The Undead Kama Sutra fg-3

by Mario Acevedo

  The leader shook his head. “Earthlings are outside my jurisdiction. I’m pissed because you just cost me a bonus.” He shoved the pistol into a holster. He waved to his comrades. “Grab his arms and legs.” The leader picked up Clayborn’s head and jammed his fingers into the nostrils and mouth. He held the head like a bowling ball and at an angle, to keep the still dripping stump from soiling him with purple blood.

  “What about Carmen?” Jolie asked.

  “Can’t help you.”

  “How can we find her?”

  “Know any detectives?”

  Jolie pointed at me.

  The leader stopped and gave me the once-over. “Good luck, lady.”

  He followed the others up the ramp but slipped and caught himself before falling again. “I’ll be glad to get home,” he muttered. “This isn’t worth the overtime.”

  The ramp retracted into the hatch, which then closed. The hum started once more. The saucer lifted and the three landing struts folded flush with the belly. The saucer rose into the sky, going faster and faster, and became a black circle that shrank into the void of night.

  I stared into the spot where I’d last seen the saucer disappear. Jolie sat on the bottom lip of the helicopter cargo door. Her aura tightened and waves of despair pulsed through it. Her shoulders quaked and she rubbed her eyes. “Damn it, I wish I could cry.”

  She turned her vampire eyes to me. This was the first time I’d ever seen tapetum lucidum clouded with grief. “Where is Carmen? How can we get her back?”

  She might as well have asked me to shit rocket fuel.

  I looked back to the stars. Carmen was among them, not in a spiritual sense but for real. In a UFO, like she’d always wished for, but not under these circumstances. All my life I’d looked up at the night sky and wondered when and if it were possible to cruise among them. Now I knew it was not only possible but that I had to. How? And when?

  “Call me a coward?” Antoine’s voice carried across the marsh. He marched toward us, splashing through the muck, his orange aura signaling a fight.

  “You’re late for the festivities,” I told him.

  “Late hell.” He pointed to the sky. “They left early.” Antoine hefted a two-by-four with a big nail sticking out one end. “I needed something to even the odds. Took me forever to find this.”

  “Antoine, I can’t even give you credit for trying. They had blasters and God knows what else. A board with a nail in it wouldn’t have done much.”

  Antoine swung the two-by-four like a ball bat. “Let me hit you and then you tell me.” He turned to Jolie. “What’s up, babe?”

  She started to explain. Antoine walked up to her and they hugged. A moment later, Antoine tore himself from her and flung the two-by-four into the sky. “Useless bastards.” The board whirled and splashed into the marsh a hundred meters away.

  Jolie checked her phone. “It’s still dead.”

  Antoine leaned into the pilot’s side of the cockpit and flicked switches. “Same here.”

  I said, “We better get moving before the government comes looking for their helicopter. Antoine, you lead the way.”

  He tugged at Jolie’s hand. She pulled free, straightened up, and marched alongside him up the sandy road. I followed right behind.

  Antoine began to trot. Jolie and I took up the pace.

  “What about you, Felix?” He quickened the trot into a run. “How do you plan on bringing Carmen back?”

  What was my answer? I glanced back to the sky and the stars. Carmen was a long distance away, even for a vampire.

  Chapter

  54

  I headed back to Colorado on I-10. I drove straight through, stopping only to gas my Cadillac and to hide in the restroom of a Houston diner while I waited for the sunrise to pass. Some big, bad vampire I was, loitering in the stall of a men’s room. Times like these made me wish for another spider bite…almost.

  Afterward I sat at the counter and ordered a large coffee and a breakfast burrito to go. Outside, I dumped half of the coffee from the Styrofoam cup. Back in my car I set the coffee in a console cup holder and unwrapped the burrito, which I lay on my lap. From the console I pulled out a plastic squirt bottle of type A-negative. I filled the cup so the mixture was fifty-fifty blood and coffee. I took a sip and added a little more blood. I pumped a couple of squirts of blood into the burrito. Mmmm, egg, jalapeño, and type A.

  I didn’t want to think about what had happened in the last two weeks, I only wanted to get home. The enormity of the loss of Carmen overwhelmed me. This was worse than her being dead for good. In this case, the great sea of space and getting Carmen back seemed as impossible as me plucking a star from the heavens.

  I couldn’t do anything about it, and worrying didn’t do anything except leave me frazzled and feeling helpless.

  Something rapped against my car. I looked up. A crow peeked over the upper left corner of the windshield.

  A crow? This meant the Araneum wanted something.

  The bird’s claws scratched across the roof of the Cadillac. The little black head appeared over my side window and tapped again, this time impatiently.

  I felt a queasy hollowness and I knew I was in trouble. I had failed in my mission. I found out about the alien threat but the cost had been losing Carmen.

  My appetite vanished and I put the burrito and coffee away. I scrolled the window down. The crow perched on the windowsill, facing me. A filigreed capsule the size of my little finger was clipped to the crow’s right leg.

  I caressed the crow’s warm, soft head. The beady eyes expressed no emotion. With my other hand, I slipped the capsule from its leg.

  I spread my knees and held the capsule low between my legs to keep it in shadow. I unscrewed the jeweled ruby cap from the platinum-and-gold capsule. The familiar and rancid smell of flayed vampire skin wafted upward. I used my little finger to pull out a roll of parchment.

  I unrolled the tissue-thin paper and read this note.

  We’ve been texting you. Check your cell phone.

  Araneum

  So the Araneum had gone snippy on me. I had a new cell phone but no car charger, so I had left the phone off to conserve the battery. I turned the phone on and got an alert that I had several voice mails and a text message waiting.

  I checked the text message first.

  FELIX

  BE AT THE MOTHER CABRINI SHRINE THIS WEDNESDAY AT 3 P.M.

  ARANEUM

  Sounded like a trip to the woodshed. Not good. I erased the message.

  The Cabrini Shrine stood west of Denver on I-70. An unlikely place for a meeting.

  I balled the parchment and tossed it out my window. When the parchment flew out of the shadow of my car and into the sunlight, the note immediately flared into a burst of fire that darkened into a puff of black smoke.

  The crow stared at the vanishing smoke and blinked its eyes. Then it turned around on the windowsill and tapped against the capsule in my hand. I screwed the cap back on and fit the capsule on the bird’s leg.

  I tried to shoo the bird, resentful of the news it had brought. When it didn’t move, I scrolled the window up. The crow jumped away, startled by the glass pane rising against its tail feathers. It flew to the hood of my Cadillac.

  I honked the horn to shoo it again. The crow wouldn’t scram.

  I checked my voice mail. Jolie left a message wishing me a safe journey and telling me that she missed Carmen.

  She signed off: “Call me.”

  There was a lot of sadness in her voice. I could wait for that conversation.

  The other calls were from human clients asking when I’d return to my office. When I got there.

  I started the car. The crow hadn’t moved. When I got to the highway, the crow centered itself on the front of my car and faced ahead like a hood ornament. I accelerated to ninety miles an hour. The crow hunkered down and squinted into the slipstream.

  Was this bird going to freeload a ride all the way to Denver? Fat chance.
<
br />   I slammed on the brakes. The crow shot from my car like it’d been catapulted from an aircraft carrier.

  Hasta la vista, you little feathered bastard.

  The crow sailed over the concrete lane for a hundred feet. It spread its wings and wheeled upward to arc over my car.

  Bird poop splattered on my windshield.

  The crow gave a laughing caw. Hasta la vista, back at you.

  Chapter

  55

  I waited at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, better known locally as the Mother Cabrini Shrine. The Catholic Church built the shrine to commemorate the first American saint, Maria Francesca Cabrini, Patroness of Immigrants. Her twenty-two-foot-tall statue stood on a commanding hill overlooking the Colorado plains to the north and the town of Golden straight east. Close by, I-70 snaked westward through the foothills into the Rocky Mountains and over the Continental Divide.

  If anyone believed the myth that the Christian cross was as feared as garlic by us vampires, then a stroll to this shrine would destroy that fiction.

  The Stations of the Cross bordered the concrete steps leading to the shrine. The dozens of crucifixes here-imbued with Resurrection juju, no less, should’ve been enough to incinerate any undead bloodsucker. But the only way to hurt a vampire with a cross would be to either bonk him on the head or sharpen one end and stab him through the chest.

  Here I stood, at the top of the shrine, waiting for the Araneum. I didn’t know their agenda. I was only told to show up. I’m sure they were pissed over what happened to Carmen. So was I. I’d be surprised if I didn’t get a major ass-chewing…or worse. The worse part unsettled me. I didn’t want my skin used for undead Post-it notes.

  The sun warmed me and I touched up my sunblock with a tube I pulled from my pocket.

  Mother Nature had given the Front Range one final arctic blast as a going-away present. Smudges of snow lingered in the shadows. Cirrus clouds traced across the distant sky like scrawls of chalk against cerulean blue. A brown haze ringed the horizon.

  Two women in their mid-thirties, both wearing fleece vests over black jogging tights, leaned forward against the base of the shrine and stretched their legs. They chatted about tax law and money, so I guessed they were lawyers or accountants playing hooky from the office.

  I peeked over my sunglasses to study their auras. Neither seemed interested in me. Good. I didn’t want to be so far down on the vampire pecking order that the Araneum sent humans to interview me.

  The two women turned from the shrine and bounded down the steps.

  Coming in the opposite direction, another woman jogged up the stairs. Her skin was the color of a roasted coffee bean and she had short, black, nappy hair under a red head-warmer band. She held the leash of a large dog, some mutt with a blue-gray coat with yellow tufts around its neck and down its long, skinny legs.

  I read her aura.

  Orange.

  Vampire.

  The time was three on the dot.

  An uneasy feeling ran through me. My kundalini noir shifted like it wanted to relieve a sudden kink.

  Her aura had the even glow of a bulb filament, not betraying any hint of emotional turbulence. The Araneum had sent a real composed one to interrogate me.

  The vampire crested the top of the stairs and halted. She stood a bit over five feet and wore sunglasses with rhinestones and a green jacket over a navy blue jogging suit. She carried a messenger bag over one shoulder. In human years, she looked in her early forties.

  The dog had a red aura, so I knew it wasn’t a supernatural in disguise. With its tail wagging and ears perked, the dog lunged playfully for me. It was a cross between a blue heeler and a golden retriever, hence the unusual coat. The vampire pulled the dog back, patted its head, and unclipped the leash. The dog bolted for me, sniffed my crotch, and turned away to explore the garden around the shrine.

  The vampire wound the leash around one wrist. “Felix, good to meet you.” She kept her distance, about six feet away, and didn’t bother to extend her free hand to thaw her frosty greeting. “Phyllis.” All business, she was. No point in asking her favorite color or taste in music.

  I didn’t recognize her face or name. “I know most of the vampires in the Denver nidus but not you. Where are you from?”

  “You have a way of contacting Carmen Arellano?” Phyllis didn’t waste time with prolonged introductions.

  I didn’t want to discuss Carmen but I knew we would. Thinking about her only uncovered the loss and deepened the scar.

  I started with my story, beginning with my acquaintance of the alien impostor Gilbert Odin.

  Phyllis raised a hand to stop me. “I’ve read Jolie’s report.”

  How should I handle confessing my failure to protect Carmen? What fate awaited me? Was the Araneum going to tear off my skin? The Araneum should have shared more information, preparing me to better deal with Goodman and Clayborn. Still, the fault was mine. Anything I had to say in my defense remained clotted in my throat.

  “Sorry to hear what happened to Carmen,” Phyllis said. Her admission surprised me.

  “We would have told you more,” she continued, “but we were afraid that you might get captured and talk. You didn’t fail, considering the circumstances.”

  The words didn’t make me feel any better. I was supposed to prevail regardless.

  “What we want to know is, is there a way to get Carmen back?”

  The question seemed absurdly simplistic. “If I knew where she was and if I had a flying saucer. You got one handy?”

  Phyllis’s stony smile meant of course not.

  “I know the rules,” I said. “No vampire can be held prisoner in a situation that threatens the Great Secret.” The existence of the supernatural world. “If we couldn’t rescue Carmen, we’d have to destroy any and all evidence of her existence. Jolie and I were ready to do that.”

  “I don’t doubt you, Felix. But the situation has reintroduced a level of tension within the Araneum.”

  “What kind of tension?”

  “There’s a small but vocal minority within the high council who wants greater control over the vampire community. The majority, the status quo, says we continue with our laissez-faire approach. Only when a vampire threatens the Great Secret do we act. Outside of that, we’re each on our own.”

  “You mentioned ‘reintroduced,’ meaning this tension has existed before.”

  Her blue heeler began sniffing one of the memorials in the garden. Phyllis whistled. The dog lowered its leg, gave an open-mouth dog grin, and trotted away.

  “It’s always been under the surface but not this pronounced,” Phyllis replied, “not recently anyway. The flip side to control is who determines what control is? What is acceptable, what is not, and how are the rules enforced?”

  “Not recently? There’s a history to this?”

  Phyllis’s aura dimmed and nodules of discomfort budded along the penumbra. Considering how cool she’d been before, this must be some bad news.

  “Civil war. It happened in the thirteenth century, about a hundred years after the Araneum was formed in reaction to the growing threat of the Knights Templar. The vampire leaders turned on each other, followed by assassinations, then more violence, and eventually an undead bloodbath. We almost exterminated ourselves.”

  “What saved us?”

  “It wasn’t because we came to our collective senses. All trust in the leaders collapsed and the violence lost its momentum. Basically, we got tired of killing one another.”

  “Interesting lesson. I’ve heard about our past troubles but I didn’t know of a war among us.”

  “It’s not a moment we’re proud of. The war proved we are more human than we want to admit, despite what we say and how we act. The human lurking inside of us does more than nag our conscience with the need for compassion and the yearning for love. It also nurtures the irrational lust for mass violence and destruction.”

  “And Carmen’s kidnapping by the aliens has rekindled this argum
ent?”

  “More than rekindled. And it’s more than about Carmen. Or you. The aliens are a new threat and we have to decide how to deal with them. They’ll be back and they’ll want more. We have to be ready. We’ve learned the humans are willing to sell themselves for petty material gain.”

  “That a surprise?”

  “’Course not. Heaven help us if we get in the way.”

  I hadn’t realized any of this. I was worried about getting my ears boxed by the Araneum, while the problem was way beyond that.

  Phyllis continued. “The aliens have a psychotronic device, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Meaning they have a primitive understanding of psychic energy but the point is, they know. This time they used money and the illusion of power to control humans. The next time they might have a more advanced version of the psychotronic device, something that can directly manipulate humans, or even us.”

  “Where does this leave me?”

  Phyllis extended an index finger and touched the tip with her other hand. “Right here. At the vanguard. You’re the point man in our negotiations with the aliens. They come back, you’ll talk to them.”

  “And if I find a way to rescue Carmen?”

  “Consult with the Araneum before you do anything. We’ll help in whatever way we can.”

  “You sound like you know something I don’t.”

  “We’re not keeping anything from you, Felix.” Her aura stayed calm. Still, Phyllis represented authority and those in charge always take liberties with your fate. If you object, it’s because you can’t “appreciate” the big picture.

  “What about Goodman?” I asked. “He’s dead but the people he worked for know a lot about Carmen and me.”

  “The government has a vested interest in keeping what happened quiet. We have family and chalices in place who can arrange that.”

  She opened the messenger bag and pulled out a small glass bottle with a chartreuse-pine spider inside. “You know about this?”

  “I do. Wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Why?”