Desperate Souls

by Gregory Lamberson

  While waiting for his bloodstream to absorb the coke, his ears clogged up as if the air pressure on the fifth floor had changed. He swallowed and heard a popping sound as his ears cleared. Then he heard a strange, rhythmic sound.

  My heart? No—drumbeats!

  Then his guts knotted up, expanded, and writhed. Pain spread through his body like white-hot fire, and he screamed.

  Gary bolted into the bedroom and froze in the doorway. Frank stood over the bureau, a plate of cocaine on the wooden surface beneath him. He gripped his stomach in both hands, his face turning beet red.

  “Frank?”

  Frank looked in his direction. Gary had never seen such fear up close. Then Frank’s stomach heaved, and he turned back to the bureau, vomiting a stream of chunky white fluid, like spoiled milk, at the mirror.

  Gary’s eyes widened. Oh, my God! He looked at the plate of cocaine again. How much of that had Frank snorted?

  Frank projectile vomited again. This time blood splashed over the mirror and plate of coke, turning the white substances uneven shades of pink.

  “Jesus!” Gary said as Frank fell backwards onto the carpet and writhed on the floor, red, white, and pink fluids streaming from his nostrils and mouth.

  What the hell do I do? Gary thought. He’s overdosing! Do I call an ambulance? It will probably be too late. Do I just leave him here to die? The idea certainly had its merits.

  Frank’s eyes turned to him, pleading for help.

  Gary took a step forward, still uncertain what course of action to take. Frank’s neck appeared as thick as his entire head, and his body turned spastic, arms and legs flopping around as if he lay upon the most powerful vibrating bed ever constructed, his hips humping the air. Frank opened his mouth wide, and Gary heard an unnatural sound, something not human: a hiss. And then Frank’s tongue, swollen and covered with white paste, protruded from his mouth. Only it wasn’t a tongue.

  Oh, dear God in heaven …

  The head of a great albino snake emerged from Frank’s mouth. Its eyes and skin were pure white, like the cocaine Frank had been snorting, but streaked with Frank’s blood, which appeared bright red on the serpentine palette. The snake rose from Frank’s corpse, coiling its body beneath it, hissing at Gary, its white tongue flicking in and out of its mouth, and its blood-soaked eyes staring at him.

  A snake made out of cocaine, Gary thought, incredulous. He took a step backwards, afraid to turn his back on the creature, and reached for the butt of his Glock.

  The snake shot forward, launching itself at Gary, a line of white streaking through the air. Gary saw its jaws open wide, and he groped the thick, scaly body with both hands. But the snake buried its fangs into his cheek even as he pulled on it. He felt a jolt of pain, and then his cheek turned numb. Crying out, he stumbled backwards and landed on the floor. His hands closed into fists, the snake seeming to evaporate, and cocaine poured into his face and over his shirt. Gary sat up in a panic and saw the white powder scattered over his torso. The creature had crumbled into its original state!

  With a cry of disgust, he leapt to his feet, no longer caring about Frank or Papa Joe or Prince Malachai. He cared about only one thing: survival. Sprinting across the room, he hurled open the front door and charged into the hallway. He raced for the elevator, heart pounding.

  What the hell’s wrong with me?

  Sticky sweat formed on his forehead as the elevator opened.

  Oh, Christ, I’m high! The snake must have injected him with liquid cocaine rather than venom. But how much? Enough to overdose like Frank? Boarding the elevator, he stabbed the button for the first floor and tried to regulate his breathing as the elevator began its slow descent. Hearing a rubbing sound, he looked up at the elevator’s ceiling. What the hell is that?

  Not a rubbing sound.

  Drumbeats. Who was playing drums? The drumbeats reverberated through his entire body. Ah, shit. What now? He reached out for the wall with one hand, steadying himself. He wanted to vomit, but the image of Frank painting the mirror with his projectile barf turned him off to the idea. Was a magic cocaine snake trying to chew its way free of his body? God, I hope not. He made up his mind to do everything he could to keep that from happening.

  The elevator door opened, and he raced across the lobby. Through the glass lobby front, he saw that the sky had turned black. Flinging the door open, he ran outside, glad to be free of Frank’s house of horrors. Jesus Christ, what had caused all this to happen? The drumbeats continued to pound in his head and rattle his ribs. He bolted down the sidewalk, scanning Fourth Avenue for the unmarked police SUV. His clothes felt soaked with sweat.

  Heart … racing … no good…

  He slowed to a stop, his SUV only yards ahead.

  Can I make it?

  His body did not respond to his mental commands.

  Oh, God. I’m going to die right here in Bay Ridge. Not even in Manahttan.

  His stomach felt even worse. Something inside him was … growing. He staggered to the car and doubled over its hatch. Cars passed him in the darkness.

  “Oh, Go-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!“

  Gary rolled over onto his back. Staring up at the black sky, with his elbows pressed against the metal, his hands opened and closed, his fingers digging into his palms. The mass in his body seemed to be expanding in different directions, like tree roots.

  Or like a nest of snakes …

  The drumbeat in his head came at a steady rhythm—

  Thrum … thrum … thrum… THRUM!

  —while his heart jackhammered at a much faster rate. Tendrils of agony continued to blossom through his body, spreading like weeds.

  It isn’t fair, he thought. What had he done to deserve such an indescribable fate? He knew the answer, and thoughts raced through his mind.

  I’ve lied to the people I love. Stolen from criminals. Accepted money from other criminals. Committed murder. Betrayed my shield. Sold my soul for drugs.

  His stomach shook, and pain crawled up his throat and through his colon.

  “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck! “

  He thrashed from side to side, then rolled his face against the glass and vomited all over the hatch. Solid matter hurled out of his mouth and rained down on the rear windshield wiper. He gasped in horror at the black and gray chunks mixed in with his blood.

  Realization dawned on him like a ton of bricks. Tumors … cancer!

  Then his stomach heaved again, and something solid obstructed his windpipe. Gary tried to expel whatever it was, but pain ripped through his ass, causing his body to go spastic. What looked like a thick tree branch covered in fat slithered out of his mouth. Dripping blood, it curled and uncurled like a tentacle. Still he could not breathe. Worse, he felt the tentacle throbbing in his throat and through his sternum to his belly. Another tentacle ruptured through his sphincter, sending shock waves of pain through his body like broken glass.

  Pounding on the SUV, he tried to force the cancer out of his body. In his mind he compared the experience to what he imagined it must be like to give birth through one’s mouth or ass. The upper tumor grew out of his mouth, filling it. He bit down on it with all his strength, his teeth penetrating the vile surface. Acid filled his mouth and leaked between his teeth, and the end of the tumor splattered before him.

  This did nothing to ease his breathing, though; the rest of the tumor remained lodged in his throat. Then it snaked through his mouth, impossibly wide, and snapped his jaws apart. He screamed through his nostrils as the corners of his mouth tore open and the thicker portion of the tumor telescoped out of his head.

  By the time the lower tentacle had burst through his anus, spilling blood and feces down his legs, his right hand had already closed over the butt of his Glock. With tears filling his eyes and the drumbeat filling his ears, he clicked off the gun’s safety, pressed the barrel against his temple, and squeezed the trigger.

  SIXTEEN

  No sooner had Jake and Edgar settled into the Plymouth’s front seat than AK emerged f
rom the building and scurried down the sidewalk. Neither Jake nor Edgar said anything. They didn’t have to; they both knew that AK had run off to score some Black Magic.

  “So that’s who you used to get your shit from.”

  Jake took a deep breath. “It seems like a lifetime ago.”

  “You miss it?”

  “No more than I do Homicide. For me, the coke and corpses went together.”

  Shaking his head, Edgar started the engine. “I knew you were fucking up, but I never said anything. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I wouldn’t have listened to you anyway. Or to Sheryl. I needed to hit bottom to open my eyes.”

  Edgar pulled into traffic, then took the FDR north to the Willis Avenue Bridge and Bruckner Boulevard to Barretto Street. During the twenty-minute drive, Jake watched Manhattan transform into the South Bronx. The lit windows of hundreds of buildings illuminated the cloudy sky.

  “What was all that talk about zombies?”

  Jake had been waiting for the question, but that didn’t make him any more ready to answer it. “You remember a movie called The Serpent and the Rainbow?”

  “Yeaaaaah. Paul Winfield, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What do you mean, you ‘guess so’? Paul Winfield played Martin Luther King Jr. on TV. He starred in Sounder and appeared in Damnation Alley and The Wrath of Khan. And he was in The Serpent and the Rainbow.”

  “Okay, whatever you say. Anyway, The Serpent and the Rainbow was a fictional movie based on a true-life book.”

  “About zombies?”

  “The guy who wrote the book used several case histories to try to prove that Haitian witch doctors used poisons to put people into a trance that lasted for years. The regular population mistook these trance cases for zombies.”

  “Okay. So what? Are you trying to tell me that Black Magic comes from Haiti and is turning people into zombies?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “You’ve seen the scarecrows. They’re all over the city.”

  “Yeah, they’re zombies, all right.”

  “No, they’re transitional cases, like AK. The real zombies are the ones slinging the Black Magic.”

  “Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. Here.”

  “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that Black Magic is screwing with people’s minds and bodies. At some point it turns them into mindless things that do whatever they’re told.”

  “Told by whom?”

  “According to AK, this Prince Malachai.”

  Edgar blew air out of his cheeks. “His real name’s Daryl Havek. Papa Joe’s nephew.

  His mama is Joe’s sister; that’s how he got into Joe’s operation. He did time at Rikers on a possession charge. When he got out, he started calling himself Prince Malachai, and Joe pushed him out of the organization. His name has popped up more than once since we formed this Black Magic Task Force.”

  “So he really could be the brains behind this operation?”

  “Could he be the mastermind behind this drug war? Sure, why not. Could he be importing some drug from Haiti that turns people into zombies? Fuck you.”

  They turned onto Garrison Avenue and prowled the deserted neighborhood located on a peninsula of the South Bronx and bordered by the Bruckner Expressway, Bronx River, and East River. Arson and abandonment had scarred the area, and over half the population lived below the poverty line.

  “Look at this place,” Edgar said as the Plymouth crept past bright murals and rusted-out cars without tires. “Two years ago this was a struggling neighborhood, but I would have given it half a chance of surviving.”

  “That was before the economic collapse,” Jake said, feeling a familiar pall of guilt.

  “No hookers or drug dealers,” Edgar said. “Scary.”

  “The question is, what scared them?” After another block of desolate, abandoned buildings, Jake said, “Pull over and kill the headlights.”

  Edgar followed Jake’s instructions. “Now what?”

  Jake scanned the empty buildings, silhouetted like giant tombstones. “Let’s get out and walk.”

  “Did I say ‘fuck you’ earlier? Because I meant it.”

  Jake flipped the switch on the ceiling dome light to off so it would not turn on when they opened their doors. “What’s wrong? You’re not frightened of some nonexistent zombies, are you?”

  “I don’t believe your snitch that Black Magic is being manufactured up here. Where I come from, big-time drug dealers kill to protect their business. God knows what you’re getting me into.”

  “This could be the biggest bust of your career.” Jake opened his door, got out, and closed the door with a gentle touch that still produced an echo. Edgar did the same. They felt a cross breeze from the East and Bronx rivers.

  “They should raze this whole place,” Edgar said in a sad tone.

  “You’re so serious in your old age.”

  They moved onto the cracked sidewalk and walked side by side up Garrison Avenue. Between Edgar’s suit and Jake’s complexion, they felt like easy targets.

  Two blocks later, they peered around the corner of a sandstone building at an industrial complex with a chain-link fence around it. Windows on the bottom two floors of a building resembling a fortress fallen into ruin glowed yellow in the night. A rusted sign with peeling paint above the front door said Tower Steel.

  Speak of the devil, Jake thought.

  “That plant closed a year ago,” Edgar whispered.

  “Then why is smoke rising from the chimney?” Thick, choking clouds of black smoke rose from the smokestack, almost invisible against the night sky. Jake nodded at a silhouetted figure standing near the entrance. “Whatever’s going on inside is important enough to warrant posting a guard outside.”

  “He’s not moving.”

  “But he is standing.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Jake studied the building. “Look at that open window on the second floor. The roof of that toolshed is practically beneath it.”

  Edgar stared at the darkness behind the building. “We don’t know what’s back there.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  Backing up the way they had come, they walked a block toward the car, then crossed Garrison, heading away from the building. They circled a block in the opposite direction, passing silent buildings with lit windows.

  “See, people do live here.”

  “Doesn’t make it any less creepy,” Edgar said. “No industry, no jobs, no families. You want to know where the junkies are, look no farther.”

  They walked back to Garrison in silence, studying the shadows and darkness for any sign of movement. Jake was glad when they reached the avenue because the streetlights provided ample illumination. Newspapers blew across potholes as they crossed the street, approaching the building from the other side of the block. With their backs close to the brick walls they passed, they jogged over to an abandoned gas station with no pumps left. Peering around the corner, they studied the rubble-strewn rear of the steel plant. Another sentry, standing in a pool of light, guarded a back door above four metal steps.

  That’s one of them, Jake thought. “Let’s follow this fence separating the properties.”

  “I don’t have a warrant.”

  “You don’t need one. We’re just going to look around.”

  Crouching low to the ground, they entered the dark backyard of the abandoned building and crept between tall weeds and plants to the fence that ran alongside the steel plant’s property. Their feet crushed grass fragments, and Jake caught the branch of a thornbush on one sleeve. They passed the sentry, and the darkness thickened around them as they reached the large metal shed.

  “That guy wasn’t blinking,” Edgar said.

  “Like he was in a trance?”

  “Shut up.”

  Ten feet of dirt and cracked cement separated the fence from the shed. A rotted construction vehicle
beside the shed reached almost to the structure’s roof.

  “That’s a corrugated roof,” Edgar said. “There’s no way that guard isn’t going to hear us up there even if we tiptoe.”

  “You’re right. Wait here.”

  Before Edgar could protest, Jake vaulted over the four-foot fence and scrambled to the corner. He could almost hear his friend’s frustration. Peeking around the corner, he saw a glassy-eyed Hispanic man. His own eyes dropped to a garden hoe lying on the ground. He looked over his shoulder and saw Edgar poised to follow the fence back to a point from which he could observe him tussling with the undead guard. Jake didn’t want that. With his right hand, he gestured for Edgar to stay put. Frowning, Edgar settled into position.

  Jake searched the ground until he found an egg-sized rock. Glancing around the corner again, he surveyed the terrain on the far side of the building and calculated the distance. Then he wound up his arm and sent the rock soaring over the dead guard’s head. The rock struck the cracked asphalt leading to an industrial hangar, and the guard made a robotic turn in the direction of the scraping sound.

  Jake sprinted forward, trying to make as little noise as possible. But as his fingers closed around the hoe’s wooden handle, the dead thing turned in his direction. Jake swung the hoe high into the air and brought its metal blade down into the zombie’s head with such force that the handle snapped in two.

  The undead guard teetered left, tottered right, then collapsed in a heap. Grayish light flickered around the hoe’s blade, and a soul rose into the night.

  I’m becoming an expert at this, Jake thought before rounding the corner again. He beckoned a relieved-looking Edgar forward and climbed the dead construction vehicle. Rust bit into his hands as he mounted the roof of the vehicle’s cab. He offered Edgar his hand. They stood on top of the cab, fully exposed in the night air.

  “What happened?” Edgar said.

  “It was lights out for Gracie,” Jake said, cherry-picking the facts.