Still I ran. I hurtled over another fence and got snagged in kudzu.
The helicopter hovered above a wall of myrtle in front of me. Goodman watched from behind mirrored sunglasses. His hands moved in animated gestures. A Suburban halted beneath him.
I tore free from the kudzu, turned left again, and raced over a wooden deck to crash through a set of French doors. A family sat at the dining room table. I leaped onto the table, my feet stomping a casserole dish and stacks of pancakes. Scrambled eggs and syrup splashed across the room. The three kids and dad screamed. The mom threw a serving spoon that bounced off my head.
I sprang from the table and bolted into the living room.
Inside the house, the nausea vanished. My skin felt as if I’d been doused with cool water. I wanted to stay and rest but the moment I stopped, Goodman and his shooters would close the trap.
I catapulted off an armchair for the front picture window and smashed through the glass.
Sunlight felt like a cauldron of lava. I tumbled over a hedge and landed on the grass. My feet pumped over the lawn and I raced onto the street. My scalded skin turned pink.
A new wave of nausea squeezed my insides and my kundalini noir felt like it was shoved up my throat.
My flesh was about to smolder. The pain was like getting skinned alive.
The street led to a dead end against the beach dunes. Beyond them lay the Atlantic Ocean. The helicopter flew close, keeping pace as if we were tethered by a rope. I scrambled over the dunes and through the sea oats. The blue horizon of water promised sanctuary. I pushed myself to run harder across the flat trace of sand to the surf.
The helicopter crabbed sideways toward me. Goodman brought an assault rifle to his shoulder. I hopped to my left. The spray of bullets churned the ground inches from my feet.
The sun reflected off the sand and burned my skin. My eyelids wanted to shut tight to protect my eyes and I fought to keep them open.
The roar of the helicopter sounded like a demon from hell. A second volley of bullets tore at my legs, ripping flesh and shattering bone.
I tumbled forward and smacked wet sand. I sprang up and tried to stand but my shredded left leg buckled under my weight.
The Jet Ranger slipped through the air. The shoreline waited thirty feet before me.
I couldn’t make it. The agony of my burning flesh, the nausea, and now my mangled leg, overwhelmed my will to flee.
Not now, Felix. Survive. Survive. Come back and fight. I rolled upright and limped into the surf.
Two of the Suburbans raced toward me down the beach.
I hobbled into the oncoming waves, into the water that would rescue me. The surf lapped at my ankles, then my shins, and finally my knees.
Bursts of rifle fire tore into the water around me. I dove forward and clawed at the sandy bottom.
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Waves broke over me, and I disappeared into the dirty foam. Gritty water stung my eyes and clouded my vision. The sunlight streaming from above cooked my back. I scrambled across the silted bottom and groped for deeper water. At last, my skin cooled. The riptide pulled me from the beach toward darker depths.
I expected the water to refresh me, but instead I felt my strength ebbing. I kept my face down and floated across the sandy bottom, limp as the sargassum clinging to my body.
My shattered left leg dragged through rocks and sand. I let out a howl of pain. My scream became lost in the cloud of bubbles blowing out of my mouth. I clutched at my leg, but moving only made it hurt worse so I let it dangle.
I was spent, down for the count.
Goodman’s ambush, my wounds, and my loss of protection from the sun had sapped my will to fight. The current pulled me around the southern side of Hilton Head Island. My kundalini noir lay slack inside my belly.
I didn’t know where the current would take me. Bermuda? The Canary Islands? I didn’t care, just as long as I never came back. I only felt the now. Time lost meaning.
I was filled with a miasma of apathy. At least when you’re desperate you thrash about in panic, because you think you have a chance to save yourself. But I had no chance. Hope had been crushed out of me.
I retreated over familiar emotional ground, harsh, forbidding, desolate, to a shuttered place in my past.
When I was a sergeant in Iraq, in the early months of our invasion before the war deteriorated into a complete fiasco, my platoon lost two men when their Humvee was struck by a roadside bomb. That evening, I couldn’t find the words to console their team leader, my own soldiers, or myself. There wasn’t anything—other than clichés—to explain the sacrifice.
Three weeks later we ambushed a family we had mistaken for insurgents. I had arrived in Iraq ready to fight against terror and injustice. Instead, what we did that night was slaughter innocent civilians. The blood of the youngest victim, an adolescent girl, stained my hands and my soul. The tragedy sent me hurling to the emotional bottom. When I hit it, it was then that an Iraqi vampire turned my remorse and desperation against me and converted me into one of the damned undead.
My mind wandered even further back. To my childhood. During one of those episodes of estrangement between my parents, my mom got tired of my dad’s drinking and bullying and struck out on her own. We lived in a tiny cinderblock duplex and I know my mom fretted about money. One afternoon she got after my sisters and me to pack our things. My mom yelled at us to hurry, as if we were fleeing a fire.
We took only what we could cram into her car and then drove to my aunt’s house, where we would live for a couple of months.
It rained a lot, off and on for days, and our mood remained as dark as the gray skies. When the clouds broke, I borrowed my cousin’s bicycle and sweated my way across town to see what happened to all the stuff we had left behind.
Our belongings had been heaped in front of the duplex: our clothes, mattresses and bed linen, dishes, furniture, photos in broken frames. There wasn’t much grass, so the days of rain had turned the tiny yard into a muddy puddle.
The wet pile stank of mildew. My mom’s Formica table rested there, the chrome legs ripped loose. A dresser lay on its side, the drawers open, disemboweled, with my mom’s bras, panties, and stockings strewn about in the mud. Our frayed and tattered picture books looked like the carcasses of decayed birds.
Our possessions were now garbage. Our hopes and ambitions deserved nothing better than to lie rotting in the sun. The neighbors could gawk at our shame and hopelessness. Had we stayed put, would my mom and sisters be lying out here in pieces, like broken dolls? Would I?
For a week afterward, I felt hollow, like a bottle made of fragile glass. I expected at any moment to be smashed and swept aside. My existence didn’t matter.
Now I felt like that again.
Insignificant.
Impotent.
Helpless.
A failure.
Worse, others depended on me: Carmen, the Araneum, Gilbert Odin, the Earth women, and I had let them all down. I deserved nothing but oblivion.
The sun set and the sea around me turned inky black. Blurry red auras circled close, nibbled my skin, and darted away.
Something grabbed my torso. I couldn’t struggle or resist.
Two hands clasped together over my chest and heaved upward. A silky head with an orange aura pressed against mine. A woman’s soft lips kissed my cheek.
Together we rose from the bottom, ascending in rhythmic jerks as she scissored her legs.
We broke the surface. The clear water rinsed my eyes. Thousands of stars dotted the night sky. A breeze cooled my wet face.
I bobbed on the surface, indifferent to what happened next. My rescuer towed me by my collar. We stopped beside a motorboat floating in the gloom.
“Jack, help me lift him.” It was Carmen.
A second set of hands, belonging to a big man, grasped my coat and hauled me over the gunwale. He slid me onto the deck.
I lay on my belly, too weak to move. A human with his re
d aura stood beside me. He had a bandanna around his neck. A chalice. Carmen climbed into the boat. She wore a cropped T-shirt and bikini bottoms. Water rained from her hair. She sat on my butt, pressed her hands against my shoulder blades, and pushed.
I puked mouthfuls of water. When I stopped coughing, Carmen rolled me onto my back and pulled my head into her lap.
She smoothed my hair and whispered, “Get a grip, Felix. You can drown later. We’ve got work to do.”
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I bolted upright, gasping, confused.
Where was I?
I sat in a coffin. I smelled formaldehyde and ethanol—embalming fluid. In the middle of the room stood a mortician’s table, a white slab with a trough around the edge and a metal stand on one end to hold the deceased’s head in place. Light shone through a row of frosted-glass windows high along one wall. A Porti-Boy embalming machine—it looked like a big, squat blender with a hose sticking out between the front dials—sat on a steel shelf on the opposite wall. The shelf was crowded with jugs of embalming fluid, autopsy compound, and tissue builder. Under the shelf waited a white porcelain commode for whatever was next to be flushed away. There was an interior door to my right and a wide service door to my left.
I was alone in the morgue. My clothes—a red print Hawaiian shirt and khaki cargo pants—were not mine.
I felt queasy.
I had the dim recollection of Carmen and her chalice, Jack, pulling my carcass out of the ocean. They had scrubbed me with soapy water, hosed me off, and brought me here. She had mentioned staying with a chalice couple who owned a mortuary in Bluffton. That must be where I was.
My coffin rested on a workbench. An insulated carafe stood on the table within reach. I tasted a recent blood meal. I didn’t remember drinking the blood nor did I remember being dressed or falling asleep in this coffin.
My wallet, its contents, and an assortment of embalming tools—a big syringe, metal tubes of various lengths, a coil of latex hose, and forceps—lay spread across the workbench. I touched the wallet; the leather was dry. I had to have been here awhile. How long?
Bracing myself against the sides of the coffin, I started to get up. My knees were stiff and they ached, as did my lower back. I ran my hands down along my thighs to my calves. My fingers dragged across the scars where Goodman’s bullets had chewed my leg.
The images and sensations from the ambush returned to torment me in a kaleidoscope of terror. First the bomb detonating, the hot blast heaving me out of the motel lobby, my face riddled with glass, smoke curling from my burned clothes.
Then the sprint through Hilton Head as Goodman and his goons hunted me, their bullets cracking the air inches past my ears.
The warming of my skin, scalding as the spider bite wore off and the sun fried my unprotected flesh.
Nausea flooded through me again. My kundalini noir tightened into a ball, compressing itself in a panicked spasm. I gagged, unable to do anything except fight the impulse to vomit. I clutched my throat as if trying to pull slack into a noose around my neck.
The nausea abated, replaced by an icy fear that twisted through me. I slumped forward and rested my head against the side of the coffin, weakened and spent.
Footsteps approached beyond the door at my right. I sat up again, the nausea returned, and I waited, too crippled by my wretched condition to offer resistance if it was trouble.
The door opened. A woman asked, “Felix?”
Somehow I knew she was Leslie, Jack’s wife, a chalice and co-owner of the mortuary. We must have met when I was first brought here.
Leslie stepped inside and closed the door. Her aura glowed pleasantly, like a candle behind red cellophane. She was in her early forties. A flowered blouse and jeans clothed her voluptuous meatiness—hardly a dainty woman, yet attractive in a nurturing, Earth-mother sort of way.
I felt her heat as she drew close. Her warm hand lay on mine.
“How are you?” Leslie’s blue eyes had the comforting empathy of a nurse. Being among chalices meant I didn’t need vampire hypnosis. I could relax.
“Not so good.” My head felt unsteady and I touched my face. I had a grizzly stubble. A scab outlined a tear on my temple. “Where’s Carmen?”
“With Jack. Running errands.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Since last night.” Leslie removed the scarf from around her neck. She pulled the tails of her blouse from her waistband and undid the buttons. Her aura brightened with a growing lust. “Would you like some fresh blood? You’ll feel better.”
If this was only about providing fresh blood, she could’ve bled herself and replenished the carafe. Chalices weren’t into this exchange of fluids with the undead for charity’s sake. Sex with a vampire was one of the bigger rewards for submission.
Leslie’s blouse fell open and displayed her large bosom in a lacy white brassiere. Wife-husband chalices were not uncommon. They promised debauched recreation in many possible combinations. But I confined my game to females. Chalice couples brought into this arrangement their many perversions, and a favorite among the men was a cuckold fetish. I had no desire to put on a show for Jack. He would have to get his voyeuristic jollies somewhere else.
I ran my tongue across my incisors. My fangs stayed flush with my other teeth. I had no urge for fanging…or for sex. At least she had asked.
“Thanks,” I replied. “Some other time.”
What irony. When I had the tan, women were losing interest in me. Now my tan was gone and I had no interest in them.
Leslie’s aura dimmed from disappointment. She smiled self-consciously and clutched the collar of her blouse. Her hands worked the buttons, top to bottom, and left the tails of the blouse outside her jeans. She tied the scarf around her neck. “You’re not acting particularly vampiric.”
“Let me worry about that.” The queasiness clung to my throat like a greasy scum. Perhaps if I washed it down I’d feel better. “Can you get me a drink? A beer. Wine? Something hard if you’ve got it.”
Leslie crouched beside the workbench and opened a cabinet door. She brought out a bottle of Wild Turkey, a can of Pepsi, and a pair of highball glasses, and set them on the workbench by the embalming tools.
I stared at the booze. “Do you and Jack pickle yourselves while you pickle your clients?”
“It’s from our last Halloween party.” She reached back into the workbench, pulled out a black paper horn, and gave it a toot.
“Cocktails and cadavers,” I said, “what a theme.”
Leslie put away the horn. “I’ll get ice from the kitchen.”
Usually it didn’t take much to get me to drink but my thirst had left me too. The queasiness grew stronger and I realized why I felt this way.
Goodman had chased me to the brink of doom and I couldn’t forget that. Even when I drifted in the water, already safe from Goodman, I had lost the will to resist. When the hands of my rescuer grasped me, I made no attempt to help in my own salvation. I didn’t care. I surrendered to what had seemed inevitable.
I was broken.
I deserved no pleasure. I never wanted to smile again. I had no desire for liquor, or sex, or fanging. What then would be the point of being immortal? I still walked among the living but Goodman had beaten me.
As a detective, I was useless.
As a vampire, I was as good as dead.
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Carmen and I sat on opposite sides of a coffee table in the upstairs office of the mortuary, she in a swiveling desk chair, I in one corner of a leather sofa. She had made drinks: a cosmopolitan for herself, and a manhattan for me.
Carmen sipped from her cocktail. She smiled in an effort to push the worry from her face. “Leslie told me you’re still not feeling well.”
“You didn’t have to ask her. I could’ve told you.”
Carmen wore a black nylon jogging suit—sans bra—with the top unzipped to the bottom of her sternum. She put her glass down. “Y
ou look like hell. You need to shave and comb your hair. When are you going to snap out of this?”
It was a question I had asked myself and kept ignoring.
I touched my temple. The scar was almost gone, as were the wounds left by the fish nibbling on my skin. I put pressure on my left foot and felt the lingering throb where the bullets had chewed my leg. But it was remembering how the sun had cooked my skin that brought back the terror.
As vampires, our primordial fear was to be caught in the open and fried by the sun. We undead bloodsuckers have many powers, but God has damned us with one great weakness: our vulnerability to direct sunlight, the source of life on this planet.
The spider bite had fooled me. Its transient protection had made me complacent and that was what had nearly killed me. I could recover from bullet wounds but there was no undoing the memory of getting roasted by sunlight.
Carmen pushed the manhattan across the table toward me. The amber drink looked perfect, the best proof that we were civilized. Condensation frosted the outside of the beveled old-fashioned glass. Two maraschino cherries sat under the ice cubes.
I made no move for the glass. Maybe it was a good thing I wasn’t drinking. If I had a thirst, then I might fill the void inside of me with hootch and wind up homeless, like Earl back in Kansas City. Vampires are immune to many human afflictions but, unfortunately, alcoholism wasn’t one of them, and many vampires found themselves on skid row.
I remembered what a sip of that manhattan tasted like. Almost as refreshing as blood fanged from a neck. But I deserved neither.
Carmen reached over the table and took my left hand. “Look.” She held my hand, palm-side up. “See your aura? It’s milky and dim.”
I shook my hand loose and withdrew my arm. I didn’t need her to tell me my problems.
Carmen lifted a valise that stood on the floor beside her chair. She opened the valise and laid it on the coffee table. She withdrew a glass jelly jar and placed it between us. Inside the jar crouched a chartreuse-pine spider.
The Undead Kama Sutra Page 17
