“You always try to put the best possible interpretation on things, don’t you?” he asked, turning back to the pit.
“Not lately,” I said, thinking about my recent deplorable behavior with Max. I wasn’t used to tithing at the Church of Eternal Guilt, but I really did owe him an apology. Someday. “But usually…yes. I am as optimistic as a reasonable IQ will allow.”
“I’m not.” His smile was charming. Perfectly square and white teeth, full sensual lips. The expression was inappropriate under the present circumstances, but very attractive.
After a moment I said, “I know. I studied you in school. Did you know that they call you Bitter Bierce?”
“Yes. And the name was earned.” Ambrose got up and walked down to the water where he spent a moment washing his hands and arms. His actions were casual and unhurried. “I applaud your optimism, my dear, but you will have noticed that these are not reasonable circumstances. I suggest that caution and a degree of discretion might be in order for the next little while.”
Caution and discretion. Translation: Don’t go off babbling hysterically about seeing zombies. Like I needed to be told this.
“You’re not worried about disease?” I asked as he came back to sit beside me. The water sparkled on his blindingly white chest. Paleness usually suggested ill health, but not in his case. He looked more like an alabaster god.
“No. I’ve already had it already. In Mexico. I’m immune.”
“You’ve had…zombie-ism?”
“A strain of it. And it isn’t so much a disease as a condition brought about by…ritual. Usually.”
“Do you think maybe you could tell me what’s going on?” I asked finally. My voice was meek, not at all its normal demanding self.
“I can take a stab at it. Part of it is guesswork, of course.”
“The zombie part?”
“No. That I know about. The only question is what a zombie is doing in Fiji, on my island.”
“Maybe that’s your only question, but I have tons!” I growled. “This is not normal for me, so you’re going to have to cut me some slack.” My verbal defense mechanisms were kicking in. I needed to shield my brain with something and words were all I had. They were all I’d ever had.
“I’m certain you do have questions, and I assure you that these are far from normal circumstances for me, either. Not these days at any rate.” Those eyes studied me. For the first time I noticed that they were truly black. I could see no pupil in the black of the iris. There was also a strange gold tracery of what looked like scars across his chest. I hadn’t noticed them before and couldn’t imagine what caused them.
He continued, “I’m just not certain how to begin answering them. It’s all going to sound more than a bit strange and improbable, you know.”
“Just start at the beginning,” I urged, forcing my eyes back to his face. “And keep talking until I stop you.”
Ambrose nodded.
“I was very ill when I left for Mexico,” he began. “The doctors told me I had only weeks left to live and I decided that if I was going to die, I preferred it be in a good cause, so I went into Mexico to join the revolution. It was there, in Pancho Villa’s camp, that I met a Dark Man, a brujo—a witch doctor—who haunted the battlefields, gathering up the wounded and even the recently dead. I found out later that his name—one of his names—was Johann Dippel.” He paused somewhat expectantly, and I felt an itch begin deep in my brain. I couldn’t identify it yet because my mind was still rather taken up with the walking corpse thing and disinclined to be distracted by a search for historical trivia.
“Dippel. Should I know this name?” I asked, unable to let it go completely.
“Not necessarily.” He shrugged. “Perhaps you would have read about him under the name of Doctor Xavier Bichat. Anyhow, once he found out who I was, he offered to cure me—to rid my body of all disease if I helped General Villa. I was agreeable since that was what I had planned to do anyway. And dying people will grasp at straws of hope, however unlikely or tenuous. Besides, if the procedure killed me, it would only be depriving me of a few pain-filled days. What did I have to lose? Nothing, I thought.” “I see. And it worked?” “Oh yes. It worked and then some.” I closed my eyes and lay down in the hot sand, not caring that it was getting in my hair. I wriggled until it was comfortable and the heat began to seep into my back.
“I woke up after the drugs and electrocution in Saint Elmo’s fire—”
I cracked open an eye and squinted at Ambrose. “Electrocution? Wait, wait, wait. Johann Dippel. I remember now. He was the real Doctor Frankenstein, wasn’t he? The one who was killed by the peasants and whose castle was burned? I’ve read about him. I thought about writing on him for a term paper but there wasn’t enough material. And Bichat—wasn’t he the one experimenting with animating corpses taken from the guillotine during the French Revolution? They executed him, didn’t they?”
“That’s the one. Only Dippel wasn’t killed quite dead enough at the time—either time. The destruction of his body, his monsters and his castle was incomplete and he was able to find his way to his lab and patch himself back together.” Ambrose looked over at the fire pit. His face was hard. “That’s the trouble with leaving this job to amateurs. They don’t destroy the bodies.”
“It…it figures though that he survived. Pure evil wouldn’t just die without a fight.” I had to say something and this was all I came up with. I did not look at the fire pit. The thing would have to burn for a long time before it would improve in appearance—in other words, become ash. I didn’t doubt that it would, though. Ambrose seemed to know what he was doing.
“Not usually. Evil often lives on long after good has given up and quit the battlefield.” I could feel him staring at me again, perhaps gauging my level of repressed hysteria. I think my response puzzled him, but I had learned long ago to moderate my emotions or risk blacking out. My heart could not pump an adequate supply of oxygenated blood to fuel full hysteria.
“Go on,” I urged, now reluctantly caught up in this improbable, but I suspected entirely true, story. “You woke up from electrocution.”
“Yes, and this Dark Man told me that I had become immortal, that he had improved on his process over the years and I was now virtually indestructible. Though I was lying there with the mark of the lightning that should have killed me—did kill me—etched on my chest in a golden ceraunograph, I didn’t believe him.” He shook his head. “Once the first instants of pain passed I felt better, fabulous even…but immortal? I laughed at him as he talked to me about my new state, and then got dressed and left the plateau where he had chained me down for the procedure. The Dark Man said nothing else, just returned to camp, packed his bag and went away with a small platoon of…zombies. Though, at the time I thought of them only as wounded soldiers who had had miraculous recoveries.” Ambrose shook his head. “He was smiling when he left, enjoying a great joke. That damned grin has haunted me ever since. It pleased him that he had told the truth and I failed to believe him.” “Obviously he was right about you, though.” “Yes. I continued to deny it all through the war, but evidence began to pile up. There were severe injuries that healed too quickly when they shouldn’t have healed at all. I never got sick, though I passed through cities where there were epidemics of contagious disease. Pancho Villa eventually shot me when we argued about using zombies—one had bitten me and I broke its neck in a fit of rage—and he dumped my apparently dead body in a shallow grave and left me. But I didn’t die, though that was the end of our uneasy association. Never say I can’t take a hint when it’s delivered with a bullet.” He smiled fleetingly
“One day, after waking up on a beach after a shipwreck, somehow alive though everyone else on the boat had drowned, I realized that I had exceeded every law of probability and even luck. I could no longer pretend that my good fortune in matters of health was mere coincidence. The Dark Man’s treatment had done more than rid me of disease. I wasn’t aging and I had become something a
kin to immortal.” He paused. “Obviously new plans had to be made for a postresurrection life. I understood that I couldn’t return to my family and friends and I would have to become someone else.”
Immortal. Resurrection. He really meant it. As a supposed Christian I was trained to believe in resurrection to an eternal life. But it was meant spiritually, metaphorically. The modern-day Christian isn’t like an ancient Inca or Egyptian. We don’t believe in literal resurrection. So we don’t do anything like make travel arrangements to the next life. We try to be good enough that our souls aren’t turned away at the Pearly Gates, and of course our relatives dress us nicely for the last hurrah with the candles and flowers—but that’s it. Immortality, the kind Ambrose was speaking about, wasn’t something we were raised to accept. In fact, as someone born in the late twentieth century I had an obligation to deny what he was saying. Only, I couldn’t. There was a walking corpse twitching on the barbecue and a man more than a century old sitting beside me that contradicted my beliefs about the laws ruling the physical world.
“What did you do then?” I asked.
“I decided to put his theory to the test, of course.”
“How?” I asked, opening both eyes.
“I killed myself again.” He grinned once more.
I pestered him for a more complete answer, but he refused to say anything else about it.
He said instead, “I’m stronger now than I ever was. Faster. Much faster. And I get faster and stronger each time I resurrect in the lightning. All my senses have been heightened—especially hearing,” he remarked. “I can stand outside the kitchens and hear a bottle break and I can tell you if it was made of clear glass, or green, or brown. I know it sounds crazy, but colored glass makes a different noise when it cracks. Regular glass breaks at about three thousand miles per hour. The colored glass is slower.” He looked at me. “I can hear your heart too. It’s broken. You have a flaw in one of the valves, don’t you?”
This bit of knowing, after all the rest, shouldn’t have disturbed me. But it did. I didn’t want anyone to know of my flaw, my literal and metaphorical broken heart that had caused my parents to reject me.
Nature designed the human heart with four chambers in order to regulate our blood pressure so we don’t blow out the delicate veins and arteries in our lungs when the blood drops around for oxygenation. Put another way, my heart was only about eighty-five percent efficient at controlling that pressure—as long as I didn’t have one of those inconvenient episodes of ventricular tachycardia, which hardly ever happened now that I was an adult and carried Vasopressin. (Ah, better living through chemicals indeed. Did you know that Vasopressin causes pairing and mating in voles and pigs? I have yet to run into a lonely vole or hog, but have always thought that it might be rather embarrassing for everyone present, and thus have avoided petting zoos.)
Day in and day out, going to the market, picking up the dry cleaning, reading research material at the library, this flaw didn’t matter much. I had a feeling it might matter now, though. This knowledge frightened me a bit and made me feel defensive and angry about my limitations.
“I have a minor prolapsus of the mitral valve,” I admitted, proud that to my ears my voice showed none of my annoyance. Not that it mattered; he could probably hear annoyance anyway.
“But you’re feeling better now? Less faint?” he asked, and I realized that I was. The feeling of pricks and tingles in my arms was gone too.
“Yes…. Sorry, I don’t mean to belabor this, but just to be clear, you’re saying that you are immortal? Johann Dippel did something to you with electricity, you died, were reborn, and you can’t be killed?”
He hesitated.
“As good as immortal,” he finally answered. “Maybe if I stood right on top of an atomic bomb or an erupting volcano, or dropped myself in a tree shredder—though I’d hate to try that and find out it didn’t work…. I thought I’d found a way out after I was bitten by a…a werewolf, let’s call her. It happened down in Panama in ’thirty-two after Amorosa passed on. There were rather a lot of them around then, though they have pretty much died out now with all the other wild species in the region. I may be the last of their kind.”
A way out. A werewolf. I didn’t like the sound of either of those things, and decided to put off any questions about his state of mind until another day. If he was still suicidal, I didn’t want to know it. There might be other zombies that needed killing. Since he’d done so well with the first, I wanted him in fighting shape.
Still, I had to ask.
“Lycanthropy was a way out?” I was proud that I knew the proper term for the disease associated with werewolves.
He raised a brow but nodded. “I thought all I would need to do is get someone to shoot me with a silver bullet when I was in animal form.”
So, he was definitely suicidal. And possibly delusional, though I had just seen a walking corpse, so I was reserving judgment about the werewolf thing for the time being.
“But it didn’t work, obviously.”
“No. And it hurt like hell for weeks after. It didn’t even cure me of being a…werewolf.” He obviously didn’t like the word. “Apparently I can regenerate the lycanthropy virus as well as flesh and bone.” He frowned slightly and fell silent.
“But on the bright side, as monsters go, you are rather attractive,” I finally said, closing my eyes again. I’d decided I didn’t want any more questions answered. It was too freaky. One impossibility at a time. Okay, two: I believed in walking corpses and that this man was Ambrose Bierce. Acceptance of the werewolf part would have to wait until some of the other shock wore off.
“Yes. And I still have an absolutely superhuman knack for chicanery. And for spotting it in others. It’s like…psychic pattern recognition of my enemies’ thoughts and plans. Or maybe it’s precognition. Which is why this zombie is disturbing.”
“Is that why the zombie is disturbing?” I asked. “And I thought it was that a dead body was walking around trying to kill us. Uh…it was trying to kill us?”
“Oh, yes.” He chuckled, and I wondered if I was ever going to see what amused him. After a moment he stopped laughing. When he spoke, his voice was serious. “No one except you knows I own this island. I have a new identity and it was purchased by a shell company owned by a series of blind corporations. And I was willing to swear no one knew about the lycanthropy either. That attack happened in a small village where everyone human was killed a week later. It’s why I’ve felt safe exiling myself here during the full moon.”
“So you…?” I searched for a way to phrase the question.
“I go furry,” he said. “I shape-shift. I’m not completely out of control as a werewolf, but let’s say my inhibitions are lowered to dangerous levels and it isn’t safe for me or anyone around me. I have to hide myself away from people who seem like little more than things to play with.”
Inhibitions. I usually think of this word in connection with sex, but he might have meant the other inhibitions. The ones that keep us from being cannibals and eating each other when we start feeling peckish.
“I see. And the zombies?” I sat up and began brushing off sand. It was a futile gesture. It had dried on me in a gritty powder that refused to be dislodged. “They’re the voodoo ritual kind, not Night of the Living Dead disease kind?”
“I think so. I hope so. They’re bloodhounds of a sort. The man who makes them now—he’s the Dark Man’s son, actually. You’ve heard of him, too. He’s the philanthropist, Saint Germain. I know it’s him doing it because I am ninety-nine percent sure that Dippel is dead. Finally. He died at Christmas three years ago, and even Dippel doesn’t have that long of a reach. Zombies don’t last long in hot climates. They’re rotting, walking flesh bags, and other diseases and parasites feed on them. Any creature Dippel made would be gone now.”
Ambrose didn’t wait for me to comment, which was a good thing because I was speechless. Saint Germain? Santa Claus to the poor and sick of the third world
, recently nominated for some peace prize, was making zombies? “He sent that thing after me,” Ambrose said. “Deliberately and with malice aforethought—just as he has his father’s other…patients. That means Saint Germain knows I am alive and that I come to this island during the full moon. And since a zombie would have rotted or been eaten by something if it walked all the way from Mexico, that means Saint Germain is somewhere nearby, raising the dead and searching for me.”
“Why?” I asked baldly. “Why would he care about you?”
“That is the question of the hour. A zombie is a rather hostile calling card, don’t you think? Not as bad as a ghoul, but unpleasant enough. Especially if they travel in packs.”
I didn’t want to ask—I didn’t! I already had more than an enough on my terrified mind. But my mouth formed the words anyway: “A ghoul?”
“Yes. An eater of the dead. The very newly dead. In fact, they usually like to kill their prey—humans—and eat them on the spot if there are no protesting witnesses. They are much faster, much meaner and much smarter than the slower zombies, who prefer to eat the living. It saves time when you don’t kill your food first. They are a sort of uber-zombie, often made of animal and human parts. They’re Saint Germain’s version of a Frankenstein monster.”
“How fortunate for us that we were only attacked by a zombie,” I said.
“Indeed. And I must say, you’ve taken this all rather well.” His voice was approving. “A lesser woman would be screaming for a seaplane and the American consulate. And perhaps for the men in white coats to come and take me away.”
“I haven’t taken it that well. On the inside I’m having hysterics. They’ll probably come out when I catch my breath. Though not in front of any consulate employees, because I’d be declared insane instead of you, wouldn’t I?” This wasn’t entirely true, though. I mean about having hysterics. The rest was. Any government employee would definitely declare me bug-munching mad if I appeared in their office and started babbling about zombies. But blind panic had left me some moments before. I was freaked out, but beginning to be fascinated by the sheer weird horror of the situation. Maybe it was the writer in me, the historian who wants to know the truth and is willing to accept unpleasant things if it means getting to the bottom of a story. Or maybe I was even less normal than I ever realized. Did chronic alienation from the rest of the world enable a person to accept nontraditional beliefs?
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