Outlaw Author

Here’s a sneak peak of Gravesinger, My first novel in the Midnight Sea Universe.

The next day, I sat at the police precinct reading over the autopsy report and rewatching the security camera videos, watching our perp stab Frank Swilly to death for about the tenth time. He looked like a zombie, pale skin, and ragged clothes, but it didn’t add up. There’s subtle but tangible differences between the living and the undead, even the vampires, and liches that can talk and walk. The mindless dead move with fluidity if the necromancer is skilled, but they still don’t hold themselves right. They don’t balance right, don’t remember to breathe, or lack thought in their posture. Everyday people miss it because they are so rare a threat, but when you live in the world I do, you can tell even from a distance or on a grainy security video.

This murderer breathed, postured, and did his best psycho impression the way a human would. He even got tired. The weapon was unique, a single-edged blade, long and thin, about the length of a man’s forearm. The handle shaped in what might be the precursor to the “pistol grip”  that modern manufacturers used. It was old though. Even with the poor-quality video, I could see the ancient craftsmanship.

“You recognize that type of blade?” Jason asked me. 

“Barely. It looks like one of those Khyber knives from Afghanistan. I don’t remember what the locals called them. They sold them at the markets sometimes. I always thought they were more ceremonial than practical.”

“I looked it up. It’s a Pesh Kabz, they were used even before the British invaded. That’s an old design. They’re made to punch through padding and chain mail.”

“That’s an old-ass knife. Looks like it got used in a fish market for a hundred years.”

“Well, our guy made it work for him on a lot bigger fish. The zombie’s body had matching wounds in the lower back, according to the medical examiner. So our mystery killer stabbed him in the back, killed him, and then drove his corpse into the Fast Trip for an evening snack. Then, while his shambler ate the customers, he chased the clerk out and  went slasher-movie villain on him.”

“What a dickhead.”

Jason’s phone rang then, distracting him from my phallic quip and he answered with a simple, “Balboa.” I watched my friend closely, and observed the transformation from a joking and jovial man that carried a father’s love like the first rays of sunrise freeze into a cold storm of professionalism. The change between fighting and killing Jason and any other Jason could give a bucking bull whiplash. He gave the standard active listening responses. He uhhu’ed, righted, and harumphed before snatching up a pen and copying down an address.

“Got it. don’t move until we get there.” He dropped the call and slipped his phone into a pocket, swinging on his jacket. 

“One of our patrol cars spotted our man on the east side of the city in one of the industrial parks. Just gave me the address of where he went to ground. Let’s get over there and see if we can hunt him out.”

I snatched up my jacket and followed Jason to his department issued SUV. We were on the road in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Jason had us going a reasonable speed considering traffic, though you’d be surprised how stupid people can be when they see flashing blue lights. Texans are more orderly than most about a lot of things, but city traffic makes animals of us all. Danton and Morris followed right on our asses in a low profile vehicle. 

Senior Corporal Tifton met us just off I-635 in a large industrial park. The place seemed quiet despite sitting so close to the railtracks and the interstate. Tifton pointed a wiry hand over to one of the concrete and glass buildings. Despite the name, he just needed a jaguar skull headdress to fit in atop a step pyramid. I instantly liked the man. He had a hunter’s look about him. His scanning kept up even as he briefed us.

“He’s in different clothes, but I’m 90% sure it’s our amigo. He’s pretty slick. I almost missed him, but I drove through looking for one of the local dealers that likes to set up around here. That old air conditioning place has been empty for months. Most of the places here are in between residents.”

“Was he alone, nobody walking with him?” Jason asked.

“What, like a train of skeletons? Nah, he’s alone unless someone already went in. I tracked him for a few blocks and watched him disappear into the back. Nuyen has the other corner covered. Said he never came around.” Tifton watched the black panels of glass with subtle aggression, his shoulders cocked and jaw half clenched. “We picking him up, or waiting on SWAT?” Jason and I shared a look. I shrugged.

“Damn it, Jason!” I said in my best Bones impression, “I’m a necromancer, not a judge.” I took the low chuckle from Tifton, Danton, and Morris as reward enough, even if Jason glared at me like the turd in the healing potion.

“We’re in pursuit of a known suspect headed into vacant property. It’s a gray area.” Morris piped in, but his hand still tracked to the pistol at his belt. “Let’s go get the son of a bitch.” He fished a sledgehammer out of the vehicle’ trunk, and tossed a Halligan tool at Danton 

“Agreed.” Jason pulled his weapon and I pulled my own pistol. I took a moment, as a weaponlover, to look over everyone’s department issues. Danton and Morris sported Glocks, both showing subtle signs of individual love with upgraded sights and lights. Jason hefted a P226, which was the old department standard. I felt the odd man out with my customized M&P 2.0 Spec series. The gray compensator, bright blue barrel, and expensive light made my sidearm the oddball.

“Damn it, Leo. There’s always one.” Jason cracked.

“Look man, I’m not stuck with government issue anymore. I don’t have uniform rules, and there’s not a single blue rubber trainer in my house. I can actually carry what works instead of the cheapest crap Uncle Sam coughs up. This thing kicks ass. Especially with an Apex trigger.” Jason started to retort, but Danton cut him off.

“So we whipping our peckers out next? Or are we going to catch a murderer?” The jovial man wiggled his eyebrows at the two of us and even teased his zipper a bit.

“I don’t care how much my consultant fees pay, that’s a magic wand I save for ladies only.” 

Jason rolled his eyes at my quip and simply led the way towards the brutalist building that held our zombie driving deviant. We spread out and followed, watching the dark building over the top of our gun sights.    

       We curved around the left side of the building, heading back to locate the service entrance. A note for any budding assaulters out there, don’t go in the front door if you can help it. The front door is always covered, trapped, warded, or both. The back door may be as well, but the human mind expects people, and even officials to come knocking.

Jason gathered magic as we weaved in among the plywood, insulation, and chain link that surrounded the back of the building. It was a hefty industrial shop, solid concrete besides the steel door, and two loading bays. Old pallets piled high with cement pads and refrigerant cylinders sat on either side of the door, while fallen plywood blocked the way.  My magic came naturally, shaking off and prowling up on subtle paws. We scanned the doors, every sense alive and aware.  

Places like this were perfect for a necromancer. When you deal with flesh, but everyone is already dead, you don’t need a sterile facility. You need workspace, materials, and tools. An abandoned workshop of any kind would have table space and a cargo facility. The only thing lacking might be cold storage.

The garage door would be loud and exposed no matter what, so we all stacked up on the main door. Danton and Morris cleared the plywood with careful hands, and Jason took position as the door man. I pressed myself to the left wall with barely enough room for all of us. My leather jacket creaked slightly as I held my pistol at the high ready. The two detectives carefully sat the wood down, and approached with the tools. 

We sat there for a moment, not a sound besides the hum of an air conditioner and the whoosh of traffic on the distant freeway. Nothing moved besides our subtle breathing. I set a hand to the door, and scanned with my Gifted senses. The real world tuned to gray, lit with neon sonar. 

I pulsed a tiny bit of energy into the world, gently seeing what reacted. Jason appeared next to me like a firestorm, while Danton and Morris appeared something more like a thermal signature. The door and other dead objects sat dark and cool. I found nothing on the door, though my limited senses spied a flutter of gaseous yellow magic within.

I opened my eyes, slipping back into my mundane senses, and gave the pyromancer a nod. Danton tapped Morris on the shoulder, and Morris in turn signaled he was ready to me. Jason gently tried the door first, but it failed to budge. Danton slipped the bill of the “hooligan” tool into the crease of the door,  and a moment later Jason’s magic erupted from his hand like a blowtorch. The door lock melted in less than three seconds. 

Morris slammed the hammer down to punch the tool in, and Danton wrenched. The door shot open immediately. The lads stepped clear. I rushed through the dark portal digging the corner hard, and getting my ass out of the way. 

Nothing tried to kill me besides the smell. Coming in from the Texas sun took a moment for my eyes to adjust as I scanned the small warehouse area and my companions poured in behind me ready for violence. Jason came through the door as the last man, and grimaced at the nightmarish aroma.

The decay of violent dead has its own distinct aroma. Soldiers smell it in their nightmares, and detectives learn to block it from their mind. I imagine morticians and coroners learn its miasma well, but in my mind formalin, or liquid formaldehyde is one of the most potently disgusting substances on the planet.

Offal, a man or beast internals, also carries a distinct smell when exposed to the air. More than rotting meat, it carries a terrible distinct scent. Blood also hits your senses differently in high concentrations, a metallic tang that fills your sinuses and refuses to evacuate without a call to the sheriff’s department. We learned over time to forcefully evict it with woodsmoke or mint. Why pay for therapy when you could take a bottle of scotch to the fireside? All those terrible aromas slapped us across the face as we swept the shelves looking for our murderer. The blood and guts…not the scotch and firesmoke.

Absent any obvious threat we all scanned the details of the room, searching for the dead thing that produced the terrible aromas. We were spoiled for choices. Across the walls, the ruddy brown of dried blood mixed with the green of old bile to produce sprawling Arabic script. The words alluded me, ancient in their origin even for all my knowledge of the subject, though I caught the symbols of necromantic workings: Alhazrad’s dodecagram and the inverted forms of Solomon’s seals. 

When I opened my magical senses again, it all buzzed with a sickly yellow energy.

“Leo, what in all of creation are we standing in right now.” Morris asked me.

“Madness.”  I muttered, trying to decipher some of the words scrawled in blood and filth. “When we’re done here, we need to burn this place to the ground. Whoever did this is drawing from powers they barely understand. There’s more than one way to practice my art, and this is the way the inquisitions had to cleanse with fire and prayer. Mostly fire.”

My magic sight led me to one of the crates, radiating with neon yellow power, and it soon took the shape of a body even through the wooden boards. My magic stood on its hackles and growled. Then I collapsed back into the real world as all around us, wooden crate tops suddenly began to shift.

The dead threw their makeshift coffin coverings aside, leaned up with bloated faces and washed the room in a fresh wave of rot. I shot a zombie in the face as it clambered forth, the 9mm hollowpoint shattering its skull and sufficiently pulping its brain. My ears rang for just a second at the loud bang, and I cursed at the rookie mistake of forgetting to cast a hearing protection spell. A few mumbled words fixed the issue as my companions fired off bullets and their own muffled curses.

I scanned the room to find more undead shambling out of crates and down from the shelves. I sighed. This whole building could be filled with zombies. I knew I should have brought my full fighting rig. The mistakes just kept piling up. Rusty old wolf just doing shotgun drills on the weekends, when I should have been sharpening my spear for days like this.   

I rolled my shoulders and drew on my magic. I could see all those undead laying in wait, which meant I could play who’s the better necromancer. I lashed out with my magic’s teeth, snatching at the energies piloting the dead, facing off in a tug of war for control of the meat puppets layered through the room. 

I gained a grip, and then all throughout the room, the sickly yellow writing flared. The explosion of clashing energies ripped my grip away. I slammed back into my mundane senses only to find the glow of the diseased power now manifested to normal senses.

“What spell is this, Leo? It makes me want to puke,” Jason said between firing.

“It’s a trap. I tried to take control of the shamblers and this whole place is a magic box to maintain spells. I can’t overide or usurp the spell.  Watch what you touch and watch out for more unusual undead. Headshots! Destroy the nervous system and the magic loses its conduit to pilot the body!” 

I started to line up another head shot, when a grim chuckle echoed through the room, and then all the light from the door cut as the pallets of cement pads and canisters collapsed. Lights clicked on immediately and more shooting came with muted thumps, along with harshly barked commands from outside.

“Everyone on me!” Jason growled, dropping a zombie  with a single shot. 

“Well, we can’t leave the way we came in.” I paused to shoot one of the zombies blocking our way. Stupid, really, we never would have left our rear unguarded in the Legion.  I thought for a moment. “You want to just explode our way out?”

“Negative. We aren’t here to cause mass public property damage. We’re  armed. We can just push out the front. Shambler’s aren’t much if they move slowly and come at us in waves.” I groaned at the comment. It felt dangerously close to Boy, it sure is quiet tonight muttered right at the start of a twelve hour nightshift.

Danton took a shot and Morris winced just slightly at the noise. Jason and I hit them with our Legion issue ear pro spell. Tinnitus is no joke, kids. The two of them let out with a short volley of fire and then paused.

“What in all the nine hells is that? A dog?” The moment marked the first time I really heard Danton scared. From an office doorway, a monstrosity emerged into our weapon lights. A rottweiler touched with our murder suspect’s special blend of nightmare magic. Two human arms sprouted from the dead dog, now prowling forward with a low growl, dripping drool and ichor from punctured intestines. Each arm ended in a gleaming blade. 

“Lazy bastard didn’t bother to close the wounds on any of his victims. Sloppy work, really. Maintaining structural integrity is a basic principle of creating an effective zomb–” 

Morris interrupted me by dumping his magazine into the charging undead canine. The bullets punched holes in the charging beast, but the bobbing skull illuded his marksmanship. An ear ripped free of the fang filled skull. One round dug a furrow across the dead dog’s scalp, and another smashed through its jaw.  Morris’s slide locked back, and he blanched, immediately reaching to reload.

Danton hauled Morris aside, completely ruining the man’s reload but saving him from the snapping fragmented jaw, and slicing knife arms. The lunging beast hurled by us, and Jason spun, blasting the beast back hips into fragmented bone. I shot a regular shambler, and turned to help, but Danton deftly timed the flailing and flopping limbs and stepped in to execute a shot to the back of the zombie dog’s head. It fell about five feet from us, finally punctured through the skull.

“Leo, please tell me you never do sadistic shit like this.” Morris said, completing his fumbled reload between dry heaves. I started to answer but Jason cut me off.

“No. Dead Wolf creations were much, much worse. Leo knows how to weld.”

The idea dumbfounded Morris in an awkward silence. The thought seemed to both impress and horrify the officer.

Another low growl, and a mind boggling chorus of slapping reminded us that another time might be better for a debate over the ethics of necromancy.

“We’re in his house, and none of us brought full battle rattle. Let’s move.” Jason gave the order, and in our small firing line, we pressed forward. 

More zombies leapt from the shelves, and one even tangled up with Morris for a moment before he got his pistol under its chin. Leaving just enough space to stay in battery, he closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. Red mist splattered all over his face in fine droplets, and most of us were caught with flecks. 

The next room reeked of blood. A chain of work benches were shoved together to form an assembly line of body parts. All the way at the end of the room, three corpses sat sprawled on the concrete floor. I reached for my magic, knuckles flaring, and the three bodies scrambled to their feet. My companions immediately took aim, but I waved them off. 

“Hold fire. Those are mine.” I gave a hand gesture to my new servants, and gave a simple order. “Lead the way. If anything hostile shows up, pin it down.” I named them Fred, Red, and George. 

Fred was homeless in life by his look, dirty and ragged besides the blood and dressed in too much clothing for the weather. He made it to his feet first. Red would have been fresh out of high school, probably an orphan or something of the like, just released on her own from the adoption system. George had lived to a ripe old age, and probably seemed more spry in undeath than life. He wore dad sneakers and lawn-mowing shorts into the afterlife. 

Silently, my minions stalked down the hallway and into the next room in our house of horrors. We immediately heard a clatter and the sound of jaws snapping, and we funneled into the room with weapons ready. A small set of cubicles sat in a large open room. The offices connected to the main entrance and customer service counter. More storage racks lined the walls for office supplies and smaller materials. 

Inside the cubicles, papers and staplers flew in a chaotic flurry as my newly risen dead tumbled and crashed around with a knife armed german shepherd and three more of our killer’s zombies. Fred tumbled with the beast, grappling against its snapping jaws,  ignoring the plunging blades that spiked over and over into his chest and shoulders. Red rolled about on the floor with a restaurant worker, and George was getting his ass handed to him in a handicap match with two construction workers.

I’d love to tell you we flowed through, guns blazing, and executing headshots as the elite team of law enforcement and retired special operators we were. I’d love to tell you that… 

We stood there like a bunch of fucking idiots watching the wildest episode of The Office ever. The war rust was real, and it’s not every day that you get to see an undead battle royale in the shipping and receiving department.

That novelty wore off when a mass of flailing limbs dropped on my damn head from one of the shelves, and suddenly, I was in a grapple for my life. I’ll give the fucker that made this madhouse credit, I’d never tried this one before. The abomination against nature that landed on my head had a human torso, but the legs were long removed. 

Hands pummeled me, seamlessly striking with impossible speed. A fist bashed down like a hammer into the top of my skull, blessedly hitting the hard part of my crown. I pumped two rounds into the thing’s guts, firing from retention out of reflex, but the hollowpoints simply ripped quarter sized holes into an already dead thing. The room erupted into roaring gunfire as my companions battled other threats beyond my senses. 

Another wave of strikes all across my body sent me from panicked to pissed. I dropped my pistol in favor of the seax knife I carried at my belt. Electric blue and green runes lit across the blade as I drew it.

 I kicked a limb out from under the heavy mass, and started ripping and slashing with the blade. I finally found a skull in the sea of limbs and spiked the six inch knife into the head over and over again until the flailing stopped. Sucking wind, I ripped the blade free and snatched up my pistol again, heaving the vanquished corpse from atop me. Bruised and gore strewn, I came to a crouch to see another wave of zombies swarming in.

I tried once again to assume control, and lashed out with my magic, but the spell woven through the building with blood and gore repelled my ability to wrench away control of the dead. Anger flooded through me, and something about the protections on the building disturbed me deeply. I didn’t have time to ponder it further in the face of the horde.

Jason ripped off multiple shots in rapid succession. His target bounced and dodged unnaturally. The thing matched the creature I just knifed back into death. A neckless head rode atop a legless human torso, the legs replaced with a second pair of arms. Along the torso, another two pairs of arms attached themselves, creating a spider zombie made from human limbs. A small squad of the crawling bastards charged at us from the front of the room, hey diddle diddle, right up the middle.  

Cursing, Jason finally threw caution to the wind, and lashed his support hand forward. The entire room turned white the millisecond before a rumble radiated through my entire skeleton. Spots danced in my vision, and new lights wobbled for a moment as my eyes fought to recover from the indoor lightning bolt. The sudden sound of traffic and sirens clued me in that these new lights were from the shattered windows at the front of the store.

The attacking undead lay twitching and sizzling, muscles spasming from the electrical discharge, but we had no guarantee that they would stay down. This time, my team and I did charge forward and start executing the undead with quick precise shots at close range. Who knew it just took a little electric shock and a Zider ass kicking to bust the combat rust off?

Then, it started raining. Indoors. I puzzled on that one for a moment while cracking another skull open with my knife. Jason had never called up a literal storm before. When a drop of the water got into my mouth I realized the coppery smell wasn’t just blood, but also old sprinkler water. 

“Well, at least I remembered my combat boots this time,” I muttered aloud as the carpet squished with blood and water.

A few moments later, a whole mess of Dallas Police smashed through the broken doors, and joined in on the now squishily wet slaughter. An hour later we were still miserably wet, but none the worse for wear. We began the soul wrenching task of counting up how many bodies it would take to create all the slain monstrosities my magical counterpart trapped us with.