Almost Froze

The clock was ticking and I get paid by the hour on these small jobs. I was running down a cold case. Some half-besotted coroner claimed a corpse just up and walked out of his autopsy room-chest still hanging down in flaps from the Y incision. Before you ask, the coroner was not a necromancer, nor did he have anything to gain from this particular body running amok with its veins full of formaldehyde. Trust me, I've met a few necromancers in my time. They are much better dressed. And they don't usually meet me in a freezer with a 60 second time lock on the door.

The doctor hired me because this isn't the first body he's lost, but if I couldn't find it, it would definitely be his last. My name is Gorman Reach. I was born a ghoul and made myself into a pretty decent private eye. Not long ago, for instance, I made eternal enemies of the oldest Vampire nation in the Country and also, the richest mortal organization on the planet. You should always judge a hero by their enemies, or so I'm told and if that's true, I'm the biggest badass this side of sunrise. The problem I'm having at the moment, however, is that the doctor wasn't telling the complete and honest truth. His fib? Well, let's just say that when a corpse starts walking, it usually isn't of its own accord. The doctor, I discovered is a vampire, and not one affiliated with the nations. This guy is what those of us in the industry call, a carpetbagger. A vampire turned by an afflicted animal or some cousin kissing asshole from the Verandas. In other words, a creep who can't afford me and I'm pretty damn cheap.

"Listen Doc," I say. "You're obviously not in your right mind. You don't get a lot of corpses down here and I get that. Really, I do. But I ain't on the menu and this corpse you turned probably puffed away as soon as he opened the door on the forever twilight outside. What I'm telling you is, he's dead for keeps and if you keep looking at me like that, you're gonna join him."

He lunged at me anyway, even knowing I know what he is and knowing a dozen different ways to stop him. Poor hungry bastard. These bottom feeders are always near starving. There isn't a lot of them in the Country. Pretty much the only vamps here are with the Montclair Group who use human DNA to live in daylight. The rest have to stay under cover at all times and it makes dinner a little scarce.

He's weak. I catch his hands easily above my head and pull out the stake I carry in my trench coat. I give him one last thing before I ram it through his heart, or where it used to be.

"I want you to know that I'm going to find the family of that poor schmuck you turned. Like I said, I don't expect he's still with us, but his family are humans and they live here somewhere, I'm sure. And I'm going to tell them that he died a hero and that the man who killed him died like a poisoned rat throwing up his insides on the pavement."

The stake slides up under his sternum and into his heart. It's hard to punch through the sternum. Best to come from underneath. The carpetbagger is gone in a puff of ash and I don't even look back as I slam the freezer door behind me and hear the time lock engage.