Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

I hadn’t thought that she might literally be phobic of rats. Snakes, spiders, I might have thought of, but not rats. Funny, how you get used to things and it just stops occurring to you that it might bother someone else.

We all trooped out onto the porch again. The view was refreshing, but there was still that smell of corpses. ‘Is the fridge working?’ I asked.

‘I know what you mean,’ Lisandro said. ‘The smell shouldn’t be this strong, but I checked, and the food is fine.’

‘Then why does that little bit of flesh smell this bad?’ I asked.

‘It’s almost as if there are more bodies we haven’t found,’ he said.

I looked at Edward. He said, ‘There’s a basement.’ He pointed to the side of the deck. I went to look where he pointed, and there were stairs leading down to a door tucked up under the deck.

‘I didn’t see a door into the basement from the inside of the house,’ I said.

‘I didn’t either,’ Hatfield said.

I looked around at everyone. ‘Anyone see a way down besides this outside door?’

They all shook their heads.

Edward walked back into the house, and we trailed him. He was standing in the back bedroom looking at the huge dresser. It towered up over the window, but the room was so small that it effectively blocked the entire corner of the room from view. He got one side and Nicky got the other. There was a shorter-than-average door in the wall.

‘They weren’t blocking the window. Someone else was blocking the door,’ I said.

‘Were they blocking something in, or out?’ Hatfield said.

‘Or were they just hiding the door from this end?’ Nicky asked.

‘Don’t know,’ I said.

‘The smell is worse near the edge of the door,’ Edward said.

‘You can’t usually find zombies just by the smell of the rot,’ I said.

‘Not usually.’

He and I looked at each other. ‘It’s either a hell of a lot of zombies, or more bodies,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I have my flamethrower in the truck,’ he said.

I smiled. ‘Not yet; let’s see what’s down there first. If it’s zombies you can barbecue it all.’

‘We need crime scene techs up here to at least take more pictures than just a few with our phones. They need to collect evidence,’ Hatfield said.

‘Technically I can call it without doing anything else,’ I said, ‘but we can call in the techs after we find out what’s down there.’

‘Let’s let someone know that we have more zombies, or more dead bodies here, before we confirm,’ Edward said.

‘You want to call for backup before we know if we need it?’ I asked.

‘If this turns into another hospital basement, backup might be good.’

I didn’t know what to say; in all the years I’d known him I wasn’t sure he’d ever said that before, which meant that maybe I owed Dev an apology. If it had bothered Edward, then it had been bad. That it hadn’t bothered me more made me wonder about myself. Maybe it would hit me later, or maybe Edward needed more emotional backup than I could supply. I had my sweeties with me to cuddle, and say what you will, that helps.

‘Okay, we call it in,’ I said, and we did.

Edward made the call. He told them that we suspected there was something preternatural or just bad in the basement, and if anyone wanted more pictures of the crime scene than we’d taken with our phones, then they needed to send techs out now. When they suggested sending more cops to back us up, Edward didn’t say no. He was mellowing.

‘Do we wait?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘If we’re going in before backup arrives, then why call it in at all?’ Hatfield asked.

‘So they’ll know where we are, just in case,’ Edward said.

‘Just in case what?’ she asked.

‘Just in case whatever is in the basement tries to eat us, or trap us, or in case the basement is all one great big trap,’ I said.

‘If we think it’s a trap, then we should wait,’ she said.

‘Probably,’ I said.

Edward turned on the flashlight mounted to his AR.

‘But we’re not going to wait, are we?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Why aren’t we waiting again?’ Hatfield asked.

‘Because they’re Death and the Executioner,’ Seamus said.

‘I thought they were Death and War,’ Hatfield said.

‘That, too,’ Nicky said.

He seemed to think about it for a minute and then nodded. ‘Maybe if we follow you around enough on cases, we’ll get nifty nicknames,’ he said.

‘Like what?’ Nicky asked.

‘Minions,’ Seamus said.

‘What?’ Lisandro asked.

‘We’re her minions, all of us are,’ Seamus said, as if that made sense.

‘War doesn’t have minions,’ I said.

‘Yes, actually he does: strife, panic, anger, discord, to name a few.’

‘Are we delaying until backup arrives?’ Hatfield asked.

‘I am,’ Lisandro said. ‘The basement smells bad enough from here.’

‘Pussy,’ Nicky said.

‘Ratty, actually,’ Lisandro said.

‘Who’s Mole then?’ Nicky asked.

‘Anita’s shortest,’ Lisandro said.

I was about to remark that they’d just made a Wind in the Willows joke, but Edward had had enough of games.

‘Shut up,’ Edward said. ‘Anita, get the door while I cover it.’

‘No,’ Nicky and Lisandro said together.

I glared at them.

‘Anita doesn’t go first if we’re here to be her bodyguards,’ Lisandro said.

‘I’m on the job,’ I said.

‘So are we,’ Lisandro said, and eased past me toward the door.

I moved into his way.

‘Anita, you can let me help Ted through that door, or we can argue about it until the other cops arrive, your choice.’

I looked at Seamus. ‘You’d let me go first.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’ Nicky asked him.

‘Because there can be nothing down there that is scarier than she is.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, I think,’ I said.

‘You have destroyed the greatest vampires to walk the face of the earth, Anita Blake; what could possibly be in this small basement that would compare to the prey you have already eaten?’

Again, I didn’t know what to say to that, so I let it go, but I also let Lisandro open the door for Edward. I wasn’t as scary as Seamus thought, Lisandro was harder to hurt, and he wasn’t letting me go first through the door, so unless we wanted to twiddle our thumbs for an hour … I let Lisandro put his shoulder up with Edward. I went next with Nicky, then Hatfield, and Seamus bringing up the rear. We had our marching order. We had our guns out and ready and were carefully not pointing them at anyone in our party. Lisandro opened the door, and the smell of rotting meat swept up and over us. Hatfield choked a little behind me. I started breathing shallow through my mouth, though that really didn’t help as much as you wished it would. Lisandro tried the light switch, but the mouth of the basement stayed black and untouched.

‘Why do the lights never work at times like this,’ I said, softly.

The flashlight attached to Edward’s rifle flared to life and trailed into the darkness like a shiny coin tossed into endless night. Okay, it wasn’t that black, or that bad, was it? I realized that I hadn’t liked the dark as well since I killed the Mother of All Darkness. She’d been the night itself made real, alive, and hungry. I’d destroyed her, but for the first time in my life I was afraid of the dark. It seemed like I should have been more afraid when she was still alive, didn’t it?

‘Stairs,’ Edward said, quietly, to the unasked question. He saw stairs, and he went down them; Lisandro followed, making a face at the smell. I followed Lisandro, my own flashlight sweeping ahead of the barrel of my AR. There was nothing to see but bare walls and stairs going down, but the smell made me dread what was to come.