I had hoped to lure someone in close enough to bloody a nose. Now that was patently impossible. I hadn't signed up for Advanced Pain and Mutilation, either, and I wasn't about to stick around and audit the course. I banged around the interior of my borrowed skull a couple of times and shot back out into the ether. Perhaps, I thought as I exited through the wall, poor Hans would be well out of it, still crouching and whimpering down under the cellar stairs of his hindbrain.
But the screaming started before I was halfway down the hall. And the closed door did little to muffle Hans' bewildered protestations and howls for mercy.
Object lesson for the squeamish and irresolute: mercy begets mercy. But when you swim with the sharks, payback's a bitch.
Something I'd do well to remember if I ever made it back to New York.
* * *
It took me close to an hour to find my own body.
I had to search two levels and a half-dozen clinics and ORs before stumbling across the green-tiled theater where they'd stashed my mortal remains. It—I—lay on the stainless steel table, secured by two simple straps. The sheet was pulled back to the waist and I contemplated my waxy appearance like a talent scout for Madame Tussaud's. I needed an astringent. A loofah wouldn't hurt . . .
But I was really looking for two things.
First, a hint of the animus. Some sign of a Divine Spark to indicate premises weren't totally vacated. But I looked dead. Not peaceful. Not sleeping nor in repose. Not even a hint of nobility or any other indication of character seemed stamped on my slackened visage.
I was gone.
The question was was I gone for good?
This brought me to the other thing. I looked for the heart's fire and saw only ashes upon the hearth. Looked for spinning chakras and found only entropy.
That left only one, sure ingress: blood.
A wound, an injury, an entry point. An IV needle clumsily inserted might have done the trick. But no one had come along, yet, to hook me up. Hello? A little service here for Mengele's Holy Grail, please!
Apparently they had something going on. Scanners passed back and forth over me like upended Xerox machines and sensors were affixed to my epidermis like computerized checkpoints for the bank of computers along the wall. A variety of monitors were displaying a variety of readouts and a cursory glance suggested some kind of biotech programming was in progress. I looked back at my body. Nanobots? The Wonder Twins had injected something into my heart and my brain back in the hospital room. Were they reprogramming thousands of microscopic machines now awash in my blood and tissues?
Maybe this wasn't the time to zip up in my wetware suit and go lumbering around in a castle full of armed Nazis. But it did seem like a good idea to go find some kind of solidity and get back here before any more alterations were accomplished with my flesh! I considered the two tough-looking guards inside the room with me. Popped into the outer corridor and contemplated the second pair stationed right outside the door. Nope. Gotta thin the ranks a little. Even the odds. Balance the scales. In other words, FUBAR Brut Adler.
And, to do that, I needed blood.
Funny how some issues dog you well into the afterlife and I had a regular theme going on here. I hunted the hall, nearly making a complete circuit before opting up the next staircase and trying another level.
I hit pay dirt ten doors later in a sickbay area that was more clinic than surgical facility. Two members of the away-team were perched on the examining table being treated for superficial gunshot wounds, arm and leg respectively. Sizing both up, I opted for the one-armed guy—I needed to move about and too many areas of the complex weren't wheelchair accessible.
A hop, a twist, and a little "Johnny, may I cross your red, red bloodstream" put me inside. No time for niceties: I elbowed the resident psyche out of the way and tried to hop off the table. The good news was they had already administered some kind of morphine so the arm wasn't hurting as bad as it should. The bad news: they had already administered some kind of morphine so the rest of my new body wasn't working as well as it should.
It all worked out for the best, though: the nurse who stepped in to catch me got my elbow in her face and staggered back with a bloody nose.
Sorry, hon, but I may need another getaway vehicle . . .
The weapons were stacked in the corner and, as I made my way toward them I noticed a couple of valves protruding from the wall. I opened the one marked "Sauerstoff" and, as pure oxygen began to hiss into the room, I heard the door open behind me. As I scooped up a handgun an all-too-familiar voice asked: "What are you doing?" I looked back over my shoulder. Sure enough, a blood-speckled Mengele II stood on the threshold, a security goon at his side. "Stop!" he commanded. "Drop your weapon!"
This wasn't looking so good all of a sudden. My hastily conceived plan—short on detail, long on improvisation—depended on the elements of surprise and confusion. For them, not for me, unfortunately.
"Sergeant, shoot that man!" he ordered.
I dropped behind the exam table before he could get his rifle up but I was deep in trouble, already. Mengele Junior was no dummy and he was already watching the rest of his men for suspicious behavior. And while I lucked out this time and got a "right-handed" body to match my own orientation, it was the right arm that was all chewed up and practically useless. Furthermore, I was in a box—a box that everyone else was starting to exit—and the call had doubtlessly gone out for more reinforcements. I raised the pistol in my shaky left hand and considered my options. Stick my head up and probably get it blown off? Keep my head down and fire blindly over the tabletop?
I went with option three: I put three bullets into the wall before the fourth hit the opened oxygen nozzle and turned a four-room complex into a phoenix pyre that flipped its own fiery bird at Mengele Redux.
Fire alarms were blaring their klaxon distress calls throughout the complex as I exited the large, charcoal briquette I had spent all of ninety seconds possessing. I drifted through the flames and three more walls before reentering the corridor and resuming my search for another host body.
Brut Adler was looking less and less like an eagle's nest and more and more like an anthill someone had kicked over. Personnel swarmed through the hallways, some fleeing the fire, others moving toward it with firefighting gear. Thirty seconds of mind-surfing the human currents and I retreated to another office and resumed my search away from the confusing kaleidoscope of mental chatter.
Office, office, closet, storeroom, lab, storeroom . . . Bingo: another OR! Or, rather, the viewing gallery for an operating theater one floor below.
Theresa Kellerman lay across the operating table, a cross-stitch pattern of bullet wounds marking her own, borrowed flesh from right armpit to left hip. And she was screaming.
Not in pain but in annoyance. "I don't want an anesthetic! I don't need an anesthetic! The last time you knocked me out for reattachment, you cross-wired two of my fingers!" Her voice had an unnatural, electronic sound and there appeared to be a modified vocoder taped across her throat. "I need to be awake this time to make sure all of the nerve endings are matched properly! When we're done I'll have a permanent body and no one's going to screw it up on my watch!"
I leaned forward for a better look, pressing my palms to the slanted observation glass. No sign of Deirdre anywhere below. About the time I realized that my "palms" were insubstantial it was already too late to recover. I continued the "lean" into a horizontal skydiver's pose, dropping forward and down into the operating room.
Onto the table.
Into Theresa Kellerman!
Her flesh was like a dry sponge, thirsty for spiritual essence: it sucked me in like that paper towel that bills itself as "the quicker picker-upper." I had a new body if I wanted it.
Well, why not? She was doubtless part of the inner circle. Why not see what kind of havoc I could create wearing her identity? Plus, they couldn't very well go ahead with the head swap while I was hijacking the donee. Or would Terry-call-me-T be considered
the donor? Come on, Cséjthe; focus! Plenty of time to muse after the dust settles. I shook my head and was rewarded with a most peculiar sensation.
In fact there was a whole lotta peculiar sensations. Every new body was a different experience, though I was getting faster and more intuitive at mastering the process with each new "jump." But this latest insertion felt—well—wrong in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint.
Movement seemed difficult. I tried to sit up and convulsed more than actually moved. I wrenched myself up with a major effort on the second try and the doctor and two nurses standing across from the table staggered back. A nurse started to scream. The other nurse joined her—no, that was the doctor! He was a better screamer than she was.
Theresa Kellerman was screaming, too. Her high-pitched keening sounded especially eerie through the electronic filter of the vocoder. Time to send her to the mental cellar. I rummaged around in my skull but couldn't find her. Not even down in the dark depths of the hindbrain.
I lowered my feet to the floor and carefully placed a little weight on my right foot. My legs felt sleepy and unresponsive and I had to lurch a little to make the position. Everyone else took a step back. One of the nurses grabbed a scalpel. The other snatched up a metal instrument tray, scattering dozens of implements, and then held it before her like a shield. The doctor threw up a gloved hand to his white-capped brow and shrieked: "It's alive! Alive!"
I took a faltering step. This body had a lower center of gravity, being a woman with the typical hips configuration, and I was having a little more difficulty than usual in finding my balance.
The nurse with the scalpel threw it. Maybe she had "carney knife-thrower" listed somewhere on her resume. In any event, it landed blade-first in my left breast. There was some wetness and I was suddenly three cup sizes smaller on that side. I pulled the scalpel out as the nurse bugged for the door and the doctor fainted. Then I reached over and cupped my remaining breast. Implants. Based on the runoff I'd guess saline rather than silicone.
The other nurse was backing toward the door, still holding the stainless steel tray up like it would protect her.
Protect her from what? I mean, I might be worried if I saw Theresa Kellerman coming toward me—we had a "history," after all. But all this abject terror? Maybe it was the expression on "our" face. Was I doing something to appear particularly ferocious? If so, I needed to practice more: I had a whole castle of Nazis to spook into submission.
I took another step. And then another.
The tray moved, trying to stay between me and the whimpering woman who kept shuffling backwards. As I came closer I could catch glimpses of my reflection, a little distorted and wavy, and very brief as the tray trembled and shook in her white-knuckled grasp.
Finally I was close enough to reach out and grab it, myself. At that point she relinquished her hold and ran screaming from the room. I let her go. I was more interested in my reflection. I turned the tray this way and that but the results were the same: no particular expression on my face.
No face.
No head.
I turned and looked back at the operating table I had just vacated. Theresa-call-me-Terry-call-me-T's head was still there, still screaming through her vocoder. I dropped the tray and reached up to feel the space just above my shoulders: nothing was there.
I felt a ghostly smile where my head poked out of Kellerman's corpse of crazy-quilt cadaver parts.
Cool.
Very cool!
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dead flesh isn't easy to animate and it should have been downright impossible. But then I was getting to the point where words like "impossible" and "unlikely" and maybe even "coincidence" were being eradicated from my vocabulary. Ever since my sojourn among the Loa and subbing for Baron Samedi, the dead seemed to respond to my presence with a preternatural vigor. Maybe this was just more of the same.
Sort of.
Alas, this stitched-together semblance of a body wasn't good for anything much beyond lumbering around and scaring the bejezus out of any rational beings it encountered. Which was plenty good for the next twenty minutes as I cleared the second-floor hallway from one end to the other. But sooner or later it was bound to come down to a fight and this putrefying mass of dissolving muscles, rotting sinews, and decaying bones wasn't up to throwing a real punch, never mind a kung-fu kick or beating a hasty retreat. I needed firearms and opportunities for grander acts of destruction.
I also needed to get back to my own body and get it disconnected from those machines before Mengele completed his Bionic Manikin play.
I staggered on down the corridor, moving a small herd of fortress personnel before me like a cattle drive of the damned as I searched for the nearest staircase back up. Another pair of security goons appeared, pushing their way through the crowd to approach me.
Now I was in trouble.
The first burst of weapons fire went wide. These guys had cojones but you would need bowling balls to face what they were looking at and not have a little tremble in your trigger finger.
The second burst clipped me. The third sent several rounds right to my torso.
Having been in actual combat I've seen machine-gun fire pick a man up off his feet and throw him three or four feet back from the shooter. At the very least it will knock you down.
I kept to my feet. Kellerman's liquefying flesh was an ineffective barrier to the bullets: they passed through me without meeting enough resistance to affect my frame as a whole.
The guards dropped their HKs and ran.
I picked them up, bracing the stock of each against the insides of my cadaverous elbows and forearms, and stalked on down the hall like Sigourney Weaver.
Sigourney Weaver on a coke-fueled Aliens pub crawl and missing her head, if you will.
I finally reached the stairs after Ramboing my way through about twenty more of Mengele's staff. I was starting to think this might work and maybe I wouldn't be needing backup after all.
But then I reached the stairs.
Going down might have worked. Going up, however, required some motor skills that were a little more demanding. After a few Pratfalls of the Living Dead, I reluctantly turned and shuffled off in search of the elevator.
Precious time was passing and the word had evidently gone out. I encountered no other personnel on my way to the lift. The elevator, when it arrived, was empty as well. I stepped inside and pressed the button for the third level. The doors closed and it started upward with a slight jerk.
Halfway between floors it stopped with a big jerk.
I punched buttons but nothing happened. It looked like I was the big jerk: someone had cut the power
I turned and looked out through the glass walls at the lobby below. People were coming out to observe the headless corpse in the big specimen jar trapped between the second and third levels.
No point in hanging around: I quit the cold, lifeless flesh that had toted Theresa Kellerman on her last mission and jumped through the wall to land back on the floor I had just left. As a spook I could move more swiftly, now, but the stairs were still going to be a bit of a problem. Behind me and above, the headless corpse fell against one of the glass walls and then slid to the floor of the lift, leaving a greasy orange smear in its wake.
* * *
I passed by the OR and checked in on T's head before continuing the search for my own. It was gone. Too bad I hadn't taken the time to stash it in the autoclave before leaving.
The stairs were a bitch but at least I wasn't providing anyone with a visible target this time around. Eventually I made it to the top and hurried down the hall like a narcissistic Diogenes in search of self.
The fire had been put out, though it still smoldered here and there. No bodies were in sight. I had to hand it to these guys: even after more than sixty years the Nazis were still an efficient lot.
I moved ahead and noted that, as I approached the area where I had last left myself, new guards had been posted. They were doubled in number and s
paced out in pairs so that every man could watch and be watched by the others. The Mengeles were quick studies.
But were they quick enough to stop me from popping into the nearest warm body with a paper cut? And then starting a chain reaction of bloody noses that would have them killing each other off as I kept skipping ahead to new corpora delicti?
Before we had a chance to find out, I spooked on ahead and checked the room where I had last found myself.
It was empty.
I moved on, afraid I'd spend another hour before I found it again, afraid I'd be too late, afraid—
I found it a couple of doors down, in the room at the end of the hall.
* * *
I'd been moved from a surgical facility to a security hub. Rows of monitors showed a multiplicity of views throughout the complex, including several perimeter areas on the outside. The overturned anthill analogy was morphing back into an orderly beehive of recovery and reconnoiters. Groups of personnel—some uniformed, most drafted from support staff—were sweeping the various levels for signs of further disturbance or incursion. Treatment of the injured was proceeding apace. Surgeries were being performed in six different theaters.
And I was in here, secured to a padded gurney with enough leather straps to delight a leather queen and restrain Houdini. Like I said, these guys were no dummies. Take one little corpse for a stroll and suddenly they were locking down bodies left and right. And keeping three more guards in the room as well as a doctor wearing a handgun in a belt holster and a scary-looking nurse who looked like she was recruited from the Russian Olympic shot-put team.
The IV needle lodged deep in my arm would probably allow me ingress to my own flesh but unless I could unbuckle a few belts and convince a half-dozen people to look the other way, I wasn't going any further.
Still, I had to do something and I had to do it soon! The needle in my arm was directing my unique blood chemistry through a tube connected to an antique blood transfuser and, from there, down an adjoining tube to another needle in another arm.
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