Another One Bites the Dust (38 page)

Mission accomplished.

CHAPTERFORTY

Cole, Cassandra, Bergman, and I stood outside the RV, watching dawn break over the city.

Cole took a sip of his coffee. “I don’t get why you’re so relaxed, Jaz,” he said. “I mean, you thought you had Samos nailed last night. But he slipped through your fingers again. I haven’t known you long, but I’m thinking, typically, you’d be gnashing your teeth and pulling your hair out.” He looked to Bergman for confirmation.

“Oh, yeah,” Miles said. “One time, in college, she got so mad after our apartment was burglarized that she smashed her fist through the bathroom door.”

“I did find that guy,” I reminded Bergman.

He nodded. “She got all our stuff back and made him replace the door too.”

“So what’s the deal?” asked Cole.

“I’m curious as well,” said Cassandra. “You told us the Reno crime scene investigators found no fingerprints. No sources of DNA. No scientific proof that Samos killed Morty Frierman. So why are you so tranquil?”

“Because I came away from Frierman’s with the goods on that son of a bitch,” I told them, feeling a grin spread across my face and not minding a bit if it looked slightly evil. “I discovered something that will allow me to pick Samos out of a crowd. Given the time, and opportunity, it’ll lead me straight to him. And then Vayl and I will take him down.”

“So what did you bring home from Reno?” Cole asked.

I wanted to chuckle and rub my hands together. But under the circumstances that seemed too maniacal, so I just took a sip from my mug and said, “The scent of a vampire.”

Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone who helped make this work the best it could possibly be: My editor, Devi Pillai; my agent, Laurie McLean; Bob Castillo; Alex Lencicki; Penina Lopez; Katherine Molina; Gabriella Nemeth; and all the folks at Orbit whose kindness, creativity, and professionalism I appreciate and admire. I’d also like to thank my readers Laurie McLean, Hank Graves, Hope Dennis, Erin Pringle, Jeremy Toungate, and Katie Rardin for taking the time to review the manuscript. Your feedback is pure gold. As for you, Reader, thanks for coming. Whether it was a return trip or a first outing, I hope you enjoyed the ride!

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Meet the Author

Jennifer Rardin
began writing at the age of twelve, mostly poems to amuse her classmates and short stories featuring her best friends as the heroines. She lives in an old farmhouse in Illinois with her husband and two children. Find out more about Jennifer Rardin at www.JenniferRardin.com.

Introducing

If you enjoyed ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST,

look out for

BITING THE BULLET

Book 3 of the Jaz Parks series

by Jennifer Rardin

The reavers rolled into us, firing seemingly at random. But there was a method to their madness. Reavers operate by strict rules. I didn’t know what the punishments entailed, but they must’ve been extreme, because even the old gnarly ones wouldn’t break them. The main no-no revolved around killing. Reavers were only allowed to eliminate people who’d been marked for murder. In other words, me. Everybody else had to survive. So while the reavers had to take me out, they only wanted to take everybody else down.

What they didn’t count on was the supreme skill and professionalism of their foes. Though they outnumbered us at least three to one at the start of the attack, within sixty seconds we’d whittled their numbers to fifteen.

Our guys had taken a couple of more hits. One second Otto had been standing beside me, a half-grin on his face, saying, “If I had a wheelbarrow full of dynamite I’d blow these fuckers to Mars.” The next second he lay writhing on the ground, trying not to scream, his hip shattered. As I stood over him, nailing reavers when I had a clear shot, pulling up when I realized I’d just aimed at one of my own, I saw Ricardo drop beneath a mass of monsters. Grace had made little progress toward the truck, and was bleeding heavily from a facial wound. Still, I thought we had them.

Then two more groups appeared, coming from both our flanks. These didn’t have firearms, but we already knew the power of their claws, and several swung swords. Terrence and Ashley fired into them, but they didn’t have the right angle to get more than one or two head shots per burst.

“Everybody to me!” yelled David.

Our guys from the farmhouse joined us and we tried to move forward, but they swarmed us. Terrence went down under a reaver’s claws. Vayl, seeing him fall, took the reaver’s eye with his sword and pulled him to his feet. I holstered Grief and grabbed his machine gun. Switching it to three-round burst mode, I fired into the crowd of reavers coming at me, their tongues lolling in anticipation of tasting my soul.

“Jasmine!” called Vayl. “Keep moving!”

Easier said than done. I inched forward, almost tripped over a body, ducked quickly to avoid a neck-ripping swipe and nearly screamed as the body between my legs lurched to its feet. I managed to mute the scream into a squawk as I jumped back, banging into Cole in my rush to avoid the rising reaver.

“Son of a bitch!” he cried, “I missed!”

“Watch out! Watch out!” I yelled. “The dead are rising!”

All around us the reavers we’d defeated the first time around had rediscovered vertical. Multiple thoughts streaked through my mind simultaneously. Not all of them made sense, but a skilled translator might put them in the following light:

Oh Jesus! Oh crap! Zombies! The Wizard’s a necromancer. He could be around here somewhere, pulling their strings. So I should just run off into the night like some rabid raccoon and hope I luck into him? How stupid is that? Plus it’s not him. It’s probably an apprentice. You know that. It may even be the mole. Is anybody murmuring a spell? How the hell can I tell? We are so outnumbered! Did Ashley just go down? My God, I think the semi is farther away than ever. Is that possible? Oh Jesus, was that Terrence’s leg? Don’t turn your head. I said don’t—never mind. Holy shit, that’s the barrel of a Colt .45 aimed right at your face.

The reaver, a live one, grinned wide enough to show the gap between his front teeth as his finger squeezed the trigger.

“Vayl,” I whispered, my eyes somehow tracking straight to his in my final moment.

“Jasmine!” He lunged toward me, too late. The gun boomed and I went down almost at the same time. Only the horrifying pain I expected never split into my brain. A zombie had tackled me, its puppet-like efforts to take off my head such a welcome relief to point-blank assassination I actually giggled. I know. Inappropriate. That’s pretty much how it always happens with me.

The zombie’s weight left me as Vayl picked it up and threw it at least twenty feet. I took the hand Vayl offered and remembered to grab the SAW as he jerked me upright. Ahead of us Cole lifted Terrence onto his shoulder. Two reavers came at him, one living, one dead. Somehow the zombie missed our guys and clawed the living reaver instead, taking out most of his face. When he turned to us I took out his legs with my machine gun.

“What is it with these zombies?” I asked Vayl. “Not that I’m complaining. But you’d think they’d come from 2,000 year old corpses the way they’re behaving.”

“Maybe their master is new to the art.”

“Huh.”

“Aaaah!” I spun at the sound. The zombie behind me clutched at the gaping hole in his chest. A living reaver had circled back to the farmhouse door. Had taken a bead on me. Somehow the zombie had gotten between the two of us.

I took aim at the zombie. Hesitated. Moved my sites to the reaver. It yelled at the zombie. Clearly telling it to move out of the line of fire. Instead the zombie shambled straight toward the living reaver.
What the hell
? I glanced over my shoulder, hoping for some confirmation from Vayl that he’d witnessed this bizarre event as well. He was with Otto, lifting him off the ground. Grace and Ashley were already limping away ahead of them.

I looked back. The zombie had reached the living reaver. Grabbed the gun. Moved clear. I took the shot. The reaver fell dead. I waited for the zombie to make its next move. It hesitated. Appeared to study the gun as if it wasn’t sure what to do with it and, in the process, managed to blow its own head off.

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