by J. R. Rain
“Mr. Dingles. She brings that damn thing wherever we go,” growled Tony. He looked back at me. “Pisses on everything.”
“They allow pets on board?”
“Course not. I’m a gambler, remember? Anyway, you really gonna pay three Gs?”
“You bet,” I said.
“You must really want that box.”
“It was my mama’s,” I lied.
He nodded. “I think Mama’s gift box might be worth closer to four Gs.”
I rolled my eyes. “Gamblers always push their luck. Just show me the box and we’ll talk.”
“Hang on, let me make sure my honey is decent.”
He had just cracked the door open when something red, white, and furry came flying through the opening.
Mr. Dingles, I presumed.
Chapter Twelve
The cute got ugly, fast.
As Tony stumbled back into the hallway, the little poodle used the man’s falling body as a sort of fleshy ramp. Yes, I could have intervened—and, yes, I probably could have stopped what would turn out to be a royal mess. Except I didn’t have a clue what the hell was happening. One moment Tony was opening the door, and the next he was falling backward with Mr. Dingles attached to his throat.
That’s when I dashed forward, swatting the thing away, except when Mr. Dingles went flying, it took most of Tony’s throat with him.
Oops.
Tony screamed as blood poured between his fingers, but it was more like a gurgling. Turns out the dog had clamped on to one of the carotid arteries. I knew this because I’d severed a few in my time. I also knew this because of the sheer amount of blood pumping through the man’s fingers.
It took every bit of my willpower not to ram my own mouth down into the mess and have a hearty snack. But I’m not that way anymore. I’m a changed man. Very changed.
I perceived Parker’s mental scream close behind me, and she undoubtedly sensed my anger at her disobeying my orders and following me.
“Holy shit!” shouted Stevie.
He backed away even as Parker ran forward. Too damn brave for her own good.
“Stay back,” I said.
She came forward anyway, of course. “Give me your shirt, Spider!”
I did, pulling it over my head, knowing it would do little good. Already, the big guy was choking on his own blood, which was undoubtedly pouring into his lungs.
So much blood, I thought.
Parker must have seen the look in my eye. She shielded the man with her body as she shoved my T-shirt deep into his neck. One thing about Parker, she was cool under pressure. How the daughter of a cult leader—and once possessed by one of the nastiest entities I’d ever seen—was so calm and collected, I didn’t know. But it probably said more about her inner strength than anything else.
Tony was in shock. Admittedly, so was I. The last thing I was expecting to see was this much blood. This much sweet, beautiful, perfect blood.
Yes, I had only gone to get the box back. I wasn’t prepared for...this.
I nearly lost it. I nearly shoved Parker out of the way. I nearly buried my face in that beautiful gushing wound—and I just might have—when I happened to see something that made even a ravenous vampire momentarily forget about a gushing neck wound.
The white poodle was slowly picking itself up off the floor. A white poodle that I had flung hard enough against the wall to break every vertebrae in its body a dozen times over. A white poodle that even now was turning to regard me with dead, black eyes.
Scratch that...reddish eyes.
Its body was badly broken. Hell, judging by the way the little booger lurched sideways—and the way its front legs seemed to trot along faster than its hind legs—I would have guessed it was being piloted by two different brains. Broken bones, including a shattered spine, pushed out against its skin and fur. In a few instances, slivers of whitish bone poked out through the fur itself.
Either way, the little guy had no business being alive. It also wasn’t going anywhere fast. Not with that mangled body. In front of me, Tony continued gurgling and coughing. Now his legs were kicking as Parker, God bless her soul, did her best to calm him. My once-nice T-shirt was soaked through and through. That my stomach growled at this moment was further proof that, despite my best efforts otherwise, I was still very much a ghoul.
Down the hallway, the little dog continued dragging its broken body toward us, its red eyes full of not pain but hate.
I was having a very bad feeling about all of this. Dogs were supposed to be man’s best friend, but nobody ever said anything about vampire’s best friend.
The kicking, gurgling, dying man was beginning to attract attention. Folks were beginning to crowd on both sides of the hallway. I heard running feet, gasps, whispers, someone asking if we needed any help. One woman screamed. Then another.
“A little too much to drink,” Parker said to them, although that didn’t really explain the blood.
I looked over my shoulder and into the open cabin door. I saw two things: the first was the box lying on the carpet, its lid open. The finger was there, but not all of it. A bit of it had been nibbled away. My guess...Mr. Dingles had himself a little snack.
The other thing I saw was Tony’s “honey.” She’d been lying in a pool of her own blood, her neck equally torn open, blood having cascaded down the front of her blouse. She looked dead. In fact, I’m sure she was mostly dead.
Except she kicked once, twice, then rolled over slowly.
As the murmurs in the hallway were turning to horrified gasps and shouts, the dead woman pushed herself up to her feet, turned and looked at me blankly, then lurched in my direction.
Chapter Thirteen
You could say one thing about Tony’s lady: she sure knew how to clear a room.
In life, she probably appealed to wiseguys like Tony, sporting surgically enhanced boobs, a four-hundred-dollar hairstyle, and eyebrows that came from a little round canister. Now that she was dead, though, her tanning booth complexion had gone a shade of green. She opened her mouth to whine or scream or laugh, but only a few dried flecks of blood flew out.
There were screams, though, as most of the women and half of the men in the hallway realized they were looking at something unnatural and monstrous.
She stared at me with eyes like black marbles. Maybe she believed I’d done something to her Tony. I backed away and held up my palms, trying unsuccessfully to look innocent.
The hallway was nearly abandoned now, with only Parker sticking around to see how this turned out. I wasn’t sure whether it was due to loyalty or a macabre scientific interest in whether a vampire could be killed by a zombie.
Neither, you fool, she projected my way.
Whatever emotion she felt for me was far too complex to decode. A definite mix of annoyance, attraction, repugnance, and...love?
I didn’t have time to worry about that at the moment, because Tony’s sweetheart was bearing down on me, her arms lifting as if to hug me. I couldn’t tell whether she was grinning or snarling. The gash in her neck leaked a little, but I had no desire to drink from it. There was something tainted and unwholesome about her fluids, a corruption deeper than the grave.
“Look,” I said to it. “We can work this out.”
She didn’t appear to be listening, or maybe her hunger was greater than her hearing. To make matters worse, Mr. Dingles was dragging himself toward me, his jaws clacking hungrily.
Parker took two running steps toward the dog and launched her foot into it like a soccer player. The dog gave a yip and tumbled head over tail about fifteen feet down the corridor.
“That qualifies as ‘cruelty to animals,’” I said. “You know the rules of horror movies. Kill as many humans as you want, but never hurt the dog.”
“I’m not the one that slammed it into the wall,” she pointed out. “Plus it’s a zombie now.”
I didn’t have time to craft a snappy comeback because Mrs. Tony reached out her long fingernails as if she wa
nted to pluck my eyeballs like grapes and make a fruit salad out of my face.
I ducked and sent a karate chop into her breastbone. At one time in my life, I wouldn’t have hit a woman—even a staggering, brain-munching zombie female—but those days were long gone. In my decades of undeath, I’d encountered witches, harpies, shrews, and demonesses of every stripe, and nothing was as vicious as a woman who thought you were depriving her of something she wanted.
In this case, I was depriving her of my tasty flesh, and she was pissed. I brought another chop down on the back of her neck and that’s when I discovered Mr. Dingles had done quite a job on her throat, because her head flew off and plopped onto the floor, rolling down the hall like a bowling ball.
“Jesus, Spider,” Parker said. “You play for keeps, don’t you?”
I let her corpse fall, wiping my hands on my pants. An alarm sounded somewhere on the deck above us, and I knew the ship’s security would be responding any second now. After the little showdown over the gun, I doubt they’d let me off so easily this time. A random gunshot was one thing, but getting caught with two corpses was another.
“We’d better get out of here,” I said.
Parker must have read my mind—I was still having a hard time getting used to that—and she leaped over the woman zombie’s corpse into their cabin. She scooped up the remnants of the finger and held it up, marveling at the gnarly relic.
I was ready to flee myself, although I had little chance of making a subtle exit. I was shirtless and covered in blood, and to make matters worse, the ripe smell of all that rich, sweet fluid had hardened my fangs. They’d extended to full length, a good two inches past my lower lip.
This would be really hard to explain.
So getting the hell out of there was not just a good idea, it was a survival instinct. But just as I was gearing up to make a fast exit, something clamped around my ankle.
I looked down to see Tony grinning up at me with that same hungry look his wife had worn.
“Tony, I know you won’t believe this,” I said. “But you’re dead and you’ve turned into a zombie. You want to eat me, but I know that’s not the real you. So nothing personal, okay?”
His eyes clouded in confusion for a moment, but then he pulled his face close to my calf, opening wide and revealing four gold fillings. I didn’t give him time to sample the buffet. I simply raised my free leg and stomped down hard on his head, driving it against the deck. It shattered like a melon, squirting purple and gray goo everywhere, including all over my shoe.
I was going to have a heck of a time explaining all this to my dry cleaner. I grabbed my T-shirt from where it had been trying to stem Tony’s wound.
“Life’s funny,” Parker said.
“You have a strange sense of humor,” I said.
“One minute we’re trying to save him and the next you’re trying to kill him.”
“A man’s got to ride the changing tide,” I said. I don’t know if Clint Eastwood ever used that line, but he was welcome to it if he wanted.
But Mr. Dingles wasn’t down for the count. He slapped his little paws on the deck, trying to get a grip. His tail whipped back and forth, broken in four places, as his tongue flicked across his blood-covered snout.
I didn’t have the heart to finish the little guy off. After all, he was just responding to the call of nature, something I could appreciate.
The instant Parker dropped the finger into the box and clamped down on the lid, Mr. Dingles stopped in his tracks. Interesting. As we stood looking down in amazement, Tony and his woman went from living dead to just plain old dead, skin no longer green. Very, very interesting.
“Okay, then,” I said, as the security force rumbled toward us from down the hall. “Two things.”
“Yes?” Parker said.
“First, nobody’s going to buy our zombie-attack self-defense story.”
“And the second?”
“The box somehow negates the power of the nzambi finger.”
“Information that might come in handy,” she said.
“Ouch,” I said.
She gave me a wary appraisal. “Did you get hurt?”
“No, but that pun was painful. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
And we did.
Chapter Fourteen
We didn’t go back to our cabin.
Instead, we headed the opposite direction of the advancing security guards—who didn’t give pursuit as they were undoubtedly distracted by the royal mess they had on their hands—Parker and I headed up.
She hung on to me as I scaled the thirty-foot wall that ran between hallways. Few would have seen us. And if they had, we would have been a blur.
We found ourselves on an empty platform looking out over the ship. A smokestack rose next to us, belching gray steam. I grabbed Parker’s hand and led her around an air vent and out of sight of anyone above.
“Wait here,” I said. “And this time, do what I say.”
“Wait...what?”
“Exactly,” I said and headed back the way we’d come, this time stopping one floor above. I put a shoulder into the first cabin door I came across and lucked out. It was empty. That’s where my luck ended. Nothing but women’s clothing. Dammit. I continued searching through their suitcases and finally pulled out an oversized shirt that must have been used for a nightgown.
I could live with the blood splatter on my jeans. I threw on the shirt even as I scaled back up the wall. Yeah, don’t ask me how.
Now wearing a clean thermal and smelling slightly of old woman’s perfume and sitting once again with Parker, I wasn’t even out of breath. Yeah, I’m a freak.
“That was quick,” said Parker, eyeing the shirt.
“I kill even quicker. At least, back in the day.”
“Thanks for that worthless piece of information, Spider. So what the hell are we going to do?” For the first time, perhaps ever, I saw that Parker was losing it. She was shaking badly, and I didn’t blame her. We had just witnessed one hell of a frightful scene. Also, I reminded myself that, despite the shit she had been through in her life, very few had ever—and will ever, hopefully—see the walking dead. And she was, after all, only eighteen years old.
I was about to answer her when I saw that she didn’t really need words. No, she needed something else and so I pulled her in close and held her tight as the fan behind us clicked on, humming gently, all while a steady stream of shouts reached us from below.
We sat like that for a long time.
* * *
We were looking down on what amounted to a crime scene.
The various security personnel appeared perplexed. Hell, I was perplexed, too. Parker had gotten hold of herself, literally—her arms wrapped around her thighs and calves, her knees pulled all the way up to her chin. A feat of flexibility that I couldn’t have pulled off even if I’d been undead for a thousand years.
“Those people were zombies,” she said after a long moment.
I had my eye out for Demande and his gang. So far, the rat bastard hadn’t made an appearance. “I reckon so.”
“But how?”
“The blackest magic. Not my specialty.”
She nodded. My answer would have to do. So far, the bodies hadn’t been removed. I wondered what would happen if I opened the ornate box, exposing the cursed finger. Would those infected live again? Good question.
I grabbed the box and, as Parker was about to lodge a protest, opened it.
Shouts erupted. Men poured out of the side hallway where the action had gone down, where Tony had met his end thanks to Mr. Dingles. One of them had moved. Or twitched. Maybe Mr. Dingles himself had lurched up on its little, bloody paws.
I snapped the box shut.
The commotion seemed to die down. But there was still a lot of shouting and some weeping. And one security officer who sported a ponytail was still running down the length of the ship. I nearly smiled. Okay, I did smile. Damn funny. What can I say? Humans are funny.
/> “Why did you do that?” she asked.
“An experiment. To see what, in fact, we’re dealing with.”
“And what are we dealing with?”
I considered how quickly the zombism had spread...first from Mr. Dingles, then to Tony’s woman, then to Tony. Within minutes all had been infected. At least, within minutes Tony had been infected. I had no reason to doubt his honey, and perhaps even the dog, had been infected just as quickly. Had they each gone on to bite a few more people, who had gone on to bite a few more…
Jesus, I thought. The whole damn ship might have been infected within a day or two. Or, hell, hours. Just like Stevie had warned us.
Parker picked up on my thoughts. “So something powerful.”
“Damn powerful.”
“Maybe we should toss it in the ocean.”
I considered it. Strange as it might seem, I had no reason to doubt that a curious grouper might nibble on the finger should the lid spill open, or the wood deteriorate. The finger was undead, that much was sure. The dog had been infected. I had no reason to believe that fish wouldn’t be the same.
“You can’t be serious?” said Parker, picking up on my chain of thoughts.
“It’s a possibility,” I said.
“But a zombie marlin?”
I shrugged. “Unlikely, admittedly, but still a possibility.”
“So no throwing it in the ocean.”
“Can’t risk it. And what if a Great White Shark got it? Jaws from hell.”
“So what do we do with it?”
I didn’t know. And with mine and Parker’s newfound telepathic communication, I didn’t have to tell her. She sensed it from me. Indeed, I had no clue, but I think I had a better question.
I grabbed her hand, helped her onto my back, and scuttled down to our deck, then we hurried to our cabin, glad that the hallway was relatively empty. To disguise my plan, I thought about the blood that had been spilled in the hallway. Blood tends to distract me. So we were in the abandoned cabin before I let her read my mind again.
