Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  Still, I wasn’t looking forward to making batboy’s acquaintance—assuming you could put any faith in the prophetic powers of dreams. I certainly didn’t. But then, a year or so ago, I didn’t believe in vampires or werewolves, either.

  The question was, what did I believe in, these days?

  As I flipped through the pages a makeshift bookmark fell out and into my lap. It was a strip of plastic wrapped cardstock. Pressed between the clear plastic and the off-white backing was an orange and black butterfly with brief white markings: a Monarch butterfly. The Aztecs believed that the spirits of dead children returned to the earth in its fairy-like form. I kept the bookmark to remind me that not all Mesoamerican tenets of faith fell into Clive Barker territory.

  As I replaced the bookmark, a new sense of horror and despair overtook me. I sagged in my chair and let the book drop from my uncertain fingers.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Deirdre asked a little while later.

  I looked up and finally focused on where she was standing in the doorway. “I just realized something,” I said slowly.

  “That you nearly died?” Count on Deirdre to be direct.

  “No. That someone actually did die today.”

  “Several people died today. If they hadn’t, you would have.”

  “I’m thinking about Marvin.”

  “What about him?” Her eyes narrowed. “He was your bodyguard. He was doing his job. And not doing it very well since it got him killed. He should have taken a bullet throwing himself in front of you, not sitting out in the parking lot like a clueless twit! So, if you’re feeling guil—”

  “I’m not feeling guilty.”

  “Good. Well. It’s okay to feel sad. He was still a good guy and—”

  “I don’t feel sad.”

  She looked at me as if my head might start spinning at any moment. “What do you feel?”

  “Nothing. I feel nothing. A man died in my employ and I haven’t given him a second thought all day.”

  She walked toward me and, as I watched her hips draw an endless series of infinity symbols, I remembered a time when her physicality took my breath away, how her proximity gave rise to primitive responses.

  “You’ve been shot. Your . . . fiancée has been shot. You’ve gone through a lot since you walked into Thibodaux’s this morning. Is it any wonder you haven’t had time to think about him?” She stopped a few feet away. “What? What are you looking at? Have I grown an extra head?”

  I shook my head and looked down at the floor. “Maybe I’ve been too busy to think about him until now. But now I sit and have the time. And I still don’t feel anything. I don’t feel bad about him. I don’t feel bad for his family. The only thing I do feel bad about is that I don’t feel bad about his death!”

  “He was a soldier, in a war—”

  “Yeah,” I said, “he was a soldier in my wee little army. Out to help me claim the Throne of Darkness so that I might rule the East Coast undead as a benevolent dictator and make the nights safer for humankind.”

  “Don’t tell me you were expecting a bloodless coup?”

  “Bloodless? No. But I wasn’t expecting a heartless one, either.”

  “You love Lupé,” she said. “Marv was just an employee.”

  “And what about you?” I asked, looking up.

  “Me?” She appeared startled. “What about me?”

  “Are you just another foot soldier in this war? What am I supposed to feel if you die, too?”

  The question seemed to annoy her. “You tell me.”

  “You are a very beautiful woman—you know that.”

  She stared at me, her gaze weighing upon me with a palpable heaviness. “Didn’t we have this conversation some time back?”

  “A lifetime ago.”

  She nodded slowly. “It was another lifetime. I was still human and grieving for Damien.”

  “And Lupé was more monster than woman to me, then.”

  “Your point?”

  I knew the point but I was having trouble finding the words. “The fact that I love Lupé hasn’t changed the fact that my pulse quickens whenever you walk into the room. You are still the most beautiful woman I have ever known.”

  She stood very still, her breathing seemed to cease.

  “I could desire you . . . while still desiring Lupé more.”

  “Torn between two lovers,” she said, “feeling like a fool.”

  “Please. I’m trying to make a point.”

  “That looks aren’t everything?”

  “There’s nothing in which you lack. Love is a chemist’s nightmare.”

  She held up her hand. “Please. You don’t have to pat me on the head and tell me that I’m as good as the next girl.”

  “Woman,” I amended.

  “Then treat me like one,” she snapped. “I’m an adult, not an adolescent!”

  “Okay then.” I sat back in my chair and locked my gaze on hers. “I don’t feel anything for you.”

  “You’ve made that point.”

  “No, I haven’t. I—I’ve always felt something for you.” I forced my eyes to stay on hers. “Even when it was nothing more than animal lust when I first met you.”

  “Really? Tell me more!”

  “Shut up and pay attention. I’m telling you that I haven’t always been sure of what I felt but I know that I’ve always felt something. Until now.”

  She stared back, wanting to ask the question.

  “I don’t know why,” I answered. “I just know that when I go to the emotional cupboard now, the shelves are bare. I don’t feel friendship. I don’t feel love. I don’t feel loyalty or desire.”

  “Well, Mother Hubbard, how about animal lust?” she asked, her fingers straying to the front of her blouse.

  My answer was lost as the house lights flashed and the doorbell began to chime.

  “Upstairs!” she snapped as I came out of my chair.

  I didn’t argue. I ran up the stairs toward the second floor and headed for my bedroom.

  The security system included pressure sensors imbedded in the boat dock and the stairs up the side of the bluff: someone or something had just set them off. It was too soon for J.D. to be returning from the blood bank and he would have keyed in the code to neutralize the alarm from the dock. I skidded to a stop and grabbed the Glock out of the shoulder holster hanging on the bedpost. I checked the magazine and slide-cocked it before turning back to the head of the stairs. The alarm stopped as I set my foot down on the top step.

  “That you?” I called quietly.

  “I killed the alarm, yes!” Deirdre stage-whispered back in the sudden silence. She crossed below me, now wearing her own shoulder rig and loading a shotgun with silver and phosphorus-laced shells. “Now stay where you are! Don’t come down until I give you the all-clear!”

  The porch light came on signifying someone had tripped the pressure sensors on the last three steps at the top of the bluff. I didn’t trust motion detectors: infrared was unreliable when it came to undead bodies in motion.

  Deirdre pumped a shell into the chamber and I put my foot down to the next stair. It creaked.

  “Get back up there!” she hissed.

  “You’ve got no backup,” I whispered. “I’m not letting you face whatever’s out there alone!”

  “You get back upstairs and lock yourself in right now!”

  “Or what?” I said, coming down another step.

  “Or pray whatever’s out there kills me because if it doesn’t, I’m gonna seriously kick your ass after we’re done!”

  Defiantly, I put my foot down on the next stair tread. This time the creaking sound came from the front porch. Deirdre turned back to the front door, knelt, and raised her shotgun. I sat back on the stairs, leaned against the banister, and extended the Glock, bracing my right wrist with my left hand.

  The doorbell chimed again, this time without the lights flashing.

  “Who’s there?” Deirdre called.

  The repl
y was unintelligible from where I sat, muffled by the door. Deirdre jumped up and moved to the entryway. Now she was blocking my line of fire: I stood and tried to descend the stairs without squeaking like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. The door slowly swung back revealing a five-foot silhouette on the doormat.

  I stared hard, trying to peer into the human-shaped darkness, hoping to make out a face. Instead I clicked over into the infrared band. The body on the other side of the threshold was cold.

  “Vampire!” I yelled, just as Deirdre did the big no-no.

  She invited it in.

  In it came.

  I eased down the remaining stairs, tracking it over the notched sight of the Glock.

  The creature looked strangely familiar. Hair as black as starlings’ wings swept around her head to fall over her left shoulder. Her almond-shaped eyes were the color of mossed jade but her pupils were crimson, splitting those deep green orbs like a cat’s. She wore a red silk pantsuit that looked more like Hugh Hefner’s pajamas than public attire. Her crimson lips smiled, parting just enough to show the tip of a single sly fang.

  “Hello, Christopher,” she said coolly. “Is that a gun in your hand or are you happy to see me?”

  Part of my mind was critiquing the mangled punch line so it took another second to recognize her. “Suki?”

  She bowed Asian style. “At your service.”

  * * *

  She had been my first babysitter when I arrived at Stefan Pagelovitch’s demesne, long on questions and short on answers. For the most part I had amused her then. That was before I got her spine snapped in two and left her in the mental ward of a Kansas hospital.

  “Stefan likes you. He says you remind him of when he was young and stupid. He felt that you were in need of additional security personnel.” She looked around. “Speaking of which, where are your bodyguards?”

  “Standing right here,” Deirdre answered.

  Suki sat on the sofa; I sat across from her on the edge of the love seat. Deirdre continued to stand despite repeated invitations to take a load off.

  Suki looked at her appraisingly. “Hmm. Yes. I heard that you’re supposed to be human, now. Nice gun.”

  “I may be less than vampire but I am more than human.”

  “I meant no disrespect. It is just a matter of power matching power.” Suki turned back to me. “How many have you turned to your service?”

  I looked at her. “Excuse me—what?”

  “How many vampire servitors have you created to protect you?” I guess I was taking too long to answer: she turned to look at Deirdre and her eyes widened. “None? How many bodyguards do you have?”

  Deirdre looked at me.

  “No,” Suki said, “the dead don’t count. Neither does Lupé. Especially for the foreseeable future.”

  “Stop it,” Deirdre said through clenched teeth.

  “One?” Suki seemed as disconcerted as my Chief of Security. “Just one human left? And you sent him with the vampire to pick up food on the other side of the river?”

  “Get. Out. Of. My. Head!” Deirdre grunted.

  I reached out and put a hand on the Asian vampire’s arm. “What are you doing?”

  “Threat assessment.”

  “You want to assess some threats?” Deirdre snarled. “Read my mind now, bitch!”

  “Ladies . . .” I tried.

  “Look, I’m sorry if I’m not taking the time for niceties,” Suki continued, “but I don’t answer to either of you. My Doman has sent me here to do a job and I may just have a few moments more before I have to make a split-second decision about Chris’s safety.”

  “And what if I just decide to dis-invite you across the threshold?” Deirdre asked.

  “You won’t do that.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because I have brought you the head of Theresa Kellerman.”

  “What?”

  Footsteps sounded on the front porch. The door opened and three men squeezed through the doorway. You wouldn’t think “squeezed” was the operative descriptor as they entered one at a time but they were each that big. And scary-looking. Somewhere there were a lot of beautiful people because these guys had used up an entire gene pool’s allotment of ugly chromosomes.

  “This is Kyle, Lance, and Beau,” Suki said. “Your new security team.”

  Deirdre gave them the eye. “How will I know that they’ll carry out my orders?”

  Two of them gave her the eye back. One of them gave me the eye.

  “They won’t,” Suki answered. “They’re my human servitors so they’ll carry out my orders. You can coordinate your security arrangements through me.”

  “I think you mean that I will coordinate the security arrangements and you will pass along my orders to your subordinates.”

  Suki smiled at her. “Of course. That’s what I meant to say.”

  “Um,” I said, “back up a moment, here. You were saying something about Theresa Kellerman’s head.”

  “And I’d like to know,” Deirdre chimed in, “how you got across the river.”

  “I brought them,” said an unfamiliar voice from the porch.

  The front door swung open a little wider and Theresa Kellerman’s head floated into the house.

  * * *

  It turned out to be an illusion: Theresa’s “disembodied” head now had a body. A body that was almost invisible in the darkness of the doorway wrapped, as it was, from the neck down in black leather straps. Her outfit looked like Versace Goth Mummy couture. Her long, wavy dark hair had been bobbed and gelled giving her the appearance of something sleek and wet and waiting to return to the water.

  Her voice was different—different body, different voice box. It was lower, giving her an air of gravitas in contrast to her girlish tone of three months before. Her eyes should have been the same but they were not. These eyes, though the same deep blue, had gazed upon alien landscapes, terror incognita, and seemed to glow with a spooky, inner light.

  But she smiled as she shared the sofa and explained how Suki and her entourage had arrived just in time to catch a ride across the river on her boat.

  “You have a boat?” Deirdre asked. As if Theresa having a boat was a bigger surprise than her turning up with a new body from the neck down.

  “It’s a rental. I have to have it back by morning.”

  “You’ve been busy,” I told her. “The last time I saw you, you were occupying a box on an old man’s lap.”

  “That was a couple of weeks ago. It takes time to encode the email. And we both wanted me to be able to follow up without a significant time lag.”

  I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. “Which makes a question of asking the next question. Do I ask about this Dr. Pipt first? Or start with what your ‘follow up’ is about? Or should I lead with the most obvious?”

  “My body,” she said. It wasn’t a question for her.

  “It isn’t yours. You’re taller now.”

  “A lot taller than two weeks ago.”

  “Ha,” I said. “Ha.” Somewhere way off in a distant corner of my brain, I made a mental note to tell The Kid to rent Boxing Helena on his next outing to Blockbusters.

  “Dr. . . . Pipt . . . is a genius. He knows more about organ transplantation, genetics—”

  “Disembodied, still-beating hearts?” Deirdre chimed in.

  Theresa nodded. “He wanted to make sure that you understood the scope of his capabilities.”

  “So,” Suki finally spoke up from the other end of the sofa, “this Pipt is not only a surgeon and geneticist, he’s a necromancer, as well?”

  Theresa shook her head. “Science, not magic.”

  “Nanotechnology.”

  Everyone turned to look at Deirdre.

  “Well, that’s what’s keeping it going, isn’t it?”

  Theresa gave her an appraising look. “Yes. How did you know?”

  She shrugged. “An educated guess. Human heart. Still beating. No sign of necrosis. The only scientific expla
nation? The tissue must be swarming with thousands of tiny nanobots, stimulating the sinoatrial node, feeding and repairing individual cells—”

  “Millions, actually.” Theresa seemed a little annoyed that the heart trick was so easily deconstructed. “Some of the nanomachines are replicators.”

  Suki stared at them both as if they had suddenly begun speaking in Farsi.

  “Nanotechnology,” I explained, “is a science utilizing microscopic machines.”

  “Just as the white and red blood cells in your body perform different tasks—feeding and oxygenating your tissues and organs, carrying off wastes, fighting off infections—nanobots perform a variety of tasks!” Theresa enthused. No one could enthuse like Theresa. I remembered how she had once enthused about the prospects of torturing her former boyfriend to death. “Each one is simple, rudimentary, microscopic. But, in vast numbers, they can repair damage from the cellular level on up, enhance biological performance, even tinker with genetic material at the RNA and DNA levels.”

  While she regaled us with descriptions of Dr. Pipt’s laboratories and his recent breakthroughs in bioengineering, a half-dozen suitcases and a couple of trunks were carried in by Suki’s human servitors.

  “Um,” I said as Theresa took a rare pause to catch her breath, “dawn is just a few hours away and we should probably arrange accommodations for our guests.”

  “I can’t stay,” Theresa said.

  “We need to arrange quarters for Suki and . . .”

  “Kyle, Lance, and Beau,” Suki said hurriedly. I caught her look: she knew I was going to say: “Larry, Moe, and Curly.”

  I turned to Deirdre. “Go help them settle in.”

  She walked over to me, saying, “I’m your Chief of Security. I can’t leave you alone with strangers.”

  “They’re not exactly strangers.”

  She leaned over and whispered: “Theresa tried to kill you before she lost her head. And the last time you saw Suki, you left her in a hospital mental ward.”

  “Actually, I’m very grateful for that,” Suki said. “He saved my life.”

  “How’s the back?” I asked as Deirdre flushed to match her hair.