He's doing his best to come across sincere, looking me in the eyes, his pupils pinned out from whatever kind of bennies he got his hands on tonight.

– How much money you got on you, Phil?

– Well, uh.

He pulls the bills I gave him out of his breast pocket and counts them.

– Looks like I got about fifty here.

– What other money?

He pats at his pockets, gives me a hopeless look and shrugs his shoulders. I squat down and put my face close to his.

– You might be close to getting off the hook here, Phil. I suggest that now is not the time to start fucking with me.

He nods and starts digging into his pockets, turning them inside out. A handful of change, his hair goop, a pack of Dentyne, a baggie full of about twenty little black capsules, and a small wad of cash all spill out onto his lap. I grab the cash and give it a quick count. Hundred and eighty bucks. I hold the bills in front of his face.

– I'm giving this to Billy, toward what you owe him.

– Sure, sure, I mean, that's what I had it on me for was ta give ta Billy for what I owe him.

I stand up.

– Yeah, right. Do what you want with the fifty, that's for the phone call. But pay Billy off before Monday.

– Yeah, before Monday, no sweat, Joe.

I bend over, pick Philip's comb up off the floor and toss it at him.

– Fix your hair, Philip, it looks like crap.

Walking past the bar I get Billy's attention and slip him the buck eighty. He counts it and smiles.

- S'more than I thought he'd cough up.

– Yeah. He'll come through with the rest by Monday. He don't, give me a call.

– Thanks, Joe. Ya gonna stay, start runnin' up that tab? Got some sweet Betties in here t'night. I could maybe hook ya up.

– Thanks anyway, Billy, I got work to do.

He nods and waves and gets back to shaking martinis. I squeeze through the crowd, out the door and onto the hot street.

The problem with Philip is, even when he's telling the truth, it looks like lying. But he has a point. The Coalition wants to keep an eye on me they got better ways of doing it than him. They really want to keep an eye on me they'll send someone down here far more subtle and dangerous. Then again, a hundred eighty is a lot of cash for him to be packing, and he would have needed more to score the speed he was carrying. He got that money somewhere. Damn it. He's dirty on something, but I don't have time to dig it out right now. The carrier is still out there and I don't know any more than I did before. Except that maybe I do.

If Philip is telling the truth, then Predo is keeping an eye on me some other way. Which means the Coalition is keeping tabs on me personally, or the whole neighborhood, or both. Which means something is going on down here. And I don't have any idea what it is. My only move is to try and find the carrier, just like they want me to. So I go home and get my guns.

Killing a zombie isn't complicated, it's just hard. The first problem is that the damn things are not quite alive in the first place. Or not quite dead. I'm not really sure which it is. The way it is, these things, they've been infected with a flesh-eating bacteria. This bacteria is slowly consuming all their soft tissues, muscle, fat, blood, cartilage, you name it. But mostly it's eating their brains. The catch is that the bacteria can only eat living tissue. So more than anything else in the world, this bacteria wants to keep its host alive and breathing, because once the host dies, I mean really finally croaks, the bacteria goes soon after. And what this bacteria does to extend its own life span is it pumps the host body full of endorphins and adrenaline and serotonin and all kinds of naturally occurring crap that kills pain, induces euphoria, and keeps a body moving. And to replenish these chemicals the bacteria gives its zombie a taste for human flesh and, in particular, For brain matter.

So, for the sake of argument, say you have a zombie in front of you and you want to kill it. Well the best, quickest, and easiest thing to do is sever the connection between its brain and the rest of its body. This may not in actuality kill the host, but not even the zombie bacteria can move a host once its brain stem is hacked or its neck is snapped. Now, say you have two or more zombies standing there and you want all of them dead and you don't really have any practical zombie-killing experience to draw on. In that case you might try pulling out your large-caliber hand-gun and shooting them in the heart. You could try for the face, but unless you hit the brain stem or blow out some really enormous chunks of gray matter, they're gonna keep coming after you. So just go for the heart. Explode the heart and the machine can't run no matter how hard the bacteria works. You could also strangle or drown or burn or blow up or hang or chop up or push from a tall building your average zombie. As long as you stop the heart or the brain or just cause massive physical trauma, you're gonna kill the thing. But we're talking about finding a quick and easy method here. So my advice is use a gun and a lot of bullets, just like if you were trying to kill your wife or husband.

I keep my guns in a gun safe in the back of my closet down in the secret Vampyre room. Not that I have any little kids running around I need to keep away from the guns. I had any kids I'd get rid of the guns. Nothing more dangerous to the life of a child than a house full of firearms. Nothing more dangerous except maybe a parent. No, I keep my guns locked up because on bad days, really bad days, it makes it that much harder for me to get my hands on them and go walking through the streets killing random strangers until the police come and shoot me down. Not that I get that urge too often. Just when I haven't had blood for about a week and the alien thing in my veins starts burning me from the inside out and I start thinking about cutting open my own wrists so I can suck at them.

I'm not one of those guys gets all breathy over his guns. I have two, one is a small, reliable revolver and one is a big, nasty automatic that holds a lot of bullets. I got both of them off of dead guys and I know just enough about the guns to shoot them straight, keep them clean and make sure they never get pointed at me. In the general course of life these things never see the light of day. And I'm not just trying to be funny. I mean things like this carrier are pretty rare even in my life, so I don't have much use for guns and they usually stay in the safe where they belong. The good thing about the guns is that when you shoot someone, nobody looks twice at the corpse. As opposed to a dead body with, say, half of its brain gone and its head chopped off.

I load the guns and pocket some extra ammo. I'm on my way back upstairs when I think about the blood in my fridge. I had a pint last night after my fight with the shamblers and another today to help with my burn. Normally I keep it to one pint every few days. That's enough to keep me healthy and take the edge off the hunger, but I'm going hunting and every little bit helps. Another pint and I'll be primed, the top of my game. I open the fridge. Eleven pints. I don't like to let my stash get much below ten pints. If I take another one I'll need to replenish the stock in the next day or two. I think about the three zombies last night and how close the girl came to cutting my eyes out. I grab one of the little bags. I suck it dry, standing there in the middle of the room, and it makes me feel the way it always makes me feel, it makes me feel alive.

There's a patrol car parked out front of the abandoned P.S. on 9th Street. A couple police barricades fence off the courtyard and the doors are sealed with yellow tape. The crime scene has been worked already, but the cops will keep it sealed until curiosity dies down and they don't have to worry about any freaks breaking into the building to party in the death room. As it is, a few people are on the sidewalk across the street, pointing at the school and taking pictures with their phones. If the Coalition hadn't fingered the kid this place would be rabid with cops and newshounds, and I wouldn't be able to get anything done at all.