Three weeks later we ambushed a family we had mistaken for insurgents. I had arrived in Iraq ready to fight against terror and injustice. Instead, what we did that night was slaughter innocent civilians. The blood of the youngest victim, an adolescent girl, stained my hands and my soul. The tragedy sent me hurling to the emotional bottom. When I hit it, it was then that an Iraqi vampire turned my remorse and desperation against me and converted me into one of the damned undead.
My mind wandered even further back. To my childhood. During one of those episodes of estrangement between my parents, my mom got tired of my dad’s drinking and bullying and struck out on her own. We lived in a tiny cinderblock duplex and I know my mom fretted about money. One afternoon she got after my sisters and me to pack our things. My mom yelled at us to hurry, as if we were fleeing a fire.
We took only what we could cram into her car and then drove to my aunt’s house, where we would live for a couple of months.
It rained a lot, off and on for days, and our mood remained as dark as the gray skies. When the clouds broke, I borrowed my cousin’s bicycle and sweated my way across town to see what happened to all the stuff we had left behind.
Our belongings had been heaped in front of the duplex: our clothes, mattresses and bed linen, dishes, furniture, photos in broken frames. There wasn’t much grass, so the days of rain had turned the tiny yard into a muddy puddle.
The wet pile stank of mildew. My mom’s Formica table rested there, the chrome legs ripped loose. A dresser lay on its side, the drawers open, disemboweled, with my mom’s bras, panties, and stockings strewn about in the mud. Our frayed and tattered picture books looked like the carcasses of decayed birds.
Our possessions were now garbage. Our hopes and ambitions deserved nothing better than to lie rotting in the sun. The neighbors could gawk at our shame and hopelessness. Had we stayed put, would my mom and sisters be lying out here in pieces, like broken dolls? Would I?
For a week afterward, I felt hollow, like a bottle made of fragile glass. I expected at any moment to be smashed and swept aside. My existence didn’t matter.
Now I felt like that again.
Insignificant.
Impotent.
Helpless.
A failure.
Worse, others depended on me: Carmen, the Araneum, Gilbert Odin, the Earth women, and I had let them all down. I deserved nothing but oblivion.
The sun set and the sea around me turned inky black. Blurry red auras circled close, nibbled my skin, and darted away.
Something grabbed my torso. I couldn’t struggle or resist.
Two hands clasped together over my chest and heaved upward. A silky head with an orange aura pressed against mine. A woman’s soft lips kissed my cheek.
Together we rose from the bottom, ascending in rhythmic jerks as she scissored her legs.
We broke the surface. The clear water rinsed my eyes. Thousands of stars dotted the night sky. A breeze cooled my wet face.
I bobbed on the surface, indifferent to what happened next. My rescuer towed me by my collar. We stopped beside a motorboat floating in the gloom.
“Jack, help me lift him.” It was Carmen.
A second set of hands, belonging to a big man, grasped my coat and hauled me over the gunwale. He slid me onto the deck.
I lay on my belly, too weak to move. A human with his red aura stood beside me. He had a bandanna around his neck. A chalice. Carmen climbed into the boat. She wore a cropped T-shirt and bikini bottoms. Water rained from her hair. She sat on my butt, pressed her hands against my shoulder blades, and pushed.
I puked mouthfuls of water. When I stopped coughing, Carmen rolled me onto my back and pulled my head into her lap.
She smoothed my hair and whispered, “Get a grip, Felix. You can drown later. We’ve got work to do.”
Chapter
34
I bolted upright, gasping, confused.
Where was I?
I sat in a coffin. I smelled formaldehyde and ethanol-embalming fluid. In the middle of the room stood a mortician’s table, a white slab with a trough around the edge and a metal stand on one end to hold the deceased’s head in place. Light shone through a row of frosted-glass windows high along one wall. A Porti-Boy embalming machine-it looked like a big, squat blender with a hose sticking out between the front dials-sat on a steel shelf on the opposite wall. The shelf was crowded with jugs of embalming fluid, autopsy compound, and tissue builder. Under the shelf waited a white porcelain commode for whatever was next to be flushed away. There was an interior door to my right and a wide service door to my left.
I was alone in the morgue. My clothes-a red print Hawaiian shirt and khaki cargo pants-were not mine.
I felt queasy.
I had the dim recollection of Carmen and her chalice, Jack, pulling my carcass out of the ocean. They had scrubbed me with soapy water, hosed me off, and brought me here. She had mentioned staying with a chalice couple who owned a mortuary in Bluffton. That must be where I was.
My coffin rested on a workbench. An insulated carafe stood on the table within reach. I tasted a recent blood meal. I didn’t remember drinking the blood nor did I remember being dressed or falling asleep in this coffin.
My wallet, its contents, and an assortment of embalming tools-a big syringe, metal tubes of various lengths, a coil of latex hose, and forceps-lay spread across the workbench. I touched the wallet; the leather was dry. I had to have been here awhile. How long?
Bracing myself against the sides of the coffin, I started to get up. My knees were stiff and they ached, as did my lower back. I ran my hands down along my thighs to my calves. My fingers dragged across the scars where Goodman’s bullets had chewed my leg.
The images and sensations from the ambush returned to torment me in a kaleidoscope of terror. First the bomb detonating, the hot blast heaving me out of the motel lobby, my face riddled with glass, smoke curling from my burned clothes.
Then the sprint through Hilton Head as Goodman and his goons hunted me, their bullets cracking the air inches past my ears.
The warming of my skin, scalding as the spider bite wore off and the sun fried my unprotected flesh.
Nausea flooded through me again. My kundalini noir tightened into a ball, compressing itself in a panicked spasm. I gagged, unable to do anything except fight the impulse to vomit. I clutched my throat as if trying to pull slack into a noose around my neck.
The nausea abated, replaced by an icy fear that twisted through me. I slumped forward and rested my head against the side of the coffin, weakened and spent.
Footsteps approached beyond the door at my right. I sat up again, the nausea returned, and I waited, too crippled by my wretched condition to offer resistance if it was trouble.
The door opened. A woman asked, “Felix?”
Somehow I knew she was Leslie, Jack’s wife, a chalice and co-owner of the mortuary. We must have met when I was first brought here.
Leslie stepped inside and closed the door. Her aura glowed pleasantly, like a candle behind red cellophane. She was in her early forties. A flowered blouse and jeans clothed her voluptuous meatiness-hardly a dainty woman, yet attractive in a nurturing, Earth-mother sort of way.
I felt her heat as she drew close. Her warm hand lay on mine.
“How are you?” Leslie’s blue eyes had the comforting empathy of a nurse. Being among chalices meant I didn’t need vampire hypnosis. I could relax.