Hennison rattled through a pan of tools on the workbench and selected a scalpel. He propped his elbows on the table and prodded my shoulder with the blade. A sting followed the trace of the scalpel on my skin.
“You’re a walking freak show, Mr. Gomez. A Wikipedia of the fantastic. How do you transform from animal to human form?”
“It just happens. You might as well ask a duck how it grows feathers.”
“What about not showing a reflection?”
“I’m a vampire.” The scalpel bit into my skin. I tried acting like it didn’t hurt but I’m sure I winced anyway. “I don’t know how any of this works.”
Hennison got another Red Bull. “Let’s not be so circumspect. Work with me, please. Your translucent skin would be easier to examine after I peeled it from your flesh but I’d rather not do that.”
“I second the motion.”
“Not that your vote means anything.” Hennison sipped from his Red Bull.
“What’s this all about?” I lifted my head and motioned with my eyes across the room.
“This”-Hennison swept his arms to take in the breadth of the room-“is my revenge.”
“On whom?”
“Everybody.”
“Why?”
“Do you know what therapeutic misadventures are, Mr. Gomez?”
“It’s when the doctor kills the patient.”
“A gold star for you,” Hennison said. “I see that you’re acquainted with our medical profession. That’s what I was accused of. My patients kept dying.”
“Must have been hell on the malpractice insurance premiums.”
“Not at all. It was a university hospital. The taxpayers paid the bills. What did I care?”
“Your patients died of…?”
“They didn’t die. I let them expire. There were no therapeutic misadventures. I was on a voyage of discovery. Would you call a mission into space a misadventure?”
Hennison absently rested his hand on the switch lever.
I gulped. “Of course not.”
Hennison pulled his hand from the switch. He paced in a circle between the switch and me. I hoped that can of Red Bull lasted a long time.
He said, “I was testing my hypothesis to unlock the greatest secret of all, the resurrection of the dead.” He waited as if he expected his zombies to cheer him.
They stared at him with empty eyes. Pus seeped from their wounds.
Hennison let out a sigh and puffed his cheeks in dejection. “Genius is a lonely vocation.”
Especially when you’re surrounded by zombies.
“I take it the medical board didn’t see it that way?”
Hennison wagged a finger. “You are so right about that. They acted as if my actions would damage the reputation of the hospital. How many patients died to perfect heart transplants? Were those therapeutic misadventures? I flatline a few patients-in the interest of science, mind you-and suddenly my techniques and procedures are called into question.”
If this delusional bastard didn’t have an advanced degree, I could see him hosing school buses with an AK-47.
I asked, “Didn’t you tell the board what you were doing?”
“You ever hear of something called intellectual property? If I blabbed to the administration about this”-he motioned to his lab-“then every idea would belong to the hospital and its corporate sponsors. I’d be given a plaque and a token honorarium for my efforts.” He crushed the can of Red Bull. “Instead they called me a criminal.”
“That was when you came to lovely Morada?” I asked.
“Not yet. I tried to interest the Defense Department in my work. I pitched to them, what better weapon against terror than terror itself? We’d free the suspects locked up in Guantánamo after I turned them into zombies. Imagine Osama bin Laden’s face when zombies come after him. We’ll send their dead martyrs back home and on our side. Brilliant, no?”
“Absolutely,” I replied.
Hennison’s expression darkened. Shoulders sagging, he turned from me. “Once again, I was cast out. A prophet is never welcome in his own home. The generals thought I was a lunatic. The government would rather waste billions on nuclear weapons, utterly useless toys except to keep their cronies fattened at the public trough.”
Kimberly’s hand grasped my ankle. Imagine a rotten orange with fingers. She licked her lips and slipped the repulsive hand under the cuff of my sweats.
I raised my head. “Hey, Doc? Little help here.”
Hennison stared at the floor and brooded. “Those were trying days. I felt I had nowhere to turn.”
Kimberly snaked her arm up my leg.
Cowboy zombie did his undead snicker. “Ghaw. Ghaw.”
“Hey, Doc. Help.”
“I watched a lot of television.” Hennison brightened. “There I found salvation.”
“You mean religion?” I raised my voice to get his attention. “A televangelist?”
“Of course not. Not those charlatans. I mean the queen of modern wisdom. Oprah.”
“Oprah?”
“An American treasure. She did an entire show called ‘Follow Your Dreams.’”
Kimberly’s cold fingers crawled up my thigh like a thawing tarantula. “Dreams.” The word came from her mouth like a gargle.
My johnson shriveled. It wanted a pair of feet of its own to run away. “Hey, Dr. Hennison, would you mind?”
Hennison was reaching into the cooler for yet another Red Bull. He did a double take on Kimberly and threw a can. It bounced off her head and sprayed Red Bull. She shuffled backward, giving a disappointed zombie mumble, and withdrew that cold serpent of her arm from inside my pants.
“Thanks,” I said. I let sensation return to my crotch. “You were talking about your dreams.”
“My dreams.” Hennison returned to the mirror. An expression of serenity soothed his face. “Oprah said, don’t give up. Every worthy cause is a challenge. The keys to success are faith, persistence, and to ground your efforts on gratitude.” Hennison paused to stare at himself. “I did exactly that. I downsized my life to the essentials and invested in my dreams.”
“Zombies?”
“It’s more than that.”
“The revenge thing?”
“Now that I’ve reanimated the dead, I’ve only whetted my ambitions. My goals before were laughably modest. Even juvenile. I wanted to even the score on every nuisance, every inconvenience, every parking ticket, every blind date who wouldn’t return my phone calls.” Hennison marched from the mirror. “Instead, my recent success has fueled my desire for complete mastery of the globe.”
“World domination?” I asked.
“For now.”
The world wasn’t enough? “And then?”
“Think of it, zombies in space.”
“I’m thinking. Yes, I see it.” I tested the metal hoops on my wrists.
“Do you think that’s too ambitious?”
“For you, of course not. Why would you say that?”
“Are you aware of Icarus?”
“I wouldn’t worry,” I replied. “Compared to you, the guy was a loonie. Come on, making wax wings and flying too close to the sun?”
“I’m glad you say that,” Hennison said. “Sometimes I think I’m getting carried away with my plans. It’s good to get a fresh opinion.”
“You want a fresh opinion? You sir, deserve a fucking Nobel Prize.”
Hennison saluted. “Thanks.”
I knew the way to his heart, on a wide avenue of flattery and bullshit. Now it was my turn to learn about his world. “Hey, Doc, how come some zombies are more animated than others? Take Lab Coat over there.” I motioned with my head.
“You mean Reginald?” Hennison asked. “The sooner to expiration I complete the reanimation process, the more animated-lifelike if you will-the revenant is. But I’ve discovered another phenomenon. Have you noticed that zombies don’t say much but they seem to know what the others are doing? It’s as if they have a collective consciousness. The deeper the zombification, the greater awareness they have of one another.”
Of course I had noticed how zombies cooperated to capture me. They moved as if they had one mind. They lacked auras so I assumed they had no connection to the psychic world, but I was wrong. What kind of mysterious connection, I didn’t know.
Hennison said, “Other than the affordable real estate, the country living, and great mountain views, let me show you why I’ve come to Morada.”
He motioned to Reginald, who went to the shelf and returned with a cardboard box the size of a small valise. He set the box on the workbench and lifted a metal case from inside the box.
The case had a transparent pyramid. This was no doubt a psychotronic diviner.
“Let’s talk more,” Hennison said. “But before we do, let’s look at this.”
Reginald brought a second box. From it he removed another psychotronic diviner, the one belonging to the Araneum, the one the zombies had stolen from me.
He placed the diviners side by side. Hennison’s had a plain aluminum case fashioned with rivets and welds and cheap switches. This diviner looked like a garage hobby project, especially when compared to the Araneum’s ornate version.
Hennison asked, “This is the device taken from your truck.” He caressed the filigreed case. “It’s beautiful but overdone. I would’ve spent the money on something else. Who made this?”
“I can’t say.” That was the truth. The Araneum could’ve jobbed out its construction.
“Where did you get it?”
“It was a gift.”
Hennison grunted in displeasure. “You’re playing games. Give me straight answers. You know what this is for?”
“I do.”
“And?” Hennison circled his fingers.
Now he was playing games. This was his power trip. I wasn’t going to tell him anything he didn’t know.
Hennison pulled a wide plastic tube from the shelf where the diviners had rested. He uncapped one end of the tube and shook out large sheets of paper that he unfurled.
He laid the sheets on the table beside me and put heavy bolts on the opposite edges to keep them from curling together.
Hennison grasped my head and tilted it to look at the sheets. They were either copies or the originals of Dr. Blavatsky’s notes from the Rocky Flats UFO.
“You’ve seen these, yes?”
“I have, but all I know is they were used to build those things over there.”
“Things?” Hennison straightened as if insulted. “These things are like discovering fire. You know what they’re for?”
“Detecting psychic energy?”
“You don’t sound impressed.”
“I’m not. Look at all the trouble they’ve gotten me into.”
“Why are you in Morada, Mr. Vampire?”
“To find the source of the psychic energy.” And zombies.
“Which is why I’m here as well. This device is a keyhole into the astral plane. The trouble is, I can see into the astral plane, but I can’t get into it.”
He pressed his hand against my forehead and pushed my head to the table. He brought his nose close to mine. I could read every pore and wrinkle in his face.
“If you’re here looking for the source, then you vampires also want to enter the astral plane. So it’s a race.”
Hennison brought his mouth close to my left ear. His breath puffed warmly against my skin. “And guess what? You lost.” He straightened up. “Which means I’ve won.” He laughed. He motioned for the zombies to join him.
The room filled with his mad scientist cackle and the ghaw, ghaw of the zombies.
Hennison wiped a tear from one eye. “We barely know each other and I am going to miss you, Felix. It’s been months since I’ve had a discussion as stimulating.”
“You that lonely out here?”
“I have plenty of contact. I subscribe to e-newsletters and Yahoo Groups. I blog. There’s no dearth of communication.”
“I meant real conversation.”
“Yeah, that’s a challenge. Reginald”-Hennison cocked a thumb to Lab Coat-“can about pass for a live human but his brain was too far gone. My fault. See, I conked him a little too hard on the noggin. Reginald, turn around.”
Reginald put his back to us. Hennison lifted Reginald’s scalp and showed a baseball-sized dent in the skull.
Hennison smoothed the scalp into place. “I didn’t mean to kill him. By the time I got him on the table and started the process, too late.” He grasped Reginald’s chin and gave it an affectionate shake. “Poor guy.”
Reginald’s eyes had the dull shine of the look from a loyal yet very dead dog.
“I preserved Barrett Chambers’s brain enough for him to drive, but you may have noticed that I neglected to keep his body looking April fresh.”
“Nothing a little Right Guard couldn’t help,” I said. “What about talking zombies?”
“Only one. And one too many for now, unfortunately.” Hennison yelled toward a stairwell leading to the lower floor. “Sonia.”
The zombies in the room fidgeted. What would make them uncomfortable?
Hennison cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled again. “Sonia.”
Quick footfalls approached up the stairs, clicking and slapping, the sound of high heels moving in a woman’s cadence.
Hennison tapped the workbench impatiently.
A platinum blonde rose onto the landing, hair in a Mary Tyler Moore cut and with puffy pink skin the color of cooked salmon. She wore a white nightgown with a fluffy hem and sleeves and strutted on clear stiletto mule pumps. Her lean bare legs looked impossibly long, like they’d been extruded from a die. Red stitch marks circled her neck, biceps, and the middle of her thighs.
Sonia’s gray eyes were shiny as glass and just as inert but the set of her brow and the drag of her lower face expressed seething contempt. “Vhat you vant?”
“Sonia’s my mail-order Russian bride.” Hennison motioned toward me. “Say hello to our guest.”
Her nose wrinkled as if I was the one who reeked of Dumpster cadaver. “Hello, guest.”
“Show a little class, will you?” He grasped her wrist and yanked. Sonia stumbled on her heels. Her breasts remained fixed inside the nightgown like a pair of plastic globes.
Hennison laid her hand on my chest. “Feel this.” She was cool but not corpse cold.
“I wrap her in an electric blanket, set it on high, and you couldn’t tell the difference between her and any horny nurse.”
Sonia twisted her hand free. She pulled over a battered wooden chair and sat. “Yes, I have dick privileges, aren’t I the lucky one.”
Hennison said, “She’s pissed because I killed her.”
Sonia reached into the top of her nightgown and pulled out a cigarette. She sorted through tools on the workbench, found a butane torch, and lit it. The nozzle shot a yellow tongue of fire. Her thumb worked the regulator knob and the torch flame shrank to a blue point.
Hennison reached to take her cigarette. “Goddamn it, haven’t I told you about the dangers?”
She turned and gave him the shoulder. “Vhat, that it’s bad for my health? I’m a zombie, you moron.”
“I meant a fire hazard.”
Sonia lit the cigarette and took a long defiant puff. “Yes, of course. Heaven forbid that anything happens to this palace.” She set her shoe against a metal box and tipped it over. Nuts and bolts, plastic vials, and human hands in Ziploc bags dumped to the floor.
“Don’t push me, Sonia. Remember the last time?” Hennison pointed to her neck. “I took off her head and mounted it backward.”
Smoke curled from the stitches along Sonia’s throat, from inside the cleavage of her nightgown, and from her hair. She crossed her legs and let an expression of boredom sink across her zombie face. “And you turned it back around after you discovered that my blow jobs weren’t worth a shit. Big genius you are.”
“Women, even undead they’re a ball and chain.” Hennison shared a brotherly look that we were comrades in the war between the sexes, ignoring that I was bolted to a table and that he had spent a good part of the morning sizzling my vampire ass with high-voltage electricity.
I said, “Necrophilia is a hard sell.”
Hennison replied, “Bah. Necrophilia is an outmoded term from an outmoded time. This is the twenty-first century.”
“But, Doc,” I said, “the stitches. The scars. You have to consider the aesthetics.”
“You’re right, of course,” Hennison said. “What Sonia demonstrates, in her own gracious Slavic way, is that it is possible to create a nearly human zombie. I learned much during her process; the next time the zombie will be flawless. The caveat is that the victim, I mean subject, should be a little younger. Sonia didn’t know what I was doing, she thought it was an advanced makeover process…which it was.” Hennison laughed at his joke.
Sonia ground the cigarette in the palm of her hand. She flicked the dead butt against cowboy zombie.
“Why do they follow your orders?” I asked.
“Because I’m their creator. I take care of them, give them shelter; where else would they go?” Hennison kept quiet for a moment. “Let’s try an experiment.” He shouted at the zombies. “You’re all free to go. Free. Free at last.”
Sonia got to her feet.
Hennison grabbed her shoulder and pushed her back into the chair. “Not you.”
The other zombies stared at him, to the outside door, then back to him. They picked at their scabs and gave tiny grimaces of confusion.
“I thought so,” Hennison said. “I made them. They owe me complete allegiance.”
“You’re creating an army of zombies.”
“More than that. I’ve tapped into something more profound.” Hennison paused, his face flush with imagined glory, as if to cue the trumpets and drums. Maybe in his head.
“Immortality,” he breathed dramatically, hesitating again, expecting perhaps that I should cry out, “Not immortality!” but I was too preoccupied pulling at my restraints.
Hennison’s face drooped. “You don’t seem impressed.”
“I am, very. But I’d find it easier to share your enthusiasm if I wasn’t bolted to this table.”
“Actually, bodies aren’t immortal, only the brains.”
The zombies drooled and muttered a chorus of “Brains. Brains.”
Sonia mouthed the word and licked one corner of her painted lips.
“I’ve perfected the technique of head transplants. I can swap bodies as easily as you change pants. Let me show you.”
Hennison went to the far side of the lab. An upside-down stockpot sat on a pastry cart. He rolled the pastry cart close.
Hennison pulled the key ring on the lanyard attached to his belt. He opened a padlock securing the bottom of the stockpot. “This is a necessary precaution because, well, you’ll see.” He let go of the keys and they retracted with a zzziit back to his belt. He lifted the stockpot.
Cleto’s head sat in a steel dish. His face was gray except for the top, which was pale and shaved bald. Tubes ran up his nose and into brass fittings along his temple. A net of wires crossed his scalp and were taped to his skin. His eyes were pressed tight, dark and shriveled as prunes, as if to not see what had happened to him.
On the other hand, Cleto deserved the look.
“Once you understand the biology and chemistry, it’s a straightforward process, a lot like fixing an appliance. The problem is not physical trauma but emotional. One minute you’re cruising along on two legs and the next you’re as mobile as a casserole.”
“Why attack Cleto?”
“Opportunity, mostly. I’ve been stalking those lowlifes for a while. I couldn’t believe my good fortune that I got a fresh head and my zombies got a nice snack.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“I haven’t decided. His body was torn up when we captured him. In the meantime I have to keep his head locked up because of the brai…”
The zombies leaned into him and their cracked lips pursed to mutter their favorite word.
“You know what I mean.” Hennison set the stockpot over Cleto and secured the padlock. “I can keep brai…I mean what’s in his head, in stasis for an indefinite time.”
Hennison came back to the table. “Oh, I can go on and on about zombies. But vampires?” He raised a finger in an inquisitive manner. “I have many, many questions. Are vampires immortal?”
Not if we’re decapitated. “We can be killed.”
“I figured that from your reaction to the sunrise.” Hennison reached for the rheostat knob on the electric knife switch. “I mean, if no harm comes to you, are vampires immortal? You’ll live forever and ever?”
That’s what immortal means. “Yes.”
“How old is the oldest vampire?” Hennison’s aura became prickly with hostility. He rotated the rheostat knob. Up or down?
“I don’t know,” I answered, my muscles tensing as I expected the worse. “Several hundred years.”
“A thousand?” The prickles on his aura grew into thorns.
“I’m sure some have been that old.”
The thorns on his aura danced like individual flames. “Can this kill you?” He let go of the rheostat knob and grasped the switch.
The electricity bit where the steel hoops held my wrists and ankles. My body tightened in anticipation of the next jolt.
“Yes, this could kill me.”
Hennison nodded, pleased with himself. “What about a stake to the heart?”
“Yes.” I hoped we weren’t checking the list of options.
“Garlic?”
“Poisonous.”
“Really?” Hennison stroked his chin and studied the jars and bottles of chemicals along the wall. “An acid bath?”
“Probably.”
“Gunshots?”
“Not fatal but very painful.”
“How painful?”
He rolled the right leg of my sweatpants to my knee. The thorns on Hennison’s aura shrank into a shroud of undulating cilia. Intermittent tentacles whipped out. He couldn’t see it, obviously, but I could read his deranged pleasure.
He opened a drawer on the workbench and withdrew a revolver. More tentacles whipped from his aura.
The zombies, even Sonia, leaned close.
Hennison aimed the pistol at the shin of my right leg. He steadied the gun. The bullets shone in the cylinder chambers with their evil promises of pain and destruction.
My kundalini noir turned on itself in despair. I steeled myself to be strong. The bullets would tear flesh and shatter bone.
Hennison closed his left eye and focused his right down the sights of the pistol. “Are you afraid?”
“Yes, I am.”
“But you said gunshots weren’t painful.”
“I said gunshots weren’t fatal.”
“First rule of any guest. Don’t correct your host.”
Hennison fired.