Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  “You open that door just a little and you wake up a few hours or days later and you’ve done unspeakable things.” She grabbed the whiskey bottle and picked up the overturned tumbler. Her hands were shaking as she filled the tumbler. She took a sip and closed her eyes with a sigh, holding the edge of the glass pressed against her lips. “This stuff is the only thing that really stops it…well not really,” she said with a bitter shake of her head. “It’s still there inside me, my own dirty, little, secret alter-ego. I can smell it on me sometimes, like rotting meat.

  “I’m not drunk enough,” she said and tipped the glass up and emptied half of it in one swallow. “It doesn’t like it. The whiskey shuts down something in my mind, closes some doors. It can’t get through. It really hates it when I drink.” She waggled the glass at the camera. “That’s why I keep drinking. Then it’s trapped down there in the dark all by its shitty self.

  “I just gotta be careful now,” she raised the tumbler and squinted at its contents with exaggerated solicitude. “My ladies’ little pick-me-up,” she said. “But you don’t want her to pick you up too much, otherwise…Whoops!” she shouted and jerked her arm in a wide, drunken toast that sloshed whiskey over her hand. “She’ll let you down instead.” She shook her head. “And that’s not good. In fact, it’s fucking terrible because then all those locks fall off, and he jumps out like some insane Jack in the Box, Jack the Ripper. Then, the real fun begins!

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if I was unconscious, but when the son of a bitch gets possession, he keeps a little peepshow hole open and forces me to watch what he does with my body.”

  She looked away and fumbled after the pack of cigarettes that lay in the puddle of spilled whiskey on the table. She shook out five or six soggy cigarettes before finding a couple that were dry enough to smoke. She laid the one carefully aside, lit the other with her little gold lighter and drew the smoke in with a deep sigh. Then she crossed her legs, leaned back with one arm stretched out along the back of the sofa and smoked in silence. She tilted her head back, watching the lazy curls of smoke unravel towards the ceiling.

  “You want to know how I got this way?” she asked without looking at the camera. “It was an accident just waiting to happen. I accidentally walked in on Rielly and Nubis one day. They were in Rielly’s study, and I heard these hissing, growling sounds. When I walked in, I saw one of the wolf-headed Anubis standing over Rielly and by the sound of it, reading him the riot act. He sounded supremely pissed and was probably making the point by throwing off his wolf shape and taking on that seven foot tall Anubis wolf-headed, human shape instead.

  “I think I knew it all along,” she said. “I just didn’t want to know so I went on fooling myself, but there was no denying it anymore. Rielly had made a pact with the devil and opened the door to the Anubis, and we were all fucked…but mostly me.”

  30

  City of Dreams, Riding on Nightmares

  “I guess I must have made some sound because the Anubis spun around, dropped onto all fours and turned back into its wolf form, but it was too late. It knew I’d seen what I’d seen, and it told Rielly I had to go.” She drew a finger across her throat with a grin so wide it almost pulled her painted-on clown smile from ear to ear.

  Then she rolled her eyes and shook her head. “But good old Rielly didn’t want that, and he told them so. He wanted to keep his little, human sex toy.

  “Not to worry, they said, we’ll fix everything. You can keep your little Barbie doll. In fact, she’ll be better than ever. We’ll just remake her. Well, not really remake her, just infect her a little…or maybe a lot. She’ll be one of us, but she’ll still be yours. Won’t that be just perfect?

  “And the son of a bitch went along with it!” she hissed and grabbed the whiskey glass. Harry saw her hand tighten and her knuckles turn white with the strain. For a second, he thought she would either crush the glass or throw it at the camera. Instead, she forced her hand to relax into a soft caress. “My last defense,” she crooned with bitter irony and, for a second, Harry knew exactly how she felt as an old hot-flash of desire came rushing back as sharp and clear as if he’d just picked himself out of the gutter.

  “They used black ice to infect me with one of their kas,” Isis said. She looked up at the camera with black tear streaks of mascara smudged across her face and her kewpie doll eyes still showing too much white. “It’s one of their favorite ways of getting in,” she added. “Only it didn’t work out quite like they expected. From what I’ve heard, it doesn’t always turn out like they expect. We’re too alien, kind of like trying to force a square peg in a round hole. Their kas can’t always link up with our body-minds without something going haywire.

  “Lucky for me,” she said with forced bravado. “Or maybe Jake Lloyd’s daughters are just too crazy to make any crazier.” She smoked her cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs and releasing it slowly, blowing out smoke rings, like insubstantial life preservers that slowly unraveled as they floated away.

  “It’s completely mad you know,” she said at last. “They’re all completely mad, but that doesn’t matter. It still dreams its unspeakable dreams. It still wants me…still wants to use me, and if I’m not careful, if I’m not always on my guard or…” She lifted the whiskey glass in a silent toast. “If I don’t have a glass of my ladies’ little pick-me-up handy, it drags me down into that rotting cesspool where it lives at the bottom of my mind.”

  She looked down, leaned over, and began drawing wet swirls with her fingertip through the whiskey spill on the tabletop. “You can’t imagine what it makes me do,” she said without looking up. “The degradation, the obscenities beyond imagining…and in the beginning, that bastard Rielly was all for it, all the kinky, sadistic, sexual perversions beyond his wildest teenage wet dreams, and I was always ready, willing, and able to satisfy any of them and more.”

  She shook her head in despair. “Look at me!” she said. “An alien sexual predator’s wet dream made flesh! You can’t imagine…” The words trailed away, and she looked up at the camera with a look of such self-loathing that Harry had to look away.

  Suddenly, she leaned into the camera and spread her arms as if she was about to take a bow. “What you want is what you get, ladies and gentlemen!” she shouted like some freak show, carnival barker and smiled her painted clown smile. “And this is what Rielly got! This is what he let them make me into!

  “Well, not always and never completely,” she grimaced. “And when I can’t keep that piece of shit locked down in its cesspool where it belongs, there’s always this,” she said and lifted the glass of amber liquid and took a delicate sip.

  “It doesn’t like it,” she said in a whispered aside. She waggled the glass at the camera. “This stuff closes doors it would rather have wide open. Gotta be careful though, not too much, don’t want to get completely blotto.” She began to giggle. “Just enough to keep it blotto.”

  She looked around in momentary confusion. “I think I’m repeating myself,” she said and then waved it away. “It doesn’t matter, it’s worth repeating.” She pulled out the top of her T-shirt and shouted down into it. “You hear that you piece of shit!”

  The cigarette had burned down almost to her fingertips, and she took a last careful drag and mashed it out in the ashtray. She looked around the room wistfully. “They leave me alone now,” she whispered half to herself. “They don’t even watch me anymore. They think I’m one of them.

  “Even Rielly leaves me alone now. I think I disgust him. I think that’s why he lets me have as much of this as I want,” she said, tapping the glass of whiskey. “He knows it stops the thing inside me, the thing that disgust even him, the thing that makes him never want to touch me again.” She suddenly looked away, hiding her face from the camera.

  “And it was all so perfect in the beginning, a fairytale come true.” She turned back and faced the camera. There were tears in her eyes. “Oh, fuck that!” she yelled and wiped away the tears with a bitter
backhanded sweep. She picked up her drink and toasted the camera. “To Las Vegas, city of dreams, riding on nightmares!” She smiled her gruesome clown’s smile and took another careful sip of her drink.

  Then she picked up her last cigarette and her lighter and laid them carefully in her little girl’s polka-dot handbag. She straightened her T-shirt, got up very carefully and made a “follow me” gesture with her forefinger. She walked a little unsteadily on her high platform heels over to the sliding glass doors. “Come on, let me show you Prince Charming’s magic kingdom,” she said with a bitter laugh.

  She must have had the vampire slaved to her because the camera followed every movement as she slid aside the doors and stepped out onto a narrow balcony of black marble. She crossed to the low balustrade and leaned over and looked down. She leaned over further and further until her feet lifted off the floor and she was balancing right on the edge. A fraction of an inch more and she would go over. She hung like that for a minute or two with her legs spread, the whiskey glass in her hand, and her arms outstretched as if she was flying. The camera never moved. Then she wriggled back and straightened up and took a sip of her drink as the camera closed in and looked over her shoulder. “What do you think?” she asked with a wave of her hand.

  The view from the camera swung out and down in a long swooping glide like a hawk dropping from the top of a huge pyramid shaped mountain of black marble and tinted glass. Then it panned out over the city.

  It was a roughly circular layout that faded into the cultivated fields of the great plantations that stretched to a horizon of dark, tropical jungle. The sun was going down casting long shadows and glazing gold on the towering spires and domes. Here and there you could still see signs of the old tawdry glitter of a bygone age in the ruins of a castle, with one turret and wall still standing, and the fabled Statue of Liberty sagging to one side with her upraised arm and torch blown away to a ragged stump.

  The city looked like a cross between a Cecil B. de Mille biblical epic and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” with an old Flash Gordon comic book thrown in. There were a couple of huge megalithic stone palaces straight out of the old kingdom of Egypt, side by side with graceful colonnades of a Greek Parthenon, and what looked like a Roman coliseum.

  A broad river twisted through the heart of the city where no pre-Crash river had ever flowed before. It branched into what looked like old Venetian canals lined with Renaissance palazzos where brightly colored barges and galleys with painted sails seemed to float upon a golden haze with their rows of oars lifting and falling in a spray of glittering droplets. Harry could almost imagine Elizabeth Taylor reclining in luxury with her Richard Burton-Mark Anthony lover kneeling beside her in the prow. Were those really slaves rowing those barges? He wondered.

  Side by side with megalithic and classical architecture were a handful of futuristic needle thin spires, swaying gently like flowers in a summer breeze.

  “Do you see that?” Isis said, pointing towards the northern outskirts of the city and what looked like three enormous, stainless-steel obelisks. They were at least fifty stories high with thick doughnut-like brass rings that spiraled up each column and then seemed to flatten out towards the top and coat the pyramid forms on the tip of the obelisk in a thin layer of brass. This layer of brass, in turn, gave way to what looked like a jeweled, cobalt blue cap stone.

  Each of the obelisks rested atop squat, square, windowless buildings that looked like they’d been cast in a lead mold. The doughnut-like spirals disappeared into the roofs through what looked like enormous, circular, transformers. The whole installation was surrounded by a high gray wall that looked like it had been poured from a lead mold of its own.

  “Watch this,” Isis said as the camera focused on the three obelisks, then zoomed in so that the miles between seemed to shrink to just a couple of hundred yards. “I think I’ve timed it pretty close.”

  As they watched, the brass rings, spiraling up the side of each obelisk, began glowing red-hot like enormous toaster coils. Suddenly, the jeweled capstones flared into white-hot incandescence, and an enormous electrical discharge danced like lightning between them. A column of sparkling haze began to form within the circle of obelisks. The haze grew thicker and became a column of light that flickered like a neon malfunction. The light flickered faster and faster until suddenly the white-hot incandescence went out in the capstones, the lightning cut off in a sputter of thunder, and the column of light collapsed. Afterwards, the air shimmered with heat within the circle of obelisks as the glowing coils cooled down to a sullen smolder.

  “They bring them in just like clockwork,” Isis said from off camera.

  Harry wondered who was bringing in what, but before he could ask the camera refocused on Isis. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree,” she intoned. “Where Alph, the sacred river ran, / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea…” Then she smiled her gruesome smile, finished off her drink and threw the empty glass off the balcony. “So much for the value of a classical education.” She laughed.

  “What do you suppose Daddy would think of that?” she asked, jerking her thumb at the obelisks. She hopped up and sat on the balustrade with her back to the city. She swung her legs and kicked up her heels like a little kid. “Rielly built them a gateway so they can come here in their own bodies instead of having to ride in on someone else’s,” she said. “He can only bring in one or two at a time though.

  “I didn’t see what it was in the beginning. There was a lot I didn’t see in the beginning.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Too busy looking at Rielly, I suppose.”

  She began to root around in the little polka dot shoulder bag until she found the cigarette and the lighter she’d put there. She lit up and inhaled deeply. “Okay, I admit I was probably a little brain dead.” She gave a short, savage laugh that had nothing funny in it at all. “Okay, more than a little,” she admitted. “All my brain cells sank down into a nice warm spot between my legs. It made Las Vegas look like paradise, and I was sailing over it on my own little, pink cloud.” She sucked in a lung full of smoke and closed her eyes and held it for a long time.

  She let the smoke dribble out of her nose. “You know how Rielly remakes them?” she asked without opening her eyes. “If you cut through all the ritual mumbo jumbo, which I admit is pretty impressive, he just slits his wrists and lets his blood drip into a golden chalice of wine. Then, he lets one of those wolves slobber all over it, and presto-change-o, instant miracle!

  “He lets his followers kneel before him and imagine their ideal body, and drink his blood and wine…and the wolf slobber of course. It reminded me of the old Christian communion ritual, only this one really does transform its worshipper. There’s something in Rielly’s blood and I suspect, something more in the wolf’s slobber that makes it possible for Norma-genes to shape-shift into new, re-made, disease-free bodies.

  “I asked for and got a sample from the chalice and from Rielly’s blood and checked it out. They gave me a pretty well-equipped lab, by the way. That blood sample had some pretty weird protein structures floating around in it but nothing compared to what I was seeing in that chalice. I’m still not sure what I saw, but it looked like…Shit I don’t know what it looked like!” she said and jumped down off the balustrade.

  “I was getting everything I wanted but when I asked for a blood sample from the wolf, the doors slammed shut with a big “Off Limits!” sign. That should have told me something but…”

  Whatever she was going to say she waved aside and said instead, “Come on, let’s go inside before I throw myself over the side.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted over her shoulder, “Man overboard!” Then, she walked unsteadily back into the apartment. It looked like that last drink had almost tipped the scales.

  She sprawled on the couch again with her arm behind her head, her leg bent up, and her plastic platform heel hooked over the top edge of the coffee table so that the short skirt rode all the
way up her thighs. With her other hand she groped for the whiskey bottle and then looked for a glass. When she couldn’t find it, a look of momentary confusion crossed her face. Then she brightened “Oh yeah, I remember, “Man Overboard!” She picked up the whiskey bottle by the neck and waved it. “Tallyho!” She giggled and took a long drink from the bottle, wiped her lips with the back of her hand and carefully set the bottle on the table. She eyed it owlishly. There was maybe an inch left in the bottom.

  She took her foot off the table and stretched out on her side on the sofa. With her head resting on her upturned hand, she looked into the camera again. “You know, after everything that’s happened, after everything he’s done to me, I still love the son of a bitch. How lame can you get?” Her words were beginning to slur and a tear trickled down her cheek.

  Harry glanced over at Diana, trying to gage how she was taking this. She sat ramrod straight, her face impassive, staring at the far wall of the truck stop interior without once glancing at the holo-screen. She reminded him of someone at a funeral.

  “I was so blind. I didn’t even see the cracks in Rielly’s picture perfect world. I didn’t see the slaves. And they were everywhere. You couldn’t miss them unless you were blind and brain dead.” She grinned her hideous clowns grin. “That was me, blind and brain dead. I mean, how do you miss seeing all those people working the fields every day, riding grav-carts filled with sacks, serving me breakfast every morning.” She shook her head in disgust. “See what I mean?” She tapped the side of her head with her finger. “Brain dead.

  “I was out riding one day. I loved riding those beautiful, streamlined horses. They could run like the wind and all you had to do was think a thought at them and they reacted. I rode out of the city on one of those ruler-straight avenues. Nobody tried to stop me. In those days I had the run of the country, famous scientist, working directly with the boss, sharing his bed. I didn’t notice the looks of contempt behind my back.