The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(112)

James Harris caught the bat on his ribs with a meaty THWACK. He brought his arm down and clamped it against his body, then spun and sent it clattering into the corner. Patricia moaned in pleasure, mindlessly grinding her thighs together, and James Harris was up, both hands grabbing Kitty’s shoulders so hard she felt bone grind against bone. He drove her backward into the open bedroom door, brushing past Mrs. Greene and Maryellen, sending them spinning aside, slamming Kitty into the door so hard the knob embedded itself in the wall. Then he hurled her across the bedroom, sending her staggering toward the corner by the window, sprawling over an armchair on her way, tipping it over backward, as Mrs. Greene brought the hammer down on his head.

It glanced off his skull, and he plucked it easily out of her hand. She screamed and stepped backward, panicking, getting out of the room, wanting to get away from him as fast as possible, shoulder-checking Maryellen, getting turned around and winding up standing in the open doorway to the master bath instead.

Maryellen stood between James Harris and Mrs. Greene. She met his eyes and wet her pants. Her numb hands seemed to belong to someone else, someone far away, and her urine and the sheathed hunting knife hit the floorboards at the same time.

James Harris shoved Maryellen out of the way and advanced on Mrs. Greene. His powerful chest muscles stood out against his body like white armor, his thick forearms flexing as his fingers formed claws, and Mrs. Greene turned fast and tried to get into the bathroom. If she could get the heavy porcelain lid off the toilet tank she stood a chance. Instead, she tripped over the threshold where the tile began and sprawled forward, cracking both knees on the floor.

Blood drooled from James Harris’s mouth and formed patterns on his chest and flat belly, and Mrs. Greene scrabbled onto tile so cold it burned, and then he had her right ankle in what felt like an iron band. With no effort at all, he pulled her back into the bedroom. Mrs. Greene rolled onto her back and brought her arms up to defend herself. When he got close she’d go for his eyes, but then she saw the fury in his face and knew that her arms were twigs in the face of this hurricane with teeth.

He leaned down, clawed fingers outstretched, and Kitty hit him from behind like a freight train, plowing into the small of his back, legs pumping, pushing him ahead of her all the way into the bathroom, both of them stepping on Mrs. Greene, feet bruising her stomach, one of them kicking her in the chin.

There was a loud SMASH and an oomph as James Harris took the edge of the sink in his stomach and went face-first into the tile wall. Kitty rode his back all the way to the floor. He landed with his arms beneath him. He was stronger but she outweighed him by fifty pounds.

He tried to flip over but she rolled her hips and pressed him into the floor. She grabbed his ears and smeared his face into the tiles. He tried to get an arm beneath him but she slapped it away.

“The knife! The knife!” she screamed, but Maryellen just stood numbly in the bedroom over a puddle of her cooling urine.

Mrs. Greene dragged herself out of the bathroom and into the safety of the bedroom. She watched as James Harris and Kitty wrestled, dark shapes on cold tiles. James Harris got both legs under him, lifting Kitty up on his hunched back as he stood.

“The knife, Maryellen! The knife!” Kitty shrieked, her voice hysterical.

Mrs. Greene looked and saw Maryellen staring down at the knife by her feet and realized she was too far away to grab it and James Harris was too close to standing up.

“Maryellen!” Mrs. Greene shouted, using her first name. “Throw me the knife!”

Maryellen looked up, saw her, looked down, saw the knife, and suddenly squatted. She tossed it underhanded to Mrs. Greene, who, for the first time in her life, caught something thrown to her. She unsnapped the button of the strap that held it in its sheath.

In the bathroom, Kitty wrapped a leg around James Harris’s right leg, hooked his ankle, and kicked out. He went down on one knee, cracking it hard against the tile with Kitty’s full weight on top of him. She bore down on her hips, pressing them into his buttocks. He had his left arm beneath him now, elbow braced against his ribs, so she used her left hand to try to pull it out of position, but it was like stone. In a desperate move, she drove her fingertips up hard into his wide-open left armpit and the shock made him lose his hold and drop to the floor with the sound of a side of beef hitting the slab.

She couldn’t do this for much longer.

Kitty wriggled from side to side up his body, trying to keep her center of gravity over his as he thrashed, and she reached out for anything that might give her an advantage. She felt him mustering his strength again and suddenly she was a piece of paper riding a wave that was about to break and she knew this time it would take her under.

Something hard knocked the back of her hand and she understood what it was without the thought even consciously entering her mind. She grabbed it and turned it around, and there was one still, perfect moment when she saw the bowed back of James Harris’s white neck and the ridges of his spine sticking out through his skin, perfectly outlined in the moonlight coming through the master bathroom skylight. She held the hunting knife with both hands and pushed the tip down.

He screamed, a sound so loud in the tiny, echoing bathroom that her right eardrum vibrated. She felt the knife grind bone. She dragged the point up and felt tissue give and she pressed down on the handle again. He threw his head back and trapped the blade between his vertebrae but she raised up her body so all her weight came down on her wrists, pushing the hilt down, and the steel tip of the blade gritted and squealed and crunched slowly, inch by inch, as she forced it deeper and deeper through his spine.