John Levitt - Unleashed

When I’d made the golem out of wood and nails, it was frightening but totally ineffective. The Ramsey corpse was a different matter. He might not have been very strong in life, but he was strong now. And being dead, he didn’t get tired. An all-out attack takes up so much energy that if it doesn’t succeed very quickly, it fails. Arms grow tired, breath becomes labored, and before long you can barely stand upright.

But in the best zombie tradition, Ramsey was tireless. And, of course, immune to injury and pain. The shape-shifter recovered in a second, whipped her long muzzle around, and took a good-sized chunk out of his shoulder. Ramsey ignored it and managed to get his hands around the shape-shifter’s throat. It tried to shake him off, but he was glued to it like the death he was. The shape-shifter brought up its powerful claws and ripped his stomach open. Some fluid gushed forth and long ropy intestines dangled out, but again it made no difference. Ramsey’s hands continued to squeeze the shape-shifter’s throat, cutting off its air. And unlike Ramsey, the shape-shifter was getting tired, especially with no oxygen fueling its high metabolism. Worse, as far as the shape-shifter was concerned, blood flow to the brain was being cut off, and if it couldn’t free itself quickly, it would pass out and never wake up.

It was like a scene in a George Romero film, except the blood and gore was real and the combination of feral stink and reek of blood and meat was overwhelming. I’d thought I could slip past them to freedom while they were occupied with each other, but naturally I’d overlooked something again. The two of them were blocking the stairs, the only exit, and there was no way past them.

The shape-shifter was losing the fight. It finally realized its best defense would be to chew off one of Ramsey’s arms, making it impossible for him to maintain a grip. But it had realized that too late. It was losing focus as its blood-deprived brain began to shut down. Its arms started to flail, and it was biting and snapping at random now, with no clear purpose. They both lost balance, the shape-shifter because it was passing out, Ramsey because there wasn’t that much left of his physical body. As they toppled over, Lou took a running start and leapt over them, doing his hurdler imitation again, landing on the stairs below. I took my cue and tried to do the same, but when my trailing leg knocked against Ramsey, he let go of the shape-shifter’s throat and reached up automatically, grabbing my ankle as I passed. I knew his magically enhanced grip would be powerful, but I’d had no idea. A little more pressure and bone would crumble under his fingers. No wonder the shape-shifter had collapsed.

I had to do something quickly. If Ramsey lost focus on the shape-shifter and concentrated on me instead, not only would that be bad in itself but the shape-shifter might recover as well. Monster and zombie together would be a bit too much to deal with. Already, with the choking pressure removed, the shape-shifter was struggling upward with renewed purpose.

But even though I had no idea how to control Ramsey, I was the one who had animated him. That gave me some magical standing. And blood was the key. I threw my jacket down the stairs, stripped off my blood-covered shirt, and dropped it over Ramsey’s head. That blood had been a vital factor in the animation, and so much of it touching him temporarily overloaded the circuits in whatever now passed for a brain. Ramsey’s hand slackened and he lay motionless, like a falcon that had just been hooded.

I pulled my leg free, scrambled over the two bodies on the floor, and then as I made it to the stairs I reached back and plucked the shirt from Ramsey’s head. Instantly his hand snapped back to the shape-shifter’s throat as he resumed his relentless pressure.

I was tempted to run out the door and get the hell out of there, but I couldn’t just yet. I had to make sure the shape-shifter didn’t survive, and equally important, I had to deactivate Ramsey-if he finished the job, his next step might be to shamble around the neighborhood. There are a lot of strange things that people will shrug off because they couldn’t possibly be true, but a ravaged corpse stalking the streets is not one of them. Even if he didn’t manage to kill anyone, it would open a can of worms that would shake the practitioner community to its core.

So I stood quietly in Ramsey’s pitiful little kitchen, listening to the sounds of thumping and scrabbling coming from up above. Eventually, all sounds stopped, followed by a brief but ominous silence. Then the sound of heavy footsteps stumbling down the stairs.

I was ready. I turned on the water in the kitchen sink, squirted in a good-sized glob from an untouched bottle of dishwashing liquid, and frantically started scrubbing the blood out of my shirt. The water ran pink as it swirled down the drain, and the footsteps from the stairs became slow and hesitant. I used a roll of paper towels to clean off any of it that had spattered on my leather jacket, until both the jacket and the shirt were as clean as I could get them in such a short time. The animating force had been funneled through the blood, and if there was not enough blood left, the force would weaken. When it dropped below a certain threshold it would cease to operate.

The steps from up above faltered, and finally, with a heavy thud, Ramsey’s body collapsed and tumbled down, ending up sprawled out at the bottom of the stairs. Between the original dismemberment and the large chunks ripped off during the last struggle, what was left was barely recognizable as a human being.

I stood in the small kitchen, staring at dismembered bodies and pools of blood, and felt nothing. No horror, no relief, certainly no satisfaction.

I was burned out, blank and empty. Lou looked up at me, worried. Or maybe he just wanted to go home. Our work here was done, after all.

“Come on,” I said, and walked out the door.

THE CLEANUP OF RAMSEY’S APARTMENT MUST have been a nightmare. Victor handled it, along with the team he uses for such things. “Welcome to the world of grown-ups,” he’d said to me earlier. But I couldn’t begin to deal with that sort of thing; I just wanted to walk away and forget it ever happened. Someone had to do it, though, and as usual, that someone was Victor. For the first time, I got some real insight into our relationship, and why he never really took me seriously. To him, I wasn’t a grown-up, and never would be. And he might just be right about that.

Morgan was happy to find out that things were back to normal, though they’d never really be normal for her again. Collateral damage. I called her a couple of times, mostly out of a sense of obligation, but she made it clear she wanted nothing more to do with me or my world.

I never saw the Wendigo again. Well, that’s not exactly true. I was over at Emily Janover’s house one night, talking about a project she had in mind. Emily is a keyboard player and singer, a Diana Krall type. She’s good, but she could have been really good if she’d only applied herself. Of course, I’m hardly one to talk. We shared dinner and stayed up late, talking about who else she wanted for her CD and what songs to do.

She turned on the TV and switched over to a late-night talk show.

“There’s a band from the Bay Area on tonight I want to see,” she said. “The Death Turtles. Supposedly they’re the next big thing.”

We listened to them, and they weren’t bad, though not to my taste. But in the back, sitting behind a massive set of drums and grinning from ear to ear, was a curly-headed fellow I knew all too well. Emily was less than impressed by the band.

“Same old thing.” She sighed. “If you want to hit the big time, three chords and a loud voice is what you need.”