Queen of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

glanced back at the drunken bystander in a way that even from my vantage point looked really guilty.
    The guy in the bar doorway narrowed his eyes.
    â€œâ€™Ang on a second…” he said. “Lezzee some ID…‘officer’…”
    â€œOf course, sir,” the Corpse said. And why wouldn’t he? After all, he had ID. He was a cop!
    But his back was to me, his attention fixed entirely on the suspicious bar dude, and that was all I’d wanted.
    In one reasonably smooth motion, I found my feet, stepped up, and punched Dead Cop in the back of his neck right at the base of the skull. Corpses have a vulnerable spot there, the place where the spinal cord meets the base of the brain, and a good shot paralyzes them. It doesn’t last long.
    But it lasts long enough.
    Dead Cop went stiff—no pun intended. Then he fell forward, right into the drunken dude, and they both went down in a heap against the door of the bar. Though he couldn’t see it or smell it, the poor human guy got himself lathered up pretty good in cadaver juice. I wondered if, tomorrow morning, his wife would notice that he smelled like roadkill.
    Time to disappear. The drunken guy was struggling under the weight of the fallen cop and at the same time staring at me in bleary confusion. Wherever I ran now, he’d report to the cop. Worse, the Corpse atop him was already twitching. This Deader was a strong one and would be back on his feet in a minute, maybe less.
    Fortunately, while I’d been flopping around on the sidewalk beside the mailbox, trying to catch my breath, I’d also picked out my hiding place. Well, the building anyhow.
    Empty buildings come in two flavors in Philly: boarded up and not boarded up. How many of each you find depends on the neighborhood. This particular street was mostly row homes and small corner shops. While I had been fighting to breathe, I’d managed to spot one house in particular that looked like nobody lived there.
    How could I tell? It wasn’t a lack of lights on in the house; it was after midnight after all, and the whole neighborhood was dark. But something else was missing from its windows.
    Curtains.
    In Center City, Philadelphia, everybody lived on top of everybody else. Privacy was hard to come by. So curtains and blinds were usually kept closed, especially after dark.
    And a house that didn’t even have curtains pretty much had to be empty. Or so I hoped.
    I leaned over the Deader and yanked the baton from his belt. Like his shoes, it was a Philly police-issue weapon. Wood on the outside and lead on the inside. He had a gun too, but those were pretty useless against Corpses. This, however, might do some damage—if it came to that.
    Then I made for my target building, crossing Wallace Street at a run.
    â€œHey!” the drunken man slurred after me. “Come back eere!”
    Right , I thought. I wondered if, in all the history of the world, any fugitive had ever obeyed that command.
    I wanted to look for my pocketknife, but I hadn’t seen where the Corpse’s blow had sent it. It might have been under a car, buried in a clump of sparse shrubbery, or down the sewer for all I knew. But I just couldn’t risk the time. Instead I made right for the first-floor window and smashed it with the baton, keeping my face averted. Then, mindful of the jagged glass in the frame, I climbed inside.
    The living room was dark and empty. No furniture. No carpets. It smelled of mold and rat poop. Yep, definitely empty.
    It looked like a pretty standard Philly layout. Living room leading to dining room leading to kitchen, with a staircase on the left. Upstairs, there were likely three bedrooms: a front, middle, and back. It would be the back bedroom I wanted.
    I headed that way, taking the stairs two at a time and almost kicking the door in. The bedroom, like the rest of the place, was empty and deserted. Two dark, rectangular windows filled the rear wall. Beyond