One Foot in the Grave - The Halflife Trilogy Book I

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  “How long have you been working in radio?” Mooncloud asked.

  It was my turn to shake my head. “If you’re wondering about exposure to RF radiation, Doc, it’s a dead end. I didn’t start my current profession until this thing—whatever it is—necessitated my taking night work. Before that I taught English Lit. Eight years. Exposure to radical ideas comes with the territory but I doubt that’s the causative agent here.”

  Mooncloud consulted the second page on her clipboard: “Patient first complained of sensitivity to light eight months ago. Shortly thereafter the formation of epidermal carcinomas necessitated avoidance of all exposure to ultravi—”

  “I am familiar with my own medical history, Doctor; the treatments for skin cancer and subsequent diagnosis of pernicious anemia.” My temper was frayed like an old rope that had been stretched too far, too long. “A moment ago you used a word I haven’t heard before.”

  “Porphyria.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “It’s a genetic disorder,” Marsh explained, “a hereditary disease that affects the blood. Porphyria causes the body to fail to produce one of the enzymes necessary to make heme, the red pigment in your hemoglobin. You’re gonna love this—” he grinned wryly “— it’s the vampire disease.”

  I must have goggled a bit. “The what?”

  “The vampire disease. At least that’s what the tabloids have dubbed it.”

  I scowled: I was not amused by the idea of a “vampire disease” and any connection to the tabloids was something I liked even less.

  Marsh looked to Mooncloud for help, but she was preoccupied with her clipboard. “There was a paper done back in eighty-five by a Canadian chemist named David Dolphin,” he said. “He hypothesized that porphyria could have been the basis for some of the medieval legends of vampires and werewolves.” He held up a finger. “Extreme sensitivity to light: the most common symptom.”

  I shook my head. “And vampires can’t stand sunlight, right? Give me a br—”

  “It’s more than that, Chris. Some porphyria victims are so sensitive to sunlight that their skin becomes damaged and, in extreme cases, lose their noses and ears—fingers, too. In other cases, hair may grow on the exposed skin.”

  “Werewolves,” I muttered.

  Marsh added a second finger to the first. “Another symptom is the shriveling of the gums and the lips may be drawn tautly, as well, giving the teeth a fanglike appearance.”

  “Great. Anything else?”

  “Well, although it remains incurable, we have a few options in terms of treatment, now. But back in the Middle Ages there was just one way to survive. To fulfill your body’s requirements for heme, you had to ingest—drink—large quantities of blood.”

  I stared at Marsh. “Nice. How about garlic and crosses?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know anything about the religious angle, but garlic is a definite no-no.”

  “Really.”

  “Stimulates heme production. Which can turn a mild case of porphyria into an extremely painful one.”

  “And you’re telling me I have this ‘porphyria disease’?”

  “No,” Mooncloud said. “You asked what your symptoms were like. I said ‘porphyria’—which they are. Like. But porphyria is a genetic disorder and tends to be hereditary.”

  “Which is why all that inbreeding during the Middle Ages produced pockets of it,” Marsh said.

  “But since there’s no record of it in your family history,” Mooncloud continued, “it seems unlikely. Particularly since it’s shown up rather late in life for a genetic condition. Which also rules out hydroa and xeroderma pigmentosum. But I won’t rule it out until we’ve run a full spectrum of genetic tests. Maybe they can tell us what the blood tests didn’t.”

  “Okay.” I felt my temper ease back a couple of notches. “Let’s get started.”

  “Not here,” Mooncloud said.

  “Then where?”

  “Washington.”

  “D.C.?”

  She shook her head. “Seattle.”

  “Tomorrow should see mostly sunny skies with highs in the upper eighties. Currently, it’s seventy-three degrees under mostly cloudy skies and although the lunar signs are less than auspicious, I’d give little credence to them. . . .” I tapped a button and then closed the microphone as Creedence Clearwater Revival launched into “Bad Moon Rising.”

  “Clever.” Mooncloud had doffed her lab coat and was wearing a sleeveless shirt of blue cotton and tan slacks. Beaded moccasins completed the ensemble.

  I shrugged. “Radio—it’s what the teeming millions demand and expect.”

  “Teeming millions? In southeast Kansas?”

  “Teeming thousands,” I corrected.

  “At one o’clock in the morning?”

  “Hundreds. Teeming hundreds.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “How about teeming dozens. . . .” It wasn’t a question.

  “Hey, it’s a job—with benefits and insurance. Something I can’t afford to walk away from with a preexisting condition like this.” I sorted through stacks of compact disks for my next piece of music.

  “All the insurance in the world isn’t going to help you if the doctors don’t understand what they’re treating.”

  I stopped and leaned across a pair of dusty turntables. “Dr. Mooncloud . . . I appreciate the fact that you traveled all the way to Pittsburg, Kansas, to meet me and review my case. I suppose I should be flattered as hell that you’ve followed me to work and are sitting here in an empty building in the wee hours of the morning to try to offer me a special treatment program. Most doctors won’t even make house calls.”

  “I am not most doctors, Mr. Csejthe.” Her smile was pure Mona Lisa. “And you are not most patients.”

  “Patience and I seem to be mutually exclusive these days,” I said. “Can you guarantee me a cure if I come to Seattle?”

  “A cure? Only God guarantees cures and He’s a notoriously reluctant prognosticator. I can guarantee you a medical research team with experience in your kind of malady and a strong interest in your particular case. It won’t cost you a thing and I can guarantee you a job in the Seattle area—”

  “I’ve already got a job right here. And working the night shift is perfect when your skin suddenly develops an allergy to sunlight.”

  There was a muffled thump and the lights suddenly went out. The studio was an interior room with no windows to the outside: the darkness was sudden and complete. As was the silence. C.C.R. had gotten as far as “don’t go out tonight,” quitting as if someone had yanked amp and mike cords in perfect unison.

  Then the emergency lighting kicked in like flashlights of the gods, amplifying the shadows in Mooncloud’s frown to intimidating proportions. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “Gremlins.” Surprise eclipsed annoyance as I watched this professional woman—who had just spent the last forty minutes speaking of medical matters that bordered on twenty-first century science—make the same gesture my grandmother had used to ward off the “evil eye.”

  “A bird, actually,” I said, pulling the phone over and flipping through the pad of emergency numbers. “There’s a place on the utility pole, just thirty feet from the building, where the power lines junction with a transformer. When a bird picks that particular spot to roost: zap! One fried feathered friend and one powerless public radio station.”

  “You don’t have a backup generator?”

  “Darlin’,” I drawled, “this is Kansas and we’re public radio.” I fumbled the receiver to my ear and began punching out a series of numbers on the keypad. “We just call the power company and they send a guy over with a long pole who resets the circuit breaker—” I stopped, listening to the silence as I pushed the buttons. Breaking the assumed connection, I listened for a dial tone.

  “What sort of bird would roost at one in the morning?” she asked, making the gesture again.

  I smacked the receiver back into the cradle with a sigh. “Phone�
�s dead.”

  The emergency lights flickered. And, inexplicably, went out.

  “Um, they can’t do that,” I announced to no one in particular. The emergency lights were on individual battery sources: even if it were remotely possible for one to go out that quickly, they all wouldn’t fail at the same time.

  Ignoring the rules of probability, the emergency lights remained off-line, preferring some variant of the chaos theory, instead.

  “From ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggity beasties,” Mooncloud whispered.

  “Nocturnal volleyball teams.” I groped my way across the room in the darkness.

  “I beg your pardon?” I would have sworn that the disoriented quality in her voice was not entirely due to the sudden blackout.

  “Things that go ‘bump’ in the night.”

  “Marsh warned me about you,” she said.

  “Yeah? What did he say?”

  “That I could look up ‘attitude’ in the dictionary and find your picture.”

  I bit back a curse as I barked my shin on a tape console that had been moved out of its place for servicing.

  “That you?”

  “Of course it’s me!” I was trying to keep my temper from erasing my mental map of the studio’s layout. “The building’s locked up tighter than a drum. Who else would it be?”

  There was another sound, then, from the other end of the building. It took a moment to place it: the rattling of a metal security grate. “I stand corrected—someone must have left a door unlocked.”

  “Is there a back door?” Mooncloud’s voice was decidedly unsteady.

  “Doctor, there’s no need to panic. It’s probably one of the campus security guards checking the building. We’ll just sit here until the power is restored—”

  The security grating rattled again.

  And then it screamed.

  The sound of rending metal groaned and shrieked, echoing down the hallway like a slow-motion freight train braking in a tunnel. I fumbled for Mooncloud’s hand in the darkness, aiming for the luminous dial of her watch. “The back door’s this way, Doc. Last one out’s—”

  “I know,” she said grimly. “Far better than you, in fact.”

  I led her around the consoles and fumbled open the sliding glass door that led to the engineering section. Groping across a bank of demodulators and telemetry panels, we maneuvered through the stacks of equipment toward the back door. A workbench caught my hip, bruising it and turning us around so that I was disoriented for a moment.

  “Hurry,” she whispered.

  “A moment,” I hissed, waving my free arm around in search of a blind man’s landmark. I suddenly realized that the exit door was before me, a vague, grey rectangle in the deeper blackness. Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw a dim glow through the tiny window inset in the main studio’s outer door.

  “Don’t look back!” Mooncloud shouted, pushing at my shoulder. “Go! Go!”

  The glow was mesmerizing, intensifying, but I turned my attention to the fire door in front of us. I slapped the crash-bar but the door would not budge.

  “Break it down.”

  “What?”

  “Break it down!” she insisted.

  I was going to say something about the weight and immovability of a fire door, but the sound of exploding glass from the main studio derailed that train of thought. I whirled and kicked the door just above the bar: the metal panel buckled and the door erupted out of its frame, sailed over the concrete porch and steps, and went surfing across the rear parking lot.

  Outside, the night seemed preternaturally bright despite the fact that the streetlights that normally illuminated the north end of the campus were dark. A van—no, one of those mobile homes on wheels—was swinging around a concrete median and heading right for us. It didn’t seem to be traveling all that fast, which was fortunate as the driver had neglected to switch on his headlamps.

  Dr. Mooncloud was also moving in slow motion, looking somewhat like Lindsay Wagner in a grainy rerun of The Bionic Woman. It felt as if Time, itself, had perceptibly tapped its own fourth-dimensional brakes. I had to make a conscious effort to linger, just to keep from leaving her behind.

  As I slowed, Dr. Mooncloud seemed to speed up, her left hand withdrawing a hip flask from the pocket of her windbreaker. The RV was braking to a stop just ten feet away and, as she began a slow turn on the ball of her foot, another woman jumped out of the driver’s side of the vehicle. The driver closed the distance between us at an amazing speed and I was only able to catch random impressions: long, dark hair, though not as black as Dr. Mooncloud’s. Tall, athletic; she wore Nikes, blue jeans, and a tank-top that revealed arms like carved cherry wood. As she reached the foot of the steps, I could see that she was carrying a crossbow. . . .

  And suddenly everything seemed to snap back into realtime.

  “How many?” the driver bellowed, bounding up the stairs.

  “One.” Mooncloud turned back to face the doorway we had just passed through. “I only detected one.”

  “Get in the van,” the driver ordered, shouldering her way between us. “Give me fifty and then haul ass whether I’m back or not.”

  “Soon as I seal the door.” Mooncloud unstopped the flask and, as the newcomer disappeared through the doorway, poured the contents across the threshold. She took special care to form a solid, unbroken stream from post to post and then stuffed it back in her jacket. “Come on!” She took me by the arm.

  “What?”

  “Get in the camper!”

  “Camper?” I was still thinking in slow motion.

  She yanked me down the stairs and shoved me toward the recreational vehicle. “Now!”

  “I can’t abandon the station! The FCC—”

  A scream sliced the night air—an animal sound as far removed from a human voice as the previous scream of tortured metal. It was a sound that went on and on as we hurried toward the RV. Mooncloud yanked the passenger door open and then ran around to the driver’s side as I climbed up onto the bench seat. As she slid behind the wheel the other woman leapt from the building’s rear doorway, sailing over the stairs and landing on the ground below. As she crouched on the asphalt, there was a shattering roar that canceled out the screaming. A ball of flame rolled out from the doorway like an orange party favor, licking the air just a few feet above her head.

  Mooncloud threw the van in gear and brought it skidding around as the blaze snapped back through the opening.

  Before I could reach for the door handle the woman was springing through the open window to land across my lap.

  “Go!” she shouted, but Mooncloud was already whipping the vehicle in a tight turn and accelerating toward the parking lot’s north exit. The speed bump smacked my head against the roof of the cab. By the time my vision cleared, we were driving more sedately down a side street, the woman with the crossbow sitting between me and the passenger door. In the rearview mirror a pillar of flame was climbing from the roof of the old dormitory that housed the radio station.

  I shook my head to clear away the last of the planetarium show and gripped the dashboard. “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

  “It’s very simple, Mr. Csejthe,” Dr. Mooncloud said, pressing a button that locked the cab doors. “You are a dead man.”

  Chapter Two

  “This is kidnapping.” I was doing surprisingly well at keeping a reasonable tone to my voice. “Federal offense.”

  Not that I wasn’t grateful: I had apparently been rescued from . . . well . . . something. But now my so-called rescuers refused to stop the vehicle or return me to town.

  “I mean we are talking way beyond vandalism, destruction of property, assault—” I looked at Mooncloud “—impersonating a doctor.”

  “Obviously, you haven’t been listening.” This from the woman with the crossbow who had by now introduced herself as Lupé Garou. A slight French-Canadian accent seemed to authenticate her last name while the cloud of smokey, brown-black h
air and coffee-with-cream complexion made sense of her first.

  “Oh, I’ve been listening,” I said. “I’ve heard every word you’ve said since we left town. The problem is I’m just not buying!”

  “What part are you having difficulty with?” Garou asked.

  I sighed and leaned my forehead against the dashboard.

  “Be patient, dear,” I heard Mooncloud murmur. “This is all rather new to him.”

  “Okay, let’s start with me.” I sat back up, turning to Mooncloud. “You say that I’m a vampire. I’ll play along for a moment and pretend that there really are such things.” I opened my mouth wider and ran a finger around my incisors. “ ’Ook, ma; nah fahgs.” I withdrew the finger. “Can’t bite necks and suck blood without fangs.”

  Mooncloud was unfazed. “Mr. Csejthe, I did not say that you are a vampire. I was explaining that you appear to be in the transitional phase. A rather long and uncharacteristically drawn out phase, I might add.”

  Hoo boy.

  “Yeah? Well, how did I get started on this so-called phase? Where’s the bloodsucker who’s supposed to have bitten me?"

  “That’s what we’re in the process of trying to determine.”

  “But you are not being very cooperative,” Garou added.

  “I’m not being cooperative? I’m not being cooperative? I want to go home! Or back to the radio station. A crime has been committed, property destroyed—the authorities have to be contacted. Good God! They’ll think I was responsible!”

  Mooncloud shook her head. “You can’t go back.”

  Garou chimed in. “You’re going to have to face the fact that you are a dead man—both figuratively and literally.”

  “Look, lady, don’t threaten me! I’ve had it up to here and if you keep pushing—”

  “You’ll what?” she asked coolly.

  I stared back, holding her gaze for a long moment while I tried to think. “Wet my pants.”

  “What?”

  “I gotta go.” I turned to Mooncloud. “Or are you planning on driving all the way to Seattle without bathroom breaks?” The two women exchanged looks. “Oh great! You were! You really haven’t planned this out, have you?”