would have been, if the sickly sweet stink of the enemy didn’t waft over from the opposite direction, the worst kind of party crasher ever.
John cursed to himself as Blay dematerialized, clearly to get on the slayer who was somewhere close by.
“What the fuck you doin’!”
The human man was in his mid-twenties, tall and lanky as if he either did a lot of coke or was an organic, non-processed foodie with a vegan slant. His buddy was along the same lines, man-bun’d and hipster-clothed, but unlike the guy in front, he was a true New Yorker who didn’t want to get involved in shit that wasn’t his problem: He was staring at the ground, shaking his head, slowing down.
When he finally did glance over, he recoiled and changed flight paths completely.
“I’m out of here,” he muttered as he turned away.
His friend grabbed him. “Get your phone—I lost mine. Call nine-one-one—make a video! This needs to be on video! We need to go—”
As John Matthew straightened to his full height, the human with the big plans quieted down a little, proof positive that the survival mechanism hadn’t been completely eradicated by all those chemicals he’d taken in at the club.
“I’m not afraid of you!” he shouted.
Considering the guy knew there was a gun with a suppressor involved here, that seemed like bluster over brains, but John was done dealing with the interruption. With a force of will, he entered the human’s mind, burrowing into that gray matter, shutting down memory function and rewiring—
“Fuuuuuuck …”
Something about the tone of that curse got John’s attention and he paused in the middle of his erase job. The other human, who’d been on the way out, was staring over John’s shoulder, his face showing the kind of horror a person would feel if they came up on a dead body.
Or, as it turned out, if a dead body came up on them.
The mortally injured civilian was back on his feet, but not because he had magically rebounded from his injuries. His eyes had stayed rolled back, nothing but white showing between those lashes, and his mouth was open and snapping, fangs fully descended.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
The lock of that scissor bite as the jaw reflexively opened and closed was piranha and then some, and even though the reanimated corpse shouldn’t have been able to see, he somehow focused on John.
The damn thing lunged without warning, and there was none of that Walking Dead uncoordinated shit. The corpse’s hands went for John’s throat like it had been trained in the art of strangulation, and when John ducked the hold, there was no break in the assault. Those snapping jaws rerouted to his shoulder, his upper arm, the just-dead-a-second-ago like a banshee unleashed with hellfire in its veins and the strength of ten thousand linebackers in its muscles.
John punched his palm forward, catching the thing in the center of the chest and holding it out of bite range. Then he plowed his gun into the gut on an upward angle and squeezed off four rounds. The corpse jerked in time to the shots, onetwothreefour—
And kept right on coming at him.
Not a pain receptor in sight, evidently.
As he wasn’t sure whether a bite from the thing would welcome him to the reanimation club, John lunged to the side, grabbed the corpse by the waist, and went discus on the sitch, slinging his undead attacker into bricks and mortar.
It didn’t even register the impact.
But John had time to point-blank a shot to its head.
There was a screeching sound that made his ears sing, and then the corpse went deadweight, falling through the cold air and landing like a tabletop in the snow.
John stepped over, put two more bullets into its brain, and then waited, his breath leaving in locomotive-puffs of condensation—
Abruptly, he remembered the peanut gallery of those two humans. Glancing over his shoulder, he erased their memories, wiping things clean and sending them away.
As they wandered off and nothing moved at his feet, he commenced a frantic self-assessment, checking for breaks in his skin under his leather jacket.
The jacket had been nailed a number of times, those twin punctures of fangs giving him a case of the cold sweats—
“John!”
Blay came stomping around the corner, the black blood of slayers spattered on his face and his jacket, his dagger traded for a pair of guns.
I’m okay, John signed. But we need to get this moved.
“I’ll take one end,” his old friend said.
The two of them hand-and-foot’d the now-immobile-and-please-God-stay-that-way body and