Deader Still

33

Compared to the last few times I had regained consciousness, waking up this time felt relatively pleasant, although what I guessed to be chloroform had given me a headache. I’d have to get myself checked out by a doctor if I got through all this. The assortment of traumas today couldn’t be good for my body.

As I struggled to rouse myself, I found it hard to breathe. I thought it might be due to the drugs, but when I opened my eyes, I found I was inside a sealed clear box myself, this one more confining. My hands stuck out of the front of it through two small, circular cutouts and were tied together on the outside. When I looked down at my arms, I realized that I wasn’t even in my own clothes anymore. Around my waist was a fake wooden table with a crystal ball on it, but above that I was wearing a shiny gold shirt and a brown vest, and in my reflection in the glass I could see I was wearing a turban with a large red jewel in it.

“What the . . . ?” I started, but my mouth was thick with spit. I swallowed. “What the hell am I doing in this getup?”

“Don’t you recognize it?” Cyrus said.

The cloud over my mind lifted a little.

“Am I . . . one of those gypsy fortune-telling machines? Like in Big?”

“Zoltar!” Cyrus said, putting his finger on the point of his nose. “Ding! Yes. Think of it, a living, breathing Zoltar machine, reading the psychic fortunes of others. It borders on genius.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m not going to participate.”

Cyrus tapped on the see-through box.

“I don’t really see where you get a choice,” he said, and then looked down at my hands.

Yes, they were tied, but they also were no longer covered. My gloves were gone.

“I’ve added a feature or two so our patrons get their money’s worth,” Cyrus said, gesturing to a button on the front of the machine. “Nothing too dangerous, mind you. Wouldn’t want to accidentally kill one of our star attractions.”

He pressed the button and a mild but slightly more than annoying electric shock ran up my leg from a metal cuff I hadn’t realized had been there until now. My teeth clamped shut, gnashing against one another in pain. My body shook with the mild dose of electricity until Cyrus released the buzzer.

“I trust that will win your cooperation,” Cyrus said, and backed away from the machine.

He studied me. I felt like an animal at the zoo.

“Perhaps we’ll need to add a little facial hair to get the look right. A goatee or a Fu Manchu.”

“Good to see you’re paying attention to the details,” I said. Muscles throughout my body twitched.

“You should see the Edward Gorey section I have planned. We’ve done the whole alphabet, a different death for all our foes.”

“I’d love a look around,” I said, then rattled my hands where they were tied, “so if you just want to undo these . . . I promise I’ll keep the swami outfit on.”

Cyrus came up to the case and started rapping on it.

“We can’t have our little Zoltar escaping on us,” he said, “not before we have a chance to see our most favorite piece of art brought to life in re-creation.”

Mad pirate Cyrus danced his way across the floor and up to the wall where The Scream hung. I could hear the sound of Mina pounding on her glass box, no doubt enraged that Cyrus was showing it off. Next to it was a contraption that was waist high and clearly meant to hold a person in it. There was more to the diorama now that had been set up while I was unconscious. There was a torture device set up in the center, a torso-high container riddled with slits, all of which had blades on the outside just waiting to be inserted.

Cyrus stood before the painting, his hand hovering over the lone figure, almost like he wanted to caress it.

“The look on this face, the pure horror, the agony . . . The real artistry here, of course, will be to re-create it as a three-dimensional vision.”

Cyrus rapped his knuckles on the top of the Pain-o-Matic machine.

“I’m sure we’ll find just the right amount of blades to get the look right on his face,” Cyrus said.

“He? He who?”

“Why, the biggest betrayer of them all, of course,” Cyrus said. “Thaddeus Wesker. All that time with the Sectarian Defense League and all the while deep cover for the Department of Extraordinary Affairs. He’s got a good time coming to him, believe me.”

I had no love for the guy, and if there was anyone in the Department who might deserve a bit of torture, it was Wesker, but honestly, even I didn’t think he guy deserved to be shish-kebabbed.

It looked like Cyrus had really given some sick, twisted thought to how he would seek his revenge on everyone he blamed over at the D.E.A. If this weren’t the project of a deranged mind, I would have been even more impressed. I kicked myself a little for having slept through the seminar “Madmen & Their Master Plans: Downfalls or Dastardly?”

Cyrus turned back to The Scream, staring deep into the face of its figure. If he started licking the painting or trying to tongue-kiss it, I was going to throw up in my little swami booth.

I sensed movement out on the rest of the exhibit floor. The chupacabra pair had turned their attention to the stacked crates over by the entrance to the room from which Mina had dragged me in. I glanced there and found further signs of movement, thankful it wasn’t the zombies who, with their master focusing on his art fixation, had gone slack from lack of command.

A single figure crept into the room. Jane.

She was dressed in jeans and a singular T-shirt that read “Brrrains . . . ” across the front of it, and carried a dark tote bag over one shoulder. In the same moment I was both thrilled and terrified to see her. The odds of her being torn apart were looking pretty high, all things considered. I started rocking back and forth in my booth to get her attention.

There was so much spectacle in the room that she didn’t see me at first. Instead, she saw Mina panicking in the glass coffin and stealthed her way across the floor toward it.

When Jane reached it, she slid along the side farthest from Cyrus as she examined the glass coffin. Mina saw her and started screaming directly at her, but thanks to the vampire-resistant strength of the glass, and being encased myself, I couldn’t make out a word she was saying.

Cyrus, however, heard Mina and turned. Even though Jane was blocked from his sight by the swirling blood and Mina’s body, it was clear something was up by the particular way Mina was freaking out in the box. In response, Cyrus incanted something and the zombies started shuffling toward the glass coffin.

I bent down as far as I could to the holes from which my hands stuck out and pressed my lips against my wrists.

“Jane!” I shouted as loud as I could. “Incoming!”

Jane peeked out from behind the coffin and looked around the room, assessing where my voice had come from. She spied me, her eyes lighting up. Then she noticed the zombies and gave up trying to hide and stepped into plain sight. Cyrus couldn’t miss her now, and sure enough he waved his hand and the zombies corrected their course, heading straight for Jane instead of the coffin.

Jane continued to look around. The only thing close to her was the power box for Mina’s holding cell. Jane slapped her hand on it before pointing toward me, emitting that piercing electronic noise I had heard first in the Oubliette. Power danced up the length of the box. It arced across the room and up the front of my display case.

Cyrus watched the whole thing with grim fascination but ran for cover, taking only long enough to incant some commands to his zombie minions.

The raw power flowed up my case and shot into the cords around my wrists. I felt electricity touch me and made sure my tongue was out of the way so I wouldn’t bite it off.

The power shocked me and the cords around my wrist burst into flames, which would have been fine had I been wearing my gloves. The smell of burning flesh, of my flesh, filled the booth, and pain I could do nothing about overtook both my hands. All I could do was wait for the cord to burn enough so that I could snap it, but the pain was intense. Seconds felt like minutes. I viciously tried to pull my hands into the booth in a desperate attempt to free them. The flaming cord snapped the glass between the two holes and my hands were inside the booth, along with the flames. The cheap vest I had been dressed in caught on fire in seconds. I gave another tug at the cord before I felt it snap.

Apart from the reinforced glass front, I noticed that the rest of the case was nothing more than the gutted remains of an actual Zoltar unit. Now that my hands were free and I could get some leverage, it was easy enough to smash through the more flimsy back of it. My jacket lay on the floor nearby, and I scooped it up, throwing it on over my charred outfit.

I looked around for Jane, spotting her near where she had come in, retreating from the swarm of zombies. Mina, on the other hand, was still trapped in her clear glass coffin. As pissed as I was at her, I just couldn’t leave her there like that.

I ran across the room and lunged for the case, throwing my weight against it.

“Brace yourself,” I shouted, hoping she got the picture even if she couldn’t hear me. Apparently she did, and she raised her arms to press out on both sides of the coffin. I ran at it again, rocking it to its tipping point, and it went over from my momentum. I landed hard on the glass, and a fraction of a second later it shattered beneath me and I came down hard on top of Mina. There was a sickening wet swirl of mist around the two of us, and although I had just had the wind knocked out of me, I resisted the urge to take a deep breath. I wanted no part of this creature somehow entering me. I grabbed Mina and rolled the two of us out of it, hoping the vamp would choose flight over fight in this situation. I looked back to see the red cloud pause as if to register us, then dart off toward the roomful of crates.

Mina was out for the count, as far as I could tell. I rolled to a standing position. Cyrus had run for cover, but where was he now? I couldn’t see him, but since he was the necromancer controlling these zombies and they were still coming, it meant he was still alive somewhere nearby.

Jane had pulled back to the edge of the crate room and began scaling the towers of boxes. It was a smart move—zombies weren’t strong in the climbing department.

I caught up with her and joined her at the top of the crates, my burnt wrists screaming with pain. I pressed them against my body.

“Sorry,” she said. “It was one of the few bits of helpful arcana I know.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine,” I lied. “At least I’m not in that box anymore.”

“But, sadly, you’re still in that gold swami shirt and it’s burnt. It smells like hair on fire.”

“What are you doing here?” I said. “How did you find this place?”

“I came here to get you, and I almost had to beat it out of Godfrey,” she said with wickedness appearing at the edge of her eyes, “but that man caves real easy. See how having evil tendencies helps sometimes?”

There wasn’t really time to argue about the finer points of good and evil right at the moment. We needed to get out of there.

“We’re so screwed,” Jane said.

“Yeah, well, at least we’ve got vampires now, so Connor will be happy,” I said. “Somehow I take some comfort in that.”

“Simon,” Jane said, pointing back into the exhibit room.

I turned around. Mina was gone from where I had left her. My eyes shot over to the main wall.

So was The Scream.