Kill the Dead (Sandman Slim 2)

There are just too many of them and more pour from the room. I could slash and smash all day and I’d end up right where I am.

I yell, “Get down!” and bark some Hellion arena hoodoo.

All the air in the room gets sucked into a central point above our heads, pulling the Drifters back with it. I knew it was coming, so I leaned the other way, and when the vacuum lets up, I drop to the floor. Brigitte is already down.

“Cover your eyes and hold your breath.”

Above us, all the oxygen sucked up to the top of the room explodes. A fireball blows down from the ceiling, frying everything that’s more than a couple of feet off the ground.

Even with my eyes closed, the flash leaves me seeing spots. The Drifters are a pile of crispy, twitching Manwich meat. I look around for Brigitte. She’s on the floor where she dropped. She shoots me a sooty killer’s smile. She never sees the little girl coming up behind her.

The girl looks like she’s around five or six. She’s in a long pink-and-yellow party dress and there’s a wilted pink rose in her tangled hair. When Brigitte pushes herself up to her knees, she’s just level with the princess’s head.

I’m running, but I know I won’t make it. The princess is too close. She opens wide and digs her rotten teeth into the back of Brigitte’s neck like a dog trying to break a rat’s spine. Brigitte falls and screams with the little girl on top of her.

I swing the na’at like a baseball bat. The princess rears up growling and the na’at slams into her mouth, snapping her head back and shearing it off at the upper jaw. The top of her head rolls away, but the rest of her hangs on to Brigitte. That doesn’t work out so well for her. Brigitte braces her legs against the floor and slams her back into the wall, pinning the headless princess. She spins and pulls her CO2 gun, locks the kid’s writhing body against the wall with her knee, and fires a bolt straight down into the baby Drifter’s spine. Her back blows out and she stops moving.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that more Drifters are stumbling out of the basement. Some trip over their friends’ burned bodies. Some fall to their knees and gnaw on them. Some of the crispy critters on the floor start to move. Charred arms and legs pull away from the pile of scorched bodies and haul themselves across the floor like spiders. This is why fighting corpses sucks. They’re too dumb to know when they’ve lost and dead enough not to care.

“She bit me.”

It’s Brigitte.

“She fucking bit me, James. She’s killed me.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

I say it really reasonably, but Brigitte’s mind has gone bye-bye. She wades into the Drifters, kicking and pistol-whipping the ones walking point. She catches others as they come out of the basement, blasting bolt after bolt into their heads. I let her blow up a few skulls figuring it’ll calm her down, but the falling bodies just make her crazier, so I grab her shoulders and pull her to the door. She shoots until her gun is empty.

I get her as far as the living room before she faints. She’s bleeding bad. There’s a kind of shawl on the back of an old chair. I tear off a long section, wrap it around Brigitte’s neck like a scarf, pick her up, and head for a shadow. But there’s no door there. Just wall. Fucking Springheel must have put an antihoodoo cloak on the house. I carry her out through the kitchen.

Extra-crispy and original-recipe Drifters shamble from the back into the living room. Most of them get lost in the furniture and bounce around like pinballs, but some of the smart ones that can follow a straight line stumble after us. Eventually, the pinballs will bounce their way out of the front door, too. Nothing I can do about that now. I get Brigitte to the Lexus, put her in the passenger seat, and buckle her in. I get to the driver’s side cursing Kinski for being gone. We could use you and your magic glass right now, you prick.

Maybe a dozen Drifters are wandering around the vacant lot and there are more behind them. This neighborhood is all warehouses and pretty deserted even in the middle of the day, but it won’t take them long to wander into populated neighborhoods. Someone left them there like a land mine. It was going to go off sometime and I’m the asshole lucky enough to have set it off. How many more bombs did whoever spray-painted behind the door leave around the city?

Brigitte moans. I hit the gas and point the Lexus in the direction of Vidocq and Allegra’s.

I BEACH THE Lexus half on the curb outside the building, run to Brigitte’s side, and pull her out. The streetlight casts a fat shadow on one wall. I step through and come out in the apartment.

I don’t know what time it is. Probably three or four. All the lights are off. In my head, the room is still the same as when I left it eleven years ago, but it’s not my place and Vidocq has changed everything. I want to put Brigitte down on the couch, but I keep stumbling over chairs and piles of books. Fuck it. I start kicking anything that makes noise.

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

A light comes on in the bedroom. Allegra wanders out in an extra-extra-large Max Overload T-shirt. Vidocq follows, tying his robe.

“What time is it? What’s going on?” asks Allegra, rubbing her eyes.

Now that I can see, I carry Brigitte over to where they’re standing.

“She’s hurt and she’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Who is she? If she needs blood take her to an emergency room.”

“She isn’t hospital hurt. She’s Kinski hurt, but he’s gone, so you’re Kinski tonight.”

“What happened to her?”

“There was a metric assload of Drifters. One of them bit her.”