One Foot in the Grave - The Halflife Trilogy Book I

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  I felt a peculiar prickling sensation at the nape of my neck. “Who’s Victor Wren?” I whispered.

  Mooncloud shrugged.

  “Handlers complicate a trackdown,” Lupé was saying. “A rogue generally leaves a trail because it’s new to the undead lifestyle . . . has no resources. . . .”

  “The handlers have been covering the spoor,” Mooncloud added. “Eliminating whatever bodies may have accumulated—and, believe me, there will have been bodies with this one.”

  “What is a rogue doing with handlers?” I wanted to know.

  “This one’s different.” Mooncloud’s face looked haunted. “We’re not tracking a newly created undead this time. This one has been a vampire for a long time. Maybe a very long time. I think New York provided handlers because this one isn’t quite human.”

  “You sure about the New York connection?” Smirl asked.

  Mooncloud nodded. “I recognized my opposite number.”

  “Dr. Cutler?” Lupé was incredulous. “But he’s not a field operative, he’s strictly research!”

  “Apparently he’s doing some field research this time around.” Mooncloud shifted her cast to a more comfortable position. “I didn’t recognize the other two, but Luis identified them as vampires.”

  “What happened to my brother?” Lupé’s voice was calm but anguish leaked from her eyes.

  “It was two nights after we finally tracked them to the old River Quay area. They were using an abandoned warehouse for a nest.”

  “Certainly fits the New York MO,” Smirl murmured.

  “Luis had the scent. I was loaded down with the whole AV rig and packing two crossbows, cocked and ready. Ditto for Liz—minus the rig, of course. She was supposed to hang back—wait for my signal. I was waiting for Luis to get in position. Something went wrong. I don’t know what she saw from the other side—maybe they were tipped off, heard us or something—but she went crashing in before either of us were ready.”

  She shook her head. “It was a mess. Cutler’s human, so we didn’t waste time on him. Luis took down a vampire and I shot another and the rogue.”

  Suki leaned forward, an expression of uncharacteristic intensity on her face. “How did you know that it was the rogue?”

  “The other two wore suits and—I don’t quite know how to say this—looked normal. But the other guy . . . whoo! He was a nightmare! Tall, thin, almost spidery—and dressed in black from head to toe. His face was, well, distorted in some odd way. He looked feral—wild, and barely restrained—and, in the brief opportunity I had to observe him, I got this uncanny feeling that his handlers had their hands full.”

  “But you shot him?” Lupé demanded more than asked.

  Mooncloud nodded. “Could have sworn the bolt caught him square in the chest. He went down like he’d been poleaxed. A moment later, he was back on his feet, holding the bloody bolt in his hand. He started for me, but Luis finished the first vampire and intercepted him. The other one had Bachman down. I didn’t see her discorporation because he was blocking my view and I was a little distracted at the time, trying to recock the first crossbow. The next thing I knew, he was up and coming at me. Knocked me down before I could get the quarrel in place. If it hadn’t been for Luis. . .” She shivered.

  “Tell me about Luis—?” Lupé was unwavering in her pursuit of her brother’s fate.

  “The rogue killed him,” Mooncloud said simply. Only there was something that wasn’t simple in the way that she said it.

  “How?” Lupé was relentless.

  “It doesn’t matter how. He died bravely. He saved my life. And we must decide how to proceed from here.”

  “No!” Lupé’s fist came down on the chair arm and there was a sharp report as wood cracked from the force of the blow. “I want to know how he was killed! It is not so easy to kill a werewolf and I want to know if they were carrying!”

  I looked at Suki.

  “Silver bullets,” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Mooncloud said. By now it was obvious to all of us that she was being evasive.

  “Then, how did he die?” The blood from the Latino side of Garou’s ancestry was in full evidence now.

  “I don’t really think that this is a good—”

  She was on her feet. “I will look at his body and learn for myself, then!” She turned and took two steps.

  Smirl was up and had her by the arm with surprising swiftness and she swung around, growling. The metamorphosis had begun and, as she raked her fingernails across his face, they were already becoming claws. He refused to release her arm, even though the left side of his face was hanging down to his collar in ribbons.

  “Ms. Garou,” he said quietly, seeming to take no notice that a portion of his jawbone was visible through the spaghetti spill of flesh. Curiously, there was no blood yet. “Dr. Mooncloud has her reasons for sparing you the details.”

  “I don’t want to be spared the details!” she snarled, peach fuzz matting into dense hair along her arms and up her throat. “He was my brother! Do you understand? I have to know! I can’t walk away and go on with the rest of my life not knowing!” Her voice became more guttural as her face began to elongate. “I’ve got to know!”

  “Sit down and promise me,” Mooncloud demanded, “that you won’t try to look at your brother’s remains.”

  “Sit down,” Smirl echoed mildly. The muscles in Lupé’s captive arm bunched and the shoulder seam parted in her shirt but the man from Chicago refused to relinquish his grip. “You’re right: you have a right to know. And so I will tell you. But you will sit down. You will control yourself. And you will have to be content with what she chooses to tell you because you will want to remember your brother the way he was. Not the way he is now.”

  Slowly, she lowered herself back down into her chair. As he released her arm, her skin resurfaced amid the dissolving fur and her teeth retracted back into smooth, white uniformity. Smirl reached up, gathering the shredded flesh into his fingers, and pushed it back into the gaping wound in the side of his face. There was still no blood, and the white strips of skin and tissue seemed to melt back into a contiguous whole like a sculpted expanse of pale vanilla pudding starting to set. He sat back down, and it was as if his face had never been touched.

  I leaned over and murmured to Suki: “Vampire?”

  “No,” she whispered, “why do you ask?”

  I shrugged. Maybe I’d pursue it later. Maybe I’d decide to forget the whole thing and go get quietly drunk.

  “Lupé. . .” Taj Mooncloud took her hands in her own, “there is no way to mince words and still satisfy you on this. The rogue—it tore your brother apart.” It was painfully clear that she meant this in the most literal sense.

  I got up as Lupé began to cry and wandered to the far side of the room. There were display cases containing shrunken heads, a monkey’s paw, a purported unicorn horn, helmets, keys, skulls, charms, amulets, totems, talismans, and other occult and exotic bric-a-brac. There was even an honest-to-God Egyptian mummy.

  “Imhotep.”

  I turned and looked at Jim Satterfield, who was standing at my shoulder. “Excuse me, but you’re what?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “Im-ho-tep. We named him after the original mummy—the one in the old Boris Karloff flick.”

  “I thought it was Kharis or something like that.”

  “Those were the later movies. Kharis and his deathless love for the Princess Anaka. Lon Chaney, Jr. did two or three in the forties, maybe the early fifties, as well. He’s remembered for the Wolf Man but I think he was an even better Mummy.”

  What could I say to that? “A boy’s best friend,” I mused.

  “It’s authentic,” he said, looking as if he should be wearing a cardigan and smoking a pipe. “We have several consignments of Egyptian antiquities. That bowl right there contains genuine Tanis leaves that we handpicked ourselves in San Al-Hajar Al-Qibliyah, the ancient site of Pi-Ramesse, in the Egyptian delta.”

  “
Tanis leaves?”

  “For the elixir of life. You know: three leaves to keep the heart beating, nine for movement—never more than that—and boil them in the sacred urn. . .”

  “The sacred urn.”

  “Right. And over in that display case is the Scroll of Thoth.”

  “Scroll of Thoth?”

  “Containing the magic words that enabled Isis to raise Osiris from the dead.”

  “Oh, that Scroll of Thoth.”

  “It’s an authentic copy. The one next to it is an authentic translation of the text.”

  “An ‘authentic’ copy?”

  He nodded. “Got it from a dealer in Egyptian antiquities.”

  I squinted at the spidered calligraphy. “Oh, Amon Ra! Oh! God of gods,” I read. “Death is but the doorway to new life. We live today, we shall live again. In many forms shall we return. . . .”

  “Enough.” Taj Mooncloud was suddenly by my side, wobbling on her crutches, one hand grasping my arm.

  I looked at her. “What?”

  “You don’t know what you’re messing with. Leave it alone.”

  I looked at the scroll. I looked back at her.

  “It contains Words of Power,” she murmured.

  I bit back a smile. “For heaven’s sake, Taj, it’s only a tourist’s souvenir,” I said in low voice. “There must be thousands of these things sold every year—read by thousands of people.”

  “Ordinary people,” she qualified. “In the hands of a shaman this could be something quite different.”

  “Oh, and am I a shaman, now?”

  “We don’t know what you are. You have your own confluence of power. Perhaps you could trigger other Powers. Perhaps not. It is best to err on the side of caution and let sleeping gods lie.”

  There was no point in arguing. I helped Mooncloud back to her chair. The scroll had to be a second-rate souvenir. Likewise the mummy. Even though it looked genuine, Egypt hadn’t permitted the sale or export of its cultural treasures or antiquities for many years. It was highly unlikely that a midwest couple living in the Kansas City suburbs could be harboring a genuine Egyptian mummy. But then I would have calculated higher odds against said couple hosting a werewolf, a semi-vampire, and a Chicago gangster whose real name was probably Gumby, under the same roof.

  Behind me I heard Mrs. Satterfield saying: “Are you sure you want to leave so soon? We have extra beds. . . .”

  “We’re wasting moonlight,” Suki said as I turned around.

  Mooncloud had just sat down and was once again struggling to leverage herself out of her chair with her crutches. Smirl stood and helped her up. “I appreciate your hospitality and handling the arrangements for Luis’s remains. But we dare not let the trail grow colder by another night.”

  Jim Satterfield nodded. “Is there anything else we can do to help?”

  “Cross your fingers,” answered Mooncloud.

  “Light a candle,” Suki added.

  Get me outta here, I thought.

  We drove to the abandoned warehouse on the riverfront. Smirl followed in a long black limousine. He sat in the back where silhouettes suggested at least one additional passenger. I only caught a glimpse of the driver: it was enough to convince me that I didn’t want a closer look.

  Smirl’s “people” had already tossed the premises so we weren’t expecting any additional clues, save one.

  “All right, ye great slobberin’ beastie,” the general was prodding the cu sith down the rear steps of the bus, “it’s time fur ye to earn yur not so inconsiderable keep.”

  The cu sith yawned, displaying teeth that might have coerced A. Conan Doyle to rename his story “The Chihuahua of the Baskervilles.” Mooncloud produced a scrap of black fabric that had been left behind in Luis Garou’s grasp.

  The redcap held it to the green dog’s snout. “Here now, Luath: get the scent, now. Have ye got it, lad?” Luath sneezed and wagged his ropelike tail, causing us all to scatter. “Right, now!” the old haunt shouted. “Hunt, laddie! Bring it to ground!”

  The Faerie beast raised its emerald jaws to the sky and made a great baying sound that put city-wide disaster sirens to shame. He followed that with a second that was even louder than the first. I had my hands over my ears before the third bay sounded, but could distinguish no lessening of the volume. I took my hands away from my ears as he lowered his muzzle and could hear the tinkle of broken glass coming from all over the neighborhood.

  Then Luath leapt forward, unfolding into a run. He vanished into the darkness of the night.

  Suki appeared in the doorway of the bus as we heard the tattoo of massive paws whisper away into the distance. “All aboard or we’re gonna lose him!” We all piled into our vehicles. As the bus pulled out again, the limo turned on its lights and followed behind us.

  Suki drove, keeping one eye on the CRT display that tracked the homing device in the cu sith’s collar. Lupé and the general opened one of the locked closets and were checking out a veritable storehouse of weapons. There were regular crossbows and crossbows with double and triple bow/barrel compositions. There were firearms of more recent design—until you studied them closely and noted deviations in the standard configurations. Some weapons appeared to be the latest in state-of-the-art, while others looked like they’d been ancient before Angle met Saxon.

  “The head,” the general said, hefting a broad-bladed battle-ax, “a stake through its heart and removing its head from its shoulders shuid do the trick.”

  “We’ve never had to do that before,” Lupé said. “A stake through the heart has always been sufficient.”

  Mooncloud stared out the window at an unpleasant memory. “I could’ve sworn I nailed this thing’s heart. When it got up, I assumed I’d missed. But if I didn’t. . .”

  “We could be in a whole lot of trouble,” Lupé mused.

  “There are myths and stories that suggested other means of disposal,” I said.

  Mooncloud nodded. “Too bad we can’t go back to Seattle and spend a few days in the Doman’s library researching this.”

  “Maybe we don’t need to.” I got up and retrieved my laptop computer. “I’ve scanned a number of books and reference articles onto the hard disk. Unfortunately, I’ve had little time to organize it much less do any actual cross-referencing. It may take awhile to come up with something pertinent.”

  “Then you’d better get started,” Lupé said.

  Even with a week’s head start, our quarry probably hadn’t gone far.

  Judging from the trail that the cu sith was following, they had spent at least three more days in the Kansas City environs before heading south on Highway 69. Luath circled three different motels between the river and the intersection of 435 and 69 South, indicating our targets had spent time there. Whether they spent more than one day/night cycle in any or all of those places was anyone’s guess.

  There didn’t seem to be much point in spending more time in checking them out: they were already gone and, as Suki had already said, we were wasting moonlight. We left K.C. behind, following the cu sith’s collar tracer, and hit pay dirt shortly thereafter.

  “Gonna see daylight in a little less than two hours,” Suki called from the front of the bus.

  I had volunteered to spell someone on the driving chores but was told that my top priority lay with the computer texts and researching alternate dispatching techniques.

  Mooncloud laid a hand on my shoulder. “If you’ve come across anything helpful so far, now would be the time to share it with us.”

  I scowled at the screen. “The deeper I go, the more complicated it gets. So far, I’ve identified over thirty different vampire legends from more than a dozen different countries, most requiring different rituals of protection and warding and separate means of extermination.”

  “Can you isolate any common threads? The next time we run into that thing we need a better plan than the ones we’ve used in the past.”

  I opened another file on the computer’s display. “See fo
r yourself.”

  She scanned my short list. “Stake through heart or navel—must be driven with a single blow. Decapitation—consecrated ax or gravedigger’s shovel. Complete immolation. Bury face downwards. . .” She shook her head. “The rest are just techniques for warding, delaying, or discouraging vampires.”

  “You asked for the common antidotes. I’m still compiling data on the more unusual vampire legends.”

  The general leaned over my shoulder. “Make yur lists, laddie, but I’m bettin’ on number two, here.” He thumbed the edge of a nasty-looking halberd that seemed to materialize in his hands like magic. “This beastie may not have a heart where we’d expect it, but there’s verra little guesswork when it coomes to taking a head from atop its shoulders. It’ll no be gettin’ oop again once’t Axel-Annie, here, has barbered it proper.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Angus—” Mooncloud stared out the windows at the rushing dark “—but, just the same, I think I’ll break out one of the flame-throwers. For luck.”

  “He’s slowing down,” Suki called from the front of the bus.

  The rest of us crowded forward to watch the blip on the monitor.

  Mooncloud frowned at the darkness beyond the reach of the headlights. “What’s the map say?”

  “We’re in Miami County,” I said. “Should be Louisburg up ahead.”

  “What’s it like?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t really know. Small town, maybe a couple thousand residents. I’ve never spent any time there. Drove through it once.”

  We turned off on State Route 68 and slowed down as we headed east into Louisburg.

  The general leaned toward the screen. “He’s stopped.”

  “About two miles ahead,” Lupé said, studying the readouts. “Maybe less.”

  “Want in a little closer?” Suki asked.

  Lupé shook her head and began unbuttoning her shirt. “Give me a minute and then stop the bus.” She walked to the back of the bus and behind the curtain, loosening her clothing as she went. A moment later a great grey and black wolf emerged from the sleeping area and trotted up the aisle.