The moon was full, its pale glory glowing brightly without a cloud in the sky to obstruct it. The graveyard was silent between gusts of wind coming in from the north as it rustled the surrounding foliage. Greg Van Helsing leaned against his massive motorcycle, waiting.
A contract was issued to investigate several reports of skeletons rising from their graves and Greg was lucky to pick it up before anyone else in the monster hunting community got their hands on it. He loved undead contracts. Though ghouls and reanimated corpses specifically were his favorite, vampires and other more intelligent undead tickled his fancy as well.
Sinister movement among the swaying grass of the graveyard began at precisely 3:00AM. A hand clawing for freedom here, a fist-pump erupting from a grave there. Altogether, he spotted four risers. Greg smiled happily, pulled his oversized hunting knife from his belt, and walked into the graveyard with a pep in his step.
Standing over a corpse struggling to free itself from the cold grasp of the earth, Greg considered waiting for all four bags of bones to fully emerge before getting to work. After a moment of amused contemplation, he decided he’d wait for three of them. The fourth he’d have a little fun with.
Crouching and scratching at his chin with his knife, Greg hovered just out of the stinking corpse’s grasp, watching with amusement as it clawed the grass in a wild attempt to reach him. This particular risen corpse had been underground for quite some time. Most of its skin was shrunken and wrapped tight around the bones, the muscle entirely decayed. Based on the long hair and thin, delicate bones, Greg knew this corpse had been a female in life. With a pair of casual hacks, Greg took off one of its hands and then the other. It was less satisfying without the spray of blood that usually accompanied dismemberment, but he wasn’t complaining.
Greg rose from his crouch then took three measured steps backward and two to the left. Undead head punting was something he had honed to an absolute art over the centuries. He took aim at the nearby maintenance shed and let ‘er rip. The satisfaction from the feeling of a skull cracking against the top of his foot more than made up for its lack of blood.
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The zombie’s head came free of its neck with a loud pop and sailed across the graveyard. He’d kicked it with such force that, when it hit his mark, the whole head burst into a brown paste that stuck to the shed. It slid down the side of the shed leaving a trail of ick and finally hit the ground with a wet splat. Greg’s smile widened, head tilted slightly to the side as he watched with perverse pleasure.
Bony fingers digging into his shoulder plucked Greg from his reverie. In one smooth motion, he grabbed onto a skeletal wrist and whirled to face his attacker. The offending undead lost an arm in the process and Greg gained an offhand weapon.
With his knife in one hand and a twitching arm ripped off from the shoulder in the other, Greg danced through the graveyard with gleeful abandon. He leaped heroically off of a gravestone and plunged his hunting knife into the top of a zombie’s head. It dropped like a sack of rocks to once again rest in death. Greg left his knife, opting to wield the undead arm like a two-handed mace.
Swinging the arm like a baseball bat, Greg bitch-slapped one zombie with all of the force he could muster - which was considerable. The contact rang out in the night with the snapping of bones. The zombie was done for, its neck bent horrifically to the side, and it hit the ground next to its compatriot. The arm unfortunately did not survive the attack either, breaking off at the elbow and leaving Greg with only a cracked humerus, sinew and torn, gray skin clinging to it. He tossed it to the ground and faced off with the final undead monster with a staggered fighting stance, fists held up in front of him.
The final zombie’s lumbering advance was painfully slow. Greg waited, bouncing back and forth nimbly on his toes as its jerky steps brought it ever-closer to him. When it tripped on the protruding roots of a massive elm and cracked its own skull on a gravestone, Greg sighed in disappointment. He crouched to make sure it was dead-dead. Sure enough, the corpse was once again just a corpse.
Contract complete, for the night at least, Greg hopped on his bike and took off back toward the Mayhew residence. There was a second, higher paying contract to discover the reason for the dead rising from their graves here and subsequently put it to a stop. Greg did not accept that contract and he hoped that nobody else would, at least for a little while. As it was, he was making $100 per night just to kill the zombies. Greg Van Helsing really enjoyed killing zombies.