Modern Magic
Page 34
“This is not what I had in mind,” she said when I got within earshot.
“Me, neither,” I gasped. I was pretty sure I had broken a couple of ribs, and while they would heal quickly, they hurt like the devil right then. “But it’s not too far from what I expected. Pop the trunk.”
“The trunk, why?” She looked at me in confusion.
“Are you one of those women who will never, no matter how dire the circumstances, do anything unless you understand all the reasons behind it? I just want to know, because if I’m going to die because of someone’s ridiculous need for exposition, I’ll go flippin’ stake myself,” I snapped. “Now open the trunk because that’s where all the guns are.”
“That’s all you needed to say,” she huffed. But she did reach into her pocket and get out her key fob to pop the trunk. Greg’s cape wasn’t the only thing I’d tossed into the trunk while everyone else was getting their seatbelts fastened. Mike and Greg came out of the police station, but stutter-stepped when they saw the chaos in the parking lot.
I got to the back of the car and yelled for Greg. “Get over here, bro, I need backup!” He hustled over and I handed him a twelve-gauge and an aluminum baseball bat. “Knees and elbows. We want the demons to stay locked in the bodies but be unable to move.”
“Mike won’t be happy.”
“Mike doesn’t get a vote anymore. That was before we realized the zombies can think and react. We have to disable them and get this done in the next couple of hours or we’re going to have a bigger mess on our hands than we’ve ever dreamed of. Imagine these guys wandering through downtown during rush hour. Now, you with me?” I racked a shell into the chamber because Greg always works better with dramatic sound effects.
He took the bait. He cracked his knuckles and said “Let’s do this.”
I think somewhere deep in his brain my partner has a folder marked “clichés” that he accesses every time we’re in trouble. His ability to quote movies in times of extreme stress is impressive, in a sad kinda way.
We came out from behind the car and followed the two unbound zombies, who had abandoned us when we stopped fighting and returned to their original course. They’d managed to navigate more than halfway across the parking lot and almost to the entrance of a fast-food restaurant. The location was problematic. We were about to shoot a couple of walking corpses right in front of PlayLand, but that really couldn’t be helped.
I took out the knees on the woman zombie. Greg couldn’t shoot a woman, not even a dead one, so I didn’t waste time asking him to take her out. Me, I’ll open fire pretty quickly on anything, living or dead, that tries to kill me, hurt me or look at me like it might eat my brain. After the knees, I switched to her arms, and broke both at the elbows with my bat. Greg did the same with the guy zombie, and we quickly bound them hand and foot and tossed them over our shoulders. I hoped the spectators in the window chalked it up to a Halloween party gone wild.
We got back to the car and deposited our cargo, but noticed something was missing—the first zombie. I heard a shouted Bible verse from the back of the strip mall. Our broken zombies wouldn’t be going anywhere, so we headed off to save the night. When we got to the back of the mall the missing zombie had knocked Anna out cold and was choking Mike against a loading-dock door. We couldn’t shoot without hitting Mike, so I tackled the pile of grave dirt while Greg tended to the wounded.
Every year I swear to sign up for a first-aid class that meets at night so I can play medic while Greg plays linebacker. But, once again, I hadn’t kept my resolution so I got the dead guy off Mike and beat the crap out of him with my bat.
The problem with beating on zombies is that they don’t feel pain, so you have to do real damage. Going after joints is best, but if they’re thrashing around trying to kill you, that’s pretty hard. I shattered one elbow, but he got a couple of good shots in before I finally connected with a kneecap. With nothing holding his leg upright, he went down like the corpse he was. I took a couple extra minutes to break his other knee and elbow, then hefted him up across my back and took him to where his buddies were writhing around.
You can’t really knock a zombie unconscious, so they were, groaning and biting and being generally annoying—which is off-putting in a dead person. I walked over to the local supermarket and got a roll of duct tape, and before too long I’d made three silver-taped and very lumpy zombie Christmas presents. Greg helped Mike and Anna back over to the car, and grinned every second that she allowed him to help her walk. If he got any more excited I was going to put Xanax in his blood bags.
When they arrived we all stood there, panting and bruised—with more than a handful of graveyard dirt and flaky zombie-flesh clinging to our clothes—and took a look at the mess around us. We had managed to break half a dozen cars or so, which I thought was a pretty good record for us. Most of the people parked in the parking lot still had transportation.
Crap. Transportation. I’d stumbled upon a huge hole in our plan. Anna had said she could perform the spell, but even with her whole coven backing her up, it would be a one-time thing. For everything to work we needed all the zombies in one place at one time. Therein lay the rub. We had neglected to address how we were going to carry eleven zombies around until we could banish them. We didn’t have a paddy wagon, and we couldn’t afford the time to ferry them back and forth to a central collection point after we ran each one to ground.
We needed some way to get these zombies to Marshall Park while simultaneously chasing down the rest of the zombies. And after that fight, we needed all hands on deck to get the job done. None of us had any desire to split up. So I called a cab for our “friends,” the zombies.
Even though it was almost Halloween, the deal took a little explaining, a little mojo and a folded hundred-dollar bill, but I got the cabbie to agree to take our three “drunk friends” to the park and detime the sun came up. He babbled something about a mother and father and a sick baby, but I didn’t really care. I waved half a dozen more pictures of Ben Franklin in his face, and he agreed not to take any fares but my “friends” for the rest of the night. Even after all this time I’m often amazed at what people will believe in the name of cash and a fraternity Halloween party.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The rest of the zombie encounters went much like the first, with the exception of the car chase. The last dead dude actually made us chase him, in the car, with Greg hanging out the window playing mailbox baseball with his spine. We kept the brain-eater alive, and because Mike had fallen asleep in the backseat long before we got to the last zombie, we didn’t get another lecture about defiling the dead.
We tossed Marathon Man in the trunk because I was out of cab fare and I was afraid that even my dreadlocked ganja-befuddled cabbie was starting to think that this was something other than a fraternity stunt.
When we rolled up to join the witches in banishing a passel of angry spirits back to Hell, we had about an hour of night left. Not to mention that a successful banishment would leave us with eleven corpses in Marshall Park, a public space directly across the street from the headquarters of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Of all the places in the greater Charlotte area that I wanted to be when the sun came up, this was nowhere on the list.
We left Mike snoring in the backseat, and I grabbed the dead guy from the trunk. This one was skinny, at least. Some of the zombies we’d bagged that night had been seriously hefty in life, and that made for a slippery, jiggly corpse. If more people toted dead bodies over their shoulders, I’m convinced the obesity epidemic in America would be solved pretty quickly.
There were a dozen witches waiting for us in the dew-covered grass around the fountain in the center of the park. Anna made thirteen. They were arrayed on the concrete steps where countless festival goers and small children have played over the years. I somehow doubted we had the proper city permits for what we were about to do.
Anna explained to us that thirteen was a number of power, like three,
seven and nine. I didn’t bother to ask more because I really didn’t care. I was tired, covered in all kinds of things that flaked off dead people, and had broken and healed ribs twice in one night. Once I even had to heal my arm. That left me hungry, grumpy and smelly—not a good combo for a vampire meeting a dozen witches for the first time. But Anna had carried her weight tonight so I tried. I honestly tried.
“Anna,” I aimed to sound cheerful. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friends?” I made what I hoped was a fang-free and friendly smile all around, but the number of glowing pentacles told me that I wasn’t exactly making a harmless impression.
“No, vampire, I am not.” Her voice was cold, and I saw Greg’s face fall.
I was less surprised to discover we were good enough to hunt zombies with, but not good enough to take home to the coven. Greg falls in love with weather girls, so I wasn’t surprised that he’d developed a monster crush on Anna in a few hours. Me, I was just interested in a little nibble, and maybe a little something else. But as hungry as I was, a bite to eat would have been enough.
That wasn’t happening. Moving on. “Fair enough, witchy-poo. Where do you want your dead guy so we can finish saving the world?”
She had the good grace to blush a little. “Put him in the circle.”
She pointed to where the other ten corpses were arranged carefully in the center of a huge magical circle drawn on the concrete plaza in multicolored chalk, with scribbles and sigils in several languages. I recognized a couple of words of Latin from hanging out with Mike all these years, but just a couple. It wasn’t complete. There was about a three-foot opening in the side for me to enter, drop the zombie and exit.
As I got almost to the edge of the circle, something felt out of
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Your witches can put him in there. I don’t want to put his head where his feet should be. I’m all thumbs when it comes to magic, you know.” I took a couple of steps away from the circle and turned so that I could see most of the witches and Greg. His face had gone paler than usual at my sudden change of plans.
I caught a glimpse of him taking a position to cover my left, and I concentrated on the witches to my right. Greg and I have been in a lot of tight spots together over the years, and it’s nice to have someone you don’t have to explain things to when the shit hits the fan. He knew something was up, and went from heartsick to ready to rumble in no time at all.
I didn’t actually know if I could be trapped by a circle. Greg and Mike and I have spent a lot of hours researching what made us this way, and we have no idea if we’re mystical, extra-dimensional, extra-terrestrial, biological or something even stranger. There’s a decent chance the circle wouldn’t have bothered me any more than a jail cell made of toilet paper, but I’m never comfortable taking chances that are only decent. I decided to err on the side of caution for a change and not get locked in a magical circle with a dozen zombies on the night before Halloween. Just this once.
Anna spoke from behind me. “Don’t you trust us, vampire?”
Her voice had a snide tone to it that I didn’t like.
“I don’t trust anyone, witchy-poo. It’s how I’ve gone this long without finding splinters in my lungs.”
“Well, don’t worry, vampire, we won’t harm either of you. Tonight.”
I didn’t like the way she emphasized “tonight,” but there wasn’t anything I could do about it with sunrise almost over the horizon.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t harm them, Anna. These boys are under my protection.” We all turned at Mike’s voice, and I swear my friend looked like he had a glowing halo around him. “I don’t think you and yours want to bring down my disappointment, do you?
When he walked the last few steps to stand next to me I thought the glow might have been nothing more than a street light behind him, but I wasn’t sure. It faded as he drew close and whispered, “Thought you’d leave the priest to sleep while all you magical types play in the park, huh? When will you guys ever learn?”
Mike grabbed the zombie by the ankles and started to drag the thing into the circle. The process was made somewhat more difficult by the bandages on his burned hand, but he was strong for a human. The dead guy thrashed around and threatened to scuff the circle, so I grabbed the zombie under its arms and helped Mike carry the animated corpse into the right place in the pattern. I figured the chances of them closing the circle with Mike inside were significantly lower than if I was alone in there, and I knew Greg was keeping a sharp eye out now, so I was willing to help.
Once Mike and I were safely out of the circle, the witches closed it with chalk and mumbling, and then the show started. There was a whole lot of chanting, some smelly stuff thrown into fires at the five points of a pentacle that was scribed within the circle, and a bunch of call-and-response “spellcasting.” I was starting to get bored when suddenly the zombies leapt to their feet and rushed at the circle.
They smacked into the magical barrier like it was a wall of glass, and I was exceptionally happy to not be in there with them. They beat on the air, which to them, at least, was very solid, and began to wail. Not the low, guttural kind of moaning that you think of when you think of zombies, but a wail that oscillated like an air-raid siren. It built in volume and pitch until Mike, Greg and I went to our knees with our hands pressed to our heads.
The witches either had earplugs, were deaf, or were protected somehow from the noise, because they kept right on chanting and singing as the keening got louder. Finally, as the zombies literally blew out their voice boxes and their throats exploded with splatters of blood on the air of the magical boundary, silence reigned again. The zombies collapsed to the ground, empty bodies again, and that quiet was the most fantastic thing in the world. I thought for a second that it was all over, that we had sent the souls back where they belonged, but I should have known better.
A new voice came out of the circle, and my blood ran cold as ice.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do,” said the disembodied voice from within the circle. It was a kind voice, a gentle voice, the type of voice that was more soothing than a mother’s croon after a nightmare but which also held more strength than a father’s sternest lecture. The voice touched a part of me that I thought had died fifteen years ago. Tears rolled down my cheeks at the sound.
I looked over at Mike, and he had the most rapturous look on his face I’d ever seen outside a painting. He stepped towards the circle. He was almost within arm’s reach of the boundary when I realized what he was doing. Completely under the spell of the demons in the circle, he was going to break the magical restraints, and all those damned (literally and figuratively) spirits were going to be free again.
I only made it one or two steps before a black blur flew in and knocked Mike sprawling across the grass. The seductive voice turned into a screech of disappointed rage and hurled curses in half a dozen languages at my oldest friend and my partner as they tumbled across the concrete away from the circle. I got a look at a face inside the circle, and if that was what things in Hell looked like, I was glad to be immortal for all intents and purposes.
Greg held Mike down with his considerable bulk and superior strength, and I yelled over at Anna “This would be a great time to wrap this up, lady!”
The witches’ chanting grew in volume and intensity, and the light show inside the circle kicked up in earnest. Nearly a dozen angry amorphous, faceless (thankfully) souls whirled and tumbled like psychotic Caspers in a spin cycle, with radiating red, blue and purple lights bouncing around inside the circle like a Star Wars rerun on fast-forward. The chanting seemed to last forever, but it must have only been a few minutes, because the sky had barely begun to lighten in the east when suddenly the circle fell dark and silent. All thirteen witches slumped to the ground, unconscious. I looked over at Greg and Mike. They had stopped wrestling around and stood staring at the scene on the plaza.
I w
alked over to Anna and checked her for a pulse. It was strong, and as I felt the blood pulse through the side of her neck, my stomach gave an embarrassing rumble, testament to the long and painful night that had left me hungry. But you don’t snack on witches who’d saved the world. Instead, I shook her gently until she began to stir, and I asked quietly, “Is it done?”
She allowed me to help her stand and walk her over to the edge of the circle. She took off her pentacle and passed it over several of the nearest bodies. When it didn’t even flicker, she nodded wearily. I helped her over to a bench, and quickly confirmed that all the other witches were still breathing. I avoided the circle, because even if Anna had broken it by leaning over and swinging her necklace over the dead guys, I didn’t want to do anything stupid like scrub out a line with my shoe and end up having to fight all these dead guys again.
Turns out the dead guys weren’t my immediate problem. Our little light show had attracted the wrong kind of attention. I heard a gentle “ahem” sound and turned. Detective Sabrina Law stood on the edge of the concrete plaza, gun in hand and pointed straight at my heart. Obviously, she hadn’t taken our disappearance last night in stride.
I hate mornings.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Hi Detective.” I reached hard for a pleasant, maybe even respectful tone but was really too tired to pull off anything other than half-dead.
“Hi yourself, Black.”
“Please, Sabrina, call me Jimmy.”