Horror 100 Volume 2

Partner

As dream jobs go, private eye doesn't rate in the top ten, or the top hundred for that matter. It's not the sort of job you aspire to. It's the job you're left with when life closes all the other doors. Ask any ten dicks how they got their start, and you'll get ten tales of ten falls from grace.

My story's no different. Not so long ago, I was doing alright. I was an ordained Sheppard, a Knight of the Golden Shield, charged by Mother Church and the Divine Trinity to defend the public from dark magic and heathen witchcraft. Not an easy job, not a fun job, but it wasn't all bad. That little gold badge comes with a lot of fringe benefits. Even so, for all the window dressing, it's still the same old story.

Loyal readers of the Herald may remember that dust-up about three years back involving the Cult of the Slumbering Eye and a few bored socialites looking for the next big thrill. Turns out the next big thrill involved a sacrificial troll calf and at least three dead pagan gods. One botched séance later, and we're up to our collective neck in tourists from beyond the grave.

The poor little rich kids were, of course, the first to go, but they made a splash before they checked out. Lowside Park was all but swallowed whole, and gates popped as far away as Battersbridge and Grifton. Kept us busy for a week solid, and I'm convinced we never plugged all the holes. Two months later, we were still finding a corpse or two every day.

My partner Frank and I pulled the short straw and Father Cussler tapped us to look for strays. Not a lot of detective work, just a straight bug hunt. Personally, I'd rather be chasing down the puppet masters, the ones in this world and the next. Instead, we had to settle for breaking their toys.

At least Frank was happy. "No pulse, no problem," he'd say. "Let the cops deal with warrants and due process. I'll stick with the deaders. No one sues when you shoot."

We were on the way back to the station after an especially nasty bit of work on the South Side. Sure, we looked rough, but just you try looking daisy fresh on the two-hours-past-the-finish-line side of a twelve hour shift. Even so, we can take only so much credit for the stench. In our line of work, spatter is an occupational hazard.

The shambler was ripe, dead at least a month. It moved in with a bricklayer and his family a couple days earlier and stayed for dinner. Landlord went to the cops about the smell. Cops came to the door, got one whiff and called us.

There was a uniform waiting for us on the front stoop. He was a skinny kid, about 18, so pale I made him for a corpse and went for my badge. I was set to drop him when he spotted us and started acting like a breather.

He did his best to fill us in, stammering through the shock and hysteria like any teenage boy. Said he'd gone round back earlier and gotten a good look in the kitchen window. Stuck around long enough to lose his lunch across the screen door before figuring he might be better off waiting out front. You ask me, he should be proud he didn't wet himself.

Sure enough, the shambler was there in the kitchen. It sat at the table, fumbling a fork across the days-old breakfast. A broken coffee cup crunched in the brown stain underfoot, most likely from an earlier effort.

Usually, it's only the new dead that try to remember their rituals. Once, I rested a body sitting on the crapper. Seriously, sat through the whole rite trying to pinch a phantom loaf. But you don't see this so often with the older corpses. Botched or no, the rites that got this thing moving again had some serious juice.

The bricky's wife and their eldest were still alive, but both were missing too many pieces and too much blood. They weren't going to make it. Thankfully, they were both too messed up to know just how messed up they were. Everyone else, the dog included, was picked clean. Never mind what you see in the papers. Brain-eaters may make for good headlines, but shamblers aren't big on reading.