I drove past churches, their lighted crosses and illuminated spires offering refuge against the spiritual darkness in this world and that which came from beyond. Was there succor there for me? Or was I already damned, like some unholy Buzz Lightyear, “to eternity and beyond?”
Away from the main part of town was a huge complex of buildings—fairly new buildings from the look of things. It looked like some freeze-frame from a Jerry Bruckheimer/Nipponese Sci-Fi flick where a lustful oil refinery runs amok and tries to mate with a nuclear power station. And it was all tricked out with barbed electrical fencing, security checkpoints, and the words “BioWeb Industries” trapped inside a huge block of clear Lucite. Even from the road you could see the letters change colors, shading from blue to purple to red and back again.
I eased on down the street without stopping, but I gave the place a good look-over from the front and pondered the little I knew to date.
BioWeb was involved in cutting-edge medical research and treatment options. Chalice Delacroix mentioned working in their R & D labs during our first interview and apparently was involved in the area of genetics from what I could put together so far. Call-me-Lou had been hot to discuss business with Nurse Jensen and the words “umbilical cords” had slipped from his trembling lips. I could think of only one likely reason: stem cell research.
My Hunger was momentarily forgotten as I swept back toward the highway. The security lights from the BioWeb complex glimmered in my rearview mirror like multiple beacons in the darkness.
Brighter and more promising of redemption than any glowing crucifix or floodlit steeple.
* * *
They were waiting for me as I pulled into my driveway: three adults, one child. I wasn’t sure of the genders until I was close enough to make out their clothing.
Even then I wasn’t sure.
The boy was white. The adults—I wasn’t really sure. What skin remained showed a mottled gray. Those facial features that still existed had become puffy and distorted past any kind of racial profiling.
One of the adults had misplaced his lower jaw.
I’ve known women who will never appear in public without wearing makeup. This woman (I think) seemed willing to come out for a visit without putting on her face.
I opened my mouth to ask what they wanted and caught my first whiff. I turned away and nearly spewed a liter of half-digested blood. Tic-Tacs, I thought, my mind tilting crazily—they were in the glove compartment. Maybe I should offer them some.
“We have come to beg your justice,” a wheezy little voice said.
“W-what?” I clamped down on my gag reflex and turned my face back to the charnel-house smell.
“We seek justice, Your Excellency.” The boy sounded like he had gargled with acid. His voice had a horrid, raspy timbre that grated on the ear like a bone saw.
I eased to my right, trying to put the security lights to my back before they came—damn! I was momentarily dazzled but at least I was a little closer to being “upwind.”
“Why have you come to me?” I asked. A couple of days ago I might have freaked. After Robert Delacroix’s dance with the damned I had progressed to the next level.
Whatever that was.
“Jussstisss,” the faceless woman hissed.
Mr. Jaw-be-gone just nodded, his exposed trachea rattling as if he wanted to add something.
“Um,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. I do divorce cases. Yep. That’s my specialty. I don’t do justice. Just divorce cases. Y’all aren’t looking to do a custody battle, are ya? Because I don’t—”
“You are The Baron,” the boy wheezed.
“The Loa,” whispered the third corpse. Not as old as the other two, I decided after a closer look. She was ("was” being the operative term) on the downward side of sixteen and now (and forevermore) an adolescent for eternity. Her skin looked like a dirty lace doily and she was missing both of her hands.
Hello, a nightlight kicked on in the back of my head. “Whoa. Hold on. Have you got the wrong guy!”
“Baron,” they sighed.
“I’m not Baron Samedi.”
“Help usss. Avenge ussss!” the faceless woman hissed.
The girl without her hands stepped forward and extended her right leg. I was stymied. If I couldn’t put a stop to this, I might well be overrun with disgruntled dead people, all demanding some sort of revenantal recompense. And now I had a corpse threatening to do the hokey-pokey on my driveway.
I looked down and saw that someone had dumped a couple of handfuls of salt on the concrete. Okay. Certain ceremonies invoking the zombie dead required salt as a material component—that much I could remember from the “Raise Dem Bones” chapter of the Voodoo Practitioner’s Handbook.
But I didn’t know what it meant.
Was somebody raising the dead from the local cemetery and pointing them in my direction? Or were they self-motivated and finding their way to me here on their own?
While I considered the desirability of going on a sodium-free diet, the other two adults came over and took the girl by each arm to steady her. Her bare foot came down, toes curled and she began to scratch at the salt with her big toe.
Off in the distance I heard a cockcrow. I looked at my watch: tempus fudge-it—not quite one a.m. Someone must have goosed a rooster. I looked up to see my decaying delegation already in motion, heading off across my lawn and toward the woods.
“Hey!” I said. And then wondered what I was “heying” about. Did I really want them to come back and continue this conversation? Let rotting corpses lie—that’s my motto. As they headed into the tree line I looked back down at the toe-scratches in the salt.
The crooked lines formed letters and those letters spelled a single word.
How
Dead people.
First they want justice.
Then they want vengeance.
And then they rudely walk away after starting a game of Twenty-Questions.
They made the Snow Queen seem the ideal client.
Someone came out of the woods, walking toward me. It was Mama Samm D’Arbonne. With a rooster under her arm.
“Siddown, chère,” she said as she lumbered on up to the porch, “you look like you could take a load off.”
I sat on the edge of the concrete slab. “I’m tired.”
Mama Samm sat beside me. “You not sleepin’ well, you?”
“I’ve had a few nightmares,” I admitted.
“So it is foretold in de Bible.”
“My nightmares are in the Bible?”
“And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God,” she quoted, “that I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams. De book of Acts, second chapter, seventeen verse.”
I sighed. “I don’t know which implication is more upsetting. That I’m an old man or that these are the last days.”
“Honey,” she said, sounding very like my Great Aunt, “I don’ tink you be ready for this, yet.”
“Ready for what?” I asked, staring back at the woods. “Being Dear Abby for the dead?”
“More den dat, chère. You mus’ be they champion. Bot’ de living an’ de dead.” She patted my knee. “Remember dis one ting: dere is power in de blood.”
“Yeah. And you know what the vampire motto is? More power to me.”
She chuckled and adjusted her rooster. He crowed again. “You make a good start, tho. Already you find de grail. Keep her close, Hefe. De Whore of Babylon, she on her way.”
I groaned. “As if I don’t have enough woman problems.”
“And dere is one who is lost between: maybe she save you, maybe she bury you—I don’ see everyting.”
“No joke.”
She rose to her feet, the creaking of her massive knees making me wince in sympathetic pain. “De grail is de key.”
“The ki?”
She nodded solemnly. “Maybe it so.
Maybe you be him for true.”
“Him? Him who?”
“Samedi, Lord of de Crossroads. For de Gédé clan. They all gone missing and here you be.” She reached down and touched the side of my face. “Remember, de dead who come to you, dey do not seek a selfish vengeance. Dose who come to you, dey seek justice to protec’ de living.”
“And who am I to give that to them?”
She stepped back and stared down at me. After a long silence she nodded. “I see wings over you. De Darkness is coming for you but you will go down to de Valley—dey will lose you dere. . . .”
Like I wasn’t already lost.
“And you will help to open de way back. Maybe dat more important than de gray men and all their plots. Take dis.” She handed me a little red bag, tied shut with colored strings and tiny feathers and beads. “Keep it in your pocket. Ti-bon-ange.”
And with a final nod of her head, she turned and lumbered back down my lawn and into the woods.
I sat for the longest time.
I see wings over you.
Yeah, batwings . . .
Mosquitoes flying reconnaissance in from the bayou circled my head in a whiney cloud, then broke formation and continued their search for sustenance out toward the road. Professional courtesy, I guess.
I gazed up at the whiteness of the moon and considered the mottled gray shadows that spotted its face like patches of corruption on a communion wafer. Grey men, I thought. Who are the grey men?
Maybe T.S. Eliot could enlighten me. There was a collection of his poetry on my nightstand. I picked myself up and brushed the salt from my rump and pants legs. Who says the dead are an “unsavory” lot?
Already you find de grail. Keep her close . . .
Something danced at the edge of my consciousness as I unlocked the door and rekeyed the security system. I meandered into the kitchen, pulled another blood bag from the refrigerator, and pressed the chilled plastic against my fevered brow. “Holy crap!” I whispered. “The grail—keep her close.”
Chalice.
My headache turned savage and I stumbled toward the stairs and my bedroom. The night was still young but I wasn’t as I grabbed the banister and started up. “Honey,” I called, the old joke worn way past thin now, “I’m home!”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” answered a familiar voice from the bedroom.
I pushed the door open, recognition starting to dawn even before I took in the all-too-solid white flesh, the shocking deep crimson tumble of hair, familiar lips distorted by unfamiliar fangs.
“Holy shit!” I said.
“Hello, Chris.”
“Deirdre!”
Chapter Eight
When I first met Deirdre, nearly a year before, she was fully human.
She and her vampire lover Damien had befriended me when I was abducted and brought to the Seattle demesne. They were very much in love and troubled by Damien’s inability to “bring her over.” Forget the books and movies, making vampires is more like making babies than you might think—sometimes it happens on the first attempt, sometimes it never happens at all. When it comes to reproduction, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.
They had exchanged all of the requisite bodily fluids and Damien had carefully taken her right up to the point where the virus should have caught hold—more than once, in fact. But it didn’t happen. And, although she was willing to risk death—final and irrevocable—to truly be one with her vampire paramour, he wasn’t willing to push the chance of losing her eternally.
Tragedy enough, but Fate had a crueler twist up its bony sleeve: it was the powerful and all but invulnerable Damien who preceded his mortal lover into the eternal darkness, staked by assassins from the New York demesne trying to get to me.
In an act that was equal parts compassion, grief, and madness, Deirdre had come to me as I lay helpless, recovering from what should have been mortal wounds. She comforted me, healed me.
First, with her body.
Then, with her blood.
And finally, while I slept in her soft embrace, she took the deadly dental appliance that Liz Bachman had given me and used it to take her own life.
When I escaped the Seattle demesne, Deirdre was a lifeless corpse on a drawer in the morgue.
Now, a year later, stretched out in my bed, she looked very lively.
And, except for a small corner of the rumpled top sheet covering practically nothing of consequence, she looked very naked.
“Hello, Deirdre,” I said.
“Hello, Chris,” she said with a slow smile. “Or should I call you ‘Master’?” Her smile dimpled, revealing sly fangs.
It wasn’t hard to figure out—even without Deirdre’s fill-in-the-blanks account of her subsequent awakening. The virus, long dormant in her bloodstream, had been activated with her death. It took longer for her to rise—probably because Damien’s gift had been diluted in the time that had passed since their last exchange. And by the time she had sundered her sarcophagus and emerged like a great and fearsome Luna moth, I was long gone down the road to Kansas and about to drop off the radar altogether.
“And now I’ve found you,” she concluded happily.
“Why?” I asked.
“You are my Master.”
I shook my head. That was a mistake: something seemed to tear loose behind my left eye and went rattling around inside my skull. “Ground Control to Major Tom . . .” I said, leaning heavily against the doorframe, “ . . . or is that Major Nelson?” I felt my legs start to buckle. “Somebody send for Dr. Bellows . . .”
She was across the room with inhuman speed, catching me as the floor tilted toward my face. I felt myself lifted by slender but impossibly strong arms and carried into a roaring vortex of darkness.
* * *
Being dead was bad enough. The unrelieved blackness was worse. But being interred in a frost-free meat freezer was way past cruel and seriously starting to piss me off. I shuddered and gasped, fighting to orient my sludgy brain in the lightless void.
Something touched me.
Something cold.
But it was soft and not nearly as cold as I was.
“You fool!” said a voice.
=How long have you gone without?=
Without what? Adrift in the black infinity of this starless space there were eternities of emptiness: loss, loneliness, regret. And what had I not gone without of late?
=You can’t resist The Hunger with this!=
Something was ripped from my numbed, nerveless fingers.
=Here . . .=
Pressure was applied to the back of my head.
My face pressed into yielding softness.
A trickle of warmth touched my lips.
=Drink.=
A thread of heat stung the tip of my tongue.
=Drink! Swallow!=
My throat convulsed but my mouth remained dry.
=Suck! Have you forgotten what every infant knows from the womb? Pull at it!=
A bare half-swallow and I felt a nudge of strength.
=More! I have fed recently but you will need something warmer than that which already grows cool in my breast.=
A bit of tepid warmth eased into my throat and the pain receded. I moved and felt the press of the mattress along my side. My hand glided to my face and found wetness. Found . . .
I opened my eyes. “Oh, God,” I moaned softly.
Deirdre drew away. “I should hunt something for you before the sun comes up.”
I tried to shake my head. Not good. “You mean someone,” I whispered.
“You will suffer if I don’t.”
“I’m good at it . . . lots of practice . . .”
“The sun will be rising soon,” she said.
“Stay. More blood downstairs—”
“Yes, I saw. It’s cold.”
“Boil water. Heat—”
“It’s not fresh,” she said like some fussy produce shopper. “But it will have to do until tonight,” she finally decided.
&nb
sp; I started to relax and slide back down that murky chute into the total dark.
“But first a little more to anchor you,” she said, reaching down and reopening her self-inflicted wound. She pulled me to the freshet of gore once more. I was powerless to resist.
Finally I surrendered, feeling like a total boob.
Like they say: you are what you eat.
* * *
I awoke to the vague glimmer of sunlight behind the heavy bedroom drapes: the embroidered, dark green leaves glowed against the black fabric like a phosphorescent jungle. I looked at the bedside clock: five twenty-seven in the p.m. I looked at the rest of the rumpled bed: empty. A few drops of dried blood were the only tangible evidence of her presence last night.
So where had she gone?
I rolled to the edge of the bed and tried to sit up. Flashbulbs went off behind my eyes.
I made it on the third attempt and stared down at the carpet, about a mile or so below. “I can do this,” I whispered. “There’s nothing wrong with my legs, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes; I’m just a little tired.”
Never mind points for proper form, the will triumphed: five minutes later I crawled out of the bedroom and made my way down the hall on my hands and knees. The stairs were a bit of a challenge but I managed to go down feet first—and butt second. As Deirdre had wrestled me out of my clothes during the night, I picked up a wicked carpet burn by the time I reached the (ahem) bottom.
By the time I staggered into the kitchen I was wobbling erect, on my own two feet. Think Weebles! I kept telling myself. Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.
I pulled on the refrigerator door. It resisted. I pulled harder. Reluctantly the magnetic and rubber seals gave way and I retrieved a couple of blood bags. I started back to the stove but the idea of going through the process of boiling the water and then cooling the contents back to an approximate ninety-nine degrees just wore me out thinking about it. Grabbing a paring knife out of the kitchen drawer, I ambled to the dining table and prepared the plastic tubing like an overlong silly straw.
The cold hemoglobin hit the back of my mouth like chilled Tabasco sauce. Halfway down my throat it started to burn then exploded in my stomach like cold fusion. My nerve endings started to tingle and strength returned to my arms and legs. The trembling in my extremities died down from a series of quivers and quakes to a mild vibration, then ceased altogether. My head began to settle and my mind started switching on the internal lights again.
Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II Page 12
