The Devil's Graveyard (26 page)

Invincible Angus was doing an impressive job of fighting off the zombie creatures. Over the years he had fought men and women of all different shapes and sizes, wielding all kinds of different weapons, so he knew how to handle himself in a fight. And even though he had been surprised to find zombies attacking him, he was disciplined enough to put that out of his mind and concentrate on killing the fuckers. There would be time later to reflect on exactly what they were doing out here in the desert. For now, survival came top of his agenda.

He had figured out pretty early that these creatures had a surprisingly high level of intelligence. In most of the zombie movies he’d seen, they tended to stumble around in a dazed fashion with their arms outstretched, mumbling words like
‘
Brains’ over and over. But these were different, at least a couple of notches above that kind of nonsense. They attacked strategically. They knew to steer clear of his pistol. In fact, the sneaky bastards only ever attacked him when his back was turned, so he had to keep spinning around. He managed to gun down four of them, but pretty soon he found that all the spinning was making him dizzy. He’d only be able to keep whizzing around for so long before one of them would catch him off guard.

The really unexpected thing, however, was that not all of them were intent on killing him. When one particularly bony, tattered creature crawled along the ground and then jumped on his back, he expected it to try to take a bite out of his neck. But the sneaky little bastard actually pushed its hand in the coat pocket of his trench coat.
What the fuck?
At first, Angus couldn’t work out what the thing was after.

To his utter dismay, by the time he’d shaken it off, the zombie had snagged the keys to his van, right out of his pocket. Sneaky fucker. As the other zombies continued circling him, the sneaky one ran off limpingly towards the van, followed by another wearing what looked like a very dirty and badly torn pink dress. If Angus didn’t get a grip on the situation, he had a feeling he was about to watch two undead, brainless freaks hijack his pride and joy. This was entirely unexpected, and extremely unwelcome.

‘Get outta there, you miserable fucks!’ he yelled after them.

Why Angus wasted his time calling after them was anyone’s guess. They weren’t going to respond. Worse still, he should have been running after them, but instead, he stood rooted to the spot as other creatures circled him, finding himself mesmerized by the sight of two fuckin’ zombies getting into his beloved giant blue camper van and closing the doors.

If they knew how to drive and actually pulled away, his chances of escape would, for all practical purposes, vanish. When he heard the engine splutter into life he knew he had one option: batter his way through the swarming monsters and get to the van before it drove off. The noise of the engine starting was followed a few seconds later by the sound of CD player in the van bursting into life. Angus’s face dropped. He charged at two zombies who were standing between him and the van, knocking them aside more easily than he had expected. Then he started running as fast as he could, shooting down or kicking away any zombie rash or stupid enough to get in his path. No fucking way were those bastard zombies gonna make off with his van and his CD of Tom Jones’s greatest hits.

‘Get the fuck outta there! That’s my fuckin’ van, you fuckin’ muthafuckers! I’m gonna kill you! Again!’

Angus’s cries were to no avail. As the zombies pulled away and zoomed down the highway, he heard the chorus of ‘Delilah’ blaring out from the van’s speakers.

Bastard thievin’ undead pricks!

Angus’s van was one of his most valuable possessions, but his Tom Jones CD was priceless.
A signed edition from the man himself
. If he had been angry before, he was absolutely seething now. Unfortunately for him, he still had a bunch of zombies to fight off before he could even think about following the van back down the highway to the Hotel Pasadena.

The Bourbon Kid waited for Jacko to finish waving at the audience. The Blues Brothers impersonation hadn’t gone down as well as he’d hoped. Emily Shannon, the Judy Garland impersonator, was way better. And having just briefly met her, the Kid was pretty sure he’d made a bad first impression. In trying to convince her to quit the show and not perform in the final, all he had succeeded in doing was upsetting her and making her dislike him. That would have been okay if she’d followed his advice and quit the show, but it didn’t look like she had. This left him with an uneasy feeling. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time. Guilt. He felt guilty about upsetting her. He couldn’t get his head around the reasons it was bothering him.

It had been ten years to the day that he had effectively deserted Beth, the one true love in his life. Emily looked so much like Beth. They were even dressed exactly the same, for fuck’s sake. And Emily had that pleasant way about her, the same fresh-faced innocence Beth had possessed. What the hell was this all about? Was it some sort of sign? A chance to make amends for the wrongdoings of ten years ago? A chance to get things right? If he righted the wrongs this time and saved Emily, would it ease his conscience?

The memory of his mother’s face flashed through his mind. He saw himself, aged sixteen, standing over her as he fired bullets into her chest. Then he remembered the grinning face of Kione, the vampire who had raped his mother and turned her into one of his own kind. That sonofabitch was still alive, albeit in a permanent state of torture, hanging from a ceiling in the Kid’s apartment back home, ripe for being tortured again upon his return. And maybe that’s where he was best off? Back home? Maiming and torturing? That’s what he did best. Particularly when it mattered.

‘You okay?’ Jacko asked.

The Kid had barely noticed that his Blues Brothers-impersonating sidekick was standing next to him at the side of the stage. He snapped out of his more maudlin thoughts and looked at the idiot in the red leather pants and black suit jacket. He’d pinned his hopes on this buffoon.
What a fuckin’ waste of time.

‘I’m done,’ he said to Jacko. ‘You can keep the sunglasses. Good luck in the final. If you get there.’

‘Huh?’

The plan to spare Emily from winning the competition hadn’t worked. The Kid had done all he could to stop her from the inevitable, but she seemed hell-bent on ignoring him and putting herself in danger by winning the competition and signing the ill-fated contract. The Kid’s talents were best used elsewhere. Everyone he’d met in the Hotel Pasadena was a fucking idiot, a lousy cheat, or a murderous slimeball. Time to leave.

Leaving a baffled-looking Jacko behind he headed to the reception desk. By the time he got there his mood had become so foul that he pulled a gun on the receptionist. He made it very clear to her that he wanted his car keys handed over to him, rather than have a valet drive the car round to one of the hotel’s entrances. It took less than thirty seconds for her to locate his keys and hand them over.

The parking lot at the rear was jam-packed with buses that had shipped in hordes of fools from out of town. These were all parked at the rear, so he was pleased to find his black Firebird parked in the front row of cars just a few yards back from the hotel’s rear exit.

He opened the driver’s-side door and was just about to climb in when he saw a chopped Harley-Davidson cruise around the side of the hotel from the front drive. It caught his attention because the rider was carrying not one but two passengers, one on the seat in front of him, the other behind him. And he recognized them all.

He sat down behind the steering wheel and quietly closed the driver’s door. What were these three jokers doing at the hotel? And why were they together? The first one he recognized was the fat bastard at the front – Sanchez, the bartender from the Tapioca in Santa Mondega. Behind him was the rider, a huge, shaven-headed biker, and behind him Elvis, a hitman from the same town. Two of this trio had been intrinsically linked to the Kid’s night of evil a decade ago. When he had gone to church to pick up his younger brother up from a late-night service, he’d arrived to find Elvis and Sanchez there with a bunch of dead vampires. Elvis and a preacher named Rex had killed the vampires and apparently, hard though it was to believe, Sanchez had shielded his brother from the vampire attacks. That’s what they’d told him anyway, and he had no reason not to believe them.

The third man on the Harley, driving the bike sandwiched between Sanchez and Elvis, was its owner, Gabriel Locke. A New Age Disciple and probably a pretty decent guy, but given what had happened in Plainview recently, probably a bit pissed with the Kid. Murderous, even.

He watched the three of them climb off the chopper and head over to the fire exit at the rear of the hotel. Sanchez the buffoon tried to open the door a few times before realizing it only opened from the inside. Then the three of them headed back round to the front of the hotel.

But why were they here? Elvis was a hitman, but might well be there to sing in the show. Sanchez was a buffoon, not worth worrying about, but Locke – he might well be there to do the job the Kid had quit on
. The job that involved killing Emily.
He would want to ensure that Julius won the show and signed the contract. Yet Gabriel Locke was a religious type, of a kind, which meant that he would probably try to avoid killing Emily. Wouldn’t he?

The Kid opened his car door and got out. He drew a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and pulled one out with his teeth. Then he sat back on the hood of his car and sucked on the end of it. It lit up brightly in the cold night air. There was some thinking to be done. What exactly was going on in this hotel? And in the desert that surrounded it?

As he sat looking up at the moon, he heard another vehicle approach. Its tyres were screeching as if it were racing around a banked concrete track at high speed. In a moment it appeared around the same corner from where the Harley chopper had arrived. It was a large blue camper van, almost long enough to be classed as a bus, and it was travelling so fast that it nearly tipped over as it sped around the corner of the hotel. The Kid couldn’t make out a face on the driver, but the van careered over towards him and slammed to a stop outside the fire exit. At once the doors flew open and two dark figures jumped out from either side of it. They rushed to the fire exit and tried the door, much as the Kid had seen Sanchez do just a few minutes earlier. They too were unsuccessful.

Then they turned and saw him where he sat on the hood of his car. That was when he spotted that their eyes were glowing. One had red eyes, the other yellow, and they shone with a sinister phosphorescence in the dark night.

Undead muthafuckers.

The Bourbon Kid put his cigarette carefully down on the hood, slid forward off the Firebird and walked towards the two creatures. He heard them hiss at him, and then they tentatively approached, fanning out one either side of him, both eager for flesh.

The Kid had to consider the facts of the situation. He only had two bullets left, and they were far too valuable to waste on killing a pair of zombies. So, as he walked towards them, he reached his right hand into the left side of his jacket for another weapon.

The nearest zombie appeared to be wearing a tattered old polo-neck sweater, which had once been white but was now grey with filth. It also had on a pair of ruined pants, one leg of which was almost entirely missing, and, incongruously, a broken pair of heavy black-rimmed glasses. It looked like the hungrier of the two, and the Kid readied himself for it to attack first. It duly did, and as it charged towards him he swung his right arm back-handed across its throat. His hand now held a bone-handled knife with an eight-inch blade. It sliced the zombie’s throat open and, as its head fell forward, blood seeped out and ran down its chest. The dying zombie fell to its knees, a rasping, gravelly sound escaping from the wound in its throat.

Its partner, a female, was wearing a horrendously dirty pink dress. It had long, straggly grey hair and a face only half-covered in skin. The sight of her comrade falling to his knees stunned her momentarily and the Kid took advantage, lunging forward with his blade and thrusting it deep into the pink dress at chest height. The blade slid in through the rotting flesh with ease and he pulled it downwards in an effort to slice the ribcage right open. The flesh was soft like butter in some places, but tough like gristle in others. After he’d slashed an incision about eight inches long the zombie, like its partner, collapsed forward and fell to the ground before the Kid could pull the knife back out. It slipped from his hand, the blade caught somewhere in the zombie’s ribcage.