Roaring Blood (Demon-Hearted Book 2) Page 4

  I cracked my knuckles. “Let's get this show on the road.”

  SIX

  The silence was getting to me.

  No one in the damned SUV was talking. There were the sounds of the engine to focus on, sure, but the pointed silence that came in from every direction was a hell of a lot more unsettling to me than the mission at hand. No one in the vehicle wanted to talk to me. They looked at me with suspicion or disgust. Maybe both. Amundsen and Kubo had put the fear of God in them and made them promise to behave, but as they palmed their rifles and glowered in the dark SUV I could tell they wanted to turn me into swiss cheese.

  I broke the silence, nudging Joe with my elbow. “You ever take on zombies before? What can we expect? Think there will actually be any there?” I paused. “And for that matter, what are we looking for, really? They didn't explain the hallmarks of this 'death magic'. Any tell-tale signs we should look for other than the usual magic circles?”

  Joe didn't have much to offer. “Eh, to be honest, I didn't even know zombies were real before this. Didn't think reanimating the dead was possible. I guess we'll know when we get there. Maybe we'll see some sigils or magical seals or something. Or, who knows, maybe we'll find a group of the bastards waiting for us.”

  One of the troopers in the seat behind me scoffed. “Oh, so you mean to tell me that the wise-ass Demon-Heart doesn't know everything?”

  “I don't remember ordering you to talk, grunt,” was my rejoinder. His scowl practically made my day. From deep within I could sense Gadreel's will; he wished the trooper would do something to provoke me, just so that I could find an excuse to pound his brains in. C'mon, I thought, save it for the zombies. This dude's not worth it.

  The demon settled down a bit.

  “So,” I asked the driver, “what cemetery is it we're headed to again?”

  “Woodlawn,” came the flat reply.

  “Ah, yeah.” I knew Woodlawn cemetery. It was one of the larger cemeteries in town. I'd driven past the spot countless times over the years, and there was a restaurant across the street from it, a Mediterranean place, that I adored. The meats were always so succulent there, and they made their own pita on-site. Oh, and the Tzatziki sauce was just out of this--

  Shit. We were about to track down zombies and here I was pining for gyros.

  Up ahead the front gates of the cemetery, propped open just enough to allow us passage, were coming into view. We drove into the abandoned lot, passing by a guard in a battered pick-up truck. Guy didn't so much as look at us. Amundsen and Kubo had probably paid him off, or else told him that we were Feds investigating the grave-robbery epidemic.

  The driver parked the SUV and then killed the engine, exiting without a word. The others, too, spilled out of the vehicle. Some were stationed at the rear, going through the containers they'd hauled along. The big, black boxes were filled with-- you guessed it-- weapons. There was one trunk filled with what looked like grenades, and another featuring a brutal-looking flamethrower. The troopers had come prepared for a full-on war.

  Hopping out of the SUV and taking a look around the grounds, though, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Except for the chatter of the grunts, the place was quiet as, well, a cemetery. Rows and rows of tombstones stretched into the distance, the monuments casting long shadows upon the ground. The moon hovered in the sky, a pale light filtering out from behind the smoky veil of clouds. I tugged at the collar of my shirt; I'd been out of the air conditioned vehicle for just a few minutes and already the fabric was clinging to me. Joe left his jacket in the SUV and palmed his lighter.

  “So,” I asked him, looking back at the troopers, “what now?” I wasn't really clear on how this was supposed to go. Did they follow us through the graveyard and search for clues? Were they going to just hang back and wait for us to give them information to relay to the guys at HQ?

  “I dunno,” said Joe. “Maybe we should go and have a look first. There's a lot of ground to cover, so the sooner we get moving the better.” He raised his voice, calling the attention of the commandos. “We're going to start looking around the place. Will probably check out the mausoleums and such first. Feel free to canvass the area... or just wait for further orders,” he said.

  “What he said,” I added.

  With that, the two of us started wandering. Slowly we worked our way through the graves, row by row, looking for anything out of sorts. Just five minutes into our errand, though, it became clear we weren't going to find anything strange. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing stirring. I'd expected to stumble upon occult graffiti or evidence of grave-robbing, but so far, we hadn't even found an emptied grave. This was looking like a bust.

  We came upon one grave which seemed a little tampered with. The flowers left upon it had been knocked aside and the ground appeared somehow disturbed, but overall there wasn't anything compelling at the site. Pushing onward Joe and I paid the first of three large mausoleums a visit.

  “You think there's any surveillance footage?” I asked. “I wonder who's stealing the bodies and resurrecting the dead. Would be good if we could see the enemy on camera.”

  “If they had footage then we probably wouldn't be here,” replied Joe. “We'd have kicked in the guy's door by now.”

  It was in the shadow of the hulking stone building that we first made a find of real substance.

  “Hey, is that what I think it is?” I walked over to a grave near the mausoleum's flank, finding a trail of fresh dirt scattered around its edges. The soil had been dug recently; I could smell it in the vaporous air. There was no grass on the site, just messily-packed dirt. An earthworm writhed through the clumps of damp soil. Whether there was a casket in the mound was hard to say. “This grave looks like it's been messed with.”

  Joe hesitated. “Maybe. Coulda been one of the ones that got dug up. Then again, maybe someone just got buried in it.”

  “Maybe...” I walked around the grave.

  A flash of intuition hit me like a two-by-four to the base of the skull. My pulse started pounding and my stomach tickled vaguely with something like dread. I blinked repeatedly in the moonlight, wondering if I'd missed something, but repeated perusals of the gravesite yielded nothing.

  The threat was felt, but not seen.

  “Feel that?” I asked Joe, resting against the tombstone and casting a long gaze about the graveyard. This feeling reminded me of the strange pang of fear I'd felt the night before, when walking to Ken's party. We'd seen my old teacher shambling down the street then; a teacher I could've sworn was long dead, and buried.

  That was when it clicked.

  “Shit. I'm picking up a bad vibe here.” I turned, finding only confusion on Joe's face. He wasn't on the same wavelength. Whatever was making my spine tingle was totally lost on him. “I think we're about to have company.”

  No sooner did I say that did a humanoid shadow lumber around the corner of the mausoleum.

  Technically, I'd already seen a zombie once. My teacher, the dead one, had walked past the two of us the night before. The one that approached us in the graveyard now was different, though. Where the first had still retained the bulk of his humanity, this thing was a sickening husk. Years in the ground had allowed the skin to dry out and settle close to the bones. The creature's movements were especially creaky and unsteady; years upon years of atrophy and degradation can do that. What I was looking at was only a grotesque impression of a human being; I couldn't even consider it a person.

  The rags it wore were so ragged and worm-eaten that they scarcely covered anything. Here and there the body had degraded enough to reveal bone, and as it stepped forward in the moonlight with an animalistic curiosity, I got a good look at what was left of its face.

  Spoiler alert: There wasn't much.

  The bulk of its face had rotted away, leaving empty sockets for eyes, a set of bared, jagged teeth and a pus-laden nub where a nose had once been.

  I turned and faced the thing. B
eside me, Joe whipped open his lighter, the flame dancing higher and higher as he prepared to launch a strike. “Hey there, young man. A little late for a stroll through the graveyard, don't you think?” I said.

  The creature made a noise. It wasn't a happy noise; I doubt that it was laughing at my joke. It was more like a death rattle, the sound of dry bones scraping against one another in the hollows of its body.

  And then it lunged.

  Something so frail and desiccated as this shouldn't have been capable of such speed, but it rushed forward suddenly, without any build-up, so that it very nearly succeeded in taking a swipe at me.

  Thankfully, Joe had been on his toes. With a wave of his hand, the flame had burst from the lighter and sailed into the zombie like a fireball. The creature was thrown back, landing in the grass, where it shrieked and burned to cinders within the space of several seconds.

  I was about to pat Joe on the back and congratulate him on the expert kill when something else shuffled out of the darkness.

  The zombie had brought friends.

  One, two, three more zombies ambled towards us, and were then joined by several more. All told, there must have been about a dozen. I couldn't tell just where they were coming from; the wave of oncoming bodies made it so that I couldn't approach the mausoleum without getting swarmed. The creatures existed in varying states of decomposition. Here was a young woman who barely looked dead. If not for the vacancy of her gaze and the grey color of her skin, I might've been fooled. Then there was the half-skeletal abomination with the missing lower jaw and the eye sockets teeming with worms. That one shouldn't have even been able to walk, but some sinister force acting over it incited it to move. The sounds of the dead filled the air; croaks, wheezes and dry rattling sounds.

  I prepared for the swarm, doing a quick stretch routine to limber up. “Hope you've got some extra lighter fluid in there,” I said, eyeing Joe nervously. “I think we're going to need it.”

  SEVEN

  You wouldn't know it just by looking at them, but zombies are damn strong. It isn't really human tissue that they draw their power from. That much was clear to me from the first time I crossed fists with them. No, these undead pricks were getting their strength from another source, were drinking deep from some dark well of power that their master had given them access to.

  Also, they tend to smell like shit.

  Their bodies, broken and bloated, released the most noxious scents imaginable. It was all I could do to keep from heaving right then and there, which gave the bastards an edge. While I tried to keep myself from barfing, they bum-rushed the two of us.

  I dispatched one of them with a kick. Got him square in the jaw and knocked his head off of his shoulders like I was kicking a winning field goal. The others, though, came up from the sides. The creatures worked with perfect synergy, as though they shared one mind. One of them might be destroyed, but the others could react in real time to shore up their defenses or find new openings. Both of my arms were caught up in the bony grasps of two snarling undead, and I had more trouble than I expected in shaking lose. By the time I'd forced the two of them to let go, four more were charging towards me.

  Joe kept his distance, nurturing the fire that roared from his lighter and allowing it to grow into a large semicircle. This arc of flame fanned out before him in long, even swoops, like a pendulum, and sheared apart the approaching zombies one by one. Trouble was, they still kept coming. It didn't matter if he dashed off their arms or legs with the impressive flames; they'd continue to shriek and crawl towards us all the same. One of them, with no arms, inched through the grass like a caterpillar.

  “You've got to get the head,” I reminded him. “Either that, or just burn them like you did the last one. Don't get too fancy with it, for Christ's sake!” A zombie swiped at me the moment the words left my lips. I barely managed to take hold of his arm and pull him close. With my other hand I grasped his neck and began to squeeze for everything I was worth. Gadreel's strength turned my fist into a vise, and it wasn't long before I'd crushed the thing's neck and lifted his head off. His rotten noggin rolled to the ground and I swiftly kicked it into one of his oncoming compatriots.

  Unless I was mistaken, there were more coming. For every one we killed, two more were showing up in their place.

  “Where are they coming from?” I asked, pausing in my bashing of heads just long enough to see one of the savages knock Joe's lighter out of his hand. That wasn't good.

  Joe dropped to the ground and scrambled for the Zippo, but the zombie that'd come up on his flank was too quick. The thing punched him in the side, then the head, and not a second later two more were upon him.

  It was time to turn things up a notch.

  Racing for Joe, I knocked away the throng of attackers and positioned myself to take the brunt of the attack. I could handle whatever they dished out; Gadreel wouldn't go down easily. Joe, though, being human and all, had definite limits to his endurance.

  From behind came a series of pounding footfalls. I half-expected to find more zombies closing in but was relieved to find a group of four commandos rushing to provide support. One of them was armed with the meaty-looking flamethrower, apparently a custom job. The tank on his back was full of fuel, and a length of black pipe linked it to the flamethrower. It probably weighed a hundred pounds and looked like it could spew fire for hours.

  The trooper let it rip, sending a massive tongue of flame spiraling from the tip of the weapon. Four of the undead were caught in the first wave of flame, immediately falling back and igniting. The smell of burning flesh washed over us.

  No, scratch that. Burning, rotten flesh.

  The smell just about knocked me off of my feet. I scooped up Joe's lighter and helped him up. Though dazed, he was mostly unharmed after his brief melee with the zombies and was ready to get back into the game. Rather than use his Zippo, Joe made use of the environment, stirring up the flames that accosted the burning zombies and forcing the fire to spread to their fellows. He raised up one of his hands and furrowed his brow, falling back a couple of paces so that he might stay out of the enemy's reach, and transferred the tongues of flame to each of them in turn. With Joe on our side the power of the flamethrower was multiplied a dozen-fold.

  In the next instant the bulk of the undead were lit up like birthday candles, croaking and shrieking as they tossed themselves to the grass. The others were held back by a near-constant barrage of automatic gunfire. Round after round sank into the damned things; the troopers weren't interested in giving up any more ground and began to approach. The deafening report of their high-powered guns echoed off of the monuments, swelling into an ear-splitting cacophony.

  Not that I was about to complain. We were winning. And that was all that mattered.

  I dashed to my right and cleaved through a zombie that was coming up on Joe. My hand passed through its body with minimal effort; the flesh was dried out like papier-mâché, the bones were brittle and there'd been precious little in between the two layers to slow me down. Even as I tore through the freak's body and pulled off its head, I found myself growing apprehensive. These things were just weathered corpses; what could possess them to move-- to take on such remarkable strength and speed? Whatever was powering these things was bad news, there could be no doubt.

  The cry of a commando broke me out of my thoughts. I turned, expecting to find him getting knocked around by zombies, but discovered something a good deal more shocking at work.

  Leaping to the ground from the roof of the nearby mausoleum was a hulking black shape. The edges of a cloak fluttered in its wake as it landed, and the flash of silver that followed was so quick I nearly missed it.

  The trooper dropped his gun and staggered back a pace, holding onto his abdomen.

  Then the dam broke.

  The commando's chest and gut were thrust open and his innards spilled out across his trembling arms. He fell, face-first, heaving blood into the ground while the towering clo
aked thing turned its attention to the rest of the guys under my command.

  It was a man; a very large man. His face was chalky, the features deep-set and seemingly incapable of anything other than perpetual sternness. On that face that only a mother could love I caught a glimpse of what I took to be tattoos. This wasn't really a Mike Tyson sort of flourish we're talking about; the designs inked all over his face were symbols of some sort.

  Magical symbols.

  Since taking down Agatha, I'd had a few opportunities to learn about magic with Chief Kubo. I was still a long ways off from being a master like him. My grasp on magical seals and incantations was so tenuous that I couldn't pull off even the simplest spells. Still, I knew the language of the craft when I saw it.

  I tensed, taking in the sight of this new threat. The wheels were turning in Gadreel's mind, too; to my surprise, he didn't pressure me into making an immediate attack. My eyes scanned the man's face, then moved to the large scythe he held in his hands. The blade was flawless silver, and the handle appeared forged of something dark and weighty, like stone.

  Had the Grim Reaper turned up to settle a score with the Veiled Order?

  Something told me that this was the source of the zombies. The necromancer we'd been seeking. Judging by the marks on his face, he was at least a zealous practitioner of the craft, and the fact that he'd just torn the guts out of one of my men made it clear he wasn't on our side.

  “Hey,” I shouted, leveling a steely gaze on him. Usually, a demonic gaze was enough to put the scare in any mortal man. I'd tried it a few times recently at bars and had found great success in scaring people off before they dared start something.

  This bastard, though, didn't flinch. He met my gaze, something of the zombie's vacancy in his eyes, and smiled.

  A smile on that face was all wrong. I shivered as his stony lips curled into a grin.

  “Didn't I see you in one of the Star Wars prequel movies?” I mocked, trying to keep my cool. Something about this dude was sending up a red flag in my head. The energy that poured off of him was unlike anything I'd ever felt. Enemies in the past, though powerful, hadn't been anything like this. Aside from his being built like a brick shithouse, there was that fearsome weapon in his grasp. I'd long lost my fear of sharp, pointy things. Even blessed, silver weaponry wasn't enough to do me in.