William Mark Simmons - Undead 3 - Habeas Corpses

Habeas Corpses

Wm. Mark Simmons

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.

form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0913-4

ISBN-10: 1-4165-0913-5

Cover art by Clyde Caldwell

First printing, November 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

TK

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production & book design by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH (www.windhaven.com)

Printed in the United States of America

Other books by Wm. Mark Simmons

One Foot in the Grave

Dead on My Feet

Habeas Corpses

Dreamland Chronicles:

In The Net Of Dreams

When Dreams Collide

The Woman Of His Dreams

Special Thanks this time around to The Wrecking Crew:

Lee (Helen Wheels) Martindale

Brad & Sue (Tag Team) Sinor

Dennis (The Menace) Smirl (who was also instrumental in recovering

portions of my earlier drafts when my laptop went Chernobyl)

Golden Plume with Clusters to:

Lynn (Mama Yard Dog) Stranathan

Rhonda (Help, Help Me Rhonda) Eudaly for editorial service above and

beyond . . .

Finally special thanks to:

Marla (The Dog Ate Your Homework?) Ainspan

And the Rest of the Folks at Baen for their patience on my long

recovery on the medical and technological fronts.

This is a work of fiction.

As always, any resemblance to people living,

dead, undead, or some stage in-between,

is purely coincidental.

Chapter One

At first glance Deirdre looked human.

Of course, Deirdre always got more than just a glance—even back when she was human.

Once upon a time she had been a stunning beauty with pale skin, blue eyes, and auburn hair. That

was before she died last year.

In death she was transformed by the twinned viruses the undead carry in their blood and saliva. As a

vampire she had gone from "stunning" to "unearthly" on the beauty meter. Her auburn hair turned the

color of arterial blood; her sapphire eyes replaced by haunted rubies and her skin a whiter shade of pale

and as luminous as the moon.

The fangs, of course, went without saying.

But she had undergone another extreme makeover in drinking my mutated blood a few months ago.

Now her sharp, pointy teeth were all but gone. More obviously, her skin was approaching the mocha

and cream shade that came from a daily regimen of sunbathing—something you rarely see in a redhead

and never in a vampire. Which was the point, I suppose, as Deirdre was no longer technically undead.

My unique hemoglobin didn't make her human, again, you understand. The crimson eyes were an

obvious clue that she was no longer the girl next door. That and the fact that she could still bench-press a

small truck. But while I couldn't give her back everything that she had lost in her original transformation,

she seemed content: being "un-undead" suited her just fine.

If only Deirdre's situation suited Lupé, as well.

My significant other understood, of course, that I needed a security chief and bodyguard who was

conversant with the unique nature of my enemies, could stop a bullet without flinching, and

could—well—bench-press a small truck. She also understood the unique obligations involved as

(technically speaking) I was the one who had brought Deirdre "over" and (literally speaking) I was the

one who had brought her "back." Lupé knew something about blood-bonds and curses and

debts-that-do-not-die even when we do the mortal coil shuffle.

Still, Deirdre was major eye candy. Worse, she had made it clear that, when it came to swapping

body fluids, we needn't limit ourselves (as we had on the two previous occasions) to blood alone.

It required frequent reminders to all and sundry that my heart belonged to Lupé.

Deirdre, it seemed, had someone else's heart right now.

She was holding it in the palm of her hand.

And it was convulsing as if it were still alive.

"Where did you get that?" I asked, sensing light gathering at the dark edges of my vision.

She held the squirming cardiac muscle toward me, oily red fluids drooling between her fingers and

sheeting down her arm. "Don't you recognize it?" She smiled demurely. "It's yours."

I looked down at the gaping dark hole in my chest . . .

And awoke in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets.

* * *

The upside to having daymares on a regular basis is that you stop going through that whole

disorientation phase and learn to wake up real quick. The downside was that they were lasting well past

sunset and I still woke up feeling exhausted.

I groaned out of bed, hoping I hadn't murmured Deirdre's name while Lupé was in earshot. Even

when she's in human form, Lupé doesn't have to be in the room to be within earshot.

In the bathroom I found a note taped to the medicine cabinet mirror.

Gone for groceries and DVDs.

Movie night tonight . . .

L~

I reached through the shower curtains and wrenched the cold water handle. Tonight was the Big

Night: I had a lot to do and I couldn't waste time trying to put a Freudian spin on today's bad dream.

Even if there was a good chance I would get my heart ripped out before the sun came back up.

* * *

T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" begins with: "Midwinter spring is its own season / Sempiternal though

sodden towards sundown, / Suspended in time, between pole and tropic . . ."

The dead of winter in Louisiana is something like that: short sleeves one day, a sweater the next.

Tonight, the weather hadn't made up its mind. I buckled my shoulder holster over a sleeveless tee and

shrugged into a flannel shirt but left it unbuttoned so I could reach the Glock-20 loaded with silver

frag-ammo under my left armpit. Opening the screen door, I stepped down and walked barefoot through

the January chrysalis of my new back yard. The brown, withered grass sighed beneath my feet, not quite

dead, not quite alive.

Like me, in a sense.

Except that, come true spring—mid to late February—the lawn would burst forth with new life while

I would be . . . well . . . what?

All flesh is grass but, where most folks end up succumbing to the Lawnmower of Life, some of us

cheat the mulching process and come back as ghastly perennials. Considering the last eighteen months of

my so-called half-life, there was probably a fertilizer analogy I could come up with . . . but I didn't want

to go there.

I stepped on a mushroom and felt it dissolve between my toes. Forget the green stuff; a pale,

nocturnal parasite was probably a better analogy for my condition. That's me: a real "fun guy."

Buh-dump-bum.

By now you'd think there would be a clear-cut diagnosis of my actual condition. But, no: I was left

with two starting presumptions.

One, that I actually died in the automobile accident that killed my family and was "reborn" in the

hospital morgue . . .

Or, two, that I was only presumed dead while "Virus A" from Bassarab's blood put me in a healing

trance. Lacking the combinant factors of "Virus B" that resided in the old vampire's saliva, the infection

started converting my body into something new—neither fully human nor technically undead.

Add to either scenario the subsequent contaminants and blood-borne pathogens from my encounters

with Kadeth Bey's tanis leaf extract and the demon-laced blood of Elizabeth Báthory—well, the

"either/or" factor became rather hazy. And while the distinctions seemed important to some, I had to

wonder: in the end did it really matter? My wife and daughter were still dead and the Las Vegas

Demesne was booking odds on me attaining the same status within the month.

But this wasn't the night to think about depressing things like vampire vendettas and daymares

concerning misplaced hearts, it was an evening made for romance! A sliver of moon hung over the

graveyard like a leprous grow-light in Death's terrarium. The wind had freshened, bringing the odor of

distant rain and nearby rot. I could see a storm was finally brewing and that meant tonight had to be "The

Night."

If Lupé and J.D. ever got back from Blockbusters, that is.

I reached into my pocket, fished past my grandmother's ring, and retrieved a small vial of

Mentholatum. I rimmed my nostrils with ointment before continuing to the far end of my property.

One minute I was alone, the next I was outnumbered three to one.

You might think that the ability to see into the infrared spectrum would give me all sorts of

advantages. But infravision is worth diddly-squat when the creatures coming at you have no body heat.

The dead were a dozen yards away before I finally saw them.

Three corpses shambled toward me; their clumsy, unbalanced rhythms reminiscent of a trio of winos

in fully soused search-mode for the nearest liquor store. The one in the middle looked freshly dead while

his wingmen had been in the ground a great deal longer. They stumbled to a stop against the waist-high

stone wall that separated the cemetery from my backyard.

Unfortunately this wasn't a dream: the stench of dust, dirt, mold, and chemically retarded

decomposition continued its forward momentum, slamming past the menthol barrier and up into my

nostrils like a slow-motion train wreck. I sneezed and set a brown paper bag on the ground.

"Yo, Cséjthe," the big one on the left said. It sounded more like he was sneezing, in turn. The proper

pronunciation of my last name, "Chay-tay," requires a tad more articulation than most decomposing

tongues and palettes can muster.

I stood about a foot back from the stonework on my side and tried to breathe shallowly. "Boo," I

greeted, "Cam."

Boo grinned; Cam nodded. Boo was scary when he grinned. Cam was scarier because he couldn't.

In "The Mending Wall" Robert Frost wrote that "good fences make good neighbors." I wonder if Bob

knew how well that analogy extended to graveyards.

In point of fact, however, it wasn't the cemetery wall that kept the dead off my property. My real

privacy fence was the line of consecrated salt along the base of the crumbling concrete partitions that

bordered my property on three sides. Don't get me wrong. I get along pretty well with a lot of the

deceased-but-not-quite-departed. But some of them just aren't real clear on the issue of boundaries.

Hey, if they're out of the ground—major clue!

Until Mama Samm came and put a hoodoo barrier around my property I had endured a nightly

parade of rotting corpses to my back door. Some wanted help in matters of unfinished business, others

were just lonely. Still, there had to be some limits. Now I just replaced the salt every month or so. More

often when it rained.

"This here's The Professor," Boo said, indicating the cadaver between them. Cam sort of nodded. A

suicide, Cameron had propped a double-barreled shotgun under his jaw and tripped both triggers as his

last living act. While the mortician's art has come a long way the funeral was still a closed casket affair.

Cam isn't geared for post mortem small talk.

The Professor didn't look anything like Russell Johnson so I politely refrained from asking after

Gilligan or Mary Ann. He did, however, look as if he was in a state of shock. It's really hard to tell with

the freshly dead; they all have that look of mild surprise or severe disappointment.

"You're not real," he said.

I've been told that I have "issues" but that wasn't what he meant.

"Well, of course he ain't the real Baron Samedi," Boo said. "Don't matter, though. He's still

our—whatchamacallem—buddy-man."

I sighed. "Ombudsman. Except I ain't. Aren't. I'm not," I corrected. It didn't matter that I wasn't the

Vodoun Loa of the Dead: half of the corpses in the cemetery still believed it, the other half didn't care.

There's something in my tainted blood that draws them to me like moths to the flame.

"Aww, he's just modest," Boo continued. Cam just nodded.

"He's not real," The Professor insisted. "You're not real!"

"Huh?" said Boo.

"I am asleep. This is a dream!"

"A dream?" I looked around. "Looks more like a nightmare to me."

"Hey!" said Boo.

A moldy green hand rose up and gripped the top of the crumbling wall. "And many of them that sleep

in the dust of the earth shall awake," intoned a new voice. In life it might have been deep and resonant, in

death it sounded wheezy and clotted, as if the speaker were missing a lung and had something stuck in his

throat. Something like roots and leaves and cemetery earth. " . . . some to everlasting life, and some to

shame and everlasting contempt. The prophet Daniel, chapter twelve, verse the second," the new corpse

finished, dragging itself more or less erect to lean against the stone barrier.

"Well, hell, Preacher," Boo exclaimed in a wounded voice, "which ones are we?"

I think the new arrival was attempting an expression of contempt—something hard to pull off when

you don't have the complete palette of skin and muscles to work with.

"He's got a point, Jerome," I said to the cadaver whose Pentecostal proclivities had earned him the

nickname "Preacher." "Ole Boo, here, has never given evidence of having any shame whatsoever."

Cam wheezed as though he was laughing. The Professor squeezed his eyes shut and looked as if he

was wishing himself back into his bed.

"Atheists," Jerome scolded.

"Now hold on there, Preacher," Boo puffed, "that ain't entirely true. By strict definition I'm an

agnostic and Cameron, here, was Unitarian. I'm bettin' that The Professor is one of them secular

humanists. Right, Doc?"

"Organized religion is nothing but codified mythology mixed with superstition," The Professor said,

still careful to keep his eyes squinched shut.

"A rational mind," I observed, "dedicated to logic and the scientific precepts."

"Yes," he said, easing one eye open.

"Boy, are you in deep doo-doo!"

"How about you, boss?" Boo asked.

I considered the rows of aged and crumbling headstones. "I don't know anymore."

"If you so-called agnostics would read the Bible—"

"'O that thou wouldst hide me in the grave,'" I interrupted, "'that thou wouldst keep me secret, until

thy wrath be past, that thou wouldst appoint me a set time, and remember me.' The Book of Job, chapter

fourteen, verse the thirteenth."

They all stared at me as if I had grown an extra head.

Reaching down, I pulled an old book out of the sack. "eBay's gotten pricier of late, Jerome, but I got

you the Kübler-Ross." I handed it to born-again dead man.

"Josephus?" he queried, taking the old tome with trembling hands. "I know there's a copy in the

West Monroe library."

"I'm not kyping library books for you, Jerome."

"I'll give it back when I'm done."

I shook my head. "You don't take care of them. It's not your fault, considering your present address,

but I think it's best if we get you your own copies."

"What you need books for, Preacher?" Boo shifted his grasp on The Professor's arm as he tried to

pull away. "Can't you just pray to God for your answers—you bein' so righteous and all?"

"Now, boys," I soothed, "we're all just doing the best we can to figure out how it all works."

"And some of us," Boo added, "are trying to figure out why we're not already in heaven instead of

slumming with the sinners on the slag heap of the dead."

Jerome turned on his heel and stalked off in a huff. Well, actually, it was more of a

shamble-off-in-a-huff kind of thing.

"Hey," the big corpse called after him, "have you tried hopping? Maybe y'all gotta jump-start that

Rapture effect! Beam me up, Jesus!"

"That's not very nice," I said.

"Aw, he's always askin' for it." But he did look a little ashamed. "And what am I gonna do? Piss off

God? Oooo, He might strike me dead! No, wait . . . He might banish my soul to wander the earth after I

die! No wait . . ."

"Alright, you've made your point." I rummaged through the sack and pulled out a packet of oddly

shaped dice. One die had eight sides, another ten, and yet another twenty. "Advanced Dungeons &

Dragons game dice," I read off the package and handed it to Cam. "You play D & D?" It was a

rhetorical question—in practical terms, anything you asked Cam was a rhetorical question.

"E & E," Boo answered for him.

"What?"

"Ectoplasm & Exorcists," he elaborated. "Plays with the Gorsky twins over in the northeast plots."

I just looked at him.

"You know . . . you're kibitzing at a séance and suddenly a fifteenth-level exorcist bursts into the

room and begins reading from the Roman Ritual. What do you do?"

I shrugged. "Make a saving throw?" I reached into the sack and pulled out another book. "Here,

Boo; Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead." As I handed it to him, he relaxed his grip on The

Professor, who wrenched himself free and ran back into the mists of the cemetery.

"Oops. Guess we'd better go fetch our newbie before he finds a way off the grounds and really stirs

up a ruckus!" As he turned to go, he ruffled the pages of his new present. "Hey, no pictures!"

"It's a war story, Bubba, not necrophilial porn."

He shrugged, took a step, and then stopped. "Hey, Hoss, I think we got company."

I turned my head and looked across the cemetery grounds. There were four—no, five—of them,

fanning out as they crept among the crypts, using tombstones and monuments for cover. A couple of

them were as cold as Boo and Cam but the others flickered like a banked fire—not warm enough to be

alive but not cold enough to be completely dead.

Undead, to be more specific. Outtatown Revenants, come to do some wet-work at la Casa de

Cséjthe.

No wonder I had bad dreams. A couple of years ago I was as normal as the next guy. That was

before an untidy blood transfusion with the Lord of the Undead netted me one-half of that recombinant

virus that changes day-trippers into night-sippers. And while it's true that I'm stronger and faster than the

vast majority of humankind, I'm no match for anyone who's completely crossed over to the other side of

the blood divide. One-on-one, I'd last about thirty seconds against a full-fledged vampire if everything

else was equal. And if I couldn't outrun much less outfight one vampire, what were my chances with five

of them?

I reached up inside my shirt and unsnapped the leather restraining strap over the trigger. There's an

old saying that "God made all men but Sam Colt made 'em equal." Well, even superhuman reflexes and a

Glock-20 with silver fragmentation loads didn't make me the equal of five fanged assassins. Still, I hadn't

used my gun in self-defense yet and I was betting that I wouldn't be doing so tonight. I left the Glock in

the holster for the moment.

It was a safe bet: the house odds were in my favor. The ground began to boil around the intruders'

feet. Two of them lost their footing and fell to the ground. Correction: fell into the ground and

disappeared without a trace. Another one fell to his knees. Three cadavers popped up around him,

looking like ghastly manikins cut off at the waist. They grabbed the surprised vampire and dragged him

down into the unsettled earth. The beginnings of a scream were cut off as dirt clods filled his fanged

mouth.

That left two nosferatu on their feet. Dozens of arms were now thrust up out of the ground, moldy

hands grasping undead ankles, shins, knees, thighs, a couple grabbing belts. One toppled and

disappeared. The other gamely struggled on, ripping an arm loose from a corpse and using it to club at

the others.

"How many is this, now?" Boo asked.

"Third attempt this year," I said, "and we're barely through January."

The reason I had survived three attacks was due, in no small measure, to our relocation to the new

neighborhood. After our old house was badly damaged during last year's assault by demonically

sponsored paramilitary forces, we found ourselves in the market for something with a little more seclusion

and a lot more security. The property boundaries of my new domicile practically screamed the old

Realtors' adage "Location, location, location!"

The front yard ended as a bluff overlooking the Ouachita River. Since most vampires won't willingly

cross running water, the bad guys just figured it was easier to come at me across open ground on the

other three sides. Well, "open ground" is a bit of a misnomer: an old cemetery borders my property line

where the river doesn't. And, so far, none of my bloodsucking assassins had made it past the necro-hood

watch. Eventually the "people" sending them were going to get wise.

But not tonight. The last vampire disappeared beneath a dog pile of decomposing bodies and sank

into the loamy earth.

"Five," Boo grunted. "They never sent this many before."

I leaned against the wall. "Kurt wants me to come back to New York. He thinks I could nip this in

the bud by facing down the families there that want to challenge me for the throne."

"Throne? You people have a throne?"

"Figure of speech," I said. "I hope. And what do you mean 'you people'? I am not a vampire. Not

fully, anyway. Not yet. And Lupé is a werewolf—you don't want to suggest otherwise while she's

around. And Deirdre—well, we don't really know what Deirdre is anymore."

He grinned. "And you're not the voodoo Loa of the Dead."

I looked away. I hate it when they grin. "I've met Baron Samedi. He's still miffed that some of his

subjects prefer my company to his."

"Guess we ain't the boyz in his hood. Ah, I see Cam's corralled our reluctant zombie."

I turned and saw The Professor being herded back toward us by Boo's faceless buddy. "What are

you going to do with him?"

"Walk him around until first cock's crow. The first emergence is always traumatic for the newbies.

And you can never tell who's gonna be hit the hardest—the religious types who expect to wake up in

heaven or the atheists who don't expect to wake up at all."

He started toward the other two and I turned back toward the house with a troubled heart. The

worst part of dealing with the living dead was not the smell or the gruesome reminders of one's own

mortality.

It was the troubling question of why they were still here.

* * *

Back in the house I could hear the clanking of heavy weights down in the basement signifying

Deirdre's presence. Lupé and J.D. were still unaccounted for.

That wasn't surprising as the trip into town takes a little longer from the new digs. For instance: the

garage is on the other side of the river. First, you have to go down to the retaining wall at the edge of the

front lawn, duck through the curtain of weeping willows, pass through the gate, go down about

three-dozen stairs to the docks below, cast off and take the boat across the Ouachita River to a private

landing on the opposite bank. Then you climb about three dozen more stairs to a private garage,

disengage two alarm systems, neutralize Mama Samm's voodoo hexes, and drive one of the cars into

town.

Lather, rinse, repeat for the return trip.

Yes, it's a hassle and deliveries are a bitch, but the whole crossing running water taboo for vampires

combined with a graveyard serving as an anti-undead minefield had raised my life expectancy by another

three to four months.

The house was a hundred-and-fifty-year-old, two-story manse with a columned front porch. A

carriage house in the back had been converted into guest quarters by the previous occupant. That's

where the security staff was housed and the boys were going to be in a lot of trouble if Deirdre or Lupé

found out about the particulars of tonight's near incursion.

Of course, I would be in even more trouble if they learned that I had stepped outside unescorted so I

William Mark Simmons - Undead 3 - Habeas Corpses

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