Black Knight 02.5 - Movie Knight (2 page)

“Bobby, come over here and look at this.” I yelled toward the wall of drawers.
 

“Hell no!’ He yelled back at me. “I ain’t moving ’til you promise me that critter is dead!”
 

“Just open the door and look at the screen, you chicken. There’s nobody here but us.” I replied. He opened the door and slowly stuck his head out. He Greg turned the monitor around, and Bobby yelped, then slid his tray back and slammed the door.
 

“That’s it!” Came his muffled answer, but we’d guessed that already.
 

“Alright, Anna, that’s the guy. It seems to be a Koontz demon.” Greg said.
 

I couldn’t resist. “They’re naming demons after horror writers now? I wonder what the Kilborn Devourer will look like?’

“It’s spelled K-U-N-Z, moron.” Anna’s voice dripped disdain all over the phone. Seriously, I could almost see the disdain. Greg was going to need a mop if much more dripped out. “The Kunz demon is a nasty little bugger, fast and vicious. It feeds on virgin blood, and lays eggs inside its victims corpses. If there are enough potential hosts in a given area, the Kunz demon can reproduce up to fifty times in a twenty-four hour period. The good news is that they only live for a couple of weeks. The bad news is that their gestation period is only about an hour.”
 

“So we’ve got a virgin-eating demon that breeds like a bunny rabbit running loose inside a hospital. Is that what you’re telling me?” I asked.
 

“Yes, and if you’re not quick enough, this thing can create an army in less than one night.” Came Anna’s voice, strangely devoid of disdain for once.
 

“How do we kill it?” Greg asked.

“The usual ways. Blessed instruments, holy water, exorcism from this plane of existence, that kind of thing. It’s immune to fire, and its scales are exceptionally tough. I don’t know how much good your guns will do you this time, guys.” More good news from the witchy woman. No wonder I didn’t like her.
 

“Alright, since we’re fresh out of blessed instruments, I guess we’d better head to the chapel and see about getting us some holy water. And maybe find a priest to bless our bullets or something. Thanks, Anna.” I said, reaching down to hang up the phone.
 

Her last words stopped me just before I touched the button. “Be careful, boys. This thing is bad, bad news. I’ll call my coven together and we’ll set a circle around the hospital, so nothing will get out. But we don’t have anything that can actually kill a Kunz demon.” I’d seen Anna and her girls send more than a dozen zombie spirits back to the Great Beyond, so if she said they couldn’t kill this thing it was looking like a very long night. I pushed the button to disconnect the call, and looked at Greg.
 

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” He said quietly.
 

“Or at least more blood.” I agreed. I went over to the drawers where Bobby was hiding and banged on his door. “Bobby, I’m taking some blood from your stash. Put it on my bill.”
 

“This refill’s on me, dude. Just go kill that thing.” I took a couple of pints from a cooler Bobby kept in the top left-hand drawer, and tossed three more to Greg. Bobby kept the blood up high because his boss was a little guy with a Napoleon complex and four-inch lifts in his shoes who couldn’t reach the handles, so he forbade his employees to use the top drawers. The blood was cold, but the date on the bags was just a couple days ago, so it was still pretty fresh. I shook the bag to make sure the anticoagulants hadn’t separated, and bit into the bag.
 

Stored blood doesn’t have any of the flavor or thrill of contact that comes from drinking straight from the source, but it does provide all the nutrition we need to survive. I liken it to living off of energy bars - you get everything you have to have, but there’s nothing enjoyable about the dining experience. The human body contains 10 pints of blood, and we need to consume that much about every three days to stay sane and not eat the first person that comes around. I try to have four pints a day to keep myself topped off, but Bobby’s call had interrupted dinner, so we were both pretty hungry. Greg takes more blood than I do, because he’s a lot bigger. I try not to make a thing of it, because he’s been sensitive about his weight since we were little kids. And alive. So we filled up the tank with plenty of nutrition, if no real flavor, and set out to find Sabrina.
 

She was coming down the hall to meet us, gun drawn. “I’ve got the hospital on lockdown, but without some proof that there’s actually a prisoner here, or word from my boss, they’re only going to give me about an hour. So we need to hurry.”

“We need to do that anyway, if we don’t want dozens of these little beasties running around the hospital.” I filled her in on what we’d learned from Anna, and we headed to the elevator. The chapel was our first stop, and it was right off of the lobby. We got there and saw the door closed, something I’d never seen before. I didn’t even know hospital chapels had doors.
 

I knocked, and a voice from the other side said “Get thee behind me, Satan! I shall not open the door for thou vile hellspawn!” Apparently my reputation had preceded me.
 

I looked over at Sabrina, who shrugged, but put her face to the door and yelled. “This is Detective Sabrina Law of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. This is a police emergency, please open the door!”
 

“Go away!” The voice came again. “My flock are safe here, and here they shall stay!”
 

“That’s fine, sir, but we need to come in there. Once we’re done and gone, you can lock the door behind us.” Sabrina yelled again.
 

“NO!” Bellowed the voice. “None shall enter so long as I stand!”
 

“Fair enough,” I muttered. “Sabrina, get out of the way.”
 

“What are you going to do?” She asked.
 

“Really? You’re asking me that? What’s my answer to almost every problem?” I said incredulously.
 

She sighed and stepped out of the way. “Hit it, shoot it, or stab it.”
 

“Bingo. Give the lady a prize.” I said as I drew back my foot. I thrust out my foot and kicked the door just above the knob, splintering the jamb and sending the door swinging wildly into the room. It caught a priest on the shoulder and knocked him several feet back into the room. “Sorry about that, padre.” I said as I stepped over him and walked to the altar.
 

Sabrina took up a position at the back of the room watching the door as Greg and I looked around. “Where’s the holy water?” Greg asked the priest, helping him off the floor and into a pew as he did so. A quick look around confirmed that “the flock” the priest had been so worried about protecting was one young couple who looked scared out of their minds, and a wizened old nun dozing in the front row.
 

“Where is it? Where is the hellspawn?” The priest was ranting now, rocking back and forth on the pew, and I nodded to Greg. He slapped the priest lightly across the face, once on each cheek, and the old man’s eyes refocused.
 

“Where is the holy water?” Greg asked again, more slowly this time. The priest held out a shaky hand, pointing towards a font at the front of the room.

“Thanks,” Greg said, starting towards the font. He paused, cocked his head to the side like a dog suddenly realizing he had no idea what to do with a car if he caught one, then turned back to the priest. He reached out to the man, took the crucifix from around his neck, and tossed it to Sabrina. She looked at Greg for a second, then nodded and put it on. “We’re going to need this more than you, Father.”
 

Greg and I opened the font and started dipping our weapons in the holy water. Obviously soaking our guns wouldn’t be the best idea, but we did dip each of our knives in the water, and I did my best to get my sword completely coated. Then we each dipped a couple of magazines’ worth of bullets in the water and reloaded our pistols. I tossed a couple of mags of blessed bullets to Sabrina, who swapped out the ammo in her sidearm as well.
 

“I don’t know how much good that will do, but it’s the best idea I’ve got.” I said as we went back out into the hall. The door immediately slammed shut behind us, and I heard the sound of yelling from inside and then a scraping as the priest moved something heavy in front of the door.
 

“Where to now?” Asked Sabrina.
 

“I have no idea.” I said, sniffing around and trying to catch a scent.
 

“Anna said this thing lives on virgin blood. So where do we go to find a lot of virgins in a hospital?” Greg asked.
 

“Well, the nurses’ station is right out the window,” I quipped, then froze as I suddenly realized the best place to find a bunch of pure souls.
 

The same thought had obviously occurred to Greg and Sabrina at the same moment, because we all looked at each other and said “The nursery!” We took off at a dead run for the elevator, only to realize that lockdown meant no elevators, either. We dashed to the stairs at the end of the hall and made our way up to the fourth floor, where the nursery and pediatric ward was located.
 

Greg and I burst through the stairwell doors onto the fourth floor, only to knock a candy-striper sprawling in a mess of linens. We helped her to her feet, stammered something about police emergency, then Sabrina was up the stairs with her badge and gun on display. The candy-striper went ass over teakettle again and this time decided that crawling away was safer than trying to deliver the laundry, so she scurried into the stairwell. The last I saw of her, she was heading down to the third floor clutching the handrail like her life depended on it.
 

“I don’t see anything.” I said.
 

“Your grasp of the obvious is remarkable.” Sabrina replied. “Do you hear or smell anything?” Okay, good point. Maybe we would be better served by my use of enhanced senses. I sniffed around, trying to find any hint of sulfur, or blood, or anything to make me think a psycho chihuahua-demon was running loose in the kids’ ward. I was just about to shake my head and report my failure when I heard an ear-splitting scream come from the hallway to our left.
 

“That way!” I pointed down the hallway toward the scream, and ran after it.

“Like I said,” Sabrina said, running along behind me and Greg, “remarkable.”
 

We turned a corner and saw a horrified set of parents beating on the glass windows of the nursery, screaming for help. “Get out of the way!” I yelled, turning to face the window. I looked into the nursery and froze at what I saw. There was indeed a demon in the nursery, looking more like a gigantic armadillo than a chihuahua, but it wasn’t the time to nitpick. The thing was blue-green, scaly and had a long tail with three spikes on the end of it. It was pretty close to the picture on the computer, except that it was capable of standing on its hind legs and slashing with all four of its front legs, which it was doing right now at a pretty blonde nurse who was holding a baby wrapped in a blanket. Baby and nurse were both screaming their heads off, and the demon was howling right along with them. Add to that a pair of parents and some other random relatives in the hallway, and it was downright noisy.

“There was no spiky tail in the picture, Greg!” I yelled at my partner. “Where did the spiky tail come from?”
 

“I don’t think that was a Polaroid, Jimmy!” My partner yelled back at me. “And stop yelling, I’m standing right here.”
 

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” I dropped to a more normal tone. “Now what?”
 

“I think ‘go in and kill the demon and save the baby’ was the general plan. Wasn’t it?” Greg replied.

“Yeah, but it looks so much meaner in person.” I said, thinking about all those teeth.
 

“Scared?” Sabrina teased. “It doesn’t look like it has silver teeth, Jimmy. I think you’ll be okay.”
 

“Just because I don’t die from it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.” I said.
 

“Pain heals, chicks dig scars. Glory lasts forever.” Greg said.
 

“You’re quoting
The Replacements?
Now?” I stared at him, the demon forgotten for a second in my shock.
 

“Shut up, you love that movie too. Now come on!” With that, he pulled back a fist and threw a punch at the window that I barely caught in time.
 

“Hey, you’re supposed to be the smart one, remember?” I said, forcing his hand back to his side.

“What? We’ve gotta get in there!” He pointed at the demon.
 

“Yeah, but let’s not shower the newborns with broken glass. Door’s around the corner.” I said, sprinting to the door marked “Nursery.” I flung the door open just in time to see the demon leap from a bassinet at the nurse, who dropped straight down and crawled away from the monster, shielding the infant with her body. The thing hit a wall and rebounded in a flash of slimy motion, flinging itself at the nurse’s back. I pulled my Glock and put three rounds in the demon’s back, knocking it off course. It landed in another empty bassinet and turned to face me, showing off all four rows of its nasty pointed little teeth.
 

“That puny mortal weapon cannot harm The Kunz, fool!” Great, a talking chihuahua-demon. I don’t even like non-demon chihuahuas.
 

“Sabrina, get the babies and nurse out of here, Greg and I will deal with this thing!” I yelled, stepping aside to let the others into the room. She nodded agreement and grabbed two
 
babies in nearby cribs and headed back out into the hall. The demon jumped up and scurried along the ceiling faster than any human could track, trying to cut her off at the door. Fortunately for everyone, it had been a long time since Greg or I were human, and we put three more bullets in the thing and knocked it to the floor.