He backed down the steps, watched the woman on the table, his mouth hanging open, eyes wide. He waited.
At last, she sat up, swung her legs around slowly to stand on the floor. She looked at her own hand. It shook. She blinked away tears in her eyes. “Alive. Oh, my God. After a thousand years, walking the earth as undead.” She laughed and cried at the same time.
“Allen, I’m alive again.”
“They’re dead!” Father Paul yelled.
He pumped a shell into the chamber and blasted a load of buckshot into the zombies that crowded the room. They kept coming, dozens of them, crawling over one another to reach the priests and the girls.
The zombies were half skeletal, leather chunks of flesh dropping off as they attacked. Mouths half full of yellow-brown teeth chewing at nothing.
Starkes and Father Paul kept pumping buckshot into the crowd, limbs and bits of flesh and teeth flying. Undead corpses piled up at their feet. A half dozen zombies surged past the priests to attack the girls.
Penny screamed.
A skeletal hand grabbed Amy by the shoulder. She gasped and jumped back. The zombie’s arm came loose, hanging from her shoulder, where it still held on.
“I think the warranty has expired on these things.” Amy pried the fingers from her shoulder. She used the zombie arm as a club, swung hard, knocking its undead head across the room. It bounced off a tomb, rolled around on the floor.
Penny kicked the leg of the zombie closest to her. The leg snapped and the zombie fell into a pile of bones and dried flesh. “She’s right. These things are… well, kind of pathetic.”
Amy reached into a zombie’s mouth, pried out a tooth. “Souvenir.”
Father Paul stopped firing the shotgun. The zombies crowded around him, pawed feebly at his chest. “Okay, this is just silly. These things have been decaying for centuries. They might as well be made out of tissue paper. Push them out of the way and let’s get going.”
They shoved the zombies aside, pushing them into piles of bones, kicking legs out from under them. They entered the hole Father Paul and Starkes had knocked into the wall, trudged through the dark passage beyond until they heard the sound of rushing water ahead.
Cassandra descended the dais steps to stand in front of Allen. She was as beautiful as ever, but there was something different about her too. A flush of pink in her cheeks. She touched Allen’s face with warm fingers.
She was alive. She was a woman.
“You can’t know what it was like, Allen.” Her smile was warm, genuine. “Walking around, half cold to life, only half feeling everything that was happening to me.” She ran both her hands over Allen’s chest. “I can feel you. I mean really feel you, one human being to another.” A pained expression struck her face. She looked away. “All the things I’ve done. A vampire can’t feel remorse, Allen. God, I’ve done such terrible things. But I’m going to live now. It’ll be different. Never again will I-”
A line of warm, red blood trickled from her left nostril. She wiped it away, surprised. “It must be some side effect. But look. It’s warm. My blood is warm and human. Allen, this is the best thing that’s ever-”
Another trickle of blood from the other nostril. Cassandra wiped it away, smearing red across her lips.
“Are you okay?” Allen asked.
“I don’t know.” She blinked, and blood ran from the corners of her eyes. She wiped it away, looked at the blood on her hands. “Something’s wrong.”
Do you remember when I used the machine to bring the emperor’s cousin back to life? I suppose now is a good time to show you everything that happened.
Pay attention.
1601
Kelley looked at the cousin’s smooth face again. Had he deserved to die so young? Was he a good person? Kelley had never met him in life. Maybe God had selected him for death. Perhaps he was wicked and cruel, and it was a kindness to the world to be rid of him. Who was Kelley to decide his life or death? Kelley tried to convince himself he wasn’t deciding anything. Roderick had built the machine. Rudolph had given the orders.
Kelley was simply pulling the levers.
“What’s happening over there?” Rudolph called from behind the wall.
Kelley frowned, ignoring the emperor.
The alchemist circled to the other side of the dais, where a row of twenty levers connected to gears and pulleys and flywheels. He pulled the first lever, and the sound of rushing water filled the cavern. The waterwheel turned, slowly at first, then more rapidly. The other levers determined the order of the lenses, the flow of light, lowering the whole apparatus. It all had to be done in the exact order. Kelley had been over the scribbled instructions in his journal a thousand times. He knew the procedure by heart.
“Do you hear me?” shouted the emperor. “What’s happening?”
Shut up, you lunatic. I’m working.
Kelley began to pull levers. The lenses lowered, surrounded the table. Overhead, gears meshed. Powered by the waterwheel, they began to spin. The big lens in the middle lowered until it was directly over the emperor’s cousin, three feet from his chest. Portals opened overhead. Sunlight from above, reflected and reflected through lenses and mirrors, poured through the shafts, struck the lenses brilliantly white.
Kelley had expected it, but he flinched anyway.
Rudolph stuck his head around the corner and squinted into the light. “Damn you, alchemist. Don’t you hear me talking to you?”
“If you want to live, Highness, get back behind the protective barrier.”
Rudolph frowned but ducked back behind the lead wall.
Arrogant fool. Hatred and resentment swelled within Kelley. Who was this insane ruler to defy the will of God, to squander the resources of an empire for his mad schemes? How many had died and suffered for Rudolph’s vanity? Kelley’s need to defy the emperor compelled him at that moment like no other force on earth, his need to rebel palpable.
Kelley glanced back over his shoulder. Rudolph and his men could not see him, would not witness what he was about to do. Roderick’s words floated through Kelley’s mind. Everything must be exact. Perfect. The smallest thing can ruin it all, prevent the light beams from flowing properly.
Kelley put his hand down the back of his pants and stuck his thumb up his own ass. He wiggled it around where it was moist and warm. He brought his hand out again, then stuck his thumb in the dead center of the lens hanging over the emperor’s cousin. Kelley’s every thought was bent on hatred for Rudolph. Kelley mashed his thumb hard against the glass, leaving a big, greasy thumbprint.
Fuck your immortality.
Not my most mature moment. But effective.
It seems the sweat and fecal matter had hardened over the years, the thumbprint crystallizing on the surface of the lens. Such a small thing, the tiniest imperfection. But it caused the beam to be off, kept the lens from doing its job exactly right. Roderick would have been able to explain the physics, would have been able to talk of particles and waves. I only know what happened in the simplest terms.
I fucked things up.
FIFTY-TWO
“Allen, help me!”
Cassandra clung to him, panic in her eyes. Blood spilled from her ears, left bright red trails down her white skin. An eyeball popped and oozed.
Allen backed away, shaking his head, eyes wide and horrified. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”
“What went wrong? I can’t believe this.” Bitterness laced Cassandra’s voice. “All the time and effort. So many plans.” The skin under her eyes came loose, began to slide down her face. “Damn it. This is bulls-”
Her bottom jaw fell off, landed with a wet splat on the cavern floor. Teeth knocked loose rattled on the stone. The rest of the skin melted off her body, revealing organs and bone, a beating heart.
Allen screamed. He took a dozen steps backward but was unable to avert his eyes. He was transfixed by the woman coming apart in front of him.
Cassandra cried a final, strangled scream before collapsing into a pile of steaming meat.
There was no psychotherapy on earth that would ever erase that image from Allen’s mind, but he felt something unclench in his chest, a veil lift from his eyes. He was free.
Cassandra was gone, and Allen was in possession of his own soul once again.
Father Paul led them over the dam, down the narrow stairs to the stream below, kept walking until the waterwheel came into view. He saw flickering torchlight. Someone was definitely down here. He kept his shotgun ready, motioned for the others behind him to stay alert.
He spotted Allen sitting on the bottom step of a raised dais, strange gizmos hanging over him, big glass discs. This must have been the machine he’d described before.
Father Paul jogged toward Allen. “Are you okay? We came as fast as we-what the hell is THAT?” He backed away from the still-melting heap of flesh and bone.
The others arrived and saw it too. Penny groaned. Amy turned away, made a gagging sound but managed to refrain from vomiting.
“That’s Cassandra,” Allen told them. “Or what’s left of her. She’d wanted to use the machine on herself all along. I guess she was tired of being a vampire, wanted to be human again. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I felt sorry for her. I saw the whole thing. She came apart right before my eyes. It was awful, the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”