Vegas Knights (28 page)

  "Then let's move. If we spot a way to the surface, we take it."

  Bill stared up at the grate. "Think you could fly up there?" he said. He wasn't looking at me, but I knew who he meant.

  "I wasn't exactly flying before," I said. "And it happened by accident."

  "All the best things do."

  I stared up at the grate and imagined myself lifting up into the air. I closed my eyes and concentrated on it as hard as I could. Having to shut out the sounds of the sewer and ignore the fact that Bill and Powi were counting on me didn't help me any. Nor did the fact that I didn't know what I'd do once I got up to the grate if I could manage it. I didn't think I could push up on it without any leverage at all – but that was the rational part of my brain talking to me, not my mojo.

  I kept at it until sweat poured down my face, but I hadn't bumped my head on the top of the tunnel yet. I opened my eyes to glance down and saw that I'd made it about two feet off the ground. This was two feet higher than I'd ever willingly made it before, but it wasn't nearly enough.

  I was about to give up when I spotted the first one of them behind Bill and Powi.

  I think I smelled it before that but had just chalked up the stench of rotting flesh to the fact I was walking through a storm sewer. Things probably crawled in here to die all the time, and I didn't want to have to think about them much further than that. The thing shambling up behind my friends, though, wasn't the decaying corpse of a raccoon or cat.

  It was human – or had once been. Its flesh had mostly fallen from its face, but it still wore a blue-haired wig and a once-pink track suit. I had no idea how long the woman had been dead, but she should have been rotting away in a grave instead of roaming around the storm sewers.

  I admit it, I screamed in sheer terror. I dropped to the ground and landed on stiff legs. Before I even knew what I was doing, I brought up my silenced pistol and pumped three shots between Bill and Powi. The slugs smacked into the shuffling corpse and drove it back.

  Bill dove to the side to get out of my way. Powi, stone faced and cool, swung around and spotted the skull-faced creature collecting itself for another charge. She aimed her gun and put a bullet right through the thing's skull.

  "A zombie?" Bill held his gun before him in a twofisted grip. His hands shook so badly I thought the pistol might go off without him pulling the trigger. "You
can
not
be serious!"

  "Shh," I said.

  "Don't shush me!" Bill said, growing more hysterical with every word. "We're lost here in this labyrinth of tunnels snaking under Las Vegas, while open war between magicians is breaking out above us – and we just got attacked by a zombie!"

  "Shut up," said Powi.

  "It's not fair!" said Bill. "It's just not fair!"

  "
Shut up!
" Powi and I said in unison.

  Bill closed his mouth and glared at us.

  "What's the first thing you learn about in zombie movies?" I asked.

  "Shoot them in the head?" Powi said.

  I ignored her smug tone. "No," I said. "It's that there's never just one."

  Bill started to moan, but I cut him off with a hiss. "So shut up," I said, "and listen."

  "Where the hell did they come from?" Bill whispered. "Walking dead don't just come to Vegas for a convention. Do they?"

  "Houdini's dead," I said. "So were Gaviota's bodyguards."

  "You work for a man with undead bodyguards?" Powi said to Bill. "And zombies surprise you?"

  I shushed them again, and they fell silent. I listened as hard as I could, and I heard something moving out there in the inky blackness. I tried to dismiss the noises as the sound of the wind blowing through the tunnel or the traffic zooming by overhead, but now I could not mistake them as anything other than the limping footsteps of a small army of the dead shambling toward us.

  Using one hand to keep my gun trained into the darkness before me, I opened my free hand and let a bright beam of light shine out of it, past the fallen corpse. Powi did the same thing, but in the other direction.

  "Anything back there?" I asked.

  "I see three, maybe four sets of eyes coming at us," she said. "How about you?"

  Bill started in with a low moan. I wanted to elbow him into silence, but I just couldn't blame him.

  "We got more like a dozen over here," Bill said, "and much closer."

  I stared at the zombies. I didn't want to, but I couldn't take my eyes off them. They looked like they'd come from every walk of life. Some of them wore business suits. Others shuffled along in vacation clothes. A pair of young ladies wore little enough to make me think they must have once been either cocktail waitresses or strippers. Three looked like they had once been dealers.

  "Time to make all those hours we spent playing
Left
4 Dead
pay off," I said.

  "We can't shoot them all," Powi said. "We don't have enough bullets."

  "I have extra ammo in my bracelet," Bill said. A note of hope crept into his voice.

  "For all three guns? Or just yours?"

  "Shit."

  One of the zombies – a man dressed like Fat Elvis – broke free from the pack and charged us at top speed. I aimed at its head, squeezed off a single shot, and missed.

  Bill opened up at the thing and emptied his revolver. One of the shots blew off its head, but Bill kept pulling the trigger on three more empty chambers.

  "Reload!" I said.

  "There are only four to the north," Powi said. "I say we break through them and keep running."

  Bill flipped open his revolver's cylinder and started shoving bullets into it. "Just give me another three seconds," he said.

  "Hustle it up, brother," I said. "Not all these things move that slow."

  "Couldn't we just phase through them?" he asked.

  "Didn't work with Houdini's bodyguards, did it?" I said.

  He dropped a bullet. It bounced on the cement, and he scrabbled after it. "Stop being so right."

  Two of the creatures to the north sprinted toward us, screaming as they came. I spun around and helped Powi shoot them down.

  "Take the right!" she said. She pumped a single shot into the ex-high roller coming at her, and he crumpled to the ground. I had to use two bullets to drop a woman wearing what was left of a little black dress. That only left two zombies in front of us and maybe still a dozen of them behind.

  Bill slapped the reloaded cylinder back into his pistol. "Ready!" he shouted. "Let's go!"

  Bill, Powi, and I charged toward the two zombies in our path, an older couple who'd maybe been in their sixties when they'd died. They'd probably come here on a vacation, maybe to celebrate their retirement. They figured they'd play the slots, perhaps some Blackjack, grab a decent meal or three, maybe take in a show. Instead, they'd died, and their bodies had wound up strolling through the network of storm sewers that riddled this desert oasis.

  I don't remember who shot who. I fired at the woman, who was right in front of me. Powi probably aimed at the man. Bill blew through all the bullets in his gun again, spraying them both.

  They went down. I did my best not to step on the couple's shattered bodies as we stormed past them.

  The zombies behind us howled in frustration or anger or maybe just insatiable hunger for the prey that was racing away. They started to sprint after us as fast as their warped but tireless gaits would carry them, and we ran into the darkness for our lives.

 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
 

"They're still coming after us," Bill said. "Keep running!"

  "Eventually they're going to catch us if we don't find some way out of here," Powi said. "The dead don't get tired."

  I glanced down at Powi's phone, which I still had in my hand. "No signal down here," I said. "Just keep going."

  "We could be running right into more of them," Bill said.

  "Are you suggesting we stop?" asked Powi.

  Bill glanced back at the snarling mass of zombies chasing us. "No!" he said. "But I had a long night. I can't keep running like this for ever."

  Powi sprinted out into the lead.

  "Hey!" Bill said. "Wait for us!"

  She didn't respond.

  "What's that old joke?" I said. "Two friends meet up with a bear in the woods. One friend stops to put on running shoes."

  "Right," said Bill. "'Those shoes won't help you outrun the bear.'"

  "'I don't have to outrun the bear, just you.'"

  Panting hard, Bill managed a bitter laugh. "Not so funny when you're the one left behind."

  I grabbed his arm and pulled. "Come on. Let's catch her."

  Up ahead, Powi skidded to a halt and raced up a short set of stairs, much like the ones that had led down from the parking structure under the Thunderbird. She started pounding on the door. "Help!" she shouted. "Help!"

  "Just phase through the door!" I shouted.

  I yanked on Bill's arm and dragged him into a last desperate sprint that put a bit more distance between the zombies and us. When we reached Powi, she was still banging on the door with her fists.

  "I can't get through the door, and we don't know what's on the other side of that wall," she said. "It might be nothing but dirt, and then we'd be trapped inside it."

  "Better trapped than torn to pieces," Bill said as he made for the wall. He bounced right back off it.

  "What the hell?" he said as he rubbed his head where he'd banged it. "I can't get through either. Damned wall!"

  "Then we'd better start running again," I said, "because here they come."

  Before Powi could even get down off the steps, the door she'd been banging on swung open, and a blinding light spilled into the tunnel through it. A man stood framed in the doorway, and he called out to us. "Then get your asses in here!"

  Powi hesitated, but Bill shoved past her and the man to dive across the threshold. I came up behind her and escorted her though right after Bill. As soon as we were clear of the doorway, the man slammed the door shut.

  He slapped a bar across the door and then clamped it down on both ends. The zombies smashed into the door, pounding on its rusty steel harder than any living creature could manage without the fear of fracturing a bone. One started in, then another. Soon I couldn't tell how many fists were beating on it, and the noise sounded like thunder.

  We were in a large room about the size of the common space in the suite that Bill and I had at Bootleggers. It seemed more like a bomb shelter than a home, but one that someone had lived in for years if not decades. A pair of couches sprawled in the middle of it, cutting off the main section of the room from a sleeping area. A TV sat in front of a chair near the couches, atop a workbench littered with papers and pens.

  With the exception of the couch and chairs and a great deal of trash, everything in the room was at least three feet off the floor. This included the bed in the back corner, which sat atop a loft, the kind that Bill and I had set up in our dorm room. The floor bore water stains, and the high-water mark in the room came up to just under that three-foot level at which everything important sat over.

  Satisfied that the door would hold, the man turned to scowl at us. He was tall and thin, but with the shoulders of a weight lifter. His hair and beard were long, scraggly, and gray, and he smelled as if he'd not bathed since the last time the waters rose in the storm sewers. He stood dressed in black slacks and a sleeveless undershirt that had no doubt once been white.

  "What the hell are you doing down here?" he asked, his voice as gritty and low as his home.

  "Escaping," I said.

  "Then you're doing a damned rotten job of it."

  "We got chased out of the Thunderbird," Bill said. "The zombies came later."

  "I'd wondered where they'd wandered off to," the man said as he lumbered over to sit on the chair in front of the TV. "It got quiet around here."

  "Are they yours?" asked Powi.

  He snorted. "Hardly. Does the wolf that comes sniffing around your door belong to you?"

  "Maybe if you feed it," I said.

  "That, young sir, is one thing that I take care never to do."

  "Is there another way out of here?" Powi said. "I need to get back to the Thunderbird."

  "I thought you said you just escaped from there."

  "She's going that way," Bill said. "I'm heading for Bootleggers."

  "Ah." The man arched an eyebrow at us. "So it's begun."

  "What?" I said. "What's begun?"

  "All right." The man waved me off. "So it's more like 'started up again' than 'begun,' but it's all the same thing. War between wizards, right?"

  I'm sure Bill and Powi had the same question on their minds, but I was the first to voice it. "Who are you?"

  The man chuckled. "Nobody important. Not anymore."

  "Prospero." Powi kept her voice soft and low, but I still heard her over the pounding of the zombies. "You're Prospero, aren't you?"

  "I have been known to answer to that name," the man said.

  I checked the GPS on Powi's phone and was surprised to find it worked. "We're underneath what used to be the Frontier."

  "That's just an empty lot now," Powi said. "Nothing but dirt."

  "It wasn't always that way," Prospero said. "For decades, it was one of the finest joints in the entire city, but time passed it by – much like it has me."

  "How long have you been down here?"

  Prospero tugged at his beard. "Since 1992, I think." He saw us gawking at him. "Why? What year is it now?"

  "It's 2010," I said. "You've been down here since the year I was born."