One Foot in the Grave - The Halflife Trilogy Book I

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  I whirled and felt across the top of the dresser for some kind of weapon. Nothing. I ran into the living room and ran my hands across my desktop. Pens, pencils, a note pad—my fingers curled around a ruler just as a body hurtled into mine from behind, smashing me into the desk. Now that hurt!

  Blindly, I flung my hand back with the ruler. I was rewarded with the twin sounds of impacted flesh and wood cracking like dry kindling. The blow had all the effect of smacking a rabid pit bull with a flyswatter. As my attacker backhanded me across the room, I grasped the other end of the measuring stick and wrenched it apart: now I had two pieces of wood with jagged, broken ends. I swung the longer piece back in my right hand, hoping that seven-plus inches of a grade school ruler was as effective a stake as any of the standard vampire-killing variety used in the movies.

  My opponent saw it coming and closed a slender but powerful hand about my wrist, effectively stopping its forward momentum. I brought up the other piece in desperation: it was barely more than four inches long. The vampire grabbed it with its right hand. Slowly, my wrists were forced together so that they could be pinned with one hand. But as they came into close proximity, one piece of the ruler crossed the other: I saw that I had a second chance.

  “In the name of God,” I cried, trying to remember the standard cinematic dialog for cruciferous encounters with the undead, “and by the power of His Son, Jesus Christ—” What came next? But already I felt a hesitation in the force exerted by my opponent. “—through this cross—” I struggled to hold the two pieces of wood at right angles to each other. “—I adjure you—” Was adjure the right word? “—begone!” I wasn’t too sure about the depth of my belief in a broken ruler at this particular moment, but you work with what you have. “Get thee hence!” I was counting on my assailant’s subconscious and Mooncloud’s theories that tied vampires and clergy together with Sigmund Freud. “Begone,” I said, “foul fiend!” There was less resistance in the vampire’s grasp, now. But was that because it believed in the power of Christian symbology? Or was it growing weak from laughter? What else was I supposed to say? I tried reviewing Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing to Chris Lee’s Dracula. “The power of God commands you!” Olivier’s Van Helsing to Frank Langella’s portrayal of the count. “The blood of Christ commands you!” Anthony Hopkins to Gary Oldham—but then my train of thought derailed on Hopkin’s performance as Hannibal Lector. So much for Coppola’s version of Dracula.

  “Am-scray!” I bellowed, thrusting the makeshift cross at my assailant’s face.

  Its grip faltered and the makeshift crucifix shot forward, striking shadowy flesh. There was a hissing, sizzling sound that was immediately drowned out by a blood-curdling shriek. The vampire released me, shoving me away, and whirled backward across the room. I raised the broken ruler again, smelling charred wood and burnt pork. The thing flinched away although more than ten feet now separated us. I moved toward it. “Hit the road, Jack,” I said.

  With an anguished moan it scrambled along the wall and threw open the door to the hall. The intrusion of light momentarily dazzled me and it took a moment to readjust my vision as it fled. It was smaller than my initial impression and wore black from head to toe like some sort of Navy SEAL ninja.

  There was no time to congratulate myself on this temporary victory: there was still the matter of automatic weapons to contend with and I doubted that a crucifix—even a real one of cast silver and blessed by the pope—would do much good against such. I ran back into the bedroom and grabbed the computer and my makeshift luggage. I exited my apartment almost as fast as my unfortunate intruder.

  And in my haste, I ran the wrong way.

  I reached a dead end, but my luck was not entirely wasted: there was a laundry chute built into this particular dead end. A burst of noise from the other end of the hall decided for me then and there: I opened the small trapdoor and dived down the chute.

  Luck was with me again: I fell three stories, but there was a huge pile of linens and such at the bottom to break my fall instead of my neck. I scrambled out of the mountain of sheets, pillowcases, and various odds and ends defying quick identification and sprinted through the deserted laundry room.

  Listening to the sound of running feet in the corridors one floor above, I descended another level and worked my way through a subterranean passage to the basement of the castle’s motor pool. There were a couple of close calls, but each time I ducked back around a corner and hid in the shadows until the voices or footsteps traveled on past.

  The garage area was empty when I arrived. There were nearly twenty vehicles parked and waiting and, for a moment, I considered breaking open the key box and making my getaway now. But good sense quickly prevailed. My original plan was to leave when most of the Doman’s people were looking the other way. Right now everyone would be on full alert and there was probably a reception committee from New York waiting right outside. No, my best bet was to do as Ancho had advised: hide myself, lie low, and wait for the right opportunity.

  The Winnebago that had delivered me was nowhere in evidence, but a bigger motor home was occupying three parallel berths at the back of the garage. I tested the door and found it unlocked: my luck was still holding. I slipped inside, closing and locking the door behind me.

  The recreational vehicle was spacious and roomy, basically a remodeled bus. Stowing my gear in a couple of the storage compartments revealed food stocks and supplies loaded and ready. The surprisingly sizable refrigerator held more than perishable foods and beverages; there was an ample supply of blood packets, as well. As I suspected, the bench seats lifted up to reveal sleeping coffins here, too. Not daring to risk any more time out in the open, I climbed into the one closest to the back of the bus and lowered the lid.

  Two more hours passed before sleep finally came. Two hours to wonder if Ancho was all right. Two hours to try to guess just what I should do next. And when. . .

  And two hours to wonder how I could invoke the talismanic powers of the crucifix when I was in the process of becoming a vampire myself.

  Chapter Twelve

  The bulwark erected by sleeping pills and exhaustion crumbles and THE BARN returns in full force. But memory falters, staggering like a badly spliced motion picture. Time has passed in this sequence. It’s as if missing episodes were run through the projector of my subconscious these past few days while Dr. Burton’s prescriptions capped the lens and switched off the lamp.

  But now the dream continues, like a horrific home movie full of washouts and jump-cuts—a herky-jerky chain of snippets in which time and events are linked like boxcars on a night train to nowhere.

  My arm aches where the needle was gouged, trenching my arm in search of an adequate vein. I keep averting my face away, but my eyes are ever drawn back to the tube carrying my lifeblood away. The cow continues to grunt and huff, sending quivers of distress through the bloody pool that soaks my shirt, permeates my jeans, and fills my shoes. It is a horrific sound that is eclipsed by a more dreadful noise: something else is stirring beside me in this pond of gore.

  “Just like ‘Nam,” the man with the knife is muttering. “Once a corpsman, always a cor—don’t move!” he screams at me.

  I feel life and strength ebbing from my body. It is more than the leeching of my blood. Here, in the darkened portion of the star map that covers the barn floor, a black hole has opened up and I feel as if my very soul is being drawn into a remote and empty universe.

  The hand that came out of the bloody stew and clamped down on my arm is growing stronger. I don’t want to see, I mustn’t see, but my head rolls over anyway.

  And I see.

  There is a skull surfacing from the visceral swamp, remnants of charred flesh clotting the bone and suggesting what might have been a face before the fire got at it. That tattered charcoal ruin rolls so that its melted features face mine from just a couple of feet away. The nightmare seems complete: it can’t be worse than this, there is no imaginable room for greater horror.

  A
nd then it opens its eyes and looks at me.

  I was dead.

  Even as my screams reverberated and died in the narrow confines of the grave, my hands were moving, beating at the walls, the ceiling of my coffin. I was dead and buried. Alone for eternity, smothered in darkness and the memory of something so terrible that I could only peek at it through the fingers of my dreams for a few seconds at a time.

  And suddenly, there was light!

  I looked up, half-blinded as the lid of my casket swung away, and tried to focus on a blurry face.

  Fuzzily, its mouth moved. “It’s Chris!” Suki’s voice said.

  “He’s here?” Lupé’s voice sounded farther away.

  An unfamiliar voice harrumphed: “A stowaway.”

  And then I heard the whine of tires on pavement beneath me. “Where am I?” I asked groggily.

  An old man with a mouthful of snaggled dentatia, wearing a rust-red beret, stepped into view, towering above me.

  “Colorado,” he said.

  So much for a clean getaway.

  Although no one seemed to see any need to turn around and take me back, a phone call was made and the Doman informed that I hadn’t been abducted after all.

  We were on our way to Kansas City, where the rogue vampire had last been sighted. More than sighted, actually: Mooncloud, Bachman, and Luis Garou had run him to ground there. Cornered, he had turned and fought back. Mooncloud had spent the past week in the hospital. The rogue was still loose and running. Lupé’s brother and Elizabeth Bachman were dead.

  As to the incursion on the Doman’s home ground. . .

  “Our best guess is another New York hit,” Suki said, explaining the little intelligence that had been assembled before they had departed that same day. “They came in and passed through quickly and were gone again without anyone making a positive ID.”

  “Vampires,” the old man said. “They took enough damage t’ kill humankinds and still walked oot.” The old man’s name was Angus, and he wasn’t really a man but a dark elf and a “haunt” of one of the lowland castles that bordered England and Scotland. More specifically, he was what was known as a “redcap,” the embodiment of ferocious warrior spirits that habitually dyed their hats in their victims’ blood.

  “Could have been lycanthropes, General.” That from a grim-visaged Lupé, who had just traded off the driving chores with Suki.

  He shook his head. “Och, not bluidy likely. They’d ha’ reverted to natural furms to make their escape.”

  “Was anybody else hurt?” I asked.

  “A few flesh wounds,” Suki answered from the front. “Nothing serious. Our folk are naturally resistant to the full effect of gunshot wounds, and these were pros on a specific mission and in a hurry. Once their presence was known and they had little likelihood of success, they blew.”

  “The worst casualty was Ancho,” Lupé said with an uncharacteristic smile. “They nearly had to hospitalize him.”

  I felt a stab of guilt. “He was protecting me.”

  “Tell it to Hinzelmann. After the gunmen ran off, the little hütchen grabbed his cane and started beating the salvani black and blue for breaking his elevator. Poor Ancho would have been better off shot.”

  Angus wasn’t smiling, however. His red eyes glowered at me as he spoke. “Ye say the one that attacked ye in yuir room was a vampire, as well?”

  I nodded. “Pretty sure. And, looking back, it was either a slightly built man or more probably a woman, now that I’ve had time to think about it.”

  “An inside job,” the redcap pronounced.

  “What makes you say that?” Lupé wanted to know.

  I caught a movement at the corner of my eye and turned to look. Someone had stashed a furry cow at the back of the vehicle where the sleeping area was cordoned off by sets of curtains. I looked back at Angus.

  “Because one of them knew where the lad’s rooms were. . .” The old goblin scratched his leathery cheek with a long, talonlike fingernail and seemed to take no notice of the beast. “ . . . and, as they were vampires from outside the demesne, whoever opened the back door had to invite them to cross the threshold, as well.”

  I looked again and saw that I was mistaken: it wasn’t a shaggy cow. It was a dog the size of a cow. And it was green.

  “Do ye ken wha’ this means?” the redcap said.

  “I have no idea,” I murmured, staring at the “dog.” It was huge—nearly the size of a two-year-old bullock—and had a tail that had to be at least four feet long that was coiled up on top of its back and hindquarters. Its feet were as big as my own, yet it made no sound as it moved forward a bit more.

  Suki finally noticed. “Luath,” she commanded, “go lie down.” The creature obediently backed up behind the curtains and disappeared.

  “It means there’s a traitor in the Doman’s household,” the goblin growled, “an’ that traitor could even be one of us on this bus right noo!”

  * * *

  The house was an imposing, multistory affair of stone and brick, replete with garrets, gables, turrets, widow’s walks, and a liberal infestation of gingerbreading. Even though the house was well preserved, the lawn neatly mowed, and the shrubbery clipped and groomed, my eyes were drawn to the black, wrought-iron fence adorned with hundreds of twisty points directed toward the night sky.

  “You didn’t tell me she was staying with the Addams Family,” I said.

  Lupé ignored me. I had initially chalked it up to distraction over her brother’s death. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  Suki turned to Angus. “Do you mind staying here with Luath, General?”

  “Och, I’ll keep the cu sith company, lass, whilst ye fetch the sawbones.”

  “There may be a few social amenities to attend to, sir. It might take a while.”

  “We’ll hold the fort.”

  We exited the bus and I followed Suki up to the front door where Lupé was already waiting.

  The doorbell didn’t sound like a foghorn, no gargantuan butler answered the door, and the owners didn’t look anything like the cartoon creations of Charles Addams. Susan Satterfield was a buxom redhead whose youthful enthusiasm and friendliness belied the fact that she was about to enter her fourth decade. Her husband, Jim, had curly, sandy-colored hair and a laid-back demeanor that was affable in its own way. In fact, he seemed deceptively serious-minded at first.

  It didn’t take long to discover that they were marvelous hosts, adept at making one feel comfortable and devoid of the need to impress anybody. They were children of the sixties with its inherent values, educated in the seventies, and successful in the eighties; all of which they had retained and brought with them into the nineties with the joie de vivre that comes from being well-centered and unpretentious. And nurtured a wee bit, Suki explained sotto voce, by having won the state lottery a few years back, as well.

  Like the poem “Vagabond House,” their home was a three-story treasure trove of antiquities, a museum of knickknacks from around the world, and a gallery of exotica. It was obvious before we reached the end of the hallway that the quick tour would take hours—if we were allowed to ask questions: days.

  We entered what would have been the drawing room in another, bygone age and found Dr. Mooncloud.

  She sat half-swallowed by an overstuffed armchair with her left leg in a cast and propped on an ancient ottoman of leopard skin and with legs of filigreed jade. Her head was bandaged and one eye still drooped a bit in a lake of purple and red flesh. There was a surprising resemblance to one of the African ceremonial masks that adorned the wall behind her.

  She was not alone. A pale man in a dark suit sat in a caneback chair adjacent to hers.

  “Lupé! Suki! Chris!” She struggled to rise, but it was clearly a lost battle before it even began. The girls converged, hugged. I hung back and smiled. And wondered.

  Wondered about Bachman’s and the general’s belief that there was a turncoat in the Doman’s household. Did that put the finger of suspicion on Lupé since Moonc
loud was out of town and essentially out of commission at the time of the raid? Or had she arranged things long distance?

  Wondered if they were both guilty but not particularly good at this double agent business as both had suffered heavy losses this past week.

  And wondered if this was a good time to make a run for it.

  “And you are Mr. Csejthe?” The pale man rose from his chair and extended a hand so white as to be practically indistinguishable from his shirt cuff. “My name is Smirl. Dennis Smirl.” His hair was dark, shot with strands of silver, and I figured him for the mid to late forties.

  I shook his hand. “I’m Chris Csejthe.” I also noticed his impeccable tailoring and how it came surprisingly close to concealing the bulge under his left armpit.

  “Mr. Smirl is from Chicago,” Mooncloud said. The pale man suddenly had Suki’s and Lupé’s full attention.

  “Perhaps we should all sit down,” Susan Satterfield suggested.

  “Something to drink?” her husband offered.

  It was an interesting collection of stories we had to tell each other.

  Smirl explained how the New York enclave had been interfering in Chicago’s business dealings these past two years and how there were rumors of a new Doman running affairs in the Big Apple. Lupé followed up with recent attacks on Seattle, and then Mooncloud and I took turns trying to define my part in the current equation. Which brought us around to the Kansas City assignment and why we were all here.

  “We tracked it for several days, never quite catching up to it,” Mooncloud said. “It’s fast. But the reason we were having trouble isolating a pattern and narrowing the search grid turned out to be handlers.”

  “Handlers?” Smirl asked.

  “Black limo and at least three people assisting. New York boys. We also picked up some information on a separate day team operating out of the old HoJo up on the bluff, above the river. Apparently they were investigating the whereabouts of one Victor Wren, but we were spread too thin to check them out beyond that.”