Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

‘Bush, Bush, can you hear me?’ I shook him until I was sure he was actually focused on me. ‘Slow your breathing down, Officer Bush.’

He nodded a little too rapidly.’

‘Are you out of ammo?’ I asked.

‘It didn’t do any good. It didn’t stop them.’

‘Shoot the head,’ I said.

‘You shot their heads off and they didn’t die. They’re supposed to die if you take their heads.’

‘Only in the movies,’ I said.

He clutched at my arm. ‘How do we kill them?’

‘You can’t,’ I said.

‘What do we do then?’

‘Do you have ammo left?’

He nodded, his breathing even, and I watched his eyes fill back up with him and push back the fear. He popped out his empty magazine, reached for his equipment belt and a new magazine. He did the transfer automatically and smoothly. He was going to be okay.

‘Shoot their heads, take the mouth out, and then they can’t bite.’ In my head I added, so they can’t give anyone else the rotting infection .

‘But it still jumped me,’ he said.

‘Sometimes they do that,’ I said. ‘Stay with me. Shoot any zombies in the face until they don’t have a mouth.’

He nodded, though his face was a bloody mask. He had the gun held upright in both hands; his hands were almost steady, his eyes were good.

‘Come on, Bush, let’s do this.’

‘Right behind you, Marshal Blake.’

‘I know you are, Bush. I know you are.’ We moved forward and started shooting zombies. He didn’t waste any ammo on anything but the faces. Fast learner; good, maybe he’d live to see dawn.

We dragged Ranger Becker out from under a mound of zombies. She’d shot off their faces with a shotgun and wasn’t bitten as far as I could tell. Her partner was dead, his throat ripped out, eyes glazed even by starlight. The head of the zombie who’d killed him was still eating his throat, even though the bits of him were falling straight out of the neck, because the body was gone, lost somewhere in the clearing. The neck had been shot through, spine severed, but that hadn’t saved him.

She said, ‘Pete!’

I turned her away from him. ‘He’s gone, move!’ Bush helped me get her moving through the carnage of decapitated zombies and body parts. Any zombie that had made a kill was eating, and other zombies joined them, so in a way even dead they helped the other men. An eating zombie wasn’t trying to kill anyone else. I’d never seen this many flesh eaters outside a cemetery. Where the hell had they come from?

I heard the leopard scream over the sound of gunfire and men screaming. It jolted through me as if I’d been shocked. I fought not to reach out to Nathaniel psychically, because it messed with the concentration of both of us for just a second. I blew the head off another zombie. I’d traded for my shotgun, putting the AR back to where it hung in the MOLLE straps on my vest. I didn’t have time to be distracted, and maybe he didn’t either. I had to trust Ares and Nicky to keep him safe until I could get to them, as they trusted me to keep myself safe.

We had a circle of officers with us now, all of us facing outward, guarding our share of the field. We finally fought our way around the edge of the building, and I could see my men with their backs against the bare rock of the mountain that loomed above them. Nicky and Ares were shooting smoothly. The big leopard was crouched at their feet, snarling. Al, Trooper Horton, and Travers were with them, though one of Travers’s arms was hanging useless and bloody. It seemed to be the only injury that they had. Seeing them all standing there loosened the tightness in my chest that I hadn’t let myself feel; the relief made me stumble for a second. I shook it off and kept shooting my way toward them.

Nicky blew the head off of a zombie, and the leopard brought down the body and tore it apart. The three humans were way too calm about Nathaniel’s leopard tearing up zombies at their feet; it showed that the division of labor had been this way for a few minutes. Long enough for them all to accept that it worked; funny what seems okay in the middle of a fight.

We waded into the zombies around them. We were winning, and then a cold wind blew across my skin. I had time to yell, ‘Vampires!’

Bush asked, ‘Where?’

The door to the building opened and it wasn’t vampires, it was more zombies, and Little Henry Crawford towering above them.

Little Henry was nude. I did a quick glance to see if he’d been bitten, but the only mark on him was dried blood all over his groin. His hair fell unbound around his shoulders; his face was traced with the dark edge of beard and mustache. I knew it was called a Vandyke beard, because Requiem, one of our vampires, had told me. Someone shone their flashlight on Little Henry’s face and I had the impression that he was handsome and that his brown eyes were empty, as if there was no one home. Was he in shock? If the dried blood at his groin was all his, then he had a reason to be in shock.

The tallest zombie was barely six feet tall, so Henry looked like a movie-handsome island rising above a sea of rotted faces, except for that one part. It looked like they’d started eating there. At least two of the men said, ‘Jesus.’

Travers called, ‘Henry, Henry, it’s me, Hank.’

Henry never even blinked.

Something was wrong, I just wasn’t sure what.

The only movement was the crawling zombie parts scattered around the clearing, and then there was another shiver of vampire power, just a breath, not enough to kick the holy objects awake, and then the zombies moved in a blur of speed so that I knew the other police didn’t see them. I had enough time to fire into the face of the one coming at me. I heard two other shots echo mine and knew it was Nicky and Ares. We fired and hit three of them, blowing their heads off just like the other zombies. They fell to the ground in three fountains of blood. It was too much blood for a zombie, closer to a person, or a vampire. I remembered that shiver of vampire power.

That left three of them to appear like magic in front of the police. It wasn’t mind tricks; vampires are just that fast. One grabbed Becker and she screamed, but she also shot it through the chest. Her shotgun sounded like an explosion that left my left ear ringing, but the vampire fell to the ground with a hole where its heart should have been. Totally worth it.

Guns exploded behind us, and I had to shove Bush to one side to see Ares on the ground with one of the rotting vampires on top of him. Nicky was there grabbing it barehanded, to pry it off Ares. Travers had the last one on top of him. Horton was trying to get a shot as Travers tried to grapple one-handed with it. Nathaniel’s leopard slashed at the zombie’s face, and it reared back from the man and screamed in pain. Zombies didn’t feel pain.

Nathaniel slashed it across the chest and the vampire, because that’s what it was, screamed again, flashing fangs, and stumbled over some of the zombie parts on the ground. It was a rotting vampire, which is damn rare in America, but it was still newly dead, or undead. Old vampires don’t stumble like that.

Nicky pulled the vampire off Ares with an arm around its neck and one arm pinned behind its back. He was strong enough to brute-force the vampire back from Ares and hold him. Ares picked up his gun and pressed it to the vampire’s chest, growling, ‘Stop struggling!’ I hoped he remembered that at point-blank range even the handgun would go through the vampire and into Nicky.

The vampire that had been on Travers raised a hand that was rotted enough for bone to gleam in the flashlights. It touched its face, and only then did I realize that it was a woman. She turned and held out her hand toward … me? It was a beseeching gesture, but wasted on me.