Free Divine Fantasy by Melanie Jackson

himself. I guess I never had any faith that they would help little ol’ flawed me who was neither particularly moral nor absolute.
    I forced myself to look away from the statue. If I needed anything else to confirm his story of being a werewolf, there were deep gouges in the concrete floor, suggestive marks that looked an awful lot like they were made by giant claws. I also saw what looked like a wisp of animal hair caught in the rough wood around the door. The golden brown fur was at shoulder height. There might also have been smudges of blood. Obviously housekeeping hadn’t been in to clean for a few days.
    “Bad weekend?” I asked, staring at the fuzz and then the torn floor.
    Ambrose paused, looking at the fur in the jamb for a moment before brushing it away.“Same old, same old. Like you, I hate the holidays. It seems that no matter what I do, I always end up with coal in my stocking and blood on my floor,” he answered,disappearing into another room. I heard a drawer open. It screeched like a rusted file cabinet. Ambrose reappeared a minute later with a nine-millimeter handgun and a shotgun. He was also wearing a T-shirt that said: A NY D AY A BOVE T HE G ROUND I S A G OOD O NE . I concurred with the sentiment.
    He handed me the pistol. It was a Colt Peacemaker. I recognized it both because it was the gun I had shot on that memorable occasion when I had my one father-daughter bonding experience, but also because of the lecture I got along with the lesson on how to shoot this rather heavy pistol without injuring myself.
    For those of you who don’t know the Colt, it had an illustrious history—and by that I mean it has a long and bloody history. It was the handgun of choice at the OK Corral, for instance. It’s shot a lot of soldiers and a lot of “injuns.” Unlike its sleeker, modern brethren that shoot high-velocity, steel-cased, narrow-caliber shells that leave neat little holes in targets—and bodies, I assume—the Colt shoots large, unjacketed, soft-nosed bullets that mushroom on impact, ripping large messy holes in targets. And bodies, again presumably. My father told me that if I was stupid enough to shoot myself in the foot with it, I would no longer have a foot. I had handled the gun with great care. As I still valued my feet, I handled this one with great care as well.
    “Don’t worry. It’s already loaded. You just have to point and shoot.”
    “Okay,” I said, again at a loss for words. Miss Manners’s etiquette guide just didn’t cover a situation like this.
    I kept the gun pointed well away from my feet, though my finger was nowhere near the trigger. I know, it’s dumb, but the whole “if I shot myself in the foot I wouldn’t have a foot” thing has always stuck in my mind.
    “Ready?”
    Well, not really. But I nodded and we went back outside. In the few moments we had been indoors, the weather had changed. Clouds had roiled in from the west and blocked out the sun. The smell of ozone was strong in the air.
    “So, shower and olives first?” Ambrose asked. “Or do we head right for the beach?”
    Olives! Pick olives!
My cowardly side sniveled. But I said: “The beach. We need to find out what’s going on.”
    I sounded so brave I almost fooled myself. I could never have faked it if I hadn’t known that Ambrose really wasn’t afraid, and confident that he could handle anything we might face. I was strictly a second-string benchwarmer.
    “Or at least if there are any more zombies,” Ambrose muttered. I don’t have supersensitive ears, but my hearing is rather good and I was listening carefully, so I caught this.
    Ambrose and I were walking differently as we stalked over the sand. Weapons do that to a person. They make one move with deliberation and purpose. Also, one’s balance is different when oneis holding a handgun out to the side so it doesn’t point at one’s feet.
    We didn’t speak, though it was unlikely that we could have heard anything over the sound of waves