Hunter of the Dead (8 page)

“You’re children. Pants-wetting children. The only person here with anything approaching a backbone is my new get. And yes, she is my get. And my heir. And nothing can change that. You think you can push me down on this issue. And once I’ve set a precedent of giving an inch, you’ll take ten thousand miles. You’ll flay me hair by hair out of existence.

“Well, guess what? You want war over a tiny matter, a small matter, a matter so insignificant I couldn’t possibly fail to back down? You have it. War it is, on behalf of my get. I would wipe every immortal from the planet and start fresh before I would give in to you and your joke of a council. Now leave my manse. Send your attackers if you really have the backbone to go through with it. But I know, as always, you won’t.

“You are all dismissed from my presence.”

Sephera seemed flustered. She nodded, and strode out the door. Signari, as always, was smiling.

“I’ve waited a long time for this, Scar.”

“Enjoy the anticipation of our first battle, Otto. It’s the only joy you’ll get out of this.”

Signari bowed elaborately and put his hand on Topan’s shoulder.

“Come on, boy. A kingdom of ashes. That’s what you’ll inherit. But you can rebuild.”

“Cicatrice,” Topan growled.

“Topan,” Cicatrice said, “I want to be clear on this matter. When this little mutiny of yours is finished and you come crawling back to me for the thousandth time to test my infinite mercy, be clear. Be one hundred per cent clear. There will be no mercy for you this time.”

Four

Price’s pants were already around his ankles. He fiddled with the key in the trunk lock like a cat burglar finessing a deadbolt.

“Come on, baby, come on…got it!”

The trunk popped open. Price kicked off his shoes and stepped out of his trousers. Nico hazarded a glance into the Caddie’s massive trunk.

“Holy shit, Carter!”

Price’s trunk looked like the storage closet of a museum – or a movie studio. Guns of every description sat alongside axes, crowbars, swords, and knives. More mundane supplies like bottled water, beef jerky, dehydrated meals, and candles filled up one corner. He was already pulling on jeans and knocking on the soles of a pair of heavy-duty steel-toed boots.

“You ever wonder why I drive a ’63 Caddie, kid?”

Nico shook his head. Price couldn’t hold back the shit-eating grin.

“Most trunk space of any car ever made.”

Price dropped the boots on the ground and unrolled a black t-shirt.

“Somehow I doubt that,” Nico replied.

Price shrugged.

“Well, that and a little thing called style.”

Price slung a bandolier of shotgun shells over a shoulder and a bandolier of what appeared to be wooden stakes over the other. He slipped a sheathed machete onto his belt and buckled it, then started strapping a sawed-off shotgun to his other leg.

“So you’re some kind of secret vampire hunter?”

Grunting, Price peeled back the bandage from his right wrist, allowing Nico to get a glimpse of a green double cross tattooed over his radial artery. It seemed spooky and ancient enough to be the sigil of an ancient secret society like the Illuminati. And the fact that Price had long kept it hidden seemed to suggest that as well.

“Inquisitor. But yeah, that’s about the long and short of it, yeah.”

“So what’s the…plan?”

“The plan?”

Price reached into the trunk and with a reverence that belied his previous hurry, drew a tan leather or possibly deerskin jacket with tassels out of his collection of junk. He ran his hand along the painstakingly oiled surface of the jacket for just a moment before seeming to remember his earlier haste and threw it on. With the ensemble completed he looked like he could have stepped right off the stage of a ‘70s Dad Rock concert.

“The ‘plan,’ kid, is that you’re going to get home. You said you came by bus?”

“What am I supposed to do, Carter? Wait by the crater that used to be the Fill-Up? How am I supposed to explain that?”

The faraway look in Price’s eyes at that moment was something Nico had only ever seen on war veterans and in movies. “The Thousand Yard Stare” they called it sometimes. A symptom of deep, pervasive PTSD.

He sighed.

“You explain it, kid, by blaming it on that weird ex-con you worked with. ‘He always was a firebug.’ Some shit like that.”

Price slammed the trunk shut loudly and walked back toward the driver’s side. Nico felt liquid panic flood his heart and he hurried around the other way to block him.

“I’m not blaming this on you. What about that…that thing?”

“Kid, the longer you stand here in my way jawing about it, the closer that thing is to getting to civilization. If you really care – if you really give a shit – the best thing you can do is leave me to my job and make up the best cock-and-bull story you can to explain those bodies back there.”

Nico’s mind rushed. Jackie’s family had a right to know what happened. Didn’t they? Even Cigarette Dick, well, sure, he had been a dick but no one deserved to die like that.

It was true there would be a lot of explaining to do. He’d have to make something up and quick, mostly involving how Carter had gone crazy, chopped off a guy’s arms, tried to eat the donut lady’s face, and then burned everything to cover it up. He’d say there’d been meth involved maybe…

But the truth is I can’t unsee what I saw.

“You can’t go after that thing alone, Carter. Either you take me with you or you have to kill me.”

Price nodded.

“Option Three,” he said.

With a speed and strength that belied his age, Price grabbed Nico by the scruff of his polo and tossed him out of the way. The last time Nico had slid across the macadam like that he had been seven years old, trying to pick a fight with Jorge Medrano, easily four years his senior and twice his size. On the playground he had been wearing shorts and both knees had been scraped to damn near the bone. This time his elbows were pretty fucked up, but at least he had been wearing slacks.

He rose to his knees, coughing; the old car’s revving sound already filling the air. He looked up. Price had already turned the car around and was about to peel out down the highway in search of his quarry.

This is stupid. Really fucking stupid.

Nico stepped in front of the car and held out his hands, as though he was going to catch it by the headlights when it came. In the driver’s seat, Price’s eyes narrowed. He revved the engine once, twice. He didn’t even bother saying anything. The message was clear: “Get out of the way, kid, or I’ll run you over.”

Nico shook his head.

“I’m coming with you,” he shouted.

Price floored it. Nico gasped; his eyes wide as a deer’s.

I should jump out of the way.

Instead, he braced himself, turning his head away from the onrushing vehicle and lifting his leg up into his chest like a flamingo. He waited a moment and didn’t open his eyes again until he realized the hot yellow glow of the headlights in his face had disappeared. He turned.

Price had pulled up alongside him and was furiously unrolling the passenger’s side window.

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

“I know.”

“You barely even know me.”

“Well, we’ve worked a few shifts together…”

“Why the fuck would you want to get involved in something like this?”

Good question.

“I’ve never been special. Never been privy to something special. I mean, vampires are real? How do you walk away from something like that?”

Price hung his head.

“I remember thinking the exact same thing when I was your age.”

He turned off the car and stepped outside, reopening the trunk with just as much trouble as it had taken him last time. Nico joined him hesitantly.

“Can you shoot?”

“No.”

“Know how to use a sword?”

“Hell no.”

Price eyed him up and down. He suddenly felt naked in his dorky green embroidered polo, loser slacks, and unfitted ballcap with “Phillip’s Fill-Up” embroidered on the front. He was a gas station clerk and had never been good enough to do anything else in his entire life.

Through clenched teeth Price asked, “Can you play baseball?”

“Well…yeah. Of course. Hell yeah, I can play baseball.”

“Good enough.”

Price reached into his voluminous trunk and pulled out a Lousiville Slugger. Embedded deeply into the top half were long, razor sharp steel blades. Nico took the bizarre weapon and traced an arc through the air with it. Used just like a bat, he could probably take someone’s head off with one good swing.

Price tapped him on the chest.

“Remember: limbs, head. Everything else is crap. You slice a nightcrawler’s belly open; he’ll regenerate in no time flat. Now get in the fucking car, Mickey Mantle.”

Nico nodded and hurried into the passenger’s side, desperately trying to find a way to stash his implement of destruction so that it wouldn’t gouge a hole in him if they hit an unexpected pothole. Price climbed in opposite and started the car.

“One last thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you fucking get me killed.”

Nico shrugged.

“I’ll do my best.”

Burning rubber, they peeled off for the reservoir. Instantly, Nico had the feeling in the pit of his stomach that they were too late, like when he suddenly found himself alone in school after hours and all the lights turned off. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe if he had just listened and hadn’t spent so long trying to be the hero…

And now look at me. I’m going to die. I can’t fight that thing. It’s going to rip my head off. And then my headless corpse will be a distraction and Price’ll get killed, too. He’ll be like, “Noooo!” but then The Damned will just…

He could’ve peed his pants just then. That felt a lot like being in school after hours, too.

Man up, Nico.

That was his dad. Back home in Puerto Rico. Back before…

“Stop daydreaming, kid. We’re here.”

Nico glanced along the edge of the lake. The car’s headlights created a pool of visibility in the otherwise inky blackness of the night.

“There,” Nico said, pointing.

Footprints led out of the water, as though the Creature from the Black Lagoon had emerged onto land. The prints were anthropomorphic, but inhuman. Almost like Bigfoot.

“Say, you don’t think vampires are the source of…”

“Shut the fuck up, kid.”

Nico swallowed his words. The prints led from the edge of the water to a small copse of trees. Price stepped out of the car and Nico did the same.

“All right, stay here. Stay in the headlights.”

“Are the headlights UV or something?”

Price stared at him.

“No, kid. They’re just lights. Unless you can see in the dark?”

“Are you pissed now because you wish you’d installed UV lights?”

Price shook his head.

“UV doesn’t do anything to them. The sun is this whole other…thing. Look, just stay in the fucking light where I can see you. I’m going to go check out that grove. And if I don’t come back, uh…”

Price thought for a moment, couldn’t seem to come up with anything witty or useful, and simply shrugged. Machete in one hand, sawed-off in the other, he disappeared into the treeline.

Nick swallowed a lump in his throat. Suddenly, every scary movie and campfire story he had ever seen or heard came rushing back to him. And each and every one seemed to have a scene like this, where the heroes or the victims split up, and then one wasn’t paying attention and…

“Get thee behind me, Satan!”

Nico turned and waved his bat towards the figure on top of the Caddie. Price came rushing back.

“What’s wrong, kid?”

Of course, there was no figure on top of the car.

“Nothing, I just thought I…”

Price grabbed him by the scruff again, and as if to prove his above-average strength, pulled Nico up onto his tiptoes.

“Kid, I didn’t think I needed to say anything…but shut the fuck up. That’s all you have to do. You have one job. What’s your job?”

“To shut the fuck up.”

Price shook him.

“Try again. What’s your job?”

“To…”

Nico pinched his lips closed. Price nodded.

“Okay.”

Price stomped off into the woods again. Nico wiped a bead of sweat away from his forehead. This was not going well. This was not going well at all. One more shock to the system and he was going to unload his cheese and tuna sub into his work slacks. And he only had one other clean pair of pants…

Of course, none of that matters now.

“Kid! Come on up here!”

Nico glanced back at the Caddie.

“Should I bring the keys?”

“Eh…no, leave ‘em. They’ll be fine for a second. It looks like we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Nico stumbled up into the copse of trees and quickly found Price by the glow of a penlight. Price looked positively demonic in the low light.

“Take a look at this.”

He pointed the penlight towards the ground. The Damned lay there. At least, what was left of it did. The thing’s fur was still slightly charred from its earlier encounter with a fireball. But the thing had been hacked to pieces. Its severed head lay glaring limply; eyes open but dead, a few feet from the rest of its body. Arms and legs were strewn all akimbo, hacked off at elbows, knees and shoulders willy-nilly.

“Limbs and head,” Nico said, “A friend of yours?”

Price bit his lower lip.

“I’ll be honest kid: I don’t see another Inquisitor doing this. I got lucky at the gas station but I was pretty sure there was no way I was walking away from this.”

“You thought you were going to die and you brought me along?”

Price cocked his head and fixed Nico with a withering glare.

“Yeah. That’s what I did. I forced you to come along. Twisted your fucking arm.”

“All right, all right. So…is there like…something else that can do this? Are werewolves real? Frankensteins?”

Price tapped the penlight against his teeth.

“The nightcrawlers pretty much keep the riffraff out of Vegas. This doesn’t really look like a werewolf’s work…I mean; this was done with a blade.”