Reginald put his back to us. Hennison lifted Reginald’s scalp and showed a baseball-sized dent in the skull.
Hennison smoothed the scalp into place. “I didn’t mean to kill him. By the time I got him on the table and started the process, too late.” He grasped Reginald’s chin and gave it an affectionate shake. “Poor guy.”
Reginald’s eyes had the dull shine of the look from a loyal yet very dead dog.
“I preserved Barrett Chambers’s brain enough for him to drive, but you may have noticed that I neglected to keep his body looking April fresh.”
“Nothing a little Right Guard couldn’t help,” I said. “What about talking zombies?”
“Only one. And one too many for now, unfortunately.” Hennison yelled toward a stairwell leading to the lower floor. “Sonia.”
The zombies in the room fidgeted. What would make them uncomfortable?
Hennison cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled again. “Sonia.”
Quick footfalls approached up the stairs, clicking and slapping, the sound of high heels moving in a woman’s cadence.
Hennison tapped the workbench impatiently.
A platinum blonde rose onto the landing, hair in a Mary Tyler Moore cut and with puffy pink skin the color of cooked salmon. She wore a white nightgown with a fluffy hem and sleeves and strutted on clear stiletto mule pumps. Her lean bare legs looked impossibly long, like they’d been extruded from a die. Red stitch marks circled her neck, biceps, and the middle of her thighs.
Sonia’s gray eyes were shiny as glass and just as inert but the set of her brow and the drag of her lower face expressed seething contempt. “Vhat you vant?”
“Sonia’s my mail-order Russian bride.” Hennison motioned toward me. “Say hello to our guest.”
Her nose wrinkled as if I was the one who reeked of Dumpster cadaver. “Hello, guest.”
“Show a little class, will you?” He grasped her wrist and yanked. Sonia stumbled on her heels. Her breasts remained fixed inside the nightgown like a pair of plastic globes.
Hennison laid her hand on my chest. “Feel this.” She was cool but not corpse cold.
“I wrap her in an electric blanket, set it on high, and you couldn’t tell the difference between her and any horny nurse.”
Sonia twisted her hand free. She pulled over a battered wooden chair and sat. “Yes, I have dick privileges, aren’t I the lucky one.”
Hennison said, “She’s pissed because I killed her.”
Sonia reached into the top of her nightgown and pulled out a cigarette. She sorted through tools on the workbench, found a butane torch, and lit it. The nozzle shot a yellow tongue of fire. Her thumb worked the regulator knob and the torch flame shrank to a blue point.
Hennison reached to take her cigarette. “Goddamn it, haven’t I told you about the dangers?”
She turned and gave him the shoulder. “Vhat, that it’s bad for my health? I’m a zombie, you moron.”
“I meant a fire hazard.”
Sonia lit the cigarette and took a long defiant puff. “Yes, of course. Heaven forbid that anything happens to this palace.” She set her shoe against a metal box and tipped it over. Nuts and bolts, plastic vials, and human hands in Ziploc bags dumped to the floor.
“Don’t push me, Sonia. Remember the last time?” Hennison pointed to her neck. “I took off her head and mounted it backward.”
Smoke curled from the stitches along Sonia’s throat, from inside the cleavage of her nightgown, and from her hair. She crossed her legs and let an expression of boredom sink across her zombie face. “And you turned it back around after you discovered that my blow jobs weren’t worth a shit. Big genius you are.”
“Women, even undead they’re a ball and chain.” Hennison shared a brotherly look that we were comrades in the war between the sexes, ignoring that I was bolted to a table and that he had spent a good part of the morning sizzling my vampire ass with high-voltage electricity.
I said, “Necrophilia is a hard sell.”
Hennison replied, “Bah. Necrophilia is an outmoded term from an outmoded time. This is the twenty-first century.”
“But, Doc,” I said, “the stitches. The scars. You have to consider the aesthetics.”
“You’re right, of course,” Hennison said. “What Sonia demonstrates, in her own gracious Slavic way, is that it is possible to create a nearly human zombie. I learned much during her process; the next time the zombie will be flawless. The caveat is that the victim, I mean subject, should be a little younger. Sonia didn’t know what I was doing, she thought it was an advanced makeover process…which it was.” Hennison laughed at his joke.
Sonia ground the cigarette in the palm of her hand. She flicked the dead butt against cowboy zombie.
“Why do they follow your orders?” I asked.
“Because I’m their creator. I take care of them, give them shelter; where else would they go?” Hennison kept quiet for a moment. “Let’s try an experiment.” He shouted at the zombies. “You’re all free to go. Free. Free at last.”
Sonia got to her feet.
Hennison grabbed her shoulder and pushed her back into the chair. “Not you.”
The other zombies stared at him, to the outside door, then back to him. They picked at their scabs and gave tiny grimaces of confusion.
“I thought so,” Hennison said. “I made them. They owe me complete allegiance.”
“You’re creating an army of zombies.”
“More than that. I’ve tapped into something more profound.” Hennison paused, his face flush with imagined glory, as if to cue the trumpets and drums. Maybe in his head.
“Immortality,” he breathed dramatically, hesitating again, expecting perhaps that I should cry out, “Not immortality!” but I was too preoccupied pulling at my restraints.
Hennison’s face drooped. “You don’t seem impressed.”
“I am, very. But I’d find it easier to share your enthusiasm if I wasn’t bolted to this table.”
“Actually, bodies aren’t immortal, only the brains.”
The zombies drooled and muttered a chorus of “Brains. Brains.”
Sonia mouthed the word and licked one corner of her painted lips.
“I’ve perfected the technique of head transplants. I can swap bodies as easily as you change pants. Let me show you.”
Hennison went to the far side of the lab. An upside-down stockpot sat on a pastry cart. He rolled the pastry cart close.
Hennison pulled the key ring on the lanyard attached to his belt. He opened a padlock securing the bottom of the stockpot. “This is a necessary precaution because, well, you’ll see.” He let go of the keys and they retracted with a zzziit back to his belt. He lifted the stockpot.
Cleto’s head sat in a steel dish. His face was gray except for the top, which was pale and shaved bald. Tubes ran up his nose and into brass fittings along his temple. A net of wires crossed his scalp and were taped to his skin. His eyes were pressed tight, dark and shriveled as prunes, as if to not see what had happened to him.
On the other hand, Cleto deserved the look.
“Once you understand the biology and chemistry, it’s a straightforward process, a lot like fixing an appliance. The problem is not physical trauma but emotional. One minute you’re cruising along on two legs and the next you’re as mobile as a casserole.”
“Why attack Cleto?”
“Opportunity, mostly. I’ve been stalking those lowlifes for a while. I couldn’t believe my good fortune that I got a fresh head and my zombies got a nice snack.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“I haven’t decided. His body was torn up when we captured him. In the meantime I have to keep his head locked up because of the brai…”
The zombies leaned into him and their cracked lips pursed to mutter their favorite word.
“You know what I mean.” Hennison set the stockpot over Cleto and secured the padlock. “I can keep brai…I mean what’s in his head, in
stasis for an indefinite time.”
Hennison came back to the table. “Oh, I can go on and on about zombies. But vampires?” He raised a finger in an inquisitive manner. “I have many, many questions. Are vampires immortal?”
Not if we’re decapitated. “We can be killed.”
“I figured that from your reaction to the sunrise.” Hennison reached for the rheostat knob on the electric knife switch. “I mean, if no harm comes to you, are vampires immortal? You’ll live forever and ever?”
That’s what immortal means. “Yes.”
“How old is the oldest vampire?” Hennison’s aura became prickly with hostility. He rotated the rheostat knob. Up or down?
“I don’t know,” I answered, my muscles tensing as I expected the worse. “Several hundred years.”
“A thousand?” The prickles on his aura grew into thorns.
“I’m sure some have been that old.”
The thorns on his aura danced like individual flames. “Can this kill you?” He let go of the rheostat knob and grasped the switch.
The electricity bit where the steel hoops held my wrists and ankles. My body tightened in anticipation of the next jolt.
“Yes, this could kill me.”
Hennison nodded, pleased with himself. “What about a stake to the heart?”
“Yes.” I hoped we weren’t checking the list of options.
“Garlic?”
“Poisonous.”
“Really?” Hennison stroked his chin and studied the jars and bottles of chemicals along the wall. “An acid bath?”
“Probably.”
“Gunshots?”
“Not fatal but very painful.”
“How painful?”
He rolled the right leg of my sweatpants to my knee. The thorns on Hennison’s aura shrank into a shroud of undulating cilia. Intermittent tentacles whipped out. He couldn’t see it, obviously, but I could read his deranged pleasure.
He opened a drawer on the workbench and withdrew a revolver. More tentacles whipped from his aura.
The zombies, even Sonia, leaned close.
Hennison aimed the pistol at the shin of my right leg. He steadied the gun. The bullets shone in the cylinder chambers with their evil promises of pain and destruction.
My kundalini noir turned on itself in despair. I steeled myself to be strong. The bullets would tear flesh and shatter bone.
Hennison closed his left eye and focused his right down the sights of the pistol. “Are you afraid?”
“Yes, I am.”
“But you said gunshots weren’t painful.”
“I said gunshots weren’t fatal.”
“First rule of any guest. Don’t correct your host.”
Hennison fired.
CHAPTER 42
My mind put everything in vampire speed.
The knuckles on Hennison’s index finger turned white as he squeezed the trigger. The hammer cocked and the cylinder rotated. I heard the mechanism click, the spring compress and release. The firing pin struck the back of the cartridge. The primer cap exploded, detonating the propellant in the cartridge and pushing the bullet down the barrel.
The bullet spiraled toward me, my mind so focused on the slug that I could pick out the grooves carved into the brass jacket from the barrel rifling.
Despite that, it happened quick. The trigger pull. The bullet flying out the barrel.
The bullet striking my right leg.
Time reverted back to normal speed. Pain tore up my leg through my spinal column to my head, a thunderbolt of misery that blanked out every other sensation. I couldn’t do anything but cry out to relieve the agony.
Blood gushed from the ragged hole, a well of red liquid that turned into a swirl of brown flakes.
Hennison lowered the revolver and admired what he’d done. The zombies went, “Ghaw. Ghaw.”
He dropped the gun into a pocket of his lab coat. He went to the workbench and returned with a wooden tongue depressor. He scooped through the dried flakes and they floated light as ash. “Interesting.”
I couldn’t escape. I accepted the inevitable. The Araneum was sending help—Jolie—and with me captured, that meant the destruction of everything and everyone in this house. Felix Gomez included.
I should’ve waited for Jolie before starting this assignment.
This was what I was reduced to, wishing for relief by annihilation at the hands of a friend and ex-lover.
Hennison pulled the leg of my sweatpants down to cover the wound. “Don’t want you to get an infection.”
He told Sonia to go downstairs. He instructed Reginald to put out guards. Kimberly pawed my crotch and gave an abbreviated zombie smile: I’ll be back, sweetie.
“I’ve got another project demanding my time,” Hennison said. “Who would’ve thought that the life of an evil genius would be so busy?” Hennison twisted the foot of my shattered leg.
The pain crushed me to unconsciousness. I came to a moment later.
He said, “I trust you won’t insult my hospitality by trying to escape? Tomorrow you’ve got a date with Mr. Morning Sun.”
Hennison turned to cowboy zombie and put the revenant’s hand on the electrical switch. “Watch him. If he tries to escape, close the switch. Shall we give it a test?”
“That’s not necessary,” I replied.
Hennison hopped up and down. “He’s trying to escape.”
Cowboy zombie pushed the switch closed.
The hot blast of pain ricocheted inside my body. My muscles locked up and my vision went from blurry to black.
The pain stopped. My arched back rested flat on the table. I tasted charred flesh and belched smoke.
“Excellent.” Hennison patted cowboy zombie on the shoulder. “I’m trusting you.”
Hennison wagged his finger in my face. “As for you, vampire, play nice.”
He walked to the left and turned down the stairs.
The situation couldn’t seem more hopeless. The electrical pain was gone but I still felt the throb from my shredded right shin bone. I was locked against a wooden table and wired to a generator.
I relaxed against the table, grateful at least for the respite from Hennison’s bestial attentions.
If I lay undisturbed, my leg might heal by morning. Fresh human blood would do wonders for the wound and my attitude. The blood transfusion machine click-clacked at the far side of the room.
The blood sloshed back and forth. I imagined the heavy copper taste warming my tongue. Those thoughts brought relief, like huddling against a candle during an icy blizzard.
Cowboy zombie kept his cold undead eyes fixed on me.
I strained my wrists to test the security of the steel bands. The bands held firm. At the moment I was too weak to rip free, but give me a few hours. How to break loose and not get blasted by electricity?
I lay still and willed my life force to where I needed it most, my shattered leg and my kundalini noir. A chill started at my extremities and worked inward through my arms and my left leg. My fingers and the toes of my left foot went numb.
Twin pools of warmth settled in me, one in my body core and the other along my right shin. My kundalini noir turned slowly, rotating like an egg incubating under a heat lamp. The pain of my right shin dulled to a cramp as the cells repaired themselves in a growing frenzy.
Thirst rasped my throat. Hunger gnawed at my belly. My chances of escape were thinner than slim. Despair filled my mind like water flooding the hull of a sinking ship.
What buoyed me was the song of hope click-clacking from the transfusion machine.
CHAPTER 43
I don’t know what time Dr. Hennison returned. For me, the day was a long stretch of misery.
Hennison bounded up the stairs, grinning pleasantly. He carried a half-gallon-sized Tupperware bowl. The sleeves of his lab coat were rolled to the elbows. Spatters of blood and a greasy black liquid covered his hands, arms, and his apron. He reeked of blood and meat like he’d been working in a slaughterhouse.
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“Ah, you’re still here,” he said in mock surprise. Dark flecks dotted his safety glasses. “I knew my accommodations would be irresistible.”
He patted the sweatpants right over my wound. His touch renewed the ache. “You might want to get that looked at by a doctor.”
Was Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition such a ball of laughs?
Hennison turned his attention to cowboy zombie and took the lid off the Tupperware. Hennison circled the open bowl in front of him. “Look. Brains.”
Cowboy zombie’s eyes snapped to the bowl. Yellow drool dribbled to his chin. “Brains.” He reached for the container.
Hennison kept the Tupperware away. “Just a snack for doing such a good job in making our guest feel at home.” The doctor plucked a tablespoon from a pocket on his apron. He scooped gray mush from the bowl.
Cowboy zombie dropped his arms and opened his mouth. Hennison spooned the brains like it was a helping of Gerber’s baby food. Cowboy zombie smacked his lips as he chewed the brains. A dab of gray yuck stuck to his upper lip, and a black tongue licked it clean.
Hennison put the lid back on the Tupperware and closed it with a burp. “The sound of freshness.” He slapped cowboy zombie on the back. “Make sure Felix sticks around.” He went down the stairs.
Cracks of light leaked in from around the drapes covering the windows. The light yielded to dark as evening crept upon us.
Night was a better time to escape. Without sunscreen, daylight would burn me like a bug under a magnifying lens. I knew that pain all too well. In a previous assignment, a government assassin had chased me with a machine gun while my naked skin burned under the sunlight. I survived by jumping into the Atlantic Ocean. This time, there weren’t any oceans close by.
Cowboy zombie kept his eyes locked on me. His hand remained on the switch handle.
The power rheostat indicated half maximum voltage. That’s all? Damn, that hurt. What would full power do?
A feather of hope drifted into my head. An hour ago, escape was impossible. Now it seemed possible. How? By making the zombie throw that switch.
Jailbait Zombie Page 18