Vegas Knights (30 page)

  "How are we going to clear the sidewalk between here and there," I asked.

  "What time is it?" Hardeen asked.

  "Almost six o'clock," I said.

  "Then hurry along, but leave the clearing of the street to me," Hardeen said. "Go down there, and open the lower door. The trick will be not getting so far ahead of the creatures that they decide to wander off after easier prey."

  "But not so close that they catch you," said Powi. "I'll go open the door," she said to me. "You push Bill."

  "No," I said. "I'm faster than you. We proved that in the tunnels. I should do it."

  "What are you talking about? I outran you."

  "Only when I was helping along Bill."

  She screwed up her face at me.

  "Look," I said, "you probably know this street better than any of us. I need you out there looking after Bill. If I push him in the cart, I'm liable to run into a car or a curb, and then we'll both be dead. If you take care of him, we have a chance."

  "All right," she said. "Just as long as you don't go around saying you're faster than me."

  "As you wish."

  "Is that some kind of
Princess Bride
reference?" she asked.

  I felt my cheeks redden. She leaned over and kissed me on the lips. "You're too cute," she said.

  My heart beat faster, and it was only partly because of the pack of zombies I was about to let loose. "I better go do this before I lose my nerve," I said.

  She kissed me again, longer. "For luck," she said.

  "A
Star Wars
quote," I said. "Better yet."

  She winked at me, and I ducked into the shed, ready to dare anything.

  "Give us a thirty-second head start," Hardeen called after me. "That should be enough."

  I started counting out to thirty in my head as I made my way toward the still-locked door. The zombies on the other side had not stopped pounding on it for an instant. I wondered if they somehow knew what Houdini was up to. Had his experiments that put them on the fence between life and death made them sensitive to the fact he was about to bring that barrier down?

  I decided it didn't make any difference. I undid the clamps on the bar and stood back. I considered just leaving then and hoping that the zombies would be able to knock the bar loose in time, but there was the chance that they might never pull that off.

  I grabbed a stick from underneath Hardeen's workbench and reached out to place the tip of it right under the bar. I held my breath, then flicked the pole up to knock the bar off the door. It burst open under the pressure of a dozen sets of dead hands shoving at it, and the zombies attached to those hands poured into the room, pulling themselves over their fallen fellows to come after me.

  I turned and ran.

  I made it up the stairs so fast I can't swear my feet actually touched the steps. I threw myself out of the shed and spotted Powi and Hardeen sprinting up the street toward Bootleggers, the shopping cart with Bill in it racing before them.

  Hardeen had thrown his hands in the air and was shouting at the people between him and his brother. "Run!" he bellowed. "Run! The gates of Hell have been flung open, and Armageddon is here!"

  Most of the people on the streets of Las Vegas had seen someone like Hardeen before, I'm sure: a ratty gray-haired madman screeching about the End Times. But I'd bet that none of those other nutjobs had come complete with his own personal Apocalypse.

  The air before Hardeen warped with huge gouts of fire that soared fifty feet over his head. Even from as far behind them as I was, I could feel the scorching heat and hear the terrifying crackling of the blaze.

  Traffic on the street screeched to a halt. Some of the cars pulled U-turns and squealed away. Others that were already heading in the right direction zoomed off at top speed.

  The people on the streets screamed and ran. Some of them raced into Revolutions or the Riviera, while others just sprinted away down the street. I worried that someone might be hurt in the stampede, but they were bound to be better off that way than they would be if the column of zombies chasing me caught them.

  I wondered how Hardeen could have tapped into so much firepower – literally – at once. It was impossible to just conjure up a blaze like that. The heat and fuel had to come from somewhere.

  I glanced back over my shoulder and spotted the Mirage in the distance behind us. Then I knew what Hardeen had done. It was six o'clock, but the volcano outside the Mirage stood silent. The master magician had stolen its sound and fury and repurposed it to his own ends.

  The zombies slammed out of the shed and came after me then. After the first few, a couple of them got stuck trying to get through the door at the same time, but the ones behind them shoved them out of the way and trampled them flat.

  I trotted to the corner and concentrated on making the lights that ran along Las Vegas Boulevard green and the ones on the cross street – Desert Inn Road – red. I wanted to make sure that both the zombies and I had a clear shot across the street. Once they made it past the light, it was a simple matter of luring them up the street and into Bootleggers.

  Well, not so simple, but at least I wouldn't be fighting traffic.

  I stood in the middle of the crosswalk and watched as the zombies streamed out after me. I felt like the lead runner in a foot race. If the creatures had only had numbers on their chests, the illusion would have been complete.

  Once the zombies made it to the curb, I took off toward Bootleggers. Powi, Bill, and Hardeen had a good twohundred-yard start on me and were passing by the main entrance to Revolutions as I made it across the street.

  The art-deco tower of Bootleggers beckoned to me from the end of the block. Because of its huge size, it looked like it was only a short hop to the place, but I knew from my other walks down the street that it was really over a half-mile away. That meant that this was about to be the longest four or five minutes of my life.

 
 

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
 

The zombies didn't seem at all perturbed to be running around in the open. They just kept right after me, hot on my tail, ignoring anyone screaming at them from the few straggling cars zipping by on the Strip. They all moved at roughly the same pace, the few fast ones apparently stuck somewhere in the middle of the pack.

  I couldn't tell how many zombies there were. They numbered in the dozens at least, but there might have been more of them still streaming up through Hardeen's hideout.

  Fortunately, the entrance to Revolutions was set far back from the street. The same couldn't be said for the Slots-A-Fun part of Circus Circus, which came right out to the sidewalk. Lots of people had ducked in there when Hardeen and his insane fire show blasted past them, but a few heads began sticking out to see what was following in the madman's wake.

  I sprinted ahead of the zombies and started shouting at a pack of college students who had poked their noses out to rubberneck at the show. "Get back!" I shouted at them. "There's a horde of zombies coming after me!"

  "Dude!" one of them said. "That's so awesome! What movie is this for?"

  That brought me up short. I stopped in front of them, panting, and said, "What?"

  They were all dressed in shorts and sandals with the girls in tank tops and the boys in polos. Every one of them had a drink in their well-tanned hands. A pretty girl with the group grinned at me. "Are you actually shooting the movie right now, or is this just a promo? I did the Zombie Walk in Chicago last year. It was a riot!"

  "This isn't for a film," I said. "It's real!"

  The girl and her friends all laughed. "This rocks!" one of the boys said. "Look! He's even got a gun. It's so real!"

  The creatures behind me were closing the distance fast. A speedy zombie finally broke free from the pack and sprinted toward me.

  "Aw, c'mon." One of the boys pointed at the zombies barreling down at us. "Those makeup jobs are awful. Have you ever seen dead people so fake?"

  I raised my gun, took aim, and fired a single bullet at the oncoming zombie, a man who looked like he'd once been a bouncer for a cutting-edge nightclub. The shot smashed into his shoulder and knocked off his arm, but he kept coming.

  "Oh my god!" another girl said. "How do you do that? Those are the best special effects ever!"

  "This isn't some kind of live-action roleplaying game. It's–" I pointed my gun at one of the security cameras. "It's a hold-up!" I shouted.

  I fired my gun at the camera, and it smashed straight off the wall. The college students next to me screamed and ran for cover. A security guard inside smashed a button, and steel roll-doors unfurled over the casino's entrance.

  I started to smile, but something at my left snarled. I spun about and brought up my gun just in time to see the one-armed bouncer nearly on top of me. I pointed the gun right at his mouth and pulled the trigger. His head disappeared, and his body tumbled forward to land on my feet.

  Just inside the casino's lowering doors, I heard someone say, "Cool!"

  I started off toward Bootleggers again, the zombies much closer to me now than I would have liked. I ran as hard as I could, happy to see that Hardeen had done an excellent job of clearing the way from here. I had a clear shot to Bootleggers' front doors.

  When I arrived there, though, security had already grabbed Hardeen. A trio of tall, muscular men spoke to him in heated tones outside of the casino's front doors.

  I stuffed my gun into the pocket of my jacket, hoping that the guards were too busy with the shaggy old magician to have spotted the weapon. As I did, I heard sirens approaching in the distance. I glanced back to see the zombies take the corner up to the casino's entrance, and I started to shout.

  "They're coming!" I said. "There are hundreds of them! They already killed everyone at Revolutions! Bootleggers is next!"

  One of the guards broke away from the conversation with Hardeen to have a word with me. "Sir!" he said. "You can't come screaming in here like that and cause a panic."

  I turned and pointed back at the zombies. The front of the column of creatures had already made it halfway from the street to the door. "I'm not the one causing a panic," I said. "They are!"

  The guard's eyes grew wide as he tried to count the number of people coming at him and failed. He reached up to tap his headset. "Control?" he said. "We have a priority-one emergency. Repeat: a priority-one emergency!"

  I raced over to Hardeen. One of the men with him said, "You are not to enter this casino under any circumstances, Mr Weiss. Our standing orders regarding you are painfully clear. I don't even want to be seen talking to you about this."

  "You can't leave him out here with the zombies attacking us!" I said.

  The other guard stiff-armed me away. "Stay out of this, sir," he said. As he spoke, his gaze shot past me to the horde of creatures stomping up the driveway toward us. Without taking his eyes off them, he reached out and tapped his partner on the shoulder. "We got trouble, Sean," he said.

  "Handle it, John."

  "I mean serious trouble." John grabbed my arm and pushed me toward the casino's front doors.

  "Is it really something that Ken can't handle?" Sean glanced toward the zombies and froze.

  "I think we're going to need all hands for this one," said John.

  Sean grabbed Hardeen and hauled him inside. I was already three steps ahead of them. "You're behind this, I'm sure," Sean said to Hardeen, "but either way, you're going to stand here quietly or the next person I shoot will be you."

  "Very kind of you," Hardeen said. He stuck a hand around Sean's back and waved me toward the elevators. I took the hint and ran.

  A moment later, the zombies smashed into the wide row of glass doors that fronted the casino. Some of the glass gave – mostly from raw bones being shoved through it – but most of it held. Gunshots rang out as the security team gave up on any chance of talking their assailants down, and people throughout the casino began to scream.

  At the first bank of elevators, I spotted Powi. She'd gotten the shopping cart with Bill in it stuck in an elevator's doorway. The elevator's alarm rang as she struggled with the cart, and a cluster of guests were shouting at her to fix the problem and get moving before they all were killed.

  "Coming through!" I said. "Excuse me!" I shoved my way from one side of the crowd to another, and when I reached Powi I lowered my shoulder and hit the shopping cart hard.

  The cart popped free from where it had been wedged and bounced off the elevator's back wall as I tumbled in after it. Powi slipped in after me, and the doors closed behind her. The alarm stopped.

  "I did that on purpose, you know," Powi said. "I wasn't really stuck."

  "I never said otherwise." I got to my feet and looked down at Bill in the cart. "How is he?"

  In response, Bill groaned, softer now than he had sounded back in Hardeen's bunker. He seemed to be in more pain than before but lacked the energy to complain as loudly about it.

  "Bad," she said, "but he's not dead yet."

  I pushed the button for Houdini's penthouse.

  Nothing happened.

  "We need a passkey to get up there," Powi said. "Don't you have one?"

  "Like Houdini would give me the keys to his home?" I pulled out the keycard to my suite. "I guess it's worth a try."

  I pushed the button again. Still nothing. I thumbed the button for the floor on which my suite was instead. The elevator leaped into motion.

  "Bill," I said in a loud clear voice. He shivered in pain, which I decided might pass for a nod, so I decided to try my question. "Did your keycard get upgraded?"