Better Off Dead : A Lucy Hart, Deathdealer Novel (Book One)

  ~*~

  Lucy felt a cold stabbing fear in her gut. It wasn’t that horrible pulling feeling anymore. No, this was pure, undiluted fear. If she weren’t so tired she might’ve screamed, she might’ve turned and ran, right then, forgetting about Abbey lying unconscious and defenseless at her feet. But she was both exhausted and acutely aware of what was going on around her.

  It was a chaotic mess. It wasn’t just Abbey’s parents digging themselves out of their graves, the cemetery was vibrating with activity—not life… just two hundred corpses rising, clawing their way out of their coffins.

  Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!

  And if the rather nasty state of James and Julie Adams freshly animated corpses was any indication of what was to come crawling out of the rest of the graves, Lucy was glad she’d already thrown up the contents of her stomach.

  Covered in dirt, stitches clearly holding her flesh together, Mrs. Adam’s head had obviously separated from her shoulders, the stitches bulging since her entire head lolled to the side. They hadn’t bothered trying to stabilize or reinforce the neck. Lucy hoped, for Abbey’s sake, that the funeral had been closed casket.

  Mr. Adams had had the top of his skull chopped off, and they had simply stapled it back on top of his head. And as he stepped out of his grave, his suit wrinkled and caked with soil, Lucy saw that his left leg was crooked—probably broken during the accident.

  Lucy couldn’t keep her eyes on Mr. and Mrs. Adams. It wasn’t their disturbing appearance… it was that corpses were breaking through the ground all around her. Some faster than others, some almost completely skeletal, some almost looked like they were in good enough shape they could’ve passed for living. Must have been gentle deaths, and the embalming procedure had frozen them that way.

  But most were stooped, rotting bags of mottled flesh, oozing fluids and eyes bulging or drooping out of their sockets.

  Lucy fell to her knees beside Abbey, trying to shake her awake. If they ran they might have a chance.

  Are they zombies? If they are, will they eat us? Lucy cried out Abbey’s name. Or just our brains?

  Suddenly Abbey’s eyes snapped open, she gasped and brought her arm up over her face, moaning. And then she was screaming. She’d caught sight of a zombie crawling out of his grave—there was only half of him left. She scrambled to her feet, spinning around, gasping between screams, looking to Lucy, her terrified eyes barely registering her. But then she just stopped screaming, stopped moving, wasn’t even breathing for a moment.

  “Momma… Daddy?” She gasped and gulped breath as she started to stagger toward her parents’ animated corpses.

  Oh god. Lucy reached out and tried to grab Abbey, caught her elbow and dragged her back to her. Abbey tried to push Lucy away, but Lucy wouldn’t let go. Abbey turned on her and pushed again. “Let go of me!”

  “Abbey, we’ve got to get out of here!” Lucy tried to pull her toward the only clear path she could see. The only way that didn’t have a corpse dragging itself toward them. But Abbey couldn’t take her eyes away from her parents, and she just kept calling to them, and pushing at Lucy, trying to get free of her.

  “They’re not you parents anymore!” Lucy said. She shook her friend and turned her to face her.

  Abbey’s eyes flashed, the whites of her eyes huge, her mouth now open in a snarl. She reared back and slapped Lucy across the cheek, hard enough Lucy lost her hold on one of Abbey’s shoulders, but she kept hold of the other for dear life. She couldn’t let her get any closer to her parents.

  She couldn’t feel much anymore, there were just too many dead people walking around, fighting with each other. But she could tell two things: there were no spirits in any of the zombies, just energy filling them, making them move; and she could feel hunger rolling off every single one of them.

  Guess that answers the “will they eat us?” question.

  Lucy gasped when she saw a skeletal hand clasp down on Abbey’s shoulder, a rotting face appearing out of the darkness, its teeth flashing as it went for her throat. Lucy swung her fist and punched the gruesome creature in the face, knocking out one of its slimy teeth. But just then something grabbed Lucy by the ankle, making her fall to one knee and scream.

  A light flared around Lucy and Abbey, scorching the air and illuminating the entire graveyard. Something whipped through the air, crackling with blurry speed, sending the two corpses attacking Lucy and Abbey flying through the misty air.

  Lucy looked up and saw an unbelievable sight. There stood her grandmother in her nightgown and robe, her hair braided in a long white rope. In her hand she held an old wooden baseball bat—the one from the hall closet. But now it was glowing, shimmering with light.

  “Gram?”

  Her grandmother moved forward and swung the bat, catching a zombie in the back of the head, then smacking another in the teeth, flattening both. Another blurry movement and she took out another zombie’s legs, sending it clattering to the ground. In no time her grandmother had run to them, and was pulling Lucy to her feet with unnatural strength.

  Lucy gulped when she caught the look on her grandmother’s face. She was majorly pissed off.

  “As impressive as this is…” she waved a hand at the throng of corpses. “That you can raise an entire cemetery, if you can’t control them and send them back to their graves you’re going to get everyone killed!”

  She grabbed Lucy’s injured hand and Lucy could feel her gram’s power flicker and sizzle against her flesh. It wasn’t very strong, but it was concentrated, and most importantly, it knew what it was doing. “Now let’s send all these poor people back to their rest.”

  Lucy could feel her own power rise up again, this time it hurt and burned far more than before. But it wasn’t as frightening. She knew her grandmother was going to put everything right.

  Gram raised her other hand up to the heavens. “Hear me, denizens of this cemetery. I am Lillian Haveraux, and I command you to return to your graves… now!”

  Lucy felt the power flash up through her, rippling over her flesh and pulsing through her hand into her grandmother, then out to the zombies. Every zombie stopped in its tracks, slowly turned to face Gram, and then just like that, they all started moving in straight lines until they started falling back into their graves. And amazingly enough, all the ripped up earth and grass just seemed to open up and swallow them, and then settled and smoothed out until even the grass looked exactly as it had before.

  Gram let go of Lucy’s hand and she felt the instant shock of their powers disconnecting. Her grandmother shot her with the angriest glower. “You stupid girl!”

  “But Gram… I-I didn’t…”

  Just then Gram’s eyes lit on Abbey’s still sobbing form, and she shook her head, giving her granddaughter’s arm a gentle squeeze. “I should’ve known.”

  Gram walked over to Abbey, peering down at her with harsh, demanding eyes. This alone made Abbey shut up.

  “Your grandma, Donna May, and I both told you not to mess with this kind of magic.”

  “I had to try!” Abbey cried.

  Gram grabbed hold of Abbey’s hand. She examined the wound and then let her go. “You’re just a witch.” Her tone was cold. Lucy had never heard her voice like that. “You can’t possibly control a necromancy ritual. It may be magic, but it is too removed from witchcraft for your kind to do anything but get themselves killed!”

  Abbey sobbed. “I’m sorry… but I had—”

  “If you had waited until you’d learned enough from your grandmother, you could’ve called your parents’ spirits from the nether realm, all by yourself, like any other self-respecting Wiccan.” She got right in Abbey’s face. “Instead, you had to trick the first necromancer you came across into this foolishness, and you almost got my granddaughter killed!”

  Abbey wiped the tears from her eyes, her face usually so full of life was stripped of all hope…beaten.

>   In an instant Gram’s face changed from angry to the gentle warmth Lucy was used to. She moved forward and took Abbey into her arms. “Sweet child. Zombies can’t remember what they were. They’ve lost the spark of humanity. Their souls moved on shortly after they died. So please don’t remember them like this. Remember them as they were when they were living.”

  As always, Lucy was touched by her grandmother’s caring nature. Even though she’d been angry enough to kill Abbey only a minute ago, she was now consoling her, her arm around Abbey’s shoulders as they turned and started to walk towards the entrance of the graveyard.

  Lucy brushed some of the dead leaves from her jeans, just starting to feel a little better. Still wobbly, but she was a damn sight better than she would’ve been if the horde of zombies had gotten their cold, dead hands on her.

  Gram’s such a rock star…

  She was going to elaborate on her grandmother’s wondrous qualities, but she didn’t get a chance to finish that thought. What’s more, she didn’t have a chance to even take a single step to follow either.

  She gasped as she felt it: something cold and dead hurtling toward her from behind. The darkness of the graveyard made her all the more confused, and she turned in time to see flowing blonde hair and a smiling set of fangs. Something hurt, and something else knocked her down and was dragging her way—then all went black.