Modern Magic
Page 32
After a minute I reached out and very gently took the gun from her hand. She resisted for a second, but eventually let go, and I ejected the magazine and put the empty weapon in my coat pocket. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said very quietly.
“I’m not surprised. Most people need a little adjustment period the first time they experience something like this.”
She looked over at me, and I could hear shock hovering on the outer edges of her voice. “The first time? Exactly how often does crap like this happen?”
“Unfortunately,” Greg said as he slid down to sit on the other side of her, “this sort of thing happens all too often. And we’ve observed that once the barriers to belief are removed, that you may find yourself seeing more and more of it. You see, our society erects so many roadblocks to any understanding or analysis of the paranormal that it is almost impossible to truly investigate anything that happens outside the ordinary.”
Greg had the bit between his teeth. This was his subject, and I didn’t have the heart to deny him a good ramble. I’m sure he said a lot more, and I’m sure that it made perfect sense to anyone that would care, but I was most certainly not in that camp, so I did what I’d done for the past two decades whenever Greg started one of his rambles. I had a drink.
Lucky for me, my flask had made it through the fight without any major structural damage. I had a belt of Glenfiddich and passed it over to Detective Law. “Want a belt?”
She took the flask and turned it up for a long slug. “Nice. What is this?”
“Scotch. What were you doing in the woods?”
“The last girl to disappear had her cell phone turned on. I initiated a GPS trace and it led me here. But . . . what was all that?”
“That’s a longer story than we have time for. You think you can stand?
“Probably.”
“Good, because we should be moving along before your comrades in arms show up.”
“Why?” She looked around at the unconscious little girls scattered around the clearing. “We can’t leave them lying here.” “If experience serves as any guide, and what good are the bruises if it doesn’t, they’ll be out for a couple more hours at least. Your people will find them.” I got to my feet and brushed the worst of the dirt off my jeans and coat. I reached down and helped her to her feet and returned her sidearm to her. “We, on the other hand, have a different task. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re still missing one grumpy old lady.”
“Shit. Where did she go?” She put a fresh magazine into the pistol, chambered a round, and holstered her gun.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be missing her. Now come on, we’ve gotta go after her, and we don’t need to get tangled up in a bunch of—Well, crap, here comes the parade.” All hope of getting out of the woods without a few hours of questions evaporated as the bulk of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s SWAT team surrounded us, assault rifles at the ready. “I hope you have a foolproof plan for dealing with this.”
“I do,” she replied. She stepped forward, badge in hand, and yelled “Lower your weapons, boys! Stand down. We’ve got it under control.”
One of the guys in body armor came over, and she huddled together with him for a few seconds. Whatever she was selling, he was buying, because in no time at all he had guys running back through the woods for stretchers and ambulances. Greg elbowed me and motioned to the cops. I gave him my best hell-if-I-know shrug, and we sat down at the base of a couple of huge oaks to wait. Looked like we were going to be stuck in the woods with the cops while our bun-headed magical psychopath got away. Again.
Chapter Twenty
“Well, Detective, do you believe me now when I say that we can be useful?” I asked as Greg, Detective Law and I sipped coffee at a small table the SWAT boys had set up.
“You’ve got your moments, I’ll give you that. I haven’t seen martial arts work like that in a long time, and I sure wouldn’t have expected it from you two,” she said.
That’s a pretty standard coping mechanism for people who see us in action. There are so many kung fu movies out there. They just think we’re super black belts or something. I usually don’t bother to correct them. This was another one of those times.
“Do you think we can get a handle on some of that reward money?” I asked, as subtle as I knew how to be.
“Maybe. You were actually investigating, and you did help in recovering the kids, so I guess you’re entitled.” She looked disappointed somehow, and that bothered me a little.
“You know, it’s not a big deal, I was just thinking—”
She cut me off with a wave of her hand “No, you’re right. You guys deserve some recognition for the work you’ve done.” That set off an alarm bell or two. The last thing we wanted was recognition.
Actually, the last thing we wanted was a nice summer vacation in Phoenix, but recognition from any authority was pretty low on our list of desires, too. Really, I just wanted a few bucks to get the new Madden NFL game. I was really tired of playing Brett Favre in a Packers jersey. While I was mentally kicking myself for opening my big mouth, she walked over to a black guy in a nice suit and gestured toward us.
Greg leaned over to me and asked, “What did you do?”
“Something stupid.”
“What else is new? Would you care to be more specific?”
“I mentioned the reward.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know. I think we should leave now before we have to fill out forms or answer questions.”
“The first girl you talk to in fifteen years, and you run her off because you’re a greedy shit. Well done.”
“She is not the first girl I talked to. I talked to that girl at Phil’s the other night.”
“Okay, the first human girl that you weren’t simultaneously chatting up and putting a dollar in her garter.”
“Point to you. Now let’s get out of here.”
We double-checked to make sure Detective Law and her boss were looking the other way and slid off into the night. Greg’s car was still at the bowling alley, and the keys were still in the pocket of a cop who was not in a mood to look kindly upon me. We improvised and mojo’d a cop into giving us a ride. He pulled up in front of our place, and Greg convinced him that he needed to get to the hospital, ASAP.
“What does he think he’s going to the hospital for?” I asked as I unlocked our front door.
“He thinks his appendix has ruptured.”
“That’s a good one. What if he gets there and he doesn’t have his appendix?”
“Then he won’t have to worry about that anymore, will he?
I plopped down on the couch and tossed my shoes across the room. Greg grabbed a blood bag for each of us, and we started to settle in for a marathon Gears ofWar session. All in all, it had been a pretty good night. We rescued the little girls, I talked to a human woman, we beat the baddy, and we made it home before sunrise. Then my cell phone rang, and the night went right to crap all over again.
Chapter Twenty-One
The display on my phone read “Father Mike,” so I pushed the button and said, “Hi Dad.”
“Jimmy, where are you?” He sounded out of breath, and I was a little worried. Mike’s pretty unflappable most days (might be something about having vampires for best friends), so anything that had him running around breathless was bound to be worrisome at best and more likely not-good-at-all.
“I’m home. What’s up?” I waved for Greg to turn off the TV. I had a bad feeling that we were going to be heading back out. I got off the couch and walked over to my shoes, cradling the phone between my ear and shoulder.
“Is Greg with you?” Mike asked.
I was really starting to worry now. Whenever Mike wanted to make sure we were together, it meant things were not-good-at-all.
“Yeah, he’s here. I’ll put you on speaker. Done. What’s going on?”
“I’m outside. I’ll be down in a min
ute.” He hung up on me.
I stood there for a few seconds looking at my phone, wondering what had him so rattled. Then I put my shoes on and got the place ready for visitors. I motioned for Greg to clear away the empty blood bags. Mike knew what our deal was, but we tried not to flaunt our bloodsucking ways in front of him.
I was in the kitchen dumping out half-empty beer bottles when I heard Mike’s feet on the stairs.
“Want a drink, Dad?” I called out, trying to keep my voice cheerful. I realized cheerful was wasted as soon as I saw how pale he was.
“Scotch,” he ordered. “Make it a double. And you’ll want one, too, I believe.” He sat on the couch and I brought over our drinks.
“Where’s mine?” Greg asked from his armchair.
“Still in the bottle, dork. I might have mad vampire skills, but I still only have two hands.”
He stomped over to the kitchen and made himself a stout screwdriver. “You never would have survived in the restaurant business.”
“Good thing I didn’t survive, then,” I retorted. “Now, Mike. You look like crap. What’s wrong?”
“You really know how to warm a man’s heart, Jimmy. But I’m sure I’ve seen better days. I don’t know if you’ve been outside recently, but it’s terrible out there. I think it might be . . . ,” he hesitated for a moment and I saw real fear in his eyes. “I think it might be the end times.”
“Whoa!” I stood up and went for more scotch. After a brief debate, I came back to the couch with the whole bottle. “Now let’s take this from the beginning. What makes you think that this could be the Apocalypse?”
“Oh, Jimmy, I’ve seen things in my life that no man should see, and you know this.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re the ones that showed you most of them,” Greg piped up. I shot him a dirty look, and he mumbled, “Sorry,” and shut up.
Mike continued. “I’ve seen plenty of terrible things in my time, but nothing compares to what I’ve seen tonight. The dead are walking, Jimmy! The newly buried dead have risen from their graves and are walking the town. I don’t know what to think, but that these are the times of Revelation!” Mike got a look in his eyes that was part fear, part excitement.
I guess this would be like Christmas, the Super Bowl and WrestleMania all rolled into one for a priest.
“Can you give us a few details? What exactly is going on?” Greg asked.
“Three corpses, all dead less than a month, have risen tonight alone.” Mike reached for the bottle, and I passed it over. He touched the neck to the rim of his glass, but his hands were shaking and he rerouted the bottle to his mouth. He glanced at me in apology and turned the bottle up. We’d been friends long enough that I didn’t begrudge him drinking from the bottle. It’s not like I was worried about germs.
“How many dead people are in your cemetery, Mike?” Greg asked.
“Hundreds, I guess, but what does that matter?”
“I’m wondering why only three have risen, is all.”
“Well, they were the most recently deceased. And all of their bodies were intact. One man, Alan Rice, who passed away in the same time period, died in a horrible automobile accident. He has yet to rise.”
“Or his body wasn’t chosen.” Greg mused. “Let me make a couple of phone calls.” He grabbed his phone and went into his bedroom. I heard one side of the conversations as he made a couple of calls in quick succession, asking the same questions each time.
“All right, I have a theory,” he announced, rejoining us and taking a healthy slug of scotch himself, “and if I’m right, we’re going to need more booze. And more ammo. And maybe an extra priest.”
Mike and I stared at him until he went on.
“I made a couple of phone calls to a friend at the county morgue and a couple of hospitals. These are not guys who get rattled easily, and they’ve seen enough of our world to believe in the unbelievable.”
I raised my hand. “Excuse me, Professor Doofenstein, is there a point coming anytime in the next week?”
Greg shot me the bird and went on. “You’re not the only one missing a bunch of dead people, Mike. The morgue has lost four corpses, the hospitals have lost three, and I’d be willing to bet that at least one more church has seen a rash of breakouts from the graveyard tonight. As far as I can tell, there are nearly a dozen dead people that decided to pull a Thriller on us, and they all made that decision about 11:30 P.M.”
“That’s when the graves at my churchyard began to cast up their dead. How did you know?” Mike asked.
“Because that’s when Jimmy and I set eleven angry souls loose on the greater Charlotte area.”
Suddenly a very, very bad light came on for me. “Oh crap. The girls,” I said in a very small voice.
“Yep, buddy. Free the girls, free what’s in the girls,” Greg confirmed.
“What girls?” Mike asked.
We told him all about fighting the little kidnapped girls, and the salt, and banishing them. “But we forgot one important thing,” I said. “We forgot to send the souls back to wherever they came from.”
“So when they got out of the girls, with no unoccupied bodies around, and no spell to bind them into a body, they went looking for bodies that weren’t being used and didn’t have salt handy,” Greg confirmed.
“They inhabited corpses,” Mike said.
He looked a little relieved and a little disappointed all at the same time. I suppose that’s how it would be for someone who believed they were about to meet their maker and had reason to look forward to the meeting, then found out that they weren’t getting that appointment after all.
“Yep, that’s what it looks like.” Greg looked altogether too pleased with himself for my taste, but I had to admit it was a brilliant bit of logic.
“Now what?” I asked my occasionally brilliant partner.
“I don’t know.” He sat down on the other side of Mike on the couch.
“We have to return these bodies to their proper rest,” Mike said. “We cannot stand by and allow this evil to be perpetrated.” “Yeah, we got that, but it’s the ‘how’ we’re a little fuzzy on,”
I told him.
“Oh.” Mike had another belt of scotch. He hadn’t quite moved back to drinking from the glass, and I decided to let the stereotype slide for once.
“Let’s look at what we know.” I started. “One, there are a total of eleven zombies running around the city. Two, if we don’t stop them, at some point between now and tomorrow night, these zombies are going to grab a kid and the demon that raised them is going to finish some humongous ritual that will mean very bad things for everyone in Charlotte. Three, the demon, named Belial, has possessed a woman who looks like a retro advertisement for cookware.
“Now let’s take a look at what we don’t know. We don’t know what they’re trying to do in the first place. We don’t know if the ritual requires a specific site. We don’t know where the zombies are now. We don’t know which little girl they’re going to kidnap to finish their baker’s dozen. And we don’t know who the crazy lady with the bun is.”
“Now that we’ve established we don’t know anything helpful, where do we go from here?” Greg asked.
“I have no idea.”
“I do.” We both looked at Mike, who looked a little embarrassed. “I have a friend who practices a religion that the Church… um… frowns upon. She may be able to be of assistance, at least in the matter of the ceremony and those questions.”
“Mike, are you consorting with Wiccans again? You keep this up, and I’m going to put a COEXIST bumper sticker on your station wagon.”
“Not consorting. Comparing. She’s a local high priestess. She’s part of a comparative theology breakfast I attend each month. We’ve gotten to be fairly friendly over the years.”
I looked over at Greg and his jaw was as close to the floor as my own. In all the time we’ve been friends with Mike, and he certainly shows the years a lot more than we do, we never would have believed that ou
r straightlaced buddy would have breakfast every month with a real live witch. Of course, most of his parishioners would have a harder time believing he was drinking scotch in the basement of a halfway house with two vampires, so I suppose that was only fair.
“Do you think you could call her tonight?” Greg asked. “I know it’s getting late, but this is pretty important.”
“She once told me that I could call her anytime if I had issues that needed her assistance,” Mike assured us.
Greg and I exchanged a glance, and I bit back any comments I might have thought about making regarding Mike’s vows of celibacy. He went upstairs to get a signal and make the call, which took only a few minutes. He came down the steps holding his cell phone over his head like he was going to spike a football.
“I assume that means she’s on her way?” Greg asked.
“Yes, boys, it does. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. I hope you don’t mind meeting her here. After all, the whole ‘invite me in’ thing could become awkward if we went to her apartment.”
“Fair enough, I suppose. Greg, you wanna tidy up a bit before we have another guest?” I asked from my seat on the couch.
“Um, no. Those are your socks, bro. You pick up the toxic waste. I’ll give the kitchen a lick and a promise, but the footwear funk factory is all you.” He headed off to wipe down the counters and put the blood in the crisper so our culinary restrictions wouldn’t be immediately apparent while I got to work straightening up the den.
My idea of straightening up was to pour all the half-drunk beers down the sink and put the bottles in the recycling bin. Not much, but it made the den look better. Then I policed any inappropriate magazines and DVDs that Greg might have left lying around, and threw them all in his bedroom. Mike straightened up the video-game equipment, and actually found a scented candle to put out on the coffee table. After about ten minutes, the place smelled significantly less like a locker room, and Mike had ceased to make comments about us having the hygiene of a pack of feral dogs.