by John Ringo
It was. And I didn’t even get ptomaine poisoning. The owner, and the young lady’s dad, wouldn’t take a penny.
And she was very grateful. Very, very, very, wow, grateful.
I am such a schmuck.
* * *
The Goth club was a shambles.
While we had been out chasing an absurd number of new werewolves, the vampires had come out to play. According to the survivors who had made it out there had been at least two of them. One male was the leader and probably a higher form. One of the new vampires, female, was a regular at the unlicensed club. She was somewhat articulate and had talked their way in through the heavy security door.
To keep people from letting friends in without paying cover, the two other doors out of the basement were chained and barred. Classic example of the sort of club where a hundred people die in a fire. Some of the patrons had their throats ripped out. The rest made it out alive.
“This is going to be bad,” Ben said.
“Why?” Greg asked. “Besides it being nighttime.”
Jonathan was already in the hospital. Werewolf had shredded him up bad. Claws only, we hoped. So far the tests were negative for lycanthropy. Somebody had created a lot of new werewolves during the last month.
“Vampires almost never do anything this blatant,” Ben said. “They’re too good at surviving, so they pick off victims one at a time, people nobody will miss. Overt slaughter draws too much heat.”
“So we’ve got a stupid or crazy vampire?”
It was barely 2AM on the first night of the full moon. I understood, now, why Trevor was so insistent on everyone being in top form. I was beat up and I’d hardly had a single physical encounter.
“They won’t have gone far,” Ben said. “I’ll put out the word to NOPD. But we need to find them, fast, or find their lair in the daylight.”
MCB agents were already splashing gasoline on the club walls.
* * *
One of the survivors had a car phone and came running over as we were leaving the club.
She was about twenty at a guess, and I’d want ID this time, heavy-set, dressed in a corset, PVC skirt, fishnet and stilettos. She had about two hundred pounds of make-up on and was just about popping out of her corset. Also nearly incomprehensible.
“The crypt!” she screamed. “The crypt!”
“There’s about six million crypts in New Orleans, child,” Ben said, gently. “Which crypt?”
“The crypt, they’re at the crypt!” she kept screaming, her black goop mascara running down her face.
“Now, take a deep breath, miss,” I said, calmly, looking her in the eye. “Where is the crypt?”
“On Decatur Street,” she said, sniffling.
“There ain’t no cemeteries on Decatur Street,” Ben said.
“It’s a club,” she said as if we were morons. “I was calling around saying that Drusilla had turned to the dark side. She was my friend! And she turned!”
“That’s what happens with vampires. More information, less sobbing.”
“Lord Vordon called. They came to the Crypt but the Guardian would not let them pass.”
“Bouncer wouldn’t open the door,” I translated. I spoke semi-fluent Goth. “Lord Vordon’s probably the manager.”
“Where on Decatur?” Ben asked.
“By Governor Nichols. About half a block towards Ursulines. Across from Fiorella’s.”
“Go home! Lock the doors!” I shouted as I ran for Honeybear. “Don’t let a friend in unless they’ll drink holy water!”
I got in and peeled out, hoping I remembered where Ursulines was.
As I was heading in the general direction, weaving in and out of traffic, siren and lights going, I got a call. It was Trevor.
“Chad,” I said, swerving around a Nissan that looked like the driver was drunk.
“This is even worse than last month. Another loup garou in City Park. Vampires on Decatur. Choose.”
“Fangs,” I said.
“You’ll be on your own. Can you?”
“They’re as good as staked,” I said. “Question is, can I find it? And are they still there?”
The answer was, eventually, and no.
I banged on the door of the club with the butt of my Uzi. It was a good, old fashioned, metal security door with the good old-fashioned slide-bar vision slit. I decided I wanted one of those in my house if Madame Whatsername ever came up with one.
“Who dares disturb the Dark Portal?” the man inside boomed.
“Hoodoo Squad,” I said. “Open up or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll get two blocks of C4 and blow your house down.”
He opened the door.
“Are they still around? If not, do you know where they went?”
Lord Vordon was tall, pale and wearing a top-hat, tails and carrying a silver headed cane. He had implanted canines that nearly had me staking his ass but I’d run into that shit in Seattle. I was surprised to see it in New Orleans since everybody in this town knew damned well fangs were real.
“They did not pass the Dark Portal,” Lord Vordon intoned over the caterwauling of the horrible Dark Wave band that was playing. I like everything about the Goth movement except the music. The Cure needed one. “We were warned that Princess Drusilla had entered the eternal night.”
We didn’t let them in. We got told Drusilla was a fang. Okay, and the weird pretensions. Just speak English for fuck’s sake!
“I need you to call all the clubs she might go to and warn them,” I said, passing him my card. “Give them this number. The moment she shows at one of them, have them call me.”
One of the bouncers, a tall dude, with a shaved head, and bunch of piercings, wearing fatigue pants, jump boots and an overstrained T-shirt, grabbed him by the arm and shouted in his ear.
“They have appeared at The Ossuary!” Vordon boomed, holding his hand to the sky. “The Dark Night has come to the Ossuary!”
“Where is The Ossuary?” I asked.
“731 Miro Street,” the bouncer shouted.
I had no idea where Miro was and no time to read a map.
“You,” I said, grabbing him by the shirt. “You’re coming with me!”
* * *
“So…” the bouncer said as we were flying down Esplanade. His name was Dave King. He went by Decay. “You get paid for this?”
“Shit, yeah. Tons. And no time to spend it.”
“Nice Uzi,” Decay said. “I’ve never seen one like that before. Is that a full auto .45?”
“Custom design of mine,” I said, passing it over. “On safe.”
“Yeah. Sweet. How’s the handling?”
“Great,” I said, taking it back and clipping it on one handed. I nearly side-swiped a Chevy then nearly got T-boned in a red intersection again. Fucking minivans. They were the hot new thing. Bane of my existence. I’m probably going to die at the hands of some suburban housewife bringing her kids home from dance class. Damn you, Lee Iacocca.
“Get ready to take a left,” Decay said. “I hear they shred .45 ammo.”
“There’s a fix for that,” I said as he pointed to the turn.
“Up here on the right,” Dave said.
“You in or out?” I asked. “You’re in, you get part of the bounty. You’re out, stay out.”
“I’m in. I heard about Orpheum. Guy on the door was my friend.”
If he lived, I was going to point him in the direction of MHI. He’d fit right in.
I parked in the street and left the lights going. There was traffic. They could just go around.
I opened the trunk, rummaged, and came out with a shotgun for Dave.
“Think this explains itself?” I asked, handing him a bandolier of shells and stakes.
“Yep,” he said, breaking the action. “You carry them loaded?”
“Always,” I said. I handed him a Boy Scout canteen on a strap. “Holy water.”
“That works?” he asked.
“That works. Just burns but
it distracts them. Oh, wait.”
I rummaged some more and came up with the dog collar.
“Best I can do for armor,” I said, handing it to him.
It barely fit around his gorilla neck.
“That’s your main and easiest to access artery. They like to climb. Keep an eye up. Stakes through the heart paralyze them. I’ll take the heads,” I added, tapping Mo No Ken.
“Works,” Dave said. The guy had balls.
The entrance was around the corner.
So were the vampires.
Princess Drusilla, AKA Amanda Worthly, 17, lived in a nice house on Charles Street. She had attended private schools where the primary teaching was in French. Her father was a Managing Partner of Lornton, Crouse, and Barrande. Her mother and father were divorced. Her mother had taken off to India to “find herself.” Amanda was trying through the Goth movement. Her father, a workaholic, gave her a generous allowance and essentially no management.
Princess Drusilla was well known in the New Orleans Goth movement. She always had money, always had access, and thus always had friends. At a club she had met the absolutely fascinating Lord Mornington, AKA Tedd Roberts originally of Durham, North Carolina, vampire.
Princess Drusilla, starting to recover her wits after slaking her raging thirst on a half dozen of her closest friends, was not someone to be denied entrance to one of her favorite clubs.
“You will let me in or I will rip this door off, Thomas!” she shrieked. She was wearing a silk LBD that barely covered her assets, fishnet and stilettos. Her fangs were out and she was hungry again. “I shall not be denied! Je vais boire votre âme!”
There were two of them. “Cover up and six,” I said, looking over my shoulder. Mo No Ken slid from its sheath with a nearly silent hiss.
“Got it,” Dave said, a touch nervous. Good.
“Hunters!”
The other vampire had been a rotund man in his fifties with a heavy beard and dark brown hair. He was wearing an incongruous opera cape and top hat.
That’s what she found attractive? Some girls just have daddy issues.
“Your silver shall not avail you!” he screamed and leapt, arms wide, fangs out.
Ben Carter had been right. Our senior vampire didn’t have a very good survival instinct.
“How ’bout two hundred year old Japanese folded steel?” I asked as “Lord Mornington’s” head hit Dave in the arm.
“Incoming!” Dave said.
Now the newly turned Drusilla on the other hand, was a beast.
It was on like Donkey Kong.
Three minutes later I was wiping down Mo No Ken with holy oil. Drusilla had been shot, staked, and was missing her head. Dave and I were both out of breath and covered in blood. She had bit him on the arm, but hadn’t hit the artery.
I wrapped his arm up tight and patted him on the shoulder. The coroner was on the way.
“You just made about ten grand,” I said. “Bad side is, when you die you’ll rise as one of them unless your head gets cut off first.”
“I can live with that,” Dave said. “Ten grand?”
“Might be more,” I said. “Part of it is based on kills and there are quite a few bodies in the wake of this group. Ten grand minimum.”
“You guys hiring?”
I miss Decay. Good man.
I dropped Decay off at an all night doc-in-the-box, all he really needed, gave them a couple hundred for the stitches and headed back out. The zombies were rising in Greenwood and we’d just lost Greg Wise.
CHAPTER 9
Moondance
Anyone who has driven into New Orleans on I-10 and is not blind has noticed that at one point it is flanked by massive, above-ground, cemeteries. If you’re headed into town, Greenwood is the one on the left and Metairie is the one on the right.
Metairie is newer and fancier. The mausoleums there run to two stories and are real works of art. It is carefully maintained.
Greenwood is older. It is about one third mausoleums and two thirds sarcophagi, packed freaking cheek to jowl. It is not as well maintained but still a very nice place. Lots of history.
Both are absolutely enormous, complex, and one hell of a place to be in the middle of the night, more or less on your own, hunting undead. They are creepy as hell without zombies moaning in the moonlight.
There is a low, iron, fence around Greenwood. That was holding back some shamblers as I pulled up next to the NOPD car.
“Your guy went in,” the cop shouted through his window. “About thirty minutes ago. Haven’t heard from him since.”
I never want to be a team leader but if I ever run a team its motto is going to be: Habes intrare exire non habetis. You have to go in, you don’t have to come out.
“Greg,” I said, touching my radio as I parked. “You there, Greg?”
No response.
Zombies can be a pain, but the kind someone raises out of a cemetery were slow and dumb. Greg had not been doing this for very long, but I had been told he knew his business. I didn’t see Greg getting taken down by a bunch of shamblers. Not in a place like this. Which meant there was probably something else in there.
“Greg, if you can hear me just hunker down.”
“Your friend is one with us,” a voice said on the radio. The accent wasn’t local. Islands in general. Maybe Haitian. “He has joined the darkness.”
“I don’t know who you are, partner,” I radioed. “But you are about to get a .45 caliber enema.”
The man laughed, a booming psychotic laugh.
Jeeze, one of those, I thought. Another freaking necromancer thinks he’s king of the world. Just my luck.
“You are weak and fragile compared to my children!” Cheeeeel-dren! “You shall become one with the darkness.”
My first inclination was to go in there and kick his ass. There was one problem. Greg and Trevor had been right. I’d been going through .45 like water. Ten loaded mags were not enough. I had to top off before I could go in.
I opened up the trunk and collected all my mags then started reloading. While I did that, more shamblers collected.
“Hey!” the cop boomed over his PA. “You going to do anything about this?”
The fence was only about waist height but had spikes on top. They were stuck on the spikes. It turned out that being familiar with the hoodoo, when they built cemeteries in this town it was usually with the idea of keeping the residents inside.
I used semi-auto to carefully tap every shambler in the head, starting with the ones who weren’t stuck then moving to the ones who were. From time to time I paused and did a 360. Still nothing major. I could hear more moaning in the graveyard. They were trying to come to the lights.
I went back to Honeybear, got out another can of Bud, took a sip and topped off the mag I’d just used. I decided I might need my night vision goggles, and grabbed that heavy pouch too. As shamblers would find us I’d walk over and tap them. It was getting silly. I finished off the shamblers at the fence then went to find the gate. There are several gates to the massive cemetery. The one I was using was at the corner of Canal Boulevard and Rosedale Drive. Canal Boulevard was not to be confused with Canal Avenue, Canal Street, Canal Court or Canal Way, by the way.
It was locked. So I walked back to the police car.
“You wouldn’t happen to have the key to the dread…the gate, would you?”
“Your buddy took it with him,” he yelled through the glass.
So much for the easy way. I called it in to Trevor, then climbed over the fence, trying not to catch my balls on the iron spikes.
The drive there had trees on the right side and mausoleums and sarcophagi on the left. Beyond the trees was an open field then the main buildings. Beyond the mausoleums and sarcophagi were more mausoleums and sarcophagi stretching beyond what I could see in the moonlight.
I had no idea where this necromancer shit-hole was hiding but he’d raised a fair passel of zombies. Every so often some moaning shambler would come stumbling
out of the darkness. I was less worried about the ones on the tomb side than the tree side. There were bushes under the trees and they blocked my view.
I stayed to the middle of the road and used semi-auto. Clean-up was going to be a bitch on this one.
There were some shambler bodies already down. I followed Greg’s path, keeping a careful eye out for what might have gotten him.
Then a shambler came out of the darkness and it was Greg. Shit. His throat had been torn out and one arm was missing. The wounds on his body were massive. That wasn’t shambler damage. There was something far worse in here.
I gave him requiescant in pace, reloaded and kept moving.
I came to a set of tombs that were stair-steps. There was a sarcophagi, a one story tomb and a two story tomb. I bounded up and up and up.
I turned off my lights, pulled out my NVGs and looked around.
The goggles were huge, awkward, heavy, and had cost a fortune, but the cemetery was an eerie green under night vision, and it was amazing how much I could see.
There were shamblers moving between the tombs but nothing fast or that looked particularly powerful. A shambler horde could have done the damage. They can rip your arm off. He’d have to have gotten swarmed for that to happen. That’s the first lesson of shamblers, don’t let yourself get swarmed. And these were having a hard time even getting together in and among the complex lay-out of the cemetery.
I saw where the body trail turned left and headed deeper into the cemetery.
Moving on the ground was a danger. My vision was limited and it something could come out from between the tombs in a flash and I’d be toast.
But the majority of the cemetery was one story marble tombs mixed with occasional nearly flat or waist height sarcophagi. The two story tomb I was on was a rarity. In fact, most of the tombs in the direction the body trail headed were one story with very few sarcophagi. Most had flat roofs. A few were angled or curved but even those had narrow ledges on the side. That gave me an idea.
The first time I encountered zombies I was still recovering from being in the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut. It was at a tent revival (long story, look at the other memoir) and there were cars scattered outside. I used the cars, often hopping from car to car, to mess with the shamblers.
