"William Mark Simmons - Undead 3 - Habeas Corpses" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons William Mark)

"Where did you get that?" I asked, sensing light gathering at the dark edges of my vision.
She held the squirming cardiac muscle toward me, oily red fluids drooling between her fingers and
sheeting down her arm. "Don't you recognize it?" She smiled demurely. "It's yours."
I looked down at the gaping dark hole in my chest . . .
And awoke in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets.
***
The upside to having daymares on a regular basis is that you stop going through that whole
disorientation phase and learn to wake up real quick. The downside was that they were lasting well past
sunset and I still woke up feeling exhausted.
I groaned out of bed, hoping I hadn't murmured Deirdre's name while Lup├й was in earshot. Even
when she's in human form, Lup├й doesn't have to be in the room to be within earshot.
In the bathroom I found a note taped to the medicine cabinet mirror.

Gone for groceries and DVDs.
Movie night tonight . . .
L~

I reached through the shower curtains and wrenched the cold water handle. Tonight was the Big
Night: I had a lot to do and I couldn't waste time trying to put a Freudian spin on today's bad dream.
Even if there was a good chance I would get my heart ripped out before the sun came back up.
***
T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" begins with: "Midwinter spring is its own season / Sempiternal though
sodden towards sundown, / Suspended in time, between pole and tropic . . ."
The dead of winter in Louisiana is something like that: short sleeves one day, a sweater the next.
Tonight, the weather hadn't made up its mind. I buckled my shoulder holster over a sleeveless tee and
shrugged into a flannel shirt but left it unbuttoned so I could reach the Glock-20 loaded with silver
frag-ammo under my left armpit. Opening the screen door, I stepped down and walked barefoot through
the January chrysalis of my new back yard. The brown, withered grass sighed beneath my feet, not quite
dead, not quite alive.
Like me, in a sense.
Except that, come true springтАФmid to late FebruaryтАФthe lawn would burst forth with new life while
I would be . . . well . . . what?
All flesh is grass but, where most folks end up succumbing to the Lawnmower of Life, some of us
cheat the mulching process and come back as ghastly perennials. Considering the last eighteen months of
my so-called half-life, there was probably a fertilizer analogy I could come up with . . . but I didn't want
to go there.
I stepped on a mushroom and felt it dissolve between my toes. Forget the green stuff; a pale,
nocturnal parasite was probably a better analogy for my condition. That's me: a real "fun guy."
Buh-dump-bum.
By now you'd think there would be a clear-cut diagnosis of my actual condition. But, no: I was left
with two starting presumptions.
One, that I actually died in the automobile accident that killed my family and was "reborn" in the
hospital morgue . . .
Or, two, that I was only presumed dead while "Virus A" from Bassarab's blood put me in a healing
trance. Lacking the combinant factors of "Virus B" that resided in the old vampire's saliva, the infection
started converting my body into something newтАФneither fully human nor technically undead.
Add to either scenario the subsequent contaminants and blood-borne pathogens from my encounters
with Kadeth Bey's tanis leaf extract and the demon-laced blood of Elizabeth B├бthoryтАФwell, the
"either/or" factor became rather hazy. And while the distinctions seemed important to some, I had to
wonder: in the end did it really matter? My wife and daughter were still dead and the Las Vegas