Rob Thurman - Roadkill

“You love her, don’t you, Goodfellow?” I said, taking another step back. “Admit it. She’s your pookie bear.”

“She’s a boil on the cheek of my finely toned ass,” he grumbled, but he let the paw hook around his finger. Robin, from what we knew, was hundreds of thousands of years old… if not older. Friends came and went quickly from his perspective, especially human ones, but mummy cats-who knew how long they could live? Wahanket, the mummy who’d made her, was older than the pyramids. She could hang around for a long while. When friends were mayflies in comparison to you, a mummy cat wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “So, I’m in my casual clothes.” By that he meant his non-Armani slacks, shirt, and long duster, which was good for concealing swords. It was when he concealed his sword without a duster that I started worrying. “Where are we going hunting?”

I grinned. “How do you feel about nature hikes? Wetlands? Save the yellow spotted leech?”

From the spitting of Greek curses an hour later as we splashed through the calf-high muddy water, surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes, he thought about the same of it as I did. It sucked.

“Wet enough for you?” I commented, and ducked the water he kicked in my direction.

“ Ai pidiksou ,” he spat, but continued after me.

We were at the Flushing Airport, abandoned since before I was born. Thanks to Robin’s owning a car lot, we had access to whatever we needed… including a Jeep… if the subway and bus wouldn’t get us where we needed to go. “This is what happens when you build an airport on a swamp,” I grunted. Swamp was the non-fancy name for wetlands. Built in the twenties, closed in the eighties, and located on top of a damn swamp was the sum total of what I knew or cared to know about the place.

That and it was home sweet home to a bunch of revenants who worked for the Kin. This was actually a sort of reward situation for them. If they’d done good and not messed up for several months, a long stretch for a revenant’s reasoning and willpower, you got hauled out in a party bus with several dead or mostly dead humans, twenty kegs or so, and left for a week or thereabouts to lie around, eat, drink, and do whatever revenants do to make little revenants. The last was yet another thing I didn’t need or want to know.

There were two hangars and one smaller building. The blue sky reflected in the still water ahead of us and it was warm enough that I’d shed my jacket and left it in the Jeep. There was no one to see out here but revenants, and since I planned on their seeing my weapons up close and personal, there was no reason to hide them. Except for the mosquitoes, the mud in my shoes, and the stink of our prey, it was a nice day. Not that there weren’t other opinions on that.

“Poseidon’s barnacle-ridden testicles,” Goodfellow snarled as he held the cat carrier up as I sloshed along. I sloshed. He moved through the water like a shark, soundless and with barely a wake. When you were possibly older than mankind itself, you were good at things like that. The temper hadn’t seemed to have improved over the years, though. “Pick a building. I’m hot, I’m surrounded by water and mud… mud without naked women or men wrestling in it, mind you, and I’m not pleased. And why isn’t Niko here? Surely he’s not avoiding his duty?”

“Niko had to work, and the day it takes more than two of us to handle a bunch of drunk and passed-out revenants is the day we get a job stuffing teddy bears at the toy store. And speaking of naked mud-wrestling women, how is Ish handling your wild and woolly ways?” I grinned wickedly. “You talk him into the whole orgy scene?” Pucks loved a good orgy, or two, or a hundred. “Or do you just swing by his place afterward and cuddle?”

“Do not go there,” he said with a grim set to his mouth.

I picked one of the hangars and headed for it. The other ramshackle wooden building was too small and the stench was everywhere, but a little stronger toward one of the hangars. “Don’t get me wrong.” I held up my hands. “I don’t want details. I so don’t want even a single detail. I don’t even want to know that details exist. I’m just curious how it’s working out since he’s a little holier than thou and you’re… well, unholier than pretty much the whole world and all alternate dimensions. In the sex area anyway.”

“I said, don’t … go … there ,” he gritted. “Or my sword will go someplace you think equally private. Are we clear?”

It was a big change from Robin’s usual bragging ways. I’d once learned more in one hour from listening to him boast than I had from two solid years’ worth of porn mags. He’d been the one to first get me laid. Not with him. Even if I were into guys, and I wasn’t, but if I were… I’d once accidentally seen him naked. Walk softly and carry a big stick was one thing. Walk softly and carry the Washington Monument was another altogether.

“Okay. Okay.” If Robin didn’t want to be his normal bragging self, it was weird, bizarre, and probably a sign of the end of days, but it wasn’t the time to yank his chain about it. It was time to slice and dice some revenants. And that, more than the sun and the blue sky, was what made this a nice day. As we approached the chosen hangar, I pulled my Desert Eagle, matte black, and my serrated combat knife, same color.

“You realize black really isn’t very adroit camouflage in broad daylight,” Robin drawled.

“Believe it or not, the Eagle doesn’t come in sunshine yellow,” I grunted before pausing at the partially askew huge metal doors. “Looks like a good place to turn her loose. You know they’re waiting inside, right? She’ll have to be quick.”

“What? You think they heard the splashing of a tsunami crossed with a beached whale that is you walking through water? Surely you jest,” he snorted.

“And I suppose you just walked on it in your day?” I snorted back as he opened the door to the cat carrier to let Salome bound out.

“Rumors. Lots and lots of wine and rumors. And the tide was extremely low.”

Salome, finding herself in and surrounded by water, picked up a wet paw and looked at it, then back at Robin with woeful betrayal in those glowing eyes. Then her hairless ears perked as her head turned back, the whiskerless muzzle opened to scent the air, and she was gone-like a streak of lightning… wrinkled, bald, undead lightning. Okay, that wasn’t exactly poetry, but she was fast as shit. I heard the ring of the hoop earrings in the tips of her ears and then I heard outraged screams. No way I was letting her have all the fun. I slipped through the crack of the two slightly agape doors and shot the revenant that immediately attacked me. I shot him in the face, which was good for killing a lot of creatures… and movie zombies… but for a revenant, it was just another hole in the head, literally. Granted, with a Desert Eagle.50, it was one almighty big hole, but it didn’t take him down; it only slowed him down for half a second. Sometimes half a second was all you needed.

He staggered back from the force of the shot and I tackled him, taking him the rest of the way down, switching hands to saw through his neck and spinal column. It was the only way for revenants. Chop off an arm or a leg and they’d just grow it back in a month or two. Blow a hole in their brain-hell, they didn’t use them that often anyway. Cut one in half at the torso-they’d die, but it would take weeks, and chain saws, props to Bruce Campbell, are goddamn heavy to carry around. Entertaining, yeah, but not very practical. Too bad.

Through the spinal column of the neck was the only way to put them down permanently and quickly. And fighting them is rather monotonous. You might have one trying to gnaw through your throat while another tries to beat you to death with the arm you just chopped off him. Or you might have one trying to break your neck while one beats you with the leg you just blew away. From what I could tell, the slimy shitheads never sat around strategizing a whole lot or watching old kung fu movies and taking notes.