Resurrection Dreams

Melvin approached the body. Standing above it, he recognized the bloody face. Wes.

  Manny’s gonna be pissed, he thought. The two guys were best buddies, and Wes was always hanging around the station when Manny was on the job.

  Wes was a jerk.

  The jerk’s throat had been slashed open.

  Melvin was suddenly quite pleased with himself. It had been a smart move, using Jack to bring Vicki in.

  Good thing he didn’t blow the fucker’s head off and leave him dead in the house, the way he’d planned while he drove there from Ace’s place. He’d almost done it the minute Jack opened the door. And came even closer when he found out Vicki was gone. It had suddenly occurred to him, though, that Jack might be useful. So he’d forced the man, at gunpoint, to drive him home. Got him inside and down to the basement, then whacked him with the barrel. It had been a cinch, wrapping his head in cellophane while he was out cold. Dead, and not a mark to show for it. With Patricia’s help, they lifted him onto the table and got to work. They were down there, still at him, when the cops showed up. Once those two bastards were canceled, Melvin had returned Jack to his own house. To wait for Vicki.

  “Did a great job, old pal,” he muttered. “Got Vicki for me and you wasted shit-for-brains.”

  Bending down, Melvin set his revolver on the pavement. He grabbed Wes by the ankles and dragged him to the car. The socks, at least, weren’t bloody. With keys from the ignition, he opened the trunk. He frowned at the body, wondering how to get it in without messing his good silk robe.

  He looked around. The streets were deserted. The few nearby houses were dark at the windows.

  Nobody’s watching, he told himself.

  They’d be out here by now, rubber-necking, if they’d seen the car or body.

  So he took off his robe. He rolled it carefully and set it on the roof of the car. Strange, being naked in the street. He felt the breeze on his hot, sweaty skin. He was getting hard. He thought about the way Vicki had looked, her robe hanging open.

  Vicki. Patricia!

  Shit.

  As fast as he could, he rolled Wes over, grabbed him under the armpits, hoisted him up, and dumped him head first into the trunk. He moved the legs out of the way. Then he lowered the lid, turned around, and bounced his rump on it until he heard the latch click.

  He opened the driver’s door. The overhead light came on. Glass from the windshield littered the seat, but most of it was toward the middle. So was most of the blood. From Jack’s head? Had his head smashed the windshield? Was that how it got flattened?

  Melvin brushed off the seat, climbed into the car, and drove it to the curb. He shut off the engine, killed the headlights, and opened the door. The ceiling light came on again, he looked down at himself. A small smear of blood on his chest. But both hands were red, and he’d used a hand to brush glass off the seat, so he probably had blood on his rump, too.

  He didn’t want blood on his beautiful robe.

  Maybe Wes kept a towel for wiping the windshield.

  Again, Melvin thought of Patricia in the basement with Vicki. She won’t try nothing, he told himself. Wouldn’t dare.

  But he leaped from the car, threw its door shut, snatched his robe off the roof, and rushed to pick up his revolver.

  “Damn him,” Vicki heard. It was a woman’s voice. It seemed to come from a great distance. “I’m not good enough for him? He prom…Put her down.”

  Vaguely, she was aware of her legs being lowered. She felt a cool cement floor under her feet. Her knees buckled, but she didn’t fall. Someone behind her (Jack?) had an arm tight across her chest, pinning her against his body.

  She saw the arm below her breasts, saw her bent legs and the gray floor. The floor was spotted and smeared with bright, fresh blood.

  She tried to lift her head, but it seemed like too much trouble.

  Bare feet and legs came into her view. Then a shirt. A glossy blue Hawaiian shirt, hanging open. The person in the shirt was a woman. She stopped in front of Vicki, less than an arm’s length away.

  Vicki raised her head enough to see the slash across the woman’s belly, just above the navel. It was cross-hatched with stitches. From the look of the healing, the wound was a few days old. This is what Jack must have under his bandage, Vicki thought. Though the shirt covered the sides of the design, she could see parts of the circle and pyramid and eye-like ovals, the same as Jack had, but faint. Faded, pink lines on the woman’s white skin. Almost gone.

  A hand, slick with green fluid, reached out and grabbed Vicki’s chin and lifted her head.

  The woman had blue eyes, short blonde hair hanging in bangs across her forehead, a sprinkling of freckles over her nose and cheeks.

  The nurse? Vicki wondered. The one who killed Pollock? “Patricia?” she asked. Her voice came out weak, little more than a whisper.

  “Yeah. And you must be Vicki.” She let go of Vicki’s chin. “You’re not so hot. What’s he want you for? Huh? He’s got me, why’s he want you?” She looked upward. “Where’s Melvin?”

  Jack grunted.

  “MELVIN!” she yelled. No answer came. She called his name again. A grin spread across her face. “He’s gone? Well, now. Jack, go upstairs and keep him out. Don’t let him down here.”

  He made another grunt, this one rising like a question.

  “Do it! I brought you back, I can make you dead again.”

  Jack’s arm went away. Vicki sank to her knees and slumped forward. Her face pushed against Patricia, eyes against the stitched wound. She heard the quick footsteps of Jack climbing the stairs.

  Her hair was yanked, her head jerked backward. Patricia gazed down at her.

  “By the time we’re done, Melvin won’t want you anymore. He’ll toss his lunch just looking at you.” A hand flashed down at her, fingers hooked to rake her cheek.

  She twisted her head and felt a quick scrape of fingernails as the hand swept by, nearly missing. The hand swung back at her. Pounded her nose. Then she was falling. Her back hit the floor. Blood was spilling from her nostrils. She licked at it as she pushed at the floor, trying to rise. Then she was sitting up, braced with straight arms.

  Patricia sneered down at her. Legs spread. Hands on hips.

  “You know Raines and Woodman?” she asked.

  For the first time, Vicki noticed the men.

  Two of them. Standing on either side of Patricia and slightly behind her.

  Dead men. Dead like Jack. I brought you back, I can make you dead again. Dead like Patricia.

  Dead, but not down.

  Vicki’s mind seemed to freeze.

  The two cops (one was the chief, all right) both stared at her with frenzied eagerness in their eyes. Their faces were doughy white. Their bodies, from the neck down, were sheeted with blood.

  The taller cop had dime-size entry wounds in the chest and belly, a bigger wound to the shoulder. He was leering at Vicki, rubbing his hands together.

  Raines must’ve been shot in the back. His torso was pocked with big pulpy exit wounds, red globs and strings hanging out here and there.

  Along with the rest of the wounds, each man had a horizontal slash above the naval, green fluid oozing from the stitched lips.

  She saw Patricia’s mouth move, heard a voice that sounded as if it came from far down a tunnel. “Let’s go to it, fellas. Have at her.”

  Patricia sat on Vicki’s legs.

  The cops rushed forward. They dropped to their knees, Raines on her left, Woodman on her right. She swung at their reaching hands, trying to knock them away as she lurched and writhed under Patricia. Then, her wrists were pinned to the floor.

  She felt hands—sliding, rubbing, squeezing, digging, twisting and pinching her.

  She saw Patricia, beyond the moving arms, lean down and bite the back of a hand that was tight on her breast. The fingers trembled open. The hand let go. Patricia dropped lower, mouth wide. She felt the woman’s tongue on her breast, felt the edges of her teeth.

  Then Raines’s face
blocked her view. His mouth covered hers. His tongue thrust in.

  She screamed into his mouth and heard a gunshot. When Melvin saw Jack blocking the closed door to the basement, he groaned.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Patricia throwing a fit, maybe.

  Not posting a guard.

  “What’s going on down there!” he blurted.

  Jack stood motionless.

  “Get outa my way!”

  Jack didn’t move.

  “Damn it! I’m your master! Move!”

  Jack shook his head, his loose eye swinging.

  Melvin raised his arm, aimed the revolver at Jack’s good eye, and pulled the trigger. The gun blasted. The eye vanished. Jack’s head crashed backward against the door. It bounced off the wood, and Jack raised his arms. Melvin lurched away from the reaching hands.

  The fucker’s blind.

  Just like Charlie, he remembered. And Charlie damn near killed me.

  “Stop!” he yelled.

  Jack grabbed Melvin’s neck and started squeezing.

  Melvin jammed the muzzle into the gash in the center of Jack’s throat. Half the barrel vanished inside the wound. He fired. The blast flung Jack against the door. The way his head drooped and rocked, Melvin guessed that the bullet had severed the spinal column, just as he’d hoped. He watched Jack slump to his knees and topple forward.

  He dragged the body out of the way.

  He flung the door open.

  Saw Patricia and Woodman and Raines on their knees on the basement floor. All three huddled over a sprawled body, their hands on it. All three looking up the stairway at Melvin.

  “GET AWAY FROM HER!” he shouted.

  As he rushed down the stairs, the two cops looked at Patricia. She nodded. They started getting up. Patricia stayed where she was, sitting on Vicki’s thighs.

  Melvin stopped at the foot of the stairs.

  Vicki lay motionless except for the rise and fall of her chest as she gulped air. Her arms were still inside the sleeves of the robe, but the robe was wide open. Her skin was slick with blood. As the cops backed away, Melvin crouched and looked closely at her body. She had awful-looking bite marks on one shoulder. Except for that, her skin seemed to be unbroken.

  “Get off her,” he told Patricia.

  “It’s not fair.” Her voice trembled. Tears filled her eyes. “I love you. She doesn’t love you.”

  “She will. Same as you. Get off her. Now.”

  Patricia sniffed. She wiped her tears away with the backs of her hands. And stared down at Vicki and peeled back her lips, baring her teeth. For a moment, Melvin thought she might lurch forward and try to bite Vicki’s face, ruin her looks. But he had given her an order, and she seemed to know it was her duty to obey. Her chin shook. She rubbed her eyes again, then stood up and backed away.

  Vicki hung limp in his arms as he lifted her and carried her to the table. He stretched her out on top of it. She lay there, gasping for breath, her gaze fixed on the ceiling.

  Stepping back, Melvin glanced at Patricia. She stood beside the pile of clothes from the cops, head down, sobbing quietly. The cops had retreated to a corner of the basement. They stood side by side, staring at Vicki.

  “Forget it,” Melvin warned. “She’s mine.”

  He went to the basin, turned a faucet on, and dampened a towel. Then, he returned to Vicki’s side and began to mop the blood off her face and body.

  She squeezed her eyes tight as if trying to shut out what was happening.

  She looked beautiful and helpless. The rage Melvin had felt against her, earlier that night, was gone. He felt only tenderness and loss.

  It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. He’d been so good to her. He’d given her the car, he’d killed Pollock for bothering her, he’d made Charlie give her the clinic. She was supposed to like him and be his girl.

  But it was too late for that.

  It had all fallen apart.

  There would be more cops, soon. They’d come for him. The only way to have Vicki was to go away with her in the car. They’d live like fugitives.

  But they’d be together.

  Melvin tossed the towel aside. She was as clean as he could get her, for now. Except for the raw wound on her shoulder, she looked fine. Wonderful. He would bandage the shoulder later, and maybe there would be time for a shower before fleeing.

  The thought of showering with Vicki brought a warm stir to his groin. He caressed her. Her skin felt damp and chilly from the moist towel. It had goosebumps. He felt her muscles quivering below the surface.

  He looked over his shoulder at Patricia. She was staring at him, crying. “Bring me the cellophane,” he said.

  She nodded.

  He bent down and kissed Vicki’s mouth. Her lips were trembling. “It’s gonna be okay,” he whispered. “It won’t hurt much.”

  He heard a metallic click behind him.

  Whirled around.

  Saw Patricia aiming a revolver at him.

  Heard a roar and felt the bullet slam his chest.

  Vicki, rigid and shaking, waiting for her moment to strike out at Melvin, bolted upright at the crash of the gunshot. Melvin hit the table. The back of his robe was embroidered.

  THE AMAZING MELVIN.

  Above the Z of AMAZING was a ragged hole.

  He dropped out of sight.

  Vicki flung herself off the table. She sidestepped, eyes on Patricia.

  The woman was staring at Melvin’s body.

  But the cops were watching Vicki.

  She dashed for the stairway.

  They raced for her, silent except for their feet slapping the concrete.

  She leaped, kicking high, her foot catching the third stair.

  A tug at the shoulders stopped her.

  The robe. One of the cops had grabbed the flapping end of the robe, had pulled.

  She tried to shrug out of the garment.

  But already she was hurtling backward down the stairs.

  They were all over her. Tearing her flesh with their teeth.

  She screamed and heard her scream and flinched and opened her eyes.

  She was in the basement. Sitting on the cement floor, her back against the stairs, her arms high, wrists bound with rope and tied to the banister.

  Though her head throbbed and all of her body felt sore, the robe was open and she could see that she hadn’t been devoured. Nor had a design been carved on her abdomen—no pyramid inside a circle, no eyes, no stitched slot of a mouth. Her skin was red in places, scuffed and scratched, but uncut and unchewed except for the burning shoulder hidden beneath the robe.

  She scanned the basement.

  She was alone.

  Even Melvin’s body seemed to be gone.

  She listened. There was the sound of her heartbeat, and nothing else.

  Groaning as hot pain surged through her body, she pushed herself up to the next stair. With her teeth, she reached the clothesline connecting her bound wrists to the banister. She began to chew it.

  She listened. Still nothing.

  Had they actually left her?

  It seemed too good to be true.

  When the rope finally parted, she used her teeth on the knots at her wrists. They loosened. She slipped her hands free, grabbed the banister, and struggled to her feet. She turned around. The door at the top was open.

  Slowly, she climbed the stairs.

  Her heart jumped when she spotted the body beyond the doorway. Jack. But he was down.

  She stepped around his body, watching it, careful not to get close. His head was turned away so she couldn’t see his face. The back of his head was blown out. So was the nape of his neck. But she didn’t trust him to be dead.

  Standing near him, though out of reach, she stared at his back. Finally, she knelt and pressed a hand against his knit shirt. There was no warmth. She lifted one of his hands, and felt the stiffness of rigor.

  At first, she was relieved.

  Then she wept.

  She
knew she should hurry and get out of the house. The others might be nearby, just in another room, or upstairs, or maybe they had left the house and would be returning soon. But she stayed there on her knees, face buried in her hands, crying for Jack and for herself and wishing for a way to go back in time and do something different and make all of it not happen.

  Finally, she forced herself to stand.

  She limped to the front door and pulled it open. Brilliant sunlight stabbed her eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The scream that woke Vicki from a nightmare of being stalked by corpses wasn’t her own. Pulse hammering, she climbed from bed and raced through the dark house to Ace’s room. She flipped the light on.

  Ace was sitting upright in bed, panting, her yellow Minnie Mouse nightshirt clinging to her body with sweat.

  Vicki sat on the edge of the mattress and took hold of her hand.

  “Melvin?”

  “Who else? Shit. You’d think I’d be over it by now.”

  “It may take a while,” Vicki said. “Like years.”

  “Here we are, our bods good as new—almost, and…”

  “Better than new, in your case.”

  “Yeah, right.” Smiling Ace patted her belly. She hadn’t been noticeably overweight before the attack. Now, she was slim. By cutting back on her meals, she had managed to keep off most of the fifteen pounds she’d lost while her broken jaw was wired.

  The only remaining mark of her encounter with Melvin was the thin faint line of a scar just below her hairline. The hair had started growing in white where her scalp had been reconnected, but she had used that as an excuse to visit Albert’s New You Beauty Emporium in Blayton from which she emerged with her hair short, swept-up, spiky and purple. What are you going to do, Vicki had asked, “Join a rock band?” To which Ace replied, “It’s me, don’t you think?”

  “Better in some ways,” Ace said. “But the damn nightmares. And half the time I feel like hiding in the nearest closet.”

  “Me, too.”

  “And crying for no reason. Really sucks, you know? How come our minds won’t heal like our bodies?”

  “Not as tough, I guess.”