Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  The pitter-patter of tiny feet never sounded so chilling.

  “Tell me, Domo, do you believe in evil?”

  I looked at Darcy. This had to be a trick question.

  “Or do you believe in theories of social injustice?” She turned and started up the stairs.

  I didn’t follow. It felt wrong. What was I doing here?

  Besides playing hall monitor to the children of the damned, that is?

  That’s when a cold and clammy hand fell on my shoulder.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Good God, girl; you scared me half to death!”

  A disturbingly nude Suki gave me a half-smile and said: “Only half?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Following you. What are you doing here?”

  I looked around at the prepubescent bedlam unfolding about us. “I don’t know yet. Trying to figure out what’s really going on in my new demesne.”

  “Typical. You blunder about like a blind man in a china shop and get your bearings from the sound of broken glass.”

  It wasn’t a bad analogy: orderly chaos surrounded us. A pent-up group rage was unfolding from the ground floor up but it had the appearance of anger with a purpose. Kids were breaking locks and forcing their way into other apartments. Screams began to erupt anew from inside the other rooms.

  No one took notice of the new Doman or the cat that had turned into a naked lady.

  I glanced at an uncomfortable expanse of bare skin and turned my attention to the stairs leading to the second floor. “I’d offer you my coat but, as you can see, I forgot to bring one.”

  “Stop blushing; I’ll put my fur back on in a moment. I just wanted to know if there was a plan. Not that you usually have one. Or that you’d let us in on it if—”

  “Here’s what I know so far,” I snapped. “Kurt has a brother whom he has never mentioned, who appears to be the black sheep of the family . . .”

  The tiny lobby elevator dinged and the dial above its diminutive door indicated that it was on its way down from the fourth floor.

  “That’s interesting. If Kurt’s the white sheep of his clan—” Her voice stopped in a shiver and I didn’t think it was due to her lack of attire.

  “Anyway, Darcy’s apparently organized some sort of a raid here and she doesn’t want Uncle Kurt to know about it.”

  “And what’s your place in her scheme of things?”

  “I get the feeling I’m along for an evaluation.”

  “Hers or yours?”

  “I started off thinking it was mine. Now I think it’s the other way around.”

  “With you, it usually is. So, are you helping or just hanging?”

  “Good question.”

  “Bad answer.”

  The elevator dinged again, signaling its arrival.

  “Either way,” she said, “I’ve got your back.” Her voice squeaked up past the human register on the last word. It was followed by a distinct meow.

  The door slid open revealing an empty two-person lift.

  Darcy arrived seconds later, swooping back down the staircase, her billowing greatcoat giving her the appearance of a giant bird of prey. “Where is he?” she bellowed. “Did he get past you?”

  “Nobody got past me. The elevator was empty.”

  The door was starting to close again and she darted forward to catch the edge before it could slide shut. She stuck her head inside and something large and dark fell out of the ceiling. She went down beneath a billowing black cloak. The sword went skittering across the floor of the lobby as it bore her to the floor. As the curved blade came to a stop against the toes of my shoes, a seven-year-old boy ran down the stairs and rushed toward the front door. He was naked and half covered in blood, twin streamers of silvery chain trailed behind him from leather cuffs about his wrists. Two little girls, no more than four or five were in hot pursuit, one brandishing a hammer, the other waving a butcher knife.

  I had seconds to make a decision as I bent to retrieve the sword. Something seemed to click behind my eyeballs as I switched over to infravision but the lobby lights and welter of confusion made it difficult to read multiple targets as I lifted the curved blade.

  The boy squealed and changed course to avoid me but I was close enough to take a step and drop the blade back down across the path of his pursuers. One good glimpse finally told me that both were cold and I sliced the closest one in half as she bore down on her victim.

  She burst like an exploding Dustbuster, scattering ashes in a three-meter radius. The thing was not a child; it was an undead predator—possibly decades older than even Tommy and the twins. There was no question in my mind that I had just destroyed something that was inhuman and evil but, as I turned to her companion, I suddenly found myself down on my hands and knees, retching up the remnants of my evening’s repast and casting a bloody Rorschach across the lobby floor.

  By the time I wobbled back to my feet, the boy was backing into a corner as the other kindervamp stalked him with a claw hammer raised in her chubby little fist. He hissed at her and I almost dropped the sword as his quarter-inch fangs became visible. A second look confirmed what I had missed with the first glance: he was as cold as the children from the street.

  Not my fight, I decided and turned back to the elevator. Darcy was still down, her legs kicking at the tiled floor of the lobby and failing to gain purchase, but now she was mostly inside the lift and was being drawn further in.

  I charged, clapping a hand to the side of the door as it began to slide shut. A young man with long golden hair had one knee pressed between Darcy’s shoulder blades and the other on her right arm as she desperately tried to reach up behind her with her left. He had her right leg twisted up behind her with the pantaloons pushed back to expose her calf and ankle and was lowering his mouth to her skin when the tip of my sword intervened.

  I tapped him under the chin with the flat of the blade and said: “Ah, ah, ah?”

  He looked up, his smooth, young face looking like an undergrad’s who has just been informed that he must enroll for Advanced Calculus instead of Speech 101.

  Then something moved under the planes of his face; he lunged.

  He was fast enough to beat a human’s response time but I’m about half again as fast and the sword was already in position. The tip caught him between ribs and collarbone as he ran up the blade. I rammed the hilt of the sword against his upper chest and drove him back against the elevator wall, embedding the first third of the blade in the metal behind him. He was neatly pinned for a moment, his toes barely touching the floor, as he struggled like a dying butterfly.

  The problem was, he wasn’t a butterfly and he wasn’t anywhere near dying. In a moment he was going to find a way to dislodge himself and playtime would be all over.

  I grabbed Darcy and dragged her back out of the lift as the door tried to close again. It would have been a little easier if she had cooperated but, as I dragged, she fumbled with the interior of her rumpled greatcoat. The elevator door bumped my hip and reversed its motion. Malik had already loosened the sword sufficiently to get his feet flat on the floor. We had maybe ten seconds.

  Darcy brought forth an M61 fragmentation grenade from an inner pocket and deftly thumbed the pin one-handed. The lever snapped open and our time was suddenly cut to four seconds. She held on to it for almost three of them. Then, as the door started to close again, she snapped it off in an underhanded throw. The metal ovoid disappeared through the narrowing slot and clattered around the inside of the lift like a golf ball inside a spin dryer.

  The door was barely closed when an awful, tripart noise shook our eardrums: the sound of the blast, the spang of metal walls warping out of shape, and the hailstorm rattle of steel fragments ricocheting throughout the elevator’s interior. Greasy black smoke simmered out of the crack in the split door.

  “That was easy,” Darcy murmured as I helped her to her feet. I hated to think what she might consider difficult.

  Tommy and th
e twins appeared beside us as if by magic. “Everything’s set,” he announced.

  “Good. Wait for me in the car.” Darcy turned to me. “You saved me.”

  I was tired and it was taking me extra seconds to come up with my “shucks, ma’am, twarn’t nothin’” speech when she continued: “And in doing so, helped me kill Malik Szekely. I trust you won’t be discussing this night’s events with Uncle Kurt.”

  The girl had a deft way of turning a front-end good deed into a back-end obligation.

  We exited the building as the bedlam inside was reaching a crescendo. I started to turn left—the limo lay in that direction—but Darcy turned right. I reversed direction, still trying to reconcile the ancient, raspy voice on the intercom with the youthful visage in the elevator and almost missed the small device that Spook was pulling from her pocket. “You know, the funny thing about life is that it is a schoolroom in reverse,” she said, opening the cover. “It gives the tests first and the lessons afterward.” The device appeared to be a small electronic controller, two switches, two buttons.

  I didn’t like the looks of it: I had used one very similar to it once and my fuse box assassin had carried another very much like it. “Yeah? Well, I hope this test is over because I’m still waiting for the lesson.”

  “The lesson is always the same. Evil always wins.”

  I walked around to stand in front of her. “So what are you saying? That we weren’t the good guys tonight?”

  “Oh yes, we were the good guys. And we did what we had to do. To have done nothing . . .”

  “Edmund Burke,” I said. “’All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.’”

  She nodded. “But often good men must do terrible things to thwart great evils . . .”

  “And thus are more evils born,” I concluded. “Aristotle said we must, as second best, take the least of the evils.”

  “Yep. You are big on the quotations. The problem with using other people’s words is no one knows where you, yourself, stand.”

  “Okay, if you’re asking about evil, I’m against it.”

  “Good to know,” she said curtly. “Now the question remains: What does the Doman of the largest undead enclave in the Western Hemisphere consider evil?”

  “Well, pedophilia is high on the list. Undead pedophilia even higher.”

  “Textbook. Pick another P-word.”

  “Another P-word?”

  “Preemption,” she elaborated.

  Ah. “The question is what lesser evils I am willing to commit in the name of what I consider good?”

  She nodded. “Does your heart bleed for Malik’s little victims? Or for the future victims of his little victims?”

  “Are we talking about breaking the chain of molestation? Or killing vampires?”

  “You tell me.”

  I shook my head. “One evil is not the same as another.”

  “Isn’t it?” She glanced back at the shadows flickering between the iron bars on the windows of the old brownstone. “Malik was captured by the Turks during the fifteenth century. He was ransomed back after a year of captivity. A year does not seem very long in an existence that has spanned centuries. But when you are a child, suffering unspeakable indignities, the acquisition of power and the passing of generations may amplify—rather than bury—the bruises of the soul. And what goes around . . .”

  “Comes around?”

  “Just keeps going around and around and around until a way is found to stop it.” She flipped a switch on the remote. “I promised you three surprises.” She pressed a button. “Surprise . . .”

  The initial explosions sounded like distant mortar fire. The charges were apparently set in the basement to breach the gas main. Which was ignited by the initial blasts. The follow-up was a blast that blew out the glass and loosened the bars, cracked the stone, and rattled my fillings. The old apartment building was instantly turned into a giant Coleman lantern, a glowing white-hot mantle that encompassed a jet of purple flame turning winter’s night into summer’s day for a couple of blocks in every direction.

  I grabbed her arm. “There were children in there!”

  “You know better than that,” she said wearily. “There were only things that looked like children. Things that might have been children, once. He took their innocence from them and he took their lives. He remade them in his own image. Undead and unnatural.”

  “Not every molested child becomes a child molester! It’s the exception, not the rule!”

  “No,” she agreed. “But the statistics are not promising when you give them eternal life and power over innocent flesh. Malik has created hundreds like himself—only he granted them the dark gift while they were still unfinished. Malik, himself, was not turned until he reached physical maturity. He offered no such completion to those he transformed into his undead playthings.”

  I stared back at the inferno that was cleansing the world of Malik and his terrible legacy. “Your little coconspirators planted the charges while the neighborhood kids went about attending to the newest victims. I guess they thought they were preventing the curse from spreading. But it was just a convenient way for you to bring them all together while your ‘mini-mes’ turned the whole building into your final solution.”

  She nodded. “As I have said, a quick study.”

  “So how are the three in your limo any different from the others? Why should they live while the others are given the shake-and-bake solution?”

  She flipped the second switch. “Surprise number two . . .” She pressed the second button and a thunderclap went off under the limousine where Tommy, Sindi, and Sassy waited. The car rose eight feet off the ground and turned into a fiery version of Darcy’s grenade in the elevator.

  I could feel my eyebrows starting to singe in the blast-furnace breeze that washed over us but I only felt colder down deep inside. “You’re out of switches,” I said after a long moment. “What’s the third surprise? That we have a long walk back to the park?”

  “Nope.” She put the remote back inside her coat pocket. When her hand reemerged it was holding a SIG-Sauer P226 auto-pistol. Up close, it looked a lot bigger than it actually was. The black eye of the barrel was positively huge.

  “Okay,” I said, “you really are a dhampir. Even though all the legends say a dhampir is the son of a vampire, you’re a credit to your gender. You outslay the Slayer and are cuter than the Executioner. But I’m the good guy, remember? Reforming the fanged, protecting the fangless . . .”

  “The thing about evil,” she interrupted, “is that it is incapable of sustaining itself indefinitely. Deal enough death, impose enough indignities, and even the sheep rise up against the wolf. Báthory was only months away from an open revolt. Never mind the living; the undead had had enough of her excesses. Unambiguous evil is self-correcting.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but I think it’s always best to speed up the process.”

  “Except people like you don’t. You’re another Chamberlain.”

  “Richard?”

  “Neville. You’d rather negotiate with evil than destroy it. Evil perpetuates itself through the cooperation of the willing. You find yourself in the belly of the beast and, instead of trying to cut your way out, you redecorate and distribute throw pillows! Worse, you’re the Typhoid Mary of the Stockholm Syndrome!”

  I was more annoyed than afraid. “Let me get this straight. I’ve been in town two days, trying to figure out how to keep hundreds of undead killers from turning all of New England into their own coffin-and-breakfast while dodging assassins so that I can live long enough to institute some positive change. And you, Miss Lived-Among-The-Vampires-All-My-Life, take a few minutes off from your job as PR flack for Uncle Kurt to lecture me on collusion with the enemy? If that isn’t a case of the pot calling the thimble black, I don’t know what is!”

  “If they knew that I was working against them, I wouldn’t live long enough to accomplish anything.”

  “And it’s
beyond your comprehension that I might be working from the same script?”

  “There are obvious differences between us, Cséjthe. I do not traffic with the dead. I have never acted to save nor had physical congress with the undead. Despite maintaining my cover for many years, I have never been seduced by it. I know who I am and what I stand for. The Hunger and the Bloodthirst have never had a foothold on my soul. I have passed through the fire and have not wavered.”

  “Yeah, unthinking fanaticism is like that.”

  “If you really want to bring down this evil empire, take solace in the fact that your death will accomplish more toward that goal than an entire lifetime of administrative Mickey-Mouse.”

  “Oooh, nice turn of phrase. But you’re not thinking clearly. I offer more advantages as an ally than a lever for political instability.”

  “At least you’re not out and out begging. I like that. You’re presenting a cool and reasoned argument for what you believe are logical alternatives. But that just underscores how dangerous you would be as Doman. You would find all sorts of intellectual justifications for the evil that would flourish under your benevolence. You lack passion. You are already becoming undead, yourself. You accept what other humans would not. I’m doing you a favor by pulling the trigger now: you may not yet possess a hellbound heart.”

  “And so you kill me and, of course, another powerful wampyr takes advantage of the resulting paranoia to make his move. Will your cause be better served if Cairn becomes Doman?”

  She shook her head. “You still don’t get it, do you? Like my mother before me and hers before her, I am Cairn!” Her finger tightened and a hissing, spitting, somewhat singed cat leapt upon her as she squeezed the trigger. Her arm was moving off trajectory as the cat became something else but an express train was already smashing into me, knocking me off my feet. Thunder roared and I smashed into the wall of the tenement building beyond the sidewalk like a rag doll hurled by an angry child.

  A giant bubble of pain swelled and burst in my chest.