by James Axler
“Bodies will often shift position as they begin to decompose,” Julio explained. “You think you can let go of my arm, man?”
Reluctantly, Grant let go.
And then the dead man moved again.
* * *
THE WOMAN IN the second room was awake and, thankfully, far more loquacious than the other patients who had been recovered from the hotel. In her midfifties, she lay in her hospital bed with a frizz of dyed red hair that encircled her head like a bird’s nest and spoke to Corcel and Shizuka with a husky voice caused by the previous night’s hanging.
“I heard music,” she said.
“There was a band there,” Corcel told her, “a quintet.”
“Yes, I recall,” the woman, whose name was Maria Zorrilla, said, “but this was different. It was better than the music that they played, more…sensual. I felt it here, in my—” she tapped her chest “—heart.”
“What kind of music?” Shizuka asked once Corcel had translated. He translated her words for Zorrilla.
The woman in the bed spoke rapidly as she reached for a glass of water beside the bed. “Era exquisita.”
“The music was absolute pleasure, a thing of absolute beauty,” Corcel translated. “It was exquisite.”
Shizuka studied the woman’s face, saw the sincerity there.
“I would return to it in a heartbeat,” she said. And then, without warning, she shattered the glass against the bedside cabinet, breaking it with a vicious strike so that the top broke into a jagged line, spilling water everywhere.
Shizuka leaped back as the water struck her. She and Corcel watched in stunned horror as the woman called Maria whipped the jagged remains of the glass up and drew the sharp edge across her throat in a deep gash. “Era exquisita,” she said as the sharp edge drew blood.
* * *
OUTSIDE, ON THE streets of the ancient city of Zaragoza, the church bells had begun to chime. They sounded in a slow drone, regular as a heartbeat but with each note characterized by almost a minute of silence between each sound—a very slow heartbeat, then. The noise had begun at one church in the south, close to the walls that surrounded the city. However, with each slow chime, the noise seemed to spread, the beat being picked up and mimicked by the next closest church, spreading across the city like a virus as each new church tower picked up the call. By the time it reached the center of the city, where the hospital stood, over a dozen churches were ringing their bells, and the streets seemed to be quietening in their wake.
* * *
“HE MOVED,” GRANT insisted as the dead man’s arm shifted on the cold bed of the morgue drawer.
Before Grant could say more, the whole body of the dead man whom the lab tech had called Frankie shifted, rolling in place and reaching his right arm up to grab for Julio. Dead Frankie snagged the lab technician around his left wrist and drew him close with a powerful yank, dragging him off his feet and pulling his whole body down until he was sprawled across the dead man’s lap.
Julio screamed.
The dead man’s eyes were still closed, pale lids over the eyeballs like a veil.
By then, Frankie was sitting up, and he pulled Julio farther until he was almost lying across his knee. He was strong, then, Grant assessed, darn strong. He was moving Julio like a puppet.
Grant and Cáscara responded in the same way. Two seconds into the attack and both of them had stepped back to put a little distance between them and the moving dead man, and both of them drew their blasters, commanding pistols into their waiting hands.
“Let him go!” Cáscara demanded, training her long-snouted blaster on the moving corpse.
Julio continued to scream, too panicked to even fight the corpse off.
Grant stepped forward again, Sin Eater raised and ready, and reached for the lab technician with his free hand. “Hold on to me,” he said, and Cáscara translated it into Spanish a moment later.
As the female Pretor spoke, Grant detected a waver in her voice. She was turning, looking at the other drawers in the room—they were beginning to rattle on their runners. Whatever was inside the morgue drawers was trying to get loose!
Chapter 18
Outside Nippur, Mesopotamia
Circa forty-fifth century BC
She would use the repetitive nature of music, Ereshkigal concluded as she stood in the ventilation room of the underground complex that served as her home and work space, listening to the rhythm of the nearby river. It was a spot in her laboratory complex where, if she listened carefully, Ereshkigal could hear the churning sound of the mighty River Euphrates. She loved the sound of the rushing water, ceaseless as the Annunaki but ever-changing in a way that the Annunaki struggled to replicate.
Ereshkigal had been working on her sum, figuring out the involved mathematics that would shift the living to death without a physical breach. The apekin were easy enough to physically breach, of course, but that was hardly the point. This was an attempt to prove that the living things could be made dead things by altering and reversing the equation that made their lives proceed, that triggered growth from baby to adult. A living human and a recently deceased human weighed the same and had the same basic chemical components—there was no reason that the formula that moved one state into the other could not be tapped, shunted and even reversed. It was just mathematics; that was all.
The complex had been built on land given to her by Lord Enlil, and constructed by slaves to her specifications. Located twenty steps beneath the surface, the complex ran a quarter mile underground, with tunnels leading to different hubs where Ereshkigal could pursue her experiments in solitude.
One room of the vast complex had been given over to her experiments with the life/death equation she had stumbled upon. Thirty paces from wall to wall, the cavernous room was perfectly round with a sloped ceiling that rose to a peak in the center. Being inside it was a little like being inside a volcano. It was lit by a complex system of mirrored surfaces that were used to reflect natural sunlight during the daytime and turned over to torchlight after dark.
Like the rest of the complex, this room was warm, kept at a consistently balmy temperature. Ereshkigal liked heat; like all of her race, she was cold-blooded, so heat was a luxury she reveled in whenever she was able.
Ereshkigal came striding into the laboratory now, her expression serene. Her wings had flourished in the six years since she had descended into this underground complex, budding from her back in twin lines so that their feathers now trailed behind her like a cape as she walked. They were artificial, created by the bioengineers of the Annunaki, built by Ningishzidda from her designs. Ereshkigal liked the way that they moved, following perfect wave forms whose complex logarithms belied the grace they sought to produce. When she watched them flutter, she saw the math behind the movement, each formula a thing of wonder and beauty.
As she descended the steps, Ereshkigal was thinking about the rhythm, working out the way in which her formula could be adapted to create its shapes, its beats. The apekin were simple, she knew—they responded well to rhythm. If she could shape her equation into a rhyme that could be sung, then she could deliver it with all the surety of a sword blow, sending the instruction straight to her victim’s brain.
She would still use her papers—she was a mathematician after all—but every calculation began in her head, committed to writing only when she had need to shift its planes and dimensions, to make the figures bisect and form new geometric shapes in her mind’s eye.
An Igigu harpist began to play from one corner of the lab as Ereshkigal entered, for she preferred to work to music—she found it drowned out the pleas and moans and screams of the apekin upon whom she experimented. The Igigu was a reptilian humanoid and moved with abundant grace, plucking at the taut strings of the harp with the subtle care of a mother cleaning its young. The Igigi were servants to the Annunaki, described by the humans as “those who watch and see.” Physically, they lacked the musculature of their masters, and mentally they lacked the Annun
aki’s cunning. They served the Annunaki not from fear, however, but out of love, believing the Annunaki to be enlightened, and hoping that close proximity might confer enlightenment upon them.
Ereshkigal watched the Igigu harpist for a moment as she stood at the bottom of the steps. Then her attention shifted, caramel-brown eyes switching to the three figures affixed to the tables that stood in a line across from the single doorway. They were apekin—“humans” in their own parlance—two males and a female, all held naked with their arms stretched tautly above their heads, their ankles strapped down with intelligent nano-fiber cord that responded to their movements to ensure they would not pull themselves free. One of the males grunted something as Ereshkigal entered, and the other two looked up and began mewing in the irritating way of their race.
Ereshkigal strode across the laboratory to the strains of the harp, the tune reminding her of the cascading artificial waterfalls that flowed from Enlil’s Royal Palace in Nippur.
“Please let us free, goddess,” the human male to the left cried, his voice coarse to Ereshkigal’s ears.
“Our devotion is absolute, goddess,” the other male added.
“No, don’t listen to them,” the woman shouted, her voice already raw from crying out for so long. “I am the most devoted. The adoration of these two is nothing compared to my adoration of you. Please let me free that I may spread your love—”
“No, me! Let me free!” the man who had spoken first cried.
“It should be me,” the other male cried out. “I have a family. They need me.”
Ereshkigal affixed her three prisoners with a look that could turn milk. The apekin continued to whine, their voices sounding like cats being slaughtered to Ereshkigal’s ears; which was ironic in so much that cats she had time for, for they were their own masters and required no one to look up to to give them a sense of worth.
Ereshkigal looked down at the female. The female’s body was red and clammy with sweat, long, dark hair clinging to her forehead and the sides of her face. “You say that your adoration is richest, Kalumtum?” Ereshkigal asked, her voice soft and rich as warmed honey.
“Yes, my goddess,” the woman replied. “Oh yes.”
“And you beg of my favor?” Ereshkigal asked.
“Yes,” the woman replied, her body arching as she strained frantically against the bonds that held her on the examination table. “I would do anything if you would only let me free. Please, I beseech you. Show mercy on me.”
“I propose an experiment,” Ereshkigal said, her eyes locked with the female’s. “I shall speak, then I shall ask you to remember my words and hold them tightly in your head until I ask that you repeat them. Do you understand?”
Still straining at her bonds, the woman nodded, though she was obviously confused by what Ereshkigal had said. Beside her, the other humans were straining to see, pulling against their bonds as they tried to look past the standing figure of the underworld goddess.
With a gesture, Ereshkigal silenced the harpist, who sat waiting patiently, staring into the middle distance until his services were needed again. Then she leaned close to the woman and spoke the words of the formula into her left ear, so close and so quiet that only the woman could hear. Ereshkigal had spent long hours stripping the sum down into grunts that the ape-descendant could easily remember. She had used rhythm and rhyme to make them more memorable.
“Now, you are to hold these in your head, repeating them over and over without saying a word aloud,” the Annunaki instructed.
The woman lay there, eyes wide, running through the words in her head. Her brow was furrowed in concentration as she tried to ensure each word was correct.
Ereshkigal took a step back and waited, watching the expression on the woman’s round face. The woman was staring intently, her lips tight, running through the rhyme—the secret equation—in her head. Her eyes seemed to grow wider as she continued to run the words of the equation over and over in her mind, and Ereshkigal’s lips rose slightly into a smile as she noticed that the woman had stopped breathing because she was concentrating so hard.
“Recite the words I told you,” Ereshkigal urged. “Loudly, so that I may hear you.”
The apekin woman opened her mouth and spoke, the first words coming slowly.
“Circle…around…my body…”
Ereshkigal’s thin-lipped smile grew wider as she saw the woman’s expression break into something that encompassed both pleasure and fear. Her eyes had become so wide that it seemed as if they might burst free of their sockets. Her mouth pulled open at each successive word she spoke and it seemed to be a struggle to bring her lips back together to form the next word in the recital.
“Be still—” the woman continued “—to…to move…”
“Go on,” Ereshkigal encouraged.
“To move…” the woman said, her face strained in rapture, “no…more.”
Ereshkigal watched in fascination as the woman’s face seemed to draw in on itself, her cheeks sunk, her lips cracking as if suddenly dry. Her eyes had become bloodshot in a matter of seconds, and dark circles materialized below them. Her ruddy skin, rosy from the warmth of the room, became pale and drawn, the flesh on her body suddenly losing its luster so that it seemed to be taut like the skin on a drum, showing every muscle and bone. The woman’s belly, where it had been rounded just moments before, sunk down as though it had collapsed, its curve switching from convex to concave before Ereshkigal’s eyes.
The other test subjects in the room were howling fearfully, unable to comprehend what it was that they were seeing.
And all the while, the woman’s smile grew more desperate, more forced. Was it because she wanted to please Ereshkigal, or was it something else, something in the equation that had made the act of self-immolation pleasurable?
Ereshkigal watched as the woman struggled for another breath, the smile still on her face, tears welling in her eyes. The woman strained and a strangled squeak emerged from somewhere deep inside her throat. Then she stopped, the look of bliss fixed on her face, her body losing all tension, sinking down against the surface of the table on which she was resting. She was dead.
Ereshkigal gestured to the Igigu harpist, and immediately the music began to play once more, a cascade of plucked notes running up and down the musical scale like raindrops on armor plate. The music helped mask the startled cries of the other apekin in the room, who were asking what had happened, whether the woman had died, whether either knew what was going on. Listening to the music, Ereshkigal tuned the shrill voices of the apekin out of her mind.
The recital was incomplete, Ereshkigal knew. The apekin woman had spoken as much of it as she could force through her throat before the throat had closed up, cartilage rings tautening to the point where no further sound could be expelled.
Death was possible then, Ereshkigal ruminated. By committing a mathematical equation to the subject, it was possible to reverse the life in them. Could that process be reversed a second time? she wondered. Could the newly dead be made to live again by imparting the same equation—albeit reversed—to the body? That was worth exploring, certainly.
But that was for later, she realized, bringing her thoughts back to the here and now. Anu had taken an interest in her over recent months, and his patronage was as valuable as that of Enlil himself. She would give him her body for a while, that she might access his resources on the mother ship, Tiamat, the better to continue her research into the mathematics of life and death.
Chapter 19
The drawers in the hospital morgue were rattling. They sounded like cowbells or drumbeats as the metal doors shook against the hinges, the drawers within shuddering on their runners.
The corpse called Frankie held Julio, the lab technician, across his lap. He was hefting Julio bodily up to get him into place for—something, Grant couldn’t guess what. Julio was screaming himself hoarse, unable to mentally process what was happening.
“Sir, you have to let him go, please,” Preto
r Emiliana Cáscara was shouting in Spanish. “There’s been some mistake. I’m a Pretor. I can help you.”
Grant had his Sin Eater primed and ready, and he was reaching for Julio’s struggling form.
“Take my hand!” Grant urged, reaching forward with his free hand and grasping Julio beneath one arm.
“What’s happening?” Julio screamed and shook Grant away in his panic. The strained note of his anxious voice was as penetrating as a knife, and it seemed to cut straight into Grant’s gut. The other man—the corpse—wasn’t answering Cáscara’s pleas, he didn’t even seem to hear them. He just shifted Julio’s body where he balanced it across his lap, sitting up and looming over it, legs still stretched out on the metal slab.
Corpses that moved. Grant had seen this before. Maybe this time it was an error—maybe the guy had been put in the morgue by mistake, one of those believe-it-or-not medical stories that you heard from time to time. Or maybe it was something much nastier. Maybe some dead chump had just come back to life and was now thinking whatever the dead thought when they’d spent twenty-four hours waiting to get in the grave, just like Bella Arran.
Grant reached for Julio’s quivering hand again, even as the corpse known as Frankie drew the morgue technician closer. But suddenly the corpse had pulled Julio up and he sunk his teeth into the living man’s throat.
There was a spurt of blood. Grant watched it from just two feet away, saw it in all its hideous glory. Blood pumped from the severed carotid artery in Julio’s throat and sprayed against Frankie’s corpse-pale face, washing him with its deep, dark redness even as he placed his mouth against the hole he had made as if to seal it. His mouth over the wound, Frankie started to drink or eat, Grant could not tell which. He saw the corpse’s throat move as it swallowed.
The whole thing had taken seven seconds, from Julio being snatched to his throat being bitten. Even if Frankie was alive, one of those medical quirks Grant had heard about, there was no reasoning with a man who bit into a helpless victim’s throat.
