Alex Lee Martinez - Gil's All Fright Diner

She sighed. "Every couple of weeks. It's usually only three or four of the bastards. I don't have to tell you, it's really cut into my business."

"You tried anything about it yet?"

"Got the preacher to bless and exorcise the cemetery after the second time. I guess it didn't take. After that, I figured I could wait them out. That's the weird part. Can't be more than a hundred graves in that place, but I've killed more than a hundred and fifty since. Hundred and eighty-one counting that batch. Damned if I can reckon where they're all coming from. Nobody's been buried in there for years."

"Sounds like a problem," Earl remarked.

She nodded, setting a plate before Duke.

The werewolf wrapped his immense hands around a fork and took an experimental bite.

"Well?"

She stared at his wolf's head, looking for any sign of a smile on his muzzle.

"He likes it." Earl pointed to the werewolf's briskly wagging tail.

"Glad to hear it. I made it myself."

She clapped her meaty hands together. "Say, you fellas looking for work?"

"We can look into that zombie problem for you," Earl agreed.

"Actually, I was talking about helping me lay a new gas line for my stove. But if you take care of those damn corpses, I'd throw in a hundred bucks and some gas."

The werewolf and the vampire exchanged thoughtful glances.

Duke slid his empty plate toward her. "Throw in another piece, and you got yourself a deal."

Her name (or the name her adopted parents had given her) was Tammy, but her followers called her Mistress Lilith, Queen of Night. At the moment, she had only one disciple, and he was more interested in getting in her pants than aiding her in opening the way for the old gods. Chad Roberts was lacking in true devotion, but assembling a legion of believers in a dust bowl like Rockwood — five square miles of town spread across thirty — was no easy task. Chad wasn't her first choice, but he could be useful in a muscle-bound lackey sort of way.

Tammy and her cult of one squatted by the ceremonial fire in the burnt-out remains of Make Out Barn. He hummed the theme to Bonanza while tracing patterns in the dirt with his fingers. The firelight glinted off her ritual dagger.

"Uh. . Tammy. ."

She tossed him a hard look.

"Mistress Lilith," he quickly corrected, "I don't think they're coming."

Sighing, Tammy snatched up her worn copy of the abridged Necronomicon next to her pile of clothes. She flipped through the pages to the ritual of Thanatos's Risen Children, but there was nothing in the book to help her. They'd performed the ceremony a dozen times. Even Chad, who didn't have much in the way of brainpower and understood nothing of black magic, could execute the spell by memory. No, it wasn't a flaw in the casting. It had to be the zombies. They just weren't enough.

"Damn that fat old bitch."

Any normal person would flee from the risen dead. Why didn't she? Something new was needed. Something more powerful.

She leafed through the book, ignoring Chad's unblinking stare at her breasts. Tammy was used to the stares. Not just from her follower, but from all the boys (all nine of them her age) in Rockwood. She was far prettier than all the other girls. Except for Denise Calhoun, that fat cow with her C-cup boobs. But Denise was white trash whereas Tammy was adopted and the only Japanese girl in town, possessing an exotic edge over Denise, whose parents let her wear makeup, even though it made her look like a big slut.

"What do we do now, Mistress Lilith?" Chad asked, as he leaned closer and brushed her long, silky hair.

She shoved him away. "I'm thinking, dumbass."

Chad was not so easily discouraged. He flexed his overdeveloped pectoral muscles like some primate mating signal.

She kept reading.

"Are we going to do it or not?"

"Why don't you go into the corner and do it yourself?"

He stood, slouching. "Aw, come on, Tammy. Big Jimmy needs his lovin'."

"Mistress Lilith," she replied.

"Uh, sorry." He adopted a whiny tone. "Come on, Mistress Lilith. Please?"

"Oh, alright." She laid the book aside with a sigh. The jerk was impossible to ignore when he was horny — and he was always horny.

Chad grinned, grabbing a condom from his neatly folded trousers. Nineteen groaning, sweaty seconds later, Tammy climbed off Big Jimmy (all three inches of him), Chad fell dead asleep, and she returned to her research.

There was much to be done. Soon the planets would align. The Gate would open and flood the world with beautiful darkness. Her masters would ascend to their rightful thrones, and she would reign by their sides while Denise Calhoun screamed herself hoarse in eternal agony.

If she could only get inside that diner.

Loretta pulled the chain, and a dusty forty-watt bulb did its best to illuminate the diner's storeroom.

"It ain't much, boys, but it's the best in town. There's a Motel 6 a little ways up the road. ."

"This'll do."

Earl entered, carrying one end of a steamer trunk. Duke, bearing his own end, followed. The werewolf dropped his side and the trunk struck the floor with a faint crack, raising a cloud of dust.

"Damn it, Duke. How many times I gotta tell you to be careful with this?"

Loretta swung her meaty arms around to denote the storeroom's amenities. "Got yourself a sink right there and a cot here. And there's some blankets and a pillow on that shelf under the canned corned beef. The sink can make a racket and don't drink the water if it's dark brown. Light brown's okay."

She paused to rearrange the shelves.

"Now I only got one rule in this room: no eating. It's hard enough to keep rodents out of here without leaving crumbs. And what with the zombies and all, I'm having enough trouble keeping my license."

"No problem." Earl threw open the trunk and climbed inside. "You wanna hand me that pillow, Duke?"

"What's wrong with the one you got in there?"

"It's flat."

"So what am I supposed to do?"

"Just give me the pillow, you prick. It's bad enough I gotta sleep in this damn box without having to deal with your shit."

Duke hurled the smudged pillow into the trunk. "Take it already."

"Thanks, hairball."

"You're welcome, Bela."

"One more thing I better make perfectly clear," said Loretta. "I don't know what sort of heathen acts you boys perpetrate in your spare time. That's your business. But I won't have anything indecent under this roof. That means no fornicating, no drinking, no smoking, and if you've got any special needs that you think I'd better not know about. ." She focused on the vampire.". . take care of them elsewhere. We understand each other?"

"Yep." Earl shut his bed.

Morning came to Rockwood. Duke was nocturnal by nature. Loretta, as owner/operator of Gil's All Night Diner, slept days as well. But the former zombies (now just plain rotting corpses) weren't about to clean themselves up. Duke loaded the bodies onto Loretta's pickup while she swept up the broken glass.

"Why is it," she asked, "that not one damned zombie can figure out how to work a door? Even the stupidest danged fool can push."

Duke tossed the last corpse onto the bed as a brown police car pulled into the diner's unpaved parking lot. A tall, lean man stepped into the hard morning light.

"Morning, Sheriff."

He tipped his Stetson to her. "Loretta. I thought I saw buzzards. Had another incident last night, did'ja?"