Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,201

what could possibly be in this small basement that would compare to the prey you have already eaten?’

Again, I didn’t know what to say to that, so I let it go, but I also let Lisandro open the door for Edward. I wasn’t as scary as Seamus thought, Lisandro was harder to hurt, and he wasn’t letting me go first through the door, so unless we wanted to twiddle our thumbs for an hour … I let Lisandro put his shoulder up with Edward. I went next with Nicky, then Hatfield, and Seamus bringing up the rear. We had our marching order. We had our guns out and ready and were carefully not pointing them at anyone in our party. Lisandro opened the door, and the smell of rotting meat swept up and over us. Hatfield choked a little behind me. I started breathing shallow through my mouth, though that really didn’t help as much as you wished it would. Lisandro tried the light switch, but the mouth of the basement stayed black and untouched.

‘Why do the lights never work at times like this,’ I said, softly.

The flashlight attached to Edward’s rifle flared to life and trailed into the darkness like a shiny coin tossed into endless night. Okay, it wasn’t that black, or that bad, was it? I realized that I hadn’t liked the dark as well since I killed the Mother of All Darkness. She’d been the night itself made real, alive, and hungry. I’d destroyed her, but for the first time in my life I was afraid of the dark. It seemed like I should have been more afraid when she was still alive, didn’t it?

‘Stairs,’ Edward said, quietly, to the unasked question. He saw stairs, and he went down them; Lisandro followed, making a face at the smell. I followed Lisandro, my own flashlight sweeping ahead of the barrel of my AR. There was nothing to see but bare walls and stairs going down, but the smell made me dread what was to come.

61

Trying to feel my way down the narrow, unfamiliar steps in boots made me wish for my jogging shoes. I didn’t dare lower the rifle to shine my light on the steps, because that would have taken the barrel across Lisandro and Edward’s bodies. You did not cross a loaded weapon over your team, especially not on narrow steps where tripping was a real possibility. Normally, with killer zombies on the loose, I’d have had my finger on the trigger ready to fire, but I’d weighed that extra second before I could fire against possibly shooting my friends and decided the danger of tripping on the stairs was higher than being eaten by a zombie, at least on the stairs.

The swing of my light showed glimpses of railing just ahead. Once I was surrounded by open railing I’d reassess the dangers; until then I’d keep my finger off the trigger.

The smell of decomposing flesh got stronger with every step down. I just hoped that there’d come a point where my nose would get used to it and it would just cancel itself out. I’d smelled rotting bodies before, but never this many, or maybe just nothing this big. It was a lot of meat going bad. It didn’t have to be bodies. Maybe they had a meat locker that had lost power and we were smelling rotting cow and pig and … Part of me really hoped it was something like that; the other part of me hoped it was something horrible that would give us a clue to find the rogue master. If he was down here in the basement, even Lisandro with his superior rat nose would never smell such innocent things as a bloodsucker over the overpowering stench of rotting meat. I didn’t think the rogue vamp was down here – most vampires are picky about odors – but it certainly would keep casual visitors away.

Hatfield cleared her throat sharply behind me. I prayed silently that she wouldn’t throw up on me. Not just for the obvious reason, but because if she did I would so throw up, too. It could be a chain reaction sometimes, not often, but once one person lost it, sometimes it was harder for the rest of us to hold on, or hold in. My stomach rolled at the smell and the thought and Hatfield’s nervous cough. I realized we hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I was glad.

I heard Lisandro make a sharp hissing sound between