Divine Fire (20 page)

Brice wrinkled her nose and set the laptop aside. The bathroom looked fabulous, but the cleaning crew really needed to visit more regularly. It smelled as if something had died in one of the stalls and—

“Oh, shit!” She jumped off the counter and reached for her gun. A part of her couldn’t believe that she managed to locate and draw it without shooting herself.

There came a familiar wheezing, the sort of whistling sound that can happen when two pieces of pipe get misaligned and a breeze passes over them.

No, no, no,
she prayed.
Go the other way!
But the whistling grew louder. It stopped right outside the bathroom door. The stink had grown even stronger.

It can’t get in
. It was a thick, heavy door, and she had the key. She and Damien had checked. The door was locked. And it was built of solid oak panels, the hardware made of heavy brass. It would take an elephant to break it down. And anyway, the zombie couldn’t know she was here.

There came a scrape and a creak, and then, impossibly, the scream of splitting wood.

The whistling grew louder. The creature was in the room. With her. On the other side of the bank of stalls!

Brice’s mouth was dry with terror as her stalker rounded the bank and shambled toward her, but she didn’t panic, not even when its long, doglike tongue flicked out and passed quickly over its scaly mouth and jowls.

It’s not really human
, she thought, aiming her pistol.
Not human at all. You can do this
.

Still, she hesitated for a moment. Her handgun could deliver a heart-stopping dose of lead—but would that be effective? If Dippel’s journal was truthful, stopping the heart didn’t mean stopping his creature. Not right away. As sick as the idea made her, Brice followed Damien’s harsh advice and brought the pistol up until it was level with the thing’s uneven head. She didn’t look into its eyes, not wanting to see if there was anyone at home there. She took a last deep breath and then, without any of the standard police stop-or-I’ll-shoot warnings, she pulled the trigger.

When the first bullet had no effect except to open up a small hole in the creature’s left forehead, she lowered her aim just slightly and shot again. And again.

Soon the head was ruined, but the creature kept walking toward her. She moved her aim down about forty degrees and pulled the trigger until all the bullets were gone. The creature finally toppled over about five feet away from her.

“Holy hell.” Brice sagged against the counter. The stench of gunpowder filled her nose, for a moment overriding the creature’s stink. Her ears rang and her legs felt weak.

She understood now what they meant by time standing still in an emergency. It couldn’t have taken her a minute—half a minute—to have shot the creature with everything in her gun. Yet those seconds just past had seemed like hours.

It was swell that the body had eventually fallen—after she’d switched from the ruined head to shooting the legs. The thing had not, however, stopped twitching and flexing its hands. It still wasn’t dead.

“What are you?” she whispered.

She started forward slowly, unable to look away. Her mouth may have been dry before, but now it was flooded with saliva, proclaiming her nausea just in case she hadn’t already noticed her upset stomach. Between the gunshots and this thing’s noisy exhalations—it was slightly quieter with the vocal cords gone, but still too loud—escape was proving a noisy, smelly process. It seemed that this creature wasn’t going to bleed to death quietly like a decent zombie should.

“Shut up,” Brice begged it, trying to listen for sounds of other monsters who might have heard the gunfire and been drawn to the area. All she could hear was the wheezing and the hum of insects—blowflies. They were already gathering. They had probably already been here, riding the walking corpse.

The thought was too much. Brice gagged. She turned toward the sink and let her stomach have its way.

Eventually the spasm subsided. Hands shaking, Brice stood up and reloaded her pistol with the last of the spare bullets Damien had given her. The strange pistol carried only eight.

Only eight!
That should have been adequate to any occasion she would ever face. It was hardly fair to fault the designers for not anticipating the situation she was currently in. Still, she wished she had something with more ammo and more power—an Uzi maybe.

Brice stared with intense concentration, slotting each bullet carefully, waiting for the zombie to die; willing it to give up the struggle and stop moving.

But the creature didn’t comply. It was still twitching, still trying to move when she had the gun reloaded. She thought about shooting it some more, but suspected it wouldn’t do any more good than the first magazine of bullets had done. She could shoot it into a dozen pieces and it would still move. And the noise might attract the wrong kind of attention—assuming she had escaped that so far.

“Damien,” she whispered, looking about quickly. The word was a prayer. “Please hurry.”

The body twitched violently at the sound of her voice and tried to sit up. Brice stepped back. It twitched again.

It is trying to get to me! Still!

Feeling panicky, Brice backed out of the bathroom through the broken door. The panel was split, cracked down the middle, and the wood scraped at her legs and tried to pull her robe away where the rough edge snagged.

Somehow the creature sensed where she was and spun what was left of its head toward her. A hand groped in her direction, and the body seemed intent on rolling onto its hands and what remained of its knees.

Should she shoot it some more?

No, she might need her eight bullets for someone—some
thing
—else.

But she had to stop it! She needed to get to Damien, and she couldn’t go up those dark stairs alone if she knew the thing would come crawling after her. It might attract other creatures as well—others that weren’t really dead. She could end up with a whole parade of zombies following her through the dark.

A padded chair stopped her backward progress. Clipped in the back of the knees, she sat abruptly, and rolled into a nearby desk with a small crash. Swiveling around quickly, she opened the nearest desk drawer, looking for another weapon or rope, a flashlight, anything—but just as Damien had discovered on their previous visit, there was nothing to be had. Just scissors, pens, papers, lipstick, a set of false nails, some kind of super nail glue…

Nail adhesive. Three tubes of it. Brice reached for the package of white tubes.
Waterproof, peel-proof, stick it and it stays, the world’s best nail glue,
it said.

“Will it work?” She hoped it lived up to its billing. There wasn’t any rope, and she needed to make sure that this thing didn’t get up and follow her.

She laughed once, a sound rough and devoid of any amusement. She stopped immediately, frightened by the hysterical sound.

Pulling open the package, Brice turned her chair back toward the twitching corpse, wondering what part of it she should glue to the floor. It was on its side, and only the ruined feet were still moving. Okay, hands and head seemed best. The nose was mostly intact and would make a good anchor. And for good measure, she’d glue the damaged right eyelid shut if anything was left of it.

A part of her felt sick at what she was doing. It was the smell—what a horrible stench, and getting worse all the time—but also at the idea of desecrating the dead.

Only, it wasn’t exactly dead. It was
undead
. Another legend had come to life for her. Wasn’t she a lucky girl? She’d remember this moment forever. There was nothing like shooting a zombie to leave a lasting impression on a stressed-out brain.

“Hell, I could end up in tabloids.” Her hands shook as she pulled off the cap of the nail glue tube, then inserted the sharp end into the tip, breaking the seal. A pungent, chemical smell drifted up to her nose. Brice welcomed it—anything was better than the smell of the monster.

“Just do it.” But she still hesitated, revulsion and fear making her reluctant and slow.

And there was something else too. It was that religious quagmire opening up in front of her again. It was all in her head, but it kept her stranded as surely as real quicksand would have done. She had to find a way to negotiate it.

Brice exhaled slowly.
Fine.
She could do this. She had become a master at using logic and rationalization.

To begin with, she had to believe that this creature—or rather, conglomeration of creatures—should be dead. In fact, whatever its movements, that it was already dead in every way that counted.

Therefore, she hadn’t murdered it. She’d shot it, but that wasn’t murder. She had really done it a favor, hastening it to a return to its natural state. She was not marked like Cain. And what she was doing now was not being done to a live person. This wasn’t a puppy or a baby or anything else alive. It was a dead monster. Gluing it to the floor wasn’t desecration, it was self-defense. Just as shooting the thing had been.

“I had to. I have to,” she said softly, making her voice firm and convincing.

Her childhood beliefs said that God was supposed to be merciful and all-forgiving. This monster wouldn’t be blamed for what Dippel had done to it. There should be a place for him—all of them—in heaven once the soul was forced away. Surely it would depart soon.

Was she sure about that?

Mostly.

But if there weren’t any accommodations there, or in hell, then she had to make sure that this thing didn’t come back to the earthly plane and follow her with its hideous, twitching body.

The quagmire slowly subsided and Brice could again see her way. She stood up slowly and started for the bathroom, eyes fixed on the shuddering ruin squirming toward the threshold. It was growing excited, agitated by her presence.

“I can do this,” she whispered, putting conviction in her voice. But before she had taken five steps toward the shattered door, something black and heavy fell over her head. Brice never even had time to scream.

Chapter Sixteen

One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if mine gets out, I’ll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again.

—Byron

As long as men believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.

—Voltaire

Brice awoke slowly. Her first thought was that someone had been using her mouth as a lint trap on a dryer. Her second thought was that her situation was probably worse than that.

She didn’t want to do it, but she forced open her dry eyes. It took them a moment to focus. When they did, she regretted her decision to rejoin the waking world.

“I am Johann Conrad Dippel,” the monster said, enunciating each word carefully.

Brice tried to answer but couldn’t.

The clock on the wall said it was 4:22—he’d been gone twenty minutes. Only twenty minutes, but the twitching corpse on the floor said he was likely too late. Dippel had probably gotten Brice.

They could now use the rotary phone to summon help. Had it been worth it?

Wanting to be certain that he had overlooked no clue—
blood; her blood, don’t you mean?
—Damien dropped to the floor and searched carefully. He found the casings from spent shells. Brice had obviously emptied her pistol into this creature to stop him. Shots to the head and to the knees, all well placed. That meant she hadn’t been too panicked to defend herself.

It was also a reassuring sign that there was no fresh blood anywhere, only the brown clotted stuff that the zombies bled.

Damien sighed, feeling slightly relieved. Brice hadn’t been hurt in the fight here—not enough to bleed. And the fact that she had been willing to defend herself said that she hadn’t been lost to blind terror; it was just possible that she had managed to get away before Dippel found her.

Kneeling, Damien found a tube of nail glue under the twitching corpse’s pantleg. He felt his heart contract as nascent hope died. Nail glue. An open tube. That was ingenious. Since it wasn’t likely that Brice had been taking time out to repair a broken nail, it seemed a good guess that she’d been intent on gluing this zombie to the floor so it couldn’t follow her.

But since she hadn’t finished the job, it seemed likely that someone had interrupted her while she was working.

The list of candidates wasn’t pleasant. Try as he might, Damien couldn’t bring himself to believe that she’d found an overdedicated Santa Claus, an overlooked janitor, or a third security guard doing his rounds.

Damien stood slowly, noticing the veil of disturbed vapor that hovered near his skin. He marveled that his body could be hot enough to cause steam when he felt so cold inside.

He also realized that he needed the bathroom. How could his bladder intrude at such a moment?

But that was the body for you—always needing something. Of course, you had to give it what it needed if you were to ask extraordinary things of it. And he would be asking.

Damien stepped into the nearest stall. He was calm. He didn’t hurry. But all around him, the cool air boiled as he made his plans.

“He must come. He wants you, and he was always foolishly brave.” Dippel spoke from behind the desk. The doctor used English, but it was heavily accented with German. The distorted voice echoed around her. It radiated insanity as surely as the sun shed light—and as effortlessly.

But Brice did not feel warm. Something about Dippel—perhaps his vaguely chemical smell—made her feel deathly cold. His repeated chopping at her manuscript and other documents with a surgical saw didn’t help her nerves either. It put him in a class with book burners. In her opinion, a man who would destroy books was capable of anything.

At least he hadn’t touched Ninon’s letters. Yet. But he was working his way toward them.

Brice began to rock her wrists back and forth, trying to loosen her bonds. It didn’t seem to have any effect, but she’d seen enough movies to know that she had to keep trying.

“So much time wasted,” the doctor muttered. “Always, always, there are people trying to stop me.”

Brice looked across the room. There was another source of uneasiness. Dippel had built up the fire in the grate until it was dangerously large. She’d have to speak to Damien about this. Such a fire was hazardous in a high-rise. Why hadn’t he converted to gas logs?

She was trying not to think about the ox roast she had attended in England. There were no oxen or livestock of any kind in this skyscraper, yet the image persisted. It took effort to not start down the path of speculation about what else could be roasted in the flames. A library? A man? A woman? All of the above? She hoped her nervousness wasn’t flickering in her eyes. Showing fear would probably be unwise.

“I think I have spiders in my brain,” Dippel said suddenly. “I can feel them…crawling. They may be eating it. I feel so empty sometimes. It’s the hippocampus, I’m sure. It shows rapid deterioration in some subjects—possibly because they were altered after death. But perhaps because the process cannot be continued forever.”

Since he had gagged her, Brice assumed that she wasn’t expected to answer this alarming observation. She wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. If his brain was filled with spiders, her brain felt like cottage cheese. This was a step beyond the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Panic and unreason were nigh. She’d been making some heavy withdrawals from the banked funds of rationality during the last twenty-four hours, and that wasn’t an account with overdraft protection. If she crossed the line, would she end up insane too?

Suddenly she remembered the old saw about how for writers there were no bad experiences, it was all just material for the next book.

Oh, God! Let me live to write this story!

Dippel spoke. “I had so many rehearsals—Byron among them—before I was able to perfect my technique for creating these wonderful foot soldiers. They are almost perfect now, don’t you think? Just their brains have failed to improve. If only I had more time…Bah! I cannot regret now. At least they should be sterile. Not that any of my soldiers has ever evidenced any interest in reproduction. Not like my living subjects.” He turned and glared, but not at her.
Through
her. He began to pace. His voice was anguished as he went on.

“Your eyes accuse me. But understand that this isn’t what I want. I have to destroy my life’s work. It’s a huge sacrifice, but I understand now that there’ll be no place for me in heaven while my blasphemies yet live. I shall never know salvation. It’s in the Epistle to the Romans—sanctification through repentance. It’s the only way. I must return myself to grace before my brain is gone.”

He stared at her intently before again turning away. “My foot soldiers don’t matter. They don’t know how they were created, don’t know how to renew themselves. They’ll die soon enough—they’re rotting where they stand, since I have stopped transfusing them and letting them feed. But my special ones—they must be killed by a certain method. It’s the only way. The only way. I’ve tried to be kind, but they’ve all fought me! They’ve made me be cruel and ruthless.” His mouth worked. The jaws creaked, a sound like rubber-soled shoes on a highly polished floor. Then the doctor said: “Judas.”

He turned to face her again. This time Dippel’s face was covered in clotted tears that looked more like slime than saline. He leaned in close, like a lover, his lips only inches from her cheek. Brice didn’t want to provoke him, but she couldn’t help recoiling. She wouldn’t want a kiss from Death, and even less did she want one from this man, if that was what he planned.

She briefly tried to feel compassion for the creature, but it was impossible when she saw the huge scalpel in his hand. He meant that for someone, and the list of possibilities was short. It was either her or Damien. His heart may not have been made in hell, but it had been fired there sometime in the last centuries. He was insane and he was evil—and irresponsible. There was no point in wasting compassion on him. It would only get in the way of anything she might have to do.

Because she
would
do something if she got the chance. Her feelings about the death penalty may have always been ambivalent, but she suddenly found the answer in this situation was very clear. There were no moral quagmires. Dippel, unlike his monsters, was definitely born human. But he had exiled himself from the realm of civilized men by committing vile deeds. And he planned another murder—maybe more than one. That meant he had to be stopped, and by any means possible. He had to die before Damien did. If Brice had to be the one to kill him, so be it. It would be a righteous killing.

Thunder boomed, making both Dippel and Brice jump. But the blizzard blowing outside was no match for the one forming within her. Brice embraced her stormy rage, hoping the power would make her strong and unafraid.

Another creature entered the room, its smell preceding it. Brice stared, fixated. She thought she had seen the worst of Dippel’s creations, but this abomination surpassed her worst nightmares. The creature looked like a wax doll—an honest-to-goodness corpse from a wax museum horror flick. But that couldn’t be. It was walking around, moving, bending, more flexible than the other one had been—and more alert. No, it had once been human. Maybe many humans.

Perhaps it was the scar that made his waxy face seem inflexible. Or perhaps it was just that the creature had been away from normal people for so long that it had forgotten how to use facial expressions. But—Brice wondered sickly—if she scratched its face, would it actually bleed, or would she just plow furrows in dead skin?

The monster grunted something, its lips barely moving. But they moved enough for her to see what was inside them as it bent over her. The jaws had been wired together at one time, and there were maggots. Dippel had apparently been in so great a hurry that he hadn’t bothered to remove the undertaker’s sutures from the creature’s mouth. He’d simply clipped them and left them there.

When Dippel finished speaking, the creature took a deep breath, snuffling Brice’s robe like a hunting dog gathering a scent. She tried not to notice the maggots that fell in her lap. The alert yellow eyes studied her for a moment, and then the monster stood up. Its movements were fast, precise. Not like the other one. This creature was…not fresher, but newer. And there was intelligence in its eyes.

What had Dippel done, raided the local morgue? The cemetery?
Brice wondered hysterically. That made sense—what else could he have done? Flown his European monsters first-class into JFK, or hidden them in trunks and hoped Customs didn’t notice anything odd?

Brice swallowed as best she could, trying not to breathe any of the air the creature brought with it. If she threw up, she might well choke on her own vomit. Dippel seemed to want her alive for now, but his ability to pay attention to reality seemed erratic at best. He might not notice her choking.

Maybe it was those spiders in his brain
, she thought. And then she wished she hadn’t. After seeing those maggots, the explanation seemed entirely too likely.