The Stein & Candle Detective Agency, Vol. 1: American Nightmares (The Stein & Candle Detective Agency #1) by Michael Panush Read Free Book Online Page A

of the bastards weighing me down and forcing me to the filthy wall of the alley. There wasn’t a single drunk sleeping one off in that alley. They were all dead – and they were all hungry. Now they stood up and we had a dozen zombies coming after us.
    I scrambled for my automatic as skeletal hands scratched at my flesh, and teeth reached for my face. Their smell struck me like a physical blow. I had seen firsthand the terrible things human weapons could do to flesh and blood in the fury of the Second World War, and I’m not exactly squeamish. But something about these zombies – the smell, their gait, their damn similarity to normal folks – made me want to slither out of my skin.
    “Suck on this, dead man!” I shouted, finally freeing one of my automatics and cracking the handle against the nearest zombie skull. It knocked him back, then he opened his mouth and I put the muzzle of my pistol between his teeth. I fired, and then pushed forward with all of my weight, knocking him into his pals. The other two dead men hit the ground. I blew out their brains before they could stand.
    Miss Rosa had pressed herself against the wall, the zombie still hanging onto her leg. She swung her purse down and I heard a sound like dry wood snapping. That flimsy bone was broken, but the zombie’s hand still hung onto her leg like a fleshy, rotting spider. I wrenched it off and hurled it against the wall.
    “Weatherby!” I turned down the alley, just in time to see the kid deal with the zombie attacking him.
    The dead man had him pinned to the ground, two of his buddies closing in. Weatherby had his dad’s revolver, and it seemed bigger than an artillery piece in his small hand. He fired the revolver, the bullet grazing the front of the zombie’s face and sending its nose to topple onto Weatherby’s chest.
    “Hold your arm steady!” I cried. “Take a breath and put it down!” I ran towards Weatherby, both automatics in my hands. But I couldn’t reach him in time and I couldn’t get a clear shot. This would have to be his kill.
    Weatherby fired again, and this time he didn’t miss. His shot took off the upper half of the zombie’s head, sending a shower of brains and bits of skull into the alley. Weatherby spun around and fired again, tearing off another zombie’s leg and then blasting apart its face in three badly aimed shots. I helped him up, as more zombies came from both ends of the alley.
    “You want to pack a cannon like that, you’re gonna have to work on your aim,” I suggested.
    He looked at the revolver and shivered. “Beastly things,” he said. “I have no desire to ever become familiar with such brutal, savage tools.”
    All around us, on both sides of the alleys, the zombies were closing in. There was no escape. Now it was more than a score of them, made up of the dregs of Cuba’s dead, lurching towards us, clouds of flies and the scent of rot following them like a comet’s trail. They must have been laying in wait in the other alleys and dumpsters around Rosa’s hotel, set there for an ambush.
    “I don’t know,” I said, raising both of my automatics. “They seem to come in handy from time to time. Now use that big brain of yours and tell me what the hell these living dead dummies are.”
    I started firing, and Weatherby waited for a gap in my shots to give me an answer. “They’re zombies,” he explained. “The dead given motion, some agency and a boundless hunger by a Voodoo priest known as a houngan or mambo. They seek only to feed, and serve their master while appeasing their hunger.”
    “And how do we stop them?” I turned both pistols on the nearest zombie and put round and round into his chest. Soon he had hamburger under the chin and he was still coming.
    “Put a bullet in their head. Destroy the brain and end the spell.”
    “Thanks for that info.” I turned the guns on the zombie’s head, and after the Colts had done their job, he toppled over backwards. Unfortunately, his