“Just open the door and look at the screen, you chicken. There’s nobody here but us.” I replied. He opened the door and slowly stuck his head out. He Greg turned the monitor around, and Bobby yelped, then slid his tray back and slammed the door.
“That’s it!” Came his muffled answer, but we’d guessed that already.
“Alright, Anna, that’s the guy. It seems to be a Koontz demon.” Greg said.
I couldn’t resist. “They’re naming demons after horror writers now? I wonder what the Kilborn Devourer will look like?’
“It’s spelled K-U-N-Z, moron.” Anna’s voice dripped disdain all over the phone. Seriously, I could almost see the disdain. Greg was going to need a mop if much more dripped out. “The Kunz demon is a nasty little bugger, fast and vicious. It feeds on virgin blood, and lays eggs inside its victims corpses. If there are enough potential hosts in a given area, the Kunz demon can reproduce up to fifty times in a twenty-four hour period. The good news is that they only live for a couple of weeks. The bad news is that their gestation period is only about an hour.”
“So we’ve got a virgin-eating demon that breeds like a bunny rabbit running loose inside a hospital. Is that what you’re telling me?” I asked.
“Yes, and if you’re not quick enough, this thing can create an army in less than one night.” Came Anna’s voice, strangely devoid of disdain for once.
“How do we kill it?” Greg asked.
“The usual ways. Blessed instruments, holy water, exorcism from this plane of existence, that kind of thing. It’s immune to fire, and its scales are exceptionally tough. I don’t know how much good your guns will do you this time, guys.” More good news from the witchy woman. No wonder I didn’t like her.
“Alright, since we’re fresh out of blessed instruments, I guess we’d better head to the chapel and see about getting us some holy water. And maybe find a priest to bless our bullets or something. Thanks, Anna.” I said, reaching down to hang up the phone.
Her last words stopped me just before I touched the button. “Be careful, boys. This thing is bad, bad news. I’ll call my coven together and we’ll set a circle around the hospital, so nothing will get out. But we don’t have anything that can actually kill a Kunz demon.” I’d seen Anna and her girls send more than a dozen zombie spirits back to the Great Beyond, so if she said they couldn’t kill this thing it was looking like a very long night. I pushed the button to disconnect the call, and looked at Greg.
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” He said quietly.
“Or at least more blood.” I agreed. I went over to the drawers where Bobby was hiding and banged on his door. “Bobby, I’m taking some blood from your stash. Put it on my bill.”
“This refill’s on me, dude. Just go kill that thing.” I took a couple of pints from a cooler Bobby kept in the top left-hand drawer, and tossed three more t
o Greg. Bobby kept the blood up high because his boss was a little guy with a Napoleon complex and four-inch lifts in his shoes who couldn’t reach the handles, so he forbade his employees to use the top drawers. The blood was cold, but the date on the bags was just a couple days ago, so it was still pretty fresh. I shook the bag to make sure the anticoagulants hadn’t separated, and bit into the bag.
Stored blood doesn’t have any of the flavor or thrill of contact that comes from drinking straight from the source, but it does provide all the nutrition we need to survive. I liken it to living off of energy bars - you get everything you have to have, but there’s nothing enjoyable about the dining experience. The human body contains 10 pints of blood, and we need to consume that much about every three days to stay sane and not eat the first person that comes around. I try to have four pints a day to keep myself topped off, but Bobby’s call had interrupted dinner, so we were both pretty hungry. Greg takes more blood than I do, because he’s a lot bigger. I try not to make a thing of it, because he’s been sensitive about his weight since we were little kids. And alive. So we filled up the tank with plenty of nutrition, if no real flavor, and set out to find Sabrina.
She was coming down the hall to meet us, gun drawn. “I’ve got the hospital on lockdown, but without some proof that there’s actually a prisoner here, or word from my boss, they’re only going to give me about an hour. So we need to hurry.”
“We need to do that anyway, if we don’t want dozens of these little beasties running around the hospital.” I filled her in on what we’d learned from Anna, and we headed to the elevator. The chapel was our first stop, and it was right off of the lobby. We got there and saw the door closed, something I’d never seen before. I didn’t even know hospital chapels had doors.
I knocked, and a voice from the other side said “Get thee behind me, Satan! I shall not open the door for thou vile hellspawn!” Apparently my reputation had preceded me.
I looked over at Sabrina, who shrugged, but put her face to the door and yelled. “This is Detective Sabrina Law of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. This is a police emergency, please open the door!”
Black Knight 02.5 - Movie Knight Page 1
