Black Knight 02.5 - Movie Knight by John G Hartness Page A

 
    “No, just that he was going to be hiding in one of the drawers with a shotgun, so we should be careful when we got there.” I went to the closet and grabbed my Glock and a shoulder holster. A Ruger LCP in a paddle holster got velcro’d around my right ankle, and I pulled out my long leather duster. I know, it’s a stereotype that all vampires wear long black cloaky things, but sometimes you need to conceal a weapon or two. I closed the closet door, thought about it for a second, then went back in to grab my sword.  
    The sword had been a gift from a fairy princess a few months ago, before she got mad at me and threw me out of her kingdom forever. Yeah, really. That crap happens to me. It’s a gift. I wasn’t sure what had Bobby so worked up, but if he was calling me, then bullets might not be enough. That gave me another thought, and I looked back to Sabrina. “You should grab your armor out of the bottom drawer in my room.”  
    “My armor?” She said, a little confused.  
    “The chain mail Milandra sent back with you when we got home from FairyLand? It’ll be better against claws or fangs than Kevlar.” She looked at me, evaluated the gear I was sporting, and went to my room without an argument. I made a mental note of the date and time, hoping I could write that down for posterity later.  
    Less than ten minutes after Bobby’s call, we were out the door and into the night. I checked the time and saw that we still had plenty of time before daylight to deal with whatever catastrophe we were running headlong into, and slid into Sabrina’s passenger seat. Using her flashers we were at Presbyterian Hospital less than fifteen minutes later, and pulled around to the small morgue entrance. The morgue was a mess, several gurneys had been overturned their occupants scattered around the room in various stages of dismemberment. Greg stopped to investigate as I went for Bobby’s hideout. I kicked a stray foot out of my way as I walked over to the wall of stainless steel drawers and banged on the top right drawer.  
    “Bobby, it’s me, Jimmy. Don’t shoot me. I’m opening the door.” I opened the door and pulled out the sliding tray. Bobby was curled up as tight as he could manage, with a sawed-off shotgun cradled in his arms. The big man was trembling, and I didn’t think it was just from the cold.  
    “Is it gone?” He asked, head whipping around furtively at the scattered corpses.  
    “There’s nothing here but us.” Greg confirmed from across the room. “I checked all the corpses, and they all look like they were chewed on.”
    “That’s what that noise was! I heard some gross crunching sounds, but no way was I gonna open up until you got here.” Bobby said.  
    “What happened, man? All I’ve got is some gnawed dead people and a freaked out phone call to go on.” I pulled Bobby’s desk chair over and helped him into it, surreptitiously wiping a clump of something nasty out of the seat onto the floor. Bobby stared at the chair as he heard the glob splat onto the tile, but set aside any fears for the safety of his khakis and sat down anyway.  
    “I don’t really know. All I know is we got this guy in here sometime today, before I came on shift. He was decapitated and left in an alley, looked like a homicide. So I put him on the table and started the autopsy, but there was something weird going on in his chest.” Bobby’s head was on a swivel the whole time he was telling us the story, like he expected something to jump out at him from a corner at any moment. “So I opened him up, and there was something weird in there.”  
    “You said that already.” I prompted.  
    “Yeah, sorry. It’s like there was something in there. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there.”  
    “Like what?” I asked. “Like a bullet? Like a spatula? Can you be a little more specific?”  
    “I don’t know what it was, but it was alive. It was about the size of a big chihuahua, only with