Zilong the Zombie Day 18

Zilong the Zombie DAY 18

Four days had passed since we'd faced down Marilyn the Magician. I'd returned that night to Harm's trailer, where he extracted arrowheads from my flesh with pliers. He put the silver mirror and the branding iron in the closet with his coffin for safe keeping. I didn't figure there was anything still magical about either of those artifacts, and Spike had told us he didn't detect any traces of enchantment on them, but we kept them anyway.
I'd had an uneventful weekend following the confrontation. I'd tried contacting Stranger Cat via the Ouija, but if he were still out there, I was unable to contact him. I'd slept like the dead. So like the dead, in fact, Dean had panicked a little upon discovering me Sunday morning. Unlike what I'd previously thought, I guess I DID sleep. Quite soundly, in fact. I couldn't recall any dreams I'd had while I slept, if I'd had any at all. Most mornings, I remembered that I had dreamed, even if I culdn't remember WHAT I'd dreamt. The last few days I had no sense of having dreamt. The holes the arrows had left in me had healed within a few hours, after having gorged on ground beef. The arrow that had been shot through my hand, it had left a scar for a few days, but even that had faded by Tuesday night.
I had been looking forward to school Monday morning, so that I could finally see Jessica. I knew I should have driven to the mall to see if she was at work, but I'd been pretty exhausted from the preceding events. A pretty lame excuse, now that I thought about it. Monday came and went, and I'd somehow slept through class. I made it to Statistics, but hadn't seen Jess anywhere around campus for the rest of the day. After school, I finally did make it to the mall, where I found out that Jess had used her vacation days for the next two weeks, apparantly for Spring Break. She'd been in just the day before, Sunday. I hoped I'd hear from her soon. I wasn't concerned, exactly, but I missed her. I felt hurt that I'd not heard from her yet. I wondered what plans she had for her spring break, and if she'd show up for class on Wednesday.
It was now after midnight, and I'd been preparing to go to sleep, when I heard a tap tapping on my window. I went outide to see Harm... he looked anxious.
"What is it?" I asked sleepily. I hadn't seen him since Friday night, after we'd faced off with Marilyn. He'd looked worried afterward, when he'd been trapped in the mirror, but not as bad as tonight.
"There's another vampire roaming this area," he said, almost bereft of tone.
"Another vampire?" I was alarmed. Harm was one vampire too many, despite him being my ally. I couldn't see how a second could possibly be good news. "Are you sure? How do you know?"
Harm turned his head, as though surveying the horizon. He turned back to look me dead in the eye. "He found me." His tone was still dead. "He found me and threatened me. This morning as I was preparing for the sun. He came in on me, I don't know if he was already hiding out in my trailer, or if he entered after I'd come in. Whatever it was, I didn't detect him. He came in, grabbed me by the throat, and warned me to leave his territory. He was strong, Zi." Harm grabbed my shoulders, pulled me closer. I started to feel very uncomfortable suddenly. "STRONG. Stronger than me, stronger than my creator. That's not all either. He warned me if I continued to draw attention to our kind, I'd suffer the same fate as our victems. When he released me, I staggered after him. He flew, Zi. He FLEW."
This time I took his shoulders. He was wearing his usual red silk shirt, black jeans, trench coat, but no hat. His hair looked wild and unkempt, very unlike the previous times I'd seen him. His eyes were dead, still reddish, but they seemed to have a tint of grey this time, as though he were even more lifeless than he were. I wasn't sure how it were possible to have a panicked yet somehow dead expression, but Harm had managed it. "Hey, what can we do about it then? What do you know about this new vampire? What did it look like?"
Harm shook his head, and paced in a circle. He looked over his shoulder, then stopped and stood still. "It was about Jerry's height, but broader across the chest. Not super big, but meatier than Jerry." That meant about five feet tall, I figured. Jerry was short. "He had long arms, longer than they should have been, and he had claws. He had fangs, like me, and his eyes were glowing red when he confronted me. But on his back he had a dozen long spines, like porcupine quills, maybe two or three feet long." He looked around again. "Wings. I didn't see any wings when he'd grabbed me, but he flew off using wings."
I shook my head in shock. In the last month, I'd been confronted with the realities of ghosts, zombies, wizards and witch doctors, vampires. It turned out I'd become a zombie, and that I knew magic. What I'd been led to believe about the laws of physics and science, I'd learned they didn't apply equally to everyone. I still hard a hard time believing everything.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"I don't know," he answered, shaking his head. "I was hoping we might be able to hunt him down and deal with him, like we did Marilyn the Magician."
I couldn't help but notice the 'We' part. As far as I could recall, it had been myself, Spike and Stranger Cat who had dealt with Marilyn. Harm had been locked in a mirror. Certainly it wasn't his fault he'd been in the mirror, but he had been of no real assistance.
I shook my head. That wasn't really a fair assesment, he had TRIED to help, he'd just fallen prey to a magical pitfall. "Do you have any ideas?" I asked.
"Maybe you could use the dead to track his lair down, and stake him while he sleeps?"
That was actually not a bad idea, but I didn't feel very comfortable with it. I was more interested in what kind of danger this vampire present. I realized what I had just thought and caught myself. It was a VAMPIRE! What kind of danger? It was a VAMPIRE! I should probably stake Harm during the day, but he'd helped me so far, so I guess that meant he counted as a friend... sort of. He wanted a cure for his vampirism. I wanted a cure for my zombism. We wanted to go back to being ordinary humans. We were united by that, at least.
"I guess I'll try that for a start, then," I said. "Maybe you should have a talk with Spike, to see if he has any suggestions for us?"
"You mean your talking cat?" Harm asked. "I don't think he cares for me much." Yes, I figured that was about right. Spike just had little patience with certain people. Harm seemed to be one of those he had no patience for. He had little enough patience for me sometimes!
I shrugged and nodded. "I guess I'll get dressed and bring my Ouija over to your place then. Meet you back there in fifteen of so." I turned and went back into the house, not waiting for his response. I wondered where Spike was, but he came and went as he pleased for the most part. He was probably hidden somewhere in my room, and would show himself when I dug around for clothes.
About ten minutes later I had dressed and grabbed my Ouija board. I didn't really feel like summoning the dead to search for another vampire. Spike had been sleeping in the back of my closet and didn't seem to feel like being roused, so I left him alone. I opened the door and stepped out.
Our kitty Porcupine was waiting outside, and gave a muffled meow. She was carrying something in her mouth, so I didn't immediately open the door to let her in. She'd catch lizards, mice, bats, whatever and they may or may not be still alive. I felt it best to see exactly what it was she had and get her to leave it outside. Whatever it was, it looked pale yellowish in the light. I probably didn't want a closer look.
And then I heard something muffled say, "A little help down here."
It was time for a closer look after all. I petted her and asked, "What have you got, kitty?" She dropped whatever it was and rubbed up against me. She'd brought me the DehydraToad again. I picked Porcupine up and tossed her inside. Then I bent down for a closer look at the DehydraToad.
It looked like it usually did, a desiccated toad body with suprisingly shiny eyes. Eyes that looked almost alive. Eyes that rotated up to look at me.
"So, you're alive... sort of," I said. I didn't know what else to say.
"Congratulations, you have your very own cursed toad now," the DehydraToad said to me. Sort of more like croaked at me. I picked it up and looked more closely at it.
"Lucky me, I guess," I said. I felt awkward speaking to a dried up toad. "So what do you want, now that you've escaped whatever horrible fate my cat had in mind for you?" What a surreal moment, I thought to myself. The DehydraToad moved a bit on my hand and I flinched and dropped him involuntarily. Something that looked like that wasn't expected to move. "Uhh, sorry about that."
"What is it with you and flinging me places?" the DehydraToad asked me, in a mildly annoyed tone. "I mean, how many times is it now? Three is it?"
"Err, sorry. I didn't realize you were, eh, alive or undead or whatever."
"Cursed," DehydraToad answered back. "No longer strictly alive in the sense that I once was, but I'm not dead and zombified like you. Think of me as a mummy without wrappings."
"Oh... kay then." I couldn't think of anything better to say. "So, errr, why are you so eloquent then if you're a dried up toad? And what do I call you?"
"What good would it be to be just an ordinary cursed toad?" it asked rhetorically. "Do you think an average toad could appreciate the irony of being cursed? No, in order to truly appreciate my predicament and do what I must, I needed to be gifted with at least human intelligence, and the ability to communicate with other intelligent beings. You can continue calling me DehydraToad, it fits."
"Yes. I... I see." Once again, I was at a loss for words. "So what is it, you were attracted to me because of my magical potential, and you were hoping I could lift your curse or something?"
"Ha, no," DehydraToad, he, I guessed, answered. His voice struck me as sounding male, anyway. "You're cursed now too. My curse has linked me to you in an intimate and integral way."
I wrinkled my nose. "Eww."
"Not intimate like that, you jerk," DehydraToad rolled his eyes up at me. "I mean, whatever happens to you happens to me, and whatever happens to me happens to you, so you have t take care of me. That means keep your cats fangs OFF me, please."
"What?! You jerk!"
"Not my fault, you picked me up," he responded, souning smug.
"Porcupine picked you up way before I did!" I protested. "I catapulted you with a shovel every other time."
"She's a cat. You're a human, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. You can appreciate being cursed, and the implications of being cursed, while she's a cat."
Vampires, curses and zombification. I wasn't having one of my better weeks, I was beginning to think. I shook my head.
"I ought to get my shovel and catapult you somewhere else," I grumbled.
"Look at it like this, at least," DehydraToad began. "At least I'm not causing you bad look anymore. Remember that first week I was around? All the problems with your truck and everything else you went through?"
I thought back. Yes, he HAD been around that extremely... INCONVENIENT time. "All the more reason I want to fling you somewhere, then. And for some reason, I thought you only had one eye back then."
"Nope, two eyes, one just gummed shut," DehydraToad answered back.
I shrugged. It's not like I'd stared at him before, maybe it had just been shut. Whatever. Now I had a toad, a DehdraToad, around. A Vampire and a DehydraToad. I had a spirit cat around too, but Spike was an asset. I suppose Harmon COULD be an asset. Too bad Stranger Cat, well, Stranger Cat's ghost anyway, had been dispelled by Marilyn's antimagic brand. Poor Stranger Cat's ghost.
"So are you of any practical use at all to me, DehydraToad?" I asked. My tone was impatient. Probably even hostile. I didn't feel like being cursed at the moment, I had a lot of things to deal with as it was, not to mention class in the morning. Well, I could always sleep when I was dead, and since I was technically dead now, I suppose I could sleep later.
"You might just be surprised," the DehydraToad answered cryptically. I shook my head, reached down, let DehydraToad crawl onto the palm of my hand, and placed him in the pocket of my London fog coat.

Harmon opened the door. "What took you so long?" was his greeting to me. He looked stressed out.
"I got a little side tracked with this," pointing to the DehydraToad, who was peeking out of my pocket.
"What - what the hell is that?" Harmon asked, half in awe, half in some sort of shock.
"This is DehydraToad, my very own cursed toad. Harmon, DehydraToad, DehydraToad, Harmon. Consider yourselves introduced. Oh, and this is another animal that talks, just so you're prepared, Harm."
Harm looked at DehydraToad again, looked away, looked again, then rolled his eyes. "Okay," he said. "Does your DehydraToad know of my problem and have any suggestions, perhaps?"
I looked down into my pocket. "What we have here is a second vampire threatening our team's vamp," I summed up. "This second vamp has more powers than ours. We want to track it down, and 'convince' it to leave us alone."
The DehydraToad looked up at us with it's shining, oh so lively eyes. "Track its aura," he simply said. "Certainly one of you can do that?"
I looked at Harm and he looked back at me. "Yes, that IS something we are capable of doing," Harm said, looking meaningfully at me. I nodded. I could track my own aura so far, and Harm could see the forms of 'ghosts' that were intent on something. Me, when I'd been ejected from my own body, and the Ghostly Jessika, for example. Spike, on the other hand, was adept at seeing auras. Neither of us had expected such an easy seeming solution.
"I'll go find Spike, bring him back here," I told Harm.
DehydraToad was reluctant to go inside the house with Porcupine inside. For obvious reasons, he didn't like our kitty. I left him in my coat hanging on the front doorknob.
Spike was reposing in my closet where I'd left him. He opened his eyes as I approached him, stretched, yawned. Blinked at me. "So what do you need?" he asked sleepily.
I ran through the situation again, "Vampire threatens Harm, Harm wants us to track him down, deal with the problem. The DehydraToad tells us tracking it by aura might be the solution."
"Dehydratoad?" Spike asked.
"It's... probably not a long story, but maybe you should see for yourself," I said. I was already tired of explaining things. Spike looked questioningly at me, but said nothing, just followed me outside. He looked curiously at the DehydraToad in my jacket pocket, but still said nothing. The DehydraToad, on the other hand...
"Uhh, cat, cat, CAT CAT CAT!" he cried out, alarmed.
"Relax, that's just Spike," I said.
"I think it might be best if you pretend I'm just your familiar for now," Spike mentally sent to me. "I'm not quite sure what to make of this thing, but better safe than sorry. Just a feeling I have."
"Yes, Spike, my familiar," I said. "No threat to you as long as I'm here." I had to grin and wink at DehydraToad.
DehydraToad looked dubiously at me, then back at Spike warily. "Alright, I'll trust you to keep me safe," he said.
"Spike, I guess you should go and tell Harm of our return," I told him, so that he could warn Harmon of our, rather HIS plan to keep DehydraToad unenlightened. I didn't blame Spike. It seemed to work well for us against Marilyn the Magician. Since I already had a seed of dislike for the toad planted in my mind, I was ready to not fully trust him. He HAD come up with tracking options for the vampire rather quickly, though, I had to admit. Spike probably would have thought of that solution just as quickly, though. I shrugged thinking this. It just meant that they both thought about supernatural things more readily than either I or Harm. I put my coat back on. "Let's go, DHT," I said after a moment, deciding already on an acronym for my new companion. We started toward Harm's trailer.
Harm was stroking Spike behind his ears as we re-entered. Harm was grinning. While he wasn't grinning his deliberately meacing grin, I still didn't care for it. Knowing he was a vampire made even his friendly grin disturbing to me. Spike seemed to be grinning as well, though. Of course, it was easy for a cat to grin.
"An aura's there," Spike sent, "but faint. Fading fast, too. It looks vaguely familiar. Have Harm describe the vampire to us."
This evening was an evening for repeating things over and over again. I sighed.
"Harm, would you mind describing you vampire visitor to us again?" I asked.
"Short, broad, long arms, faintly glowing red eyes, longer than normal arms, claws, spines, fangs, retractable wings," Harm summed up. DehydraToad just looked back and forth between Harm and I, paying attention to whoever was talking. He was trying to ompletely ignore Spike, though not quite successfully. Every now and then, his eyes would focus on Spike for just a fraction of a second, before flicking back to whomever was speaking at that moment.
"What color was its flesh, and was it wearing clothes?" Spike transmitted to me.
"What did it's clothes loiok like," I repeated to Harm, "and did you notice it's skin color?"
Harm thought for a moment. "I'm not sure about what shade its skin was, but darker than me," Harm answered thoughtfully. "It was really dark in here, because it was very near to sun up. And I don't remember actually seeing any clothes on it."
"El Chupacabra," sent Spike.
"Goatsucker?" I blurted out.
"What?" Harm asked, surprised.
"Chupacabra," I said, more firmly. "It's Spanish for goat sucker. Umm, I think that sounds sort of like what you were describing." I wasn't actually sure about that. "I've heard legends of the chupacabra," I said. I'd never actually sought out any information on it, however. "Out here in the wide open wastes of the desert, it's supposed to go around feeding on cattle, I've been told by some of the Mexican farmers. Drain goats of blood, mutilate cattle and so forth." It had always struck me as maybe some sort of alien thing, what with cattle mutilation and all. "According to the farmer, the Chupacabra was supposed to have made its way to the desert by now, and lives in the hills and mountains nearby."
Harm looked at me thoughtfully, and Spike continued grinning and winked at me. I was doing something right in Spike's book, and I was pleased.
"El Chupacabra..." Harm said thoughtfully. "I've heard of it, but I don't know much about it," he admitted.
"The aura's fading, if we want to do something, we should probably do it soon," I mentioned.
"It leads off into the desert, toward the mountains," Spike sent me. "We won't be able to follow it at all in another few hours."
"And it's leading off into the desert, so we'd have to do a lot of offroading and probably climb some mountains to follow it," I announced.
Harm sighed. "I have a few things specifically for countering other vampires, but I'm not sure we'd be able to make it tonight. Since, you know I have a fatal alergy to the rays of the sun."
I looked at the window toward the hills in the distance. Harm was right. I wasn't sure how fast we could take the truck over the scrub and sand. I was even less sure about our ability to cross the hills and mountains on foot in the few hours we had before the sun came up.
"Damn," Harm cursed. "I guess we're going to have to wait until it comes back to deal with him." He shook his head, stood up, and paced back and forth in the small space he had in his kitchen. "I know this is asking a lot, but would you stay around for the rest of the night? I don't want to try facing him alone if he should show up."
It was my turn to sigh. "Yeah, I will," I told him. "Maybe we should see some of this anti vampire gear you have."
Harm opened the closet I now thought of as his coffin closet. He tossed me a crossbow, not a rifle sized monstrosity that had been used against me by the creations of Marilyn the Magician, but a small modern pistol style crossbow. He reached in and pulled out a case about the size of a hard cover book, and tossed that to me. I opened it up and saw makeshift crossbow bolts. "They have the factory made feather parts," Harm told me, "I don't know what they're called, and used small thin sharpened wood dowelling."
"I think they're called nocks," I told him.
He tossed me a bokken, a solid wooden samurai style sword. It, too had been sharpened and pointed. "And I have a few wooden tent stakes and a malet, too. Maybe fifty crossbow bolts altogether. That is the extent of my anti-vampire gear."
His gear seemed kind of... pitiful to me. Where were the anti-vampire bullets for his impressive looking gun? Where were the super squirtguns with holy water? Solar powered lasers? I guess we'd have to make do with what we had. I certainly wasn't geared up to kill vampires.
"I can tell what you're thinking," Harm told me. "Is this all? It is. Garlic doesn't work like it does in the Blade movies," he told me, pulling a clove out of his refridgerator, holding it up for me to see, and tossed it back in. "Crosses and crucifixes don't work on me. SO what's the point of me having them? If holy symbols don't work, I doubt holy water would either." He shrugged. "This is what I've got, what I know works so far."
I nodded. Harm pulled out more makeshift crossbow bolts and placed them on his kitchen table. Tonight, the four of us would wait.