Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  About this Book . . .

  * * *

  Dead on my feet

  * * *

  THE LIVING DEAD WERE MAKING HIS LIFE A LIVING HELL . . .

  A year ago, Chris Csejthe (pronounced “Chay-tay”) was completely human—then a blood transfusion from the Lord of the Undead changed everything. Now he is a hunted man, sought by human and vampire alike for the secrets he knows and the powers that his mutated blood may bestow. So far he's dodged undead assassins, werewolves, a 6,000-year-old Egyptian necromancer, and Vlad Dracula himself. But now he's really got problems.

  The dead are turning up on his doorstep after dark to ask for justice and the police want to know where all those corpses are coming from. Undead terrorists are testing a doomsday virus on his new hometown and he's caught in the crossfire between a white supremacist militia and the resurrected Civil War dead. His werewolf lover, jealous of his dead wife's ghost, has left him. And the centuries-old and still very beautiful (and very deadly) Countess Bathory is determined to have his uniquely transformed blood for her own dark purposes.

  Now, more than ever, life sucks!

  Dead on my Feet

  Book II of The Half-Life Chronicles

  Wm. Mark Simmons

  DEAD ON MY FEET

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Wm. Mark Simmons

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-7434-3610-5

  Cover design and illustrations by Patrick Turner

  First Printing, June 2003

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Typeset by Windhaven Press,

  Auburn, N.H.

  www.webwrights.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  19 Feb 2006 : Formatted and converted to BetterLit from HTML, which is not posted since it's available elsewhere. I just do this so all the extras in ReaderWorks are used, the BetterLit formatting, and so books in a series display in order in MS Reader. Note: Since MS Reader V2.0 doesen't display the spine, I add it here. It still shows up the same in MS Reader V1.x

  —EvilRich

  Dedication:

  Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster,

  and if you gaze into the Abyss,

  the Abyss gazes also into you.

  —Fredrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

  Beyond Good And Evil

  Flectere si nequeo Superos,

  Acheronta movebo.

  (If I cannot move Heaven,

  I can raise Hell.)

  —Virgil The Aeneid

  Author's Note:

  This is a work of fiction.

  The twin cities of Monroe and West Monroe actually exist on the banks of the beautiful Ouachita River, however names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual business establishments, events, specific locales, the U.S. government, or persons living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  This one's for Dennis, friend & author.

  While a number of people contributed time and advice, he beat me mercilessly with a blue pencil through conception and rewrites.

  Any faults within are mine for advice ignored.

  Baen Books

  by Wm. Mark Simmons

  One Foot in the Grave

  Chapter One

  The beaded curtains clicked and rattled like finger bones as I brushed them aside. Hesitating on the threshold, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness beyond. The first impulse is always to slip into the infrared band, but augmented perception of heat sources rarely comes in handy unless you’re hunting prey. I was here hunting information.

  Candles provided most of the illumination, although a lava lamp glimmered in one corner and the crystal ball at the center of the table seemed to shed a soft luminescence all its own. Tiny red eyes of burning incense glared through the dimness. Oriental rugs and tapestries vied with hand-woven god’s-eyes for supremacy in the general decor. A couple of human skulls counterbalanced the effect of plaster saints and dangling rosary beads.

  I stepped across the threshold. Technically, I didn’t require an invitation, yet, but the appointment set by telephone would have served at any rate. I looked around, my eyes still working in the range of normal, human vision. Now that I was inside, the rest was less impressive: a step below a Jaycee’s tour-the-haunted-mansion-and-your-donation-will-help-charity shtick.

  “Nice,” I said. “I’ll bet the rubes just eat this stuff up.”

  “Atmosphere,” said Mama Samm, “is very important in opening de gates of belief. Please,” she indicated a chair, “sit down.”

  I sat. The chair was surprisingly comfortable. I sank down into its cushiony depths and discovered, belatedly, that it might be difficult to extricate myself in a hurry. Not that I should have to worry about busting out of a faux fortune-teller’s parlor, but if I had learned one thing during the past year or so of my “afterlife,” it was the value of charting all potential escape routes when walking into unfamiliar territory.

  And my on-the-job motto was: “Never relax.”

  “Relax,” Mama Samm said.

  She was immense. Her caftaned body seemed to fill a third of the room like a giant, glimmering white mushroom and her white turban floated above her dark features like a disembodied ghost.

  “You have questions,” she said. She wasn’t asking.

  I nodded. Opened my mouth.

  “You are here on behalf of anot’er,” she continued.

  “Well—”

  “A client. Someone wishes to know if I am legitimate. De real ting.” She still wasn’t asking.

  “You’ve checked me out,” I said, deciding to drop sixty percent of the bluff.

  She nodded.

  “And?”

  She smiled. Her teeth were all white and even so that ruled out one ever-present concern. “You made your appointment under de name of Jon Harker. Your driver’s license, social security card, in fact all of de right pieces of paper, plastic, and computer files say your name is Samuel Haim.”

  “Yes,” I answered, interjecting just the right tone of “you’ve found me out.”

  “Even though ‘Samhaim’ is de ancient Celtic festival of de dead, its proper pronunciation is ‘Sow-en.’ So you see, Mister . . .” she paused, arching an eyebrow, “ . . . Haim . . . it is not a very good pun for all de trouble dat you or someone else has gone to in leaving de proper paper trail.”

  I tried to say “I don’t know what you’re talking about” but my mouth wouldn’t engage. Anyway, she was on a roll: “You come to Louziana six month ago—supposedly to open a blood bank here in Monroe. Ot’er people run it for you. You do not keep office hours and you have money.

  “You live on de west bank of de Ouachita River. Big house, tree stories, lots of property, fenced and rigged with expensive security systems. You value your privacy. No record of any family. In fact, no record of any ting prior to your appearance here.

  “You suffer from insomnia, rarely go out in de day, and have no personal physician. In fact, you have no life or healt’ insurance. You do, however, have an interesting hobby: last mont’ you opened a sep
arate office wit’ ‘After Dark Investigations’ stenciled on de door. Now you are here.”

  I shrugged. “Not much nightlife in Northeast Louisiana.”

  “So why come here? Nawlins has all de nightlife someone like you could want.”

  “New Orleans already has blood banks.”

  “Nawlins also has vampires,” she said mildly.

  I blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Owner of a blood bank, pale skin, an affectation for sunglasses, nocturnal lifestyle—some people might tink that you were a vampire, yourself.”

  I blinked again. “I have a medical condition that makes me allergic to sunlight. I’m highly susceptible to skin cancer.”

  “Of course. If you really were a vampire, you would hardly be able to roam about in de daylight. And you have been seen to roam about in de daylight on several occasions.”

  It didn’t seem necessary to point out that this was one of them. “You have an interesting sense of humor,” I said.

  She dimpled without actually smiling. “Don’ I? It is odd, however, dat with such a medical condition, you have not found a personal physician or done business with any pharmacy since you have moved here.”

  “You really have checked me out, haven’t you?”

  She smiled again. “I have clients, too, Mr. Haim. Your presence, here, has raised certain questions.”

  I felt a chill creeping up my spine. “I came here,” I said, trying to keep my voice disarmingly pleasant, “thinking that I was going to be the one asking the questions.”

  Her smile grew more pronounced and she reached across the table. “You have a client who is wanting to know if I really am a true psychic with prescient abilities. Let me see if I can answer such questions with a personal reading of your own. Give me your hand.”

  Essentially I had three choices: refuse and still try to get the answers I was hired to get, get up and walk out now, or go along and risk that “Mama Samm” D’Arbonne was everything she was purported to be. The first course of action was unlikely and the second would mean that I might as well give up my newly chosen avocation and take up some less risky nocturnal pursuit.

  Maybe needlepoint.

  I put out my hand, the skeptic in me murmuring that a bona fide medium was about as likely as—what? An actual vampire? A real-life werewolf? Too late: Mama Samm clasped my right hand in her left. Engulfed, actually. The index finger of her right hand moved across my palm like a doodlebug on acid. “My, but you have de most interesting lifeline, Mr. Haim.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the marks.”

  She shook her head and the white turban did a ghostly hootchy-cootchy. “No, chère, I not be funnin’ wit you. According to dese lines, you already died.”

  “Really.” My mouth loosened into a smile.

  “Truly. More dan once, in fact.”

  “Is that so?”

  She sighed. “You are about to tell me dat you have no idea as to what I am talking about. Dat you do not believe in fortune-telling.”

  My smile grew, showing teeth. “Maybe you really are psychic.”

  She closed her right hand over her left, trapping mine in-between. She squeezed. I felt a tingle, like a low-voltage electric shock, and Mama Samm’s head snapped back. The turban wobbled but held.

  She moaned and her eyes rolled back in her head. The electric tingle intensified, crawled up my arm.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. Her only response was another moan as the tingle crawled across my shoulder and up into my head. I tried to pull my hand back but it was enclosed in a grip of velvet-sheathed iron.

  The current slammed home in my brain, knocking me out of the room and down a dark corridor, a tunnel not unlike the one I had traversed when I had nearly died the year before. Memories fragmented and unfolded, waltzing across my eyelids like an acid-edged kaleidoscope.

  The Barn . . .

  Vlad Drakul Bassarab . . .

  The transfusion . . .

  The crash . . .

  The morgue . . .

  I cried out at the memory of two mangled bodies on the stainless-steel tables, and wrenched my hand free.

  “My apologies, Mr. Cséjthe . . .”

  It felt as though the temperature in the room had dropped a full ten degrees: She not only knew my real name, she had nailed the Hungarian pronunciation, “Chey-tay.”

  “ . . . I did not know you were oungan for the Gédé.” Her voice sounded strange, distant.

  “What?”

  “Tonight you will meet Je Rouge. It will hunt you for the Ogou Bhathalah. The shadow of Ogou is long here. . . .” Her eyes had rolled back in her head, showing a disturbing amount of white. “You must seek the grail, she will be the key. The Witch of Cachtice has helped them open the fifth seal.”

  “What?” I gripped her two hands with my left as the fine hairs suddenly lifted on my neck and arms. “Who did you say?”

  “Unless it is closed,” she continued, oblivious to my question, “the sun will turn black and the moon to blood.” A shudder went through her. “Stars will fall like rain and the end will come before the Appointed Time!”

  “You said the Witch of Cachtice!” I stammered. “Tell me what you mean!”

  “Find the Grail before the Ogou sows the wind. Find Marinette Bois-Chèche and unmask the whore of Babylon before she puts her red dress on!” She moaned and her eyes fluttered.

  I stared at her, waging an internal war over which was more upsetting: revisiting the deaths of my wife and daughter or a chance reference to a monstrous ancestor nearly four hundred years in her grave. “Save the gibberish for the gullible,” I said, my voice harsh with the rawness of fresh memory.

  Her eyes snapped open. Refocused. Her brow furrowed. “You are angry, Mr. Haim. What did I say?”

  I snorted, feeling some control of the situation pass back to me. “Some fortune-teller; you want me to do your divination for you.”

  She stared at me for a long moment. Then: “Why don’ you ask your wife to join us?”

  Now I was angry. “My wife is dead.”

  “She must be tired of waiting in de car.”

  Like a flash fire, the anger was suddenly gone but a taste of ashes remained in my mouth. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Or vampires? Or werewolves? Or legitimate psychics?” She smiled, white teeth erupting into a gleaming crescent in her dark face.

  “Who are you?” I asked, rising shakily to my feet.

  “Mama Samm D’Arbonne. Siddown, chère; I’m not gonna hurt you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “De trut’, Mr. Haim. De trut’ is always important.”

  “And what do you do with the truth?”

  “Depend on who it help and who it hurt. Keep it secret, mostly.”

  “Why?”

  “We all have our reasons, chère. De Prince of Wallachia had his when he let you live—gave you a set of new identities and de money to lead a new existence down here in Louziana.”

  “And what are yours?”

  “As I told you before, I have certain clients who are curious.”

  “Curious?”

  “About you. Who you are. What you are. Why you’ve come here. What you intend to do.”

  “And now you can tell them, right?” I moved back so that my chair was added to the furniture between us.

  “ ‘Can tell’ is not the same as ‘will tell.’ As I said, I keep secrets, mos’ly.”

  “Mostly?”

  A cat jumped up on the cushioned arm of her chair unacknowledged as she nodded and repeated: “Mos’ly.” The cat should have been a Chocolate-point Siamese except for one thing. . . .

  “Your cat has two tails.”

  Mama Samm turned to consider the Siamese and it jumped into her arms. “Ah, my Taishi is usually too shy to enter dis room while a stranger is on the premises. You must have an unusual affinity for cats, Mr. Haim. It’s not every day dat Shötoku Taishi presents himself so boldly.” She stroked its head as
it regarded me with pale blue eyes that lent intensity to its cool appraisal.

  “It’s not every day that one sees a cat with two tails,” I said, taking another, shaky step backward.

  “An interesting mutation,” Mama Samm agreed. “It is extremely rare. Did you know dat de ancient legends of Japan held dat deir vampires could assume de form of a cat? De one distinguishing difference between such unnatural felines and normal cats was de Japanese vampires always had two tails.”

  “No kidding,” I said, fumbling for the doorknob behind me.

  “Mr. Cséjthe. . . .” There was something in her voice, the way she said my name, that locked my legs on the threshold. “ . . . Your name is hers. . . .”

  It wasn’t just a chill: an entire army was conducting close order drill on top of my grave.

  “ . . . But de Loa say that her blood . . . is not yours.”

  “Who?” I could hardly get the question out again. Maybe because I didn’t want to ask it in the first place.

  “You know who, Mr. Cséjthe. The legacy you bestow is life. Hers is death. Marinette Bois-Chèche will haunt your dreams until you unmask her. Before she devours you.”

  “That’s not her real name,” I said stubbornly. “And if we’re talking about who I think we’re talking about, she died in 1614.”

  “You do not know her real name, you only think you do. Do not forget that she is a liar. She has always been a liar. Her true power is in those she deceives. Do not give her your power, as well.”

  “Your accent is slipping,” I said.

  “The Loa say one more thing. . . .”

  “Chatty folk, these luau.”

  “They say this is very important. They say you must save the child twice and bury the dead three times!”

  What do you say to that?

  There was nothing to say to that.

  I forced my feet to carry me away from the fearful quality of her voice. I was careful not to slam the door. And I tried to exhibit dignity and decorum as I walked back to my car.