Free Heist of the Living Dead by Clarence Walker (the late) Page B

to?” And then he gave us a crooked smile and I could see his canines,
sharp and pearly white and cocky as hell.  
    “What’s
your kind doing here?” I said, gun still on him, but now a little lower so that
I could empty my clip into a line across his neck. “You’ve obviously got no
need for brains. Isn’t there a high school girl you should be off impregnating right
now?”
    The
vampire guard’s face looked confused, and then he burst out laughing. He lifted
his hands and made talking motions with them, back and forth like they were
having a conversation. “Aar aar aargh! Aar aar arr arr!” he said between bouts
of laughter. “You sound like a demented seal or something! Aar aar arr!” The
bullet hole in his head wasn’t bloody at all, just kind of black, and it
appeared to be knitting together already. The rest of his skin was so flawless
it could have been photoshopped.
    “Naar
war Daaarnt!” exclaimed Freddy. “Yaaargh MarMar.”
    This
just made the vampire laugh harder. I’d decided to pull the trigger when his
hand shot out like a snake, grabbed the gun, and ripped it out of my grasp.
“Look,” he said, now leveling the gun on me, serious, “you guys, and . . . ugh,
is that a girl? . . . Well, you people are the bottom of the
barrel. Me, I’m the next stage in human evolution. There’s no competition.”
    “For
an übermensch, you sure look like you’re working as a security guard to me.
What do they pay you, twelve bucks an hour?”
    “I
am not unkind to the less fortunate,” the vampire continued as if I hadn’t said
anything. “In fact, I’ll make a deal with you. You leave, go into town, and
come back with a couple warmbloods for me to snack on, and I’ll forgive the
whole thing. I get to tell my boss how I valiantly foiled their robbery. You
get to go on with your little barrel-bottom existence for another night. Win-win,
Capiche?”
    I
realized now that the vampire possessed the cultural acumen of a drunk spring
breaker streaking through a hotel lobby, and therefore didn’t speak a lick of Zombish,
but I couldn’t help but mutter “Capiche? You get turned while watching Full
House reruns, or what?”
    Suddenly
an explosion rocked the building. At that moment, several things happened at
once. Sarah shrieked, the guard stumbled, and Freddy shoved past me with his
glass cutter. Before I knew it, the vampire was relieved of his head and
dissolving into a pile of dust on the linoleum floor. Freddy stood over him, the
glass cutter still whirring. “Araaargh Ar,” he said through clenched gums.
    “Araargh
Ar,” is a common Zombish idiom of unknown origin. It means, roughly, “Tell me
more about evolution while I go get the dustpan.”
    It
seemed apropos.
    I
kicked through the dust, pulled out my gun, and patted Freddy on the back.
Never been so proud of somebody in my unlife.
    Another
explosion rocked the compound as we cut into the window and lowered ourselves
into the frigid warehouse. I went straight to the computer terminal and
disabled all the alarms. Then we went over to the shelves together to start
gathering our spoils. For a moment we just stared at the bounty before us,
taking in the blue light reflecting off the polished white plastic of thousands
of canisters. We’d done it. Not only that, but we’d gotten to kill a vampire in
the process. Our crew would be legendary after this!
    Sarah
reached out and tapped one of the plastic containers. There was a thin,
vertical window in each, and her long purple fingernail made a clicking sound
as it tapped the small strip of glass.
    “Umm,”
she said. “This one’s empty.”
    I
looked at the one in front of me. It was empty too. And the one beside it. And
the one beside that. And—
    “Aaar
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh aar!” shouted Freddy, a little ways over.  
    “Just
calm down, everybody,” I said. “It’s probably just this row.” All the talk
about calm though, and I ran as fast as I could around to the next section