Chapter 17 #2
His lips turned up at the corners. He had such a temptingly gorgeous mouth. “Don’t worry. It was mostly blood.”
I tsked and faced front. “You’re the one who told me all about the horrors of soda, the high fructose corn syrup, the carbonation, the caffeine, the food coloring.”
“It won’t hurt him. He’s an immortal.”
“I gave up coke because you convinced me that it was going to kill me, but you’ve been slipping it to my children? That’s just wrong.”
“Ah, you’re jealous. Well, if you turn into a vampire, you can drink all the soda you want with absolutely no effect.”
“Don’t listen to him, mom,” Wat warned, seriously.
I patted his hand. “He’s joking, Wat. Even as a vampire, soda will dissolve your organs.”
Hazen laughed, or I should say, the Grand Master laughed, because that wasn’t my husband’s laugh. It was gorgeous, though, all deep and perfectly pitched with a slight rumble that caught on your nerves and gave you goosebumps.
The battle started suddenly, with zombies coming out of the ground, slowly at first, and then more and more as they made large tunnels from wherever they’d come from.
I gripped the arm of my chair while the zombie numbers grew in the empty center. “The bases are loaded,” I said.
“Seriously, mom, that was a lame pun,” Wat complained.
“It was pretty bad,” Lock agreed.
“How is that even a pun? It’s a joke, not a pun. Hazen, tell them that it’s a joke, not a pun.”
“Of course, your mother is right.” He leaned over and took my hand.
I froze for a second, because his hand felt so right and so wrong at the same time. I didn’t know if I should pull away or climb in his lap and kiss him to take my mind off nerves, instead of making bad jokes, puns, whatever it was.
He released me before I could make up my mind and then he said, “Exterminators, begin.”
Begin what? I was his exterminator, but was I supposed to kill all those zombies by myself?
I stared at him until I noticed all the other people in the stadiums getting up and walking down to leap gracefully into the seething mass of undead.
Exterminators, plural. All of them looked much less human than me, as in less delicate, and most of them had cool long cloaks that fluttered beautifully as they slashed brains and ripped out spines.
Like this one guy, just grabbed a skull and yanked out a spine, and then used it to flay the other zombies.
It was a little more messy than the woman with the sledgehammer who just slammed brains like that jumping moles game.
I’d always hated that game. It reminded me of trying to get rid of mice or cockroaches.
I gave Hazen another look in case he wanted to stop me from messing up the real exterminator’s pretty show, but he didn’t say anything, and I was his exterminator, and I was wearing armor. I should at least get it covered in a nice layer of zombie brains.
I took a deep breath and smelled nutmeg, and then I walked past Hazen and Lock, noticing the red flash in Lock’s eyes before he looked away, and I felt bad.
“Don’t feel bad,” Wat said from right behind me.
I turned to frown at him. “Where are you going?” Lock was standing up directly behind Wat, but Hazen was still sitting.
“We’re your first guard,” Lock said and pulled out a pretty hammer. “Is it as disgusting as it looks?”
“Well, I mean, it is, but it doesn’t seem necessary for you two to put yourselves at risk.”
“They’re your first guard,” Hazen said, smiling slightly. “You’re my exterminator, so you may proceed.”
That was a command. He’d put it delicately, much more than last week’s Grand Master would have ordered me around, but it was definitely a command.
I scowled at him. “Sure. I may.” I spun around and headed down the aisle, trying not to be overprotective of my children.
If it was safe for me to go down into the seething zombie mass, it was safe for my vampire offspring.
The trouble was that it wasn’t safe for me.
I was a delicate human. Still, we were all here to do our part, and if Hazen thought it was best for us to have a nice bonding zombie exterminator evening, that’s what we’d do.
Heaven forbid the Grand Master tell me what the whole plan was, or ask for my opinion.
He couldn’t help it. He was older than Genghis Khan.
“He thinks that you’re hilarious,” Lock said, frowning as we hesitated on the edge ten feet over the field. Most of the exterminators just threw themselves over, but I’d have to climb down.
“Because it was a joke, not a pun.”
He grunted.
“What’s with the grunting?” I asked, delicately climbing over the corner edge to see if I could get some purchase on the corner pole with my boots. Maybe I’d have to slide down it like a fire pole.
“That’s what he does when he doesn’t want to explain why he said something that answered what you were thinking instead of saying. He does it a lot,” Wat said, scowling at his brother and then vaulting over to land down below in the small spaces between seats.
“You were reading my mind about jokes and puns?”
“Dad. I was reading his reaction to you. I can’t directly read his mind, but his feelings towards you are too strong for him to conceal.”
“His amusement, because I’m so hilarious.”
“Like now, you clinging to the pole like a monkey. It’s funny.”
I sighed and then slid down the pole, hitting the ground too hard and falling over on my butt. Wat helped me up. “You are pretty funny.”
I brushed his hair out of his eyes. He needed a haircut, too. “Everyone needs some comic relief, particularly vampires. Everyone knows that.”
“Vampires are very serious,” Lock said from behind me, although I hadn’t noticed him jumping or sliding down.
“Exactly.” I went to the last separation between us and the field of zombies and just leapt over it, drawing my knife in the movement, so I landed on a zombie, stabbed its forehead, flung up its brains, and used that momentum to take out the next zombie in cue.
I killed zombies. Stab, twist, fling brains away from me, over and over, but in the meantime, I watched the other exterminators to get ideas. I pressed forward into the zombie horde, clearing the way, while Wat and Lock guarded my back.
“Ew. That was gross,” I heard Wat say to my right.
“Yeah, because you used your teeth,” Lock said. “Zombies aren’t edible. The Zombie Queen already sucked everything out of them.”
“I wasn’t trying to eat, but crush. It was like rotten toe jam exploding in my mouth.”
“Like I said,” Lock said, sounding so superior and sophisticated.
It made me smile to hear them, like they were talking about why the hockey score didn’t count instead of zombies.
I flipped my knife and severed a spinal column then smashed the brain after the zombie was on the ground. Time went by in a blur, the whole thing made more pleasant and like a family outing with Wat and Lock chatting behind me.
When the zombies parted, revealing an entirely different kind of creature with a long fluffy hot pink tail and a Japanese hat, with a grinning face-mask, I wasn’t sure what to do.
He pulled his sword out and held it in front of him. It flared with green and pink fire that smelled like cotton candy that had been dropped in a toxic ooze puddle.
I was crouched with my knife when six vampires materialized in front of me, knocking me back so I stumbled and fell down between Lock and Wat.
Wat sat down cross-legged beside me. “It’s pretty lame. You’re only allowed to fight the base level zombies, and we’re only allowed to guard you, so we hardly get to kill anything.”
“I don’t know if it’s killing since they’re already dead,” Lock said, crouching next to his brother.
I watched the six vampires take on the hot pink warrior. His creepy mask grin was super creepy. Ah! He was the Cheshire cat.
“We’re all mad here.” I smiled at Wat and Lock. “It’s the Cheshire cat.”
They stared at me. “Like from Alice?”
“That’s right.”
“So, is there a Jabberwocky?” That was a concerned-looking Wat.
“What about the walrus? I don’t want to kill walruses,” Lock said, frowning.
I stood up and looked around for zombies to kill, not that it wasn’t fascinating to watch the blur of vampire vs.
Cheshire cat, but we were here to war, not gape at the super weird soldiers.
“I guess we’ll see. Come on. I see some normal zombies to take out.
” I headed around the cat battle like a mom leading her kids to a shorter line in the grocery store.
It felt like a Black Friday. I tended to avoid that kind of pressure, but I could cope with it if I had to.
I leapt at a zombie and slashed its brains up and continued deeper into centerfield, one zombie extermination at a time. I hummed the cartoon song. How did those words go, something about flower power? Smash a zombie face, kick back a rotting brain, and watch it explode. Flower power indeed.
I moved faster and faster, a whirl of death fueled by a sense that we needed to get this wrapped up in time to clean the field before the next baseball game when the humans came. There wasn’t any real sense of desperation, more sport.
Maybe that came from being immortal and very hard to kill. At least, that’s the vibe until a roar came that shook the ground, knocking me to my knees.
The dragon came out of the ground, but it wasn’t your conventional dragon, more giant puppy with tentacles. Make that clawed tentacles and a few extra heads with puppy teeth longer than my fingers.
“That’s got to be the Jabberwocky,” Wat said, staring in awe at the creature. “Who’s riding it?”