Habeas Corpses

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  "Look," she said.

  A great crimson stalactite hung just inches above the water, looking like a single bloody fang. At its very tip a single droplet of mineral-charged water trembled, stretched, and finally leapt to its own oblivion in the murky waters.

  "It's coming for you."

  I turned to her. "What?"

  "Don't look at me. Look down. Look deep."

  I looked down. The opening above throttled the sunlight into a closely focused beam. A few feet beneath the glowing liquid turquoise was a dark, gray-green zone shading to black that had been dark from the dawn of time. "What am I looking for?"

  "Camazotz."

  I felt a giggle forming. "Camelot?"

  "Camazotz," she said sternly, "also called Zotz or Zotzilaha Chimalman. Bat demon, god of darkness and caves, and tutelary deity of the Tzotzil Maya."

  "Why am I looking for a Mayan bat-demon in an underground swimming pool when I should be having a pleasant dream about our honeymoon?"

  "Because I am leaving you now to be reborn," she answered as the water at the edge of the light began to stir. "And he is on his way to find you."

  Down below, in the bottomless depths of the dark zone, two pinpoints began to glow. Red specks became dots became marbles as the water began to churn. Crimson marbles became great fiery eyes that grew as the thing at the bottom of the lake came closer to the surface. Behind those eyes was a need and hunger beyond human measurement.

  And those lamps of hell were focused on me.

  I woke up screaming.

  Chapter Six

  By the time the arguments were over it was dark outside.

  We didn't discuss her pregnancy, much less why she had hidden it from me—we both pretended that the topic hadn't been broached yet.

  It was decided that Lupé would stay with the Gator-man for a regimen of rest and a profusion of infusions for a few days. My own fainting spell had passed. The dream or nightmare (or vision) had even energized me some.

  At least I knew that I didn't want to close my eyes again any time soon.

  Staying with Lupé, however, was out of the question.

  The accommodations were such that two was well past "company" and three was something approaching standing room only. I was not only in the way; I couldn't even sit by the bed and hold her hand.

  Even worse, I thought I saw relief flood Lupé's eyes as I took my leave.

  As I handed my cell phone to the old Cajun at the front door I noticed a series of ridges that marked the outside of his forearms like serrated rows of calluses. The heartbreak of psoriasis? Or was "Gator-man" something more than a poacher's nickname? I gave instructions that I was to be called at any time of the day or night if she so much as hiccupped. Then I reluctantly climbed into the station wagon and allowed Mama Samm to drive me home.

  I tried to memorize the route on the way back but it was dark and I was still a little woozy. The smell of blood from the back didn't help. I was getting hungry again and not for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

  Mama Samm kept up a steady stream of questions about my dreams of late, but I was distracted and surly. And I found myself focusing on the way her pulse visibly throbbed along the side of her throat. When the topic turned to who might be inclined to send me a message and say it with hearts instead of flowers, I tuned completely out. I dropped my chin to my chest and half-feigned sleep.

  My mind was a roiling stew of emotions. Questions about Lupé's recovery, about her feelings for me, about her devotion to her furry heritage. And about her secret pregnancy.

  The woman I was going to marry was carrying my child.

  A son. (What about my brother, Mommy . . . )

  And she had not told me.

  Couldn't she trust me?

  Could I trust her?

  * * *

  Deirdre and J.D. met us at the garage on the far side of the river and helped me down to the dock and into the boat. I didn't need that much help but I couldn't be too careful around deep water, now. It seemed my swimming skills had all gone to hell since inheriting one-half of the supervirus Vampirus horriblis. There was a weighty reason that caused vampires to balk at crossing running water.

  "How are we fixed for food?" I asked as they prepared to cast off.

  "You kiddin'?" The Kid asked. "Didn't you get a gander at all the bags me and Lupé toted in last night?"

  "What about blood?"

  "Blood?"

  "Yeah, blood, FangBob SquarePants. I had a couple of packets at the back of the fridge. Are they still there?"

  "Were those your packets?" His feigned surprise was all the answer I needed.

  "Yes and yes: my blood bank and my stash for when the Hunger comes back." I tossed my keys to him. "Make another trip. You know the code for the alarm; I'll edit the surveillance video tomorrow."

  He took off with a long look over his shoulder. Some people lose their appetites when they're sick. Me? It usually means I'm overdue for a meal. Right now I felt about three days overdue. And probably looked it, judging from the look my Chief of Security was now giving me.

  Deirdre wasn't inclined to wait while J.D. drove to the blood bank. She took me across the river, docked the boat, and followed behind my unsteady stumble up the stairs to the top of the bluff. Once inside the house, I headed for the kitchen while Deirdre picked up the phone and directed Clay—our sole surviving security guy—to take the boat back across the river and wait for Junior.

  I checked the refrigerator and then set a pan of water on the stove. My instincts were good: The Kid had finished off my emergency stash. Normally this wouldn't be a problem. I could still tolerate solid food and stayed away from hemoglobin for weeks at a time.

  Eventually, though, I always gave in.

  Back in my college days I had tried out a theory that I could train my body to go without sleep by setting my alarm to go off five minutes earlier each morning. As you might suspect, I made do with less but never made do without. Sooner or later I always crashed and burned.

  Trying to reprogram my partially transformed flesh to give up the red stuff was just about as effective as my youthful attempts to give up sleep. Except the crashing and burning was a lot uglier when the Hunger finally overrode the last dregs of my willpower.

  I hoped J.D. wouldn't take too long.

  There was no point in standing around and watching the water come to a boil. I turned the gas knob on the burner so that the ring of blue flame was more suggestion than actual fact and then limped upstairs to change clothes.

  A quick rinse in the shower was all I had patience for, peeling off the bandages and examining the grayish skin marking bullet wounds that already looked two weeks healed. I toweled off and dressed without rebandaging: what would be the point? A gray pullover and pair of gray Dockers to match my mood. I slipped on a pair of Doc Martens and glanced in the mirror as I headed back toward the stairs. Gude eevning, I am Count GAPula. I vant to suck . . . Ah hell, I just suck and let's leave it at that.

  I descended the stairs and wandered into the library, my mood still descending as I waited for my food to arrive.

  The heart continued to beat in its low-tech aquarium.

  My email folder contained nothing but ordinary spam.

  I went to the shelves and pulled a dog-eared copy of Popul Vuh, the creation myths of the Quiché Maya. As I pulled the book toward me I noticed that my hands were only slightly trembling. I decided to sit down before I fell down.

  By translation Popul Vuh means "Book of Written Leaves." I wondered if Walt Whitman cribbed the title for his own magnum opus a couple of millennia after the fact. I had thumbed through it only once since my honeymoon a decade ago—last year, in fact. That was when I had figured out that I desperately needed wisdom on that twilight territory between life and death. Since Amazon.com had yet to list The Afterlife for Dummies, I was reduced to scavenging texts containing theological theorizing or tomes with treatises on cultural myths and legends.

  In either I found little
but fable, poetry, and allegory. Maybe that was a good thing: according to most ancient cultures the "afterlife" was a pretty scary place. Modern religion cleaned a lot of this up but left the stink of disinfectant on their generic version of the afterlife. I found little to persuade or reassure me outside of a little sect that called itself the Community of Christ. Since I doubted this Camazotz was a congregant, I flipped through the Popul Vuh looking for a catchier catechism.

  A big chunk of the creation myth of the highland Mayan culture involved the underground realm of Xibalbá, a charming underworld whose name translated as "Place of Fear." There was this whole Akira Kurosawa plotline where hero twins Hun-Hunapú and Vukub-Hunapú were lured to the ninth level of Hell to play Mayan b-ball against a bunch of demons. The game was fixed (big duh!) and the twins were slaughtered by the underworld kings Hun-Camé and Vukub-Camé via a horde of their grotesque subjects.

  Not to worry: everything turned out okay because the twins were avenged by Hun-Hunapú's sons Hunapú and Xbalanqué.

  The enlightening thing about this little intergenerational revenge fable was that ole Hun didn't have any sons before he went to Hell and got killed. The boys, it seems, were posthumously conceived on Xquiq, a passing demon princess. Nice to know that sex doesn't end with death. . . .

  Of course, it's whom you have the opportunity with that determines whether that's a good thing—or a very bad thing.

  At least the boys inherited some advantages from their mother. When one of them was decapitated by Camazotz and his head was used as the ball in a hellish ballgame, he obtained a substitute head and the boys went on to take the field against all comers.

  So, maybe all demons aren't bad, just as all humans aren't good. Perhaps this Xquiq was the prototypical demoness-with-a-heart-of-gold. She probably didn't have to be that much of a looker to catch the eye of a young dead hero in love.

  Just consider the competition.

  Each of the nine levels of Xibalbá had its own pantheon of demons and death-gods. There was Ah Puk, the death-god who usually showed up on temple walls in the form of a seated skeleton wielding a sacrificial knife. His one saving grace was that his name was easier to spell than Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec death-god. Then there was Ixtab, the goddess of suicides, often depicted as a putrefying corpse dangling from a noose. And Kawil, Lord of Blood, who thought knives were for sissies and required those performing his blood offerings to do so by passing a spiked cord through their tongues or genitals. By comparison to these guys, even the bat-demon Camazotz, Lord of Caves and Darkness, was a charmer.

  Still, I wasn't looking forward to making batboy's acquaintance—assuming you could put any faith in the prophetic powers of dreams. I certainly didn't. But then, a year or so ago, I didn't believe in vampires or werewolves, either.

  The question was, what did I believe in, these days?

  As I flipped through the pages a makeshift bookmark fell out and into my lap. It was a strip of plastic wrapped cardstock. Pressed between the clear plastic and the off-white backing was an orange and black butterfly with brief white markings: a Monarch butterfly. The Aztecs believed that the spirits of dead children returned to the earth in its fairy-like form. I kept the bookmark to remind me that not all Mesoamerican tenets of faith fell into Clive Barker territory.

  As I replaced the bookmark, a new sense of horror and despair overtook me. I sagged in my chair and let the book drop from my uncertain fingers.

  "What is it? What's wrong?" Deirdre asked a little while later.

  I looked up and finally focused on where she was standing in the doorway. "I just realized something," I said slowly.

  "That you nearly died?" Count on Deirdre to be direct.

  "No. That someone actually did die today."

  "Several people died today. If they hadn't, you would have."

  "I'm thinking about Marvin."

  "What about him?" Her eyes narrowed. "He was your bodyguard. He was doing his job. And not doing it very well since it got him killed. He should have taken a bullet throwing himself in front of you, not sitting out in the parking lot like a clueless twit! So, if you're feeling guil—"

  "I'm not feeling guilty."

  "Good. Well. It's okay to feel sad. He was still a good guy and—"

  "I don't feel sad."

  She looked at me as if my head might start spinning at any moment. "What do you feel?"

  "Nothing. I feel nothing. A man died in my employ and I haven't given him a second thought all day."

  She walked toward me and, as I watched her hips draw an endless series of infinity symbols, I remembered a time when her physicality took my breath away, how her proximity gave rise to primitive responses.

  "You've been shot. Your . . . fiancée has been shot. You've gone through a lot since you walked into Thibodaux's this morning. Is it any wonder you haven't had time to think about him?" She stopped a few feet away. "What? What are you looking at? Have I grown an extra head?"

  I shook my head and looked down at the floor. "Maybe I've been too busy to think about him until now. But now I sit and have the time. And I still don't feel anything. I don't feel bad about him. I don't feel bad for his family. The only thing I do feel bad about is that I don't feel bad about his death!"

  "He was a soldier, in a war—"

  "Yeah," I said, "he was a soldier in my wee little army. Out to help me claim the Throne of Darkness so that I might rule the East Coast undead as a benevolent dictator and make the nights safer for humankind."

  "Don't tell me you were expecting a bloodless coup?"

  "Bloodless? No. But I wasn't expecting a heartless one, either."

  "You love Lupé," she said. "Marv was just an employee."

  "And what about you?" I asked, looking up.

  "Me?" She appeared startled. "What about me?"

  "Are you just another foot soldier in this war? What am I supposed to feel if you die, too?"

  The question seemed to annoy her. "You tell me."

  "You are a very beautiful woman—you know that."

  She stared at me, her gaze weighing upon me with a palpable heaviness. "Didn't we have this conversation some time back?"

  "A lifetime ago."

  She nodded slowly. "It was another lifetime. I was still human and grieving for Damien."

  "And Lupé was more monster than woman to me, then."

  "Your point?"

  I knew the point but I was having trouble finding the words. "The fact that I love Lupé hasn't changed the fact that my pulse quickens whenever you walk into the room. You are still the most beautiful woman I have ever known."

  She stood very still, her breathing seemed to cease.

  "I could desire you . . . while still desiring Lupé more."

  "Torn between two lovers," she said, "feeling like a fool."

  "Please. I'm trying to make a point."

  "That looks aren't everything?"

  "There's nothing in which you lack. Love is a chemist's nightmare."

  She held up her hand. "Please. You don't have to pat me on the head and tell me that I'm as good as the next girl."

  "Woman," I amended.

  "Then treat me like one," she snapped. "I'm an adult, not an adolescent!"

  "Okay then." I sat back in my chair and locked my gaze on hers. "I don't feel anything for you."

  "You've made that point."

  "No, I haven't. I—I've always felt something for you." I forced my eyes to stay on hers. "Even when it was nothing more than animal lust when I first met you."

  "Really? Tell me more!"

  "Shut up and pay attention. I'm telling you that I haven't always been sure of what I felt but I know that I've always felt something. Until now."

  She stared back, wanting to ask the question.

  "I don't know why," I answered. "I just know that when I go to the emotional cupboard now, the shelves are bare. I don't feel friendship. I don't feel love. I don't feel loyalty or desire."

  "Well, Mother Hubbard, how about
animal lust?" she asked, her fingers straying to the front of her blouse.

  My answer was lost as the house lights flashed and the doorbell began to chime.

  "Upstairs!" she snapped as I came out of my chair.

  I didn't argue. I ran up the stairs toward the second floor and headed for my bedroom.

  The security system included pressure sensors imbedded in the boat dock and the stairs up the side of the bluff: someone or something had just set them off. It was too soon for J.D. to be returning from the blood bank and he would have keyed in the code to neutralize the alarm from the dock. I skidded to a stop and grabbed the Glock out of the shoulder holster hanging on the bedpost. I checked the magazine and slide-cocked it before turning back to the head of the stairs. The alarm stopped as I set my foot down on the top step.

  "That you?" I called quietly.

  "I killed the alarm, yes!" Deirdre stage-whispered back in the sudden silence. She crossed below me, now wearing her own shoulder rig and loading a shotgun with silver and phosphorus-laced shells. "Now stay where you are! Don't come down until I give you the all-clear!"

  The porch light came on signifying someone had tripped the pressure sensors on the last three steps at the top of the bluff. I didn't trust motion detectors: infrared was unreliable when it came to undead bodies in motion.

  Deirdre pumped a shell into the chamber and I put my foot down to the next stair. It creaked.

  "Get back up there!" she hissed.

  "You've got no backup," I whispered. "I'm not letting you face whatever's out there alone!"

  "You get back upstairs and lock yourself in right now!"

  "Or what?" I said, coming down another step.

  "Or pray whatever's out there kills me because if it doesn't, I'm gonna seriously kick your ass after we're done!"

  Defiantly, I put my foot down on the next stair tread. This time the creaking sound came from the front porch. Deirdre turned back to the front door, knelt, and raised her shotgun. I sat back on the stairs, leaned against the banister, and extended the Glock, bracing my right wrist with my left hand.