Kill the Dead

feet hand over hand, using the Dumpster like a ladder. His back is to me. When he’s upright, I spin the na’at and toss it. It goes all the way out his front and one of the barbs hooks on the edge of the Dumpster. When I pull the na’at, the Dumpster moves, too, and the Drifter has to do a little soft shoe to stay upright. Brigitte sighs and walks to the Dumpster. The Drifter lunges for her and she calmly spins and catches him with a roundhouse kick to the head. While it’s dazed, she climbs onto the Dumpster’s lid and kicks the na’at free. “Thanks.” “Don’t talk. Kill it.” That might be the sweetest thing a woman’s ever said to me on a first date. I snap my wrist the way she did, but the barbs are still out the front of the guy’s body. The spinning helps dig through his chest, but I get stuck on his rib cage. I’m pushing and pulling the guy all over the alley, like I’m the worst puppeteer in the universe. “You’ve shit it all up. There’s no finesse here. Use your strength. Just rip it out.” I take half a step forward and then snap back, using all my body weight to pull. The Drifter’s back explodes as its rib cage, lungs, heart, and spine spill out onto the alley floor. The stink is worse than a Hellion outhouse. “Now you know why we try not to do that,” Brigitte says. “Thanks, Nurse Ratched. Haul up the other one. I’m getting a feel for this.” Brigitte sets the third one upright. It takes one drunken step toward her. As she steps back, her left boot heel comes down on a chunk of the delivery guy’s liver. Brigitte wobbles for just a second, but it’s just long enough for the Drifter to lunge forward and grab her wrist. She lays into the guy hard with fists, knees, and elbows, hammering him and twisting her arm to break his grip. A living guy would have let go just from the pain. The problem is that Drifters don’t feel pain and none of her shots are quite hard enough to lay him out because she’s still ice-skating on the guts of the other Drifter. I swing the na’at and throw. It hits the Drifter square in the back and this time it stays inside. Wrist snap and pull. His spine pops out of his back like a bony jack-in-the-box. I run over to where Brigitte is leaning on the Dumpster, scraping pieces of lungs, muscle, and who knows what else off her boots. “I’m really sorry about that.” “Do you know what these boots cost? Of course you don’t because if you did you’d be shitting yourself.” “Sorry. I don’t have money, but I can walk into any store in the world and steal you another pair.” “I’m not worried about the boots. Simon will buy me all the fucking boots I want. I’m worried about what I’ll tell him happened to them.” “He doesn’t know about your hobby?” “Simon can be a sweet man, but ninety-nine percent of his IQ is in his cock. I’m his trophy fuck and he can’t conceive of me as anything else.” “Too bad. He’s missing out.” Brigitte looks around at the gore-filled alley. “I’ve seen neater kills, but I’ve also seen worse.” “I need to call someone about this. I can’t leave a bunch of corpses lying around Carlos’s back door. I know some people, the Golden Vigil. They have all kinds of resources. They can handle this kind of thing.” “I have people, too. They know how to dispose of revenants. Besides, I don’t much like your Vigil.” “What do you have against them?”