Affliction ab-22

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  ‘SWAT is going with us.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Hospital parking lot, waiting for SWAT so we can roll out.’

  ‘Lisandro and Dev are headed out the door now.’

  ‘If Seamus is that good, he’ll eat Dev for dinner.’

  ‘Yeah, but if I were one of the fallen council members I’d want to kill the new vampire king of America. That means that I’m keeping good people here to keep Jean-Claude safe.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said.

  ‘Besides, you’ll have a team of SWAT with you; they’re pretty good for humans.’

  ‘They’re very good for anyone,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, Anita, they can’t compete with our speed.’

  ‘Yeah, but training counts, too.’

  ‘You don’t have to defend them to me, Anita. I respect SWAT and their abilities. I’m just saying they’re human and Seamus isn’t.’

  ‘No arguments, and sorry if I was defensive.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m going to talk to the Harlequin wereanimals and see if I can learn anything helpful about the Lover of Death.’

  ‘If you get any info that will help, call me,’ I said.

  ‘You know I will,’ she said.

  ‘If SWAT gets here before Lisandro and Dev arrive, then we’re gone. We need to use every bit of daylight we have.’

  ‘Understood; I’ll text Dev and make sure he and Lisandro understand.’

  ‘You know my objections to endangering Lisandro, because he has a family. Why send him?’

  ‘You know why, Anita.’ She sounded softly chiding.

  I sighed. ‘Yeah, I have practiced with Lisandro and watched him against others. He’s not the strongest of the guards, but he’s wicked fast and he’s got the best all-around speed, endurance, strength, and technique of anyone in the MMA classes, except maybe Pride.’

  ‘Which is why one of them goes with you and one of them stays here, just in case.’

  ‘It won’t come to a one-on-one champion fight, Claudia.’

  ‘Probably not, but if there comes a point where you can maneuver Seamus into fighting Lisandro and leaving the rest of you out of it, I’d do it.’

  ‘You going to throw Pride to the hyenas, too?’ I asked.

  ‘No, we have a lot more guards here, Anita. We’ll overwhelm him with skill and numbers.’

  ‘But you’ll still keep Pride with you, just in case,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘Send someone extra to Micah, too,’ I said.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Keep them safe for me.’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘Speaking of jobs, SWAT just pulled in,’ I said. I waved them over to let them know I needed to talk to them before we headed out. They spilled out of their black Tahoe looking all around six feet tall or over, broad of shoulder, trim of waist, like a sports team in body armor with weapons. Most SWAT and special teams were tall and athletic and had a certain we are just that good attitude. It wasn’t bragging, it was just training combined with surety; most of them had spent their lives being the toughest and most competent person in the room.

  ‘Kill this guy for us, Anita,’ Claudia said.

  ‘It’s my job,’ I said.

  She gave a small chuckle. ‘Yeah, I guess it is.’

  I hung up and went to tell SWAT we knew exactly where the vampire’s lair was located. I also had to tell them that we had another shapeshifter that might have been mind-fucked like Ares. If this kept up, they were going to change the rules so I couldn’t bring my furry friends along.

  75

  Two things kept us in the parking lot long enough for Lisandro and Dev to arrive and throw their gear in the back of our SUV: Little Henry’s request to borrow a gun, and my explaining what had happened with Seamus. The gun would have normally been not only no, but hell no, but they all knew him. They knew his skills in the field and at the shooting range. He’d actually been in the military with Machet and Wilson, two of our SWAT guys. Machete and Willy, respectively – most SWAT units were big on nicknames. Some were name-based like these two, but others were just call signs, like Sergeant Brock was Badger, and Yancey, who had come to see me in the hospital, was Swan. He pulled off enough of his gear so I could glimpse the nearly black hair with its hint of curl, and the smiling brown eyes. He didn’t look remotely swanlike.

  ‘So you’ve had another shapeshifter deputy marshal go rogue?’ he asked, studying my face as if he wanted me to say no.

  ‘This master vampire’s animal to call seems to be hyena. It gives him a step up on mind-fucking them.’

  ‘Any of you other guys werehyena?’ he asked.

  Dev raised his hand, ‘Tiger.’

  Lisandro said, ‘Rat.’

  ‘Lion,’ said Nicky.

  Badger, whose skin was smooth and nearly as dark as the black gear he was wearing, said, ‘So if you guys get bitten you’re not going to try to kill us?’

  ‘You’re safe from us,’ Dev said, smiling.

  ‘Okay, Little Henry rides with us and draws us a detailed plan of the layout while we drive. We’ll have an entrance plan by the time we get there.’

  ‘Sergeant, not to put too fine a point on it, but the vampire rolled Little Henry, too. Being human doesn’t keep you safe from a vampire.’

  He touched the cross pinned to his vest. ‘My faith will keep me safe.’

  ‘Yeah, mine, too, but if a human servant or zombie that he controls rips it off you, we’ll need a backup plan.’

  ‘Vampires are your side of things, so you got to have a plan that will protect us from the vampire by the time we get there,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘That’s all I ask.’

  I looked at him a minute to see if he was kidding, then realized he wasn’t. Here was a man who would expect your best, period. ‘Then let’s saddle up, we’re burning daylight,’ I said.

  He and Yancey grinned at me and then each other. ‘Another John Wayne fan— See, Badger, I told you I liked her.’

  Badger nodded, still grinning. ‘Let’s mount up, we are burning daylight.’

  Nicky drove, I rode shotgun, and Lisandro and Dev had the middle seat. We followed SWAT and Little Henry onto the main road, and away we went.

  We were at the edge of town, about to head into the mountains, when a woman ran across the road in front of SWAT’s Tahoe. Their brake lights flashed red, and Nicky had to slam on his brakes to keep from rear-ending them.

  A zombie ran across the road in front of both cars, in the direction that the woman had run.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ Lisandro asked.

  ‘It’s not dark yet,’ Nicky said.

  Dev said, ‘Here we go again.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said, and reached for my door handle.

  76

  The moment I opened the door I could hear the woman screaming. I’d have loved to have time to put together a plan, a formation, something, but we were out of time. We spilled out of the SUV and ran toward the screams. SWAT was out of their truck, too. I heard one of them yell something, but if we waited the woman was dead.

  I had my handguns and my knives. The AR and shotgun were still in the truck. I was betting that SWAT was taking the time to gear up. They were probably right, but I’d seen the zombie move; it wasn’t the shambling dead, it was fast, and when night fell it’d be faster.

  We found them on the driveway between two small identical houses. Her legs were kicking uselessly at the ground, the zombie straddling her waist, holding one of her arms in its hands and eating the flesh off her forearm while she shrieked.

  I drew the Browning, aimed at the zombie’s head, and fired. The force of the bullet rocked its whole body, but it just turned and stared at us, mouth scarlet with fresh blood, the woman’s arm still trapped between its rotting hands.

  Someone exclaimed behind us, ‘Sweet Jesus!’

  The zombie kept chewing on the meat in its mouth, as if we w
eren’t walking closer, guns out. It was like the ones in the mountain, in the hospital: no fear, no thought of saving itself. It wouldn’t run, not while it had meat to eat. It had ripped the woman’s arm to pink tendons and red muscle, blood pouring out of the wounds, drenching the zombie’s chin and upper body.

  I shot it between the eyes; the head rocked back, the round hole bled dark blood, and some of the back of the head was shaped wrong now, but it bent back toward the woman’s arm. It was going to take another bite. I walked up almost point-blank and shot it in the mouth, twice, three times, until the mouth was shattered and most of the head was a red mess. It still tried to bend over the woman’s arm and take another bite, except now it had no working mouth to bite with.

  The woman was still screaming.

  SWAT was with us now, and they had taken the time to get the big guns. ‘Blow it to pieces, and start first aid on the woman,’ I said.

  ‘I give the orders here, Blake,’ Badger said.

  ‘Fine, you decide what we’re going to do, Sergeant. We’re going back to the car for the rest of our weapons, then we’ll come back and help you with the woman and the zombie if it’s still intact.’

  I turned and went back for the car and the rest of the arsenal. Nicky followed without hesitation. Dev hesitated while we walked a step or two, but it was Lisandro who almost didn’t come at all. We were almost to the car when he jogged up behind us.

  ‘I can’t believe you left that woman like that,’ he said, as he came to the back of the SUV while we started getting out the long guns.

  ‘SWAT knows basic first aid, and if we’re lucky maybe we got the paramedic.’ I slid the AR over me in the tactical sling and settled the shotgun into its sling and Velcro on the vest. I preferred the AR to the shotgun for the suburbs. I added extra ammo to match the guns, and I was ready.

  We went back at a paced jog and heard more gunfire. Machete was firing into the zombie, keeping it off the woman. Badger was wrapping up the woman’s arm. Yancey and Willy were watching the perimeter for more undead. They looked very organized and official.

  ‘Nice of you to join the party, Blake,’ Badger said.

  The woman seemed to be unconscious. I didn’t know if she’d fainted from fear or blood loss. ‘If we’d waited to gear up, the zombie could have killed her before we got to her,’ I said.

  ‘You stay with the group unless ordered otherwise, Blake, is that clear?’

  ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ I said.

  Machete had finally reduced the zombie to something that could barely crawl; without fire it was the best we could do. I had grenades in some of the pockets of the tactical pants, but if I set a zombie on fire here it could run into a house and set it on fire before it burned enough to be immobile. Suburbs were hard, so many soft targets.

  ‘We have to get her a hospital,’ Badger said.

  ‘Yeah, so much for hunting vampires,’ I said.

  Badger looked up and gave me a very unfriendly look. ‘We can’t leave her like this.’

  ‘I know, and I’ll bet almost anything that this isn’t the only zombie attacking citizens right now.’

  ‘I thought zombies couldn’t come out during daylight,’ Machete said, coming back with his rifle loose in one hand.

  ‘They don’t like daylight, but they can walk around in it, or most of them can. They’ll be slower and a little more confused in daylight, so the flesh eaters will be faster and more deadly when we lose the sun.’

  ‘It looked pretty damn fast,’ Machete said.

  ‘It was,’ I said.

  ‘The vampire did this, didn’t he?’ Yancey asked.

  ‘Yeah, he did. We have to take her to the hospital. We’ll have to protect the citizens of Boulder from the walking dead, so we won’t get to the mountains before nightfall.’

  ‘You’re saying he did this as a diversion.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘How can he make them rise when he’s miles away?’ Willy asked.

  ‘Good question, but I don’t think he raised the zombies today fresh. I think he’s just letting us see some of the ones he raised earlier. He’s sacrificing them as a diversion from his real body. Destroying his original body is the only way to kill him and stop this from happening.’

  ‘You ran after her first, Blake. You weren’t willing to let her die so we could kill the vampire.’

  I looked at Badger as he picked up the woman with her freshly bandaged arm and settled her like a child in his big arms. ‘No, I couldn’t just keep driving and let her die like this, and that is what he was counting on.’

  ‘If you could have kept driving and let her die, then you wouldn’t be human,’ he said.

  ‘By saving her and all the others who are being attacked right now, we’re giving him time to have one of his servants move his body and missing the chance to kill him once and for all. It’ll cost lives.’

  Badger nodded. ‘You’re probably right, but I’m still glad we saved this woman.’

  I sighed. ‘So am I; damn it to hell, but so am I.’

  77

  When we got back to the trucks, Little Henry wasn’t there. Badger said, ‘I told him to stay here, damn it.’

  ‘There he is,’ Yancey said.

  At the same time Nicky said, ‘There,’ and pointed.

  I followed where he pointed, and it was Little Henry running toward us, using all that long leg to run as fast as he could, carrying someone over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. There were two zombies chasing them.

  ‘Go save his ass, then we got a hospital run to make,’ Sergeant Badger said.

  We had a second where SWAT looked at us and we looked at them. I said, ‘We’ll take the zombies, you secure the civilians.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Yancey said.

  I wanted my shotgun when we got to the zombies, but once you had the AR on its tac swing for running, you had to hold it as you ran, or it tangled your legs. The shotgun in its cross-draw shoulder sleeve was fine for running; I’d just have to change guns when we got there. I started jogging toward the zombies and Little Henry. Dev, Lisandro, and Nicky did the same, all of us jogging with our ARs in our hands. The men fell in around me, jogging easily to keep up. SWAT was moving out to meet Little Henry and there was a moment when all eight of us were close. Then the zombies seemed to sense that their prey was getting away, because they suddenly picked up their own pace, and it was fast. Why was it that only the flesh-eating zombies ever moved like that? I started to run, using that otherworldly speed the way I had in the mountains, and my men paced me, easily. They could have outstripped my shorter stride, but they stayed with me, because I had a plan, I would tell them what to do; people with training like people with plans, and they’ll stay with you as long as you keep having a plan and making decisions.

  We left SWAT behind, because humans couldn’t move like we could. We came even with Little Henry. He was running full out, long legs eating up the ground, the woman on his shoulder bouncing a little as he kept moving toward SWAT and we kept moving toward the zombies.

  I let my AR slide to one side, keeping my left hand on it, and reached with my right hand to draw the shotgun out of its back sleeve. I had a few moments of running with a gun in each hand. Nicky was beside me with the same double-handed run. I stopped with a few yards between us and the running zombies. I let the AR fall from my left hand and put both hands on the shotgun, raised it to my shoulder, and snugged it into place as the zombies ate up the ground between us. Nicky mirrored me.

  I called, ‘Right.’

  He answered, ‘Left.’

  I shot the knee of the zombie on the right. It stumbled, falling to the ground. The zombie on the left fell down as Nicky blew its leg out from under it, too. Lisandro and Dev moved up on both sides of us to flank the zombies. They got up off the ground on hands and the remaining leg, snarling, and launched themselves at us. Nicky and I shot them in the heads; at this distance most of the upper parts of the heads exploded. Their bodies recovered
from the force of the shots and they got back up. Lisandro and Dev fired into their bodies. Again the zombies reacted to the physics, but they couldn’t feel pain, or fear, and they were already dead, so they got back up. Nicky and I shot them again, took the rest of their heads. Lisandro and Dev concentrated on the other intact leg. They used their hands to start to crawl toward us. Nicky and I used the shotgun to blow a hand into red mist on each of them. Lisandro moved up and shot the arm that Nicky had taken the hand off in a series of rapid gunshots until the arm was destroyed. Dev did the same on the arm of my zombie. Nicky and I took the other hand on our zombies, and Lisandro and Dev took out the arms. The zombies lay on the ground with legs and arms ruined, no heads, their bodies destroyed, and the remains of the bodies started trying to wiggle forward.

  Dev said, ‘These things just never give up, do they?’ He stared down at the zombies with a look that might have been fear, but he was trying to hide it, and he’d done his job perfectly.

  ‘No, they don’t,’ I said.

  ‘It’s going to be a long night,’ Lisandro said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘it is.’

  78

  We got the first woman to the emergency room and left the woman that Henry had rescued there, too. She was shocky from the whole nearly-being-eaten-by-zombies thing. There were other injuries from zombie attack, including two police officers. There were zombie calls from all over the city. So far it was just one or two zombies attacking, but we still had an hour until full dark. I was betting that once night fell we’d get more zombies in larger groups just like up in the mountains, except there we’d all been armed and trained. The normal citizen wasn’t going to fare very well against these things. Hell, a single officer in a patrol car was going to have trouble if there was more than one of them. You needed armed groups that knew how to shoot and work together, and even then there might come a point where overwhelming numbers, well, overwhelmed us. I stood there in the emergency room letting the noise and the movements of it wash over me. Nicky stood not far away. Lisandro and Dev were talking to the SWAT guys. Who you going to call when it looks like you’re really going to have to survive the zombie apocalypse?