I searched for zombies but until they moved, they remained inconspicuous against the texture of the night. I walked down the hill with the elephant gun loaded and ready.
A hundred feet away, a human shape walked from beside a juniper bush. Another shape moved. Then another. Within a minute, I had six zombies advancing, two carrying lumber studs fashioned into clubs.
I leveled the elephant gun. They sensed the threat and kept their distance.
Instead of approaching, I hustled from them. The zombies followed and bunched up one behind the other. I lowered the elephant gun and fired both barrels.
The gun roared, the muzzle blasts brilliant as lightning, the recoil like a kick against my shoulder.
The large slugs plowed through all of them in an explosion of slime. They collapsed in a heap of black mush.
I made for the gas tank. I broke open the elephant gun. The ejected spent cartridges tumbled free with a whoop and loops of smoke. I reloaded and snapped the gun closed.
Sheets of plywood fell from the windows along the back of the house. Zombies lunged through the openings toward me, Kimberly leading the charge.
I scrambled for my target, the gas tank.
My senses pinged. Something was wrong. Their attack was too obvious.
A shape darkened the stars over the roof. Then another. A sharpened pole shaved alongside me and ripped my vest. The two zombies got ready to spring from the roof.
I fired the elephant gun. Once. Twice. The blasts engulfed the zombies and they plopped into the ground, their guts streaming behind them.
I ran and reloaded the elephant gun. A first wave of zombies tromped over their fallen comrades.
Jolie BMW’s roared through the darkness. She zoomed alongside the zombies, close enough that they turned toward her. She stood on the motorcycle pegs, leveled her pistol in her left hand, and blasted away.
Zombie heads exploded like rotten cantaloupes.
She fishtailed through the dirt, leaving the surviving zombies a disorganized mob, not certain whether to go after her or me.
I fired the elephant gun, reloaded at vampire speed, fired again, and again and again.
I had fired so fast that the spent cartridges were still looping smoke in the air when I stopped. The blasts echoed in my ears.
Jolie circled for another strafing attack, and in the wake of her high-speed pass, she left zombies in squirming piles.
I proceeded to the gas tank and fastened the bomb to the bottom of a leg closest to the garage. The bomb would sever the leg and the weight of the gas tank should drop the tank through the garage and into the bottom floor.
I turned on the cell phone. The screen flashed.
I went to the porch. Jolie waited, having ditched her motorcycle and helmet.
Guns at the ready, we entered the lab. Shelves and equipment littered the floor. Discarded heads and empty canisters lay in puddles of oily liquid. The heads rested on their cheeks, the lifeless eyes clouded and empty, the skin gray and gummy.
Jolie kept her.45 pointed at the heads. “Where is everybody else?”
“I don’t know.” I put my hand on the floor and kept still. I felt the tremble of bodies moving below. Hennison?
We went through the top floor room by room but no zombies or the doc. Jolie stood with me on the landing to the bottom floor.
Below us, a coil of tubing and cable unraveled down the stairs. The tubes and cable went through crude holes punched in the walls. A light shone from a wide door in the middle of the hall.
“Seems too quiet down there,” Jolie said. “It’s a trap. One wrong move and we’re zombie chow.”
“Who goes first?” I asked.
“I’ll do it.” Jolie tensed her legs to leap.
“Hold on. If it’s a trap, how about neither of us goes first?” I rolled a cart from the lab and pushed it down the stairs. The cart clattered a few steps, spilling surgical tools and bottles, then tumbled end over end. When it crashed against the bottom, a curtain of mist sprayed across the threshold.
The odor burned my nose like acid. My eyes watered.
Garlic oil.
Clever, that trap would harm no one but a vampire.
Five zombies leaped from around the corner and surrounded the cart. They banged on the metal cabinet like enraged baboons before realizing their mistake.
I got two with the elephant gun. Jolie finished the rest with her pistol. I whisked a tarp from the floor, covered my head and arms, and bounded down the stairs.
I landed on top of the zombies, not levitating so I hit them with all my weight.
They collapsed beneath me and I sprang away. The fine mist of the lingering garlic oil stung my nose and eyes. I reached clean air before shedding the tarp. I searched my pocket for another couple of cartridges for the elephant gun. The pocket was empty. No problem, I had plenty of ammo. I searched another pocket. My fingers poked through. The pocket had been sliced open. I tapped the other pockets, anxiously searching for more ammo.
We were getting deeper into the lair and losing our advantages by the second. Jolie landed beside me.
I asked, “How are you fixed for bullets?”
“Down to half. Sure are a lot of these fuckers.”
I threw away the elephant gun, drew my.45, and went through the door in the hall.
Banks of lights clamped to the ceiling illuminated with a brightness and heat as intense as a summer sun. The dirty humid air smelled like a polluted swamp.
Rows of aquariums sat on metal shelves, containing human parts instead of tropical fish. At the bottom of one aquarium, bubbles spewed from a plastic clam, a tiny frogman trapped inside its pearly jaws. The bubbles frothed around livers, spleens, and kidneys.
Pairs of eyes bobbed in Mason jars. As we walked in, the eyes followed us as if they had nothing better to look at.
A naked and legless human torso lay pinned with cabinet-maker’s clamps against a picnic table perched at a slant with a car jack. Stitches held the arms to the shoulders. An assortment of feet sat alongside on a workbench as if they were shoes to try on for size.
The top of the head was open, the cap of skull hanging off to one side. Wires and small colored cables were strung from the empty skull to a battery of cheap-looking electrical gizmos as if this were a kit from Popular Science.
As a vampire I’m an expert in corpses, dining regularly on the blood of the innocent and guilty, ripping the flesh off the bones of my enemies, etc. And having seen an alien hoodlum pull a prosthetic robotic eyeball from his head, in short, I’ve witnessed plenty of freaky ass, capital A-S-S, shit in my short undead existence.
But this house outside Morada, Colorado, took the cake. And the icing. And the creamy filling.
Jolie noted the bloody handprints smeared across the walls. “Hennison?”
“I hope so. If he’s lost this much blood, he’s close to biting the big one.”
Where were Reginald and Sonia? Maybe this was yet another trap?
Zombies dragged their feet on the floor above. Three, maybe four zombies gathered for another attack.
Jolie and I followed the streaks of blood to a second lab.
Another naked body lay on the table, feet and crotch toward us. It was a man, obviously. Tubes and wires draped from incisions in the arms, the legs, and the torso. Three ragged holes marred his chest, one by the sternum, the others closer to the left shoulder. Gunshot wounds.
The needles on the gauges of the adjacent pumps and electrical console twitched. A row of laptops presented black screens, and blinking power lights indicated sleep mode. This had to be the main reanimation lab, where Hennison created his zombies.
I kept my pistol ready and I advanced, my senses at maximum gain.