I hit him with my shoulder on the third. He went down and I went right over him. If I’d been wearing pants instead of jogging shorts he would have snagged me. Instead, long clawlike nails raked my leg and clutched my left Reebok. I left it in his grasp, sprinting across manicured grounds and rounding the corner of the next building. A door was open! I leapt for it and nearly collided with an elderly black couple who were just emerging. A twisting pirouette and I was safely inside!
He was right behind me standing on the steps, hands clenching and unclenching in impotent fury. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the large, wooden cross on the back wall of the entrance hall. Felt a smile start to bloom across my face: he couldn’t enter a church. I turned back and saw that he was already gone. Just as well: I was too spent to gloat.
“Sir, are you a friend of the family?”
I turned again and found myself face-to-tie-clasp with one of the deacons. Or so I assumed. He was tall and elderly with pale, seamy features and a snowy pompadour such as only a mature, Southern gentleman can properly cultivate. He wore a plain, black suit and tie, sharply contrasted by a crisp white shirt and the man, himself, was nearly as monochromatic as his apparel.
“Beg pardon?” I asked, resisting the urge to grab my trembling knees, tuck my head down and gasp for air.
“Are you a friend of the family?” he asked once more.
“Um, sure,” I said cautiously, hoping that, whatever family I was claiming association with, it would be large enough to allow me unobtrusive passage. . . .
“Would you care to sign the book, then, sir?”
It took me another moment to figure the trajectory from his gesture: an ornate guest book sat atop a podium near the doorway to the right.
“Um, sure.” I took a couple of steps and recalled that one of my shoes was outside, near the edge of the parking lot. In fact, I was suddenly aware that, overall, my appearance and apparel were hardly appropriate for a church service.
Or a funeral.
A closer look at my surroundings revealed that I wasn’t as safe as I first assumed. A church enjoys the automatic presumption of “holy ground” and, therefore, out of bounds to creatures of darkness. A funeral home, despite its religious symbols and services for families of the departed, is a debatable edifice on the sacred footage issue. The vampire had not followed me across the threshold, but then it couldn’t follow me across any doorstep unless it received an invitation to enter.
While this might have been an impediment in the nervous North, we were down here in the sociable South: all that ole fang face needed to do was amble around to the back door, knock, and ask permission to come in. Sanctuary would give way to sanction.
The deacon cleared his throat behind me. I hurried to the guest book and grabbed the ballpoint pen that was glued to the bleached ostrich feather. Having spent the past six months living under an assumed name, I suddenly found myself unable to concoct another fake moniker: Caving in under the pressure, I signed my real name, figuring no one here was going to attach any significance to Christopher L. Cséjthe’s signature.
Outside of taking a little detour through Weir, Kansas, a year or so back, it would prove to be one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
“We’ll be closing in twenty minutes,” the deacon intoned, nodding toward the doorway to the visitation rooms. “The funeral is tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock.” He looked at me expectantly.
Expecting me to turn and bolt out the front door, most likely.
I glanced out at the darkness beyond the double entry doors: not bloody likely! My best bet was to find a hiding place and wait till an hour before sunrise. I turned and limped through the side doorway to the visitation rooms.
So much for low profile: I wasn’t the only white person in attendance but the three or four of us were a distinct minority. A young black woman in her twenties was surrounded by a throng of young men who seemed to be competing for the opportunity to offer solace. Other faces turned and began to notice the banged-up white guy in the scorched tank top and running shorts. I kept moving, trying not to step on the flailing laces of my remaining shoe, and ducked into an adjoining room.
It was blessedly empty—if you didn’t count the open casket at the far end. I limped over to a chair next to the coffin and started to retie my shoelace then decided to just chuck the whole footwear thing.
I sat down heavily and tried to let my lungs catch up to the rest of my body. As my respiration slowed, I thought about Mama Samm D’Arbonne’s warning. What had she said? Something about Je Rouge—a rough translation suggested “the blush” but I’d heard the phrase used once before in a more compelling context. It was during a lecture on Haitian Vodoun. Je Rouge was the name given to cannibalistic, evil spirits by the boku or sorcerers who invoked them. The interpretation meant, quite literally, “Red Eyes.”
Which certainly seemed to fit my fanged foe.
What else had she said? That it was hunting for the Goo-goo Battleaxe—or something like that. I should have paid more attention.
So now what?
Scoot out the back door or find a hiding place and wait until morning? The deacon would be closing up shop shortly and I needed to find a broom closet if I was going to stay. As I straightened up, I glanced down into the open casket. An elderly black man wearing a brown suit lay in repose. “You wouldn’t happen to know where they keep the broom closets around here, would you?” I murmured.
Wrinkled eyelids twitched, slid upwards; yellowed eyes rolled in the corpse’s sockets, focused on me.
“Uh!” I said. The question had been implicitly rhetorical.
A skinny arm shot up and dark, cold fingers closed on my wrist before I could react. “Bairrr,” the old man croaked, “rrunnn . . .”
“Oh mama!” I said.
“ ‘Tect . . . of enge . . .”
“Say what?” I tried to pull back but the old corpse’s grip was like refrigerated iron.
“Baarronnn . . .” The dead jaw creaked audibly as it tried to form the words.
“Hey!” said a voice from behind me.
“Pro-tect,” the dead guy was saying.
“What are you doin’? Get away from there!”
I glanced over my shoulder. It was one of the consolers from next door. He was a lot bigger than me and looked more angry than anguished, now. “What the hell you doin’, man?”
I turned, trying to show that I wasn’t the one doing the doin’. Maybe he couldn’t believe his eyes—I knew I couldn’t.
“Moses! Elvin! Some cracker is messin’ with Mr. Delacroix!”
Maybe it was one of those perspective-based optical illusions: the two guys who appeared in the doorway behind him looked big enough to push the first guy around in a stroller. The only way this could get any worse was if the vampire came back.
There was a blur of black and white at the edge of my vision and my luck for the evening was just about complete.
No one is here. Although the creature’s lips did not move, his thoughts echoed through the room like a public address system on the edge of feedback. Leave this room and close the door behind you.
The three mourners shuffled backward like extras in an extremely corny zombie movie from the ‘40s.
Forget what you have seen. . . .
Or as Oz, the great and powerful, had once thundered: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
The door closed and it was just the two of us. Or three, counting Mr. Delacroix. Who I suddenly realized had released my wrist. Trouble was, the vampire was now between me and the two exits from the room.
“Nice,” I said. “A real ‘Men In Black’ sort of thing. How about I forget what I’ve seen, too? I’ll go close the other door.” I took a step.
Instantaneously, he was across the room, slamming into me like a freight train. I went down with the thing on top of me, Mr. Delacroix and his casket landing on top of us both.
Then, just as suddenly, he was off of me. I didn’t waste time l
ooking around to see why. I took off on all fours, plowing through a clutch of folding chairs on my way to the other exit.
I almost made it.
The vampire caught me three feet from the doorway and threw me into the wall. Or through it—it was only double Sheetrock with two-by-four bracing, after all. But I was in luck: I had found the broom closet.
A taloned hand reached in and clutched my leg.
Yanked.
I grabbed a mop on the way back out and slammed it across the newly made opening, halting my momentum. Momentarily. As I chinned myself into a sitting position, he yanked again and the mop handle snapped in two with a loud crack. As I exited the closet, feet-first, it seemed obvious who was going to mop the floor with whom. But as he climbed on top of me and bared his fangs, he got careless. He also got the jagged end of a broken mop handle planted in his chest. He screeched and fell backward. I scrambled up and headed once more for the second exit.
This time I made it. I ran down a connecting hallway and found myself in the chapel. Dodging between the pews, I had almost reached the podium at the front when I heard a familiar hiss behind me. To quote my realtor, “location is everything": I had evidently missed the monster’s heart.
Rounding the podium, I cut to the left, behind an ornate screen of carved wood. As I reached for the door set in the far wall, the vampire crashed through the screen and into me. I crashed through the door and we both went tumbling down a flight of stairs into the basement.
The vamp was still stronger and faster than I was but, surprisingly, I was the first one back up on my feet. Maybe I just had more experience in taking punishment. I saw a door to my left and a heavier, reinforced door to my right: I gambled on the one to the right. I slammed it behind me and fumbled for the lock.
There was no lock.
I fumbled for the light switch.
There was a light switch.
I had just enough time to take in the general layout of the mortuary’s workroom and vault the first embalming table as the vampire kicked the reinforced door off its hinges.
He stalked into the room and glared at me, now crouched between the steel table legs. No mocking smile, no “little bunny” now; he had finally figured out that, despite my appearance, I was more dangerous than a human. And the mop handle through his chest had pushed his need for fresh blood to a dangerous level. I wouldn’t catch him off guard again.
Slowly, deliberately, he reached over and flipped off the light switch, plunging the room back into darkness.
Unlike the hot, humid air outside, the embalming room was kept cool by refrigeration units that were separate from the central air system serving the rest of the building. That kept the room temperature in the upper fifties for the customers who passed through for their final cosmetics. With the lights off, he could still see my heat signature in the infrared spectrum. Down in this air-conditioned bunker, I had the disadvantage: he wasn’t warm enough to register as a heat source and the surrounding air wasn’t warm enough to offer a contrasting backdrop.
Blind man’s bluff and I was “it.”
I rolled under the embalming table as he vaulted it in turn, his heels smacking down on the tiled floor where my head had been a second before. I upended the table, throwing some four hundred pounds of steel over and onto my undead assailant. I heard him toss it aside as I fell across a second table. The metal edge knocked half the wind out of me but, more discomfiting, this one was already occupied. Instinctively, I flung myself to the left and the vampire smashed against my former location, sending the dead body flying in one direction and the heavy structure careening in another.
A light glimmered at the far end of the room, a tiny wisp of blue-gold flame. I stumbled toward it—stumbled being the operative word as I caught my toe on some unknown part of a corpse’s anatomy. As I went sprawling, I felt the intimate breeze of someone passing just overhead.
He caught up with me just before I reached the glimmering light. I was slammed against the wall—brick this time and not as forgiving. As I slid downward, the rough surface peeling my cheek like a cheese grater, I grasped a dim projection. A knoblike handle. It twisted in my hand and the tiny flicker of the pilot light erupted into multiple rings of flaming gas jets behind oven-tempered glass.
As an icy claw closed around my throat, I looked at my assailant’s face in the flickering light. His lips were split and one eye was puffed shut. He grimaced and I was rewarded with the sight of one and a half fangs instead of two, now.
I tugged futilely at his wrist with my right hand while my left scrabbled behind me for leverage. I found another handle, pulled down. The door of the crematory oven creaked open and, with a puff of hot air, the flickering light intensified. His eyes widened, the puffy one showing a little iris, now: rings of red surrounding the pupils glowed with a crimson incandescence.
“Red eyes,” I croaked.
“Je Rouge,” intoned a dead voice from just behind the monster’s head. A cold, dark hand appeared and pried the vampire’s fingers from my throat. He whirled and another dark hand clasped his shoulder, tearing him away from me and into a stranger’s embrace. Mr. Delacroix had come, it seemed, to cut in and demand his own dance with the devil.
I eased aside as the dead man forced the vampire toward the open oven. The monster struggled and snarled, slashing at the corpse’s throat with his teeth. Dark flesh tore but no blood emerged, just the slow trickle of embalming fluid dripping down and tinting the edge of Delacroix’s collar a pale green.
“Baron . . .” the dead man croaked. The vampire twisted and squirmed in his grasp. His face swiveled from the vampire’s to mine. “Baruhhhnnn.”
“You talking to me? Are you talking to me?” Great: two dead guys are dancing the tango and I’m doing Travis Bickle impressions.
“ . . . Baarruuhhhnnn . . .”
“What!”
“ . . . A boon . . ."
“Boon?”
“ . . . A bargain . . ."
“Bargain?”
“ . . . Protect . . . my . . . daughter . . .” He lifted the vampire off of the floor and threw him headfirst into the crematory oven. The creature screeched and spun, clambering out like a great, smoking spider. Delacroix pushed him back into the flames. “ . . . Avenge . . . me . . .” He blocked the vampire’s second attempt to escape and, shoving the undead thing back once more, climbed into the oven to hold him in the fire.
“Promise . . . me . . . Baron!” Delacroix bellowed as the vampire exploded in flames. A great jet of fire shot out from the oven’s opening like a great blowtorch and I blistered my hands getting the steel-and-tempered-glass door to close over it.
“I promise,” I whispered to the writhing knot of flames on the other side of the glass.
I heard the sound of footfalls on the stairs.
Time to leave.
Chapter Three
Once upon a time my barbarian ancestors roamed large portions of east central Europe—sort of like the bison’s dominance of the North American prairie before the coming of the white man. My forebears probably would have liked that analogy. In fact, it worked on more than one level. But, rather than run down the list for an appalling side-by-side comparison between those lumbering smelly beasts and a herd of buffalo, just trust me: there are worse things to be compared to.
Like my great-to-the-something-power, great-grandmother for instance . . .
As if to punctuate my ancestral musings, the wind suddenly shifted as I limped toward home. An odor even worse than a hoard of unwashed Hun settled over the area as the local paper mill cranked up an olfactory distraction from the aches and pains wrought by my evening’s dance with the dead.
If you’ve never experienced the airy fragrance of a paper mill when the smokestacks go on-line then I invite you to picture a cute little baby.
With an overfull bladder.
Now imagine the wettest, soggiest baby diaper it’s ever been your misfortune to change—no baby putty, strictly “number one.” Bu
t a lot of “number one.” And in an old-fashioned cloth diaper, none of those sissy, disposable, paper-and-plastic jobs. Next, take that sopping, dribbling diaper and, without wringing or rinsing, deposit it into a large plastic bag. Seal the bag so that it’s airtight. Place the bag outside in the hot sun for three or four hours. At the end of that time remove the diaper from the bag.
Finally, place the empty bag over your head.
That’s a vague approximation of what it’s like when the industrial venting process and the local wind patterns collaborate: this was turning into such a special night for me.
My driveway was a long winding tunnel through a half-mile of trees and shrubbery to my property. Actually, the half-mile of trees and shrubbery was my property too, but my philosophy is if you don’t have to mow it, weed it, or water it, you can call it God’s property and cross another set of worries off your maintenance list.
As I staggered closer to the roadside entrance, I found the way well lit by a column of flame.
Fires in the night. More reminders of my ancient relatives, the Hun. Now there was a group who knew how to keep the darkness at bay with the application of large quantities of combustibles. Of course the people they overran would say they brought a lot of the darkness with them. Jenny claimed that my “doesn’t play well with others” attitude came from the sap that flowed through my family tree from the roots up. Hey, at least I didn’t go around raping and looting and pillaging and burning down entire villages.
At least not yet, anyways.
I limped over and looked down the incline where the ground fell away from the road and slid into the tree line—which is what someone’s automobile had tried to do. The Lexus had left the pavement and the steepness of the hillside had just carried it along until it met unmovable objects in the form of a five-pine cluster. The crumpled car must have ignited on impact and now the flames licked at the overhanging branches some thirty feet in the air.
In the distance I could hear approaching sirens: a good thing as a half-hour from now we would likely have a birthday effect spreading to the rest of the woods. Think mint cake with flaming candles for a five-hundred-year-old giant.
Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II Page 3
