Page 68 of Slayer Mom
“Dad. I was reading his reaction to you. I can’t directly read his mind, but his feelings towards you are too strong for him to conceal.”
“His amusement, because I’m so hilarious.”
“Like now, you clinging to the pole like a monkey. It’s funny.”
I sighed and then slid down the pole, hitting the ground too hard and falling over on my butt. Wat helped me up. “You are pretty funny.”
I brushed his hair out of his eyes. He needed a haircut, too. “Everyone needs some comic relief, particularly vampires. Everyone knows that.”
“Vampires are very serious,” Lock said from behind me, although I hadn’t noticed him jumping or sliding down.
“Exactly.” I went to the last separation between us and the field of zombies and just leapt over it, drawing my knife in the movement, so I landed on a zombie, stabbed its forehead, flung up its brains, and used that momentum to take out the next zombie in cue.
I killed zombies. Stab, twist, fling brains away from me, over and over, but in the meantime, I watched the other exterminators to get ideas. I pressed forward into the zombie horde, clearing the way, while Wat and Lock guarded my back.
“Ew. That was gross,” I heard Wat say to my right.
“Yeah, because you used your teeth,” Lock said. “Zombies aren’t edible. The Zombie Queen already sucked everything out of them.”
“I wasn’t trying to eat, but crush. It was like rotten toe jam exploding in my mouth.”
“Like I said,” Lock said, sounding so superior and sophisticated.
It made me smile to hear them, like they were talking about why the hockey score didn’t count instead of zombies.
I flipped my knife and severed a spinal column then smashed the brain after the zombie was on the ground. Time went by in a blur, the whole thing made more pleasant and like a family outing with Wat and Lock chatting behind me.
When the zombies parted, revealing an entirely different kind of creature with a long fluffy hot pink tail and a Japanese hat, with a grinning face-mask, I wasn’t sure what to do.
He pulled his sword out and held it in front of him. It flared with green and pink fire that smelled like cotton candy that had been dropped in a toxic ooze puddle.
I was crouched with my knife when six vampiresmaterialized in front of me, knocking me back so I stumbled and fell down between Lock and Wat.
Wat sat down cross-legged beside me. “It’s pretty lame. You’re only allowed to fight the base level zombies, and we’re only allowed to guard you, so we hardly get to kill anything.”
“I don’t know if it’s killing since they’re already dead,” Lock said, crouching next to his brother.
I watched the six vampires take on the hot pink warrior. His creepy mask grin was super creepy. Ah! He was the Cheshire cat.
“We’re all mad here.” I smiled at Wat and Lock. “It’s the Cheshire cat.”
They stared at me. “Like from Alice?”
“That’s right.”
“So, is there a Jabberwocky?” That was a concerned-looking Wat.
“What about the walrus? I don’t want to kill walruses,” Lock said, frowning.
I stood up and looked around for zombies to kill, not that it wasn’t fascinating to watch the blur of vampire vs. Cheshire cat, but we were here to war, not gape at the super weird soldiers. “I guess we’ll see. Come on. I see some normal zombies to take out.” I headed around the cat battle like a mom leading her kids to a shorter line in the grocery store. It felt like a Black Friday. I tended to avoid that kind of pressure, but I could cope with it if I had to.
I leapt at a zombie and slashed its brains up and continued deeper into centerfield, one zombie extermination at a time. I hummed the cartoon song. How did those words go, something about flower power? Smash a zombie face, kick back a rotting brain, and watch it explode. Flower power indeed.
I moved faster and faster, a whirl of death fueled by a sense that we needed to get this wrapped up in time to clean the field before the next baseball gamewhen the humans came. There wasn’t any real sense of desperation, more sport.
Maybe that came from being immortal and very hard to kill. At least, that’s the vibe until a roar came that shook the ground, knocking me to my knees.
The dragon came out of the ground, but it wasn’t your conventional dragon, more giant puppy with tentacles. Make that clawed tentacles and a few extra heads with puppy teeth longer than my fingers.
