Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  “Interesting murder weapon.”

  I nodded again. “Murder by flu. Yes.”

  “So, who pulled the trigger? And why?”

  “I think BioWeb is manufacturing the weapons. I don’t know about the why, yet. Erzsébet Báthory is involved and there is some kind of military connection, but I don’t know if they’re legit, rogue black ops, or militia.”

  Bubba’s brow furrowed like the cotton fields east of town. “Distinctions?”

  “If it’s private, paramilitary involvement then we’ve got homegrown terrorists taking the game to a whole new level. It will make the anthrax scare pale by comparison.”

  “There’s heavy metal music involved?”

  I gave him The Look.

  He shrugged. “Sorry. I used to think I was an invulnerable badass but between you, Mama Samm, and that Romanian bitch back there, I’m starting to think about getting religion. Too bad I’m already damned.”

  “We may all be beyond damned. If some rogue black ops division is financing this it gets scarier. There’ve always been backroom operations that the government either forgets or decides it doesn’t want to know about. When dirty work needs to be done, it’s best to not to have too much knowledge or responsibility for the really nasty elements of your own counterterrorist resources.”

  “Sounds like you know something about that.”

  I stared out the passenger window as if there was something worth seeing. “I had my own encounters with Uncle Sam’s heart of darkness. You pushed one of them into a wall back there.”

  “But it’s even worse if the military connection is legitimate, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “God help us if our government is officially involved. Perhaps the gun nuts and the militia separatists are right, after all.”

  “Okay, we’re still working out the ‘who.’ Any more progress on the ‘why’?”

  “BioWeb appears to be two separate entities,” I said. “The front organization is involved in pure biomedical research. Employees like Chalice Delacroix are unaware that their work is being utilized for bioweapon development behind the scenes. Chalice told me that she’s working on the genetic triggers to the aging process. A little while ago I was listening to a conversation between Báthory and some guy she called ‘General’ where they discussed a ‘Greyware Project’ and another called ‘Operation Blackout.’ Recently there’s been a local strain of the flu killing a disproportionate number of blacks in the community.”

  “What about old people?”

  “First thing I looked for. As usual, there’s always a higher mortality rate among the elderly with every new strain of influenza. But nothing disproportionate to the death curves for previous years.”

  “Maybe it isn’t perfected yet.”

  I shook my head. “Báthory spoke of work on an antidote. I think the virus has been engineered but the cure isn’t ready, yet. They’re not ready to let the chimera out of the lab until they can be sure of their own immunity. I think they’ve engaged in open-air testing of the second virus because they’re not concerned about a vaccine.”

  The truck suddenly fishtailed onto the shoulder as Montrose stood on the brakes and swore. “They’re targeting the black population and aren’t worried about a cure because the people doing this don’t think they need one?”

  Like I said, you never knew what attachments the undead might form with the community around them.

  “Which could be the first glimmer of good news we can pull out of this morass,” I said, nodding.

  The expression on Montrose’s face shifted from passive horror to a willingness to make a little active horror on his own. “What the hell are you saying, boy?”

  “The people behind this need a vaccine to protect themselves against a virus tailored to be fatal to the elderly. If they’re not worried about protecting themselves from a mutant strain that targets blacks then they’re not likely to be legitimate military. Even covert ops has been racially diverse for a long time.”

  “So we’re back to private militia backing with an all-white membership?” The hostility in his face and voice ramped back down to bitter anger.

  “Yeah,” I said, “the KKK wearing kamouflage.”

  * * *

  “Mosquito delivery?” he was asking as we turned in at my driveway.

  “Why not?” I said, peering up at the dark, swaying forms of mimosas and willows beyond the headlights. “They’ve been working on genetic manipulation of—shit!”

  Bubba was baffled. “Genetically modified excrement?”

  I pointed at the swaying shrubbery that wasn’t shrubbery after all. “We’ve got company.”

  Montrose took in the congregation of corpses assembled in my front yard. “You’ve got company, son; I’m just the taxi service.” He pulled up and attempted to turn in to the circle drive. It was slow going as the corpses in his way were a little slow in granting right-of-way.

  “Oh, man,” I groaned, “I do not need this right now!”

  “Got that right!” He tapped the horn at one particularly slow stiff. “You’ve got five minutes to get in, grab, and get back out! I’m out of here in ten, with or without you—Mama Samm be damned.”

  I opened the door and sent a fresh roll of saw-toothed agony through my arm as I tried to exit without unbuckling my shoulder harness first. Hitting the ground on the second attempt, I pushed my way up to the porch and turned around to address the crowd. “What do you people want?” I yelled.

  They swayed like a grove of saplings in the wind and in a mass voice that fluttered like a breeze they whispered: “Jusssticcce . . .”

  Oh God.

  I didn’t have time for this.

  And all the time in the world wouldn’t make any difference.

  If there really was a Baron Samedi, I was going to hunt him down someday and seriously kick his ass.

  “Go home,” I said wearily. “I can’t help you.”

  “Jusssticcce . . .” they sighed.

  It wasn’t fair. You stumbled and fought and bled your way though life with only the hope of rest and heaven and reward once you were done with it all. Why were the dead coming back?

  And why were they coming to me?

  It just wasn’t fair!

  To any of us.

  “Jusssticcce . . .” they repeated.

  I put my hands on my hips and bellowed back: “There is no Justice!” My voice cracked on the last syllable and I felt as if something were breaking down deep inside, as well. “No Justice in this life! And, from the look of things, no Justice in the life beyond!”

  “Baaarrronnn . . .” they murmured.

  “I am not your baron!” I yelled. “I can not help you. No one can help you! Go back to your graves and your tombs! Go back into the silence and the darkness! Sleep! Find your peace in oblivion! There’s nothing I can do—”

  “You’re wrong,” whispered a feathery voice near my waist. I looked down and found one of my previous, deceased visitors: the dead boy who was now much closer to resembling a puffy, white mushroom than he had during his last visit. Behind him were the mortal remains (and not so much of them now) of his companions: the faceless woman, Mr. Jaw-be-gone, and Kandi Fenoli, the Houdini of the parish homicide division.

  “What?”

  “You make justice where you can, when you can.” The kid nodded at the chinless corpse: “Chuck?”

  Mr. Jaw-be-gone stepped up onto the porch, carrying a sack, and the other cadavers moved back, clearing an open patch of concrete. He stooped and spilled the contents of that sack onto the cement, making a white, crystalline mound that glowed with a faint blue luminescence in the moonlight.

  Salt.

  “You make justice through one soul at a time,” the boy said.

  As Chinless Chuck stepped back, the faceless woman spoke, sounding like an ancient steam pipe: “Barrronnnn . . . you mussst level the pile . . . ssssspppread the ssssaltttt . . .”

  A moment ago I had been defiant. Anger formed in hopele
ssness, forged in helplessness, was already fading. I knelt obediently and leveled the mound into a smooth plain of white powder.

  “Kandi?” the boy called.

  I moved back as the handless girl stepped forward.

  Again, as before, she dipped her toe into the salt and began to draw lines, making grooved letters in the grainy page of my porch. The first three letters were the same as before: an H, an O, and a W. Then three more followed in quick and sure succession as if she had practiced for this moment: an A, an R, and a D. Then a second line began and I could see that she wasn’t asking a question but, rather, revealing a name. The pale cast of moonlight and the shadowy forms around me made it difficult to read but then the porch light came on and the letters clarified in their shallow trenches.

  HOWARD

  IGER

  black Chevy van

  2109 Boudreaux

  Sikes, La

  basement

  The toe stopped.

  Kandi Fenoli stepped back.

  I looked up at her shadowed face. “Is this the one?” I asked, my heart a cold lump of lead in my frozen chest. My own soldier’s heart. “He did this to you, didn’t he?”

  She nodded. Once.

  If there is a God, I thought, He must be an absentee landlord.

  The front door opened. Terry-call-me-T peeked out. “Sam?”

  I stood up and turned to my wide-eyed houseguest. As I did I saw a familiar red firefly dance across the doorframe and disappear into my shadow.

  A giant fist slammed into my back, knocking me across the threshold and slamming me into Terry with the force of a battering ram. We both smacked into the vestibule wall and she went down beneath me.

  I didn’t think her eyes could get any bigger but I was wrong. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. I tried to lift myself off of her, but my arms had lost their strength and my legs their feeling. I had to roll to the side, flopping onto my back, and push myself up on shaky elbows.

  The world lost its momentum.

  Time slowed.

  Moments became a succession of freeze-frames.

  Even as deep shock probed my brain with muzzy fingers, my body was ramping up into preternatural battle-mode. Unfortunately, my legs had gone on weekend furlough.

  I heard the door open on Montrose’s truck and his head appeared above the cab. “What happened?” he called, his voice distorted into a bassy drawl.

  Beyond his shoulder, something flashed in the branches of one of the trees. Wide-eyed, I stared in disbelief as a small rocket whooshed toward the pickup in slo-mo.

  My heightened reflexes gave me just enough time to yell: “LAW!”

  Master Sergeant William Robert Montrose, who had last seen action in 1865, couldn’t know what a Light Antitank Weapon was. And even if he had, he could not have cleared the truck in time. The front yard turned the color of his red-orange dashboard lights and a gust of hot wind threw me down the hall.

  It took me a moment to shake off the disorientation from my double battering. As I oriented myself I discovered that I had a small hole in my back and a larger one in my front. Judging from the alignment, I probably didn’t have a liver any more. Curiously, there was no pain, just numbed discomfort and hazy exhaustion. I turned back toward Terry and saw that she had been flung onto her side, where it seemed as if a large carnivore had taken a bite. Her shirt was in rags, oozing raw, bloody hamburger and nubs of white bone where her pelvis and ribcage had been shattered. She blinked once. Twice. Stretched her arm toward me. Opened her mouth. No words came, only a freshet of blood. Her eyes stayed open but her body suddenly relaxed and her gaze went past me, focused on eternity.

  Shadows appeared on the roiling, flickering play of yellow, red, and orange lights on the curtains and hallway walls. They moved like parodies of human beings, their distorted forms shrinking as their sources drew closer to the door and windows, backlit by Bubba’s burning truck. I flopped over and began dragging myself deeper into the house.

  Footsteps sounded behind me and the odor of cooked and spoiled meat heralded the presence of my ghastly supplicants.

  “Baron,” said the small, familiar voice of the dead boy. “Let us help you.”

  Outside, someone began yelling. The deep tones of concern suddenly pitched into a higher register of terror. Abruptly, the shrieking was cut off.

  “We will protect you, Baron.”

  “You can’t protect me,” I gasped. “Others will be coming.”

  “What would you have us do?”

  “Get me to the phone while I can still talk.”

  Spongy fingers grasped my arms. My wounded biceps had barely knitted, and I groaned as I was lifted and carried to the chair by the phone. Swollen hands, withered fingers assisted me in unknotting my tie and slipping off my ruined jacket. Folding the torn and stained material into a bulky pad, I pressed it against the exit wound in my abdomen as skeletal phalanges secured it with my necktie, re-knotted about my waist.

  “There should be some blood in the fridge,” I gasped. “Bring it to me, please.” I didn’t know what good it would do: I had already lost more than twice that amount through my sniper’s wound and I was still leaking. I picked up the receiver and, after three tries, managed to dial 9-1-1 correctly.

  “Nine-one-one,” a voice answered, “please state the nature of your emergency.”

  “I’d like to report a murder.” My own?

  “Your name and the number you’re calling from, sir?” It was standard procedure, even though my call was being recorded and the Caller ID was expected to log my telephone number. In a moment they’d realize that I had filtered the ID trace on my phone.

  “I’m going to give you the identity of the man who murdered a young woman named Kandi Fenoli. Her body was found in Winn Parish a week or so ago.”

  “Have you contacted the authorities in Winn Parish, sir?”

  “Listen closely!” I heard a click over the line and guessed that they had already started a trace. “Her murderer’s name is Howard Iger. He lives at 2109 Boudreaux in Sikes, Louisiana. He drives a black Chevy van. Tell the cops to get a search warrant and check his basement. Got that?”

  “How do you—”

  Of course an anonymous phone tip wasn’t going to convince a judge to fork over a search warrant but, now that the local constabulary had a name and an address, it would probably be just a matter of time and a little legwork. I slammed the receiver down and grabbed the half-empty blood bags that were offered. There wasn’t nearly enough and I spilled some of that trying to get it to my mouth with shaky hands. It was cold and greasy-tasting and my stomach cramped as it went down. I couldn’t be sure that it was doing any good at all.

  “Baron . . .”

  I looked up at the dead boy and found I was having trouble focusing my eyes. “I’m just a man, son. Only a man.”

  “You are more than a man, Your Excellency. You are the Adjudicator for the Dead. Kandi says she can rest now . . . that four others can rest now. And that many more will be saved because of what you have done.”

  “I made an anonymous phone call.”

  “We have no voice in the realm of the living. You are our voice. Speaker for the Dead.”

  “Great. Vampire enclaves from both coasts are after me and now Orson Scott Card is going to sue my ass. Can it get any worse?”

  My question was answered by multiple burps of automatic weapons fire. The living room windows shattered and a couple of corpses a few feet away went down, cut in two. Normally that would just be a colorful exaggeration but some of these guys had been dead so long that a decent kick would scatter them to the winds. I looked down and realized sadly that there was no way I was ever getting all of them out of my carpet.

  A grenade came sailing through the broken window. A half-dozen corpses piled on like it was a loose fumble at the New Orleans Superdome. A muffled crump and I was picking other people’s scalps out of my own.

  “That was a rhetorical question, dammit!” I hauled out m
y Glock and tried to stand. “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!” A couple of spastic attempts and it was painfully evident that I couldn’t stand anymore.

  “Please, Baron!” The kid put a half-cooked hand on the gun’s barrel. “You cannot help us if you become one of us.” His clothes were smoking and a large, twisted shard of metal jutted from his back.

  Other arms encircled me, helped me up as the dead boy pulled the Glock from my trembling fingers. “I have a safe room in the basement,” I mumbled. “Help me down the stairs and I can lock myself in.”

  But they steered me past the door to the basement and into the kitchen. Small arms fire rattled from the front of the house and the crump of another grenade echoed as they opened the back door. Something—maybe someone—was down on the ground with a knot of ruined corpses huddled atop, struggling as if to contain an extremely powerful man reduced to mindless hysteria. I lost a shoe and still could not feel the ground against my toes as my feet dragged nervelessly between my dead supporters’ strides. Down the hill we went and then down into the dark waters of Gris Bayou. I felt the cold bite of the water from a distance as it reached my knees.

  Then I was hoisted up and over into a pirogue. The sound of gunfire was closer but I couldn’t see anything lying facedown in the tiny boat.

  “Go with God,” murmured a hoarse, new voice.

  “There is no God,” I whispered into the weathered planking as I felt a shove and the skipping rhythm of wavelets striking the prow as it moved out into the main channel of the bayou.

  My forward momentum was spent in a matter of moments. Now I was a sitting duck. Without wind or oars, there is no actual current in a bayou unless you count inches-per-hour as actual movement. In a few minutes, Lieutenant Birkmeister’s boys and Countess Báthory’s hounds were going to reach the backyard. Then the only real question would be: bullets, grenades, or swim out here and haul me back in?

  Using the last vestiges of my strength, I raised myself up enough to hook my right arm over the gunwale. I scooped at the water with my hand and was gratified that the pirogue’s shallow draft actually allowed me some leeway. Unfortunately, one-sided paddling was also bringing me about, turning me back toward the shore. If I paddled long and hard enough I could probably execute several watery doughnuts before BioWeb’s troops arrived to play Sink The Bismarck.