Of course, things went wrong.

For starters, he wasn't counting on her already having company. When he got to her house, he saw her walking in the front door - and she wasn't alone. There was some guy with her, and from the way they were looking at one another, it was pretty obvious what they were going to do.

Her guy closed the door behind them. The front room light went on for a little while and then off. And while we were too far away to hear anything in detail, we could figure out what was going on.

But she was beautiful, and he wasn't the jealous type. So we stuck around, hiding in someone's bushes like an alkie trying to find a good place to sleep. He figured he'd wait until the other guy left - which would have to be soon, since it was a weeknight and she had to work - and then knock on her door. She'd open it, thinking it was the other guy, and blammo - instant romantic interlude from beyond the grave.

After about fifteen minutes, we had company. Someone came walking down the street, making a bee-line for her front porch.

My other half took one look at this guy, and didn't like what he saw. Not only was he ragged and filthy, and not only did he look like he was going to tear the door off its hinges, but he was ice cold and not breathing. His skin was pale and reflected funny in the streetlights.

He was dead. And he had the look in his eyes. You know which look: the one that says I'm going to rip someone apart - NOW.

Of course, we couldn't have that, so my other half got up like a shot and headed to intercept him. He was figuring the other guy was a Leech, though what he was doing here with that kind of murder in mind was unknown.

As he got closer, the other guy stopped and told him to mind his own fucking business. My other half said hey, this is my business. The other guy said you don't know the half of it, buddy - back off.

By this time, we'd gotten close enough to notice that this guy wasn't a Leech. Something was a little off, he smelled of fresh dirt and there were a few weird wounds sporting through his torn-up clothes that had healed post-mortem. He also had really blue eyes, but that's neither here nor there - it just made his pale skin seem all the more strange, and magnified his anger quite a bit.

Suffice it to say that my other half figured it out: he was Risen - one of us.

So my other half, he tries to make nice - make small talk. It didn't work. The other guy told us to fuck off and get lost. That bitch owes me, he said, and I'm here to collect. You get in my way, I'll take you down, too.

My other half says hey, that's not right. You got the wrong girl, man. I'm here to tell her I love her.

You're wrong, fucker, the other guy snarls - I've got the right girl. And you can say it to her head after I've torn it off.

Then he tried to push us away. My other half slapped the other guy's hands away from him and pushed back. The other guy regained his balance faster than he should have and took a swing...

And then... well... they fought

God Below, I wish you could have been there. It was a fight to remember.

My other half was quick, strong and tough, but he'd never been much of a fighter before being dead. He mostly used his special little tricks to win in the end, just like he'd done the other night at the warehouse. It's hard not to win when bullets go right through you, and you can punch a hole in some gunsel's chest without really trying, right?

But the other guy, despite having just crawled out of the dirt, was getting the better of him. And that's because he did know how to fight. And he was so pissed off that it almost scared me to look at him.

It was a fucking bloody mess, and that's no mere quote of the day: the black slop guys in our state have instead of blood was being splattered all over this poor lady's front yard. They were throwing each other into parked cars, shattering the cement underfoot, tossing one another about ten... maybe fifteen feet away. On and on and on for what had to have been a whole half an hour.

But they couldn't keep that kind of high-octane acrobatics up for too long. Even Risen have their limits. So before long they were just grappling on her front lawn, trying to put one another in a headlock and really, really pull. This is where it started going downhill for my other half, as you might have guessed; Like I said, the other guy really knew how to fight.

That's about the time I was about to turn the situation around though a well-placed comment, but as it turned out I didn't have to. My other half finally got wise and remembered that while some of his old tricks wouldn't work in the meat world, some of them still did. And he'd hung around with a Haunter long enough to learn an interesting distraction...

Would you believe it worked like a charm? One second, the other guy was seeing things. The next, we were breaking free of what would have been a terminal full-nelson. The other guy got a good hit in on our face, and something broke, but we were moving so fast that my other half hardly noticed.

Before we knew it we were on top of the clown, arms locked together, fists smashing down on his skull... using everything we had to pile-drive on his head. Blam - blamp - blash - blorsh - splork - splat - squish - smoosh.

And then it was all over. The guy's head looked like an elephant had sat on it. He wasn't even twitching. He was out of there.

There was that calm after the storm thing. We could hear people gaping and whispering from behind drawn curtains as we got up, but none of them were coming out into the street. It didn't take anything approaching genius to realize that one of them had probably called the police by now, so was time we should be moving along.

But for right then it was just enough to stand there, victorious. Just us, and her house...

And her.