Jailbait Zombie

by Mario Acevedo

“Okay, four,” Phyllis relented. “Consider the astral plane as another dimension. One we can access only by using the psychic energy component of our being. You’ve heard of astral projection?”

  “I saw an ad about it in a comic book. Right next to one about X-ray specs.”

  Phyllis kept her expression arid and inert. “Astral projection is when our psychic selves travel from one place to another across the astral plane. That’s one phenomenon involving the astral plane. Others include remote viewing and out-of-body experiences.”

  I asked, “How does this concern the Araneum?”

  “The Araneum is investigating the use of the astral plane.”

  “For what reasons? Discount travel?”

  Phyllis’s voice became a little more dry. “Something like that but we shouldn’t speculate.”

  As in, you don’t need to know.

  The bartender interrupted when she brought our drinks. She glanced at the diviner and remained unamused, as if she’d seen stranger things in the bar. She poured the beers into glasses and left.

  I tasted my beer. “Where did this diviner come from?”

  Phyllis took a collection of papers from the carry-on. They were photocopies of pages from a notebook. The writing on the margins used Cyrillic letters. “In your investigation of Rocky Flats, did you ever come across a Dr. Milan Blavatsky?”

  “No.”

  Phyllis said, “He was a scientist hired to reverse-engineer what the government could of the UFO. These are his private notes.”

  Workers at Rocky Flats were forbidden from taking classified material. Sometimes the security precautions were concrete solid; other times, they were a sieve.

  I studied the small drawings and the cramped lettering. The notes were reduced images of much larger originals. Some of the drawings were simple representations of the case and the pyramid. There was also one sketch of the original psychotronic device. Other drawings were as complex and indecipherable as the electrical schematics of a rocket ship.

  Mel traced a big finger along the most complicated of the drawings. His eyes registered admiration.

  I went from the plans to the diviner. “I was under the impression the government couldn’t deduce much from the UFO. Too advanced.”

  Phyllis said, “Another lie.”

  “Figures. Where did you get these notes?”

  “After Blavatsky retired”—Phyllis drank from her glass—“he went public with them but didn’t get much attention outside of obscure pseudoscience journals.”

  “Seems the government would’ve tried to stop him.”

  “Maybe they did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dr. Blavatsky was obsessed with UFO phenomenon,” Phyllis replied. “When he went to a wheat field to investigate a crop circle, he got run over by a combine.”

  Phyllis waited as if she wanted a chuckle, but to me, the point of her anecdote was that psychic energy studies were not only weird but deadly.

  I didn’t laugh.

  I opened my right hand. “Here’s my zombie.” I opened my left hand. “Here is the psychotronic diviner.” I put my hands together. “What’s the connection?”

  Phyllis reached back into the carry-on and withdrew a state highway map of Colorado. “The Araneum has triangulated the source of an unusual set of psychic signals.” She laid the map flat beside the diviner and noted two thick pencil lines. One started in Boulder. The other came from the southeast, off the map.

  “Austin, Texas,” Phyllis explained.

  The two lines intersected over Morada.

  CHAPTER 8

  Zombies. Psychic signals. The astral plane. All had something to do with Morada. Even trying to guess made my thoughts loopy, as if my beer had been spiked.

  “What’s so important about this particular signal?”

  Phyllis answered, “The signal is unusually strong.”

  “What’s the source? Supernatural? Human? Alien?”

  “We don’t know. That’s your job to find out.”

  Mel massaged his temples. “All this mental gymnastics has made me hungry. Anybody up for a snack?”

  He set his lunch box on the table. “I’ve eaten here before. The menu would make a goat puke.” He opened the lunch box and doled out three bags of warm blood. “A-negative.” He offered straws that we punched into the bags. With plastic bendy straws sticking out the tops, the silvery bags looked like kids’ juice containers.

  The bartender returned. “No outside food or drink.”

  Mel waved his bag. “We’re on a special diet.”

  One end of the bartender’s unibrow levered upward. Her forehead wrinkled and the makeup cracked like plaster.

  I tossed a ten on the table. “Let’s pretend we ordered something to eat.”

  The bartender curled the ten around her long purple fingernails, tucked the money down the front of her blouse between the tattoos of two devils, and walked off.

  The blood tasted good but did nothing to improve my understanding of psychic energy or my attitude toward this investigation.

  Phyllis pushed the diviner across the table toward me. “You’re going to need this to locate the signal.”

  Given the ambiguities in this assignment, the diviner seemed less like a tool and more like Pandora’s box. “So this particular signal comes from Morada. Why is that such a big deal?”

  Phyllis hesitated as if parsing in her mind what she could and couldn’t tell me. “Usually the use of psychic energy is a passive activity, similar to hearing or observing. But there are some who can focus and direct their psychic energy outward—a psychic energy attack, if you will.”

  I pulled my chair closer. “For what reason?”

  “To enter someone’s psyche through their subconscious. Imagine if you could reach someone through their dreams.”

  Dreams. Were my nightmares and hallucinations the result of psychic manipulation?

  I had thought of the Iraqi girl’s resurrection as a symptom of my guilt. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe someone had opened up my head and was monkeying around in my subconscious.

  I felt as if I was shrinking deep into myself and the world pulled away from me with a wet, sucking sound. I became queasy from the sense of violation. Everything seemed an illusion—who or what could I trust? I retreated behind my doubts.

  I wasn’t sure what was going on and I didn’t like it.

  Mel busied himself draining his bag of blood. He searched with the straw to slurp from the corners of his bag. His eyes turned to me and wrinkled with concern. “Felix, you look like there’s a spider crawling in your shorts. What’s up?”

  All of us wore contacts and we couldn’t read one another’s aura. I must’ve really telegraphed my emotions to have them read so easily.

  “What about hallucinations?” I asked.

  Phyllis had been drinking blood while she studied me with her keen eyes. She put down her bag. “What about them?” Her gaze pulled at me like hooks.

  Talking about the hallucinations would stir up my feelings of violation and guilt, but Phyllis might know something that could help.

  “The last few nights I’ve had bad dreams about my turning.” I fought to displace my emotions and kept my voice calm as if I were talking about someone else. “I’ve been getting hallucinations that bring back memories I worked hard to forget. A voice comes to me, repeating my name.”

  “Whose voice is it? A fanging victim?”

  “No.”

  “Was that it? Just a voice?” Phyllis fired the questions like an interrogator.

  “I saw a face.”

  “Whose?”

  “Someone from long ago. Someone dead.”

  Phyllis played with the straw in her bag of blood. “How do the hallucinations come to you?”

  “At first in nightmares. Lately I’ve been getting them even during the day.”

  “What triggers them?”

  “They just happen.”

  I remembered the girl. My kundalini noir
wilted and I felt my shoulders sag with grief.

  Buck up, Felix. Don’t show weakness. I erased the girl’s image from my mind. I straightened up and put a stoic gaze into my eyes.

  For the first time since I’ve known Phyllis, a flicker of regret played across her face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Phyllis hardened her stare. The corners of her eyes twitched. “Are you up for this assignment?”

  “You mean finding the zombie creator?”

  “And the source of the psychic signals.”

  I didn’t appreciate these jabs she was throwing at me. “Are you doubting my abilities?”

  “I have my concerns.” Another jab.

  “What are you getting at?”

  Phyllis shifted uncomfortably as if she were about to say something that would hurt us both. “I’m sending you help.”

  The comment stung like one of those jabs had connected to my chin.

  Mel winced and whispered sympathetically, “Ouch.”

  Phyllis’s meaning lingered in the air, stinking. She’d lost confidence in me as an enforcer.

  I asked, “Why?”

  “No reason other than my own paranoia.”

  “I don’t like someone from the Araneum describing herself as paranoid,” I said. “The rest of us should be paranoid about you.”

  Phyllis’s expression seemed to petrify.

  I wanted to break through her calm veneer, so I added, “Unless this business of being paranoid is bullshit.”

  Phyllis let her face relax. A manipulative gleam sparkled in her eyes. “I wouldn’t worry.”

  “It’s my ass. I am worrying.”

  Her eyes went dim and her mouth flattened, like her mind had clicked off the “show emotions” button. She said, “I’m bringing in Jolie.”

  The name was a stab where my heart used to be. Jolie was another vampire enforcer from the Araneum. She and I had met through our friendship with Carmen Arellano. We both had been Carmen’s lovers. In the days since we lost Carmen, Jolie and I had kept in touch. Our conversations were strained by the mutual understanding that we had unknowingly betrayed Carmen. Because of our mistake, she was now a prisoner of extraterrestrial gangsters.

  Jolie and I once commiserated our way to sex. I’m sure both of us were thinking of Carmen as we screwed each other. I know I was. Afterward, we both pretended that the other no longer existed.

  “Send for her then,” I said. “You don’t need my permission.”

  Phyllis replied, “Jolie’s finishing another assignment. You should wait for her.”

  “I’ll get started now. The Araneum said ‘immediately.’”

  “You should wait. A repeat of what happened to Carmen would be a disaster.”

  This wasn’t another jab, it was an uppercut to my jaw.

  I looked away from Phyllis and let my ego absorb the blow.

  I slipped a few bills under my glass and collected my backpack. “Phyllis, you don’t think I can handle this, bring in anyone you want.”

  She dropped her empty bag of blood into Mel’s lunch box. “Felix, you’re the best we have. Unfortunately, even the best can’t afford to make mistakes.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The psychotronic diviner sat on the front passenger’s seat. A dim white glow shimmered inside the crystal.

  I was on the way to Morada. I had borrowed an older Toyota 4Runner from Mel because I didn’t want to bang up my Cadillac.

  South of Saguache, the highway emptied into the San Luis Valley. Yellow and orange autumn leaves splashed like fire across the evergreens of La Garita Hills. The highway made one last jag before heading straight south along the western boundary of the valley.

  I was about to tune the stereo when the girl appeared. Her face and those unforgiving eyes loomed before me.

  The voice returned.

  Felix…ix…ix.

  Just as suddenly, her face disappeared and I stared at the square grill of a semitruck coming straight at me. Its horn bellowed.

  A shock wave of panic and terror ripped through me. I snagged the steering wheel to the right and jammed on the brakes.

  The semi roared by, the horn blaring even louder, the driver flipping me off.

  The Toyota skidded across the pavement and swerved left. My guts seized in fear that I would flip over. I countersteered. The 4Runner snaked back and forth, losing speed, and came to a halt. The sharp odor of burned rubber came through the vents. The back end of the semitrailer receded in my rearview mirror.

  I rested my head against the rim of the steering wheel and let go a long sigh of thanks.

  Something shone in my peripheral vision.

  The crystal in the diviner burned bright white.

  It burned bright white.

  The diviner had just detected a psychic signal.

  During the hallucination.

  This couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Did this confirm that the hallucinations were psychic energy attacks?

  It had to.

  The glow in the crystal faded. I put my hands close to the pyramid and my fingers trembled in dread.

  If the hallucinations were the result of my guilt, I could find a way to cope. But what defense did I have against a psychic attack?

  I imagined a hand groping inside my skull, fingers sifting through my brain. The sense of violation returned.

  I felt stripped and humiliated.

  Naked.

  Unclean.

  Why the attack? Why me?

  Who was doing this?

  A sense of foreboding cut deep into me, as if I were pressed against the edge of a giant knife.

  Were the zombies and the psychic attacks related?

  What else could the psychic attacks do? Could they only manipulate my thoughts or could they also steal from my mind?

  The foreboding cut sharper.

  Was the Araneum not telling me something about this assignment?

  How much danger waited for me in Morada?

  Why was the Araneum sending me out here like this? As bait? Was I that expendable?

  I reached behind me for a cooler on the rear seat. A dozen 450-milliliter bags of whole human blood sat in the cooler. I snatched a bag and fanged a hole in an O-neg, inserted a plastic straw, and sipped.

  The taste of human blood comforted me. My fear eased and I became filled with a calm and cold determination. I had powerful weapons of my own and my enemies would be foolish to underestimate me.

  It was time to get my questions answered. In Morada.

  I took my foot off the brake and pressed hard on the accelerator pedal.

  The highway crossed a bridge over the Rio Grande, passed a potato co-op, and led to the one stoplight in town. To my left, a giant white letter M decorated the side of a tall rocky hill.

  I turned west on Abundance Boulevard. Wasn’t much in abundance except for wishful thinking. A sporting goods store with grimy, opaque windows. A big-game meat processor offered family discounts. A couple of antique shoppes sold junk. Faded real estate signs advertised mountain views and country living.

  My first stop would be Donald Johansen, Barrett Chambers’s landlord. I followed the MapQuest printouts to the address of the apartments on the north side of town.

  The street became a washboard dirt road. Small forlorn houses with tarpaper roofs sat behind rickety fences of slack wire. Rusting cars, tractors, and farm machinery rested like broken statues in weed-filled yards.

  I got to the address on C Street, a row of five tiny apartments on a scraggy lot. The twisted window screens looked like gray scabs. Half of the windows either had cardboard inserts or were covered on the inside with aluminum foil. Chambers had lived behind door number three.

  I parked next to the only car on the lot, a dusty Chevy Lumina, and got out.

  MANAGER had been scrawled in black marker on the door closest to the Chevy.

  I removed my contacts and checked to see if anyone watched. The only life I saw were a few birds flying ove
rhead and the traffic passing down the street.

  I stored my contacts in their case and covered my eyes with sunglasses. I had to be ready to use hypnosis.

  I pressed my hand against the manager’s door. The texture was rough from the peeling varnish. By feeling for vibrations and using my hearing, I could get a better picture of what was going on inside.

  A television commercial sang the praises for yet another breakthrough in toothbrush technology. I heard a gentle rustle, like someone shifting on a chair.

  I stood to one side of the door—a habit in case the occupant answered with a shotgun blast—and knocked.

  The volume of the TV was turned down.

  “Yeah?”

  I knocked again. “Hey, Donald, I got the rent money.” I emphasized “rent money.”

  The chair squeaked and approaching steps rattled the door.

  “That you, Barrett?” A man’s voice. “About goddamn time.”

  The door jerked open. A guy in his mid-thirties stared out. His flabby face had the dull color of cold cuts that had been forgotten in the fridge. The mood in his eyes went from anticipation to surprise. His dark hair was parted in the middle and hung to his shoulders. He was barefoot and wore sweats and a ratty green T-shirt that said ROCK-N-ROLL FOREVER.

  His eyes gave me the quick one, two appraisal, and his expression turned hostile. He kept his hand on the doorknob. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m here about Barrett Chambers.”

  “Haven’t seen him since the beginning of last month. I’m about to evict his deadbeat ass.” Johansen squinted at me and grimaced. “Who are you?”

  I held out a business card. “A friend of the family.”

  Johansen’s eyes cut to the card and back to me. “What friend? What family?” He started to close the door. “Unless you’re here to settle his rent, I’m not talking. You got any problems with Barrett, go to the cops.”

  I had to search Chambers’s apartment, and if Johansen didn’t want to cooperate, I had other ways.

  I dropped the card into my shirt pocket. I jabbed my hand and the toe of my shoe in between the door and the jamb. Johansen’s expression exploded with alarm. One shove using vampiric strength and I was inside. Johansen tripped over a vacuum cleaner and stumbled against the wall. He made a choking noise like a scream for help was stuck in his throat. I kicked the door shut, grabbed his arm, and pulled him upright.