by Zombie Eyes
Kendra tightened her grip on him, and he held firm to the crystal skull, asking her to see that it be kept in an absolutely safe and unassailable place as they put him into the waiting ambulance. She climbed in with him, telling him he wasn’t getting rid of her so easily. In the absence of his eyes, unable to see the destruction to his torso, limbs and arms, Stroud sensed her apprehension on seeing him in the light of the outdoors. The medics were calling in with the report to the hospital, second-and third-degree burns over two thirds of his body. Most of his clothing had been torn away. Stroud wondered if Kendra thought he was going to die when he went off into a drifty little boat that carried him into unconsciousness.
Three months later
Abraham H. Stroud’s bandages had come off his eyes the week before, and after some initial distress, he was able to see through darkly shaded sunglasses, and by now he knew he would regain full use of his eyesight. This week some sections of the burn bandages were being peeled away and the skin given treatments. His body was a mangle of scars from various other encounters with beasts of the night and cave dwellers, not to mention the war. He felt like a man who had gone in for full-body tattoos, except that he hadn’t gone in voluntarily.
Still, all his limbs were intact and in working order, and he hadn’t gone out of his mind, although some people would question that—especially the nurses on the floor.
Kendra had suffered through the worst of the agonies with him, to the point of exhausting herself, and was for days tearful and easily agitated. She continued to come to see him and sit with him every single day, letting her career go and angering him for doing so. She’d put everything on hold for him, unable to return to the CDC until she was sure that he would be all right. For a time, he flirted with the idea of making her his wife, but the near mention of the idea backfired, and now she was rushing off for Georgia to get back into life there and the career she had almost abandoned for him. Kendra could not see herself waiting up nights wondering what new banshee or beast he was combating next. Like most of the people who knew or read about the circumstances surrounding the bizarre New York legion of zombies that had fed live people to a gaping hole in the earth, Kendra didn’t know quite what to make of Abraham H. Stroud, or his strange crystal skull; even now the fact that he had survived engendered more awe and fright than respect or love.
He couldn’t completely blame her. Why should she wish to spend a lifetime with a man who was called by the tabloids a modern “vampire hunter”?
Wisnewski visited with chocolates and flowers like a man going on a first date. He discussed in detail with Wiz the events leading up to the final demise of the demon, a story that Kendra did not want to hear. Stroud was glad to tell it, but it had left Wisnewski a little estranged, too, as if Stroud had some kind of communicable disease. In time, Wiz would come around again, he told himself, but the old doctor got busy again in his Museum of Antiquities and never returned.
A surprise visit by Commissioner Nathan proved testy at first, Stroud assuming the man wanted nothing more than a hasty whitewash done, a rationalization that would make the truth go away, a rationalization of the events that would be more farfetched than the actual horror that had occurred in the city. But Nathan surprised Stroud again as they went through every detail of the events that had occurred below Manhattan.
“I don’t expect you’ll be sorry to see me go,” Stroud finished. “Seems everyone would like that.”
“On the contrary, Stroud. If you need anything, want anything at all, I’m at your disposal. You gave this city a second chance at life, and I’ll never forget that, ever.”
Stroud had heard that song and dance before, from the commissioner of police in Chicago for one. Nathan would likely deny any connection with Stroud after today, he had thought.
But the following day, on public television, Nathan defended Stroud, who was being crucified in the tabloids as a modern-day Rasputin who charmed city officials into allowing an elaborate seance as extravagant as a David Copperfield magic stunt to go on for days in the city. Nathan warned others across the nation that men like Abraham Stroud were scarce, men who were willing to sacrifice life and limb for total strangers. People ridiculed him afterward.
An official inquiry into what was being termed the “Zombie Disease” incident was in full swing, and it appeared the questions would go on endlessly. Stroud was subpoenaed to appear before a board of inquiry that had been set up primarily by political hacks who were interested in getting their faces on the tube and their names in the columns.
Stroud, in a wheelchair, still in great physical pain, wearing a pair of black Oakley dark glasses, playing the blind man part to the hilt, since it afforded some protection from both press and public, answered politely the questions put to him. He did so knowing that few of the people here wanted to know the truth. That no one wanted to hear about human accomplices involved in human sacrifices to an unheard-of demon. He simply repeated again and again such tired phrases as, “There is more between Heaven and Hell, dear Horatio, than we know” and “Suffice it to say that we were dealing with supernatural elements beyond our control and human understanding.”
He was debunked in most circles, held up as a hero by fringe elements in the community, invited to speak at any number of functions that involved psychics and Wicca people. He wound up hiding in the sanctuary of the hospital feeling a lot like Quasimodo without a bell to swing. The papers and most of the editorials regarded him as a freak of some sort. It was the same sort of publicity he had run ahead of in the past, the reason he had forsaken American continental archeological pursuits for foreign digs such as the one in Egypt.
Strangely, he had gotten more well-wishing letters from foreign ports than home. He had even gotten a telegram from Mamdoud who seemed to understand best what he was going through. Most well-wishers here had a hand out, a thousand requests to visit some haunted place in the heartland of America to vanquish some evil spirit that was causing harm and destruction to a community or a single family.
Haunted America, he had thought, no end of work for a Peter Hurkos or other ghost hunters, but he was not a goddamned ghost hunter, or a vampire stalker. He was an honest archeologist with the credentials to prove that he had worked hard to become who he was. But the press twisted who he was and what he was beyond recognition, to the point where sometimes now he was wondering himself.
He had to seek safer ground. He must go home to Andover, Illinois, sort out his feelings there amid his grandfather’s presence in the old manse, a positively haunted place indeed. He wondered if his best friends after all were not among the dead … his grandfather, his parents, Esruad…
They would not question him, deride him. They alone understood. Stroud reached for the crystal skull and gazed into its smoothly fashioned indented eyes, watching the fire refracted by light slicing through the opened blinds there in the hospital. The inquiry hadn’t gotten to the root of the evil, hadn’t placed it where it rightly belonged, as Esruad and Stroud knew.
In all this time none of Stroud’s champions or detractors had any idea of the shameful causes of the body count racked up by Ubbrroxx and the terrible human accomplices of the demon. It seemed only Nathan, Kendra, Wiz and a handful of others appreciated the true horror of the day, the guile and the fear residing in the species called man. There was no undoing what people had done to one another here, given the catalyst of the ancient god of the Etruscans.
Mankind’s only hope, it seemed, was to keep the genie in the bottle, or in this case, to keep Ubbrroxx in the skull … In the wrong hands, the skull could be a true Pandora’s box, unleashing untold powers.
Some days later Stroud was on a 747 jet, bandages still encircling half his body, the arrangements made between his doctors in New York and doctors in Chicago. James Nathan had taken more time from his busy schedule to see him to the airport in the limousine that had driven him that first day to the Gordon Construction site. He’d told Stroud that despite Gordon’s death, the tower
was going up, getting back on schedule. Gordon had many associates who were anxious to take over his tower and they’d formed a pool to do so.
Stroud was simply glad to be on his way home, anxious to see his Andover prairie and home again, Stroud Manse. It had become a haven for him, a place to hide away from the publicity-seeking that not even the hospital had been able to completely stay. It had also been a long time since he had sat by the pool, and a long time since he had opened his mail. No doubt stacked to the chandelier by now.
He thought of his people at the manse, his housekeeper, gardener, his butler and stable man, his helicopter pilot … all people he had, at one time or another, saved from some black form of demonic evil. The only people who didn’t fear him.
Even the stewardess who had approached him some weeks before on his flight from Egypt to New York, flirting with him then, pretended now to not know him at all.
Stroud wondered what effect it would have on her if he asked her for a date; wondered what effect he’d have on the pilot if he dropped in on the cockpit and announced himself.
“People,” Nathan had said in exasperation, “damned people. Most fear themselves, their own shadows, Stroud. Can you really blame them if they fear you? Can you? A man like you? A man who has grappled with the supernatural and won?”
“No,” he said quietly to himself now. “Can’t blame people…”
As for Kendra, she promised to keep in touch, and she had promised to visit him in Andover soon. He knew that she wasn’t like most people. He knew that she would make good her promise and that soon, very soon, they would be in one another’s arms again. For now, couched in his arms was the carry-on luggage he had hugged to himself the entire way, and inside it, the crystal skull, a “supernatural” gift which had made him feel immortal for a time down there in the boiler room of the demon’s own hell. Esruad’s power had coursed through his veins and part of that power still lingered like salt spray in the pores after a walk on the deck of a ship. Stroud had also come away with a new knowledge of his ancestry, and he was a better man for knowing the noble Esruad.
“I … I didn’t know you … you were the Abraham Stroud when we first met,” said the stewardess, who’d come to him with a pot of tea, remembering how he liked tea. “Maybe when we reach Chicago … you … I … perhaps…”
“A meal, a show?” he asked, surprised at her sudden turn.
“Yes, yes … I’d like that.”
“You don’t mind living … dangerously?”
“Try me.”
Stroud smiled inwardly as he watched the beautiful woman return to her duties, giving him another glance as she did so. She was sultry and naturally pouting unless she smiled, and her smile was like moonbeams. Perhaps he had misjudged her after all … or perhaps she was part of an Egyptian plot to recapture the skull on the seat beside him, wrapped in linen and wedged into a carry-on. It had managed to draw curiosity when it was run through the video display at the metal detector baggage check, but Nathan had calmed the guard with a few words. It belonged at Stroud Manse with him, with the ghosts of that place, below his grandfather’s portrait.
But Mamdoud had already wired him that the Egyptian government believed the “missing” skull belonged in their country and had begun a worldwide search for it. Stolen by common criminals, passed through hand after hand until it was brought to the court of the Pharaoh, Stroud now reclaimed it for his lineage, and damn the Egyptian government.
But there were any number of Egyptians on the plane…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert W. Walker is the author of more than forty published novels, beginning with SUB-ZERO in 1979. He has millions of books in print. You can visit him at www.robertwalkerbooks.com.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE INSTINCT THRILLERS featuring FBI forensic pathologist Dr. Jessica Coran
Killer Instinct
Fatal Instinct
Primal Instinct
Pure Instinct
Darkest Instinct
Extreme Instinct
Blind Instinct
Bitter Instinct
Unnatural Instinct
Grave Instinct
Absolute Instinct
THE EDGE THRILLERS featuring Detective Lucas Stonecoat
Cold Edge
Double Edge
Cutting Edge
Final Edge
THE GRANT THRILLERS featuring Medical Examiner Dean Grant
Floaters
Scalpers
Front Burners
Dying Breath
THE RANSOM MYSTERIES featuring 19th century detective Alastair Ransom
City for Ransom
Shadows in the White City City of the Absent
THE DECOY THRILLERS featuring Chicago cop Ryne Lanarck
Hunting Lure
Blood Seers
Wind Slayers
Hand-to-Hand
THE BLOODSCREAMS SERIES featuring archeologist Abraham Stroud
Vampire Dreams
Werewolf’s Grief
Zombie Eyes
HORROR NOVELS
Dr. O
Disembodied
Aftershock
Brain Stem
Abaddon
The Serpent Fire
Flesh Wars (the sequel to The Serpent Fire) Children of Salem
THRILLER NOVELS
Sub-Zero
PSI: Blue
Deja Blue Cuba Blue (with Lyn Polkabla) Dead On
Thrice Told Tales (short stories)
YOUNG ADULT
Daniel Webster Jackson & the Wrong Way Railroad Gideon Tell & the Siege of Vicksburg
NON FICTION
Dead On Writing – Thirty Years of Writerly Advice
