Hard Day's Knight (Black Knight Chronicles)

by John G. Hartness

  Except he hadn’t fallen. He was standing right behind me, and as I turned he picked me up over his head like a bad pro wrestling show from the 80s and tossed me about twenty feet. I stopped when I went through the windshield of a parked bakery van, and slowly disentangled myself from the gearshift and front seat. I got out of the van and joined Anna back near our car.

  “Okay, this is not what I had in mind.” She said as 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 just 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. Mike and Greg had made it out of the police station, but were looking around confused at the chaos in the parking lot. They hadn’t gotten the message that there was nothing simple about our simple little operation.

  I got to the back of the car and yelled for Greg “Get over here, tubby! I need backup!” He hustled over and I handed him a 12-gauge and an aluminum baseball bat. “Knees and elbows. We want the demons to stay locked in the bodies but unable to move.”

  “But Mike said…”

  “Mike doesn’t get a vote anymore. 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. Just 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.

  “Let’s do this.” Somehow he can find the cliché in any situation, no matter how freshly ridiculous. I mean, here we are in a strip mall parking lot fighting zombies with a Catholic priest and a witch, and he still trots out “Let’s do this.” The man is simply amazing.

  We came out from behind the car and headed toward the zombies, who had abandoned us when we stopped fighting and returned to their original course. Naturally this put them more than halfway across the parking lot and almost to the entrance of a fast food restaurant, so we were about to shoot a couple of walking corpses right in front of PlayLand, but that couldn’t be helped.

  I took out the knees on the woman zombie (Greg wouldn’t shoot a woman, not even a dead one, so I didn’t bother making him try. Me, I’ll open fire pretty quickly on anything, living or dead, that tries to kill me and even looks at me like it might eat my brain) and then broke both her arms at the elbows with my bat. Greg did the same with the guy zombie, and we quickly bound them hand and foot and toted them back to the car. I hoped the kids in the window weren’t too scarred by what they’d seen, but that’s what happens when you’re out past your bedtime.

  We got back to the car and deposited our cargo, but noticed something was missing. Something like both our friends and the third zombie. I heard a shouted Bible verse from the back of the strip mall and 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 shambling pile of grave dirt while Greg tended to the wounded.

  Some year I’m going to sign up for a first aid class that meets at night so I can play medic while Greg plays linebacker. But this obviously ain’t that year. I got the dead guy off of 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 moving fast, that’s pretty hard. I got one elbow, but he got a couple of good shots in before I finally connected with a kneecap. With nothing holding the leg in the right position, he went down like, well, like a corpse. I took a couple extra minutes to break his other knee and elbow, then tossed him over a shoulder and took him back to where his buddies were writhing around.

  You also can’t really knock a zombie unconscious, either, so they were groaning and biting and generally being really annoying dead people. I walked over to the local supermarket and got a roll of duct tape to deal with our packages, 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 happier I was going to put Xanax in his blood bags.

  So we stood there, panting and bruised, with more than a handful of graveyard dirt and flaky zombie-flesh hanging off our clothes, and took a look around at the mess. We had managed to only break a half-dozen cars or so, which I thought was a pretty good record for us. That’s when I stumbled upon a huge hole in our plan. We had neglected to address how we were going to carry the zombies around until we could banish them. Anna said she could perform the spell, but even with her whole coven backing her up, it would be a one-time thing. So we needed some way to get all the zombies back to our place while simultaneously chasing down the rest of the zombies. And after that fight, none of us had any desire to split up. So I did what you do in these situations – I called a cab.

  It took a little explaining and a folded hundred-dollar bill, but I got the cabbie to agree to take our three “drunk friends” to the park and deposit them on the sidewalk away from the police station. I told him that we had plenty of partying planned for the night, and if he’d keep his mouth shut and his cell phone on, he could make almost a grand by the time 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 prank.

  Chapter 24

  The rest of the zombie encounters went much like the first, with the exception of one moderately amusing scene that had us chasing the last dead dude in the car with Greg hanging out the window playing mailbox baseball with his spine. I know, I know, we weren’t supposed to defile the dead, but we kept the brain-eater alive, and Mike had fallen asleep in the back seat long before we got to the last zombie. We tossed him 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.

  So we had about an hour of night left when we rolled up to join the witches in banishing a passel of angry spirits back to Hell and leave us with eleven corpses in a public park that happened to be less than a block from the police headquarters. 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 back seat, 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, and Anna made thirteen. She explained to us that thirteen was a number of power, like three, seven and nine. I didn’t bother to ask, because I really didn’t care. I was tired, covered in all kinds of things that fell off dead people, and had broken and healed ribs twice in one night, and once even had to heal an arm. So that left me hungry, grumpy and smelly – not a good combo for a vampire meeting a dozen witches for the first time.

  “So, Anna,” I tried to sound cheerful but probably failed miserably. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend
s?” 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 the most harmless impression.

  “No, vampire, I am not.” Her voice was cold, and I saw Greg’s face fall. Seems like we were good enough to hunt zombies with, but not good enough to take home to the coven. Greg falls in love with the weather girl, so I wasn’t surprised that he’d developed a monster crush on Anna in just 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 nice.

  “Fair enough, witchy-poo. Where do you want your dead guy?” I asked, shooting her a dirty look. She at least 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. The circle wasn’t complete, there was about a three-foot opening in the side where I guess I was supposed to go in and drop the zombie. The circle was drawn on the concrete plaza in multi-colored 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. I guessed that once I had put the zombie in the right place, they planned to close the circle and complete the banishing ritual. As I got almost to the edge of the circle, something felt out of kilter, and I dropped the corpse on the ground.

  “I don’t think so. Your witches can put him in there. I don’t want to put his head where his feet should be, you know.” I took a couple of steps away from the circle and turned so that I could see most of the witches. I saw Greg out of the corner of my eye, and 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.

  Anna spoke from behind me. “Don’t you trust us, vampire?” Her voice had a mocking lilt to it that I didn’t like. Come to think of it, I can’t recall a mocking lilt that I’ve ever liked. So maybe it’s just an anti-lilt prejudice I have, but I think it’s more than that.

  “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 really didn’t like the way she emphasized “tonight,” but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  “Good idea, Anna. These boys are under my protection, and I don’t think you and yours want to bring down my disappointment, do you?” We all turned at Mike’s voice, and I swear it looked like my friend had a glowing halo around him. When he walked down to stand next to me I thought it might have just been a street light behind him, but I wasn’t sure. The glow faded as he got next to me and whispered, “Thought you’d leave the old guy to sleep, huh? When will you kids ever learn?”

  Mike grabbed the zombie by the ankles and started to drag it 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 it under the arms and helped Mike carry it into the right place in the pattern. I figured the chances of them closing the circle with Mike inside were significantly lower than if it was me alone in there, and I knew Greg was keeping a sharp eye out now, so I was willing to go into the circle.

  I also don’t know if I could even have been trapped in the circle. Greg and Mike and I have spent a lot of hours researching what made us this way, and we have no idea if it’s 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 if it were a jail cell made of toilet paper, but I don’t like taking chances that are only “decent.” So 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.

  Once Mike and I were safely on the correct side of the circle, the witches closed it with some chalk and mumbling, and then the light show started. Not really, but 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 just about to make a snarky comment (I know, I was surprised I held out that long, too) when all of a sudden all the zombies leapt to their feet and rushed at the circle!

  They ran into the circle 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 and louder. Finally, as the zombies literally blew out their voice boxes and their throats exploded with splatters of blood on the inside of the circle, silence fell again. The zombies fell to the ground, empty bodies again, and the silence was the most fantastic thing in the world. But just for a minute, then a new voice came out of the circle, and my borrowed blood ran cold as ice.

  Chapter 25

  “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” It was a kind voice, a gentle voice, the kind of voice that was more soothing than a mother’s croon after a nightmare but held more strength than a father’s sternest lecture. It touched me down in a part of myself that I thought had died fifteen years ago, and I felt tears fall down my face. 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, slowly at first, then faster, then a normal steady stride. He was almost within arm’s reach of the circle when I saw what he was going to do. I saw, but I was too late to do anything about it. He was going to break the circle, and all those damned (literally and figuratively) spirits were going to be free again.

  I only made it one or two steps when a black blur flew in out of the corner of my eye 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 I was pretty much immortal. 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. Have you ever wondered what happens when you put nearly a dozen angry souls in a blender? Me neither, but much to my chagrin, now I know. The formless, faceless (thankfully) souls whirled and tumbled like psychotic Caspers in the 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 was just lightening in the east when suddenly the circle fell dark and silent. All thirteen witches slumped to the ground, immediately unconscious. I looked over at Greg and Mike, and they had stopped wrestling around and were just staring at the scene on the plaza.

  I walked 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. Cut me some slack, alright? It had been a long, and painful night, and I was hungry. I shook her gently until she began to stir, and asked, “Is it done?”

  She allowed me to help her stand and walk 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 careful
ly 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.

  And of course, our little light show had attracted the attention I least wanted. I heard a gentle “ahem” sound and turned toward the sound. Detective Sabrina Law was standing on the edge of the concrete plaza, gun in hand and pointed straight at my heart. I hate mornings.

  Chapter 26

  “Hi Detective.” I tried for a cheerful, jaunty tone, but was really too tired to pull off anything other than half-dead.

  “Hi yourself, Black.”

  “Please, Sabrina, call me Jimmy.”

  “No thanks, Black. And my first name is Detective.” She holstered her gun and reached behind her for a pair of handcuffs. I snapped at that point. It had been a ridiculous night. I’d been handcuffed to a bowling alley chair, been beaten up by possessed middle-school girls, chased zombies all over Charlotte, been tossed through a windshield, almost gotten trapped in a magic circle by a coven of witches, and I was not about to be handcuffed again, even if it was by the sexiest cop I’d ever seen. Without even thinking of the consequences of my actions, not that I often think about them very much, I grabbed the cuffs from her, spun her around, and put them on her wrists. With her hands secured behind her back, I pulled a hanky from my back pocket and stuffed it in her mouth as a gag.