J.L. Doty - Dead Among Us 01 - When Dead Ain’t Dead Enough by J.L. Doty

vampires?”
    The door in the stairwell on the floor above creaked open. “Shit,” she said and grabbed him by the arm. “For some reason it’s after you. Don’t look in its eyes. Don’t let it touch you.”
    He started to tell her it already had, wanted to tell her about the pull he’d felt, but before he could say anything she pulled on his arm painfully and dragged him out into a hallway on the first floor. Guiding him down the hallway she spoke as they limped down its length. “If you have to face it remember your one advantage: it can’t just kill you then feed; you have to be alive while it consumes your soul.”
    Paul knew the two of them made an odd sight, her skirt and blouse torn badly, both smeared with blood, most of it Paul’s, she weakened by the vampire feeding—he couldn’t believe he was believing this crap—he weakened by blood loss and pain. He wondered if either of them could walk on their own, if the only way they managed to remain standing was by leaning heavily on each other, limping together through the halls of the hospital and leaving a trail of blood smeared on the floor behind them. The receptionist at the front desk looked at them fearfully as they staggered by, hurriedly picked up her phone and started punching in numbers.
    They stumbled out into the dark of the wee hours of the morning. Her knees started trembling and he realized she was about to collapse, and in the odd position in which they supported each other, leaning heavily on each other, the only thing he could do was wrap his arms around her in a lover’s embrace to hold her up as her knees gave way.
    She smiled up at him. “I like you too, Mr. Conklin. But is this really the right time or place?”
    He felt his face flush and she laughed. “You’re blushing.”
    He eased her over to a concrete bench to one side of the hospital entrance and lowered her onto it carefully. She reached into her coat pocket, pulled out one of those little black, plastic car-alarm things, pressed a button on it and a car in the parking lot nearby flashed its lights and honked its horn. “My car,” she groaned, almost pleading. “We have to get to my—”
    Looking up at Paul her eyes suddenly widened and focused on something behind him. Thinking it must be the vampire, he pushed her over into the bushes behind the bench, trying to push her to safety. He spun to face the vampire, but a big meaty fist slammed into his cheek  . . .
    He didn’t recall going down, didn’t recall the act of falling, didn’t recall the time it took to go from full upright to prone. One instant he was standing there as Joe Stalin’s sledgehammer of a fist closed on his face, and the next instant he bounced painfully off the concrete bench and onto the sidewalk in front of it. Head spinning, cheek throbbing, ribs aching, he rolled over and saw Joe standing over him. The big Russian reached down, grabbed him by the tattered remnants of his shirt and lifted him like a child’s doll.
    A fist slammed into his ribs, another into his face and Paul went down again. Joe Stalin stood over him, drew his foot back to give him a good kick, but Katherine landed on his back screaming like a banshee, legs wrapped around his waist, one arm around his throat, the other swinging a rock the size of a baseball.
    Paul crawled painfully to his feet as Joe spun around blindly, swiping ineffectually behind his own head trying to dislodge her, while she slammed the rock into his face and head. Paul waited until Joe’s spinning brought him around one more time, then kicked him as hard as he could in the balls. Joe grunted, stopped spinning and bent forward into a crouch, Katherine still riding him like a cowboy on a rodeo bull. She raised the rock one more time and slammed it into the side of his head. He curled up and crumpled like a deflated balloon. Katherine rode him down and hit him one more time in the back of the head with the rock.
    Her legs were tangled in Joe’s so Paul