Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

  The sun was now high enough that I could no longer stand without doing my sulfur match-head impression. I rolled over and began to creep, on hands and knees, toward my floating sanctuary.

  A couple of months ago I probably wouldn't have tried so hard.

  All those crappy vampire novels make the fanged nightlife seem romantic and exotic—a real panacea for the mundane, nine-to-five, dronelike existence that plagues so many of the still-warms. Well, here's a news flash for all the blunt-toothed wannabes: the reason ninety percent of the undead don't survive their first year and master vampires rarely attain age spans of a century or more?

  Suicide.

  Those that don't go rogue and get hunted down by their own kind usually end up making some kind of dumb-shit mistake with death-wish underpinnings. That or engage in a deliberately willful act of self-sabotage.

  Fearless vampire hunters, stakes, holy water, cloves of garlic, crossbows, and crucifixes—much further down the list on the undead actuary tables.

  Why is cheating death such a downer you ask?

  Well, first of all, no one actually ever cheats Death. It's not logistically possible. Death owns the poker table and the deck, marks the cards, and has been dealing multiple hands before your ancestors crawled out of the primordial oceans and climbed up into the trees to begin with. You know all that nonsense about knowing "when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em"? The house odds are unbeatable and inescapable. The only workable strategy to shortcut Death is dying. As long as you're alive Death can screw with you. Semi-alive, undead—Death gets that much more time and opportunity to toy with you and on a much more cosmic scale. Drs. Mooncloud and Burton, even Mama Samm, say it's the combination of my meds and the depression talkin' here. But I'm tellin' ya: forget all the attractive come-ons of the Goth lifestyle. All you have to look forward to is the unrelieved horror of a cold eternity. Without love. Without warmth. Without light. Killing to live. Living without purpose except to kill.

  Undead is a sucky existence.

  Thirty feet.

  I was luckier than most, I suppose. I was still half human. Perhaps I still had half a soul. I wasn't totally dependent on blood. Yet. And having money and owning a blood bank meant that I didn't victimize anyone. Directly. With the exception of those occasional little "accidents" . . .

  Twenty feet and I had to drop and crawl on my belly another ten to reach the New Moon's shadow.

  But my wife and my daughter were dead because of me. My lover had left me. I could practically count on my fingers all of the people who didn't want to kill me or turn me into some science-project-of-the-damned . . .

  So I had taken to popping Prozac and Paxil like Skittles ( . . . taste the rainbow . . . ) and had numbed down to the point where I was just playing a waiting game. Either Lupé and I were going to get back together and this half-life I had cobbled together would start to feel like it was worth all the bother again . . .

  Or not.

  And then we'd see which would catch up to me first: my enemies or the consequences of not seeming to care too much.

  About anything.

  Apparently my not-so-normal metabolism made me resistant to the beneficial as well as the detrimental effects of drugs and pharmaceuticals. Hell, if it hadn't been for this brand new threat to my soon-to-be-born son, I'd probably still be sitting on a rock about fifty miles back, humming "Here comes the sun, little darlin'" . . .

  But however worthless I felt my own twilight existence, fatherhood involves obligations—even in the womb. Literally or figuratively, now was not the time to be a deadbeat dad.

  I climbed up on the walkway to the pier and duck-walked up the entire span to keep the silhouette of my three-story boat between me and the sun, checking the guards, wards, and alarms as I went.

  All were disarmed or disabled.

  Not good! Not surprising, either. Sooner or later the Nasty Things were going to come calling again—I'd come to accept that. Even anticipate it.

  I'd just figured on having a little more time before they found me.

  I eased the mud-slimed Glock out of its holster at the small of my back, chambered the first round, and stepped onto the gangplank, finally able to stand erect.

  A demon erupted from the doorway leading to the salon on the main deck.

  For the briefest of moments it appeared to be human but, as it left the confines of the man-sized hatchway, it expanded to inhuman size and proportions. The New Moon tilted towards me as the monster's mass doubled, quadrupled, octupled with its transformation into a spelunker's darkest nightmare.

  It was vaguely man-shaped—emphasis on "vaguely"—standing somewhat erect upon tree-trunklike legs. And I say "somewhat" because its massive head bumped up against the overhang from the bridge deck forcing it to hunch forward, Quasimodo-style. Its arms bowed out on either side like a gorilla on steroids and long, sharp claws curved like scimitars from black, leathery fingers. Its thick, shaggy pelt rippled, revealing tectonic plates of muscle. The demon glared down at me with baleful, lamplike eyes and opened its mouth. The impossibly wide maw looked like a diorama of Carlsbad Caverns: a dense forest of stalactites and stalagmites in place of dentition. To say its head looked like a bat's would be about as accurate as saying a Tyrannosaurus rex resembles a gecko.

  It paused as it eyed my Creature-from-the-La-Brea-Tar-Pits outerwear and then roared: "Where the hell have you been? We've been worried sick!"

  * * *

  The muddy runoff from yours truly had the shower drain backed up before the hot water ran out. I stepped out of the stall just as it turned into a sludge-lined wading pool. As I grabbed a towel and dried off in the master bedroom, I could hear the susurrus of voices through the cabin door. It was way past my bedtime but the forward salon was full of people. Apparently there had been search parties and strategy sessions going on for the past three weeks so it would be rude to blow them all off with a quick "good morning and good night."

  I pulled on a pair of old, worn jeans, all the while looking longingly at my neatly made bunk. I was still trying to wrap my mind around the time differential when there was a knock at the door.

  "Are you decent?" asked a muffled voice. It sounded like Olive.

  "No," I answered, slipping into a paint-spattered work shirt. "But I am presentable." I began buttoning. "More or less. Come in."

  Olive Purdue was a slender black woman who looked to be on the shy side of thirty when she was professionally attired in one of her color-coordinated pantsuits. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as she was now, made her look even younger. In point of fact, my former secretary was closing in on forty and liked to do The New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. Once I had figured out that I lacked the temperament and the organizational skills to run a detective agency I had found a better use for her talents. Now she ran it for me as my partner.

  And it clearly irked her that she hadn't been able to track me down during the three weeks I'd gone missing.

  "Three weeks?" I asked again as she entered and offered me a steaming mug. "I've only been gone for three weeks?"

  "Obviously your . . . captors . . . wanted you to think it was three months," she said as I took it and tried to judge the color of its contents.

  The shades were drawn and anchored. The only artificial light angled in from the bathroom. (Excuse me. "Head." Nobody warns you that owning a boat will involve learning a foreign language.) I tried sniffing: there was still mud up my nose. "What's this? Coffee?"

  She shook her head. "O-Neg. I warmed it up for you."

  "Thanks." I took a sip. Even warmed-over, plastic-stored hemoglobin had it all over caffeine.

  The trick was to stay away from that potent ambrosia that bubbled straight from the vein . . . .

  I had almost given into The Hunger on the ride home. The only thing that had kept me off of the driver's neck on the long drive back was the knowledge it probably would have gotten me home ten minutes too late.

  That and the fact that I didn't have any fangs.
Not any real ones, anyway.

  And then it came to me that the motivation for my restraint was practical. Not moral. The forward momentum in my transformation from man to monster had not abated.

  "It would appear that the plan was to get you to sign over your parental rights," Olive continued. "It would be easier to twist your arm if you believed your child to be already born and the mother dead."

  "Yeah? Well, they screwed up," I growled.

  "What tipped you off?"

  I didn't want to have this conversation three times. I didn't want to talk, at all. But, get the social obligations out of the way, all at once and with everyone present. "'Twas the Bard of Avon, milady," I said, opening the door and stepping into the corridor barefoot. A little meet and greet and then head for bed. Suspended animato, Mr. Roboto.

  "But why?" I couldn't help asking as we moved forward, past the open galley and entered the salon that took up more than a third of the main deck. "Why my son? Who isn't even born yet? And why act like they need my permission to kidnap him?"

  Camazotz Chamalcan, ancient Mesoamerican bat-demon, was sitting on one end of the sofa on the port side. He wasn't all big and batty, now, having collapsed down and into the avatar of a small, nattily-dressed black man. "This is why I keep saying we need to go back!" he was saying.

  "But even if we knew where this place was," a newcomer argued from a chair near the helm, "you won't find anything. They'll be long gone."

  The new guy was big. Tall rather than bulky, with a lean muscularity that indicated an extremely athletic lifestyle and a tan that suggested that he pursued it outdoors—no gyms and barbells for nature boy, here. His shaggy brown hair was streaked with natural blond highlights and fell past his shoulders in thick, tangled locks. He wore a black leather biker's vest with matching pants and no shirt. He didn't have chest hair so much as a pelt with brief glimpses of bronzed skin here and there. Olive had introduced him as "Fenris" and—even without the no-last-name, Norse affectation—there was little doubt that our guest was a werewolf.

  Likewise his companion, sitting cross-legged on the floor and leaning up against the sliding glass doors that led out onto the fore deck.

  Volpea's tan was so dark she made Fenris look pasty in comparison. She had more hair, too—also thick, also brown, also streaked from the sun—all gathered to her scalp and falling to the small of her back. She wore cut-off jean shorts and a khaki shirt tied midriff style to reveal an eight-pack of killer abs. Daisy Duke does Pilates.

  Between the two of them they radiated so much health and energy that I felt like I needed a doctor. Maybe I would. They were probably enforcers. The questions were: from which demesne and why were they here?

  "What other options do we have at the moment?" the deconstructed bat-demon countered. "First, captives would provide us with hostages—negotiating materials, should the need arise. Second, it reduces their ranks, reducing their threat. Third, one or more captives provide us with information, answers to questions like the one the Bloodwalker just asked."

  I winced. "Don't call me that."

  "A waste of time," Volpea disputed in a husky voice. "Even if you acquired a prisoner, they'd as like tell you nothing."

  Zotz shook his head. "They would tell me . . . everything."

  I don't know which creeped me out more. His voice, his words, his inhuman smile that never quite touched his eyes. Or maybe it was the eyes, themselves: eyes that looked like nothing so much as the deep dark holes that had spawned his kind.

  The ancient Quiché Mayans had believed that the Afterlife—or the "Underworld" as most Mesoamerican cultures weren't big on the concept of "Heaven"—could be directly accessed through consecrated gateways called cenotés. Cenotés are essentially deep caves with sunroofs—great water-filled sinkholes that could serve as a cistern for an entire civilization or a sacrificial pit for thousands of human sacrifices.

  The ancient ruins of Chichen Itza have two such sinkholes: the smaller Cenoté Xtoloc which served as the city's water supply, and the large and fearsome Well of Sacrifices where young girls were drowned as sacrifices to Chac, Mayan rain god and cosmic monster. When your hands and feet were bound and your body was weighed down with sacrificial jewelry and ornaments, the whole "gateway to the Afterlife" was more than a religious euphemism. A little push by the priests and, if the fall didn't kill you, your drowning was sure to be accomplished swiftly.

  "And then what?" I asked. It should have been a rhetorical question—the kind you don't even ask out loud. Certainly not of an ancient, bloodthirsty bat-demon. "Turn them over to the authorities? I don't know about The Mullet but I doubt that a woman who can levitate and start fires with her bare hands is going to stay locked up in a conventional jail for very long." My only defense was that I was too tired to think clearly.

  He snorted. "Why would we turn your enemies over to those who have no hope of restraining them? After they yield up all the information that we require, we should slay them so that they cease to be a threat."

  Mama Samm D'Arbonne, palm reader, fortune-teller, and honest-to-God juju woman, was sitting on the other two thirds of the couch that Zotz occupied. She lazily lifted an oversized hand and suddenly bitch-slapped him upside the head like a stroke of black lightning.

  Despite the fact that Mama Samm was immense and Zotz was single-serving sized, she was still human. Zotz only looked it for the moment. I would have feared for all of us had I not seen her do it a half dozen times before. Even a couple of times when he was still all supersized and demony.

  "Now what do I be tellin' you about wastin' Mr. Chris' time?" she scolded, her ever-present white turban leaning forward aggressively. "He gots too much to worry 'bout wit'out some raggedy-ass monster always fallin' off the wagon . . ."

  "What did I say?" he whined, flinching back as her hand came back up.

  "You show up 'bout six month ago, all 'help me find the higher path, please, sir.' But you ain't learned nothin' in all this time. Now here you be talkin' 'bout torturing an' killin' folk. Next thing you know you be cravin' the sacrifices, again."

  "But they aren't people," he argued. "They're creatures of earth and sea and air! Not human."

  "Faeries," I muttered, closing my eyes and wondering how I could even contemplate a rational discussion of the subject matter. "I think the point that Mama Samm is trying to make, Zotz, is about you, not them. If you continue to set your feet to the path of violence, you harm yourself. It's about what happens to your heart, your soul—how your thinking is shaped and hardened, when you see every encounter as nonnegotiable."

  Fenris and Volpea exchanged looks. Zotz muttered something under his breath. The only words I could make out were: ". . . see you negotiate . . . warrior-thane . . ."

  I sat down at the table on the starboard side of the salon—a bit heavily if anyone was paying close attention. I had been running on pure adrenaline for more hours than I could remember and thought I might need something solid to hold onto before we were done. The warmed-over blood helped. I still needed some serious sack time in order to get my head rebooted and back in the game. But my unborn son's life was in danger and I had a boatful of people who had spent the better part of a month trying to find me. Not only did I owe them the basic amenities but there was also the matter of the two lycanthropes. Enforcers or freelance, it wasn't a good idea to show weakness or vulnerability until I knew more about whom—or what—they represented.

  "Okay," I announced over the conversations being murmured around me, "I very much appreciate all of your efforts to find me during this little interlude. The question is where do we go from here?"

  "As I was saying," Zotz began.

  "They're gone, Bats. Let's move on." I turned to Mama Samm. "They want my son. I want to know why."

  Mama Samm and Olive exchanged looks across the room.

  "What?" I said.

  "The world's been a little—busier—in your absence," Olive offered cautiously.

  Like it was my fault? "Define 'b
usier,'" I said, not liking the hesitation in her tone.

  "Well, there were a couple of big quakes in Mexico and Central America, some major volcanic activity out in the Pacific Rim . . ."

  I shook my head. "That was before I got shanghaied to elvesville."

  She shook her head back. "And since. Grand total of quakes in the past month, five. Two small islands reported sinking this past week. An undersea volcano growing in the southwest, bringing the grand total of spewing geological formations to four at present. Two major tsunamis, one minor. And the reason why people are looking up at the moon and using astrology and astronomy in the same breath."

  "Atmospheric debris," I observed. "Filtering reflected light. Turns the moon's albedo the color of Ocean Spray CranApple juice."

  "Maybe." Olive laid a hand on my arm. "But, for a lot of people, this falls into the Signs and Portents Department."

  "The question is," Zotz growled, "does it juice the elves in a similar direction?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Come on, Cséjthe, think. Some faerie tries to trick you into signing over your son. . . "

  The look on my face must have been a little blank.

  "Who's about to be born in the midst of end-of-the-world signage?"

  "First of all," I said, "a lot of babies are about to be born in the next eight or nine weeks. And I don't consider three or four temblors, some heavy seas, and a handful of eruptions in the notorious Ring of Fire to be irrefutable evidence of the Last Days. You want end-of-the-world theories you should've been around for World War II or the great flu pandemic of 1918."

  Zotz gave me a Mona Lisa smile. "I was."

  Oh yeah.

  "And, signs and portents aside," he continued, "none of the other babies being born at this point in history have your son's unique pedigree. Put 'em together?"

  It was food for thought. "Okay," I allowed, "maybe there is a connection. Maybe the elves are all Seventh Day Adventists and this is their come-to-Jesus moment on the wheel of time. Whatever. Priority number one is making sure that security is airtight and in place, starting right now. Today."