The Book of Death (44 page)

‘What now?’ he asked.

‘I wanted to say thanks for
pulling me clear from the fire earlier.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ He found himself
blushing as he thought back to the moment he had dragged her away from the
fire. ‘Well, y’know,’ he mumbled, ‘you’re my ride home.’

Flake poked him playfully in the
stomach. ‘They need you in there,’ she said, pointing to the museum. ‘Go be a
hero again. Good luck.’

Fifty-Six

Kacy’s head hadn’t cleared. She
felt nauseous and totally dazed from the impact of being hit on the head by
Napoleon’s concrete bicorn hat. Her eyesight had temporarily deserted her too.
But she could hear voices. They were the voices of the ninja vampires who had
dragged her over to the tomb where Dante was laid out on the floor in an even
worse state than her.

‘Yo! Save some bandages for us.
We’ve got to do the girl.’

‘Just strip her off. We’ll
bandage her up.’

‘Why do
you
get to
bandage her up?’

‘Because I’ve got the bandages,
numbnuts.’

A third voice butted in. ‘I’ll
help you strip her.’

‘Okay. Hold her up while I take
her pants down.’
 

‘All right, but hurry up. She
looks like she’s getting her wits back.’

On hearing that she was about to
have her pants pulled down, Kacy was indeed trying her best to clear her head
and get her wits back. She felt a pair of hands slide under her armpits and
haul her up from the floor. Another figure bent down in front of her and began
unbuttoning her jeans. He got to work pretty quick too. Her jeans were tugged
down past her knees with ease.

‘Fuck me, look at those legs.’

Kacy blinked a few times and
slowly began to get her sight back, albeit somewhat blurred. Her jeans had been
pulled down to her ankles. The ninja who was bent down in front of her was in
the process of frantically pulling her sneakers off.

As her sight was returning, the
guy who was holding her up from behind reached down and grabbed the bottom of
her sweatshirt. He yanked it up over her head, where it got stuck and smothered
her face, blinding her again. She was now being twisted in all directions by
two vampires who couldn’t care less how it made her feel. Even if she hadn’t
been totally dazed it would have been difficult to put up much of a struggle.

She felt her sneakers come off
and heard them being tossed aside. Moments later her jeans were tugged hard and
came off completely. She felt the touch of the vampire’s cold, bony hands
making their way up her legs towards her underwear (a pair of tiny pink panties
Dante had bought for her with the words FREE ENTRY sewn into the back in black
lettering). Behind her, the other ninja was still fighting hard to get her
sweatshirt over her head.

As she felt the cold vampire
fingers tug at her panties, she heard a loud crack. The grip of the vampire’s
fingers on her underwear loosened, then his hands fell away, leaving her
underwear in place, albeit only just.

The guy behind her stopped
tugging at her sweatshirt. ‘What the fuck?’ he said, sounding puzzled.

BANG!

Kacy’s felt the whoosh of a
bullet speeding past her head. The guy behind her immediately relinquished his
grip on her and she fell backwards, her head crashing down hard on the floor.
She lay there on her back feeling even more dazed than before, wondering what
had happened. After a brief moment wincing at the pain of yet another blow to
the head, she came to her senses and remembered her predicament. She grabbed at
her sweatshirt and set about pulling it back over her head to cover at least
part of her modesty.

The blast of the gunshot was
still ringing in her ears. As she wrestled with her sweatshirt she heard two
further shots, followed by the sound of two more bodies dropping to the floor.
A few moments of quiet were followed by the sound of Rameses Gaius’s
distinctive booming voice.

‘Show yourself, you cowardly
sonofabitch!’ he yelled.

Kacy finally managed to poke her
head back through the top of her sweatshirt. She took a deep breath and looked
around. Her vision was still blurred but at least was able to get an idea of
her bearings. Dante was laid out on the floor a few yards away. She expected to
see the Bourbon Kid somewhere too. He was definitely in the hall because the
results of his handiwork were in evidence. She could see a pair of dead
vampires on the floor either side of Dante. Both of them had suffered fatal
head wounds courtesy of the Bourbon Kid’s deadly aim with a gun. Two others
were on the floor, not far from her. One had a broken neck, the other one only
had half a head.

As Kacy continued to survey the
carnage around her, a flash of bright blue light suddenly dazzled her. She saw
the source of it. Gaius was firing off blue laser bolts from both hands, aiming
blindly in all directions. But where was the Bourbon Kid? There were numerous
statues and displays within which he could conceal himself, and it seemed that
Gaius was unable to locate him.

As if the laser bolts and
gunshots weren’t enough to contend with, one of Gaius’s mistimed attacks had
created another problem. A set of red curtains had caught fire and burst into
flames. So as well as being stuck in a room with an angry mummy, a serial
killer, an unconscious boyfriend and not knowing for sure where her pants were,
she now had to contend with the fact that the place was on fire too!

She hauled herself forward onto
her knees and stared around the hall. Her jeans and sneakers had been tossed
across the floor and had landed not too far from an antique piano with a
mannequin of Ludwig Beethoven sitting at it. She took in another deep breath
and groggily began crawling on her hands and knees towards it.

Behind her she could hear
Rameses Gaius cursing and firing laser bolts off in all directions.
Occasionally a gunshot would ring out in response. Gaius and the Kid were
taking shots at each other but, where the Lord of the Undead was out in the
open, the Kid was hiding within the shadows of the museum’s displays.

Kacy reached out and grabbed her
jeans with her fingertips. As she did, a blue laser bolt hit the floor nearby
and ricocheted up, flying a few inches past her nose. Clearly, time was in
short supply. Her jeans were almost completely inside out where the vampires
had yanked them off so hurriedly. As she picked them up off the floor,
something fell out of the one of the front pockets. It was the small object
Vanity had handed her. She cast her mind back to the moment when he had slipped
it into her hand. “
Use it…
’ he had said.

Fifty-Seven

Sanchez made his way tentatively
down the stairs to the main hall. Below him he could hear gunfire and all kinds
of stuff breaking. That was a sure sign that the Bourbon Kid was already taking
on Rameses Gaius, and doing it without The Book With No Name. Sanchez hoped he
wasn’t too late.

At the bottom of the stairs he
saw the actions that went with the noise. A pair of curtains had been set on
fire too, and the flames were spreading. There were dead bodies lying around on
the floor, which was nothing unusual in all honesty. Over by a shattered glass
display he saw the unconscious figure of Dante, wrapped up in bandages from his
feet to his shoulders. There was also the strange sight of a rather attractive
brunette in her early twenties crawling across the floor on her hands and
knees, wearing just a black sweatshirt and a pair of pink panties with the
words FREE ENTRY across the back. In any normal situation Sanchez would be
checking the spelling quite rigorously, but this wasn’t the time. The large
shaven headed figure of Rameses Gaius was standing in the centre of the hall
with his back to Sanchez. He was firing off blasts of blue lightning from his
hands, aiming them at just about anything. They were ricocheting off the floor
and walls, blasting into statues and displays. Everything he hit either snapped
in half or burst into flames. This was one destructive bastard.

Out of the corner of his eye,
Sanchez caught sight of the Bourbon Kid. He was hiding in the shadows behind a
black curtain that covered a statue of a fat naked guy. He had a large gun in
his hand. He saw Sanchez and nodded at him. Then he vanished into the shadows.
His disappearance was followed by a loud gunshot that drew Gaius’s fire. The
giant mummy launched a laser bolt at the curtains where the Kid had been hiding.

Sanchez had no fucking idea what
the Kid had nodded at him for, but he suspected it was some kind of signal. It
probably meant he was supposed to do something important. Something brave. The
Kid had drawn Gaius’s attention away from the stairs so Sanchez could sneak in
undetected. This was obviously his big moment. Gaius was only twenty metres in
front of him. Time to be a hero, like Flake had suggested.

He tiptoed as quickly as he
could up behind Gaius, only taking his eyes off the back of the mummy’s head
briefly to check out the ass on the girl with the pink underwear one last time,
just in case he never got another chance.

When he was less than a yard
behind Gaius he raised The Book With No Name up above his head and smashed it
down towards the back of the mummy’s skull. Unfortunately, as he plunged it
down, the Lord of the Undead suddenly spun around. There was no time for
Sanchez to pull out of the attack and neither was there time for Gaius to duck
out of the way. The book crashed down, right into his face, hitting him hard on
the bridge of his nose.

Sanchez thought back to the
moment Flake had hit Jessica with the book. It had set the Vampire Queen alight
almost instantly. The same thing couldn’t be said for Rameses Gaius. For what
felt like an awfully long time, Sanchez stood motionless, pressing the book
against the face of the mummy. But Gaius didn’t burst into flames. He simply
reached up with both hands and grabbed the book. Then he shoved it back into
Sanchez’s face. The impact was immense. It sent Sanchez sprawling back onto the
floor behind him. His feet bounced up over his head and he rolled back until he
eventually came to a sudden halt with his head almost wedged between his own
ass cheeks. As he sat back up, he saw Gaius toss The Book With No Name at him.
The magical book hadn’t wounded Gaius at all. The mummy had no interest in it
either. He nonchalantly tossed it at Sanchez’s head. Sanchez ducked out of the
way of it and raised his hands defensively, in readiness for a violent assault
from Gaius’s now glowing blue right hand.

And then behind his attacker, he
saw a ray of hope. The Bourbon Kid had stepped out of the shadows and was
pointing his gun at the back of Gaius’s head. A red laser sighter was aimed
precisely at the back of the eye socket that held the Eye of the Moon. As Gaius
prepared to fire a laser bolt at Sanchez, the Kid fired off a shot.

BANG!

It was a damn fine shot. Sanchez
watched in awe. He saw everything clearly as if it were in slow motion. The
back of Gaius’s head spurted out a few spots of blood as the bullet pierced his
skull. A clanging sound followed as the bullet hit the back of the Eye of the
Moon and then like a dream, the blue stone flew out of his eye socket, spraying
blood all around it.

Sanchez’s joy at the sight was
short lived.

Rameses Gaius had reflexes every
bit as quick as the laser bolts he fired from his fingertips. His left hand
snapped into action. He reached up and caught the blue stone as it flew out of
the front of his head. The stone had travelled less than half a yard before he
had recovered it.

Gaius looked down on the stone
with his remaining good eye. For a moment Sanchez almost thought he saw the
mummy smile. The moment passed all too quickly and Gaius turned around to face
the Bourbon Kid. In the back of Gaius’s head Sanchez saw the hole where the
bullet had entered. As he stared at it, the hole closed up quickly, vanishing
courtesy of the healing powers in the Eye of the Moon.

“Fuck me,”
Sanchez thought.
“This guy
is fucking invincible.”

Gaius snarled at the Kid. ‘You
had your shot. Now it’s my turn!’

He raised his right hand and
fired one of his blue laser bolts at the hooded figure in the long dark coat.
It hit the Kid in the chest and lifted him off his feet. He flew back twenty
feet through the air and crashed into the Egyptian Tomb display behind him.

Holy crap!

 
Sanchez gawped at the sheer power of
Rameses Gaius. This man was a walking army of Iron Man, General Zod and the
Incredible Hulk all rolled into one.

Fortunately Gaius seemed to
forget all about Sanchez as he took several giant strides towards the Bourbon
Kid, ready to finish him off.

If Gaius succeeded in killing
the Kid, it wouldn’t be long before he turned his attention back to Sanchez and
the semi-naked girl. One of them would be the next to die. At least Sanchez had
his pants on, so he’d probably be less likely to catch Gaius’s eye first.

Any hopes they had of surviving
rested with the Bourbon Kid and his renowned fighting prowess. Sanchez needed to
come up with a way to distract Gaius before he killed the Bourbon Kid. He had
to buy the Kid some time because right now the hooded slayer looked dazed and
out on his feet on the floor by the tomb.