Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  “Well, I guess I’ll never get the chance to find out now, will I?”

  “You said you would kill her if she didn’t—”

  “Is the word ‘bluff’ in your lexicon? Remind me to teach you how to play poker.”

  Kurt sounded wounded: “I prefer chess. One does not bluff in chess.”

  “No? We really must play a match some time. Perhaps after the end of the world.”

  The candles were still guttering in their alcoves along the inner corridor. I gave them a glance. And then a second look as I moved into the dimly lit passageway.

  “What is it?”

  “Those candles. They were red the last time I was down here. Now they’re black.”

  “What does that signify?”

  “Something, I’m sure. If this place is still being used as a Vodoun temple, then color would be significant in identifying the Loa who are invoked here. My guess is the Ogou clan has been cleared out and something else has checked in.”

  “What?”

  “Something that likes the color black. Now hush.”

  He hushed but the quiet was broken by another voice. “Koki Oko,” a voice sang in the distance.

  “O wa djab-la!” It was a woman’s voice, high-pitched and eerie.

  "Koki Oko ki anba . . . nèg mare nou!

  Koki Oko, ki anba, nèg mare nou

  Koki Oko, ki anba, n’a lage!

  Koki Oko, o wa djab-la . . .

  Koki Oko, ki anba, nèg mare!

  Koki Oko, o wa djab-la . . .

  Koki Oko ki anba, nèg mare nou!”

  “Jesus,” I whispered.

  “What is it? What do the words mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said quietly, hoping my voice wouldn’t carry in the sudden silence following the song’s end. “I recognize two or three of the words. Djab-la is a Vodoun name for a wild spirit. It’s a distortion of the French word diable for devil—only its connotation here is more in the magical realm than the spiritual.”

  “Could have fooled me. What’s Koki Oko?”

  “Um, the translation wouldn’t do it justice. Let’s just say the song was oriented somewhere between naughty and nasty.”

  The voice started again, this time chanting instead of singing: “Amen. Seculi venturi vitam et. Mortuorum resurrectionem in baptisma unum Confiteor. Ecclesiam apostolicam et catholicicam, sanctum, unam et . . .”

  “That sounds like Latin,” I said.

  “It is,” Kurt agreed, “but it is gibberish. The words make no sense.”

  “ . . . prophetas per est locutus qui . . .”

  “Maybe,” I said, moving ahead, “and my Latin’s a little rusty but there’s something familiar about some of that gibberish.”

  It made sense: Vodoun was such a distorted blend of African Mystère and Catholicism that Latin might well be invoked along with variants of French, Spanish, and the Fon language of West Africa.

  “ . . . mortuos et vivos judicare Gloria cum est venturus iterum et. Patris dexteram adsedet . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” I said as we came to the hounfort and entered the temple area. “I may not know my masses beyond a Te Deum and an Agnus Dei, but isn’t that the Nicene Creed?”

  Kurt considered the chanting more attentively.

  “ . . . Scripturas secundum, die tertia resurrexit et . . .”

  “Yes. It’s being recited backwards.”

  “Thought so.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means something very bad. Voodoo is always getting a bad rap from the Hollywood treatment—”

  “Yes,” he said, “they do the same disservice to vampires.”

  I let that one slide. “Rada—or ‘right hand’ voodoo—is a positive religion. Even Petro—the left hand or sinister perversion of the African mysteries—wouldn’t hold their services underground like this. So whatever we have here is something off the map.”

  “ . . . coelis de descendit salutem nostram propter et . . .”

  As we started across the peristil, I could see the altar room beyond the sinister maypole of the poteau mitan. Someone had come in since the conflagration accompanying my last visit and cleaned up. Black drapes now hung on the sides of the alcove but the back wall was left uncovered. There, on a series of small shelves, were racks of tiny glass bottles—DNA sample vials like the ones in the Gen/GEN lab upstairs. The flames from thirteen ebony candles did little to illume the dark décor but here the glass containers seemed to glow with pale red and blue phosphors—much like the alternating glow from the BioWeb sign outside. A swatch of scarlet was draped across the altar table, appearing in the pulses of blue light, disappearing in the counterpoint bursts of red illumination.

  “ . . . saecula omnia ante natum Patre ex et . . .”

  The rest of the Ogou paraphernalia had been removed from the area but the crimson dress had been salvaged. Symbols, Father Pat had said, are very powerful agents in systems of belief.

  I was beginning to form a theory concerning the nature of Cachtice’s blood sacrifices.

  “Isn’t that Chalice Delacroix?” Kurt whispered.

  She had been nearly invisible against the backdrop of darkness but now that my attention was drawn and my eyes adjusted, I could see the woman standing by the altar. She wore nothing but her own skin and a faint, golden limning of light from the votive candles on the altar. An arm-shaped thread of gold extended toward the swirl of red and a moment later a crimson flash of fabric unfurled, setting a dozen and one points of light a-shiver. She wasn’t dead! Chalice had survived!

  “What is she doing? Kurt whispered.

  Chanting was the first answer that came to mind as I moved toward her. But as I circled around the great wooden post and got a better angle and a closer look I wasn’t sure that it was Chalice after all. Four lines of clotted blood still striped her stomach, but her umber flesh seemed vaguely out of place, as if subtly redistributed. It was like clothing that you are used to seeing on one person being worn by another: the colors and patterns are identical but the shape and drape differ, even on similar forms and figures.

  “ . . . invisibilium et omnium visibilium . . .”

  She turned her head and my heart seized up in my chest. Chalice’s moss-green eyes might appear to be black in the near darkness of our surroundings but these eyes glittered red and orange with a light that was not all reflected candle-flame. Her mouth moved in an unnatural way and the teeth within appeared to be filed to triangular points as if they were retro-engineered for tearing flesh and separating gristle from bone.

  “ . . . Deum unum in credo,” she finished and smiled. Her mouth grew inhumanly wide. “Cséjthe! How good of you to come!” It definitely wasn’t Chalice Delacroix’s voice!

  “Wh—who are you?” I asked.

  “Don’t you recognize me?” she purred. No, that wasn’t the right word: “purred” suggests something feline. But cats are warm-blooded creatures and there was nothing warm-blooded here. She turned and posed provocatively, the red silk flung over one shoulder. “Didn’t you get a good look?”

  I stopped moving toward her. I was already closer than I suddenly wanted to be.

  “How about another taste?” She sauntered toward me, one hand caressing her bloody belly. “You took so little before. A few sips, really.”

  “You’re not Chalice,” I said, taking a step back.

  “What is a chalice?” She came toward me, step by step. “A glass? A cup? A drinking container? I contain blood; would you like another drink?”

  I took another step back. “No.”

  “No?” Her eyebrows went up in a parody of surprise. “I thought you liked me. I thought you loved the taste. Wasn’t I yummy? Yummy in the tummy?”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Yummy in your tummy?” she asked, closing the distance between us with a dreamlike inexorability. “Didn’t you find my tummy yummy?”

  I got a better look at the fabric draped over her shoulder and stopped backing away.
>
  “You look very thirsty, Cséjthe. Maybe even a little hungry. Would you like a little nibble before the fun begins? A little taste? There’s room on the altar for two. Or I could stand here while you kneel . . .”

  “I know who you are,” I said.

  “Yes, I think I’d like that—you on your knees . . .” Flickers of light from ancient sacrificial fires danced in her eyes and she began to hum.

  “You’re Marinette Bois-Chèche,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I am your chalice . . . your goblet . . .”

  “Yeah, more like my hob-goblet.” Somewhere in the back of my brain a beeping sound commenced, signaling that I seriously needed to be backing up now! Instead I stood my ground, wrestling with the problem of Katarina Beneczky and Marinette Bois-Chèche. Were they one and the same?

  In Vodoun, the spirit Loa manifest by possessing a human body. It’s called “mounting the host” who is referred to as a “horse” as the spirit “rides” the human. Chalice—whether truly dead or still alive—was gone and the most dangerous, bitter, and vengeful of the Petro Loa was sitting in the saddle and applying supernatural spurs.

  “Kneel, Cséjthe . . . kneel and drink . . .”

  I hesitated and felt invisible bands of pressure close about my head. While there was no doubt about my ability to physically overpower Chalice Delacroix, this was an entirely different matter. Given the manifest changes in her physicality while the Loa had her boots in the stirrups, I had serious doubts about the efficacy of any direct resistance. I could remain defiant and see just how high Marinette could ratchet up the grief-o-meter. Or I could apply the principles of Ju-jitsu and use her centers of balance against her.

  I sank to one knee and felt the pressure lessen.

  “Kneel . . . and feed . . .” She stepped up to me and, reaching behind my head, pressed my face to her belly.

  I embraced her legs with my left arm and ran my right hand up the smooth curve of her flank in a leisurely caress.

  “Taste the blood of the Loa,” she crooned. “Taste the power . . .”

  That wasn’t my goal. The touch of her cold, blood-slicked flesh was actually the last thing I craved at this particular moment but I had to endure it to keep a promise. I had turned out to be no damn good at keeping my word to Chalice’s daddy but the world’s fate might well be sealed tonight if I failed in my charge from Mama Samm.

  A funny thing happened in the midst of my deception: The Hunger began to return. In spite of the revulsion I felt for the atrocities rendered upon Chalice Delacroix’s flesh this night, I felt the ancient lusts begin to stir as the scents of blood and sweat and musk bathed my nasal epithelial receptors. My hindbrain began to wake from its ten-thousand-year slumber, stretching limbic limbs and flooding my veins with a hormonal soup of predatory impulses and drives. A few moments more, I told myself as my right hand roamed higher, palm surfing the wavelets of muscle-sheathed ribs. It was unavoidable, it was necessary, I told myself, sipping at the dark wine that trickled by the well of her navel; she must believe me compliant, complicit . . .

  Compromised . . .

  The power that transmogrified Chalice Delacroix’s flesh and shaped it to the will of Marinette Bois-Chèche burned in her blood like bitter whiskey and sweet rum. Lightning from the Ogou forge crackled there and something latched onto my tongue, drawing it into a whirlpool of sensation, a whorl of power, a vortex of violence.

  The plan had been to catch the demon Loa off-balance but it was I who had suddenly lost my own footing. Even as I took her dark essence into me I felt my will, my resistance, my very conscience being drained. Metaphysical fangs were biting into my own heart, a vampiric feeding frenzy had begun: even as my body took on unaccustomed physical strength and power, I felt my inner strength ebb and fade.

  God help me, I thought frantically. I can’t disengage! I tried to think of a prayer, a scripture that would help me pull out of this Tantric tailspin. Psalm 121 began with: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” When I looked up, the only hills I could see undermined my resolve that much more.

  Then I saw a flash of scarlet and my attention was drawn to the red dress still draped from her shoulder, now inches from my questing right hand.

  She sighed and caressed the back of my head. “Deeper . . .”

  I strained my hand upward . . . an inch . . . then another.

  “Ooo,” she cooed, “devour me!”

  The monster inside was breaking loose, ripping the chains of conscience away with brutish strength and subhuman rage. In moments it would be free.

  “No,” I murmured, crimson threads gumming my lips.

  Her hand fell away from the back of my head and I looked up.

  Her head was tilted back, her own gaze turned upward, as well. “What?” she asked, slowly, dreamily.

  “I’ve had about all I can stomach,” I said more clearly as the fingers of my right hand closed on the hem of the dress. As I yanked it from her shoulder, I pulled her legs out from under her with the sweep of my left arm. I bounced to my feet even as I heard the back of her head thud against the earthen floor.

  “Kurt!” I yelled.

  “Here, Master,” he answered from a few feet away. “I couldn’t move!”

  “Can you move now?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Then the last one out is a rotten corpse!”

  We ran for the exit. Kurt should have been twice as fast as I but he followed closely while keeping me in front; guarding my back, no doubt.

  “What are we doing?” he asked as we scrambled into the outer corridor and headed for the stairs.

  “Saving the world!”

  “By running away?”

  I held up my scarlet trophy. “By preventing the Whore of Babylon from putting her red dress on!”

  “I don’t understand!”

  My reply was drowned out by the thunder of our feet pounding up the stairs.

  “What?” he yelled as we reached the first floor.

  “I said: Neither do I!”

  We turned and ran for the rear exit and the loading docks.

  “It can’t be that simple!” he protested.

  Of course, it wasn’t. . . .

  Chapter Twenty-five

  As a full-fledged battle raged outside on the BioWeb grounds, Kurt and I exited through the loading docks and found a half-dozen vampires hiding behind a large, canopied truck.

  “What are you doing?” my new majordomo demanded. “They’re only humans!”

  “Hey,” I muttered, “watch the profiling.”

  “Some of them are armed with lasers,” Viktor answered.

  Kurt and I exchanged looks. Bullets were one thing. An extremely well-placed shot or a heavy barrage of poorly placed shots might prove fatal—but most of the time guns were nothing more than a painful inconvenience to the undead.

  Weapons utilizing amplified or coherently focused light were another matter, entirely—think sunrise in a continuous deadly stream. Marinette Bois-Chèche might have duped the general in the lab but he was no dummy in military matters. He had arranged for most of his troops to be rendered hypno-immune to vampiric mind control and armed them with weapons deadly to living and undead flesh alike. Already they had made ash out of a dozen of New York’s best fanged enforcers.

  “What do we do now?” Kurt asked.

  “Do I look like a man with a plan to you?”

  He shook his head. “Actually, you look more like a frat boy who ran through a plate glass window fleeing a panty raid. Wipe your face.”

  I opened my mouth. Felt more threads of blood decorate my oral cavity. Closed it and wiped my face with the dress. “We’ve got to keep them from driving out the main gate with their cargo,” I reasoned. “Okay, everybody fall back to the inside of the building!”

  We turned and ran like hell. All but two of us made it back inside the loading docks.

  Mirrors, I thought as we pounded toward the front of the buildi
ng, we could rip mirrors off the restroom walls—and have our legs cut out from under us a moment after we held them up as shields.

  Along the way some of the vamps acquired BioWeb security firearms. It didn’t look to be much of an advantage—few of them seemed to have any real expertise with twenty-first-century weaponry.

  Oh man, we are really screwed.

  =Is that what you’ve been doing in there while I was busy organizing a rescue operation?=

  Deirdre?

  =We’re still waiting for you, Chris, but the action has shifted around front. In a few moments we’re going to need all the help we can get or the militia is going to drive off with three truckloads of viral cultures.=

  We’re on our way but I don’t know what we can do.

  =Got any guns?=

  I looked around. Maybe a half dozen side arms, a couple of rifles. We charged through the lobby and out the front doors. I would have preferred to reconnoiter but you don’t play it safe when the end of the world is getting ready to drive out the front gate. We split up immediately to prevent a clustering of targets for the opposition. We were in luck: A few gunshots rang out but there was no concentrated response.

  =That will have to do until the rest get here. Though I’m not sure our troops will know how to use them.=

  My follow-up “Huh? What troops?” to that was derailed by the arrival of a black van.

  * * *

  Okay, I get the need for tinted windows and eschewing the waiting-for-an-accident-to-happen ragtops and sunroofs.

  But would it be such a violation of the undead code to drive a vehicle that explored other colors of the spectrum? Maybe a green sedan or a red pickup or a blue sports car? But, no; it’s always a black paint job when a citizen of the night is at the wheel.

  Okay, guilty as charged, I thought as the black van smashed through the lowered security bar and was followed by a familiar-looking black 1950 Mercury Club Coupé with a chopped silhouette and a raggedy hole in the roof. Both vehicles swerved across the parking lot dodging shots fired from the side of the main building. They rolled to a stop on the grass just beyond the edge of the asphalt.

  As I ran toward my car, the driver’s door opened and my zoot-suit buddy clambered out. He turned, seeming oblivious to the chaos unfolding from the far side of the lot and heading in his direction. As he retrieved his wide-brimmed hat, the door to the van opened and the driver that emerged was a creature unlike any I could recall seeing despite this past year’s subscription to the Necronomicon Yearbook.