Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  I nodded. “Wasn’t she Frasier’s ex-wife?”

  He grinned. “Now you sound like a theologian.”

  If I could I would have blushed.

  “According to Jewish lore she was the first wife of Adam,” he continued, “or the second. There are two different accounts of human creation in Genesis, one saying “Male and Female He created them.” Some ancient scholars interpreted this passage to mean that the creation of man and woman was simultaneous, while the account of Adam and Eve is obviously sequential—the whole rib/transplant thing. While the identity of Adam’s other wife is somewhat tenuous, Lilith is referenced later in the book of Isaiah in her identity as a Babylonian night demon.

  “More detailed references to Lilith can be found in the Talmud, the apocryphal text The Testament of Solomon, and ‘The Alphabet of Ben Sira,’ which emerged from Persia or Arabia around the eleventh century. She is described as having long, dark hair and a seductive, earthy appearance while in human form. After she deserted Adam over what seems to be issues of inequality and male dominance, she went and dwelled in a cave where—according to different accounts—she seduced God, married Satan or the demon Samael or Asmodeus, the king of the demons, and became the mother of the world’s demons. Modern feminists wrestle with the Lilith stories portraying a negative female archetype who is assertive, seductive, and ultimately destructive.”

  “Is there anything in these texts about her putting on a red dress?” I asked.

  “I’m not a chapter-and-verse man.” His eyes flickered like troubled candle flames. “My memory isn’t what it should be. Earlier passages in the Book of Revelation say something about a woman with child running into the wilderness. Whether it is the same woman who appears later, wearing purple and scarlet, is another point for debate. Her scarlet attire may be symbolic for sin, acts of wantonness, or of bloodletting on a massive scale. I only know the Whore of Babylon makes her appearance with the unleashing of great plagues in the end times.”

  “The opening of the seals,” I said.

  He nodded. “Widespread death and destruction.”

  “Any of those plagues resemble the flu?”

  There was a muffled crash behind the chancel and the man turned toward the back of the chapel. “What was that?” He started toward the altar. “Michael?”

  “Don’t go outside!” I said.

  He glanced back at me but didn’t ask the obvious question.

  While Pagelovitch’s watchdogs couldn’t very well enter the church even with an invitation, this man would lose that protection if he stepped outside. While his back was turned, I hurriedly scooped a little aqua sacra into the Styrofoam container and moved back into the narthex. I was lamenting the scant inch or so I had been able to collect at the bottom when I spotted the drinking fountain. Hey, dilution issues might be moot: they didn’t have to know I watered down the water. A moment later I was coming back out the front door.

  To an empty entryway.

  No one around.

  I ran down to the Suburban.

  Still no vampires.

  I poured a bit of my now-brimming cup onto the door handle. Made sure it was nice and wet. Then rushed around to the passenger side. Still no vamps. I needed to draw them back to the front before the handyman left the safety of the sanctuary.

  Plus, the bluff wouldn’t work if they didn’t catch me in the act.

  So, what did I do now? Yell: Olley olley oxen free-o? Come and get it?

  Come and get me?

  I glanced in the Suburban’s window and saw nothing: dark, tinted glass. I tried the handle: it opened.

  Ah: the door alarm dinged; the ignition buzzer buzzed. It brought them running.

  I had the door closed by the time they reappeared round front. I smiled and raised my glass in a friendly salute. Tipped it so a nice little stream of water spattered over both door handles on the passenger side.

  That slowed their charge. “What’s that? What are you doing?” the black woman in fangs and ‘fro demanded as she moved to cut me off from my car.

  “Your door handles were filthy so I rinsed them,” I said, “real good!” I held the cup up and tipped it so she could see its clear contents. “You know holy water not only cleans, it blesses, too!” I jerked the cup so a little slopped over the side and went splat on the pavement at her feet.

  She said an unholy word and jumped back. By this time the other vamp had arrived, a Gen X slacker complete with knit cap and three-day-old goatee. He immediately took in his partner’s strong reluctance to get anywhere near me. “Yolanda, what’s wrong?”

  “This—” Yolanda said another unholy word “—has a (unholy adjective) cup of (unholy modifier) holy water! He’s soaked the (unholy adverb) car doors with the (unholy noun)!”

  “Well don’t let him drive away! We won’t be able to follow him until the handles dry off!”

  I told her that it would be a real shame to “rain on her parade,” and she had a few more unholy words and phrases for his suggestion and my innuendo. It wasn’t hard to get back into my car, especially after I sat behind the wheel and poured some more water over the outside of the door.

  “Take off your shirt!” she yelled at her partner. “Use it to wipe off the handles!”

  This one was no dummy.

  “My shirt? Why does it have to be my shirt?”

  Her partner, on the other hand . . .

  I turned the key as she started peeling out of her own shirt. I drove away as she wrestled her top off on the way back to the Suburban. I cruised on down to the next intersection and waited for the light to change. It turned green about the time that they discovered that I had auto-locked their doors.

  Eventually they would decide to smash one of the windows. I patted my pocket: at that point they would discover that their car keys were no longer in the ignition.

  Another example that homo vampiris was not necessarily the next step “up” the evolutionary ladder.

  * * *

  Just about the time that the glow from the BioWeb facilities became visible through the trees, I felt an overwhelming sense of something coming into the car.

  I jerked the wheel as something grabbed me and the car skidded off the road in a spray of gravel.

  “Oh, Chris!” It was Jennifer. And she was sobbing.

  For a moment I thought my heart might break.

  And then I remembered that my wife was nearly two years dead and I had promised myself no more psychic circle-jerks.

  “Oh, Chris, it was horrible!” she/it/something wailed.

  “What?” I asked, in spite of myself.

  “Something—Evil! It—it knocked me away—threw me back into that—that faraway dark place!”

  “Where were you? At home?”

  I felt ghostly stirrings against my neck and shoulder as if someone was there and nodding. “And when—when I finally found my way back again . . .”

  “What? What is it?” The ectoplasmic tears trickling down the side of my neck shot my resolve all to hell.

  “I—I—couldn’t get back in! It was like—like there was some kind of barrier—a barrier of darkness surrounding it—keeping me out!” She pushed back from me and I could almost see a face in the dim glow of the dashboard lights. “There’s something evil there, Darling! No! Evil with a capital ‘E’! You can’t go back there! It isn’t safe!”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “I need a little time to think about this.” I glanced at the dashboard clock. “Right now I have an appointment.”

  “But—”

  “Shush.” I adjusted the rearview mirror and studied the hazy reflection of my own eyes. What was I doing? Trying to psych myself out of going to the one place where I might find answers for my condition?

  I turned on the radio. Static. I turned the tuner until I hit music, a gospel quartet:

  Would you be free from your passion and pride?

  There’s power in the blood, power in the blood.

  Sin stains are lost in its life
-giving flow;

  There’s wonderful power in the blood.

  I reached for the knob again.

  Oh, there is power, power, wonder-working pow—

  Hiss, crackle, pop. Then an oldies rock station playing “Total Eclipse of the Heart":

  Once upon a time there was light in my life;

  Now there’s only love in the dark—

  I snapped the radio off and pulled back onto the gravel side road.

  * * *

  By the time we—er—I—pulled up to the main entrance gate, she—or—hell! The situation was a bit calmer.

  So what was my subconscious manifestation trying to tell me? That, deep down, I perceived Deirdre as a real threat? What kind of a threat? Physical? Emotional? Spiritual? Or was I more spooked by Pagelovitch’s arrival? Or maybe I was just freaking out over this Baron Samedi mix-up with the restless dead.

  Whatever it was, my most immediate concern was what fearful secrets I might find in the maze of laboratories inside the BioWeb complex—or the labyrinthine maze of my own circulatory system.

  An armed and uniformed guard came out of the guard shack with a clipboard. “Mr. Haim? I’ll need to see some identification.”

  I handed over my driver’s license and a moment later was directed to the visitors’ parking lot.

  “Where are you going?” my displaced psyche asked as I opened the door.

  “I haven’t seen a doctor since Taj Mooncloud and I thought I’d get a second opinion. Wait for me here, okay?”

  “I—I don’t think I could follow you in there if I wanted to. That—that horrible darkness—I think it is coming from here!”

  I stopped and considered that.

  Mama Samm had said something—several somethings, in fact, but still unclear somethings—about the coming of the Whore of Babylon. Her coming was supposed to be connected to the opening of seals, the unleashing of plagues, the beginning of the end. If I were a bloodthirsty demon, I might want to pick up some something supernatural and malevolent from the pits of Hell to unleash upon the world.

  Something biblical. Or, at least, Cecil B. DeMillical.

  It would certainly be apocalyptic.

  But if I had learned anything during my life and subsequent postscript, it was that Evil rarely arrived with a packed suitcase. Evil preferred to make do with what was already at hand.

  I looked up at the surreal light show flickering on the sandstone exterior of the main building. The glowing letters of the BioWeb sign pulsed from red to blue, red to blue.

  To red.

  To blue.

  Some say the world will end in fire.

  Some say in ice . . .

  Who needed demons and paranormal pestilence when there were labs with anthrax and smallpox and Ebola and terrorists or careless researchers or untrustworthy governments? Yessir, who needed underlings from the underworld when there was so much to work with up here: Genghis, Attila, Adolph, Idi, Saddam—the list rendered the need for interplanar interference moot. We were our own demons, followed our own devils.

  “Chris?”

  “All the more reason to take a little look around.” I said it with more confidence than I actually felt. Maybe the lights of the BioWeb complex weren’t so much beacons of hope as candle flames that draw the moth to a fiery extinction.

  As I closed the door behind me I heard the lock snap shut. I hoped I wouldn’t need to get back in in a hurry.

  * * *

  I was met at the front entrance by another security guard, who let me in and then called upstairs for Chalice to come and fetch me. While we waited by the elevators I learned that his name was Reginald and that he worked the lobby/night shift, Sunday through Thursday. By the time the elevator arrived with my client, Reggie had a subset of unconscious commands to let me into the facilities whenever I dropped by—no questions asked and no conscious memories later.

  Maybe next time I could arrange for my very own passkey.

  “Tell me about BioWeb,” I asked Chalice as we rode back up in the elevator.

  “Where do I begin?” she asked with a pro forma smile. “BioWeb is a research consortium dedicated to extending longevity and improving the quality of life. Our primary foci are in genetics with viral offshoots but there are also divisions that work in the development of pharmaceuticals, bionics, nanotech, surgical advances—even mosquito modification.”

  “Mosquito modification?”

  “We had an outbreak of West Nile encephalitis right here a few years back. The National Guard was called in. Crop dusters, mosquito abatement trucks, larvicide in the sewers and storm drains, even a hundred crews with hand-held foggers and backpack sprayers working their way through the city, street by street, could hardly make a dent until the cold weather arrived. And since winter, down here, typically means temperatures in the forties, it was still a pitched battle for months.

  “But as bad as that was here in our little ole parish, the problem’s a lot worse in other parts of the world. Malaria, dengue, and yellow fever. Mosquitoes have dealt death to more people throughout history than any other creature. You may think of them as an annoyance but they’ve defeated entire armies—from the troops that attacked ancient Rome to the Europeans who sought to conquer Africa. In the Pacific during World War Two, General MacArthur estimated that two-thirds of his men had verifiable symptoms of malaria. During the nineteenth century, mosquitoes turned some American cities into ghost towns. Now, here in the twenty-first, we’ve got a new series of mosquito-borne epidemics: St. Louis Encephalitis, West Nile Virus, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, Western Equine, LaCrosse Encephalitis . . . still, it’s the big three—malaria, dengue, and yellow fever that infect a half a billion people each year with a mortality rate of over one million annually.”

  “So BioWeb is working on an eradication program?”

  “Yes, but not the way you think. We’re working on bioengineering mosquitoes on two fronts. Manipulating the genetic structure to alter their breeding pattern—that’s an old project. But we’re also looking at ways to change the host environment for the viruses and parasites they carry.

  “The mosquito’s body has evolved into a safe harbor for these pathogens, enabling them to be transferred from one host to another, using the mosquito as a traveling incubator. We think we can disrupt that benign relationship and more. We want to splice in the genetic codes that will produce antibodies, causing the mosquito to not only destroy the disease in its own body but might well someday inoculate everyone it bites from other diseases. Maybe even this flu strain that is going around!”

  I rubbed my chin. “Could be a tough sell to the public. Remember all the hysteria over genetically modified food? I can see the headlines now: Lab wants to create Frankenskeeter! You’d probably have more success selling a cloning agenda.”

  “We do have a cloning agenda.”

  “Really?”

  “Nothing human,” she qualified.

  “Define human.”

  “BioWeb has an equally strong commitment to bioethics.”

  “Everyone has a strong commitment to bioethics,” I said. “It’s just a matter of whose biology and whose ethics.”

  Her smile was more genuine, now. “Yes, there is that.”

  “Stem cell research?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course?”

  “BioWeb is working on the conversion and harvesting of stem cells from umbilical cords, placentas, bone marrow, fat cells, other alternative source materials. We don’t do embryos.”

  “Some do.”

  “We don’t.” The smile wasn’t as friendly, now, and that made me a little sad.

  The elevator doors opened and we stepped out into a beige-walled, tan-carpeted hallway.

  “So, what do you do?”

  “Me?”

  I nodded.

  “We’ll get to that . . .” she said enigmatically.

  * * *

  For the next forty-five minutes I was taken on a brisk tour of the main buildin
g. Although the night shift meant a skeleton staff, I was introduced to cell biologists, gene therapists, bioinformatics specialists, virologists, and analytical chemist biostaticians. Along the way I observed artificial breeding ponds for mosquito research in one of the “outbuildings” out back. I was whisked through labs and libraries, computer rooms and conference halls, tissue banks and petri farms, even mini-hospital wards with private rooms. One floor housed twenty patients of both genders and a broad range of ages; their only common trait was their African-American heritage. The other ward housed both genders of Caucasian patients but these were of a similar age group: all were on the north side of fifty.

  “Whatever happened to desegregation?” I asked as we continued down the hall.

  “In case you haven’t heard, we have a flu strain going around that primarily targets black populations.”

  “I heard something of the sort but I didn’t take it seriously.”

  “Of course not.” You’re white. She didn’t say the words but they hung out there in plain view, anyway.

  “I mean, it sounds like some sinister government plot. . . .”

  She smiled ruefully and I felt the warmth of absolution. “It does, doesn’t it? Yet the facts remain, it’s cutting a swath through the south side of town while the north side remains largely untouched.”

  “Couldn’t exposure profiles—”

  “You’re suggesting that it started in the black community and patterns of social interaction have confined its infection patterns?” She shook her head. “That’s not borne out from past epidemics. Besides, there have been no white fatalities so far while the death rate among African Americans is more than double the average from previous strains of influenza.”

  “So you think there’s some kind of genetic link—like sickle-cell anemia?”

  She nodded. “We have teams working around the clock on issues like genetic triggers in viruses. Our beds are full here and we’re contracting for additional space at several area hospitals.”

  “Are you working on this?”

  “Not directly. I’m contributing in my time off but all African-American staff are being distanced from serious research involvement at this time.”