forward, my palm sweaty on the grip of my. 45. The funky smell stirred with our passage and grew with every step. At the end of the tunnel, I squatted down and peered into the room beyond.
Cut out of the earth, the chamber was easily a hundred yards across and about twenty high, all rough-hewn. A row of dim, battery powered lamps hung from the furthest wall, providing just enough luminescence to see by.
On the floor below them, like a scene out of a World War II documentary, were haphazard piles of corpses, heaped on top of each other, five to six bodies high, in some places. All in various stages of decay, the fresher bodies had oozed bile and embalming fluids, which had formed glistening pools on the stone floor. Arms and legs lay akimbo, no apparent order to the collection of dead bodies. As my eyes took in the mass of lifeless faces, there was one I recognized. My stomach hardened into a tangled knot.
In the heap, nude from the waist down, was Candy. Though I didn’t know her well, our relationship cut short, I was sure she didn’t deserve this. It was a pretty lousy way to go, her body hidden in a cave, dumped amongst the nameless, rotting corpses of Old Town like so much trash. It was a bitter end.
While sickened by her death, her life gone to waste, I still had work to do. I returned my attention to the bodies. I didn’t bother to count them, but it didn’t look like there were two hundred. It was probably something closer to seventy. That meant there was another hideout somewhere or the dead were on the march. I sighed at the realization. Nothing was ever easy.
Seeing no movement, I let my gaze slide across the rest of the room. To my left were several shrouded alcoves cut high into the walls, their depth impossible to tell from where I stood. I’d have to keep an eye on them.
The rest of the room, away from where the bodies were, was empty, but there on the floor, etched into the rock, were a large number of magical symbols I didn’t recognize. Schooled as I was in demonology and the dark arts, that was surprising. I dredged my memory to see if maybe they’d simply been buried in the murk, under thoughts of a particularly good night out, but there was nothing. A little common sense told me they were necromantic in nature, given all the zombies, obviously, but that didn’t tell me much about their true purpose.
Unable to decipher the symbols, I decided to record them. I pulled out Candy’s phone, feeling a twinge of guilt knowing she was lying just a few feet away, and snapped off a few shots. Tiny clicks accompanied each picture, the sound over-loud in the confines of the cavern. The images, while a little dark and spotty, would be good enough for what I needed.
McConnell grunted behind me, shuffling his feet. Realizing he couldn’t see past me in the cramped quarters of the tunnel, and thinking I didn’t want to get caught unaware in a space I could barely move in, I stepped into the room. As he followed me, I heard him hiss. I glanced back to see him staring off past me, his eyes grim.
I mouthed the word, “What?”
He pointed to the corpses. “They know we’re here.” He didn’t bother to whisper.
I turned around slowly just as a gentle creaking, like a ship moored at low tide, sprung up behind me. My heart dropped into my stomach when I saw the corpses on the pile rising up, slowly getting to their feet. They groaned a horrible threnody, spewing bouts of random nonsense as their blank stares settled on us.
I slid the phone back into my pocket. “Time to go.”
I spun around to run but before I could take a step, a hail of zombies dropped down on top of us from out of the alcoves; the same ones I told myself to watch and had forgotten to do so.
Under slabs of rotten flesh, I crashed to the floor, narrowly avoiding having my nose bitten off. Assaulted by the smell as much as by the zombies, I squirmed, trying to get them off me. To my relief, my gun hand was free. Twisting my wrist into an awkward angle to point it toward the corpses, knowing it was gonna hurt for a while-if I lived that long-I snapped off a round. The recoil whipped my hand back and slammed my knuckles into the rock floor, causing an explosion of pain before going mercifully numb.
Though I was gonna have a hard time using my right hand effectively, the pain was worth it. My shot struck the top zombie in the side of the head. Its dead again body rolled to the side, and off me. I helped it along, using its bulk as a bulldozer to muscle the other two that were gnawing at me, off my chest. It worked somewhat. My upper body loose, I sat up just as a pair of gnashing teeth tore into the meat of my calf.
Biting back a scream, I pressed the barrel of my gun against its biting head and blew a fist-sized hole in it, my hand twinging like a motherfucker. Its head snapped back and crumpled, leaving behind its teeth, still buried in my leg. I shot the other one and swiped at the embedded teeth, knocking them loose in jagged little pieces. With a growl, I examined the wound. A gooey greenness was mixed in with the blood.
“If I catch Corpse Creep, I’m gonna kill you again,” I shouted at the toothless undead while I hopped to my feet. My leg gratefully supported my weight, though it felt as if it were on fire.
I glanced around for McConnell. He, too, had been caught off guard by the attack. While I played zombie snack, he must have freed himself. A pool of melted, disfigured flesh and yellowed bone encircled him. Steam wafted up from the waxy zombie puddle as he stood with clenched fists, sparkling gray energy whirling about his hands.
When the rest of the horde approached, their chaotic symphony of gibbered epithets leading the charge, he let loose. A fiery blast of energy burst from his hands, slamming into the clueless zombies. The temperature in the room rose by twenty degrees as the front line of undead exploded into ash. Black clouds filled the air, biting at my lungs. It was like sitting in a sauna that was built inside an ashtray-the perfect stop smoking ad.
Coughing out the bitter blackness, I watched as the next wave of zombies ignited with gray flame. Its touch was virulent, contagious. Methodically, the fire leapt about the room, attaching itself to the corpses like sentient napalm, sparing everything not undead, for which I was quite grateful. The surviving zombies shrieked their incoherence at the wizard, their ranks going up around them faster than a California hillside. They were pissed.
McConnell roared back, his energy building once more. He raised his hands, readying to finish the job. Right then, I saw a blur of black spring from one of the alcoves. It dove toward us. My mind whirled. It had to be the guy who attacked Baalth’s men. No zombie could move like that.
I spun and tried to track him with my gun, firing, but he was too fast. My shot whined off into the darkness. Less than a heartbeat later, the shrouded figure, dressed from head to toe in what looked like a ninja outfit, landed in a crouch beside McConnell.
The wizard barely realized he was there, focused as he was on the zombies. There was a flash of silver, followed by an arc of crimson that flung blood across the room. McConnell let out a pained cry and clutched at his stomach. He stumbled backwards toward the tunnel, his pants discolored with an ever-growing red stain.
I dove forward, angling myself for a clear shot, and let loose a barrage. The assailant saw me coming. He ducked, using The Gray for cover, and leapt to an alcove. The move was pure grace. He stared down at me for a split-second, his masked face hiding his expression. I leveled my gun as his cold eyes bored holes through me. Before I could get off another shot, he disappeared into the shadows just as McConnell collapsed.
Torn between chasing the guy and helping McConnell, my rarely present conscience took the lead. Hatred being too weak a word to express how I felt about the cowboy, he had probably saved my life. I couldn’t have decimated the zombies like he had. There’s no telling how I would have fared against the horde alone. I at least owed him a chance at survival, if nothing else.
My eyes peeled on the alcoves, my teeth grinding, I raced to his side holstering my gun as the few remaining zombies made their way toward us. I took a quick peek at McConnell, looking to assess the wound. It was bad; real bad.
A chasm of intermingled red and black ran a good twelve inches across his stomach, just below the beltline. It was ugly. The floor beneath him was slick with dark blood and there was a stinging, bitter scent coming off the wound I couldn’t recognize. Whatever it was, it’d have to wait. Unceremoniously, I dragged him bodily back into the tunnel. It was too narrow to carry him.
A trail of crimson bled out behind us in the passage and The Gray’s quiet moans punctuated the seriousness of his condition. As quick as possible, I hauled him back toward the crypt. There was no time for gentle. Deep down, I can’t say I was all that bothered by it.
At the base of the ascent, I propped him against the wall. “I need your help, McConnell.” I lifted his chin so we were eye to swimming eye. His were glassy and unresponsive. “If you want to live, we’re gonna have to do this together.”
He groaned, his head bobbling weakly. He was losing a lot of blood and I didn’t have time to staunch the
