I had sobered up, so I tried to finish off the bottle. It wasn’t working. My stomach was raging and every shot I took felt like a fire in my gut. I didn’t really have a plan for the evening, but all of this was not it.

Mo’Lock was pacing around the room and the little thing watched his every move. Finally, after a couple hundred laps around the office, he stopped and turned to me. The ghoul opened his mouth to talk, but instead, he just sort of froze. His eyes weren’t on me, but the window behind me.

I turned around.

“Oh, give me a fucking break,” I said.

There, floating outside, were two sets of prying eyes dangling from two flying brains. I assumed the brains had come from the skulls of the old man’s goons.

That was it. I’d seen everything.

I jumped to my feet and my gun was in hand in an instant. I fired right through the window. Glass shattered, mixing with smoke from the blasts. The little creature behind me started squealing like a pig.

“Shut that little bastard up!” I yelled.

I couldn’t tell if I’d hit anything at all, and it didn’t matter. Before I knew it, the client-eating creature ran past me and jumped out the window. Mo’Lock yelled after it, but it was gone, as were the flying brains.

The office was quiet.

I looked at Mo’Lock. His mouth was still open.

“Can we stop now?” I asked. “Any more of this shit and my head’s going to explode.”

“We can’t leave it out there. It will kill everything it comes across.”

The big dead freak was right. I jammed my gun back under my shoulder and, with me leading, we left the house. We didn’t get very far. Outside we found out I was a better shot than I thought. One of the brains was on the sidewalk. I’d blown a decent chunk out of it. It wasn’t moving.

“Check it out. I killed the brain.”

Mo’Lock looked at the dead brain. “I have never seen anything like this before, have you?”

“Nope.”

I was about to bend over for a closer look at the brain when all of a sudden, there was the sound of screeching wheels and people screaming nearby.

I shot a look at the ghoul. “The thing?!”

He nodded and we both bolted toward the commotion. We were running up my street, headed toward Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I could see up ahead that there had been an accident. I prayed the thing had been mowed down.