“What the hell is going on? None of this makes any damned sense.”
“Let’s discuss it somewhere else.”
“Like where?”
“Somewhere more comfortable. We’re done here, but Simon won’t be up for hours. Take me home. I want to see where you live.”
She reaches down and grabs my cock through my jeans, gets up on her toes, and kisses me. I lean down to her, slip my hand around her ass, and pull her into me.
I see Kasabian’s beer bottle crashing into the wall and me yelling, “Don’t say her name.”
No. I’m not going to feel bad every time I touch another human being. I’m the one who’s still alive on this rock. I won’t apologize for wanting to feel like a person every now and then.
But this is pretty fucked up even for me, making out in the room where someone was ripped to pieces and eaten a few days ago. We’re standing where his blood was pooled like black custard.
“I can’t do this here.”
“Are you sure you’re the man who lived in Hell for all those years? You’re awfully delicate sometimes.”
“And you’re pretty hard core. Does anything get to you?”
“Not this. I was helping my father hunt when I was seven. I’ve seen bodies in every state imaginable.”
“Well, I’ve been the guy torn up on the floor. I don’t want to kiss you here. Let’s get out. I’ll get Kasabian some beer and smokes and he can spend the night in the closet.”
I loop my arm around Brigitte’s shoulder and steer her toward the door. We’re just about clear when she stops.
“What?”
“I want to see something on the wall.”
She swings the door half closed and doesn’t move for a moment.
“This is a very old sigil. A revenant clan. People who took revenants into their families with dreams of immortality.”
“Let me see.”
I step around and there’s the sigil. The writing is different, but the design looks a lot like Eleanor’s belt buckle. But the paint job isn’t right. Everything else in the room, as screwy as it might be, is put together well. The big, toothy monster face on the wall was spray-painted fast and sloppy, like a kid tagging his school at lunch.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Definitely.”
I push the door closed to get a better look. When it shuts, there’s a sharp metallic click. Brigitte gives me a funny look. A thin metal strand leads from the top of the door frame across the ceiling. A tripwire rigged to go off when the village idiot closed the door to look at the wall. This is why I hate working with other people. They see things. I don’t look, so I don’t set off traps. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Other people did.
There’s a grinding and the floor vibrates as a section of the far wall slides away. Fluorescent lights blink on in the deep black. It’s just a basement. Springheel’s secret room. The walls look like they’re carved out of solid rock. Someone’s been working down there. A wall is open and fresh dirt and rocks are scattered on the floor.
I hold up my phone to get a shot of the room, but someone gets in the way and it’s not Brigitte.
I don’t have to look to know who. I can smell them.
Zeds pour out of the basement like army ants protecting their territory. There’s just enough time to get out the na’at and collapse it to a couple of feet, leaving the thorns exposed so that when I swing it, it’s like a morningstar.
I catch the first one on an upstroke, crushing its face and jamming its jaw up into the bones around its eyes. The second gets it on a downstroke. One of the barbs catches his skull just above his forehead, his head opens up, and everything inside spills out. After that, I don’t notice individual blows anymore. I’m swinging the na’at like a street sweeper, trying to clear some room on the floor so that I can actually fight. With each swing, the na’at sends bone and meat flying.
“Get the door open,” I tell Brigitte.
“It is.”