Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) (2 page)

He had managed to get one down for the count. Now, he just had to draw the other two out of his office; there were too many valuable volumes and rare texts in there.

Once in the front office, the ear piercing shriek emanating from behind his secretary’s desk had become more strident. He tried to think of comforting words to tell her, but ‘shut the hell up’ was the best he could come up with.

He spun around to look back at the other two zombies.

Both goons had clamored into the front office. Jonathan moved to his left, away from the strident screeches, and further into the room. He hoped to draw them further in with him. It also put him out of the reach of the one-legged corpse.

The two came at him, one stepping on its felled companion.

Jonathan took another step and reached blindly behind him. His hand felt the smooth wood of the coat rack and he grabbed it. He attempted to swing it up, only to find its weight awkward and uneven.

With a curse, he spared a glance to figure out what was wrong and saw a pink, fluffy coat dangling from one of the tines.

Taking out zombies could be done with relative ease, as long as you had access to a hot enough flame. Once started, the things went up like balsawood carvings. The tricky part was stopping them from bumbling about, setting the whole building, or yourself, on fire.

Jonathan shook the coat rack, trying to dislodge the coat his secretary had, for some ungodly reason, hung on it. He finally managed to get the article unhooked and swung it around, hoping to corral the corpses long enough to set them on fire.

The coat rack collided into the side of the brute and cracked. It didn’t slow the creature. An upper cut lifted Jonathan into the air and he landed against the far wall. Jonathan found himself on the low bookcase, his face a raw ache, his back a single spasm. He had put up with enough.

“Screw this.”

He had them as close as he could hope for, and at least one of them wouldn’t be wandering about.

He brought up his right hand and rubbed his middle and ring finger together. He began to chant the words of power, of focus. After being hit by a ham hock of a fist, his jaw felt like rigor mortis was setting in, which made pronouncing the proto-Egyptian language of the spell tricky.

Luckily, it was a short invocation.

Jonathan felt his energy swell as though the earth itself were rising up through him, and reached further still. He tapped into the beyond and pulled the forgotten forward, through him.

He rode the White Dragon.

Sweat soaked into his clothing. His skin felt abraded with the heat.

He hated this spell.

His chest burned from the inside out, his heart pumped lava through his veins.

He hated necromancers.

As his mind spun through infinite harmonies, every molecule of his body danced violently.

The fire he had formed leapt from ethereal to physical. A flame that burned deep-orange engulfed his hand, its flickering edges sending swirls of black soot into the air.

Jonathan lashed out with his foot, catching the closest zombie on the chin and rocking it backward. Before it had a chance to close in again, he released the spell.

The flame rolled off Jonathan’s hand, growing as it absorbed oxygen from the air around it.

He shivered with the sudden cold.

The summoned fire smashed into the closest zombie. It pushed the corpse backwards and lapped over it. The overspill ignited the bourbon soaked fabric of the second zombie. The room quickly smelt of melting polyester and overcooked ham.

Still, they came at him. One thing that had to be said for zombie employees, they literally couldn’t quit.

Beyond the flames, Jonathan caught sight of his wide-eyed secretary as she bolted up from behind her desk.

“Hey, Alice, while you’re up, grab the fire extinguisher from the hall would you?”

She looked at him, or the walking flames, and darted out the door.

“That-a-girl.”

Jonathan relaxed a little. All he had to do now was keep them at arm’s length and wait for his secretary to return.

He wished he had the coat rack. Without it, he was reliant on his feet. That was a good way to ruin a perfectly serviceable pair of shoes.

All three of the corpses were blazing pyres now. Flames licked at the ceiling, and charred the cheap rug. The heat trapped in the room caused his arm hairs to curl and his lips to crack.

“Any minute now . . . secretary.”

He kicked the nearest zombie and hit its arm. The limb rocked backwards and just kept going—a flaming comet. Jonathan brought his knees to his chest and kicked out with both legs at the same time.

The zombie staggered back a few feet and then crumbled in on itself. Jonathan hastily beat at his trouser cuffs to extinguish the flames lapping up his legs.

He looked up and saw the other two had been almost completely immolated as well. What he didn’t see . . . was his secretary.

With a sigh, Jonathan slipped off the bookshelf.

Skirting the pile of burning bones, he went to the front door to look about.

There was no sign of the woman.

The fire extinguisher remained clipped to the wall. With a groan, he retrieved it, returned to his office, and sprayed down the flames that had found fuel for their appetites beyond the corpse flesh.

The office smelled like charred meat, burned bone, and, oddly, sour milk. The ceiling had a large scorch mark and the rug was ruined. Jonathan put down the fire extinguisher. He stepped over the pile of smoldering ash and entered his office. He closed the door, righted his chair, and sat back down behind his desk.

“I hate necromancers,” he said, pouring himself a fresh drink. “They never consider the second-hand damage.”

T
he office, the next day, was thick with a fug that went beyond just the cigarette smoke trapped in the small room. The smell of bourbon clung to the blue-grey air, but it was his own fermenting emotions that thickened the enclosed space.

Frustration draped the walls, and Jonathan couldn’t deny the guilt that clung there as well.

The Apatedyne situation really needed to be handled on a level beyond simply freeing those affected by cursed products, like the widow yesterday. He saw little choice but to stop this company from operating in New Hades before their business went further than a few people being rooked of their savings. Preferably before more corpses walked through his door.

He had to admit he wasn’t enthused with the idea of another corporation adding him to their black list. Jonathan knew firsthand how difficult it was to force a company into a position where they decided to back off. They had their own practitioners. They had money. Industry, as a rule, didn’t sleep.

Still
, he thought,
if not me, then who
?

Sitting back and fixing the mess afterwards—for a fee—made him no better than Apatedyne and Jonathan knew it. He just wasn’t as young as he used to be. Tilting at windmills hurt more than it had in the past.

He needed to find a method which would be effective, and hopefully, not drawn out. A prolonged siege wasn’t what he considered a good time. Devising ingenious ways to trip them up could be fun, however.

If he got his imagination going on this one, it might motivate him to act. Needing to get his synapses fired up, he reached for his cigarette case when a pounding on his outer office door resounded through the office.

Jonathan paused. His hand hovered over the silver case as he waited for his secretary to answer the door.

The pounding came again and reminded him he no longer had a secretary.

He couldn’t be blamed for forgetting; she had only left the day before. When she had failed to get the fire extinguisher, Jonathan had hoped she had simply decided to grab a breath of fresh air.

He had to accept that he’d lost yet another secretary.

The hand assaulting his door didn’t seem to be doing so in anger and so Jonathan assumed it wasn’t another attempt to dissuade him from meddling in company affairs.

As he got up, Jonathan realized the nature of the knocking belonged not to someone who wanted in but someone who
needed
in.

He opened the door separating the offices and the stagnant air escaped with the speed of a diesel truck backfiring. Through the frosted glass of the front office door, he saw the person turn away.

Jonathan slowed.

But the dark blob of a hand rose again. With a groan, Jonathan took the last few steps and swung open the door.

In the hall towered a lean man. His true height Jonathan couldn’t approximate from the way his shoulders rolled forward over his chest.

A wide-brimmed hat, squashed on hair that looked like a pile of straw, seemed designed to obscure the man’s identity.

Jonathan might have been worried about that if wasn’t for the other unmistakable oddity; the lower portion of the pallid face was spotted with tiny wads of tissue paper, most with a crimson center.

“Mr. Alvey?” queried the man with a voice possibly unused in the last decade.

“That’s what the door says.”

“You are, though, right? You’re Alvey, the private investigator?”

Jonathan reached up to the top of the open door with his fingers and studied the man’s face.

Resisting the urge to flick the pieces of tissue from the stranger’s jawline, he wondered why they always asked that question. What sort of sacrament made them want to hear him speak those specific words?

“Yes, I’m Jonathan Alvey. I guess you’d better come in.”

Jonathan stepped back, allowing the man he tried desperately not to think of as Lurch to enter.

The man slipped the hat from his head and walked in. Jonathan swung the door closed and marched past his guest into his office.

In the short time the door between the rooms had been open, a reasonable portion of the accumulated smog had dissipated. Jonathan felt somehow vulnerable without it.

He sat behind his desk and waited for his latest client to accomplish the feat of settling himself into a chair. Once the glum man was seated, with leg twitching and finger tapping the crown of the hat in his hands, Jonathan reached once more for his smokes.

Opening the silver case, Jonathan made sure he could actually see the man’s reflection in its smooth exterior as he withdrew a cigarette. Having satisfied one curiosity, Jonathan extended the case towards his guest.

Perhaps
, Jonathan thought to himself,
it’s the haunted look in his bloodshot eyes that makes me think he’s glum
.

The man’s square jaw swung slightly from side to side. “No, I quit—” he started to say. But then suddenly, and vehemently, he exclaimed, “Oh, what the hell does it matter now?”

He leaned out and grasped the case long enough to slide a cigarette from it. Jonathan put the case back on the desk, relieved that the man had been able to touch silver. Made the odds better that he was human.

He lit his cigarette then slid the lighter to the scarecrow across the desk. Jonathan took one deep drag. “So, how is it you’ve come to be in my office this evening, Mister . . . ?”

“It’s my life,” the man blurted out.

“Come again?”

“My life,” the man croaked. “I’m here for my life.”

“Someone stole your life savings?” Jonathan tried to hook one single barb into the wriggling fish of this man’s conversational gambit.

“No.” He took a deep drag and Jonathan watched the tip burn bright and hot.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning, Mister . . . ?”

The man moved his mouth oddly. To Jonathan, it looked as though he was trying to tie a cherry stem—only this stem fought back.

After a minute, he vaulted out of the chair.

Just as Jonathan became convinced he’d have to ram a stick between this guy’s teeth while dialing nine-one-one, his potential client landed back in the chair.

He had produced a small card from his back pocket, which he smacked down on the desktop with one long arm before dropping back into the seat.

Jonathan leaned over to investigate the item before he considered touching it. It looked quite familiar and, as the protective wards tattooed like a necklace around the base of his neck were not flaring up, Jonathan reached out and slid it closer.

Made of stiff paper with an inked outline; it called to Jonathan’s mind the title card which popped up between scenes in silent movies. Inside the simple, yet elegant, border were six words. They did wonders to clarify his client’s statement.

Printed in a simple font was the phrase: ‘You will die in three days.’

Jonathan looked up from the card to the man across the desk from him. No hint of amusement tugged at the man’s tight lips. No humor danced in the wide, brown eyes. Truth be told, Jonathan only saw the hazard signs of someone breaking under the burden of stress.

Whether the statement was threat or prediction, his client seemed to believe the validity of those six words.

“All right, Mister—what
is
your name?”

“Uh . . . Courtney,” the man wiped a long-fingered hand over his face. “Wendell. Wendell Courtney.”

“Okay, Wendell, is there anyone you know of who might have a reason—any reason at all—to want to hurt you, or even just scare you?”