Hard Day's Knight (Black Knight Chronicles)

by John G. Hartness

  “I was worried, my dear, but I feel much better now that you’re here.” Mike’s accent had slipped, and a little of the old South he grew up in had dropped into his words as he gave the pretty witch a brief, and chaste, hug. Good to know my old friend was celibate, but not blind. “These are my friends, Jimmy and Greg.” He pointed to each of us in turn, and I stepped forward to shake her hand.

  I was surprised when she pulled back, reaching quickly inside her sweater to drop a pentagram necklace out into view. It began to glow, and I took a quick step back. “Hey now, no need to get all magical in my den, lady.” I exclaimed.

  “I know you, vampire.” She said, and when I looked up at her eyes, they were a cold blue, staring right into my soul. If I had one left. The jury’s been out on that one for a while.

  “Nope, pretty sure we’ve never met.” I replied. “But if you want to get together sometime for a quick bite, just let me know.” I bared a little fang at her, and paid close attention to where Greg was moving behind me. I heard his pistol clear the holster and knew that he had my back. I guessed he was still in the kitchen with the gun hidden below the counter. As long as I kept her attention on me, my partner could keep her covered. “Mike, you want to explain to Mrs. Broomstick here that we’re the good guys?”

  “It’s true, Anna. These boys have been friends of mine since before I entered the seminary. I’ve known them since we were boys in school together, and they’re good lads. They have their problems, sure, but good lads nonetheless.”

  “Mike,” the witch said, keeping her voice level and her eyes locked on me, carefully not looking in my eyes. “This good lad, as you call him, is a vampire.”

  “And you’re a witch,” I said. “And by the way, you might as well look me in the eye, our mojo doesn’t work like that. And it doesn’t work at all with your necklace in the way. Now can we get past our little stereotypes and species bias and work together to deal with the body-snatching demon and the zombie infestation?” I went back to my spot on the couch and took a seat. Anna followed me with her eyes, then made her way to the armchair and sat facing me. Obviously she knew I was a vampire, but it looked like Greg’s status as a bloodsucking fiend was as yet unknown to our new teammate.

  “So are we good?” I asked as she got settled. “We wouldn’t have called you over here, to our home, unless we thought we could trust you, and unless we needed you. Mike was pretty convincing on the first count, and the situation pretty much covers the second.”

  “What’s the situation?” She asked, pulling a Macbook out of her backpack. “Is there Wi-Fi here?”

  “Yes,” said Greg from where he suddenly stood right behind her chair. I almost fell off the couch laughing as Anna jumped about eight feet straight up. Obviously she really didn’t know that Greg was a vampire, and his vamp-speed to right behind her got the desired reaction.

  “The password is TruBlood. Capital T, capital B.” He said as she glared at him. I shot him a look, too, but that was just for picking a dorky password.

  “Seriously? You’re just going to Wikipedia ‘zombies’ or something? Tubby over there coulda managed that without too much prodding.” I leaned back on the couch, not just to get further away from her glowing necklace, but also because I think she might have caught me checking her out. Leave me alone; I’m not dead. Well, I am dead, but I’m not dead and blind.

  “I’m not just going to Wikipedia it. I have a group of friends I can contact online that may have some firsthand knowledge of what we’re working on.”

  “You know people who have their own pet zombies?” I marveled. “Now that’s cool.”

  She sat there for a few minutes typing and muttering to herself and generally looking way hotter than any woman that had been in our apartment in decades. Or ever, for that matter. After a couple of “hmmms” and the odd “mmmm-mmmm,” I got bored and went to the fridge for a snack. Greg immediately plopped down in my seat on the couch and yelled over to me “You keep eating this late at night, you’re gonna get fat!”

  “We can’t get fat, dork. You want anything?”

  “Yeah, throw me a bag of B-Neg.” I tossed him the bag and hopped up on the bar that overlooked the living room, my own blood bag in hand.

  “Either of you guys want anything to drink?” I asked our guests. “We don’t have any food, for obvious reasons, but we’ve got a couple Cokes…”

  “Not so much,” Greg corrected.

  “Okay,” I went on, “we had a couple Cokes, but we’ve got beer, ginger ale, and a lot of booze. There might even be some orange juice left.”

  “Again, not so much,” chimed in my gluttonous partner.

  “Jesus Christ! Do you ever replace what you drink?”

  “Heh heh. Nah, I usually count on the marrow to do that for me.” We both laughed, because sophomoric vamp humor never goes out of style. It’s like a fart joke, only different.

  “Anyway, either of you want a drink?” Anna and Mike replied in the negative, so Greg and I drank our blood in silence while Anna worked. Mike looked a little unhappy about us drinking in front of his friend, but hey, she knew what we were, no point in hiding it. Cold blood is kinda flat tasting, but it’s better than room temperature. Obviously it tastes better at body temp, but I didn’t want to offend Greg again by going off to hunt. And we did have work to do. So it was O-positive flavored with plastic and anticoagulants for me. Yippee.

  While Anna was hacking away, I looked over at Mike. “Hey, Dad?”

  “Yes, Jimmy?”

  “Did you ever find anything more out from the girl?”

  “The girl?”

  “You remember, little girl, possessed by a demon, threatened our client with a death curse, got us into this whole mess?”

  “Oh yes. Michelle was her name. What do you want to know?”

  “Well, let’s start with how she was planning on cursing Tommy Harris and his whole family into oblivion.”

  “Oh that.” Mike actually sounded amused. “That was actually a mistake.”

  “Huh?”

  “It was a mistake.”

  “I heard you, I just didn’t get it. What do you mean, a mistake? She didn’t mean to curse him?”

  “Oh, no! She definitely meant to curse him, she just didn’t know how.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The little girl had dabbled in some witchcraft, but was by no means a skilled enough spellcaster to actually make a curse stick.”

  “So she didn’t curse Tommy?”

  “Not with anything meaningful, no.”

  “So he was never in any danger?”

  “Not until you confronted the possessed child with him in tow, no.”

  “Great. I love my life. So this little girl just happened to be the one possessed, and it really has nothing to do with our case at all?”

  “Well, it may certainly be the case that her experimentation with magic made her more attractive to outside influence, but that is generally the case.”

  “So this was all just a mistake, and we never should have gotten involved in the first place?”

  “Basically, yes.”

  “Story of my life.” I went for another drink and sat down on the couch to wait for the hacker witch to finish. I had plenty more questions for Mike, I just didn’t think I could handle any more good news.

  It was the better part of an hour before Anna looked back up from her computer. “Oh, are you all still here?” She asked, blinking rapidly like someone waking up from a nap.

  “We live here. Where would we have gone?” I asked, not gently. “We’re waiting on you to give us instructions on how to send zombies back to Hell.”

  “Actually, James, we want to be very careful about that. We only want to send the inhabiting souls back to Hell. The bodies we very much would like to return to their resting places.” Mike corrected me.

  “Fair enough, Padre. But I’m not digging. I didn’t get this manicure just to dig graves.” I was half-joking. I’ve never had a m
anicure. But I was serious about the no digging part.

  “Okay, here’s what I’ve got.” Anna stood up in front of the television, which got Greg’s attention. He threw an Xbox controller at her, which she caught and winged right back at him. Not bad, I thought. “It sounds like your guesses were right on as to what happened to raise these dead bodies. The souls that were raised and locked into the kidnapped girls were banished from their hosts, but not sent back to Hell. So they gravitated to the nearest empty vessels, and thus we ended up with a bunch of zombies.”

  “Yeah, we got that part.” I muttered.

  “So now,” she went on, shooting me a dagger glare, “we must gather all the zombies in one place and banish their spirits. This will empty the vessels, returning them to their previously inert state, and send the possessing spirits back to their last plane of existence.”

  I got a little lost after the inherent pee joke in “empty the vessels,” so I raised my hand. “So we send them back to Hell and the dead guys go back to being dead?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We knew that. You got a plan as to how?” I was starting to get irritated. I mean, hot is one thing, but we’d just wasted an hour and a half of a rapidly dwindling night and we didn’t know anything more than we had before this chickadee got here.

  “Yes. My coven is gathering at the fountain in Marshall Park. If we can get all the zombies there by dawn, we can banish the spirits in a sunrise ceremony.” I choked a little at the s-word, but she didn’t even slow down. “So now we go get the zombies, incapacitate them, and drop them at the park with my coven. They can bind the creatures long enough for us to exorcise them, for lack of a better term.” She looked apologetically at Mike, who gave a little nod. No one wanted him to think we were stepping on his theological turf, but he wasn’t terribly well-equipped for this sort of thing, dogma-wise.

  “Alright, that sounds like a plan. A crappy one that will probably end up with some of your coven having their brains eaten, but it’s the best one we have. Any idea how to find these zombies?” I asked.

  “I’m on that one,” Greg piped up. “I’ve been following police reports on my laptop,” which really impressed me, since I thought he’d just been messing around on FaceBook the whole time. “and it seems like the zombies are all converging on one spot. I don’t have enough data yet to figure out where that is, but I think I can use the info I do have to give us a best guess as to where to go.”

  I raised my hand. “Hey Professor Pugsley, do I even want to try to understand how you’re doing that, or should I just wait until you give me the signal and then hit something really hard?”

  “Let’s all play to our strengths. I’ll do the thinking, Mike will do the driving, Anna will do the banishing and you do the punching.”

  “Sounds good to me. Give me a minute to gear up and I’ll be right with you.” I headed over to the coat closet but stopped cold at Mike’s voice.

  “Remember, no guns.” I turned around almost slowly enough to be a parody of myself, and looked at him.

  “Why not, exactly? I understood the whole ‘no killing the little girls’ rule, because regardless of my membership in the Walking Dead Society, I’m not a monster. But Mike, these guys are already dead. It’s not like they’re going to get upset about it.”

  “First, you technically are a monster. There are movies and everything. Secondly, I cannot allow you to defile the dead in my presence. I am a man of the cloth, after all.” He crossed his arms and gave me his best priestly gaze. The priestly gaze works much better on people who didn’t steal licorice from the corner drugstore with you when you were seven.

  “I won’t hold your career decisions against you if you don’t hold mine against me. And as much as I love you, Mikey, I’m taking the shotgun for the zombies. Get over it.”

  “Then I’m not driving.”

  “Fine, we’ll take Greg’s car.” I caught sight of Greg out of the corner of my eye gesturing wildly at me, but I ignored him. As usual, it turned out to be a bad idea.

  “Greg’s car isn’t here. You left it at the bowling alley, where it has doubtless been towed to the police impound lot by now.” Crap. I hate it when other people are right. Because it usually means that I’m wrong. And because it happens so much of the time. So now I had to use non-lethal methods to subdue a dozen dead guys, and I had to figure out how to get Greg’s car out of hock without ending up arrested. Again.

  I might have stomped around the room cursing for a minute or two before I said anything intelligible again. “Alright,” I said when I ran out of euphemisms. “We’ll do it your way. I’ll leave the shotgun, but can I at least take the cricket bat? I bought it special just in case I ever got the chance to whack a zombie with it.”

  “And you have the audacity to call me a dork.” Greg said from behind me.

  “Dude, you still wear Underoos. Your geek-fu is so much stronger than mine it’s ridiculous. You are the Mister Miyagi of geek-fu. You are the geek ninja. You are the first person in history to be granted a P.H.Geek from Oxdork University.”

  “I get it. Here’s your bat.” And he poked me in the stomach with it as he walked to the stairs. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and gestured grandly to Anna for her to precede him. “To the car, madam?”

  “You first, vampire.” Wow, not only was she a witch, but she was a witch with good taste in men. Greg sagged like a kid who’s just dropped his favorite G.I. Joe down the well. He trudged up the stairs, head hanging low. He was so disappointed that his gallantry went unappreciated that he forgot his cape. I grabbed it and followed him up the stairs to Mike’s car. According to my figures we had a pile of zombies to capture and banish, and only about three hours to do it in.

  Chapter 23

  Greg’s math was better than I’d ever willingly give him credit for – we found the first set of zombies just about fifteen minutes after we left our place. The nearest church had lost three corpses, all dead less than a month. They were decidedly gross, even with the whole embalming thing. That process is really only designed to make people look good for a few days. After that, it starts to get very George Romero very quickly. At least they had all their parts. I don’t know if I could have dealt with pieces falling off all around me.

  Anna had briefed me on her plan on the way, so I had a vague idea of what I was supposed to do. It pretty much boiled down to hitting things, so I was okay with that. It had been a rough couple of nights, and I didn’t mind the idea of some mindless violence. As the car stopped I took stock of the situation. We had three corpses all shambling along like, well, zombies, all walking through a strip mall parking lot on the east side of town. With it being a Saturday night, passing them off as drunks might be pretty easy, but the fact that there was a police substation in the strip mall complicated things a little.

  Mike and Greg went into the cop shop with a couple boxes of Krispy Kremes to make sure they got the undivided attention of the constabulary, then Greg put the mental whammy on them while Anna and I took care of the zombie wrangling. The first one was really easy, we just put handcuffs on him, tied his feet together, and that was that. No fight, no attempted eating of brains, nothing. After the first one, though, they apparently got the idea that we were going to try and block them from their destination, so they decided to fight back. I had one handcuff on the second zombie, a middle-aged guy who was a little on the heavy side if I’m being particularly kind, when all hell broke loose. His eyes glowed, and he went from shambling, slow 70s-era zombie to 28 Days Later butt-kicking monster in a split second.

  “Look out!” I yelled to Anna as the dead guy threw a haymaker that would have broken my jaw if it had connected. I got out of the way, and backed into the arms of the third zombie, a woman who was probably attractive in life, which made it all the worse that she’d been messed up enough to obviously need a closed casket. She grabbed my arms and the guy zombie put one hand on my throat. He drew back with a huge fist, and I dropped out of the way just
in time to keep him from smashing my face flat. He connected squarely with the woman zombie, and she flew across two parking spaces and fetched up against the side of a Toyota minivan.

  “Throw me the bat!” I screamed as I jumped on the hood of a parked car to avoid the guy’s next punch. He jumped right up behind me, but I had the bat by them and clocked him a solid shot to the left temple. I was trying to heed Mike’s words about not defiling the corpses, but it was gonna be hard if they were this intent on defiling me first. I heard Anna scream and looked over to see her running toward our car with the female zombie in hot pursuit. I threw the bat as hard as I could and got a “thunk!” on impact that echoed across the parking lot. The female zombie went down hard, and I looked around to find where the guy I decked had fallen.