Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  It occurred to me to wonder if he could produce fangs when he inhabited a mortal body or if he was going to attack her throat with the dentures of a 70 year old man?

  Herman dove forward, his mouth hinging open, the mixed blood supplies of his host and himself pumping out the wound in his neck in ever-weaker streams with each pound of his feet. Jennifer’s throat was bared in horrible slow motion as she fell backwards. But in that moment, Ramon – the quiet one, the one who had the sunlamp the first night we’d seen the technopagans here, the one who when I met them told me he was studying at Durham Tech in hopes of transferring to NC State and majoring in electrical engineering – happened through the sheer bad luck of Brownian motion to fall into the gap between Herman and Jennifer, shielding her with his body.

  Herman landed on top of them, twisted Ramon’s head to face him as though for a kiss, and then, to my horrified fascination, buried Ramon’s mouth in the folds of waddle he’d stabbed open atop the dune moments before. As blood shot obscenely across Ramon’s face, and into his mouth, Herman’s body kicked wildly at the sand once, twice, and died. Roderick and I carried our dogs towards them as fast as we possibly could.

  We dropped out of super speed as we ran up and everyone else tumbled to the ground around us. Smiles and Dog both leapt from our arms and ran over to the now obviously deceased Herman and Ramon struggling to get out from under him. Smiles was silent but alert, his head down, his ears back, the sort of pose I see him take when he thinks he might be about to fight something.

  Dog walked right up and started sniffing Ramon, then Herman, then back to Ramon, up and down his face and torso. I noticed he sniffed all the way out Ramon’s right arm to his fingertips, then all the way back up.

  “Are you alright?” Roderick said words that sounded normal but his tone was hostile. He was ready to kill Ramon on the spot if he didn’t get an answer he liked.

  He didn’t get a chance. Ramon shoved Herman’s corpse off of himself with a show of strength well beyond what Ramon could have produced himself. There was fire in his eyes as he leapt to his feet and shot around us towards the Beach Patrol ATVs.

  Roderick and I looked at each other as we both spun back up to super speed to chase him.

  My cousin’s eyes positively gleamed.

  Waaaaaaaait, I heard Jennifer shouting at us as she started to stand. I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking to us or to Ramon. I also realized we still had no idea what was the name of the vampire whose spirit was now driving Ramon around. All we knew was that the last living part of that vampire was some small amount of blood, passed from one victim to the next for, what, seventy years? And that one small part of the monster, that tiny volume of blood, was apparently enough to keep his psyche alive and transport it from one mortal vessel to another.

  Jesus, I thought to myself. Is this what we are? Are we so indestructible we only need a little blood to live forever? Are we so determined to survive we don’t even need bodies to do it?

  I always thought of my transformation into a vampire, to some degree, the ultimate attempt at preserving who and what I thought of as me, body and all. I thought the body was the most important part of that, too. After all, what’s a soul but a lie we tell ourselves to make us feel like we’re more special than a rock? Who I am, I always believed, is what I am.

  The monster that leapt into Ramon by the forced feeding of a little putrescent blood didn’t even seem to have retained that anymore.

  Ramon’s body was young and strong, and the critter inside it was taking full advantage. He was moving fast, and though he wasn’t as fast as Roderick or I, he had a head start. Ramon leapt onto one of the Beach Patrol ATVs with obviously supernatural grace and a feral grin, gunned it to life, and spun away in a sharp turn to go back up the beach towards town as fast as it would go. Without a moment’s hesitation he ran right over the corpse of one of the cops who rode it there in the first place. The four-wheeler’s fat tires dug into the wet sand and Ramon shot forward as fast as its engine would take him.

  Roderick whistled and I clicked my cheeks, and Dog and Smiles spun up beside us as all four of us took off on foot after the ATV. Behind us was some commotion. I glanced back and saw Jennifer and Crew Cut both moving faster than human speed and both headed for the other ATV. Crew Cut beat her to it, jumping onto the driver’s seat, but Jennifer straight-up side-tackled him, slamming into his upper arm with her own dropped shoulder. Crew Cut tumbled off the ATV’s other side and rolled onto the sand as Jennifer took the driver’s seat away from him. I clapped my hands once and laughed, a loud sharp shot in the howling wind of the beach at night, and Roderick cackled beside me at my delight.

  “Yes, Cousin!” Roderick called as we ran, our dogs beside us, “Finally, finally, a proper hunt!”

  The sound of the ATV started to catch up to us, which I didn’t think it should really be able to do, and as it went past I saw Jennifer driving the ATV, Crew Cut clinging to it behind her, and sparks shooting out of the engine. Of course, I thought, A vehicle is just another kind of technology, and that’s Jennifer’s specialty. Whatever witching she’d done to the ATV, it was throwing off smoke, too, and it looked like maybe it was shaking all over as she rode hell for leather after Ramon. She shot past Roderick and the dogs and me, fast as we were going, and practically left fire in her tracks as she tore ass up the beach in pursuit of Ramon.

  “Naturally, Cousin,” Roderick said conversationally as we ran, “There is the small matter of whether the one we called Herman was successful in resurrecting his maker.”

  Right on cue, lightning struck again, behind us, back where we’d been standing. Then it struck again. Then it struck a third time and this time the light stayed on: not just a flash from one bolt, but as though someone had turned on a spotlight aimed at the sky. I looked back and sure enough, where once had been the dune with its local landmark mailbox, there was now a giant crater of sand. Light poured out of it – blue-silver light, blindingly bright, utterly unnatural, clearly not the light of the sun but rather the light of the moon brightened a thousand times – and emerging from that light, walking at a normal pace, was a figure I clearly recognized, even in silhouette.

  It was Herman’s maker, and this time she was absolutely as solid as you or I.

  Sheila and Dan were still standing there, both trying to tug the other to run faster as they beat a path back in our direction. As they moved, molasses slow, I saw Sheila draw a symbol in the air and just like that they faded from view.

  “Things are about to get really super complicated for your boyfriend,” I said to Roderick, both of us still running. “But I think maybe he’s got some magic to protect himself.”

  “I told you ‘boyfriend’ is too strong a term, Cousin.” He looked annoyed as all hell, too.

  Jennifer and Crew Cut surged ahead, but the ATV Jennifer was pushing past its normal maximum was clearly suffering for it. Smoke absolutely billowed from its underside and occasionally little jets of flame shot out of the motor. It wasn’t going to last much longer, but Jennifer had gotten so close to Ramon it didn’t matter. She was maybe six or seven feet from him and slightly to his left, with Roderick and me running maybe six feet behind them, but slightly to Ramon’s other side. Dog and Smiles were behind us, in turn, churning up huge clods of wet sand as they tore into it, tongues hanging out to the sides.

  The failing and scattered lights of Sunset Beach glowed maybe a half mile away, but getting bigger all the time.

  Jennifer gunned the motor again, and it made god-awful noises: a high-pitched metallic shriek came from it, and the sound of combustion was sufficiently jerky it sounded like there was something getting into the fuel that shouldn’t be. The engine was literally tearing itself apart to get the speeds Jennifer was demanding from it.

  I saw Crew Cut’s mouth move in Jennifer’s ear, and she nodded. With one final surge, she pushed the ATV up beside Ramon. He looked over, tried to veer away, but Jennifer and Crew Cut simultaneously leapt from their v
ehicle – which immediately produced a giant cloud of black smoke and flipped over – to tackle Ramon off of his. The ATV he was driving went shooting away from him as the three of them rolled end-over-end into the sand in a tangle of arms and legs and the guttural howls of the thing riding Ramon’s flesh.

  Roderick and I ran up as Crew Cut twisted Ramon’s arms behind his back and Jennifer grabbed Ramon’s jaw.

  “Come out of him right now!” Her voice was a hoarse growl, and I thought of that old advice you always hear about walking around in the woods: never get between a mother bear and her cub. Jennifer’s eyes were at once as full of malice and affection as two eyes can ever be. Ramon was one of her people, and she had lost one too many of her people already.

  Ramon didn’t try to twist away. Instead he bore into her with his own gaze and said, hoodoo in full effect, “Release me at once and kill yourself.”

  My heart sang: I learned years ago Jennifer is immune to the hoodoo.

  She didn’t just tell him no. Instead Jennifer reared back and walloped Ramon across the jaw with the back of one hand, literally trying to slap some sense into him. “I said come the fuck out!” Jennifer hit him again, and then again. “I call on every power,” she said, and her voice dropped and the shape of her mouth changed. I could see, as Roderick and I stood there a few feet away, that Jennifer was at this moment doing that witch business and doing it hard. “I call on the untamed and untamable power of the ocean before me,” she said, and her voice gained new dimensions, unearthly echoes, the depths of power resonating from within her and yawning before us like the sort of water so deep it doesn’t know light exists. “May it rip from Ramon the thing inside him and take it to the grave it has so long escaped.” With one hand she struck him again, but this time with her fist, as sure and hard as a prizefighter scoring a knockout. I saw his lip burst and blood shoot out from Ramon’s face.

  Despite our being at least twenty feet from the edge of the water, the tide so far out it exposed many tens of yards of sand not normally seen by beachgoers, I could hear the roar of the water as a wave started to crest. Driven forwards, drawn further in than it should have been, a breaker about waist high slammed into all of us where we stood, knocking Roderick and me and our dogs aside. It washed over Ramon as Jennifer and Crew Cut held him under it together for a moment before being dragged off their feet themselves, and the five of us were pushed inland, then tugged back and dumped on the sand where we started, all in one rapid arc.

  As the water ran back into the sea, revealing Ramon’s drenched body, I saw blood – human and vampire – stream from him in a great gush. Ramon bled from the mouth, from the nose, from the ears, even from the eyes, as the vampiric essence within him was ripped free by Jennifer’s magic and sucked into the ocean on the back the wave receding from us. Ramon produced a gurgling scream, the sound of a human throat being shredded by its own effort, and his neck muscles bulged as though he were straining to stay in his own skin. The sound of his screaming didn’t wind down, it just kept going, making my skin crawl all over. I stood back up and ran over, clapping my hands on his shoulders.

  “Let go of him,” I shouted, putting all I could into my own hoodoo, and with a shudder, a grotesque mockery of a lover’s climactic convulsion, Ramon’s whole body shook once, then twice, then a third time. The blood stopped shooting out of him and the last of the giant wave Jennifer summoned carried off with it the last of that vampire. Whatever – whoever – had ridden Herman and Ramon washed away into the sea. Ramon’s scream died somewhere in his throat and he fell forward, face first, into the sand. He was still bleeding and he’d lost a lot of blood already. His skin was white and starting to turn gray. His lips were already blue.

  Jennifer stood beside us now, and reached down to feel at Ramon’s neck. “He’s alive,” she said. We were all back at normal speed, and the ocean crashed heavily at its usual pitch instead of the deep and distended bass chords it played during our whole ridiculous chase.

  Roderick stood, wiped seawater and sand from his plastic jacket, and said, “So is she.”

  We turned and looked, and half a mile down the beach from us, still backlit from the unnaturally argent light from the crater, there was that figure of a woman walking toward us at a casual pace.

  Jennifer was standing back with the technopagans the whole time Herman spoke to Roderick and me. She looked down the beach where Roderick indicated and said, “Who the hell is that?”

  “The Rhinemaiden,” I said without looking away from the resurrected vampire’s approach. “Herman – whatever his name really was – succeeded in bringing her back.”

  Like a film skipping a few frames, abruptly the silhouette of the Rhinemaiden was closer one moment than it had been the next.

  “Shit,” Roderick and I said at the same time.

  In another blink, she was closer still.

  “Jumpstart,” Roderick said. “That’s what we call short-distance teleportation in Seattle. She has multiple Last Gasp abilities.” He blinked slowly and said to me, “Cousin, I suspect her power is the ability to absorb the abilities of others.”

  I stood and started to back away, Smiles walking warily alongside me, glancing backwards, but with a third blink of the eye the Rhinemaiden was standing in the midst of us.

  A few feet back, standing with their eyes open but catatonic, were Beth, and Marty Macintosh, and Dan, and Sheila.

  The Rhinemaiden was not physically imposing. She was maybe five foot seven, Caucasian, with long dark hair and features like you see in old portraits of nobility: thin, a long and narrow nose, lips like a slim line across her face, and cheekbones you could use to hang laundry out to dry. I was surprised she wore clothing, but in fact she was dressed in a fashion I immediately recognized as the sort of off-the-rack Georgiana-ish frock women wore all the time at the end of World War Two: a hemline just below the knee, a cinched waist, and short puffy sleeves hanging off a high-collared neckline. She looked cruel in the face, but dressed for a garden party seventy years gone. If this was the boundless, irrational appetite the elders had summoned back from the beyond when she still had no body, now she seemed to be restored to her previous self exactly as she was when destroyed. She didn’t look mindless. She looked calculating. She glanced between us with the piercing, frost-wreathed, and indifferent gaze of a thousand year old housecat.

  The voice that came out of her was not verbalized. It was in my head, and apparently in all our heads. She spoke directly to our minds, without need of words. Which of you destroyed my servant. It was a question, but it was stated so flatly it sounded like a statement. She didn’t sound angry. She didn’t sound anything. What she sounded was old – unfathomably ancient, old beyond words, old beyond my ability to envision one lifespan no matter how supernatural somebody got. The way she addressed us was the way one addresses a particularly disinteresting carpet stain: we were there, but we weren’t really her top priority, but maybe also she should go ahead and clean us up while she was around. Receiving a communication from her also had a certain clumsiness to it, like maybe she was having to blow the dust off the concept of words.

  I guess Roderick must have thought something back to her, because they looked at one another for a moment. The Rhinemaiden started to open her mouth and needle-teeth – gods, I can’t even call them fangs, they were like a row of icicles, with another behind them, and another behind them, her face transforming around them as she bared them at him – but Jennifer spoke.

  “I did,” she said. “I summoned magic to undo his possession of my friend.”

  The Rhinemaiden turned to regard Jennifer with narrowed eyes, that horrible mouth hanging open. Her mind-voice rang in my head as she caressed the ridiculous shark-jaws jutting out of her too-wide lips with her tongue, like a snake tasting the air. Her whole face was twisted into a grotesque, like something right out of a stop-motion animated movie. Watching the skin flex around her deformed skull, and watching the skull deform itself, was like watching the devil wor
k clay with his own hands. Magic? And who gave a serf permission to use our powers against us?

  Though he was lying there in the sand looking more dead by the second, Ramon sprang into action. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know how his body worked with that little blood in it. I could tell – some innate sense we have – that, had I known the right ritual, I could have turned him into a vampire right there on the spot without taking a drop. He was running on fumes at best. But when The Rhinemaiden threatened Jennifer – the leader of his coven, the extraordinary genius who walked into his house and told everyone she was in charge now, thank you very much – he came up off that sand with his fists balled and the fires of hell in his eyes and he went right at The Rhinemaiden, ready for war.

  Ramon’s hands caught her by the front of the dress and he tried to head butt her, a straight-on frontal attack, but he didn’t get as far as hitting her. Instead, those stomach-churning jaws cranked open and Ramon stuck his head – his whole head, all the way to the neck – right inside her mouth, carried by his own momentum.

  The Rhinemaiden’s jaws snapped shut on him. Just a little blood flew in all directions, and with a crunch and a snap, Ramon’s headless corpse fell straight down to the ground at her feet.

  I started screaming, I don’t mind one bit being the one to say it, because something about the Rhinemaiden told every cell in my body to get the fuck away. Years before, when I walked into the street to fight zombies that arose in my neighborhood, I was shocked when they instinctively strove to escape me. It was like they knew, even in their mindless and senseless state, there was a hierarchy of the monstrous and I was above them on it.

  When I watched The Rhinemaiden kill Ramon, I knew exactly how they felt.