Soft Apocalypses (20 page)

Some of the undead turned their heads and began to shamble toward the truck when we were about 50 yards away. At 20 yards, Tura started punching keys on her smartphone and the tiger sprinted for the zombies.

Fluffy decapitated the first zombie with a single swipe and tore into the rest of the mob. Zombies fell dead all around her. It was like watching a hot knife go through a block of rancid butter.

“Faster, zombiecat! Kill! Kill!” Tura yelled.

But when Fluffy dove after what might have been the 200th zombie, an unusually tall and fat one, he fell across her back as he went down, and Fluffy’s movements became erratic, jerky.

“Crap!” Tura exclaimed. “He dislodged her dorsal antenna. I gotta fix that—cover me!”

We jumped out of the truck and ran over to Fluffy. I plugged away at zombies with my pistol as Tura worked on getting the tiger back online.

I had to pause to reload, and in that moment a runner I hadn’t seen grabbed me from behind and chomped my neck. I hollered, elbowed it off, and shot it right between the eyes. I touched my neck, and my hand came away wet with blood.

“I think I’m okay, guys. Honest.” I was strapped to a dentist’s chair in an observation room in the laboratory.

“I’m sure you’ll be fine.” Tura bandaged me up and gave me an antibiotic shot.

“We’ll see,” replied Mickey from the other side of the bulletproof glass. “Just try to relax.”

“Okie-dokey.” Mickey was a sweet hunk of scientist: he had a tight runner’s body, long-lashed green eyes, an easy smile, and a mop of unruly black hair that practically said “Please run your fingers through me all the time, thanks!” He had the trifecta of brains, looks, and okay, maybe his personality wasn’t exactly sparkling, but so far he didn’t seem to be a jerk. Tura clearly didn’t have eyes for anyone else.

I felt abandoned and miserable, and did the only thing I could do: I waited. And waited. And waited.

Six hours later, half the scientists still watching me were snoring in their folding chairs, so I cleared my throat and announced, “Guys.
Seriously
. I think I’m fine.”

So they took my temperature, and drew a sample of my blood, and spent some time staring at it under a microscope.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“We think you’re fine,” Tura said.

“And I think we’ve finally got a source for good antibodies against this wretched plague,” Mickey said, looking at me like I was a grand prize-winning lottery ticket. “Thanks to you, we’re going to be able to save millions of lives.”

“Sweet.” I knew that saving humanity should have felt pretty darned satisfying, even if it
was
dumb luck. But in my loneliness, the miraculous victory just seemed hollow.

A young lab technician came into the room and began undoing my restraints. I hadn’t really noticed her before, but she was red-haired, had a cute dusting of freckles, and was gazing at me with the kind of adoration that people usually reserved for movie stars. She was looking at me the way I’d probably been looking at Tura the past year.

“I think you’re very brave,” she whispered. “
Very
brave.”

Me, a genuine hero? Apparently so. I smiled back at her. Suddenly the future seemed like a much brighter place.

Repent, Jessie Shimmer!

My familiar Palimpsest kept insisting we go back to Madame Devereaux’s house in the heart of bayou country to properly thank her for curing him of lycanthropy. And I kept telling him it wouldn’t work; he was stuck in the form of a bear and would be awfully hard to explain to the townsfolk if we stopped to get a cake and flowers down at the Piggly Wiggly. Not to mention the difficulty of finding a rental car with a seat that could hold 800 pounds of grizzly.

Fate smiled on his determination a couple of weeks later. Well. Smiled is the wrong word. It was more a fately smirk. A newly-hired guard—one who apparently dozed off during his orientation on the strange creatures living in my father’s castle—stumbled onto Pal after my familiar’s morning swim in the moat. The guard, a kid barely out of school, freaked the heck out. And lit Pal up with his Taser. Which would have been an act of epic, life-ending stupidity on the guard’s part had Pal been a normal grizzly bear. But instead of sending Pal on a man-slaying rampage, the powerful shock triggered his polymorphic enchantment and he began rapidly (and painfully) cycling through his past familiar bodies until the guard stopped zapping him.

When the smoke of burnt fur cleared, Pal was in his ferret form. Small. Cute. Non-threatening. Portable. Clearly it was time for a trip down south.

So just a few days later, I pulled my rented Dodge Ram truck up in front of Madame Devereaux’s sprawling blue ranch house. The old witch was bent over the engine of her 1968 Volkswagen Beetle in the shade of the huge magnolia in her front yard. Her African mudcloth sundress and orange Crocs were smudged with black oil and red transmission fluid. Her granddaughter Shanique sat close by on a metal folding chair, holding a red toolbox at the ready, clearly trying to keep her brand new purple sneakers from getting greased.

“Hey there!” I waved to them as I got out of the truck with Pal perched on my shoulder.

Madame Devereaux straightened up, squinting at us from behind her thick, old-fashioned bifocals. “Jessie Shimmer, is that you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Ain’t you got that paw of yours fixed yet?” She pointed at the gray satin opera glove covering my left hand and forearm.

“Oh, it’s fixed. No more hellfire.” I pulled down the cuff of the burn-proof glove to show her my pale, luminous flesh. I was glad it was closer to normal. Having a hand made out of flame is great if you’re trying to barbecue things, but it’s lousy for pretty much anything else. It’s especially hard to hold onto anything when your hand doesn’t have any bones; I’d had to rely on my natural talent for spiritual extension, a type of parakinesis, and even that failed if I wasn’t paying attention. My Frisbee game sucked hard.

“It still looks weird, so I still keep it covered up,” I finished.

“What you doing here? Your daddy need something?”

“No ma’am ... Pal here wanted to come back to see if there was anything we could do to thank you for curing him.”

The old lady seemed simultaneously flustered and annoyed. “I done told you I don’t need no payment for that!”

“It’s not about payment, ma’am ... he just wants to do something to thank you.”

We went back and forth for a couple of minutes in gentle argument until Shanique finally said, “What about your healing stone, Grandma?”

“Hm.” Madame Devereaux rubbed her chin. “I reckon gettin’ that back would be a fine thing.”

“Healing stone?” I asked. “Where is it?”

“Boudreaux Metier borrowed my best crystal to cure some of his coon hounds what came down with distemper last year. It’s a relic your daddy gave me, a dark purple amethyst carved in the shape of the goddess Hygieia. ‘Bout four inches high. Boudreaux said he’d just be a couple days with it but he ain’t brung it back yet. I tried to call him on his cell, but I reckon he dropped it down the sump again. He lives a ways back in the bayou and I just ain’t been up for going out there on my own.”

She paused, wincing. “Boudreaux always wants you to set a spell, see, and try whatever vile rotgut he’s brewed up from his still. I think that boy’s done burned out his tastebuds. Anyway. If y’all were to go get that stone back for me, I’d surely appreciate it.”

“Consider it done,” I replied.

It was almost evening before Madame Devereaux’s directions got me on the road to Boudreaux’s place out in the bayou. She’d warned me that my truck’s GPS wouldn’t be much good, and sure enough, the device was telling me I’d reached a dead end even though I could see a straight path of mud-reddened gravel parting the thick forest of pine trees and cypresses. I could have cast a spell to track him, but that required a bit of Boudreaux’s hair or a toenail clipping or a personal item, and Madame Devereaux didn’t have so much as a mason jar of his moonshine.

We followed the road down into a darkening hollow, then up onto a small hill where we encountered the real dead end. A couple hundred yards away, I could see an Army green house lurking in a clearing. The two-story plantation style home had seen better days; the double wraparound porches were warped and Spanish moss dripped from the upper railings. A couple of rusty cars on blocks and cords of firewood were piled in the yard around the building.

“I can’t say I like the look of the place,” Pal told me telepathically, craning his neck out the window and sniffing the piney air. “I smell carrion.”

“Boudreaux’s got coon hounds,” I replied. “He’s a hunter. Of
course
you smell dead things. He’s probably got a critter pit or something to dispose of carcasses.”

Despite my words, far more sinister possibilities were already crowding in my mind. So after I killed the engine I went to the trunk to get out my Mossberg shotgun and a sheathed knife I could slip inside my boot. A girl can’t be too careful. My defensive magic is pretty decent, but sometimes there’s just no substitute for a firearm or a blade.

I slung the Mossberg over my left shoulder and Pal perched on my right, his whiskers twitching with anxiety. Still, he didn’t complain. I began to make my way through the litter of leaves, small branches, and scattered car parts toward the house. Halfway there I stepped over the crumbling remains of a low stone wall that, once I’d crossed it, we both realized contained some kind of warding magic.

“Oh dear,” said Pal.

I reached down, picked up a couple of tinder-dry pine needles, and spoke a couple of old word for “flame”. The charm seemed to stick in my throat. Nothing happened. Not so much as a spark or wisp of smoke. Crap. I’d run into a magic-dampening field before; it had been powered by captive witches and wizards trapped in a thrall circle. Not an easy piece of spell work. The stones behind my feet didn’t feel strong enough to be the source.

Pal was staring at the unlit needles in my hand. “This does
not
bode well.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I thought back to him. “But Boudreaux’s a friend of Madame D. ... if he’s in trouble she’d want to know. Especially if the trouble could spill over to her and Shanique.”

Still, it was time to do a couple of quick tests before we went any further. My left eye was an enchanted stone; I blinked through a couple of views to confirm that the suppression field wasn’t affecting items imbued with permanent magic.

“My ocularis is good, so whoever’s casting this isn’t that powerful.” I reached into my pocket, found a lighter, flicked it with my thumb. A sturdy little flame flashed to life. “And we’ve got fire. So my shotgun will still work. It’ll be fine.”

We continued on to the house. I kept the shotgun slung at what I hoped looked like a casual angle, but I could bring it up in a hurry if I needed to. If we were being watched, I didn’t want to seem threatening. We got to the front of the house, and went up the creaky, mossy steps onto the worn porch. I knocked on the brown steel front door. Waited. No answer.

“Hello, Mr. Metier, are you there?” I called. “Anybody home?”

I was about to knock again when I heard the deadbolt slide back and the door swung open to reveal a tall man dressed in a tattered black dress shirt and muddy black tactical pants. His hair was a filthy, gray-streaked blond mane and his long beard was turning into dreadlocks. He didn’t look or smell like he’d showered in months. And it was more than just dirt, old sweat, and crusty underwear; he wore an unmistakable stench of meaty rot.

“Whatchu want, girl?” He had the voice of a man who’d smoked a million cigarettes, and glared down at me with eyes the color of an algae-sheened cesspool.

“Madame Devereaux sent me.” I couldn’t keep my voice steady. “Are you Boudreaux Metier?”

He shook his head, and as his beard moved I saw that his black shirt was topped with a stained clerical collar. “I’m Brother Hiram. Boudreaux is busy with the Lord’s work.”

“Jessie.” Pal’s voice was tight with fear. “This fellow doesn’t have a heartbeat. We should go.
Now
.”

“The Lord’s work?” The magic suppression spell, no doubt. If this guy had enslaved Boudreaux, he probably wasn’t working alone. I had the horrible feeling I didn’t have nearly enough ammo. Time to call for help. I fixed a smile on my face and carefully backed away. If I got past the first car on blocks I could sprint for the stone fence and be past the wards in maybe five seconds. “He must be real busy. I’ll just come back later, okay?”

Brother Hiram opened the door wide and strode toward me, his frown deepening. “You say Madame Devereaux sent you?”

“Yes.” I half-stumbled off the porch and down the stairs. Maybe I should drop the neighborly pretense and just shoot him. But that might not stop him. I didn’t know what he was. He seemed too smart and self-aware to be a zombie. A headshot would just annoy a vampire. I couldn’t remember what to do with a ghoul or a revenant. Heart? Stomach? Decapitation?

“That Madame Devereaux is a hoodoo witch, ain’t she? That must mean you’re some kinda witch, too.” Brother Hiram was staring at my gloved hand as if it still glowed with hellfire.