Undead to the World

by DD Barant

  I give him a nasty smile. “Don’t you mean an OR? That’s the clever, ironic term all you toothy types are using these days.”

  “I guess I’m not that clever. I don’t know what—”

  “Original Recipe.”

  He looks a little disgusted. Good. I can use that.

  “I don’t think that’s clever or ironic,” he says. “It’s just cruel.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard worse. Breather, bloodbag, midnight snack, throatwich … but really, my favorite’s always been tampon slurpee. Not as widespread as some of the others due to exclusive pire usage, but crude, evocative, and demeaning all at once. Has a certain rhythm to it, too, you know? Makes it easy to chant.”

  He uncrosses his arms. “Look, I’m not a speceist. I don’t use those terms, and I’m sorry you’ve been given a life that’s not exactly fair—”

  I snort. “Given? Nobody gave me anything, hairball. I had things taken away. Dignity. Respect. Any chance at making a decent life for myself or anyone I care about. But what does that matter, right? My puny seventy or so years is barely a quarter of your time on Earth, and an eyeblink to any pire.”

  “The fact that we live longer is hardly our fault.”

  “No, but everything else is. You killed us by the millions and then took over when there weren’t enough of us to fight back.”

  He sighs. “Oh. You’re one of those. Look, I may not be a doctor yet, but I’m in medical school. And I can tell you that the plague that hit the human population after World War Two wasn’t caused by pires or thropes.”

  I laugh. “Sure. Only conspiracy fanatics believe that, right? And the whole pire pregnancy spell that just happened to come along right after that was a total coincidence. Absolutely.”

  I can see by the look on his face that I’m losing him. “Wait a minute, just listen to me. I’m not someone who believes whatever she’s told. I’ve been shown, okay? I’ve seen actual hard evidence.”

  “By whom?”

  I hesitate. “People who know. Serious people.”

  “What makes them so serious? They tell you all these things in a really sincere tone of voice?”

  There’s more amusement than mockery in his voice, but it pisses me off all the same. “These are people who do more than just talk. They do stuff. Stuff that gets noticed.”

  That gets his attention. “Wait. Are you talking about the Free Human Resistance?”

  I don’t answer.

  “You are, aren’t you?” The frown on his face deepens. “You can’t trust people like that. They’re terrorists, for God’s sake.”

  “No, they aren’t. They’re freedom fighters.” I can hear the passion in my own voice, but the feeling belongs to someone else. “They want to change things.”

  “How? By murdering people? That’s not change, it’s just mayhem.”

  “No. Some people have to die. That’s just how things are. It’s how things have always been.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that. I believe in life. In fact, I’m thinking of studying human medicine—”

  “Sure you are. That’s why you’re working in a gray-market lem factory.”

  That stops him for a second. “One has nothing to do with the other.”

  “’Course they don’t. One’s about studying a soon-to-be-extinct species, the other’s about creating slaves.”

  “Isn’t it better to be a slave than have no life at all?”

  I shake my head. “That’s how you justify it, huh? Well, I don’t agree. If it thinks and feels, you can’t simply use it up and throw it away. You’re not giving them life, you’re just giving them existence. Big difference.”

  He looks away, not sure how to answer that. Which is when the door opens and his boss walks in.

  His boss is a thrope too, but only in the sense that a Doberman pinscher and a poodle are both dogs. This guy is a card-carrying member of La Lupo Grigorio, the Gray Wolf Mafia, and looks it—from his greased, jet-black hair to his hand-tailored Italian suit. Thick gold rings adorn both hairy hands, and the expression on his bulldog-like face is one of annoyed contempt.

  “What?” he says to Pete. “This? You call me for this?”

  “I caught her breaking in downstairs—”

  The mobster waves away his explanation with one meaty hand. “Yeah, you already said. She got an eyeful, huh?”

  “I’m not sure how much she saw—”

  “I saw enough,” I snap.

  “Shuddup,” Pete’s boss says casually. He’s looking at me with less contempt now, and considerably more interest. “You didn’t mention she was human.”

  Pete frowns. “What difference does that make?”

  “She’s a federally protected endangered species, that’s what difference it makes.” He glares at Pete. “The last thing we need is the feds sniffin’ around. You did right after all. I’m going to have to take care of this myself.”

  “What are you going to do?” Pete asks.

  “Get her out of the country. Keep her on ice for a while until this batch is done—we were gonna move to a different location, anyway. Then whatever she knows don’t matter.”

  It’s a plausible enough story, but I don’t believe it for a second. Mr. Wolfioso is a professional criminal, one who crosses swords with the federal authorities all the time; violating my protected status doesn’t mean anything more to him than breaking any other federal law. He’s feeding Pete just enough misinformation to keep him quiet, but once he’s got me out of here—

  “Bullshit,” I say loudly. “C’mon, you really think he’s going to go to all that time and trouble? He’ll be on his phone to the nearest yakuza blood farm the minute after he locks me in his trunk.”

  Pete glances from me to his employer and back again. He knows I’m telling the truth, but he doesn’t want to. He wants to sink back into his nice warm web of rationalizations, the one where he’s just making a little money under the table by bending a few rules. All his boss has to do is feed him a few more sugar-coated lies—lies Pete will swallow as fast as he can choke them down—and the status will return to quo.

  But that doesn’t happen.

  The Gray Wolf’s face hardens. Maybe Pete’s phone call interrupted something important; maybe he just had a big deal go sour. Maybe someone higher up the food chain is squeezing him, or previous encounters have left him with a grudge against human beings. It doesn’t matter. What matter is that he holds my life in his hands, he doesn’t give a damn what Pete thinks, and I’ve just pissed him off.

  “You goddamn slice of lunch meat,” he growls. He stalks forward and grabs me by the arm, which is pinned behind my back by the ropes. He hoists me one-handed into the air as easily as a man picking up a sandwich. My own weight threatens to dislocate my shoulder, and I yell in pain.

  “Hey!” Pete says, taking a step forward.

  His boss ignores him, taking me through the open door and onto a small landing overlooking the main floor of the warehouse. For a second I think he’s going to throw me down the stairs or over the railing, but he doesn’t. He just shoves me forward and says, “Take a look, girlie. Take a long, hard look, and tell me what you see.”

  What I see is an illegal lem production facility, what’s called a gravel pit. Pens full of goats and pigs, all of them oddly quiet. Crude ritual altars made of wooden tables, crusted with dried blood. A gigantic yellow-brown pile of sand in one corner, almost reaching the roof. Racks full of empty golem skins made of thick, transparent plastic, like the ghosts of blow-up dolls waiting to be filled with breath and life. And trundling along with wheelbarrows and shovels, brooms and buckets, are quite a few of the finished product.

  The Gray Wolf doesn’t wait for my answer. “What you see is an efficient operation. Nice, tidy, profitable. Runs like clockwork—in fact, I could run it twenty-four/seven, except for one little problem: I don’t got enough activators. Like your new friend, the one who’s so concerned about you.”

  And now Pete steps out to joi
n us. “Take it easy. You don’t have to—”

  “I think I do. And I think what you need is a little dose of reality.” He points at the lems. “See, what you’re looking at is a significant investment of time, effort, and money. But it didn’t come easy, oh, no. I got all kinds of things to worry about: supply chains, distribution, production deadlines. I got lots of people I have to keep happy, and even more I got to keep quiet. It’s a juggling act.”

  And suddenly he lifts me, chair and all, over the railing. The concrete floor is a good thirty feet below me.

  “Don’t!” Pete says.

  “Sometimes,” the Gray Wolf says, “it’s all I can do to keep all those different things in the air. And you, Mr. Peter Damien—or would you prefer Doctor Damien?—are one of those things. An important thing, one I don’t wanna drop … but I can only do so much, y’know? Sometimes, with so many things goin’ up and down, I gotta make a decision. I gotta let something go, so I can keep everything else moving.”

  “Please,” I say. I want to be brave, I want to be tough, but my voice betrays me.

  “Killing her doesn’t—you can’t—”

  “Oh, I can. It solves all kinds of problems. But I won’t, and you know why?”

  When he answers, his voice is dull. “No, I don’t.”

  The Gray Wolf chuckles. He knows a lie when he hears it. “Because you didn’t bargain. You didn’t say, if you kill her, I’ll quit. That tells me a lot, right there. It tells me you understand things, and where you fit in. It tells me you know where the line is, and not to push me past it. That’s good. That’ll keep you alive.”

  I swallow, and try to keep the quaver out of my voice. “What—what are you going to do with me?”

  “You?” He laughs, pulls his arm back, and sets the chair down on the landing. “You got lucky, kid. Normally, I’d just make you disappear. But that would upset my activator here, and I want to keep him happy. So—today only—you get a pass.”

  “I—I’m free to go?”

  He smiles. “Not just yet. We’re going to have a little talk in my car, first. Then you can go.” He turns to Pete. “That okay with you?”

  Peter Damien—soon to be Doctor Peter Damien, then Doctor Peter Adams—blinks. His face is pale. The lie his boss is offering is as thin and fragile as tissue paper, but he wants to believe. Believing means he isn’t condemning me to a horrible death. Believing means he doesn’t work for a monster. Believing means he still has a soul.

  “Yes,” he says faintly. “That’s fine.”

  “No,” I say, as the Gray Wolf carries me down the stairs, still bound to the chair. “No! He’s lying! He’s lying!”

  “She’s pretty upset,” the Gray Wolf says. He’s got me slung over his back one-handed, like a jacket. I can see Pete’s pale face in the shadows of the landing above, slowly receding as we descend. “I’ll keep her restrained until we get outside. Don’t worry, she’ll calm down.”

  Pete doesn’t say anything. He just stares.

  We make it down to the floor. The lems stare at me with curious eyes, then quickly look away.

  “No!” I scream. “No, you can’t let him do this! He’ll kill me! He’ll kill me!”

  “Ssshh,” the Gray Wolf says. “Everything’s fine. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “He won’t let me go! He told me your real name, you bastard!”

  And then he drags me through the door and out into the alley.

  That’s where the memory ends.

  EIGHTEEN

  Now that I’ve done this a few times, I come back to myself fairly quickly. My eyes snap open and I check to see if the rest of the plan is working.

  Athena Shaker lies in the middle of the floor, wrapped in chains; her eyelids flutter as her own consciousness returns. Charlie stands over her, his arms crossed, looking pensive. I turn my head to the side and see Doctor Pete, already awake but looking groggy. But is it really him?

  “What was—what was that?” Athena says. “I thought you were going to … what’s going on?”

  I shake my head, trying to clear the last of the muzziness out of it. “What’s going on is the old switcheroo, Athena. I took a chance that the alpha werewolf wouldn’t be able to resist discovering the identity of the master vampire, and you went for it. We both got sucked into the memory sequence, and Charlie wrapped you in a few dozen feet of tow-chain while you were drooling on the carpet. Didn’t want you to wolf out and gut us as soon as you woke up and discovered you’d been suckered.”

  She glares at me from the floor. “You’re making a mistake. I’m not—”

  “You are. But you know who isn’t? This guy.” I aim a thumb beside me. “Sometimes a good old-fashioned lie works just as well as an illusion spell. We used Terrance to fake you out and throw you off balance. It’s the kind of thing he’s good at.”

  Terrance—or maybe someone else—gives me a look of consternation. “Jace? Damn, this is messed up.…”

  “Let me clarify things for you,” I say. “Doctor Pete was shacked up with the alpha werewolf, who was using him to infect the townspeople with her own blood via phony innoculations. She may look like a petite redhead, but that’s more illusion magic; you just can’t trust appearances in this town. I even briefly considered that she might be a he, but the local transvestite is the wrong shade—the alpha wolf is not only tall, she’s black. Her real name is Catherine Shaka, AKA the African Queen.”

  She doesn’t bother to deny it. “I knew he smelled wrong,” she growls. “I should have killed all three of you the second you walked through the door.”

  “The woman I knew wouldn’t do that,” I say. “Not without a good reason, anyway. After Longinus snatched you, he must have tampered with your memory. What do you remember?”

  “I had returned to my homeland, traveling in secret, to meet with a shaman who said he could return my throne to me. He told me of you, and what you had done to my people, and where you were hiding. Then he brought me here.” Her tone is savage. “This place of evil will be redeemed through your suffering. My bloodline will spread throughout the population, giving birth to a world of foot soldiers. Then we will return to my country to reclaim it.”

  I sigh. More wrongheaded, hate-filled propaganda—but this time, it hasn’t been pumped into the brain of some hapless alternate-world civilian. This is the genuine article, a royal woman warrior I’ve fought alongside—and she is not someone I want as an enemy. Even without the ability to turn into a nine-foot-tall hairy monster, the African Queen is a legendary heroine, one whose fighting prowess, battlefield experience, and skill with a bow make her lethal at any distance.

  “You’ve been brainwashed,” I tell her bluntly. “With powerful sorcery that’s slowly eroding. You’re one of the most single-minded people I’ve ever met; if anyone can beat a spell into submission through sheer willpower, it’s you—”

  “Excuse the hell outta me,” Terrance interrupts, “but I’m still a little confused. I seem to remember something about being in a jail cell, but there was this little blonde in there with me. Only I also remember being in a cell—a different cell—all by myself. And then there’s her.” He points to Shaka’s bound body and shakes his head. “I kind of remember being with her, you know? And giving shots to people. Was that me?”

  I study him carefully. “On Thropirelem, Azura’s a damn fine illusionist herself. She used her abilities to infiltrate the federal prison where you were locked up, then convinced you to help us. That is, she convinced Tair to help us.” What I don’t tell him is that because more than one mind was involved, there’s a possibility that either persona could surface, or parts of both—leading to a confusing mix of memories in Terrance’s head.

  He frowns at me. “I … I don’t think my name is Tair. That doesn’t feel right.”

  I grin. “Maybe not,” I say. “And that’s fine by me.”

  I turn back to Shaka. “How about you, Catherine? You feel any more like yourself, or do you still think I’m the
Antichrist?”

  Her response is to bare her teeth, which are a lot longer and sharper than they were a minute ago. Her auburn hair darkens, and coarse, jet-black fur sprouts from every inch of her skin as her frame reshapes and contorts. Her eyes glow bright yellow; her fingernails lengthen and curve into razored weapons. She’s hoping to burst her bonds through brute, physical-law-defying force as her mass increases and her body expands.

  All I can do is stare. I have one of those moments of sudden clarity brought on by intense emotion—in this case, terror—as the real, true horror of what Ahaseurus planned for me becomes evident. The snarling monster straining at her chains in front of me is exactly one-half of a pitiless equation, the other half being her vampire equivalent. Together, they spell the inevitable, bloody demise of every human being sharing this particular version of Earth; those who aren’t turned into creatures like this will become food, slaves, or both.

  And all of it will be my fault.

  The chains hold. She howls and writhes and bucks, but we keep well away from both claws and jaws. I try to communicate with her using thrope sign language—it’s how beings with a muzzle for a mouth communicate—but she doesn’t seem to understand me. In the end, we grab a dangling length of chain and drag her into the garage, where the trunk of her late-model sedan is just big enough to cram her into. It’s like wrestling a grizzly with rabies—I may be immune to scratches, but one bite and it’s Full-Moon City, final stop on the Fur-Ball Express.

  She keeps hammering away on the inside of the trunk, but I’m not too worried; as long as the chains hold she’s not going anywhere. One monster down, two to go.

  “Pretty worked up, isn’t she?” Terrance says.

  “It’s this place,” I say. “Or maybe this world. Pires and thropes aren’t the same, here. They’re—more basic, somehow. Wilder. Less evolved, maybe—”

  “Nah,” says Charlie. He’s inspecting a row of tools on the garage wall. “That ain’t it. You don’t want to say it, but you know exactly which word to use.”

  “Primitive?”

  “Evil.” He picks up a pair of gardening shears and studies the cutting edges critically. “I can feel it, and so can you. They ain’t like the pires and thropes back home—these are bad-to-the-bone killers. I don’t know why, and I don’t much care. They get in our way, they gotta go down and never get back up.”