Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

  Now he shook his head. "Tried that second. And third. And fifth. They did something to make the chairs equally unbreakable. How about popping out some fingertip hacksaws like you did before?"

  I thought about it. The problem was my hands and fingers weren't in a position to do anything worthwhile if I could. Still, I tried.

  In other words, I thought about my fingertips sprouting serrated, metal-cutting blades. Tried meditative visual imaging.

  Nothing happened.

  Big surprise: so far all of these weird manifestations had been unconscious responses to life-threatening situations. I had yet to exert any conscious control over any nanocybernetic manifestation. And this attempt would be a useless exercise anyway. Even if I could produce some kind of cyber hacksaw and position my hands where I could start sawing on chain links, it could take hours to cut through a single link. What I really needed was a key to the padlock . . .

  "You're bleeding."

  I refocused on Zotz. "What? Where?"

  "Looks like from under your fingernails. Somebody do the bamboo splinters job on you?"

  I shrugged. Or tried anyway: chains clinked. Fand seemed determined to break me of this particular habit. "How would I know? I've been 'out.'"

  "Maybe those pop-out claws are malfunctioning. Maybe all sorts of sharp, spiky things are gonna start poking out of your skin and you'll bleed to death."

  I turned my head this way and that, trying to see. "Well, aren't you just a little ray of sunshine."

  "Sorry. I guess you'd much rather have a pet demon."

  "Focus, Zotz. We've got to work together if we're going to figure a way out of this. Too many lives are at stake."

  And I told him about all that had happened since I'd hitched a ride in Volpea's head.

  "So—the big voodoo lady? Did she survive the blast?" he asked.

  "I don't know. I don't know if she was successful in dispersing the storm. If Laveau and her—" I almost said "pet monk" but caught myself in time. "—Rasputin are still alive and functional, they're going to try something again. So, either way, I've got to get back down there and stop them! And the Pointy Sisters are going to have to get out of my way or I won't be the only one bleeding!"

  There was a snickt sound.

  "What was that?"

  Zotz craned his neck around and checked my back. "You bled on the padlock and it popped open."

  "What?"

  "Yeah. And now it looks like you're bleeding backwards."

  "Excuse me?"

  "And sideways."

  I squirmed in the chair to get some slack and felt the links shift a bit. Then heard the thunk of a padlock hitting the carpet. The chains slipped down and loosened a bit. Slipping free was relatively easy—it only took me another five minutes.

  By the time I was out of the chair and retrieving the keys that Zotz had seen Setanta stow in a galley drawer, the chains, chair, and even my fingers were devoid of any blood residue or evidence that I had bled in the first place.

  "You're sure what you saw?" I asked as I set him free.

  "Didn't imagine your padlock poppin' off, did I?" He got up, stretched, and began to coil one end of his chain around a bunched fist. Swear to God, he was humming "Unchained Melody" under his breath.

  I laid a hand on his shoulder. "We don't have time for that. They took you down once, they could do it again. Our best bet is to grab Jamal and get off the boat, jump in the car, and drop him off at Olive's on our way to New Orleans. Think we can do that without the Twister Sisters noticing before we're gone?"

  Zotz shook his head. "Jamal's gone. He went for a swim shortly after elfquest arrived."

  "What?"

  "They weren't paying him no mind, him being all catatonic and all, and he just gets up and walks out the door and over the side before they could grab him."

  "And?"

  "And nothing. He didn't come back out."

  "No one went after him?"

  "I wasn't allowed the option. I think Fand's afraid of the water—which is a shame because I bet she'd look bitchin' in a bikini . . ."

  I waved my hand in his face. "Again, focus. What about the Mullet?"

  Zotz shrugged. "She didn't tell him to. He doesn't do anything 'cept what the faerie queen tells him."

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. "Olive is going to go nuclear!"

  "Just as long as she goes nuclear on the bad guys," the demon muttered as he headed for the portside exit. "The end of the world is just around the corner and I'm tired of getting whaled on by a bunch of women. What are you doing?"

  I paused with my hand on the refrigerator door. "Grabbing some snacks for the road. I'm starving."

  Zotz shook his head. "Big'n'beefy tossed all of your blood out. I don't think there's a packet left on board."

  My heart sank. "What? Why?"

  He shrugged. "Probably thought he was messin' with your mojo. He kept talking about how your eyes turned to blood down in the mound when you escaped."

  Great. Add "cross the river and get supplies from the blood bank before I turn into a monster" to the list of things to accomplish while dodging werewolves and elves and tentacled extraterrestrials on my way back down to the Crescent City. Seriously, do regular vampires deal with any kind of crap like this?

  We managed to get topside without being noticed. Above us, on the top deck, we could hear the muttering of voices and catch an occasional word or phrase. Something about "surveillance" and "presumed threats" and "shifting alliances." As the sun was now on the horizon and we were heading toward it, we had the double advantage of glare and twilight. Still, if they looked over the edge and down, we would be visible right away. We eased over the side and half-swam, half-waded along the shoreline another hundred yards before coming ashore.

  Now what?

  Climb the stairs up the face of the bluff to the ruins of my old house, cut through the south cemetery and follow the slope back down to a rutted, dirt road that would bring us back around to the parking area where we would—hopefully, still unobserved—slip behind the wheel of my car and get the hell out of Dodge. Or, more accurately in this instance, get the Dodge out of Hell. I patted my waterlogged jeans. For once the omens were good: my car keys were still in my pocket.

  The stairs to the top of the bluff were nothing compared to all fifty-one floors of One Shell Square but I was using my own legs this time and shocked to find out that I was a little out of shape. I tried excusing myself on the basis that my body had been on the shelf for an extended period of time but the memory of the mountainous Mama Samm chugging up a skyscraper's worth of steps humbled me.

  No wonder I was depressed: every time I turned around my life exhibited new nuances of suckiness.

  By the time we reached the top I was huffing and puffing but doubted any little pigs would have cause to worry. I got as far as halfway across the waist-high stone wall bordering the graveyard when I decided to sit for a minute and enjoy the show. It was dusk now and the gathering darkness made the little pinpoints of light dancing across my field of vision all the brighter by contrast.

  So what the hell had those little nanobuggers been up to while I was away?

  It actually took closer to two minutes for the flickering spots to complete their choreography, take their bows, and one by one exit the proscenium of my vision, but I finally felt like I could go forward without blundering like a rubber-legged blind man.

  That's when the ground split open and the first corpse appeared.

  He was a desiccated-looking fellow with major chunks of flesh gone missing, peekaboo bone showing in the unnatural hollows of what remained.

  "Cséjthe . . ." he said, doing surprisingly well for a guy whose soft palate had either gone hard or was pretty much gone.

  "Jerome . . ." I nodded back.

  I think he was squinting at Zotz and attempting to raise an eyebrow at me—it's hard to tell when their eye sockets and regions round about are missing most of the major components. "The End Time
s are upon us and you traffic with demons?" the revenant asked archly. Jerome was of a Pentecostal persuasion and had earned the nickname "Preacher" among the other animated dead in the cemetery. He'd never really approved of any of the company I'd kept so Camazotz was going over like a big ole lead balloon.

  Zotz drew himself up, finally transforming himself out of his diminutive human avatar and bulked out in big bad, semi-bat form. "Not just any demon," he growled menacingly at the zombie, "but his personal pet demon!"

  I rolled my eyes. "Give it a res—"

  "And," Zotz continued theatrically, "he consorts with . . . lesbians!"

  Preacher gasped.

  I sighed. "Look, boys, I'd love to stay for the Punch and Rudy show but God called and said He'd like to keep the Book of Revelations on schedule. So," I slid down off of the wall, "if you don't mind—"

  A rotting hand came up in my face. "Ezekiel twenty-two: twenty-seven," its owner hissed.

  I stopped. I didn't want to "talk to the hand" but it beat taking another step and winding up with a squidgy finger up my nose. "What?"

  "Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening to the prey," he hissed, "to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain!"

  Zotz turned to me after a couple of beats. "What's that mean?"

  The rotting reverend cast a meaningful look over his skeletal shoulder, gazing at the far perimeter of the burial grounds.

  "It means," I said, as he turned and we started weaving between the tombstones toward the south wall, "he's trying to warn us about something."

  "Yeah? Well, how come he didn't just do that in plain English?"

  "He sort of has this thing for Biblespeak. Don't you, Jerome?"

  "Her princes within her are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves," Jerome muttered. "They gnaw not the bones till the morrow. Zephaniah three: two through four."

  "There. You see?" I said brightly, like it all made sense now. Trouble was, it did make sense—if ole Jere was alluding to what I thought was just one of several loose ends.

  "I don't see nothin'," Zotz groused as we reached the far end of the graveyard.

  As I leaned over the wall and gazed down the curving slopes where the bluff gave way to a more reasoned approach to the river, Preacher switched from Old to New Testament mode. "Behold," he said, sweeping his decaying arm out along the trajectory of the rutted dirt road below to the grassy flat where a half dozen cars were parked. "I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves . . ."

  "Got yourself a real Jesus complex there, doncha, hamburger boy," Zotz growled.

  " . . . be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves . . ."

  "Filter the religious connotations," I told the demon, "focus on the zoological." I pointed down toward area around the vehicles.

  " . . . but beware of men . . . for they will deliver you up to the councils," Preacher finished. "Matthew ten: sixteen and seventeen."

  A dozen or more dark forms were moving about down below, some walking upright, some loping about on all fours. I shifted my night vision over into the infrared spectrum. Nearly two dozen forms became evident, even through the cover of the trees and bushes near the river. They blazed white and yellow like lycanthropes, not orange and red like humans or natural wolves.

  "Werewolves," I muttered.

  "There," Camazotz grunted, "there . . . wolves!"

  I punched his ham-sized bicep. "Don't. Even. Start."

  "So now what?"

  I tried to think. "Too many to take. We'll have to go another way."

  Zotz nodded. "The odds are better back at the boat. Three instead of thirty. Plus a little payback is always nice . . ."

  "What would Mama Samm say about your thirst for vengeance?"

  "She'd say stomp them elves and come save my ass!"

  "She would not! Besides, we could just grab a couple of life jackets off of the stern and paddle across the river to the far—"

  "Paddle? As in dog-paddle?"

  "You cannot swim across the river," Jerome insisted.

  "We wouldn't be swimming so much as floating," I pointed out.

  "Leviathan waits for you beneath its dark, cold depths." The corpse spread his arms like Jimmy Swaggart. "The dead go to him and do not return."

  "Sounds like my old gig," Zotz mused.

  I thought about the froggy folk we'd tangled with before. And my disjointed visions of an alien city beneath the ocean where something monstrous slept and dreamt monstrous dreams. Something that was starting to wake up.

  "Okay," I said. "We retake the boat. But we aren't doing this alone." I turned to Jerome. "I need volunteers. Zotz and I are heading back the way we came. Tell anyone who's willing to meet us next to the dock where the shadow from the boat blocks the moonlight."

  "No one will come."

  "What? Why?" It wasn't like I was asking anything dangerous: they'd tackled vampires and worse who'd tried to get to my former residence. Besides, they were already dead, had nothing else to do, and couldn't be killed any deader. Maybe they got miffed that movie nights were canceled when my house burned down and I moved offshore.

  "You are not listening," Jerome answered. "I said the dead go unto Leviathan and do not return." His arms swept the expanse of the old graveyard. "All who could leave have gone down to the waters and have joined with his unholy minions. I . . . I alone . . . remain . . ."

  Great. Call him Ishmael and what remained of the remains was not going to be of any help. I turned to Zotz. "We'd better get back before we're missed."

  "Beware the spawn of Dagon!" Jerome called as we picked our way back down the steps fronting the bluff.

  "How about beware the ears of nearby werewolves?" Zotz muttered as we neared the bottom. "I got me a feeling that Bible-boy up there wasn't real popular back when the graveyards were more populous."

  "True enough," I admitted as I checked down the shoreline for welcoming committees or signs of activity aboard the New Moon. "But prophets are rarely accepted in their own countries."

  "Oh man! Don't tell me you take that guy seriously? I mean it's pretty obvious that his church choir's missing a few hymnals!"

  I turned around on the bottom step, forcing Zotz to stumble to a stop two steps behind me. "Two years ago I didn't believe in much of anything," I said quietly. "Since then I've been treated to a whole smorgasbord of what's possible. Forget vampires. Forget werewolves. Forget elves or faeries or whatever else is cataloged in the Grimm lexicon of Things that go Bippidy-Boppidy-Boo in the Night! I've met an honest-to-God angel. And, right now, I'm having a conversation with a demon. So, you'll understand why I'm not completely dismissive of a resurrected dead man who quotes scripture when the rest of the world seems to be going to hell!"

  I looked up.

  "But right now I think we'd better get back on the boat," I said, "before the Wild Hunt passes by . . ."

  Zotz followed my gaze to the top of the bluff where a row of red eyes gazed down at us. As we watched, several sets peeled off from both ends of the line, some wolves starting to pick their way down the wooden steps we had just traversed, the others heading back down the far slope to circle around and try to flank us. As we turned and ran, howls from the ridge signaled the pack members down by the cars that the chase was afoot.

  Better yet, the searchlight atop the New Moon flickered on and swung round to illuminate us in its bright-as-day beam. Not only was our night vision destroyed but we were precision targeted for every other predator within a mile of our location.

  "Can it get any worse?" I muttered.

  There was a thumping sound and the spotlight swung away from us to the base of the bluff where the remaining werewolves were leaping and landing in an attempt to cut us off before we could reach the dock.

  "Just had to ask, didn't ya?" Zotz quipped as the first beast limped toward us, reknitting a broken leg in the process.

  The drop was too great for any of the creatures to land unscathed. The mud that had cushioned my
impact but a couple of days earlier had dried to the consistency of concrete. Still, it wasn't a big enough fall so that a lycanthrope couldn't heal or regenerate in a matter of minutes. Zotz took advantage of the wolf's limited mobility to maneuver around and grab its tail. Jerking it up off the ground, he swung it over his head for a full revolution, releasing it on a trajectory that took it out into the river.

  Another light came on.

  It was under the water and peered toward the submerged banks like the great phosphorescent eye of the Biblical Leviathan.

  The enemy below. The enemy above. What next?

  "Yo, Cséjthe, might want to be watching your six," Zotz hollered. He had to, to be heard: the New Moon's engines had started up. Behind me I found two more wolves struggling to flank me even while they were regenerating from a host of injuries from their tumble down the cliff. Our slight advantage was dwindling in the face of growing numbers and quick regenerative powers. And reinforcements would be arriving in a few moments.

  I tried willing my hands to turn into sharp, multibladed weapons.

  Nothing happened. Other than a few more wolves getting a little closer and looking a bit stronger and more capable.

  I banged my shoulder up against the bat-demon. "I need some blood!"

  "Yeah? Well, bite me."

  "Uh . . . no," I said. "I need some of my blood! I need your claws!" I held my arm out. "Cut me!"

  He glanced down at my right wrist and forearm, offered for a little slicing and dicing. "How much?" he asked. "How deep?"

  "Not committing suicide. And I don't want to pass out from blood loss . . ." My two wolves were joined by a third and a fourth and had closed the distance to ten feet. "But I need to bleed pretty good in the next twenty seconds or you're in deep doo-doo."

  Doo-doo? There was that weird fight-or-flight vocabulary fillip, again.

  "I'm in deep—trouble? What about you?" He took my arm and ran his pointy black talons from the back of my hand to my elbow. It tickled. "They get to draw first blood without even laying a paw on you?"

  I started to repeat my request when parallel lines appeared in my flesh and began to ooze blood like four leaky fountain pens. Two wolves leapt forward as they saw (and probably smelled) the blood that started to sheet down my arm. I cocked my arm back and then swung it so that my blood flew in a spattering arc before me. It striped across the muzzles of the two wolves closest to me and across the side of another trying to get around Zotz. All three tumbled to the ground and began to thrash about, yipping and whining and snapping at empty air. The engine noises masked the hissing sounds of dissolving tissues but steamy, noxious vapors marked the acidic effects of my silver-laced blood on lycanthropic flesh and fur.