Resurrection is for the Unbelievers
By
Part Nine
All Previous Disclaimers Appy
Razz Me: shaych3@yahoo.com
~Chapter Seventeen~
Dersk liked the bar. Sharkey’s wasn’t quite at the level of say, a demon dive like Flugrut’s or Bash’Em’s, but the customers were less likely to turn and try to take a bite out of him. Besides, the bartender was a fox. He grinned. Elizabeth Blaine. Who would’ve thought that the pretty little toy of Iscariot’s would turn out to be made out of steel and not lace? It was a pleasant surprise.
Derskingorlus, as he was known to his Ssilligorthic brethren had been around long enough to have heard plenty of boogey tales about the vampire who had sired at least half of the current blood suckers who wandered the European continent.
He also knew quite a bit about the bastard’s messy and well-deserved end. Rumor held it that the one who had slain him – a priest, if the stories were true – had vanished in the aftermath of Iscariot’s death.
That the redhead who was once considered to have been Iscariot’s favorite bride was now acting as the bartender for a Chicago dive like Sharkey’s was less intriguing to the information gatherer than the fact that Elizabeth Blaine, vampire, was a walking, talking, breathing being. Curious, Dersk spent more time than what Kate paid him for just watching the redhead.
Even if his erstwhile boss didn’t want the info, someone would. There was always a market for data, and Dersk had learned long ago that no information was worthless.
Finishing his beer, he signaled for another and left a five on the bar.
Elizabeth watched the half-demon closely. She knew him – knew that he was associated with Kate, and that he was not wholly human. Yet he appeared harmless, so she let him drink without issue.
Dersk was in his human guise. The snake-like visage had been hidden by dark, swarthy skin and a pair of eyes so green they seemed to glow. This was topped off by a shock of bleach-blonde hair cut in a spastic version of a skater’s buzz. Anyone who looked beyond that would see a man whose face was so plain that it was without remarking. Only his eyes stood out, and those were easily forgotten when faced with the scantily clad bevy of women strutting their stuff on Sharkey’s tiny stage.
To supplement her income, Elizabeth had taken a second job. Three days a week, she stayed late and scrubbed the tiny dressing room and shower that the girls used to get ready for the little show that kept the bar afloat. It was a hellish job, but the extra cash allowed the vampath the freedom to eat food that came in something besides greasy wife beaters.
She ran a rag over the bar to sop up the scattered droplets of beer and condensation then went to fill another order for one of the three types of cheap whiskey that the bar served.
Dersk watched her a moment longer and then turned his gaze on the room at large. There was another reason he came here – Tom Bizby liked the place.
Gathering info on Caruso’s right hand man would put him in good odor with Kate, and earn him a few more bucks toward this month’s rent.
Big, almost corpulent in his size, Tom Bizby was thoroughly convinced of his own attractiveness. The steady flow of twenties from his hands into the g-strings of the dancers only reinforced his convictions. They practically fell over themselves to shimmy their evenly bronzed bottoms in his face.
His grin grew wider and wider, and his wallet grew emptier and emptier.
It was almost enough to make the half-demon wish he were female.
Dersk sipped his beer and watched.
%%%
Kate was awash in paperwork. In her business it was feast or famine and right at that moment, she was supping from a massive table of work. Six separate cases, all mundane, had come through her door and she was loathe to turn any of them down.
Two of the six had been successfully concluded, which was why she was drowning in documentation. One had been a simple track and trace of a deadbeat dad – the other, a slightly more difficult job of locating a runaway child.
Once she had ascertained that the parents weren’t evil, blood sucking bastards or worse, she had gladly went from shelter to shelter until she found the girl. Strung out on heroin, and about five minutes from becoming the pet of some pimp, Kate had simply flashed a wad of cash in the girl’s face.
The girl was now in the arms of her family and Kate still had to fill out all the forms necessary to create an invoice. Without that, she wouldn’t get paid and without income, well… she wasn’t a vampath. She could not subsist on air alone.
Her stomach chose that moment to remind her that breakfast had been a very long time ago, and that lunch had gone south for the winter.
She finished typing the last of the information out and picked up her phone. “Yeah? Hey, Dersk. Anything?” With the cases had come an influx of much needed cash, some of which she had used to hire Dersk on a more full time basis. The half-demon was proving to be of invaluable aid.
Listening as the invoices printed, she addressed two envelopes, put stamps on them and then added the folded paperwork when it was ready. “Okay, stay on him. Let me ring you in ten. I need to run upstairs and nuke something.”
%%%
The cheap meal sat like lead in Kate’s stomach. After eating, she had called the half-demon and met him at a lakeside cabin. The half demon reported seeing Caruso’s second in command, Thomas Bizby enter the cabin and then hurry out about ten minutes before the detective had arrived.
Curious as to what had sent the fat man running like he was being chased by Jenny Craig, Kate and Dersk had cautiously approached the cabin. The door was partially open, but the easy access was unnecessary.
The scent of death was more than enough to let Kate know what had happened.
Drawing her gun, she motioned for the half-demon to push the door open. As he did, she nearly lost her lunch. The walls and floor of the small cottage ran scarlet. Blood coated everything in a paste that had congealed in places while in others, it oozed into sludgy puddles.
Everywhere she looked, there were bodies. It took a moment longer to realize that the bodies belonged to children, and that they weren’t actually whole, but in pieces.
That was when dinner made a rapid reappearance.
~Chapter Eighteen~
It was a shit sucking mess. The cabin was crawling with cops and CSU techs. Kate had sent Dersk off before the officers arrived, but she stayed to answer a bevy of questions.
Somehow, the Chicago PD bought her story of being out for an evening ride. As a former homicide investigator, they even understood how she had detected the signs of death. What was so frustrating for Kate was fighting the desire to grab a pair of gloves and join the other officers in gathering evidence of the crime.
Kate badly wanted to have first hand knowledge. What she could glimpse from beyond the borders of crime scene tape and a barricade of beat cops told her that what they were dealing with was far from human.
Something nasty and quite possibly undead had come to visit Chicago.
Don’t underestimate man’s capacity to do evil unto itself, Kate. The mental voice sounded surprisingly like Angel’s.
He should know. He’s made evil into an art form.
As soon as she was allowed to leave, Kate got on her bike and rode a few miles away and then called Willow. Quickly explaining what she wanted, she then headed home to wait beside her computer and fax machine.
%%%
The police reports were concise and yet lacked any sort of evidence that she needed to prove one way or the other that the massacre in the cabin was of supernatural origin. Willow had offered to cast a few spells, but Kate knew that would be like sending off a flare to anything waiting for just that sort of poking around.
No, she was back to good old fashioned leg work. All remaining cases of a mundane nature were given to Dersk to work on while she attempted to track down the killer.
To start, she decided to revisit the cabin. Kate already knew that it belonged to a shell corporation owned by Tom Bizby. What she didn’t know was whether or not it was a usual drop point, or just a pleasure palace.
The crime scene photos had been graphically unclear, due to the sheer level of violence that had taken place.
Parking half a mile from the cabin, Kate hiked in, keeping watch for anything out of the ordinary. It was late afternoon, and under the trees, night was rapidly falling. The night vision filter on her helmet limned everything in an eerie pale green glow. As she neared the cabin, she lifted the face plate and took a cautious breath of air.
Faintly, she could smell the traces of the horror that had occurred within, but it was covered by a heavier scent of bleach. Bizby had wasted no time in having his place cleaned.
Now Kate exercised caution. It would not do to be caught prowling around the scene of a mass murder.
Sidling up to the cabin wall, she cocked her head and listened for any stray sounds.
I could wish that I had a vampire’s enhanced senses right about now. It was hard to hear through the helmet, so she pulled it off and clipped it to her belt. If she had to run, it was going to leave a massive bruise on her thigh, but she needed the use of her ears.
Next time, I get an external mic built into it.
Creeping around until she found an open window, she got right up against the wall and peeked inside. Naked as the day he was born, Tom Bizby wiggled his fat white butt around while lip-synching to Britney Spears’ “Oops I Did it Again”. Kate nearly gagged.
Lying on a bed in the center of the room, a nubile young woman watched the man with a look of pure boredom on her face and then buried her nose in a pile of white powder.
“Hey baby,” he crooned as he writhed about. “Want some of this?” He grabbed at a region that Kate guessed was somewhere approximating his genitalia, but since she wasn’t about to look to be certain, she wouldn’t have sworn to it under oath.
“Oh yeah baby, let’s do it!” The girl on the bed suddenly came to blazing life. Leaping from the mattress, she wrapped as much of herself around the man as she could.
Having seen more than enough, Kate backed away from the window.
“Well, well… looks like we have us a visitor.”
The voice was male, amused and spoken in a low murmur that made Kate silently curse.
Slowly, Kate turned to face the speaker. Melting out of the shadows, six men stood facing her. All wore heavy leather jackets and bright red hooded sweatshirts. Sunglasses barred their eyes from the remaining sunlight and if that wasn’t enough of a clue, the leader’s face was already morphed into full vamp state.
“Guess we won’t have to send out for Chinese,” one of the vamps said wryly.
“Yeah, nothing wrong with a little domestic now and then,” said another as his face shifted.
Kate drew her gun.
Six different laughs greeted her action. They stopped laughing when the first shot dusted one of them. Rushing her, the remaining five vamps pulled weapons of their own.
Daggers, metal saps and even an aluminum baseball bat wielded by a creature with the strength and speed of a vampire quickly left their marks on Kate. By the time she had dusted two more, she was bleeding and battered to the point of dizziness.
She staggered back and ended up taking the baseball bat full in the gut, which doubled her over. Gasping for air, she tried to regain her feet, and felt the fiery slice of steel as it cut through her jacket and into her ribs. The scent of fresh, warm blood caused the vamps to growl hungrily.
One of them punched her in the wound, pulled his fist back and licked it. “Sweet,” he hissed and dove for her.
She went down firing. He was dust, but there were still two left. One was bat-man the other – she spared a glance in his direction – the other wielded a steel pipe the size of a small Volkswagen.
Kate raised her gun and was about to pull the trigger when a voice interrupted.
“I think that’s quite enough of that.”
The vamps stopped and bowed their heads respectfully. Dread clawed at Kate’s gut as she craned her head over her shoulder. Standing on the stoop of the cabin was Thomas Bizby. Dressed in a pale peach robe, the right hand man of Vitmar Caruso held a shotgun that was trained on Kate’s head.
“I think the lady will be joining me inside now, boys.”
%%%
Kate couldn’t remember a time without pain. The moment she entered Bizby’s cabin, she had been slugged hard in the face with the butt of the shotgun. She was then stripped of anything resembling a weapon and tied to a chair.
For the next five hours, Bizby and his two remaining pets had taken turns slapping, hitting, kicking and punching her. The big man had never once asked a question. Instead, he seemed to derive a peculiar kind of satisfaction from watching her bleed.
It was not the way his pet vamps eyed her – he didn’t see her as food – it was more in the way a young boy will toy with a slug by pouring salt on it and watching the way its flesh popped and melted. Fascination. That was it. Tom Bizby was fascinated by Kate’s pain.
The more she felt, the more he dealt.
Since she couldn’t withhold information, she did the only thing she could do – she refused to scream. Every abuse earned them a silent glare of hatred.
When they broke her fingers, she bit her lip.
When Bizby punched her until she saw stars, she smiled and spat a gob of bloody saliva into his face.
When the bat wielding vamp made like Mark McGuire on her ribcage, she did the only thing she could do – she dove for oblivion.