Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

  She stopped.

  She began to convulse.

  “That’s interesting,” I heard Báthory say.

  “Deirdre!” I gathered her into my arms. “Somebody help me here!”

  “We’ll need a diagnosis.” Báthory snapped her fingers. “Jahn, Kurt, get her down to Krakovski. Tell him to prepare Red Clinic Two.”

  As the other two vamps moved toward the bed, Kurt cleared his throat. “Gold Clinic One is just down the hall.”

  “Red has a double setup. We may want to do a side-by-side.”

  My head snapped around and I stared at her. “A what?” Jahn and Kurt started to take her out of my arms. “Are you talking about a double vivisection?”

  “It won’t be a vivisection if she’s dead, it will be an autopsy.”

  I shook my head and refused to relinquish my grip. “You can’t autopsy a vampire! Not unless you’re doing spectrographic chromatography of the ashes!”

  Deirdre’s seizures suddenly stopped. Between that and the superior strength of two vampires, I lost my grip and fell back on the bed.

  “Be thankful, Mr. Cséjthe, that I’m not sending you down to Krakovski’s lab for analysis.” She didn’t add the word “yet.” She didn’t have to.

  I wasn’t thinking about that, however. I was focused on Deirdre as Kurt and Jahn carried her toward the door. If I had let Deirdre die I would have saved her. Instead, my act of “mercy” was going to make her remaining existence one of utter horror.

  I heard a moan rising up from the floor behind me: the vampire I had thrown into the wall was beginning to stir. There were three other fully conscious vampires in the room. If I’d had my silver-loaded Glock, the odds would have still been out of my favor. Unarmed and woozy from blood loss, I didn’t have a chance in Hell.

  Which was pretty much where I was now, I figured.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  “Oh my God!” I said, doubling over, “I’m going to be sick!” I jumped up off the bed and ran toward the bathroom, clutching my stomach. The bathroom was roomy—luxury-sized just like the bedroom. The tub was a doublewide Jacuzzi and the twin sinks were half-partitioned off from the rest of the facilities. There was no window, only a fine-meshed ventilation grill capping ductwork that would give a rat claustrophobia. The door had a lock and I pushed the button in for the illusion of privacy. If Báthory or her minions wanted in, neither the lock nor the flimsy door would give them a second’s pause.

  I sat on the toilet seat and bowed my head. I had but one chance and it was a slim one.

  Since I first learned about vampiric translocation about a year before, I had managed to successfully pull it off fewer than a dozen times. My last attempt—following my little tussle with Je Rouge, Mr. Delacroix’s brief resurrection, and hosting my post-mortem accident victim—was the first time I had managed to pull it off while under stress.

  I usually failed, even when meditating under the most ideal of conditions. The question was, could I do it now? Hostile forces surrounded me. Deirdre and Theresa were on their way to protracted, horrific deaths. The third most ancient and powerful vampire I had ever known was just on the other side of a door that was one step up from papier-mâché.

  My only chance was that my luck had hit bottom hard enough for me to hitch a ride on the rebound.

  “Christopher . . . are you all right?” The door was barely a barrier to Báthory’s voice.

  “Leave me alone!” I yelled. “I’m sick!” I flushed the toilet for corroborative sound effects.

  “Poor Christopher,” she crooned. “I’ll come back when you’re feeling better.” The sound of retreating footsteps was encouraging—until my hypersensitive ears heard her say: “Awake now, are we? I’m locking him in but I want you right outside the bathroom door, just in case. Think you can handle it, Viktor?”

  “Y-yes, my lady!”

  “Because if you can’t, we can roll an extra gurney into Red Two.”

  Two sets of footfalls moved toward the outer door.

  I tried to relax. I couldn’t unclench my teeth.

  Don’t think about how little time you have. This is the only way past Báthory and her goons. This is the only way to reach Deirdre and Theresa. The only way.

  The only way.

  Only way.

  The tunnel.

  Tunnel.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  Stop breathing.

  Death.

  The tunnel.

  Death is but the doorway . . .

  To new life . . .

  We live today . . .

  We shall live again . . .

  In many forms . . .

  Shall we return . . .

  Return . . .

  Return . . .

  I didn’t know what forces still roiled through the charged atmosphere of BioWeb’s labyrinthine facilities, but this time there was a sensation of movement, like tunneling through murky water. I felt my hackles rise and, with them, the fur along my spine. I ran in the darkness upon all four limbs, my snout straining for the scent that would lead me to Deirdre. A golden thread of pheromones looped off to one side and I followed, falling, tumbling.

  I came out of the tunnel and into the brightness, rolling across the floor and into the backstop of a row of cabinets. I lurched to my feet to confront the vampire named Jahn. He was standing behind the autopsy table where Deirdre struggled against heavy straps buckled about her wrists and left ankle. Her right foot flailed about, Jahn having only made it that far when I popped in. Clearly, the sight of a naked man tumbling out of empty air was more of a major distraction than two naked women strapped down and apparently unable to move: Jahn’s jaw dropped open, which made Deirdre’s forceful, upwards kick all the more devastating as her foot smashed into his chin. His head snapped back and he went over backwards like a stunt double in a chop-socky kung-fu movie.

  Jahn was down but not out. I had just enough time to unbuckle Deirdre’s left wrist restraint before Jahn popped up like some giant, creepy Jack-in-the-Box from Vamps-R-Us.

  “Look out!” Deirdre exclaimed unnecessarily.

  “You’re naked!” Theresa shrieked even more unnecessarily. “Omigod! Why are you naked?”

  Jahn didn’t attack me immediately. The whole “appear out of thin air” thing was not only a major showstopper, it was a provenance limited to the undead “ruling class.” Manhandling the enlisted fangs and the occasional nosferatu noncom was one thing. Jahn might be Elizabeth Báthory’s creature, but this was probably the first time he’d been confronted by someone with a Doman’s credentials from the outside and off his home turf.

  “They’re mine!” I declared, following each word with an emphatic push. “You have no right! The law of the wampyr says you have no power over them! No rights!”

  Jahn looked conflicted. Actually, he looked a little cross-eyed; he apparently hadn’t come all the way back from that kick. This was probably why Deirdre was able to sucker him again.

  This time her foot shot up, missing his face by a good three inches. He blinked as Deirdre’s leg completed a ninety-degree arc, toes straining for the ceiling. “My lady commands—” he said, sounding for all the world like his tongue had developed a charley horse. He never got the chance to finish the sentence: Deirdre’s leg came crashing down, catching Jahn behind his head at the base of his skull and propelling him face-first into the stainless-steel surface of the autopsy table. There was a soggy crunching sound as flesh, albeit undead, collided violently with reinforced steel alloy. Deirdre’s subsequent attempt to pin him down with a scissor-lock about his neck was thwarted when Jahn dissolved into a loosely knit clump of dust and ashes.

  “Wow,” I said, as Deirdre rolled to her side and unbuckled her right wrist restraint, “now that’s what I call a real ash kicking.”

  “Hey!” Theresa called. “Could use a little help over here!”

  I was helping Theresa with her ankle straps w
hen the door opened and Krakovski strode into the room. He stopped. Took in the sights of scattered ashes trailing across dissection table one and puddling to the floor, a naked redhead going through the cabinets in search of something to wear, a naked brunette nearly free of her restraints on dissection table two, and naked me who wasn’t scheduled to be here. At least, not yet.

  Krakovski was the only one dressed. And he was wearing (by God!) one of those white, button up the side, lab tunics that all the mad scientists used to wear in 1930s cinema. But he had enough “naked” fear in his eyes to make up for the unclothed state of the rest of us.

  He opened his mouth and started to turn. To sound an alarm? To flee? Neither mattered: while his face was still turned toward us, his forehead sprouted a metal handle. A thread of blood traced a tiny tributary beneath the scalpel’s grip and sought an estuary between Krakovski’s bulging eyes. He collapsed as Deirdre raised two more surgical knives, throwing fashion, in her right hand and hefted a bone saw in her left.

  “I’ll keep the door covered,” she said, “while you two get dressed.”

  There were extra surgical smocks in one of the lockers. I fastened the ties on Theresa’s back then took the scalpels and covered the door while Theresa fastened mine and Deirdre dressed. The smocks gaped down the back but it was a vast improvement over “streaking” for the nearest exit.

  Selecting handfuls of cutlery from the surgical tray, we crowded the door. Before I could ease it open, Deirdre grabbed me and pulled me around to face her. “You came for me,” she said, her eyes shining. “Thanks . . .” She pulled my face down and pressed her lips against mine. Maybe it was because I hadn’t caught my breath before the kiss started: I was definitely lightheaded when she finally broke the seal of her mouth against mine. It took another moment to forcibly uncurl my toes. “I won’t forget what you did for me!” she vowed breathily.

  I opened my mouth to say that she had done all the heavy lifting, I had just showed up; but she clutched the front of my smock with one hand and closed the other around my right hand, which was holding the bone saw. “Promise me!” she demanded fiercely, “that you won’t let them take me alive!”

  I looked over her head at the dissection tables where the heavy leather straps lolled like predators’ tongues. “I promise,” I said.

  “Just get me out of here,” Theresa moaned.

  “I’m way ahead of you,” I said.

  Actually, I was only a little ahead of them both: they crowded my back as I eased the door open a crack. The outer chamber was deserted.

  We moved through the anteroom and cracked the next door. It opened into a fourth-floor hallway. At least that’s what I assumed from the number on the door across the hall. “Come on,” I said. We moved out into the deserted corridor and headed for the stairs.

 

  I staggered: the voice inside my head didn’t hurt so much as it caught me off guard.

  “Chris?” Deirdre reached out to steady me. “What’s wrong?”

  I made a shushing motion with my hand.

  “What do you want?” I murmured.

 

  “So he’s worried? How sweet.”

 

  “Didn’t he just take a nap against the bedroom wall? Well, tell him to go ahead. I’m going to take a long, hot bath.”

 

  We reached the bend in the hall: no stairwell. The stairs were another building’s length away, at the end of the adjoining corridor.

  “Not sleepy. Slept all night.”

 

  “Grandmother, what big teeth you have.”

 

  “Vice is nice but incest is best?”

  Theresa’s eyes grew large while Deirdre’s narrowed.

 

  I sighed. “What do you want? You’re not attracted to me sexually. And definitely vice versa. So what would be the point?”

 

  “Sez who?”

 

  “Really? Like a pristine vinyl pressing of Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony—the Bernstein and Welles’ performance?” We reached the end of the hall without being seen and opened the door to the stairwell.

 

  “Yeah? It was my understanding that you were having my friends dissected.”

 

  “Hey, fuck you, witch, and the broom you rode in on.”

 

  “You want me to swear at you in front of an audience, I got no problem with that.”

 

  “Then why negotiate?” We were almost down to the third-floor landing.

 

  “Haven’t I seen this movie on late-night cable? Oh yeah, ‘An Affair To Dismember’.” But I knew what she really wanted. Sex magick, a powerful ritual of binding that would cement my allegiance in the eyes of her tribe and bind me into servitude with unseen cords of power. Her only true desire was her need to turn me into some emblematic trinket to be added to her charm bracelet of power.

 

  “Now that would be a fatal mistake.”

  She snorted, producing a really unpleasant sensation between my ears.

  “Which is why I’d have to force him to kill me.”

  Now Deirdre’s eyes grew wide while Theresa’s narrowed.

 

  “Oh shit!” I said. My voice boomed and echoed up and down the stairwell.

 

  “What is it?” Deirdre and Theresa echoed.

  “Dawn is coming!” I said. “Run!”

  We ran. Over the slapping thuds of bare feet pounding down the stairs I heard the whisper of Báthory’s voice as she ordered Viktor to break down the bathroom door. In a few minutes she would probably have a full-scale security alert and the building in total lockdown. A few minutes beyond that and it probably wouldn’t even matter: Once the sun came up we would be effectively trapped in the building for another twelve hours, anyway.

 

  “Looking for Red Two. Where did you take them, you bitch?”

 

  “Sure. Better ash than hash.”

 

  “Well,” I puffed, “that’s one of us.”

  promise to let the others go and provide them with safe transport.>

  “You promise?”

 

  “Ooo, there’s something I can take to the bank! A promise from Bloody Báthory!”

  Deirdre reached out and touched my arm as we hit the door on the first floor and spilled out into the hallway. “She offering you a better deal?”

  “More like a bitter deal.”

  “Don’t take it!” she said fiercely.

  A security guard appeared around the corner of an intersecting corridor. From the look on his face I guessed that no one had sounded any alarms. Yet.

  “Eeek!” Deirdre squealed, suddenly sounding very girly. She flung her arms out and put on an extra burst of speed. “Help me! Save me!”

  The guard instinctively reached for his side arm, but the sight of a squealing, jiggling redhead running toward him in an abbreviated smock set one group of reflexes against another. The resulting hesitation cost him: instead of embracing her uniformed savior, she ran him down and stomped on him for good measure.

  While she dealt with one roadblock I dealt with another.

  Reginald, I called, Reggie!

  —What?— Not possessing a brain that had been rewired for telepathy, the lobby guard’s voice was very faint in my head. If I hadn’t opened his mind and poked around inside on my first visit, I wouldn’t even have the vaguest of connections now.

  Unlock the front door.

  —What? Who’s there?—

  Just do it, Reggie! Even at this distance I didn’t have to push, just nudge. My initial contact with Reginald was paying off in a manner I hadn’t originally envisioned. Oh, and Regg . . . what kind of a car do you drive?

  —Subaru station wagon. Yel—yellow.—

  Doesn’t anybody buy American anymore? Parked out front?

  —Su—sure.—

  I need to borrow your keys, my man. Have them ready. I sensed a growing resistance and had to push now.