Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  I still didn’t know if this guy was legitimate brass or bogus militia, but his numbers were the real deal. Once upon a time—back in the 1930s to be more precise, less than half of the general population was expected to live past the age of sixty-five. It took sixteen people paying into the Social Security trust fund to pay for one retiree and, given early twentieth-century life expectancy, the ratios worked. Fast-forward to the close of same century and changes in medicine and economics had changed the math radically. Eighty-six percent of the population was living past retirement age and only four people of working age were available to support each retiree.

  Now, in the twenty-first century, the baby-boom generation had begun lining up for their retirement benefits and Gen X lacked the population base to fund the growing tidal wave of Social Security claims. On top of that, the cost of Medicare was doubling every ten years and claims to other entitlements were expanding exponentially. The mathematical fix was savagely simple: As long as a worker produces, he or she has value to the system. Once they retire, they not only lose their desirability as producers, they become economic liabilities. The Greyware Project was the simple, direct solution, a biotechnical assist to the Darwinian laws of economic entropy.

  There was just one problem with his logic—that is, assuming you didn’t find the willful murder of human beings for economic stability to be morally repugnant. The general’s equation measured only economic contributions and those within the corporate payroll template. It assumed that “productivity” ended on a certain schedule. It didn’t account for the necessities of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents: the guidance and stability they provided for the base unit structures of society—children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Families. Neighborhoods. Communities. And this narrow economic definition failed to consider that some cultural contributions aren’t possible until enough years and experiences are stacked up in a lifetime to begin great works rather than close out the books on them.

  Would the Greyware Virus care that Voltaire was 64 when he penned Candide? What about other literary works, like Zorba the Greek, written when Nikos Kazantzakis was 66; The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White at the age of 70; or The Fountain of Age by Betty Friedan, 72? Would the Social Security Solution take into account the fact that actor Tony Randall was the same age when he founded the National Actors Theatre or that Jessica Tandy won Best Actress Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy at the age of 80? How about Tony Bennet’s singing career enjoying a renaissance in his 70s or Grandma Moses starting a serious painting career at the age of 78? Jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli and classical guitarist Andres Segovia touring to worldwide acclaim when they were in their 80s?

  Never mind the moral repugnance of the Greyware solution—for every Alzheimer-tranced oldster drooling in a private ward in some entitlement-funded facility, there were hundreds of vibrant elders making their greatest contributions yet to the quality of communal life for society as a whole.

  But how do you get these points across to the “Bottom Line” Institution? They’ve already reduced people to commodities long before they reach a certain age. Use ‘em up, throw ‘em out. They’ve served their purpose; never mind that the money they’re entitled to is the money they’ve paid into the system over their lifetimes. Once the cow stops giving milk, it’s time to make hamburgers.

  The general nodded as if my silence indicated consent. “We are talking about the survival of the greatest country on the face of the earth.”

  “If we’re reduced to this then maybe we’re not so great as we think we are.”

  “There are historical and societal precedents,” the general argued. “The American Indians—”

  “You’re going to cite me the example of what some of the nomadic, Plains tribes did when their elderly were too frail and ill to be cared for anymore. This is not the same thing. We’re not talking about abandoning the elderly and infirm to live or die on their own: We already do that. We’re talking about wholesale generational murder! So don’t bring up the Hemlock Society or obsolete cultural groups like the Spartans. The only comparable cultural analogy is Hitler’s Final Solution.”

  “This is nothing like that!” he roared.

  “Yeah? The only noticeable differences I’ve picked up on so far is that you now have the technology to bring the Zyklon-B to the victims rather than the other way around. And no one’s mentioned making soap or lampshades out of the elderly.” I eyeballed him. “Have they?”

  His face was red, now. “We are talking about survival, here!”

  Or as a certain contestant on the Vietnamese game show What’s My Lai once said: “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

  “Okay, I get the new Medikill program for the elderly,” I replied, “but what’s the deal with Operation Blackout? Isn’t killing off a significant portion of the population sufficient? Or is it that bureaucratic attitude of a few million deaths here, a few million there—pretty soon we’re talking genuine fatality rates?”

  I don’t know what I expected to come out of his mouth. That Blacks were a “mongrel” race as so many White supremacists were overly fond of saying? Well, that’s sort of what it was, only dandified and dressed up as the second round of Useless People Economics 101. The general had more numbers ready and started off with the dramatic racial shifts in prison populations, statistics on crime and recidivism, poverty levels, school drop-out rates, joblessness, drug use, and—before I knew it—we were back to the Greyware issues of welfare and entitlements.

  I tuned him out.

  There was no point in even attempting a debate, internally or externally. The man was locked into his worldview and a cozy little conversation with moi wasn’t going to change his accounting system or the way he crunched his numbers. I was better off nodding and agreeing and acting like a True Believer until I could get everybody to look the other way.

  But then what?

  Even without a roomful of Marine-wannabes there didn’t seem be much that I could do about what I had learned. I felt like Mary Philbin unmasking Lon Chaney, pulling back the spooky veneer and finally getting a glimpse of the true horror underneath that was BioWeb.

  The issue here was even larger than the issue of wiping out millions—potentially billions—for the shortcomings of a few thousand. I had used the term “African American” when the truth was this virus wouldn’t stop to check your citizenship papers at the borders. If this thing got loose and did what it was designed to do, it would dwarf all of history’s past attempts at genocide. It truly would be the end of the world for an entire race, a monumental crime against humanity that would put the death camps of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, China and North Korea—all of history’s horrors from the Black Hole of Calcutta to the Trail of Tears to the Bataan Death March—in the category of “felonies and misdemeanors.”

  And that was just for starters. The follow-up question was: for what degree of ethnicity are you adjusting this virus?

  Had the general and his band of brown-shirt patriots considered the fact that issues of racial “purity” and separation of the races were fairytale concepts at odds with the human genome? Perhaps his great-great-grandparents had introduced a little mulatto blood into the family tree. Would he find himself coughing out his last lungful of life alongside his distant cousins in some hospital ward a few months from now? Would we all?

  Or was Operation Blackout geared to the genetic subsets for melanin—a different genetic issue than that of “race” or ethnicity?

  I was impatient. I didn’t want to waste any more time doing a verbal dance with Generalissimo Muscle-ini, here, so I took the direct approach. Probing his mind with mental fingers, I tried to roll his brain—much like I used to turn over stones by the river to hunt for night crawlers.

  And, as in my childhood fishing expeditions, I found them: the general was quite mad.

  It was a quiet and elegant psychosis, not loud and vociferous like George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strange
love. More of an understated and unconscious, Anthony Hopkins-esque type of lunacy—not in the rabidly self-aware mode of Dr. Hannibal Lector but more along the subtle manners of Corky the ventriloquist in Magic.

  I picked up a couple of interesting impressions as I considered the scramble of mentalpedes wriggling about the base of his skull.

  First, he wasn’t standard Government Issue, after all. Private militia, then—though he retained a strong conviction that he really was working covertly for Uncle Samuel.

  Was it possible? Presidents, senators, and congressmen came and went with every election, but generations have whispered of a shadow government—unanswerable to the populace or its chosen but transitory representation. Might other gray men infest the corridors of power in D.C.? Shadowy gray power mongers who knew no masters beyond their own star chambers and secret societies? Might colorless, darkling hearts and minds birth such evil schemes and then entrust them to self-styled patriots-in-exile?

  Perhaps. But I could not know the truth from this man’s mind. It had been sane, once. Sane in the sense that bigotry and narcissism could rule a man and not impede his rise to power. But he had been twisted beyond his own feeble abilities for evil. The monster who ruled the East Coast undead had used her powers of psychic persuasion to reshape the general to her own dark purposes. A man who fancied himself a commander of men was nothing more than a spear-carrier for a campaign that was beyond his damaged understanding.

  I opened my psychic fingers so that everything disappeared beneath the surface again with a little, telepathic “plop.”

  So it was a waste of breath to argue right and wrong: all I could expect to get out of a debate was an extra layer of security around Yours Truly. If I was to have any chance at throwing a monkey wrench into the works, I would have to act the part of team player.

  And figure out how to smile without gagging.

  By the time I had considered my real options and brought my attention back to General Genocide, he had finished his statistical analysis and had moved on to cultural comparisons to other disadvantaged groups—essentially how the “chinks” and “gooks” scored higher on the school LEAP tests despite the “niggers” home advantages of language and American culture . . .

  I forced a grin. “Really, sir; I was just yanking your chain. You’ll get no argument from me about the Black problem.”

  At least not right now when all the guns were on his side of the room.

  “But,” I added, “I’m afraid I get a little testy when I think about my dear old grandmother getting a dose of BioWeb super flu.”

  The general gave me a look that suggested he knew horseshit when he heard it, saw it, or smelled it and he wasn’t, by God, about to swallow any of it.

  “So, here’s one of my negotiating points,” I continued. “I sign on with you guys and she gets the vaccine.”

  “You don’t seem to understand, son,” he said, missing the whitening of my knuckles on that last word, “your ass is ours and it don’t matter whether you decide to cooperate or not.”

  On that issue he was terribly misinformed: there was a vast difference between them having me and my being “cooperative.” I intended to demonstrate the difference in no uncertain terms.

  I just hadn’t settled on a lesson plan, yet.

  “Do you need to use the bathroom, son?”

  “Huh? No. Why?”

  “Because the countess wants you presentable this evening. She’s planning on some formal ceremony shortly after sundown and it wouldn’t do for you to soil yourself before I have to deliver you. Then we have a midnight flight to catch: her highness wants you bundled back to her base of operations in New York where her security situation is a lot tighter.” A thoughtful look passed across his face—a rather misleading expression from what I had seen so far. “We’ll have to trank you a third time, I guess.”

  “A third time?” I asked.

  “The third time will be for the traveling.”

  “What about the second, then?”

  The general’s answer consisted of one word and a nod: “Sergeant.”

  A tranquilizer gun coughed and a hypo-dart smacked into my leg, injecting its dose on impact.

  “Looks like you’ll be a little late for the ceremony, son,” he said, getting up from the chair and brushing himself off, “but I can’t have you pulling any shenanigans on my watch. After sundown you’re their responsibility.”

  To use or to lose, I heard his mind echo as he headed for the door.

  My eyes started to flutter. This was just great! Unarmed and alone, I had just hours to arrange the fall of this high-tech House of Usher. Never mind that I had no practical plan and now I was going to spend most of that time drugged and unconscious.

  Was I ever going to catch a break?

  Ah, Lupé, I cried, I’m sorry I never got the chance to tell you how much you meant to me. That I’ll never see your face again. That the world may well go down in flames and I won’t be there to hold you—

  =Hold on there, big guy, the cavalry’s coming for you!=

  Deirdre?

  =Now admit it: Are you really so sorry to have the advantage of a blood-bond under the present circumstances?=

  Are you all right?

  =All right?= She laughed and my toes curled in a most unnerving manner. =Yeah, I’m all right! I’m not a physical or mental prisoner of Bloody Báthory, I’m not strapped to an autopsy table for Krakovski’s amusement, I’m alive!=

  You are alive?

  =I just ate a cheeseburger—my first solid food in over a year. It was delicious! And now I’m standing outside in the sun. I think I’m starting to tan!=

  Pretty amazing.

  =You don’t understand; I could never tan before I became a vampire!=

  Where are you?

  =Hiding out at your friend, Mr. Montrose’s, place. Did you know he practically has his own Civil War museum? I’ve never seen so many muskets in my life. It’s like an ancient armory.=

  How did you wind up there?

  =Your other friend, that fortune-teller, she was waiting for me at your place. We ditched the Subaru and she drove me to the Montrose estate. Told me to wait here. She’s out, rounding up some of your other friends—=

  Other friends?

  =I never knew you had so many friends.=

  Neither did I.

  =She wanted me to give you a message.=

  Yeah?

  =She said to tell you to remember Ephesians six-twelve.=

  That’s it? That’s the message?

  =Yes. What does it mean?=

  I have no idea.

  Actually that wasn’t true.

  I hadn’t darkened a church door since the deaths of my wife and daughter except to steal holy water from the Catholics. And it had been more than a couple of decades since I’d had to memorize Bible verses for Sunday school. But a few passages had stayed with me down the long years of a secular life lived and Paul’s warning to the saints at Ephesus was one of them.

  “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,” the Apostle had written, “but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

  =What are you thinking?=

  That I ought to give up wrestling and take up bowling.

  And that, for a juju woman, Mama Samm seemed awfully conversant with the New Testament. Of course, if you’re gonna get down and get jiggy with the end-of-the-world references, the Bible was, by and large, the text of choice for most of North America. . . .

  =Well, I’m supposed to wait for her here. And I’m supposed to hide if the police come by.=

  Montrose is dead, I told her. My old adversaries-in-arms put an antitank rocket into his truck and blew him up with it. The cops will probably send someone by in the next day or so for a cursory investigation. Since he didn’t die at home it isn’t really a crime scene but they’ll want phone numbers for next of kin, anything that might shed light on relation
ships . . . business dealings . . . connected to his death . . .

  I shook my head, trying to clear it.

  Is anyone else there? I sent what I hoped was a clear image of Chalice Delacroix and the Be-bop, re-bop, zoot-suit guy.

  =I think I’m alone, but the lock on the back door is broken and it looks like there’s been some kind of a struggle.=

  I shook my head again. It only served to make the room spin.

  =But what is happening? You’re starting to fade!=

  I’ve been drugged . . . probably be out until dark. Then they’re moving out around midnight. After we’re gone you need to get Pagelovitch . . . his people . . . to get their hands on explosives . . . plastique, dynamite, hell . . . make Molotov cocktails if you have to . . . but this place has to be destroyed!

  And I told her as much as I could until my brain completely fuzzed out. The next to the last words I heard inside my head repeated her promise to come back and rescue me.

  No, I told her. It’s too danger . . .

  =I’m hooking up with some of your friends. In fact, Mama Samm said Billy-Bob—=

  Hello Darkness, my old friend.

  * * *

  >Cséjthe.<

  The voice was ancient.

  >Cséjthe . . .<

  Sonorous.

  >Cséjthe!<

  And chilling.

  >Cséjthe?<

  Did I mention familiar? Prince in exile Vladimir Drakul Bassarab was providing narration for my next dream sequence.

  It’s about time, I answered groggily. Where have you been, Old Dragon?

  >Hither and yon, child. My business takes me many places.<

  I smiled in my sleep. You lie like a rug! You’ve been on the run ever since that little mutiny on the East Coast that dethroned you and set up Liz Báthory in your place.

  >Ah, Erzsébet! I hear you’ve finally made her acquaintance.<

  Well now, maybe I have and maybe I haven’t. Did you actually do the face-to-face before she sent you packing?

  >’Ware, Cséjthe; I’ve impaled entire villages for showing such disrespect.<

  Blah, blah, blah. If Báthory’s in town, you’re probably no farther away than the Eastern Hemisphere.