by J. C. Diem
Death Embraces
J.C. Diem
Copyright 2013 J.C. Diem
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9875377-2-0
Amazon Kindle Edition, License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be copied, resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.
Cover art by: Dreamscape Covers
Photographer: Noctem Photography
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter One
I woke to find myself staring at darkness so intense that only by blinking could I tell that my eyes were open at all. My left cheek was pressed against something soft yet gritty that smelled suspiciously like dirt. That’s because it is dirt, I thought in increasing confusion.
Granules of soil were in my nose, my mouth and clung to my eyelashes. Worst of all, they scraped harshly against the raw edges of my neck. Wait a minute…the raw edges of my neck? I didn’t like the sound of that very much. As far as I knew, necks weren’t supposed to have edges, raw or otherwise. They were just supposed to be attached to your shoulders. Then it dawned on me; I couldn’t feel anything below my neck at all.
Shocked, bewildered and terrified, I lay helplessly on my side and whimpered pathetically. I didn’t know where I was, how I’d gotten there or how I’d come to be paralysed. Keeping my mind as blank as possible seemed to be the way to cope with being in this state. Thinking would lead to panic then screaming and general hysteria would shortly follow.
The only concession I made to my predicament was to close my left eye to prevent further dirt from entering it. A few persistent grains were gleefully scratching away at my eyeball. Apart from that small annoyance, I felt no pain, just a vast and distressing nothingness below my neck.
After an unknown length of time had passed, I finally admitted that I couldn’t lie there forever doing nothing. I had to deal with my predicament and finding out where I was would be a good place to start.
Opening my right eye, I rolled it to the left and right then up and down. My night vision had kicked in and it was far better than I could ever remember it being before. My inspection told me that the wall was only two or three inches away from my face. Strangely, the ceiling also seemed to be only a few inches away. Wherever I was, I didn’t have much room to move in.
“I must be partially buried,” I whispered. I had to be because my cheek was sitting flush against the ground. If I’d been lying on my side, my head would have been canted downwards at an uncomfortable angle. The only conclusion I could come to was that someone had attacked me then put me in a tiny room. They had then piled dirt inside and had half buried me in it. What kind of psycho would do something like this? Sadly, there were a lot of sick people out there who had strange ideas of fun.
Since I couldn’t feel anything below my neck, turning my head was going to take a monumental effort. After straining for a few minutes without getting anywhere, I closed my eye again and concentrated on the part of my neck that I could still feel. As far as I could determine, feeling stopped at the base of my neck just above where my shoulders began. I wouldn’t be able to turn my whole body over if I was buried but that wasn’t my plan. I just needed to turn my head enough to see the room more clearly.
“Ok, you can do this,” I murmured encouragingly to myself. Pep talks had never had much effect on me before but this time proved to be the exception.
Creaking audibly, the muscles in my neck responded to my mental command and my head began to turn. Once it started, my head flopped over with surprising ease, almost as if I wasn’t half buried. Or as if my head wasn’t actually tethered to my body. That’s a good one, Nat. You’re not paralysed at all, you’re just a detached head! Ha, ha, ha. My silent amusement held more than a touch of hysteria.
After my brief mental bout of dark hilarity faded, I was ready to examine the room in more detail. It had stark, unpainted wooden walls and ceiling. The building must have been constructed fairly recently because the wood still smelled freshly cut.
Woodwork wasn’t my speciality but it looked like cheap pine to me. A pair of hinges to the left caught my eye. It almost looked like the ceiling was actually a trap door. To back up this theory, a small metal lock had been placed on the wall to the right, just below the ceiling.
Sweeping my eyes from left to right and back again, it occurred to me that the room was only about a foot wide. That can’t be, my confused subconscious argued. My shoulders and hips are wider than that. There’s no way I’d fit in a room that small. Peering down towards my feet, I realized I couldn’t even see my feet, or any other part of me either for that matter. My body wasn’t paralysed, it simply wasn’t there. The room I was in wasn’t in a room at all. It was a box. A tiny little box.
When the fact finally sunk in that my body was missing and that I was just a head in a box, I subsided into a panic. I’m not sure how long I spent screaming and gibbering but the most frequent phrases I used were; “I’m a head in a box! Head! Box! Arrgghh!”
Finally exhausted from my screaming fit, I wound down to the stage where I was whimpering again. “How can this be?” I moaned. “What in G-G-G.” I stuttered on God and couldn’t spit it out. “What in C-C.” I couldn’t say Christ either. “J-J.” Jesus was also a no go. “Fuck it!” For some reason, I couldn’t say the Lord’s name out loud.
I admit I had a sneaking suspicion why this might be the case. Three facts had occurred to me since I’d woken up as a head in a box; I could see in the dark like a nocturnal animal; my head wasn’t attached to my body yet I was somehow still alive and I couldn’t say God out loud. Add all three together and I could only come to one conclusion. “I’m a zombie,” I moaned then sobbed at how low I’d fallen.
No actual tears slid down my face to go with the sobs and crying was frustratingly unsatisfying. One good thing, possibly the only good thing, about being a zombie so far was that no snot clogged my nose. Tears and mucus seemed to be beyond my ability to produce now.
“Ok,” I whispered to myself once I’d calmed down again. “I just need to figure this out. Someone turned me into a zombie and cut off my head. Who hates me that much?”
Thinking long and hard, I came up totally blank. As the manager of a clothing store in the centre of Brisbane, I had a few rivals in the area but I wasn’t outright enemies with any of them. My parents had died when I was nineteen and I’d been pretty much alone for the past nine years. I had no friends or remaining family who might despise me enough to wreak this kind of revenge on me. The idea that one of my infrequent boyfriends was behind this was simply ludicrous. I’d b
een single for a couple of years now and couldn’t remember the last time I’d been on an actual date. None of my exes had been into the occult and I just couldn’t see any of them holding a grudge for this long. Besides, they’d all dumped me. If anyone had a right to unholy vengeance, surely I did.
That thought rang a dim bell. The word ‘unholy’ brought to mind a picture of a cross. The picture doubled and the lone cross became a pair. They gave me the sense of being old and heavy, possibly made of iron. A much smaller silver cross, decorated with fancy filigree bits, sat in the centre. Old and tarnished, the workmanship was exquisite.
“Not unholy,” I corrected myself. “Holy. The holy…something.” Holy what? Spots? Stains? Blotches? Nah, that wasn’t right but it was close. The word I was looking for was right on the tip of my tongue. I thought it might start with an m.
Someone had taught me a trick once that might help me solve the mystery. If you couldn’t remember the name of something but you could remember what it started with, just start saying words that began with that letter. Usually by the fifth word, you came up with the correct one.
Since I had nothing better to do, I decided to give it a go. “The holy Martian. Mutant. Maggot. Meat. Mark!” That rang a much louder bell. “The holy marks!”
Excitement ran from the tip of my head down to the raw wound that ended at my neck. “That’s it!” Now what the hell does that mean and what does it have to do with me being a zombie?
It was a good question but I didn’t have an answer to it. Not yet anyway. My memory still remained stubbornly vague. Maybe because remembering will be both painful and unpleasant. I was a zombie for Christ’s sake, of course it was going to be unpleasant.
Blinking obstinate grains of dirt out of my left eye, I winked at the lid of the box as if I was trying to send out a message in Morse code. Dot-dot-dash-dash-dash. I was suddenly stricken with the giggles and was soon laughing hysterically. It sounded awful in the enclosed space and I gave myself a massive case of the creeps. If I’m a zombie, why do I still have a sense of humour? I should have been mindlessly pining for a snack of human brains. Maybe I wasn’t a zombie at all then. Maybe I was something else. But what else could survive after having its head chopped off?
Prodding my teeth with my tongue, I located my incisors and winced at how long and sharp they seemed to be. “Ah, great,” I said with despair as the truth finally became unavoidable. I wasn’t a mindless, brain eating zombie at all but something even worse. I was an evil, blood sucking creature of the night. “I’m a vampire!” I cried with utter desolation.
Chapter Two
My memory came flooding back like a movie set on fast forward. My last day as a mortal had been spent in a prolonged agony of needing to pee. It had been Friday, Brisbane’s late night shopping day, which meant I’d had to stay at work until nine pm.
A last minute customer had delayed me enough that all the shops in the street had been closed when I left for the night. It had been spooky creeping down the deserted alley that led to the lone bathroom. A weird old man had jumped me when I’d exited from the toilet. It turned out he wasn’t just a strange old man, he was an ancient and possibly insane vampire by the name of Silvius.
Silvius had knocked me out and carried me to a small crypt in the nearby cemetery. When I’d risen after three nights of excruciating pain, he had explained that he’d created me for the express purpose of becoming his new servant.
I hadn’t exactly been thrilled with the idea. I’d been even less happy when he’d started cackling madly and I saw the length and sharpness of his teeth. It was then that I figured out Silvius was a vampire. Ok, he’d actually told me he was a vampire, but I hadn’t really believed him until I saw his fangs descend and he’d started laughing at me.
My natural instinct had been to stab him through the chest with whatever object was handy. A heavy metal cross had been the closest weapon. I’d snapped it off a nearby sarcophagus then speared it across the room at him. Silvius had died badly. Screaming, coughing up thick, black blood he finally caught on fire when he tried to pull the cross out of his chest.
I remembered something strange about him as I examined my memory. Even stranger than him being an actual vampire, that was. “His shadow,” I said to myself. “It moved on its own.”
More memories came crashing back then. I remembered meeting ‘Lord Lucentio’ in the cold and lonely mausoleum that had been my home so briefly. He had kept me safe as we travelled to Romania to question an aged vampire prophet about my future. Thanks to the holy marks I’d managed to acquire on both palms, my new friend thought I was the scourge of vampirekind. I even had a title; Mortis, which was Latin for death. My sole purpose was apparently to wipe out ‘the damned’.
Luc, as I’d nicknamed him mainly because I was Australian and lazy, and I were met by guards from the Court upon landing in France on our way to Romania. The Court, a group of snobby European vampires numbering in the hundreds if not thousands, was run by a panel of nine Councillors. Of those nine, the Comtesse was the one who was really in charge.
Portents had been seen at my strange new birth but that was only one inconsequential detail that barely concerned the Comtesse. Her main concern was a female vamp that was killing off the European vampire population. It was rumoured that she was the dreaded Mortis.
Luc and I were pretty sure that particular gig already belonged to me. Checking with the prophet who had foreseen my arrival a couple of thousand years ago seemed like a good idea. Luckily for us, the Comtesse had reached the same conclusion. She ordered Luc to head to Romania to question the seer about the renegade female vamp and I tagged along with him for the ride.
Vincent, the creepy custodian of the prophet’s domain, met us when we arrived at the Romanian mountain hideaway. Like Silvius, his shadow had a life all of its own. It gave me chills just looking at the thing. Unfortunately, Vincent wasn’t the only one in the underground lair to have a shadow that seemed to be able to act independently.
After finding a secret journal that had been squirrelled away by the prophet, we quickly determined that I was indeed the fabled Mortis. Being the scourge of vampirekind had never been on my wish list and it wasn’t a job I’d ever aspired to. Before I could even get used to the idea of what fate had in store for me, Vincent set his lackeys onto us. We were forced to dispatch them and then him. Believe me, the world was better off without them.
During their attack, I discovered the holy marks on my hands weren’t just unusual decorations, they were also deadly weapons. If the head of a vampire happened to come between my palms, it invariably imploded shortly afterwards. But only if I willed the implosion to happen. Otherwise, my hands were just like anyone else’s. Honest.
After we landed back in France, Luc phoned the Court mansion to warn them of Vincent’s treachery but no one answered. This disturbed my companion greatly since the phone was always manned. The mansion seemed to be deserted.
Meeting up with Igor and Geordie, a pair of Court servants and Luc’s acquaintances, we drove to the mansion to try to determine what had happened. We discovered that the impersonator had made an appearance and had sliced her way through a number of guards. The Councillors and remaining courtiers had sensibly scattered like dust motes in the wind.
Along with having the holy marks and being impervious to holy water and stakes through the heart, I had one other weird talent. I could interpret foreign languages, both spoken and written. The journal, unintelligible to anyone else, said that I would battle the vamp who was impersonating me and that I would win. I would then go forth and smite down the damned. Lastly, and most horribly, I would be smitten myself. Worst of all, I knew who was fated to do the smiting.
Luc’s plan was to follow the path set out for me by the prophet and to find the woman impersonating me so that I could kill her. My goal was slightly more self-serving, I just wanted to stay alive. Or maybe unalive would be more accurate. I figured the only way to do that was to run away like a coward.
Death was a state I very much wanted to avoid.
During my all too brief escape, I encountered a crowd of sewer vamps beneath London. I knew the Brits didn’t always like Australians but their lack of hospitality had been appalling. Their leader was a guy called Alexander and he had been heavily into experimenting on vampires who were stupid enough to fall into his clutches. He fancied himself as a scientist and was hell bent on creating a stronger, faster and harder to kill breed of vampires. What he got was me.
Being the latest vampire to stupidly fall into his clutches, Alexander had cut my chest open then dripped his diseased blood into my dead, unbeating heart. The pain had been prolonged and exquisite. Unfortunately for Alexander, his experiment worked. The wound in my chest closed and I healed so fast it was almost unbelievable. I was stronger and faster just like he’d wanted. I guess he’d never considered that if his experiment worked, his lab rat might just turn on him. But turn on him I did and he’d paid the price of using me as a test subject. Instead of politely dying on the stone slab as Alexander had expected me to, I instead taught him a harsh lesson on what happened to anyone who screwed with Mortis.
Luc caught up to me shortly after I left the sewers and guilt tripped me into re-joining the hunt to take down my imposter. We found her trail and quickly caught up to her. As prophesized, I killed her, using my holy marks to pop her head like a ripe pimple. She’d disintegrated, leaving behind only her clothes, weapons and a nasty stain on the floor.
Then the prophecy had taken a wrong turn. According to the journal, I was supposed to go on a killing spree and start thinning down the bulk of vampirekind. Instead, Luc, my trusted companion and occasional bed partner, had lopped my head off.
Only the timing of his attack had come as a surprise to me. Thanks to a drawing on the last page in the prophet’s journal, I knew Luc had been fated to be my own personal doom. I’d hidden the drawing from him so he wouldn’t have to suffer the knowledge that he would be my end. After all, we had been naked together a couple of times. Ok, maybe more than a couple.