Tommy Nightmare(97)

“Hello, sweetheart,” Alexander said. “Want to take a walk?”

He laid a hand on her neck. The dark energy flowed out of him, carrying droplets of Alexander's essence into the dead cells of her corpse.

He opened another drawer, revealing a young man with a bullet wound through the chest, his jersey shirt stiff with dried brown blood. Another drawer held an elderly man who might have died of natural causes. Another held a shrunken boy of eleven or twelve with a shaved head.

“What are you doing?” The older morgue assistant approached him, and his green-haired protégé trailed behind him, looking embarrassed. “Where’s your ID badge?”

“Don't you recognize me?” Alexander tugged down the face mask and gave him a big, crazy smile.

“You a student?” the older man asked.

“No,” Alexander said. In his mind, he made contact with the bits of energy he'd planted within the bodies around him. “You work with me every day, side by side. You must know who I am.”

The green-haired assistant approached, standing beside his supervisor with his arms crossed. He was a short and wiry guy, but he looked ready to fight.

“Stop messing with my bodies,” the older man said. “You tell me who the hell you are and what the hell you’re doing or you get the hell out of my morgue.” He pointed to the door. “In fact, let’s just skip to that last part.”

“I am simply carrying out my business,” Alexander said. “And as for my name, I've had far more than I can remember.”

Alexander held up a hand, and the dozen dead bodies slowly sat up behind him.

“I am the vulture circling above from the moment of your birth. I am the eternal force that eats the souls of men and sends the damned to their final suffering.” The dead bodies slid off their tables and staggered toward the mortuary assistants. “I am Death, destroyer of worlds.”

The dozen reanimated corpses lurched toward the two men, their bare feet shuffling forward one step at a time, their toe tags scraping along the linoleum floor. The corpses raised their arms high above their heads, with their hands hanging limp in the air like they were marionette dolls. All the walking dead dropped their jaws wide open and groaned in unison, shambling closer to the morgue assistants.

Both of the morgue assistants screamed and ran away.

Alexander laughed. He mentally ordered his walking zombies to stop where they were, and they locked up as if playing freeze tag.

He opened more drawers, touched and animated more bodies. Some of them were quite diseased, or a bit gory and mangled, but that didn't matter. He was taking them all. And then he’d be on his way.





Chapter Forty-Four


Seth pulled at the rope with his right hand, which pulled his left hand back against the headboard. Then he pulled with his left hand, and his right snapped back.

“What the hell?” Seth said to the naked blond girl on top of him. “Help me get out of this!”

“But I like it,” Allegra frowned.

“I have to go!” Seth said. “That was Jenny! My girlfriend!”

“I don’t think she’s your girlfriend anymore.” Allegra giggled. “You’re funny.”

“I’m serious here.” Seth looked up at his bound hands. He couldn’t see them very well when they were close together, so he pulled his right wrist to his face. They were tied with a dense clump of small knots. “Can you cut me loose or something? Look for a knife.”

“You want to leave me?” Allegra asked.

“Yeah, look, I don’t know what happened here, but this was not a good—”

“I’ll tell you what happened.” Allegra laid down on top of him and kissed him. “First, we met.” She kissed him again. “And then we came here.” She kissed him again, and she reached between his legs and took him in her hand. “And then…”

“Stop it.” Seth shivered. The girl had some weird hold over him. It almost reminded him of Ashleigh.

In fact, he realized, she almost reminded him of Ashleigh.

“You have to help me out.” Seth used the fingers of his right hand to pick at the hard little knots binding his left. He couldn’t pull anything loose. The girl was some kind of knot-tying genius.

“Please,” Seth said.

“Please what?” She kissed him again. “Tell me how to please you.”

“Let me go,” Seth said. “That would please me.”

“No, I’m never going to let you go.” She kept kissing him. “Never, never, never…”





Ashleigh stood between Tommy and Esmeralda on the balcony of their fifth-floor room at the Mandrake House. Below, the street was thick with festival-goers, but the police presence had swelled from an occasional blue uniform to several squad cars, each of them trundling slowly through different parts of the crowd, occasionally shining a spotlight into the park.