Grave Creatures Read online

  “That’s what I thought!”

  He eyed the area worriedly. “Need any help?”

  “If you want to take a few people and go up to that corner,” I said, pointing, “we’ve got seven on the loose.”

  “Sweet.” He rubbed his hands excitedly. “I usually don’t get them until after they’re dead. It’ll be fun to take some out beforehand for once.”

  “That’s…disturbing.” I then raised an eyebrow. “You do realize that they’re already dead, technically speaking?”

  “Thanks for ruining it for me, Dex.”

  With that we split apart and took off running. Rachel was already a good distance in front of me, clearly having decided not to sit through my stirring discourse with Portman. I caught up to her quickly.

  “Anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Chief,” said Chuck through the connector, “Griff and I just dropped two of them. They were heading in from the corner of Eldorado and South Eastern.”

  So those were zombies that I saw when I’d turned the corner after the taco joint.

  Right?

  “You did verify they were zombies first, yes?”

  “They were most assuredly reanimated corpses,” Griff answered.

  I made a face in the air, mocking Griff, but simply replied, “Excellent.”

  “Straight ahead,” Rachel said, holding out a hand to slow me down. “Do you see them?”

  There were three forms dragging themselves across the dirt field. This section of the cemetery hadn’t been greened up with grass yet. King David was apparently growing their business, though, because the dirt looked to be packed down nicely. I guess when it came to cemeteries, people were just dying to get in there.

  “Why are we slowing down?” I asked, thinking that maybe Rachel had some interesting plan in mind.

  “I uh…” She stopped and looked at me. “Habit, I guess. Sneaking up on the bad guys and all that, you know?”

  “Gotcha.” Then I had an idea. “Any chance you could cast a nifty spell that causes roots to come up out of the ground and hold them in place?”

  She merely blinked at me.

  “What?”

  “Roots?” she mostly snorted. “Wizards do crap like that. You know I don’t.”

  “It doesn’t have to be roots, exactly, Rachel,” I retaliated. Why was everyone so particular? “My point is to find some way to hold them in place so they can’t attack us.”

  She sighed and said, “Fine.” She waved her hands around for a second and launched a white orb at their legs. They instantly fell down. Then they turned and started crawling toward us. “There.”

  “That was pretty effective. Why didn’t you do this before when we were fighting a bunch of them?”

  “Because I didn’t think about it.”

  “It just seems that it would make sense…”

  She pointed at the oncoming zombies. “Any chance you could shut up and shoot those damn things?”

  I casually leveled my gun and placed three bullets into three craniums.

  They stopped crawling.

  “Boy, that sure was a lot simpler than when they…”

  Something slammed in to me from behind, knocking Boomy from my hands and throwing me facedown in the dirt. The smell of rotted flesh was nearly overwhelming until my world became a searing force of pain and anguish.

  The thing had bitten me.

  Chapter 7

  “Ian,” Rachel yelled as I writhed around on the ground, “it did not bite you.”

  I stopped my groaning and looked up at her. She was leaning over with a face that mixed concern and disbelief. It reminded me of a time when we used to date and I asked how she’d felt about handcuffs in the bedroom.

  “It didn’t?” I asked, hoping that she was right.

  “No.”

  I felt at my neck, expecting the worst, but there was no gouge. I was covered in slime or something, but there were no holes in my flesh that I could make out.

  “Then what the hell did I feel?” I asked. “It hurt like hell.”

  “I cast a targeted blast of energy and blew its head off before it could bite you.”

  “Oh…thanks.” I sat up and nearly vomited at the realization of what constituted the slime that was covering me. To be sure, though, I asked the question I really didn’t want to ask. “Are you saying that this is brain goop all over me?”

  “Yep.”

  “Nasty!” I began pulling it out of my hair and scooping it off my face, throwing it all on the ground while fighting the urge to decorate my second pair of shoes with bile.

  Then I paused.

  Something wasn’t adding up. If Rachel blew the thing’s head off before it could bite me, what was that searing pain I’d felt? Maybe it did bite me and she’d just healed it? She wasn’t a healer like Serena was, but she had a spell or two that she could use in a pinch.

  “If I wasn’t bitten,” I said as my thoughts continued racing, “why did that hurt so bad?”

  “Hmmm?” she said while looking around the area.

  “My neck.”

  “What about it?”

  She was acting too innocent. Something was going on. I’d known her long enough to tell when she was hiding something from me.

  “Rachel?”

  “I think I see one over there,” she said, ignoring me. “No, that’s Portman.”

  “Rachel?” I became a little more insistent.

  “We should probably head down…”

  “Rachel!”

  She jolted. “What?”

  “Why did that hurt so bad?”

  “Why did what hurt so bad?”

  “You’re stalling,” I said with a sharp look.

  And then it hit me. I reached for my neck again and noticed that the flesh was a little softer in one spot than in the rest. That only happened when…

  “Holy shit,” I said, opening my eyes in shock. “You shot me!”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Son of a bitch.” I was beside myself at this point. “When you fired at that zombie, it went straight through and took a chunk out of my neck.”

  She tilted her head and squinted, peering in to study the covered-up wound. “It did?”

  “Unbelievable.”

  It was a rare thing for Rachel to screw up. I did it all the time, and she pointed it out in equal measure, but for her to foul things up somehow was like finding a diamond at the bottom of the ocean. It didn’t happen very often.

  Then I felt a sense of horror. “Did zombie bits get into the cut? Oh shit! Have I got zombie bits in me?”

  “Relax, Ian,” she stated firmly. “I made sure all the zombie bits were out before…”

  She stopped herself and turned white. Then she opened and closed her mouth a few times, clearly seeking the right words. Finally, she slumped over.

  I took a deep breath, trying to maintain my composure. It wasn’t easy. I had no doubt she’d actually got all the zombie bits out, and I believed Griff when he said that there was no “infection” or anything related to being bitten by a zombie or by touching zombie juice, but it was still beyond disgusting.

  It was my turn to cross my arms at her.

  “Remember a couple weeks back when I screwed up and you were kidnapped by a werewolf?” I asked pointedly.

  Her eyes grew dark for a moment and then she tore away her gaze and nodded.

  “We’re even,” I stated sternly. “And I want it noted that you were never injured or anything when you were taken during my mistake. You also didn’t get covered in werewolf parts.” I started walking away, but stopped and yelled, “Oh yeah, and I didn’t shoot you!”

  “So much for ‘we’re even,’” she replied, tailing me like a scorned puppy.

  “Hey, Chief,” Felicia said through the connector, “Jasmine and I didn’t spot any on our route, but Portman just dragged one back. Looks like there are still four missing.”

  “No,” I replied, giving Rachel a glare. “We got lucky
and dropped four out here. Three were crawling about and one attacked.”

  “You guys okay?”

  “We’re peachy.” I cleared my throat. “Have Griff do a recount, just to make sure. Also, Portman should send a few of his team to collect the ones out here.”

  “You got it, Chief.”

  The walk back was mostly quiet, except for the sounds of vehicles passing by.

  There was a time, long before I was the chief, where Rachel and I would take late night strolls together. Not in a cemetery, of course. Usually it was at a park or even just down the strip. Things were different now, though. They had to be.

  “You going to tell everyone?” she asked.

  “Would you?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  We got back and everyone gave me the once-over. It was obvious that I looked dreadful. Hell, I felt dreadful.

  “What happened to you?” said Felicia.

  “Nothing,” I replied, glancing at Rachel. “Nothing at all.”

  Portman reached into his van, pulled out a towel, and threw it at me. I studied the rest of his crew. They were all wiping remnants of something off their person. I assumed it had to do with how they’d destroyed the poor zombie they’d found.

  “All the bodies are indeed accounted for,” Griff announced, “assuming your count was accurate.”

  “There were four,” Rachel confirmed.

  “There you have it, then.”

  I went to hand the towel back to Portman, but he pointed at a barrel that was half full of them already. I dumped it in there.

  “You need our help here, Portman?”

  “Nah, all set. This was a fun night, Dex. Thanks for the invite.”

  “Yeah,” I replied with a sniff. “It was a real hoot.” I then turned to my team and added, “Let’s get back to base. We’ve obviously got a new problem on our hands.”

  Chapter 8

  The Directors were already waiting when I entered the meeting room, which was accessed via the door at the back of my office.

  There were four of them on the panel. I could only see flashes or basic shadows of them in the dim lighting, and the moment they pulled away my memory of their faces faded. It was like speaking with apparitions.

  Silver, the representative for the vampires, opened the conversation. “We’ve been told that reanimated corpses appeared off the strip, but we don’t know any further details. What have you learned?”

  Right, so no pleasantries today.

  “Not much yet, sir,” I replied with an equally businesslike tone. “We arrived on the scene, were subsequently attacked, killed them, in a manner of speaking, and are now working through how this all happened.”

  “But you must have some idea?” grumbled Zack, the werewolf rep.

  “Griff…” I started and then decided to go formal instead. “I mean, Officer Benchley, suggested that it has to do with necromancy.”

  “This is obvious,” noted O. He was the top-dog for the Crimson Focus Mages. Usually he was one of the more cordial Directors of the bunch, but today he seemed just as snippy at the rest of them. “The very fact that they came out of the ground denotes necromancy, Mr. Dex.”

  “I’m aware of that, sir,” I said, fighting to maintain my cool. It wasn’t easy considering that I still carried zombie juice on my person. I took a deep breath. “What we know is that bodies crawled out of the ground and that’s highly unusual.”

  “No shit,” said EQK, offering his two cents.

  “Officer Benchley found a magical power line that was moving across the ground,” I continued, ignoring the Vegas Pixies representative. “As it crossed the graves, it reanimated those inside. They came up with the desire to attack us.”

  “Your team specifically?” Silver asked.

  If anything, it seemed like me specifically. The zombies hadn’t gone into attack-mode until I’d arrived, after all. Still, there wasn’t enough data to jump to that conclusion yet.

  “That I don’t know,” I replied, keeping my expression even. “We were the only ones in the immediate area at the time. Or at least the only ones required to stay and fight the things.”

  “If Officer Benchley spotted a combing light,” O mused, “then the necromancer had to have been nearby.”

  “We didn’t see anybody,” I said and then I remembered the hobo. It wasn’t much, but in the essence of full-disclosure, I said, “Wait, scratch that. There was an old guy walking across the street. He was just a drunk…I think.”

  “Probably not,” O stated. “Did he look sickly and small?”

  “Yeah, but most drunks in this town look like that.” I licked my lips and suddenly regretted it. The taste of zombie juice is not exactly pleasant. “You think that was the guy?”

  “There’s no way to be certain without having the ability to speak with him,” O answered after a moment, “but it would seem likely. People who dabble in necromancy tend to shrink over time. I’ve seen large men morph into a fraction of their normal selves.”

  Damn it. I had the guy right in my hands and let him go. To be fair to me, though, he was a pretty decent actor. Assuming it wasn’t actually just some drunk. The real necro could have been anywhere.

  “What is your plan?” asked Zack, jolting me from my thoughts.

  “My crew is working on it now.” I didn’t know if Rachel or Jasmine knew much about necromancy or not, but it seemed that Griff had the topic well in hand. “I have Officer Benchley heading up the research.”

  “Wise,” said O. “He’s dealt with this before.”

  “Before?” I raised an eyebrow at that. “What do you mean he’s dealt with this before?”

  “He means it’s not the first time this has happened, you boob,” EQK explained.

  I glanced toward the pixie and then back at the place where O sat. “When?”

  “Many times over the years, Mr. Dex,” answered O. “It’s an art that we in the mage community have shunned. We’ve gone to great lengths to eradicate it and all of its users.”

  “Good work,” said Silver.

  “I note and accept your sarcasm, Silver,” O said without inflection. “It’s not a simple thing to pin down those with ill will, as I’m sure your vampire brethren can attest.”

  There was a pause, and Silver replied, “True.” His voice sounded heavy.

  “It’s the same with werewolves,” admitted Zack. “We have many tarnishes on our historical record.”

  While I couldn’t see the panel, I had the distinct feeling that everyone had turned to stare at EQK. They’d all owned up to their particular lot having nefarious sorts among their numbers and now they were looking to the pixie to join the crowd.

  My assumption was verified when EQK said, “Screw you guys. We don’t raise the dead or bite people or go running around marking our territory by pissing on trees.” There was a light growl from Zack. “Sorry, dudes, but pixies just aren’t like you warped fuckers.”

  Chapter 9

  My crew was already in the conference room when I returned from the precinct showers. I snagged a quick sandwich from the vending machine directly across from them and wolfed it down.

  I was cleaned up, moderately fed, and feeling like I belonged in the world again.

  As I walked into the room I found that Warren and Serena had joined the fun, along with Turbo. None of them were street officers, per se. They all worked at the PPD, of course, and Warren and Serena had enhanced genetics, though the horny side-effect didn’t seem to impact Warren at all. I used to praise anything that would listen regarding how the horny gene impacted Serena though. Ah, those were the days.

  Turbo was a pixie who managed all of our technological needs. Everything from software to hardware, if it needed building or fixing, Turbo was our guy. He had coke-bottle glasses and wore a little police officer uniform, including a badge and everything. It wasn’t really protocol for the PPD, but it seemed to make him happy. He was also one of the fortunate ones who didn’t need genet
ic enhancements.

  Warren was our only wizard on staff. He had that hippie thing going with the long straggly hair and matching beard. It wasn’t gray, though, and he wasn’t old, but he did have leathery skin that marked him as having spent too many days on the beach.

  Serena handled forensics, which put her in the limelight alongside Griff. If there was any one person I could lay with for all eternity, it’d be Serena. I don’t mean that in a spiritual way. While she was nice enough, we were compatible in the sack only. Roleplaying, specifically. She played the role of succubus and I played the role of lucky guy who got to be with her while she played the role of succubus.

  … back when I wasn’t chief.

  I sighed and got my head back in the game.

  “What’s the word, people?” I asked as I moved to the head of the table.

  “I’ve been doing some research alongside of Serena,” answered Griff, “and we are planning to return to the King David Cemetery so that she can study the area in greater detail.”

  Serena nodded and added, “I’m going to try and pick up the necro’s trail.”

  “Right, uh, about that.” I coughed and rubbed my nose. “My guess is that he was crossing Eldorado after we’d dropped the majority of the zombies.”

  “What?” said Rachel with a look of shock. “You mean the old guy?”

  “Exactly what I mean. O pointed it out when I was meeting with the Directors.”

  Griff leaned forward. “Interesting.”

  He looked like a man who could use a nice long nap. All of the mages did, in fact. That was one of the drawbacks of their profession. They got tired a lot faster than the rest of us.

  “Looks to me like you could all use a little rest.”

  There was no argument.

  “Lydia,” I called out, “do you know if Portman got everything squared away at the graveyard?”

  “He checked in about fifteen minutes ago, sugar. Said everything was back to normal.”