Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  The computer beeped and the monitors froze their displays.

  “Here we go. This is you. Your genetic map and the significant tags.” He frowned as he studied the monitor. “Without running any of the details, I must say that your overall pattern looks a little unusual.” He tapped a sequence of keys. “You might want to come back during the day and have Dr. Coane look over your tags in detail—that’s not my area. But we can take a look at your Six-factor.”

  “Six-factor?”

  “Yeah, genealogically speaking, everyone’s just six generations away from being related to Kevin Bacon.” He rewarded himself with a hearty laugh.

  Then he stopped.

  He stared at the screen and his eyes lit up. A huge smile bloomed across his face.

  I looked and saw one of my deepest nightmares come true.

  * * *

  I slipped out of the Gen/GEN lab nearly a half-hour later. I might have finished up in ten minutes but I wanted to make sure my samples were thoroughly destroyed and my records were thoroughly purged from the database—not just deleted but scrubbed off the hard drives and any backup sectors on networked machines.

  The fact that Spyder Langdon knew who my forebears were was a warning shot across my bow. That he found my lineage significant had tripped every alarm wire in my head and body. His reluctance to assist me in purging the lab of my samples and the computer files of any reference to my deoxyribonucleic acid structures—even under psychic duress—necessitated some serious “pushing.” More like extreme psychic shoving and shaking and pummeling. When it came to forgetting that we had even met, I found it necessary to be “insistent.”

  Maybe a little too much so: I left him sitting at a blank monitor, an even blanker expression in his eyes, and a dribble of spittle linking his chin and the spacebar on the keyboard.

  If I was lucky he would remember nothing of our meeting this night.

  If he was lucky he might remember something of the past year.

  I was now monster enough that I could bet more on myself than on him.

  * * *

  It took another hour to find the other room I was looking for.

  I had sensed it shortly after entering the BioWeb complex. A preternatural heaviness pervaded the air trapped inside the building. It was something more than the stink of disinfectant and the vague vapors of distant reagents circulating through the whispering vents and air returns. It was like there was a little more darkness hiding around the edges of the track lighting and between the shimmer of fluorescent tubes. Now, away from the distraction of other people, the presence of Something Else became more palpable, the sense of oppression more tangible.

  I tried to focus on sensing an increase or decrease in the area of effect as I moved through the building. It was as if the whole complex was lightly saturated with a mild toxin but removed from the source. I was about to give up when I discovered a second set of stairs leading toward the basement. I had checked the basement level early on. If you’re going to hide something diabolical or store something unmentionable, basements are “high” on the list of dark, out-of-the-way places for nefarious nooks and crannies.

  The BioWeb basement level, however, housed nothing but the physical plant for the complex: boilers, furnaces, heat exchangers, generators, transformers, and miles and miles of pipes and conduits. Two service elevators and a back stairwell accessed it.

  Except I had just stumbled across a second set of stairs leading down from the ground floor and there had been only one set of stairs when I had walked through the basement about forty minutes before.

  So where did this one go?

  One way to find out. I started down the stairs.

  I went down and down.

  And down again.

  Past the level of the basement and another turn and a flight down.

  And a dead end.

  The stairs ended in a cubicle-sized landing with no visible exits. Overhead a single red lightbulb glowed angrily, enmeshed in a steel cage. The far wall was also colored red, with an elaborate green pictogram at its center. The two-foot by one-foot image looked three-dimensional. I walked up to the design and grasped it with my hands. It was a metal sculpture, an ornate grillwork that stood away from the wall by an inch or so.

  The design was familiar. I vaguely remembered seeing iron grillwork very similar to it somewhere down in the French Quarter during my last visit to New Orleans. I considered the pair of idealized swords that flanked the grid of rectangles criss-crossed into interlocking triangles with curlicues and lightning bolts and hammers and stylized flames.

  I had seen this pattern more recently. . . .

  In a book somewhere.

  And the color red was linked to it somehow.

  “Swords . . .” I murmured, “ . . . lightning . . . hammers . . .” Hammers?

  Hammers—metal—the forge.

  “Vodoun,” I whispered. “A symbol—no—a vèvè of the Loa.” But which one? Something clicked in the back of my mind. “The Goo-goo Battleaxe,” I chuckled, butchering the pronunciation again. I cleared my throat and said it correctly this time: “The Ogou clan. Ogou Bhathalah, the Loa of alchemy. Ogou Ferraille, the Loa of the sword, iron and metals. Ogou Shango and Ogou Tonnerre, the Loa of lightning and thunder.”

  As I spoke the name of the Loa, something clicked again, only this time it came from behind the wall. Voice activation and password recognition security: voodoo gone high-tech. I pushed against the metal grill and the wall swung back on silent hinges.

  The darkness beyond wasn’t complete. A series of candles flickered in recessed alcoves providing a dim pathway into the unknown. The sense of oppressiveness that had infused the air upstairs now made breathing seem difficult.

  On more than one occasion I’d remarked that Mama Cséjthe didn’t raise no dummy. But she wouldn’t hesitate to say that her clever baby boy could still make some bonehead decisions from time to time. Example: I stepped forward into the near darkness.

  The wall swung shut behind me.

  Part of it made immediate sense, I reasoned, as I moved slowly between the parallel rows of flickering points of light. The Ogou clan of Vodoun spirits was supposed to manifest in matters of war and alchemy. If they were tied to BioWeb’s viral and genetics research, then the alchemy connection was apparent.

  But what about war?

  Mama Samm had said something about the fifth seal and the end of the world. The Book of Revelation tied the opening of that seal to the unleashing of great plagues that would devastate the earth. But those Biblical end time plagues were associated with the appearance of the Whore of Babylon, not some Johnny-come-lately third-world religion like Vodoun.

  Voodoo was a mangled meld of African tribal spirit worship overlaid on a distorted template of Catholicism. It utilized a doubling approach to its principal gods, matching each Loa with a Christian saint, bestowing a dual identity of sorts.

  So, maybe the Whore of Babylon had an “altar” ego among the Loa.

  Maybe the Whore of Babylon—or Lilith—was also Marinette Bois-Chèche.

  And if “magick” was involved, it might explain the darkness that Jenny had described or the odd sensation that had made my skin crawl since walking through the front door.

  I looked around. The candles lining the walls were red. Red was the primary color of the Ogou pantheon, so that fit. But the Ogou clan wasn’t typically known for significant acts of evil. And their sacred spaces were, as a general rule, located out of doors. Not underground, deep beneath a high-tech biological research facility.

  The “aspect” or manifestation of the evil Marinette, however, would alter everything, corrupting even the pure motives of scientific research.

  Up ahead, the darkness was starting to fade in patches. Glimmering eyes grew in intensity, became more candle flames. The pathway opened up into a larger area. A voodoo temple space: the hounfort.

  My eyes were adjusting to the dimmer light sources and I could make out more details, now. I wa
s entering the peristil or dancing area for the Vodoun ceremonies. The floor was hardened dirt and, at its center, was a great pole extending from the floor to the ceiling: the poteau mitan. Beyond lay the djevo or altar room, glowing like a great, rectangular ruby against a larger dim backdrop.

  I moved toward the altar, a large table draped with a black cloth and decked out with a profusion of objects. There were bottles covered with colored sequins and glass beads. And here was a small bottle, nearly a match for the finger-sized glass vials in the Gen/GEN lab, but marked as containing a Zombi-astral—a spirit from a corpse kept in a glass container like a hoodoo battery for certain spells.

  For most people the word “zombie” conjures up the Hollywood image of a corpse shuffling about like a retarded sleepwalker. That or the stage persona of White Zombie front man, Rob Cummings. But while I had seen more than my share of the walking dead recently, they didn’t actually fit the true voodoo zombie profile.

  The walking “dead” documented as parts of Petro and Congo rites were actually living people, not reanimated stiffs. They were the result of a bokor or sorcerer lobotomizing the victim’s personality and higher brain functions through hypnosis, autosuggestion, and a complex pharmacopoeia that included fish, frogs, and ferns.

  The puffer fish (Sphoeroides testudineus, S. spengleri), the porcupine fish (Diodon hystrix), and the balloon fish (D. holacanthus) have all been cited as ingredients from a variety of sources, but the most likely culprit is the Fugu species whose skin, liver, intestines, and ovaries are overripe with a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin. This particular neurotoxin is not only a hundred times more deadly than strychnine, but a single puffer has enough joy juice to wipe out a roomful of people. The Japanese consider Fugu sashimi an exquisite delicacy that, properly prepared, will cause one’s lips to tingle, one’s senses to soar, and produces a pleasant near-death experience for the adventurous gourmand. Improperly prepared, you are either unpleasantly dead in short order or paralyzed for life—however long and equally unpleasant that may be.

  You might remember that this is a delicacy to the culture that also produced seppuku and the kamikaze. For those not sufficiently put off by the mortality rate of Fugu fans there’s a little death dish called chiri that specially licensed chefs will prepare for those diners who would rather “play chicken” than eat it. But I digress.

  Moving down the zombie recipe list, you can go from Fugu to Bufo: the toxic glands of the toad, Bufo marinus. Down in Colombia, the native Indians discovered that toasting these toads over a fire produced a yellow liquid that dripped from the carcass: curare. Once they figured out that arrows and darts dipped in frog fondue were fatal no matter where the victim was hit, precision marksmanship went right out the window. In small amounts, the Bufo toxin would prevent oxygen from entering the bloodstream and cause massive heart failure. In smaller amounts, it could paralyze without killing but the horrific hallucinations that it produced would make you wish for death anyway.

  Then there were plants like Albizzia and Datura stramonium, known in Haiti as the zombie’s cucumber and in North America as jimsonweed. Producing a topically active neurotransmitter-blocking drug, the plant could induce disorientation, hallucinations, amnesia, coma, convulsions, and death. It had a long history of “curing” marital infidelity in Africa. “Permanently” in most cases.

  The bokor had their own recipes for mixing such biotoxins along with ground spiders, powdered human bone, colored clays, lemons, and various leaves and branches of other plants such as Jamaican dumb cane (Dieffenbachia seguine) that paralyzed the mouth, throat, and vocal cords.

  But I continue to digress.

  The only truly “dead” zombies in Vodoun were the zombi astrals, being the spirit—or “ti-bon-ange”—of a dead person caught and kept in a bottle for medicinal or healing purposes. Think of it as something akin to a psychic battery. Since the soul is eternal, it keeps going and going and going. . . .

  I wondered what spell this little bottled soul was running.

  Around it upon the altar were small statues and porcelain dolls encompassed about with lengths of chain and cages of wire. Colorfully framed photos and drawings were propped up against machetes and knives and axe heads. Kongo packets, shredded palm leaves, and small mirrors were scattered here and there. A series of defaced medallions bound a clutch of kewpie dolls that had bead-headed pins stuck into their arms, legs, eyes, ears, torsos—each seeming to have its own, distinct pattern of torment. Bowls containing offerings—salt, cayenne peppers, Tabasco sauce, rum, palm oil and palm wine, cigars, roasted yams, and green plantains—formed a border around the table’s edges. One bowl held blood, a deep maroon shading toward black as it coagulated. An ancient glass retort bubbled over an invisible flame while a dozen black candles and another half-dozen red candles provided eighteen dancing tears of shimmering light, casting fantastic shadows upon the red satin drapes that covered the back and side walls of the djevo.

  At the center of the altar, wrapped in a whorl of scarlet silk, was a realistic drawing of a nude woman performing an obscene act with a crucifix—my money was on it being a representation of the vile Marinette Bois-Chèche. Her face was turned away so that her features were obscured. And the crimson cloth it nested in was a dress.

  Perhaps The Dress.

  The one that the Whore of Babylon would put on when the sun turned black, the moon turned to blood, and the stars began to fall like rain.

  But that wasn’t what caused my knees to go all rubbery and hungry motes of darkness to gather at the edges of my vision. Two photographs were displayed across from each other, the left one elevated to be ascendant, and the one on the right positioned upside-down and in descendant mode. A photo of a gray man wearing a gray suit held no special significance other than the fact that someone had drawn a military helmet over his head and medals on his chest with a ballpoint pen. On the other side was an inverted wedding photo that had been torn in half, lengthways, and then scotch-taped back together.

  A very familiar wedding picture.

  The same ballpoint pen used on the other photograph had blacked out Jenny’s eyes and mouth and drawn fangs that protruded cartoon like from my lips. An “X” was deeply marked into the center of my chest.

  A blackness rose up inside me and I leaned against the table, the stink of shriveled blood rising toward my face like foul incense.

  What was I supposed to do? I was just one man!

  Something had stirred the dead to leave their graves and seek me out by night. Something was mounting a psychic attack that affected my perceptions in the form of the ghost of my dead wife. Vodoun magicks were being invoked in the name of the Loa who ruled the realms of alchemy, the forge, and the military. The government—or some “aspect” of the government—was making a list and checking it twice. No doubts in my mind whether it was naughty or nice.

  End of the world prophecies and an ancient demoness who was the mother of monsters.

  In retrospect, the fact that vampire enforcers were in town and Erzsébet Báthory was involved seemed a minor annoyance: we were already at Defcon Four.

  Except . . .

  Oh, God.

  If Marinette Bois-Chèche could be a manifestation of the Whore of Babylon . . .

  Then why not my great, great-times-great grandmother, Erzsébet-the-Hun?

  How could I thwart the schemes of an ancient vampire who commanded the undead might of the entire East Coast and God knew what biotoxic witches brews in this high-tech chamber of horrors? Even Dracula had gone to ground for fear of her power. And I knew Pagelovitch wouldn’t risk the lives—or unlives—of his enclave over some fortune-teller’s half-baked prediction or my questionable, fevered dreams.

  It was way past time to leave town.

  But where could I go if Erzsébet Bois-Chèche ended up destroying the world?

  I thought about demolishing the altar, but they would only put up another one. And know that someone had penetrated security. I pushed away from the table
and turned to leave.

  Then turned back.

  Screw the element of surprise—it was an illusion of security that I no longer had! I grabbed all three pictures and tucked them into my shirt pocket. As I did, I felt the little gris-gris packet that Mama Samm had given me. Ti-bon-ange. I reached for a candle but hesitated as sounds reached my ears from the candlelit hallway. I dove beneath the altar.

  Moments later two men and three women entered the peristil, leading a goat. Crouching under the table, I could see the goat better than I could see the people. The women wore loose sack dresses and were barefoot and barelegged. The men wore loose shirts and pants with the legs cut off at mid calf. They were barefoot as well.

  Imports, I guessed; not locals. While Vodoun doesn’t hang out a shingle or erect well-lit signs like most churches, they tend to be known within certain circles in their neighborhood. I had checked into those circles during my past half-year of residency and hadn’t heard a thing about this sort of going on. Báthory probably recruited them in New Orleans. Or maybe even Haiti. This was no Entertain-the-Tourists shtick so E.B. probably spared no expense in acquiring the Real Deal rather than apprentice wannabes.

  The goat was tethered to the great post while one of the men squatted at the outer edge of the dance floor and began beating a drum. I was no expert but I had done enough research to recognize that someone was setting up to raise a Baka, a possessive spirit. Not a ritual for the squeamish or faint of heart under the best of circumstances.

  All things considered, these were not the best of circumstances.

  The women began to dance, bare feet shuffling along the packed earthen floor. They would be the mambos or hounsis. The men—they would be hougans—began to chant.

  The language wasn’t a French variant like some of the invocations I had run across in my research. It was more likely some African dialect like Yoruban, so I couldn’t even take a wild guess here.