"Yes," it agreed, "and you must now know what I have known for centuries. Death does not bring oblivion. It grasps us by the neck and rubs our face in our failures, our faults, all the wrongs we seek to flee from. Suicide is not so much a mortal sin as a headlong rush to the seat of our eternal pain."
"Keep talking," I seethed, "you'll inspire me to try even though I know I'm hopelessly outmatched."
"Of course you would want to try. I have no right to ask any human for help when I have fed off of the suffering and misery of the human race for countless gen—"
I whirled and grabbed him by his furry throat. "Look, I don't care diddley about the rest of the human race. We don't need demons to blame for our misery and our own inhumanity to man. You guys kibitz and stir the pot but I've got a pretty good sense that we could blow up the world on our own, thank you." He made no move to escape my grasp. "You ever read Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly? It's an analogy, Batzilla: God is Doctor Frankenstein and humanity is His monster—a mass of mismatched parts stumbling around in search of its creator and committing more atrocities every step of the way." I tightened my grip though it felt like I was making no impression on that column of muscle. "But let's not talk about the millions of faceless, nameless strangers that died in wars and concentration camps and political game preserves providing you with some kind of psychosexual runoff to feed on. Let's talk about you coming to my house and killing the mother of my unborn son!"
"Oh really, Chris," Lupé nagged, "don't be stupid!"
I shook my head. It was just like her memory to nag me as I confronted the monster that had murdered her.
"Why would he hurt me if he was coming to you for help?" her voice continued. It was as if she were still alive and with me.
Camazotz nodded, making it difficult to hold on to his throat. "My only thought was to protect her." He turned his head and looked past me. "I thought I told you to wait in the truck."
"It's getting close to sunrise," her voice argued. "I only agreed to wait outside if you got in and back out again in a hurry."
"The sun, while unpleasant, doesn't harm either of us—"
"But Chris might not have his sunblock with him and he may have allies that wish to leave with him. Honestly, do I have to do all of the thinking around here?"
I turned then and stared at the apparition standing in the doorway. Lupé looked very real, very solid, and more than a little annoyed.
Another familiar face popped up behind her. Boo, wearing a jacket with a turned-up collar, a muffler, and a Peterbilt cap pulled down low over his eyes. "C'mon, Hoss, I've got an eighteen-wheeler double-parked topside and we're not gonna be low profile much longer!"
I opened my mouth. "What—?" was about all I could get out.
"What did we bring an eighteen-wheeler fer?" the old zombie asked for me. That might even have been one of my questions. "It was her idea. More room for more people. No windows."
"Come on, come on," Lupé urged. "Grandfather showed me the secret ways in and out of this place when I was young, but that was years ago and I wasn't on the wanted list back then. Unless you've got valuables stashed somewhere, I suggest you follow me right now."
I shook my head. "I've got valuables but they're packed and waiting upstairs in a windowless van."
"There's more room in the truck."
I nodded. My brain finally engaged. "We'll split up here and meet on the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse, in front of Belvedere Castle."
Camazotz growled at the zombie: "Get her back in the truck!"
"You get Chris out of here safely," she growled back. Then she turned and sprinted back down the hall. Boo shambled after her as speedily as his rotting limbs would take him.
"Come on," the bat-demon said, taking my arm in his taloned grasp, "you don't want to make that lady mad."
"Tell me about it."
We didn't exactly run but we passed through the corridors, then into the service passageways and up into the sewers before emerging near the Dakota Building on Central Park West. Anywhere we encountered vampires or staff, one look at the Mesoamerican demon and our pathway was suddenly vacant. We met no resistance whatsoever.
As we were climbing up the ladder to the street level he reconfigured his anatomy, compacting down to a smallish black man. By now I had grown accustomed to seeing Lupé transform so it wasn't completely novel. Unlike my beloved and the other Weres, however, he seemed to be able to manufacture clothing out of his residual mass.
Our conversation, however, wasn't focused on matters of sartorial sorcery. Instead he proceeded to explain how among all of the dreams and all of the nightmares of bloodshed and war and murder most foul, a face had appeared. My face. And something had suggested that I might know enough about monstrous hungers and remember enough of the human condition to serve as a guide . . .
"Guide?" I grunted, shouldering the manhole cover up and out of the way. "What kind of a guide? Guide for what?"
"My way out of the blood-drenched darkness that has been my existence for uncountable human lifetimes. My journey back to humanity."
I climbed up and saw that Suki was directing the sparse, early morning traffic around us with a flashlight. I reached down to give Zotz a hand up. "Um, not to discourage you on the whole self-improvement gig, but you were never human to begin with."
"I contain the spiritual detritus of a hundred thousand drowned souls within my own essence," he said, popping up and brushing off his suit. Dirt didn't appear to stick to him the way it did to me. "I think I have more 'human' antecedents than you do in that sense."
"If 'sense' is an applicable word here," I muttered.
Suki came over. "Sunrise in thirty minutes. Who's he?"
"My intern." I kicked the manhole cover back into place. "By the way, there's been a change in plans."
* * *
We made the rendezvous and offloaded the van into the truck with minutes to spare. By the time that the rising sun was turning the Manhattan skyline into a shadowbox diorama, we were well along and stuck in morning traffic, Boo and his buddies up in the cab and the rest of us back in the day-shelter of the trailer.
There was a little bit of grumbling on Boo's part about being stuck up front with Preacher. Cam was sitting between them but, as I've pointed out before, he's a limited conversationalist and it was going to be a long road trip. I thought about swapping Cameron out for the demon as both Zotz and Jerome could probably have some spirited discussions on the topics of theology and the afterlife. But that wouldn't necessarily mollify Boo and no one wanted to share closed quarters in the back with a rotting corpse. As it was there were about fifteen automobile air fresheners hanging from the ceiling of the truck cab's interior.
Lupé, Zotz, and the cemetery crew had outfitted the back of the semi with cots and coffins and a sofa from the living room for the return trip.
"I knew you would need rescuing," Lupé said, "you always do."
"Mother's intuition?" I asked.
Her left eyebrow went up but she didn't answer.
"Actually, I was doing rather well on my own," I continued, ignoring the stifled hiccup sound from Suki. "I'd made my points, the plan was unfolding on schedule, and I'd be another thirty miles down the road, by now, if you hadn't interrupted with your 'rescue.' Not that I mind, of course." I gave Zotz a sideways glance as I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
"Ow!" She jerked away and rubbed her face as if stung. "Just scoot over there, a little farther away, please! And keep your hands to yourself."
I slid back over to the far end of the sofa where the light from the Coleman lantern wouldn't betray my own face quite so readily.
"What's in the big suitcase?" she asked after a moment. "Nazi gold?"
I looked over at the large metal suitcase that contained frozen embryos of Jenny and Kirsten. "Personal effects." I didn't feel like discussing that topic right now.
"Do you really think they'll agree to put up with your rules and restrictions?" Suki
asked, running conversational interference.
"Yes," Lupé chimed in, "it sounds like you gave a convincing display of dominance but how long can that carry you?"
"I'm not a fool," I said, feeling somewhat the fool for different reasons. "You cannot domesticate vampires." Or werewolves . . .
"Then what was the point?" Zotz asked, moving to sit on the cushions between us.
"Oh, it's obvious, Cammy," she answered before I could open my mouth. Cammy? "Chris couldn't bear to preside over a demesne that allowed the hunting and killing and turning of humans. He's just one man and even a full-blooded vampire couldn't go up against an entire enclave and survive. So, he's turned them against each other."
Suki nudged my foot with hers. "You've read Sun Tzu, haven't you?"
"It won't last," I said. "I knew that when I set it up." Cammy?
"You buy whatever time you can, using what you're given," Lupé said. "The thing is, by the time they've thinned their own ranks to eliminate competition and curry favor they'll realize that they need a new Doman to coordinate the survivors in bringing you down."
"Which will bring about another round of assassinations and bloody infighting," Suki summed up. "In the meantime, your precious humans are given a reprieve and you have a chance to stop and catch your breath."
Theresa Kellerman cleared her throat. "Speaking of stopping . . ."
We all turned to look.
We'd all been trying very hard not to since climbing aboard and heading out but staring was inevitable.
The stitches that held her head and neck on Deirdre's body were already superfluous due to the accelerated healing factors combined in her flesh and my blood.
"Oh, please!" Deirdre scolded, rolling her eyes. "Did I not tell you to be sure and go before we left?"
Her head was tilted a bit to the left to make room for Theresa's, which tilted to the right.
The Wendigo and her troops had arrived too late to stop the operation from getting underway. Mengele's surgeons had gotten as far as attaching Kellerman's central nervous and circulatory systems before the OR was stormed. Another five minutes and Deirdre's head would have been excised like a five-pound tumor.
So, "too late" and yet . . .
"I tried," Theresa sniffed, "but it's hard. I'm not used to going when somebody else is in the room."
"And you'd better not get used to it, either," the redhead snapped. "As soon as we get back to Louisiana, Doctors Mooncloud and Burton are going to perform a lunkectomy!"
"That's not fair," the brunette wailed, "you've had this body all along! It's my turn to have a body!" She began to sob hysterically. "Not fair! Not fair! Not fair!"
"Not my body, you twit! Now stop it; you're getting hysterical." Deirdre reached over and gave her a little slap with her left hand.
Theresa stopped crying but failed to calm down. "You hit me!" She reached over with her right and yanked a handful of auburn tresses.
"Uh-oh," sighed Suki, "here we go again."
"Ow! Psycho!" Slap!
"Bitch!" Yank!
"Freakazoid!" Smack!
"Whore!" Pull!
"Nutjob!" Whack!
"Bitch!" Tug!
"You're repeating yourself, dear."
"Bite me!"
Deirdre obliged by craning her neck and sinking her teeth into Theresa's nose.
"Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!"
As soon as her nose was released, the brunette reciprocated by doing a Tyson on the redhead's ear.
Things really started to rock and roll at that point. Although they shared a single body from the shoulders down and were (was?) deeply ensconced in a beanbag chair so that they didn't move all that much, heads and arms were quite active for the next several minutes as a full-fledged catfight developed and then subsided with both sides crying "Uncle!" Like their previous "disagreements" since our departure from Brut Adler, what it lacked in range and athletics it had more than made up for in pitch and volume.
I picked up the transceiver and punched the send button. "Breaker, breaker, this is Bat-daddy callin' Big Bubba, you got your ears on, good buddy?"
The response was immediate. A crackle of static and Boo's voice came back over the tinny speaker. "This here's Big Bubba, come on back, Bat-daddy."
"Boo, we're going to need to find a restroom or rest stop or something pretty soon."
"What? Come on, Hoss; you gotta be kiddin' me!"
"'Fraid not, big guy. And one other thing."
"Sure, Long Pall Trucking, we aim to please."
"Be on the lookout for a veterinary clinic or animal hospital or pet supply store. We may need to pick up a couple of those large, plastic head cones."
"Head cones?"
"You know those lampshade-looking collars they put on pets to keep them from chewing on themselves . . . ?"
Theresa and Deirdre turned their heads to look at me. I had their attention now but I knew from recent experience that it wouldn't last.
It was going to be a long drive home.
* * *
THE END
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Habeas Corpses Page 44