Back From the Undead (20 page)

Every time I get close, he switches things up and does something else. It’s driving me out of my mind. When I finally do orgasm, it’s long and intense and loud.

I lay beside him, panting, covered in sweat. My whole body is flushed with a rosy glow, from head to toes and everywhere in between. So is his—but even though he’s stopped, he hasn’t reached the place I just arrived at. “You didn’t—”

“No.”

I reach for him. “Then we need to try
harder
.”

He pushes my hand away, gently. “I don’t think so.”

I frown. “But—”

“It’s not you. It’s just … not that important.”

“You’re a much better lover than liar.”

He smiles. “I wish that were true.”

“So is that what I am to you? Just another way to punish yourself?”

“No.” He props himself up on an elbow. “You’re something special. Some
one
special. You mean a lot more to me than … this.”

“This? Hey, we just lit up the sheets like the Fourth of July—I’m surprised the room didn’t burn down. That’s worth a little more than a single word, don’t you think?”

“Of course it is. But there’s a bigger picture here. And a lot more going on than you’re aware of.”

“So fill me in, Mr. Fireworks. As many times as it takes.”

“Say that again. And
think
about it, this time.”

I have no idea where he’s going with this. “The offer stands. And from the look of things, so do you.”

“That’s not what I’m—” He stops. Tilts his head slightly in that way people do when they’re listening intently to something very faint.

An instant later he’s on his feet and pulling me to mine. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

I don’t argue, just grab for my clothes. “There’s no time for that!” he snaps, and pulls me toward the door.

And then we’re running down a hallway, naked, and something is chasing us.

Everything changes as we run, becoming more and more dream-like. The hallway stretches ahead of us to infinity, an uncountable number of doors lining either side, some of them ajar. We sprint past, but everything’s going in slow motion now, and I catch unsettling glimpses through the doors that are cracked open: a jungle full of dinosaur-riding Aztecs, an eighteenth-century airship in low-earth orbit, a city populated by six-foot mantises. Everything’s in full color now, almost oversaturated with it, and I have no idea where we’re running to or what we’re running from.

No, that’s not true. I may not know where we’re going, but I know what’s chasing us. It’s the man in the alley, the one whose face I couldn’t see. He wants to devour our souls, and if he catches us we won’t be able to stop him.

“The doors!” I say. “Maybe we can lose him if we go through one of the doors!”

“We can’t,” he says. “Can’t doooo thaaaaaaaaaaatttt…”

I look at him in horror. He’s got a black, slimy-looking tentacle wrapped around his stomach, a tentacle that stretches back the way we came. It’s not the only thing stretching, either; his whole body is being pulled like taffy, skull elongating, torso deforming, arms and legs getting longer as he’s drawn backward. It’s like seeing someone being grabbed by a living black hole, dragged down toward the event horizon by his belly.

He’s still holding on to my hand, but now a ripple runs down the length of his arm, snapping his hand like the end of a bullwhip and hurling me away. We fall away from each other in opposite directions, his face distorted by the terrible gravity of the thing that’s caught him, and I know that once it’s finished consuming him I’m next …

THIRTEEN

I wake up screaming.

I stop as soon as I realize the dream’s over and I’m awake—but it takes me a second to get my bearings, then another second to process what just happened and what the immediate consequences will be.

“Charlie! I’m—”

CRASH!

“—okay.” I sigh. “Does our expense account cover hotel room doors?”

Charlie glares at me. The only thing he’s wearing is his fedora, which actually makes him look a lot less naked than you’d think—golems have the same sex organs as a Ken doll, which is to say none. The door is on the floor, hinges and all. Charlie doesn’t let a lot slow him down when he’s in a hurry.

“You sure?” he growls, looking around like he expects to see an assassin hiding behind the drapes or under the bed.

“Yes. Bad dream, that’s all. Go back to to bed.”

“Can’t.” He looks down, then back at me. “Got a door to fix.”

“Sorry.”

“You got to stop with the sauerkraut and mushroom pizza before bed,” he mutters as he picks up the door and examines the damage. “I’m gonna need tools…”

“I’ll call down to the front desk.”

A terrific start to another great day …

I hole up in the bathroom and take a shower as Charlie waits out in the hall for maintenance to show up. I mull over the dream as I scrub, trying to figure out what it was trying to tell me.

A lot of it was actually close to reality: Cassius did smuggle anti-plague charms to the human population at the end of World War II. The plague was actually more of a curse, part of a deal the pires made with an Elder God named Shub-Niggurath to gain the ability to procreate. The deal required the sacrifice of millions of human souls, a price Cassius thought was too high. He’d done his best to help save those he could—though I don’t know if he had a human lover while he did so. Knowing Cassius, it’s entirely possible.

The black-and-white to color stuff was weird, too—in fact, as a psychologist I’ve never heard of that happening in a dream. It seemed like some kind of metaphor, beyond the obvious sexual one. But for what? The past and the present? Something simple becoming something complex?

And then there’s how it ended. The thing chasing us down that endless hallway, all the doors and the bizarre things behind them. Were they supposed to represent memories? Choices? Emotions? I don’t know.

What I
do
know is that the sense of menace was overpowering, so vivid and real that I can still feel echoes of it. Either my subconscious is scared to death of something and trying to send me a message—or this was more than just a dream.

It was a warning.

But from who? Cassius? If he’s trying to communicate with me through dreams instead of just picking up a phone, does that mean he’s in trouble? Or am I reading too much into having an ordinary nightmare under stressful conditions?

No easy answers pop up from the shower drain or magically appear in the soap dish. I lather, rinse, and repeat, not because I believe in following directions but because I need a little more time to ruminate.

Dream-Cassius was definitely trying to tell me something. He told me to think about what I’d just said. What was it again? Something about his lovemaking and comparing it to—

Fireworks.

I open my eyes in abrupt realization, and promptly get shampoo in them. I curse and turn my head into the shower spray to rinse them out.

Cassius’s world has never
seen
fireworks. Fireworks were the crude precursor of firearms, which never evolved here. So what, right? It was a dream, it didn’t have to make sense. But the thing is, Cassius not only noticed that discrepancy, but tried to point it out to me as well. Which means some part of my brain thought it was important enough to tap myself on my own mental shoulder through a surrogate.

Now that I think of it, there was another reference to guns in the dream—something about ammunition. So whatever the dream was really about, my gun—or maybe the global anti-gun spell—was involved.

I get out, dry off, get dressed with the clothes I brought in with me. Leave the bathroom and find a paunchy guy in jeans and a faded black T-shirt fixing my door with a cordless drill and a couple lengths of wood. Charlie’s wrapped a white towel around himself, sarong-style, out of consideration for my delicate sensibilities. Together with the fedora, it’s quite the outfit.

“Wow,” I say. “You look like a hard-boiled … guy. In a sauna. Like a guy who was really unclear on the whole hard-boiled thing, and tried to cook himself a little more. In a sauna.”

Charlie gives me a look.

“Okay, not one of my best. Caffeine now, please.”

“Just give a moment to slip into something a little less punch-line-oriented, all right?”

We rap on Eisfanger’s door, tell him we’ll be in the hotel restaurant. We get a sleepy but coherent acknowledgment and head downstairs.

Coffee. Gulp gulp gulp. Ahhhhh.

“Right,” I say. “Brain function returning. Will to live at acceptable levels. Robot imitation program terminating—
now.
”

“I know I’m going to hate myself for asking this, but—in what way, shape, or form was that an imitation of a rowboat?”

“Robot.
Robot
imitation.”

“What the hell’s a robot?”

I squint at my partner suspiciously over the rim of my coffee cup. Charlie once got me to believe that lems prefer the term
Mineral American,
and he still makes the occasional outrageous claim with a straight face, relying on my relative inexperience with Thropirelem’s history and culture.

After a moment’s reflection, though, I realize that what he’s saying makes perfect sense. Nobody ever came up with the idea of robots here, because a real version already existed: golems. They’re mystical, not mechanical, but conceptually they’re virtually the same thing; they’re manufactured, they’re inorganic, they’re used mainly for repetitive labor or as weapons.

“Oh my God,” I say, putting down my coffee. “You guys don’t have robots. No R2-D2, no Gort, no Robby. No Data or Hymie or Optimus Prime. Wow.”

“Yeah, it’s a real tragedy. My grief is somewhat alleviated by not knowing what the hell you’re talking about.”

“I feel like I just discovered a whole branch of your family you didn’t even suspect existed.”

“Lems don’t have families.”

He says it bluntly, like it’s a self-evident fact that he has no personal connection to. I’m not fooled. I can tell when he’s trying to hide something.

“Well, now you do,” I say. “Okay, they live a long distance away, and speak a different language, but just think of them as relatives from the old country. Part of your heritage.”

“Heritage, huh? So these ‘robots’ have been around a long time? Longer than lems?”

“Oh, sure. C-3PO was built a
long
time ago. And far, far away, for that matter.”

Charlie frowns. “Far away from what?”

“From, uh, here. I mean, all the robots I mentioned are from my reality, so they’re
all
far, far away. Obviously.”

“Obviously. So what, exactly,
is
a robot?”

“It’s a machine. Usually humanoid, but not always. Some look like garbage cans on wheels.”

“How inspiring.”

“No, no.” I finish my coffee and signal the waiter for a refill. “Most robots are
impressive
. Take the Transformers, for instance. We’re talking fifty-foot-tall guys made out of steel and electronics and machinery. Walking engines of destruction.”

“Like military lems. Grizzly units.”

“Yeah, exactly! Except bigger and able to fly. And blow stuff up from a distance.”

“Huh. That does sound kind of impressive. But I don’t get the name: Transformers. What is it they transform into?”

I blink. “Um. All kinds of things.”

“Like what?”

“It depends. They’re all different.”

“Give me an example.”

I try to desperately come up with one that isn’t ridiculous, but I can’t remember any of their names except their leader. “Well, there’s Optimus Prime. He turns into…”

“What?”

“A truck.”

Charlies raises one hairless eyebrow. “A truck?”

“A really
big
truck.”

“It’d have to be.”

“A tractor-trailer rig, actually. You know, a semi? With a big trailer on the back?”

“Uh-huh.” He’s looking at me intently now. “So this fifty-foot, flying killer robot turns into a
truck
. Towing a
trailer
.”

“Well, yes.”

“Why?”

I feel like I’ve been lured into an inquiry about Santa Claus by a six-year-old. “To fool people,” I say weakly. “Because they aren’t just robots. They’re robots in
disguise
.”

Charlie leans back and considers this. “Yeah, I can see that,” he murmurs.

I’m trying desperately to come up with a way to change the subject before Charlie decides to unravel my logic a little further when I’m saved by the unlikely appearance of a thrope dressed in the brown, short-pants uniform of a delivery guy. He comes straight over to our table and says, “Hi. Got a delivery for a Jace Valchek?”

I study him carefully. “How’d you know who I was?”

“I was gonna deliver it to your room, but the guy at the front desk said you were eating in here with a lem, and here you are. Sign here.”

Charlie takes the package while I scrawl my signature on one of those electronic clipboards. The guy thanks me and leaves.

“Seems legit,” Charlie says. “Label says it’s from Canada Customs.”

The package is about two and a half feet long by a foot wide, and the weight is familiar. I grin and rip it open, revealing the polished wooden case I keep my scythes in. They’re inside and seem none the worse for wear. “How about that. Funado is a god of his word.”

“We should still have Eisfanger give them the once-over, make sure they haven’t been messed with.”

“Good thought. Paranoid, but good.”

“Paranoia is just the bastard child of fear and good sense.”

“Poor thing. Let’s adopt it, give it a last name and raise it right.”

“You want to get it a puppy, too?”

“Sure. We’ll call it Panic. It and little Paranoia can play together at the park and scare the hell out of all the other kids.”

My breakfast arrives at the same time Eisfanger does. He orders a huge meal himself, then scoops up the scythes and runs them back upstairs to check them out for any enchantments or spells that might be attached. He times it perfectly, strolling back into the restuarant just as his order shows up, by which time I’m halfway through my own. Charlie’s hiding from the carnage behind a newspaper.