Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  “I don’t think they are going to make it.”

  I looked over at Baron Samedi, who seemed to have popped up out of nowhere.

  “Can you help them?” I asked.

  He pulled a cigar out of his jacket pocket and bit off the end. “Why should I?”

  Why should he? After I had freed the Ogou and his Gédé clans from their imprisonment by the demon Lilith? I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times. Then I snatched the top hat off of his head and settled it down at a rakish angle atop my own cranium. “Go on back to Haiti, Hefe; there’s a new baron in town.”

  He stared at me suspiciously. “I thought you wanted out.”

  I shrugged. “Gonna need some new friends if my old ones get killed tonight.”

  He stomped his foot angrily and descended back down into a gap in the buckled asphalt.

  The main building had sunk to where the second floor on the south side and the third on the north were now disappearing into the churning soil. As to what had undermined the foundations of the complex, I could only guess. Was it the biotoxic witch’s brew of chemicals that had leaked or been dumped during the past several years, the movement of the restless dead beneath the earth this past century and a half, the emergence of the “dragon,” or maybe even the juxtaposition of powerful magicks and opposing elemental forces?

  Perhaps all of it and more. I would have wished it Godspeed on its trajectory to Hell but my friends were still inside. And destined to remain, it seemed: the second level of the foyer was now buried beneath the churning mud. I began to weigh my chances of translocating back in when a bubble appeared.

  It swelled into a dark brown membrane above the roiling grass and quickly expanded into a large, opaque dome. It grew until it could garage a school bus and then quivered as a hand stretched through its dirt-flecked skin. The hand was daubed with white paint, the skeletal markings of the Baron Samedi. The fingers closed to a fist, then suddenly opened again.

  The bubble burst and the Loa of the Dead emerged from its soft crater, leading a chain of beslimed escapees, holding hands like an overly affectionate chain gang.

  Behind them the rest of the main building sank into the morass and murk with a gaseous, bubbly sound.

  The flush of the House of Usher.

  As I stood at the edge of the pit and watched my friends struggle out of the muck and mud, I folded my arms across my chest and said, “Gee, guys, what kept you?”

  Grins opened in the masks of mud and caked dust but I quickly learned that it was more than simple relief at seeing me alive. “I’m thinkin’ the more pertinent question, Big Daddy,” J.D. shot back, “is how come you’re not wearin’ any threads?”

  * * *

  “Terrorists?” Detective Ruiz repeated for the fifteenth time.

  Pagelovitch nodded, his eyes holding hers in a tight, hypnotic gaze. “That’s right, Lieutenant. BioWeb was working on a supersecret government weapon and Mr. Haim here was deputized to help us ferret out some suspected saboteurs. . . .”

  I sighed, closed my eyes, and leaned back against the rear doors of the ambulance while a paramedic finished bandaging my ribs.

  “Nice stigmata.”

  I opened my eyes and considered the spots of blood on my bandaged hands and the red stripe blotting through the pad taped to my side. “We all,” I said carefully to Detective Murray, “have our cross to bear.” His Mona Lisa smile was playing peek-a-boo through his goatish beard. “Shouldn’t you be paying attention to the debriefing?” I asked. Pagelovitch was apparently going to have to sell his story a second time.

  “Naw,” he said, tilting up the brim of his porkpie hat just enough to reveal a pair of small horns at the edge of his hairline. “There are eight million stories in the Naked City; yours is just one of them.” He chuckled and turned away.

  “Naked city, indeed,” Deirdre remarked, pulling at the thin sheet I had tied about my waist. The paramedic picked up his case and went in search of other injured parties. “Looks like I get to drive you home,” she added with a mischievous waggle of her eyebrows.

  “Have you seen my car?” I asked sourly.

  She looked over at the colander bodywork on my Merc and said “oh” in a little voice.

  “Besides, even though I’ve talked my way out of going to the hospital,” I added, “I’m not so sure Pagelovitch has talked Ruiz out of packing me off to the pokey yet.”

  “You see, Professor Haim was supposed to be the bait to draw them out into the open,” Pagelovitch was explaining as he stood next to my bullet-riddled Mercury. “That’s why they attacked his house.”

  Ruiz didn’t stop staring into the Seattle Doman’s hypnotic eyes but said: “I don’t get the bit about Kandi Fenoli’s corpse.”

  “Er, it’s classified,” he answered, fighting a smile. “I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you. . . .”

  Deirdre shook her head. “Then maybe I shouldn’t hand you this, quite yet.” She hefted the zippered handgun pouch holding my silver-loaded Glock.

  “You may as well keep it for all the good it’s done me.” I stared at the remains of my car. “What a mess. My house is riddled with bullets, the napalm in my front yard has probably made it impossible to grow anything but kudzu and crabgrass for the next decade, the dean will probably schedule my termination meeting on the seventh floor of the library just so he can throw me off the balcony, and now there’s some kind of paramilitary militia group out there that I can officially add to my enemies list. T.G.I.F.”

  Deirdre had unzipped the gun pouch and was checking the Glock’s magazine. “T.G.I.F.?”

  “Thank God it’s Friday.”

  “Um, not to be a nitpicker but, actually, it’s Saturday.” She rammed the clip back in the grip. “Just a little better than an hour before dawn.”

  “I guess we’d better head back to the house.”

  “We’ve got extra beds at the hotel,” Pagelovitch said, turning away from Ruiz and walking toward us. “It will be more convenient—especially since we will be starting back to Seattle at sundown. We all will.”

  I gritted my teeth and struggled to my feet. “The answer is still no.”

  “Well, you can’t stay here. You would be rogue and everybody now knows where you live.”

  Deirdre had started to tuck the Glock into her handbag but she hesitated now, waiting to see how this was going to work out.

  Kurt came around the far side of the ambulance, saying: “He isn’t rogue, he is Doman.”

  Pagelovitch pounded his fist against the side of the ambulance. He couldn’t be that exasperated; it only dented a little. “The other Domans won’t permit a new enclave! We’ve already discussed this!”

  “Not a new enclave,” Kurt clarified, “Christopher Cséjthe is now the Doman of the New York demesne.”

  “What?” The Seattle Doman was taken aback. “Him? You must be joking!”

  >Believe it, Stefan.<

  “Vladimir Drakul?”

  We all looked around but Dracula was nowhere to be seen.

  >Yes, I am still here.<

  “If you think to return now that the countess is dead—” my majordomo began.

  >Nay, Kurt; I am an observer, now. I have no taste for intrigues these days.<

  “Coulda fooled me,” I muttered.

  “This—this pup—will not last a month in New York,” Pagelovitch protested.

  Ruiz was taking in the audible portion of the debate with open-mouthed curiosity. “Come on, Dorcas,” Murray took her by the hand and tugged her back in the direction of their unmarked car. “Let the Feds sort out who’s got jurisdiction over Mr. Haim.”

  “I keep forgetting,” she said, stumbling along in a daze, “which one is FBI and which is CIA.”

  The Prince of Wallachia chuckled inside our heads. >This one is much more dangerous than you suppose, my friend. Twice now he has destroyed timeless foes that not even I could withstand in my prime. I think New York might well fear his coming. Fare well, Cséjthe, the Dra
gon’s blood burns brightly in your veins.<

  And then, just like that, his presence evaporated from our collective consciousness.

  “Did you hear that?” Pagelovitch finally asked with a disconcerting grin. “Dracula called me his friend!”

  * * *

  The sky was noticeably—well, not lighter but definitely less dark. Leave-takings were a hurried affair. Father Pat and “Brother” Michael would take Chalice Delacroix back to their encampment, now hidden even deeper in the swamps. There she could rest and heal and questions as to her future might be asked and eventually answered in a safe and nurturing environment. I tried to shake hands with the dead cleric but he slipped between my bandaged hands and embraced me. Breaking the hug with a hearty backslap he whispered that he would be in touch.

  Neither option was feasible with the angel as his hands were filled supporting Chalice Delacroix’s limp form. She was conscious, however, and asked me to lean in close.

  “Thank you for my life,” she whispered, kissing my cheek. “Your blood has saved me.”

  I shook my head. “Jesus saves, I only invest.” I smiled. “I just bought you some time. Just as you did for me.”

  And, in the end, isn’t that all we can really do for each other?

  The Kid came roaring up in a 1932 Ford Cabriolet that made my ‘50 Merc look state of the art. Its Gibson body was high-gloss midnight purple with red-and-orange flames ghost painted as emerging from the hood’s vented side-panels. It had straight pipes, a dropped front axle, Just Hobby rails, and the chopped roof had been stowed. The license plate read: NOS4 AH2. He reached back and popped open the rumble seat and then turned and leaned over the driver’s sill. “If you need a ride, better jump inside! This crate rates, but it’s gettin’ late!”

  I glanced back at my Swiss-cheesed junker and sighed. “Guess it’s not too likely we’ll get a cab out here at this hour.” As Deirdre and I started for the car, Kurt gave instructions to his brethren and hurried to join us.

  “We will make our traveling arrangements after sunset,” he told me as The Kid opened the passenger-side door for me.

  “Whoops,” he said as I started to climb in beside him, “gotta make some room.”

  “Uh, Kurt,” I said as The Kid picked up a bowling ball-sized object from the front seat, “about the New York gig . . . this bears a little more discussion . . .”

  The vampire’s face fell. “If you will not rule over us, then who will?”

  I postponed that question as I sat beside The Kid and he plopped Theresa’s severed head in my lap.

  “See what I found down there in the dungeon,” he announced, proud of his discovery. “Turn it from side to side: it looks like her eyes follow you no matter which way you move it!”

  With a sinking feeling, I realized that it was true. Theresa’s eyes moved in her head, her eyelids blinked. Her mouth opened and closed.

  “I seen stuff like that: autonomic reflexes and stuff,” J.D. elaborated as Kurt and Deirdre climbed into the rumble seat behind us. “Kinda like those chickens that run around after their heads get chopped off.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said slowly as he popped the clutch and started maneuvering the Ford around the buckled stalagmites of asphalt. “I think she’s still alive.”

  “What!” We screeched to a halt and Kurt’s and Deirdre’s heads bracketed mine as they leaned over my shoulders. J.D. took the head out of my grasp and held it up for a better look. “If she’s alive, how come she don’t say nothin’?”

  A numbed and disembodied portion of myself took up the intellectual analysis. “She has no lungs to move air through her vocal cords.”

  “But, if she don’t got lungs—and I mean the breathin’ kind, you understand—then how can she still be alive?” He looked up and found a vampire, a semi-vampire, and a former vampire all staring back at him. “Oh.”

  Kurt cleared his throat. “Perhaps a better question is how much alive is she?”

  I looked back at him. “What do you mean?”

  “How much awareness remains? Does she retain actual consciousness? Does she still enjoy higher brain functions?”

  “Somehow,” Deirdre murmured, “I don’t think ‘enjoy’ is an applicable term, here.”

  “And you would do well to remember that,” I told her, “considering your own circumstances.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The Kid raised the head in one hand and touched his own brow with the other. “Alas, poor Yorrick! I knew her well!”

  I plucked Theresa’s head from his grasp. “This isn’t funny.”

  “What do you mean ‘my own circumstances’?” Deirdre insisted.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I told her. “Our main concern right now is what do we do with her.”

  “I want to talk about it now,” the redhead persisted. “You gave both of us some of your blood. I’m no longer a vampire. She’s no longer . . . well . . . connected.”

  “Well connected,” J.D. chortled, “I like that.”

  “I’m alive and so is she,” Deirdre continued, “though neither of us should be.”

  “See, now ‘alive’ is one of those subjective terms—” I began.

  “Are you telling me that if I get all chopped up that I won’t die either?”

  “Well,” I shrugged, “that thought had just crossed my mind.”

  “Cooool,” opined Mr. Jump ‘n Jive Jittersauce.

  “Not so cool,” answered Kurt. “Imagine being trapped in a fire, falling under the wheels of a subway, being crushed in a building collapse, blown up by a terrorist bombing—”

  “I’ve got the picture,” Deirdre said sourly. “Is it true? Could the same thing happen to me? Can I die? And, if I can’t, is any damage to my body permanent?”

  J.D. sobered as he appeared to consider existence without the regenerative powers that a vampire enjoys.

  “The problem is,” I said, “I don’t know how we’d go about finding out without . . . without . . .”

  Deirdre nodded.

  “The sky is turning gray,” Kurt observed. “This matter should be debated elsewhere.”

  The Kid nodded and started the car back toward the road.

  “I think I may turn this matter over to Pagelovitch before he leaves,” I said as we drove past the abandoned guard station. “There are labs and medical facilities back at the Seattle demesne and I trust Dr. Mooncloud.”

  “There are labs and medical facilities in New York,” Kurt offered.

  I sighed. “I guess there’s no putting this off.” I turned to J.D. who was whistling “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and said: “Cut that out.” Then I turned back to my majordomo and said: “Here’s what I want to do . . .”

  * * *

  We made it back to what was left of my house in good time. The Kid hadn’t replaced the Lincoln V-8 or the Lincoln Zephyr transmission but he had kept the original parts in pristine condition and replaced other elements with an eye toward integration and performance. The interior was tricked out with VDO classic gauges, including clock and tach, and we rolled through the predawn gray on Hildebrand Sprint wheels—Michelins, big and little with the narrow whites out.

  “I was thinkin’ about chopping the hood,” he was telling me as we wove up the tree-canopied drive, “and adding a B and M blower—”

  I touched his shoulder and pointed at a lighted window on the second floor. “Someone’s up there.” A shadow ghosted along the section of ceiling that was visible from the car.

  The Kid killed the lights and engine and set the brake as we coasted to a stop. “Give me my gun,” I said as Deirdre and Kurt scrambled out of the folding backseat.

  She just looked at my bandaged hands and snorted.

  “Doggone it!” I muttered, easing the passenger door shut behind me. “I don’t know why I ever bought the damn thing in the first place!”

  There was a quiet argument going on when I reached the front porch.

  “I am his adjutant,” Kurt was
whispering, “I should go in first!”

  “But you haven’t been invited, so you can’t cross the threshold,” Deirdre argued.

  “But I am more powerful and less vulnerable than you! Invite me in and let me handle this!”

  “Guys, guys,” I said, pushing between them, “it’s my house, I’ll go in first. You’re both invited in to follow behind and provide backup.”

  “But—” the redhead began.

  “Funny thing,” I said to her, easing the scorched and broken door aside, “I don’t remember inviting you in to begin with.”

  I expected to find the downstairs littered with the remains of desiccated body parts but the primary evidences of the Birkmeister’s assault on my digs had been cleaned up. The bullet holes remained in the walls and the windows were still broken but all signs of my dead visitors had been cleared away along with the shattered furniture and busted lamps. The carpeting had been rolled up against the far wall and the floor beneath appeared to have been recently mopped. A serious attempt had been made to remove any evidence of the previous conflict.

  Deirdre rechecked the Glock and headed for the stairs.

  “Get back here!” I stage whispered.

  “Who’s there!” called a harsh, guttural voice from the top of the stairway. We looked at each other but no one answered. Now the sound of growling drifted down the stairs to our ears.

  I suddenly knew and was afraid. I was in no way ready for this—had no conceivable defense and now all of us were in danger: it would have been far better for me to come here alone.

  An inhuman shadow appeared on the wall of the stairway as she began to descend the steps.

  “Run!” I whispered to the others. “Hide!”

  A long muzzle came into view, filled with sharp teeth. Canine lips were drawn back in a snarl. A hairy, clawed hand gripped the banister.

  “Get out,” I urged, “before she sees you!”

  Too late: she had reached the landing and had as clear a view of us as we did of her.

  J.D. came scurrying through the doorway and into the living room just then. He skidded to a stop and took in the wolfish head, the clawed hands and feet, and the thick pelt of fur that covered her from head to taloned toes, including the single, human pair of mammary glands.