Chapter 70
l looked up as Infantile Me booted her way through my
mahogany doors. Mahogany! The idiot child had no comprehension what
such things cost these days.
“Ah, yes, you’re off.
No, I’m not going to tell you where Jessica and Tina are. And as
I’m sure Marc told you, Sinclair isn’t available to you at this
time.”
“Marc didn’t tell me
shit. He was too busy channeling Ted Bundy, George W. Bush, and the
guys from Queer Eye. He’s pretty
stylin’ for a sociopath.”
Ah, that was
unfortunate. Marc was a tool these days and nothing more. But the
chisel can turn in the sculptor’s hand. He’d gone off the
reservation, mentally, before he could impart the information I
needed Juvenile Me to have.
“He’s having an off
century,” I said, feigning disinterest. “Thank you for stopping in.
So sorry you can’t stay, goodbye—grrkk!”
I’d said grrkk because Insane Me had darted across my
carpet, lunged across my desk (my
desk!), and hauled me to my feet by the throat. I didn’t mind that
nearly as much as I worried for my boucle dress. Such things were
difficult to come by these days, and it didn’t matter what year it
was: once wool was stretched, it never went back. “Stop that!” I
gurgled, kicking. I felt one of my flailing feet smash over a
filing cabinet and reminded myself those files were more priceless
than firewood.
“What did you do?”
Toddler Me shouted. “Or what didn’t you do! Tell me!”
“This—is
not—correct!” How could she be doing this? I
didn’t remember doing this! “You’re not—sticking—to the
script”
“Sucks to be you,
then, I guess,” Preschool Me said with a noted lack of
sympathy.
The most maddening
thing? I didn’t dare fight back. I couldn’t risk causing a fatal
injury. I had so much experience, centuries worth of knowledge, not
to mention being the most powerful vampire in the history of the
undead. It would be too easy to kill her. And as I had learned over
the years, it was difficult to raise the undead.
Raising the
dead.
Yes. I knew how to
handle this. And it would give the stupid child something to ponder
when she was back in the twenty-first century, struggling with a
sudoku puzzle.
I took my hands from
her wrists, wrenched us sideways, and managed to stab the button on
the left side of my electronic blotter. The rear door to my office
slid open, and as always, the zombie was preceded by her
smell.
Betsy dropped me and
backed off at once, as I’d anticipated. “Oh my God!” she shrieked, hands clapped over her mouth.
“What the hell is that?”
“One of the shambling
undead, naturally.” I straightened the neckline of my dress.
“You’re fortunate you didn’t smudge me. And still, it hasn’t
occurred to you to take a shower? Be shamed, slob.”
“I’m shamed?
I’m shamed? Why do you have a
zombie lurking in a secret compartment
behind your office that opens when you push a button on your big,
ugly desk?”
I handed the zombie a
subdrive (the size of a dime, the knowledge of worlds) and said,
“Take this to Ops.”
One of her fingers
fell off, and, when she clutched the subdrive, we could hear her
remaining fingers squirting and squashing. I smiled to hear Betsy’s
horrified groan. My zombie—the wife of one of our heating
engineers, and how silly was it that in all this time, there was
still no cure for cancer?—shuffled past Betsy and out the main
double doors.
“What, I should just
leave the dead in the ground? When they can’t freeze to death? When
they take orders so beautifully, don’t feel pain, and don’t call in
sick? You want me to waste a human on chores like
this?”
“Waste a human? Do
you hear yourse—wait. Where do they come from?”
“Sorry,” I said,
which was a pure lie. “Privileges of rank. You’ll figure it out
eventually. The Queene shall noe the dead, all
the dead, and neither shall they hide from her nor keep secrets
from her.”
The smile fell off my
face when she snapped, “Yeah, and noe the dead
and keep the dead. That’s how you interpreted that awful
book? You figured out how to raise zombies? Stop me if you haven’t
heard this in the last few hundred years, but what is wrong with you?”
“Run along,” I said
coldly. “I could never make you understand.”
“Yeah? Well, I
understand that I can kick the shit out of you pretty much at will,
and you don’t dare hurt me back.”
“I will dare. Dare
and more,” I muttered. “There are ways to keep you off me that
won’t kill you.”
“Then bring it,
cow.”
I tried to recall the
last time someone had dared insult me to my face. Or even behind my
back (among other functions, fresher zombies could repeat overheard
conversations verbatim ... they were my all-seeing eyes, the rotten
darlings).
To my annoyance, she
had called my bluff. I sat behind my desk, my hand resting close to
the zombie button. That, at least, wasn’t a bluff. I had raised
another dozen or so only last week. They wouldn’t be too decayed to
move for at least another three days.
“Run along, little
girl.”
“What’d you do to my
husband, you fucking sick zombie groupie?”
“My husband’s whereabouts are none of your concern.”
Had she really called me a groupie?
“Where are Tina and
Jessica? And elderly Laura? And why are you letting Marc walk
around like that? You might be dead inside, you might have crummy
color-coordinating skills in your decrepit old age, but you have to
see he’s dangerous, he’s unpredictable, and he’ll probably be the
end of you.”
Good points, all. It
was refreshing, seeing the occasional flash of logic Infantile Me
was capable of. Certainly only a very old vampire would ever have
any hope of killing me. Fortunately, Marc was too far gone to rally
any troops. And one-on-one, as he had found out nine hundred years
ago, he had no chance.
In retrospect, I
shouldn’t have kept him sealed in a coffin draped with rosaries for
so long. I’d wanted him broken, but I hadn’t anticipated he would
go insane. It had only been for fifty years, for God’s sake. I
still remember the disappointment I felt when I realized I had
overestimated his resolve, grit, and discipline. I’d expected more
from a physician . . .
“What do you want,
Betsy?”
“What do you
think I want, you psycho shithead?” she
cried. I didn’t like to admit it, but being insulted like this was
almost refreshing. “I want you to not be a psycho shithead! I want
you to go back in time and undo whatever the hell happened to Marc!
He was your friend, you nasty cow! He
was devoted to you!”
I stared at myself,
my stupid, infantile, foolish self. I was red faced (a good trick
for someone who’s blood moves sluggishly at best). I was out of
control. If I’d been able to cry, I would have been
bawling.
“I don’t know if you
did it or Tina or Sinclair, but you should have saved him! And if
you couldn’t, you should have taken the head of anyone who
dared touch a friend of the vampire
queen.”
“You have noticed Tina’s absence,” I said quietly,
arranging the antique pens on my desk.
That shut her up.
Alas, not for long. “I don’t believe you. Or maybe I do. I can’t do
anything about it now. But you should be ashamed, not me. You let
all this happen, and for what? So you could stay
safe?”
“Not at all.” I
paused. Was I going to do this crazy thing? I had no memory of this
conversation. My memories of this chaotic time were of realizing we
were all living in a tampered time line. My memories were of seeing
the future with horror and running back to my own time as quickly
as possible. I didn’t confront myself. This nasty little scene
never happened. Laura and I had slunk home when we thought no one
was looking. “So my son could stay safe.”
She paused, then
shook her head. “Don’t pretend you did all those things because you
were trying for Mom of the Year.”
“I never pretend,” I
said evenly. “I lost my taste for it once the death toll reached
ten million.”
What was I doing? If I was going to match her
recklessness, why not just tell her everything? Tina’s betrayal,
Sinclair’s weakness. What I had allowed to happen to so many
people.
Satan’s last, great
gift to me. A page from the Book of the Dead flashed in my mind’s
eye.
“The Morningstar shalt appear before her own chylde, shalt help with the taking of the Worlde, and shalt appear before the Queene in all the raiments of the dark.”
She had. She
certainly had. And then some.
“The Queene’s sister shalt be Belov’d of the Morningstar, and shalt take the Worlde.”
And let us not forget
my favorite truism: “The Queene shalt see
oceans of blood, and despair.”
l had. And I had.
So what was I doing
now? Why was I tolerating her interference ? Thinking there was an
alternative . . . it was more of that residual weakness. The last
part of me that was still squirming and alive. The last part to be
smashed like a snake.
The last
environmental specialist had broadcast his findings to a shocked
world. And when he’d finished, he had said something I’d never
forgotten: “This is no world for cold-blooded
animals.”
Fool.