The Black Knight Chronicles

by John G. Hartness

  He was tough, though. He went for his gun with his left hand. I picked him up by his belt and held him over my head for a few seconds, just staring at him. I couldn’t get my head on straight enough to mojo him, but apparently, being hoisted into the air by a skinny white kid with fangs made him decide that this was not the time to be a hero. He dropped the gun, and I set him down.

  “I don’t want no trouble, man. Lemme go, and you can have whatever you want.” He sank to his knees in front of me, and big tears started to roll down his round face.

  “Open the safe.”

  “I don’t know the combination, man. You got to believe me.” He was really crying at this point, but his eyes kept flicking behind me to the door, as if expecting somebody. I heard soft footsteps and the sound of somebody trying very quietly to cock a revolver, and I was on the move.

  I jumped one of the shelves with an easy hop and ran around behind my new attacker. A kid, barely sixteen, stood in the aisle looking very confused and holding a .38. I tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Boo,” when he turned around. The kid jumped and yelled a little, and the gun went off, the bullet ricocheting off the floor into a shelf. I quickly snatched the gun from him and slapped him across the face.

  “That’s why children shouldn’t play with guns. Now get out of here.” He looked in my eyes for about half a second before he decided to take my advice. He ran like hell itself was behind him, and I turned my attention back to the sobbing mountain of humanity on the floor.

  “Open. The. Safe.” I leaned in, showing my fangs, and the fat guy nodded. He went around behind the counter, and when he knelt down to open the safe, I continued, “If you do anything with the gun in there except hand it over quietly, I’ll eat your spleen and make you watch.”

  I don’t even really know what a spleen looked like, or where it was in the body, but it sounded good. Tiny pulled a couple of stacks of cash out of the safe, along with a Glock 19.

  “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that gun mysteriously doesn’t have any serial numbers on it,” I said quietly.

  “I don’t know nothing about that, man. I just work here. You broke the shit out of my arm. Why you gotta do that?”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, do you want to open the gun cases, or should I break the glass?”

  “I guess I’ll get in less trouble with the boss if you break the glass, so go ahead.”

  So I did. I broke into the display cases and loaded up with another pair of Glocks, half a dozen magazines and three boxes of ammunition. A short-barreled pump shotgun with a bandolier on the stock completed my arsenal. I pocketed the cash and looked up at Tiny.

  “Sorry about this, Tiny, but I’m a little peckish.” I had settled down enough to mojo him a little, so I made him knee-walk out into the main aisle. I bit into him just below the left ear and was rewarded with a rush of blood and stimulants I’d rarely felt in my life. Whatever Tiny was on, it was more than just a five-hour energy drink. I felt my muscles sing. I had to admit I liked it. I drank until I was full, then paused for a second, burped loudly and took one last sip.

  “That’s truly disgusting,” a voice from behind me said.

  I whirled around, bringing the shotgun to bear on the intruder.

  Greg leaned against the store’s front door, a disapproving look on his face. “Couldn’t just rob the joint, could you? You had to trash the place, too?”

  “Yes, I did, Mother. Tiny here thinks he’ll get in less trouble with his boss the more mess I leave behind. Looks like he fought more. How did you get here? And how did you find me?” I wiped my mouth on Tiny’s sleeve and walked over to Greg. “Help yourself. If you’re coming with me you’re gonna need guns.”

  “We could have bought this stuff. I have cash in a fireproof safe back at our place.”

  “Back at what used to be our place. The place that got incinerated, remember? Look Mother Teresa, we’re the goddamn apex predators, okay? We’re the top of the mother-loving food chain, and it’s about time you sack up and act like it. Now either gear up, or go home. They’ve got Sabrina, they’ve started feeding on her, and I’ve got a lot of vampires to kill and not a lot of time to kill them in.”

  He stared at me for a long time and I could almost hear the bitchy things he wanted to say. Finally he decided that there would be a better time to discuss comparative morality, and started picking pistols out of cases. “Finding you was simple, doofus. You’ve got my phone, remember?”

  “Yeah, and . . . ?” I had no idea what he was babbling about.

  “For such a nerd, you are technologically stuck in 1998. I tracked my phone online using King’s tablet computer. Then I caught the bus over here.”

  “You can do that? Track a phone, I mean? And how’d you catch a bus? You don’t have any cash.”

  “Any idiot can track a cell phone. And hello, mojo? Do you ever have a plan?”

  “You know my favorite plan. I punch things. I think you like to refer to that as the tactical solution. Now we need to get our tactics the hell out of here before the cops show up. So top off the tank on Tiny here. He’s on something good.”

  “You know I don’t do drugs. Or humans,” Greg said with distaste.

  “Drink. I need you at full strength. Or more.”

  He caught the look on my face and drank a little bit from Tiny just to shut me up. A couple of minutes later, Tiny was mojo’d into thinking there had been five of us driving motorcycles, and my partner and I were headed for the parking lot.

  “What was that guy on? I feel amazing,” Greg said, then looked down like he hated admitting that.

  “I dunno, but I got a feeling we’re going to need a lot of amazing before the sun comes up.”

  Chapter 18

  We loaded the backseat of King’s pickup with guns, covering them with a layer of fast-food wrappers, and rolled north toward where we’d last seen the frat-boy vampires. I had a big pickup truck full of guns and ammo, my best friend riding shotgun, literally, and a belly full of blood. I felt pretty good about my chances for pulling this off and getting Sabrina back in good shape.

  “What’s the plan?” Greg asked.

  We stopped just inside the tree line, and the house loomed about fifty yards in front of us. It was just like it had looked on my scouting run, except all the crappy college-kid cars were all gone. When we got closer, I saw the Greek letters over the door proclaiming it as the Beta Beta Beta house, and I chuckled a little.

  “What?” Greg whispered.

  “The sign. I was so preoccupied before, with the whole trying not to burn to death thing, I didn’t catch it. Bunch of smartasses,” I said.

  He still looked puzzled, so I took my moment to be the smart one. It didn’t happen often, so I tried not to let those opportunities pass me by. “The Greek alphabet doesn’t really have a V, so the Beta is as close as it gets for ancient Greek. By calling themselves Beta Beta Beta, they’re saying, VVV. Basically they’re hanging a sign out saying ‘Vampire.’ I admire that kind of audacity, even if I plan to gut every one of them.”

  “You’re a weird dude.”

  “Says the guy with the utility belt.”

  “Touché. Now, what’s the plan?”

  I looked over the front of the building and saw no lights on anywhere. “Hard and fast. I go through the front door first and take the upstairs. These old houses usually have a big staircase in the foyer, so I’ll head up while you clear the main floor. If you finish the ground floor before I finish the second, you leapfrog me to the third. If everything’s clear, we meet in the main foyer to go downstairs together. If everything’s not clear, we converge on the trouble and make it dead. Fast.”

  “Yeah, but why do we wait to go downstairs together?”

  “Because that’s where I think they’ll be if they’re home, and there are a bunch of them. We probably can’t take them alone, so we should go together. But I don’t want to go into the boss fight until we’ve cleared the rest of the level
. Make sense?”

  “Yeah, when you make everything sound like Legend of Zelda, it makes perfect sense.” He chambered a round into his shotgun.

  I made sure I had a pistol in each hand cocked and locked, and we bolted for the front door. I blew through the door as if it were made of tissue paper and made it up the main staircase in about three long steps. I heard Greg on the first floor, knocking doors off hinges and stomping through rooms. I found myself in a long hallway with doors on both sides, like a scene from a French farce, or a horror movie. There was one door at the end of the hall, and I went for it first, smashing through the old wood like it was nothing.

  You know the drill, it’s always the door at the end of the hall. The hero spends all that time checking the rooms on the sides, and there’s nothing there. Then he gets to the door at the end of the hall and that’s where the bad guy is. Or the girl tied to a chair. Or a bomb. Or, in my case, an empty bathroom. A really disgusting fraternity bathroom at that. By the smell of things in the bathroom, Sabrina had never been there. Neither had bleach. The fixtures were all disgusting, and something in the sink smelled like Ebola, or what one would think Ebola would smell like if one could smell a virus, which I could, and had a morbid curiosity about whether or not one could catch hemorrhagic fevers, which I couldn’t.

  The other rooms on the second floor were all similarly gross, and all showed the same lack of sexy police detective presence. They were typical dorm rooms, mostly, except with a lot of discarded blood bags and no pizza boxes. The bongs and Bob Marley posters were still present in about the same ratio, as well as black-light posters and a ridiculous number of porn DVDs. Hadn’t those guys discovered the Internet yet?

  One whole room was devoted to a small marijuana-growing operation, just a dozen or so four-foot plants, but enough to make me wonder why they’d never been raided by campus police. It also made me wonder if we could get high the normal way. I’d only ever gotten a buzz from booze or stoner’s blood, so I had no idea, but was willing to try. I was just going into the last room when I heard Greg’s footsteps on the stairs.

  “Ground floor’s clear,” he whispered as he passed my floor.

  I opened the last door and found a room very different from all the others. It was neatly decorated in modern chrome and black leather, with no pipes, bongs or rolling papers to be seen. A laptop sat in the center of an IKEA desk, the only personal touch in the room.

  The screensaver caught my eye as soon as I crossed the threshold. On the screen was a picture of Abby staked to the wall in what used to be our house. Three goofy vampires posed in front of her making obscene hand gestures and stupid faces. I sat down in the chair and tapped the touchpad to wake up the computer.

  The laptop flickered to life, and a document appeared on the screen. It was a note, addressed to “BusyBody Investigations, Inc.” I assumed that was us, so I read it.

  “Dear nosy boys, if you’re reading this, then you must have gotten our little message at your home last night. She was cute, but a little noisy. Her screams as the silver went into her veins were particularly shrill. If she survived our little barbecue, I do hope you work with her on her wailing. A lower pitch would be much more appealing to the ear. If she didn’t, then my condolences. It can be so hard to lose a sibling.”

  “As for the snack, we thank you. We accept your peace offering of the lovely detective, and will agree to cease all hostilities between our organizations as long as tributes of this quality continue to arrive on a quarterly basis. You can leave them here in the house for us, and we won’t cause you boys any additional harm. There need be no further contact between our organizations as long as you fulfill your duties to us like good vassals. If you refuse, that is, of course, your choice. But please understand that any refusal will be met with my extreme displeasure and may have unfortunate repercussions on certain clerical associates of yours.”

  It was signed, “Sincerely, Professor Wideham.”

  I sat there for a long moment trying to keep my cool, then gave up. I picked up the desk chair and threw it through the wall into the next room. I flipped the bed, tossed a couple of other small pieces of furniture and ripped the door off the hinges. Greg came running in like a bat out of hell, but paused at the door when he saw I was alone.

  “Dude, is there like some invisible monster in there?” he asked from the hall.

  “No.”

  “Then would you like to explain what’s going on?”

  “No. Read it yourself.” I pointed to the computer.

  He came in, giving me a wide berth as I stood holding the two halves of the door, shoulders heaving with the effort of not going completely nuts. He read the letter, chuckled a little, and closed the lid on the laptop. “What a douche,” he said. “Now we’re totally going to kill all these assholes, right?”

  “Totally.”

  “Okay, then. Third floor’s clear. I got a new laptop out of this deal, so let’s go into the basement and kill a whole lot of bad guys.” He led the way out of the room, then looked back at where I still stood trying to get my temper under control.

  “Hey!” Greg yelled.

  My head snapped up, and I glared at him.

  “Hulk smash down here.” He pointed down the stairs, and I followed him to the basement and my chance to hurt a lot of vampires who were trying to eat my girlfriend.

  Chapter 19

  Except there weren’t a lot of vampires in the basement. In fact, there wasn’t a lot of anything in the basement, except for the ubiquitous red plastic cups found at every college party in the world. The basement had long since been turned from any lair-type use into a rec room, complete with a pool table, a foosball table, three plasma TVs on the walls, an old Pac-Man game in one corner and a full bar along one wall. A huge open space, it was littered with couches, chairs and futons, all covered in magazines and empty blood bags. I did spot a couple of Rolling Stone and High Times magazines amidst the porn, but those pinnacles of literacy were few. The only concession to lairdom was a thick metal door with bolts driven through the frame into the concrete foundation of the house. Once that door was locked from the inside, nobody would get in without a wrecking ball.

  Greg glanced around the room and immediately started tapping on walls, looking for hollow areas behind them. I tried the more direct approach. I walked over behind the bar and started flipping light switches on the wall. One turned on a blender, resulting in a spray of some truly nasty concoction that for all the world smelled like an O-negative margarita. Another, mundanely enough, turned off the lights, causing Greg to trip over an ottoman and swear at me. I enjoyed that so much I did it a couple more times just for fun.

  The third switch was the charm. As soon as I flipped it, servos in the door swung it shut and automatically locked the bolts. All the lights in the room went red, making it very difficult for humans to see, but no problem for those of us with undead eyes. The Pac-Man game dropped into the floor on an invisible lift, and a tunnel was revealed behind it.

  “I think we should go that way,” I said, leaning carefully on the bar to avoid getting my elbows in the grossness there.

  “Show-off,” Greg muttered, unclipping a flashlight from his utility belt.

  “You’re the one with a utility belt, but I’m the show-off?” I followed him into the tunnel.

  “If the fangs fit, pal.”

  “That doesn’t even make any sense. Sorry, I’m worried, and I’m being a dick.”

  “I’m used to it. You’re always kind of a dick. But I forgive you,” Greg said.

  I crossed into the tunnel, then froze as the wall slid shut behind me. I looked around for a few seconds, but couldn’t find a switch to open the door again.

  Greg and I exchanged a look.

  I shrugged. “Onward and downward?”

  My partner, decidedly more grumpy with our escape route cut off, nodded tersely and started down the tunnel.

  “Wait!” I hissed.

  Greg stopped cold. “What?”r />
  “What if there are booby traps?” I was suddenly very interested in the walls and floor of the tunnel.

  “What makes you think there are booby traps?”

  “These guys have lived up to every stereotype we’ve been able to think of so far, right?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Okay, think about it. Can you imagine having a secret lair with tunnels underneath it?”

  The look on his face told me I’d just tapped into the pleasure centers of his brain.

  “Okay, now imagine you have a lair with tunnels. Got that image?” From his little smile, his tunnels were full of Playboy Bunnies. “Now, can you imagine any scenario in which you would not booby-trap those tunnels?”

  His smile dropped like Enron stock.

  “We gotta be careful. There’s no way these tunnels aren’t booby-trapped,” he said, just as if it had been his idea. He moved forward, slower this time, playing his flashlight along the walls and floor.

  I shook my head and followed. I wasn’t a huge fan of small spaces, which was why I’d never been much for the coffin stereotype. Give me a California King bed and a vaulted ceiling any day. Skulking along an old tunnel with a ceiling just barely high enough for me to stand upright was nowhere on my list of fun things to do.

  The tunnel was dry, at least, and there weren’t any apparent spiders. I wasn’t afraid of them. I just didn’t like them. What did anything need that many legs for, anyway?

  It was dark, but Greg had a couple of those snap-and-shake glow sticks in his utility belt. He handed me one, so we each had some light. The floor was packed red clay and looked old, like it had been there a lot longer than the house. I ran my fingers along the rough brickwork and tried to figure out what the place had been before the stoners had made it into their lair.

  As if he’d read my mind, Greg whispered, “Underground Railroad.”

  It made perfect sense to me. There were abandoned cellars and passageways all through the South left over from the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, as my redneck Uncle Morris called it. Morris was one of those guys who still used racial epithets in casual conversation and had a confederate flag flying in front of his trailer. He wasn’t my favorite uncle by any stretch, but as the saying went, you could pick your nose, but you couldn’t pick your family. I was wondering what had ever happened to Uncle Morris when Greg froze in front of me, one hand up, fist closed in a “stop” gesture.