Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  “Oh, no you don’t! I’ve got about two days’ worth of questions. You can’t just pop in and then rush right off again. Unless you’re taking me with you. Are you taking me with you?”

  He shook his head slowly. “You cannot go where I go.”

  “Well, then let’s start with where I’m supposed to go.”

  That massive brow rose a little at one corner. “Would it do any good to try to tell you?”

  He had a point. Once, long ago, in Sunday school the teacher had asked me if I knew where bad little boys and girls went. “Sure,” I had told her. “Behind Fogherty’s barn.” And it seemed like people had been unsuccessfully telling me where to go ever since.

  Or maybe not so unsuccessfully given my current state of affairs.

  I watched the barrel of the syringe fill with a milky substance and wondered if this was the final hallucinatory result of the brain decaying from oxygen starvation: an angel doing drugs at my bedside while I played Twenty Questions on the theme of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

  “It’s just that I’d like to know if I’m going to Heaven or Hell or just supposed to pick out some real estate to haunt . . .”

  “You want to know about Judgment Day,” the archangel intoned.

  “Judgment Day?”

  “’And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened,’” he quoted. “’And another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.’”

  “Actually,” I said, “I’ve never bought into that whole Book of Revelations courtroom-drama-at-the-end-of-time story.”

  “Oh?” His eyebrows rose and he fixed me with that piercing look that bore more than a passing resemblance to a bird of prey.

  “Well, at least in terms of an end-of-the-world trial and a big book filled with your life’s deeds and such.”

  “You don’t believe there’s a big book?”

  “Not a literal book. With covers and paper pages and such.”

  “It would be comforting to think there are no files, no records of your past misdeeds . . .”

  I shook my head. “Oh, I know there’s a record—there’s a file on everything I’ve ever done, not done, felt, thought, imagined . . .” I tapped my chest. If you can call nonexistent fingers passing through nonexistent pectorals “tapping.”

  “Right here. I’m my own book, my own filing cabinet: my own record of accomplishments and failures, dreams and nightmares, graces and sins. It’s all written down, line for line, inside of me. You want to know who and what a man is, you don’t look it up in some book on a shelf. You go inside him and see what graffiti is spray-painted on the innermost walls of his heart.”

  “So,” Michael pursed his lips, “when the Day of Judgment comes, you are your own record of what you are, for good or for ill.”

  I nodded. “Except I don’t believe in that, either.”

  “In what? A Day of Judgment?”

  “Nope. Not a final, let’s get out the calculator and add up the plus and minus columns to close out the books kind of event. I figure every day is judgment day: hour by hour, minute by minute, you are what you are and who you are based upon the latest, up-to-the-second totality of your choices and experiences. The balance changes constantly and your fitness for this life or the next is a moment-by-moment affair of existence. Life doesn’t decide who and what you were after the fact, only dusty historians.”

  The angel pulled the syringe from his arm and stood. “You have an interesting perspective on metaphysical imagery. I would be interested in how you interpret the afterlife when your time comes.” He took a step and leaned over my carcass in the bed.

  “What do you mean ‘the afterlife when my time comes’? I’ve been doing the Kiefer Sutherland with the spooks and spirits for the past twenty-four. Doesn’t that count even if I’m just visiting? Uh, I am just visiting, aren’t I?”

  Michael shook his head and positioned the syringe over my chest. “This isn’t the afterlife, Cséjthe. You haven’t sojourned out among the vast interdimensional interstices of creation.”

  “So what have I been doing all of this time?” I eyed the needle positioned over my heart. “And just what do you think you’re doing there?” Leave it to Mama Cséjthe’s baby boy to second-guess an angel when there’s no one else to turn to.

  Before I could get an answer to either question there was a sizzling sound and the darkness that had dogged me from the chapel downstairs came boiling through the wall like a wronged lover on the Jerry Springer show. Malevolent energy washed in with it like a black tide and I felt a vicious undertow grasp at my supposedly nonexistent lower extremities. I staggered.

  Michael did not even look up.

  “You have no business here,” he murmured. “Go back to the Darkness and hide in the Greater Shadow until the Light finds you at the appointed time.”

  And, just like that, it was gone. No struggle. No contest of wills or powers. One moment the shadow was present, the next it was gone. No muss, no fuss.

  “Penn Station,” the angel said.

  “Uh, what?”

  “You wanted to know what you’ve been doing since you were dispossessed of your vessel, your body. Try Penn Station.”

  “Penn Station?”

  He nodded. “Penn Station isn’t the world or a country or even a city. It’s a place, an area—one of many within one city of many—where people come and go as they make the transition from one place to another.”

  “It’s a train station,” I said.

  “That is one way to look at it. Albeit a rather narrow one. And all that you have really done is to wander around Penn Station for a few hours. While thousands of souls are catching trains and hopping taxis to towers of glass or fields of green out beyond the city’s stone and metal sprawl, you have wandered about the cold stone and brick lobby and mezzanine. Instead of traveling with the other travelers, you have squatted with the few dispossessed.”

  “The who?”

  “You can find them in any train or subway station: the mad and the homeless who sleep in the maintenance tunnels and come up briefly to panhandle for change. Do not look into their empty eyes nor heed their senseless babble. They are the fading echoes of life squandered and ill-used. They are not guides to the truth that lies behind the curtains of this world; they are the lost and the Deceiver’s sleight-of-hand to turn others from their paths.”

  “And what was the dark cloud? Give me a Penn Station analogy for that!”

  “Do you think terrorists are confined to the world and politics of the living? Hatred of life and light go hand in hand. That is why I am here.” He plunged the needle into the chest of the body on the bed.

  “To do what? Stick it to me? Why not? Everyone else has.”

  The angel depressed the plunger, presumably sending the milky substance into my heart. “Poor traveler. So busy counting the quantity of his enemies that he does not measure the quality of his allies.”

  “That include you, Mikey? Or are you here on someone else’s orders?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “We didn’t exactly see eye to eye the last time our paths crossed. Just curious to know where you stand now. And why we seem to be blood brothers all of a sudden.”

  “It is not yet your time. The blood of the Eloihim may buy you the time you need to complete your mission.”

  “Mission? What mission? And you didn’t answer my first question.”

  “Is it not enough to know that I and my kindred possess free will? And that the essence which now seeks to repair the contamination of Marinette Bois-Chèche’s demon-tainted blood flowed in my veins before it entered yours?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I hear your words, Mikey, but I’m still not sure this is anything more than ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ kind of deal. Not that I’m not your grateful dead, you understand, but I would like a better handle on the sitch before it unravels any
further.”

  “I am not a fortune-teller, Cséjthe.”

  “Man, you’re not even a guy by the side of the road who’ll give directions to the nearest Gas’N’Go. All I know is that everyone seems to want my blood and yet I’m the guy who seems to be getting everyone else’s. I’m supposed to be undead but that hasn’t worked out. Then I’m supposed to be dead—can’t get closure here, either. If this is God’s plan then He must be a cosmic-sized Forrest Gump. On the other hand, what if this action isn’t officially on the game board?”

  “You don’t believe in books and courtrooms. Why would you believe in game boards?”

  “Irony? Sarcasm? Good God! Who are you and what have you done with Mikey?”

  “Very funny, Cséjthe. But I must leave you, now.”

  “What am I, winged one? The spook who comes in from the cold?”

  His brow twitched. That was unnerving: it put one in mind of a landslide waiting for one good temblor. “Perhaps you are not as dense as you pretend.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Tell you what? That there are forces for good and for ill in the world? In the worlds within worlds and the worlds that encompass this and those beyond? That the laws that bind and shape and define reality and creation at every level hold us locked in eternal conflict? A never-ending battle?”

  “For truth, justice, and the American way?”

  He closed his eyes. “I do not know why I even try.”

  “And that’s just my point: why do you try? With me? Why are you here? With me? Why are you sticking your—um, blood—in me? I’m nothing! I’m not alive anymore! I’m not dead, yet! I’m no damn good at following the rules!”

  “That is precisely what you are good at,” the angel interrupted with a smile. The curving of those so solemn lips was like a sunrise in the gloom.

  “Following the rules?”

  “Breaking the rules.” He laid the syringe on the tray of instruments next to the bed and pushed the wheeled table away. “Last year, while you were being pursued by mortal enemies, you had a conversation with the red-haired woman who stands outside in the hallway now. You told her that there was a difference between laws and rules. That true laws could not be broken . . .”

  “Only superceded by higher laws,” I murmured.

  He nodded. “Most people—here and even where I come from—do not understand the difference any more. We are all bound by the laws of our various kingdoms. That is the reality of creation at every level. But, in the meridian of time, we have become equally bound by the rules we have come to believe in as legitimate as though they were laws themselves.”

  I stared at him. “And I’m special because I’m good at breaking the rules.”

  He nodded. “Dead and yet not dead. Human and yet something more—and less. Rule-breaker. Warlock.”

  “Warlock?”

  “By the original definition, which meant ‘oath-breaker.’ The breaking of oaths was once tantamount to the breaking of laws—sacred laws.”

  I shrugged. “And this is important to you?”

  “Perhaps much ere the struggle between light and shadow is played out to finality.”

  “And you’re here, doing the milk-it-does-a-body-good spot because I have a role to play in the game. Is that it?”

  “Everyone has a role.”

  “Everyone doesn’t have angels popping into their hospital rooms to give them a bolus of angel juice in the heart.”

  “There are a relatively low number of ‘players’ who are the head of the second-largest vampire enclave in the world while harboring elements of vampire, werewolf, Loa, and demon blood in their body without yet being mastered by any.”

  “And now I have something else in the mix.”

  “As I said, I’ve come to place my finger on the scales.”

  “Sounds like cheating.”

  “To bring you back into balance?”

  “To tip me in any direction.”

  “What if you’ve already been tipped?”

  I sighed and tried to rub my aching eyes. It might have helped if they had really been there. “I’m not saying I don’t need help here. And don’t think I’m not appreciative—though it would help to know what I’m supposed to do so I could appreciate my situation a little better. But if the other guys start tipping me one way and you and your posse start tipping me back the other—well, pretty soon I’m nothing more than one of those round-bottomed inflatable punching bags, getting knocked one way and then the other, swinging and swaying back and forth until entropy brings blessed relief. What’s the point of having free will and personal agency if I’m just a collectable action figure for the shelf of the Almighty or a paperweight on the desk of the Devil? What’s our purpose then? Heroic, moral poses while they wave us at each other and make appropriate combat noises?”

  “Perhaps coming here was a mistake,” he said.

  “Aha!”

  “Aha?”

  “Now we come to the heart of it! Are you here in an official capacity or are you kibitzing?”

  “I can stay no longer. Others are coming.” His wings fanned out behind him and spread as if he would take flight by crashing through the drop-panel ceiling.

  “Well, if you won’t read my tea leaves, tell me what I can do for The Kid!”

  He looked at me strangely. “The one you call J.D has twice survived his destiny. Let him go. You have enough worries.”

  “Let him go where? Into the light? I wouldn’t hold him back if that was the case. But he’s got some free will, too. And I’m in need of a little backup until this whole thing gets settled out.”

  “Trust your son,” Michael said, starting to glow with an unearthly radiance. “He’s saved you twice so far.”

  “My what? I don’t have a son, I have a daughter.” An unexpected surge of grief and I was suddenly close to tears. “Had a daughter.”

  “Had, have, will have . . . you’ll find that tense doesn’t matter so much when you step outside of time.” The light increased to a painful intensity. “The fact that your daughter died doesn’t make her any less your daughter even now. The fact that your son has not been born yet doesn’t make him any less your son even now. Who do you think pulled you through the wall of the gymnasium when the creatures you call Threshers were right behind you?”

  “Who?”

  “I do not know his true name. Nor his birth name. You have taken to calling him Will.”

  And, like a flash of lightning, he flickered with a bright and terrible light.

  And disappeared.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The door opened and a parade entered my hospital room before I had a chance to recover from Michael’s flashbulb exit or digest his allegations about our will-o’-the-wisp companion. A pair of doctors and a nurse entered, the men carrying white, hard-shell briefcases and the woman pushing a draped crash cart on noiseless casters. Deirdre and Suki followed behind trying, in vain, to get an update on my prognosis. Kurt trailed behind, dragging Darcy. Or was she holding him back, trying to avoid a confrontation with Suki? I wasn’t sure because I was still trying to put Michael’s parting words into some kind of comprehensible perspective.

  And figure out why the Indian—excuse me, Native American woman now coming through the door looked so familiar.

  The representative of the Northern Wilderness Clans was still arrayed in her traditional Native American garb. I figured the buckskin dress and moccasin boots were diplomatic garb for the formal reception a few nights back but the outfit seemed a bit out of place for traipsing about the Big Apple otherwise.

  “Cséjthe,” Wendy said. “The Mangler will wait no longer.” She was looking at ghostly me, not at unconscious, pile-of-meat-in-the-hospital-bed me.

  “I demand to know what you are doing,” Kurt was saying. He was speaking to the doctors, not to Wendy. “I am supposed to be consulted and kept up to date on any and all treatment decisions!” No one was paying any attention to Wendy.

  “They cann
ot see or hear me, Cséjthe, any more than they can see or hear you,” Wendy explained.

  “We are preparing the patient for transport,” answered Doc Number One.

  “We are medevacing him to NYU, where they are better equipped to treat unique cardiac trauma,” added Doc Number Two.

  “Why?” I asked. “Are you a ghost?”

  “Out of the question,” Kurt argued. “I’m bringing in my own specialists. They should be here any minute!”

  “Not a ghost. A spirit,” Wendy said; “you still do not know who I am, do you?”

  Doc One opened his briefcase and pulled a syringe out of the foam-lined interior. “That leaves us no time for checking vitals,” he said. The syringe wasn’t like any hospital-issue instrument I’d ever seen. It looked like something the Klingons would have used for executing criminals.

  “Does it matter?” asked Doc Two, opening his case, as well. “We would proceed with the infusions regardless.” He produced another syringe that looked like it was mating with a fuel injector.

  I pulled my eyes away from the nightmare needles long enough to notice something else: there was something familiar about these two . . .

  “I am Wendigo,” Wendy was saying, “and my patience is at an end! We must depart now!”

  “Now hold on, baby sister . . .” I moved in to get a better look. “ . . . these bozos are messing with my flesh and something’s not right here . . .”

  “What is in that syringe?” Kurt demanded.

  Maybe the doctors reminded me of each other. Upon closer examination I could see that they were twins. Identical twins.

  “Let them work, Uncle,” Darcy whispered. “If you’re moving Domo Cséjthe back to the demesne for his recovery, you may as well let them continue to prepare him for transport.”

  “Your flesh is useless for any practical purposes,” Wendigo said. “We will leave it behind and find more suitable flesh for you.”

  “I’m not so sure that NYU isn’t the better option,” Deirdre was saying. “I mean taking a helpless and mortally injured man back to home base for the assassins who are trying to kill him doesn’t strike me as a particularly efficacious plan.”