“I suppose that sends me to the Archbishop’s office to coordinate with our people there. I don’t know who the Hunter is for this part of the country, but I know it is customary to stop in for a visit whenever we’re passing through.”
“And what will you be doing, Ms. Master of the City?” I asked Catherine.
“Oh, the usual,” she replied with a breezy tone. “Drinking the blood of tourists, overseeing my vast criminal enterprises, and trying to make sure that this goddamned interloper doesn’t destroy the fragile peace I’ve built between the supernatural entities in this city before the sun comes up.” Her eyes flashed and I was suddenly a lot more willing to accept her as the head vampire for all of New Orleans and the surrounding areas.
Chapter 4
“I hate cemeteries,” I muttered as Amy slid between the gates of St. Roch Cemetery #1. The rusted chain holding the gate closed left plenty of room for her slender form to fit between the bars, but there was no way the Bubba belly was getting through that tiny space. It was well after midnight, and the nearest streetlight was half a block away, so we were in pitch black, with just a couple of red-lensed flashlights to help us find our footing, or any bad guys.
“How can you hate cemeteries? Half of your working life is spent in cemeteries,” Amy whispered, looking at me through the nine-foot gate leading into one of New Orleans’ oldest cemeteries.
“Yeah, well, I’d rather be fishing,” I replied, trying to no avail to jam myself through the gate. “That ain’t happening. Got any other bright ideas?” I tried to keep my voice down and the gate noise to a minimum, but I’ve never been accused of excess subtlety.
“Sure, what about this?” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small key ring.
“What’s that?”
“Master keys for every U.S. manufacturer of padlocks.” She spun the ring around, selected a key, and seconds later we were both inside.
“Why didn’t you do that in the first place?”
“Sometimes, Bubba, it’s worth it just to hear you gripe.” She shot me a grin bright enough to see in a deserted cemetery in the middle of the night, and I gave her a quick kiss before getting down to business.
“Now what is it about St. Roch #1 that makes you think we’ll find something here?” I asked.
“Honestly, it was just the closest of the old cemeteries to the latest attack. I figured if we’re going to spend all night roaming through the halls of the dead, we might as well start with the nearest one.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s almost poetical. Halls of the dead. That’s a lot prettier-sounding than graveyards or zombie farms.”
Amy stopped walking and held up her hand. I froze, then looked down at her. She pointed at her eyes, then off ahead at her two o’clock. I followed were she pointed and saw a faint green glow in that direction. We stepped between the tombstones single-file, heel-toe in a slow crossover walk that kept sound to a minimum and left my right hand free to draw Bertha from my shoulder holster. I couldn’t see what we were walking into, but usually if it was glowing in a graveyard in the middle of the night, it was bad enough that I was gonna be glad we went back to the hotel and got our medium-sized guns before we went out hunting.
Yeah, a Desert Eagle is my medium-sized gun. I know, I’ve got issues. Amy tells me that shit all the time, too.
I stepped left and waved Amy to the right as we broke forward into the same line of headstones as the light. I stretched my thumb forward and flipped the red lens cap off my flashlight, directing the xenon beam on whatever nasty thing was glowing in front of me.
Like a glow stick. A green glow stick laying on the ground in front of a skinny twenty-something kid who just about jumped out of his skin when me and Amy suddenly appeared out of the darkness with flashlights in his face and pistols pointed at his head.
“Whatthehell!” he screeched as he half-jumped up, then ducked back down, then turned to Amy, then spun back to me, then decided to just curl up in a little ball. “Please don’t shoot me! I’ve only got like forty bucks, but you can have it if you just don’t kill me!”
I looked at Amy, who stared at me with what I figured was probably a mirror to my dumbass expression, then I holstered Bertha and reached down to pat the kid on his trembling shoulder. “We ain’t gonna kill you, kid. I promise. Just…stop with the yelling for a second.”
He stopped hollering about getting killed, and Amy put her gun away. She kept her best federal agent voice, though, when she asked the kid, “Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?”
“My name is Jacob Wylie. I’m doing research for a school project.”
“In the middle of the night?” Amy asked.
“I work until midnight at the casino to help pay for school. This is the only time I can come out to the cemetery and get my research done.”
“What kind of research?”
“I’m doing grave rubbings,” he said. I motioned for him to go on because I didn’t have any damn idea what he was talking about. “It’s a way to get information off of headstones when the writing has faded. I take a sheet of butcher paper and I tape it to the headstone. Then I rub the paper with charcoal to highlight the carving on the stone. When I take the paper down, the parts that are white are the parts where there was carving, and I can read it a lot easier than by the naked eye. I’m researching my family tree. They came to New Orleans back in the early nineteenth century, but a lot of our family records were lost. What wasn’t lost was destroyed by Katrina, so I’m trying to rebuild my history back to the first ancestors that came here.”
“Kid, it’s not that I necessarily believe you, it’s just that I think that story is too damned boring to be made up! I mean, damn, who in the world would come up with all that to justify being in a graveyard after dark?” I said.
“But if y’all ain’t here to kill me, what are you doing in a graveyard in the middle of the night?” the kid asked.
“Hunting vampires,” I said, and waited for the laugh, or whatever was coming. The last reaction I expected was the one I got: indifference.
“Oh, okay.”
“You say that like it’s something people do all the time,” Amy said.
“Ma’am, I don’t mean to sound rude, but we’re in New Orleans. Hunting vampires down here is no stranger than hunting gators. I mean, Anne Rice does live here, you know. And a fair number of her fans have moved here, too. And they all gotta make a living. Vampire tours are second only to voodoo tours in New Orleans. Now, if you’re really not gonna kill me, I’ve only got a couple hours left before I have to go get some sleep, so I need to get back to work. And y’all only have about four hours of night left, so if you’re chasing vampires, you’d best get on it.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Good luck, kid.”
“Y’all too,” he replied. “Try not to get dead.”
“Always the goal,” I said. Amy and I slipped the red lens covers back onto our flashlights and moved off toward the center of the graveyard. I figured any chance we had to sneak up on anything went out the window with all the yelling, but we might as well check out the rest of the cemetery before we moved on to the next one on the list.
And I was right. We saw nothing else out of the ordinary in St. Roch #1, or St. Roch #2, or St. Louis Cemetery #1. It was less than two hours before dawn when Amy opened the gate of Lafayette Cemetery #1 and we stepped foot into our last graveyard of the night.
“Something’s different,” I said, drawing Bertha and checking that I had silver ammunition in the gun and cold iron in my spare magazine.
“I feel it, too,” Amy said. “Can you hear or see anything?”
“Nothing, but this place just feels wrong. Let’s see what we can find.” I started down a main aisle of the cemetery, the ubiquitous above-ground tombs pressing in on me from all sides. The light from my flashlight penetrated just a few feet in front of me, and the dark was almost palpable. I felt Amy’s hand on the small of my back, using touch to guide her whe
n her sight failed.
We’d wandered through the cramped graveyard for a good fifteen minutes before I stopped in mid-stride. Amy froze behind me, then dropped as I went down to one knee.
“You hear that?” I turned back to Amy and whispered.
“Barely,” she replied. I listened harder, trying to pick words out of the air. It was a faint chanting, like at a great distance, but it was there underneath the car noise, the far-off party sounds of the Quarter and the chirp of cicadas in the weeds. I crept forward, trying to pinpoint a direction, and the chanting got louder. I turned left, deeper into the cemetery and toward the noise. I could discern voices now and pick out the occasional word.
“Sounds like some kind of ritual,” I said, creeping forward.
We broke into a clearing, and it was indeed a ritual, but not one I’d ever wanted to see. Half a dozen people stood around an empty grave, with an open casket resting on a pile of dirt next to the very recently created hole from which the casket had emerged. Lying on the ground at the feet of what I assumed to be the high priest was the most recent occupant of the casket.
The high priest was a powerfully muscled black man, over six feet tall and a good two-twenty if he was an ounce. He stood over the body and chanted, wearing nothing but a necklace of bones and feathers.
Amy let out a low whistle, and I waved her to silence, but it was too late. Every eye in the voodoo circle turned to face us.
“Oops,” she said. Then, recovering from the shock of finding a naked man making a zombie in the middle of the night, she stepped forward. “Hi there,” she said. “I’m Agent Amy Hall with DEMON, the Department of Extra-Dimensional, Magical and Occult Nuisances. This is my partner, Bubba, and we’re looking for a rogue vampire. Anybody seen him?”
Chapter 5
Have you ever noticed how grumpy people get when you interrupt their black magic zombie-making rituals to ask an innocent and completely unrelated question? Maybe this just isn’t something that happens to normal people, but I have found that at no time in my life have I stumbled across a man butt-naked in a cemetery in the middle of the night that had much of a sense of humor intact. Well, there was that one time with a high school football coach in Newberry, South Carolina, but that had a lot to do with a bachelor party.
Well, this situation was not a bit different from all those other times I’d stumbled across naked men with bodies chiseled out of obsidian raising the dead in a graveyard late at night. You know, I think this was the first time I’d ever run into a good-looking man performing necromancy naked in the wee hours of the morning. Usually necromancy was kinda like community theatre—the people willing to get naked at the drop of a hat are not the people you want to see naked in the first place. I had run across my fair share of knobby-kneed basement-dwellers trying to bring Aunt Sadie back from the dead, but this dude looked like he could handle himself in a fight. And he probably could handle me in a fair fight, too.
With unpleasant memories of naked Sasquatch grappling running through my head, I drew Bertha and pointed it at the High Priest’s most valued member of his congregation. “I don’t want to fight, but if I have to start shooting, you can see where my first target is.”
The priest nodded and waved his fellow zombie-makers back. “What can we do for you this evening?” He looked at me with steady eyes, and I made it a point to look him right in the eyes as well. For one thing, I didn’t need any more insecurity in my life.
“We’re chasing a vampire. A bad one, not one of Catherine’s crew.” At the mention of the Queen Vamp of New Orleans, the priest spat in the dirt. “You’re not a fan?” I asked.
“I am the High Priest Edgar of the Holy Church of the Afterlife. I am a man of God, and I do not answer to some undead bitch with fangs and fetish wear.” A chorus of amens met his declaration, and I gave my first look to Edgar’s half dozen followers. They were a cross-section of mid-thirties and forties New Orleans citizenry, two white, three black, and one Asian dude. Four men, all in relatively good shape, one skinny woman and a white woman in her thirties who looked like she approached every buffet table the same way I do: like a challenge to be conquered. Their clothing was varied in style and budget, from work boots and jeans to a designer dress. They were apparently only brought together by their desire to see this dead dude come back to life.
“So, what’s going on here?” I asked. “Y’all making a zombie, or having a séance, or did I stumble on something really freaky?”
“This man, James Artile, was a member of our flock who was killed in an automobile crash several days ago. It was his greatest desire to serve as a member of our congregation even in death, so we are calling upon the spirits to return him to us.”
“Yeah, because nothing ever goes wrong with that idea,” Amy muttered beside me, then spoke up. “Look, I’m going to ask very nicely, once, that you return the nice dead man to his casket and then put him back in the vault and fill in the hole. While you do that, we’re going to look around for a vampire. How does that sound?”
I never heard how that sounded, because right about then was when the zombies attacked. Not Edgar’s zombie, who he hadn’t ever actually turned into a zombie, but a pack of half a dozen zombies, all armed and way more nimble than I was used to out of dead dudes. They came at us silently, a fringe benefit of not having to breathe, and wielding machetes and metal pipes. Two of Edgar’s followers hit the dirt in the first few seconds, one bleeding out from a neck wound and the other unconscious from a shot to the head with a pipe. The other four worshippers ran off into the night, the whole raising of the dead thing now a lot more immediate and painful than it had been mere moments before.
With the innocent bystanders out of the way, I drew Bertha again and dropped a pair of zombies in quick succession. Amy put three in the face of two more walking dead, then we turned to see Edgar hand to hand with one of the remaining zombies. The last zombie raised its arm to cave in Edgar’s skull, and I shot it in the back of the head with Bertha. Brains splattered all over the big man, who shot me a grateful grin. Then he dropped his arms, taking the last zombie off-balance, and twisted its head until we hard a sharp crack.
“I’m guessing those weren’t yours?” I asked Edgar.
“No, not at all. They were not members of my flock, and I recognized none of these men.” That’s when I realized that all our assailants were men.
“What does that mean?” I asked Edgar.
“It could mean nothing,” he admitted. “There are many practitioners in the Quarter, and not all of them like to share the cemeteries. It could just be a random attack from someone who doesn’t want me playing in their sandbox.”
“Or it could be someone trying to interfere with us,” Amy said.
“Which, given our normal tendency for sticking our nose in where it doesn’t belong—” I started.
“And the number of times people have offered to remove that nose for us—” Amy continued.
“Makes it a strong possibility that they were here for us,” I finished.
“Yeah, the fact that there’s another dozen coming through the headstones right now certainly makes me think this might be our problem,” Amy said, then turned to Edgar. “As much as we appreciate the assist, you might want to get out of here now. These zombies are moving faster and better than the last set, and you’ve got an awful lot of exposed flesh to get bitten.”
“If they are resurrected zombies, that should not be a problem. I would only be in danger if they were zombies created by disease, and therefore capable of transmitting the disease. But I will, in fact, take my leave of you at this time. Mother and Father spirits, please consign our unfortunate friend and brother back to your loving arms to serve you in death as he did in life. Let him know he would have been welcome as part of our undead flock, but circumstances did not permit it.” Edgar reached down, flipped the dead body back into the vault, and slid the concrete lid back on. Then he picked up a backpack lying in the shadow of a headstone and ran off in
to the night, neatly dodging zombies as he did so.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“I did indeed,” Amy replied with a little bit of a dreamy look on her face.
“Not that,” I growled. I’d seen more than enough of his that myself, but that wasn’t the point. “He moved that vault lid all by himself, without a crane or nothing.”
“Is that good?” Amy asked,
“Good? That slab of concrete must have weighed five hundred pounds if it was an ounce. He could have been some real help with this mess.” I spun and fired twice, dropping two zombies in their tracks. I ejected the spent magazine and slapped a new one home.
“Duck,” Amy said, her voice smooth as a lake at sunrise.
I dropped to one knee and looked behind me as another zombie’s head exploded. I stood up and got back to back with Amy, and we made short work of the zombies. They weren’t all that fast, and they weren’t particularly well-armed, so it didn’t take too much of a stretch to take them out.
After they were dead, we sat on a couple of headstones reloading our weapons and checking the bodies for clues. Okay, I was reloading Bertha while Amy checked the bodies for clues. I’m not much of the investigative type; I’m more the blow shit up and ask questions later type.
“Find anything?” I asked.
“Other than a couple of empty wallets and a condom, which is disturbing on so many levels, no.” Amy sat on the ground by my feet and I leaned down to stroke her hair.
“Well, what do we know?” I asked. “Let’s start from there.”
“We know there’s a rogue vampire in town. We know that he has the capacity to raise zombies, and we know that we haven’t seen a vampire do that before, so I don’t like it.”
“I don’t think we know that the vampire raised these zombies. Maybe it was an accomplice,” I said.
“So we either have a vampire that can raise zombies, or a vampire with a friend that can raise zombies,” Amy said. “I like neither of these things.”
Moon over Bourbon Street - a Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 3
