"Outside of Sandusky, Ohio, October of '95. Just before Halloween. Crazy time of year in this business. My team was taking care of a ghoul problem at an old cemetery, when this one surprised us. We didn't expect a wight. It popped out of the ground right in front of our vehicle, crushed the whole front end with its bare hands, and smashed through the window like it was nothing. I was in the passenger seat and it was on me so fast that it was a blur. It hit me and all of my muscles locked right up like I was frozen. Milo was driving. It nailed him too. Julie was in the back seat. She opened up right between us with her pistol, surprised it apparently, because it quit trying to kill me and Milo. The wight jumped on the roof and started peeling it back to get her. She bailed out with that spear." He paused and chewed on his lower lip for a moment.

"Make a note, it was a good thing she didn't just keep using her gun. Firearms will stop a wight eventually, but eventually is the key word. See, the longer an undead like the wight exists, the stronger it becomes. New ones are pretty easy to kill, but this particular son of a bitch dated back to the Civil War. They can take forever to quit, so you work in teams, hold them off you while you pour fire into them. The rest of the team heard the commotion on the radio, and they were coming fast, but not fast enough.

"So anyways, Julie gets out and uses the spear to hold it back. Every time it moved, she would stick it. You can see in the slide that it has a catch past the blade to keep creatures from slipping down the shaft to get you. She kept sticking it and basically played keep away. It couldn't reach her as long as she kept stabbing it, but there was no way that spear was going to put it down. The guy that took the picture was no help. He was just some bozo bystander. Great shot though. Finally the feeling returned to my limbs enough to flop out of the Suburban and I lit him up."

"Lit him up?" somebody else asked.

"Flamethrower. Don't fight high-level undead without one. Once its flesh was on fire it was only a matter of time before it ran out of steam. Julie pinned it to a mausoleum door and held it there until it quit kicking. Took forever. Mean sons o' bitches."

"How old was she?" Holly asked.

Harbinger thought about it for a moment.

"She had just turned eighteen."

"Damn."

"It runs in the family." He returned to the lesson.