I pulled from a deep reserve and the effort to speak was like climbing out of a crevasse. “Yes, I understand. No more, please.”
“Please?” His aura smoothed. “Don’t expect a ‘you’re welcome.’”
I wanted a sip of warm blood. I wanted a ticket home. I wanted…I wanted…
The morning light on Ghoul Mountain inched down the summit. The last of the eastern stars disappeared into the cerulean blue.
The dawn approached.
I wanted not to die.
I turned to the man. “Take me inside.”
“Why?”
“Please, take me inside.”
He tapped the club against the wooden deck. “Tell me why.”
The light on Ghoul Mountain broadened and lengthened like a pale tongue. My kundalini noir rolled and bucked in apprehension.
The man knew too much as it was. He’d seen me transform from a wolf. I didn’t want to tell him I was a vampire. I didn’t want to confess my greatest fear and weakness-the rays of the morning sun.
The man scanned the terrain. “What is it? All of a sudden you forgot about my shock therapy. What are you afraid of?”
“I can’t…can’t…”
“Can’t what? Tell me?” The man swung the club like a baton. “I think we’ve established that you’re going to do whatever the hell I tell you. I got all morning and apparently you don’t.”
The light on Ghoul Mountain was halfway down its side. My kundalini noir coiled in desperation. I couldn’t betray the Araneum. “No, please, you don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand. I’m an intelligent man. Shouldn’t be hard.”
I could lift the plywood floor and hide behind it. But the electric grid would shock me and I’d thrash around, burning, to the amusement of this demented bastard.
The morning light slanted across Ghoul Mountain.
The dread of annihilation made me feel the flames licking my skin. My mind clawed for ideas to escape but there was only one.
I cried out: “It’s the morning light.”
The man turned his face toward Ghoul Mountain. His eyes became twin shiny disks, as yellow and menacing as the sun about to destroy me.
He pointed to the east. “The sun?”
“Yes,” I yelled.
“The morning light?”
“Yes,” I yelled again, the word shooting from my throat.
“What’s so dangerous about it?”
Moments ago, electric pain had stripped me of everything but the ferocious touch of its agonizing sting. Now fear, the fear of being roasted into nothingness, the absolute and complete destruction of Felix Gomez, lay waste to every thought but one: Survival.
I let cowardice splash over me with a filth that I readily gulped to stay alive. “The morning sun destroys us.”
“Us who?”
“Us vampires.”
The man looked stunned. “Vampires?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“No shit,” he replied. “You are a vampire?”
“Yes.” My throat hurt from the scream.
Sunlight reached the bottom of Ghoul Mountain and marched into Deadman’s Gulch.
The man rapped the club against the deck. He smiled triumphantly. “They said I was crazy for my studies in reanimation.”
He was the reanimator.
“Look at what I’ve done.” He pointed the club at his mob of zombies and then to me. “I’ve opened the door to a world beyond death and see what else I’ve found. A vampire.”
“Please, take me inside.” I saw myself a pathetic sniveling coward, helpless to do anything but betray my kind. My kundalini noir lay in a circle, head to tail, opened its mouth, and began eating itself. My strength emptied out a gash in my psyche.
“Now that I know this, why should I take you inside?” the reanimator asked. “You said us, meaning more vampires. I caught you; I can catch them. I might learn a very interesting lesson by watching what the sun does to you.”
The echo started.
Felix…ix…ix.
Phaedra’s face bloomed before me.
The echo ricocheted in my brain and my spine quivered.
What did she want? Was this a warning? Too late, I was already in deep, deep shit.
The echo grew loud. A trembling continued down my spine.
Not now, for God’s sake.
I grasped the plywood board and pulled myself into a ball. In a second, that psychic noise would have me thrashing against the inside of the electrified cage.
My psychic column vibrated. My vision blurred. I shut my eyes tight and got ready for the worst.
The vibration suddenly stopped. The echo halted, more abruptly than it ever had. I opened my eyes.
The man set his hands on his knees and stared in amazement. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
At the moment, everything. “Take me inside,” I whispered.
The man stood. “Not until you talk.”
A zombie brought a camcorder. Unlike the other revenants, his clothes-clean white lab coat, black trousers, and dress shoes-were well-kept and neatly pressed. He was the one I’d seen on the porch last night. Aside from the gummy smears around his lifeless eyes, he looked like a service technician in an ad for Mercedes-Benz.
The reanimator took the camcorder and aimed it at me. The pale triangle of Ghoul Mountain reflected in its lens.
“Smile for YouTube. Time’s running out.”
I recoiled at the image of the white rays of the sun lapping my skin and the sizzling flesh turning into smoke. “I’ll tell you everything.”
He lowered the camcorder. “Such as?”
“Everything. Vampires. The world of the supernatural.” The dam of self-restraint had broken, and I would jettison every promise and secret in trade for one more day undead.
The reanimator handed the camcorder to lab coat zombie. “Then we’ll talk. After all, there will be another sunrise.”
Zombies slipped poles through the wire grid of the cage and lifted. They carried me sedan-chair style while lab coat zombie tended the electric power cable attached to the cage.
I swayed on the plywood sheet, vacant eyed, defeated and broken. I, Felix Gomez, combat veteran, vampire detective, had turned yellow to save his hide.
All those stories I’ve heard of defiant heroes burned through my memory and singed me. They had stared into oblivion and were given a choice. Treachery or death. They had chosen death.
I had chosen treachery. All the heroics in my life meant nothing.
We entered the porch door. Cowboy zombie stumbled at the threshold and the cage tipped. I fell against the wire grid and, as I cried out, scrambled to center myself on the plywood.
Cowboy zombie leered at me over his shoulder. “Ghaw. Ghaw.”
This part of the house was at one time the living room. Most of the walls had been knocked out. Thick dirty drapes covered the floor-to-ceiling windows. Cables and tubes snaked across the floor and hung from the ceiling like the vines of a grotesque plant growing out of control. The humid air was thick with the odor of benzene and formaldehyde. It looked like the lab in a straight-to-video horror movie-with me as the starring victim.
Shelves stood along two of the adjacent walls. Bubbles pumped through dozens of glass jars and aquariums on the shelves. Human parts floated inside the cloudy solutions. A blood transfusion machine sat on a narrow table. The machine rocked back and forth, pumping blood from a dismembered torso in a tub and into a plastic bag warming in a Crock-Pot.
The zombies took me to the far end of the room next to a heavy wooden door mounted on a steel pipe frame. The door had been fashioned into a table. Lab coat zombie donned a pair of oven mitts and opened the door to my cage. The reanimator snapped his fingers and the zombies upended the cage.