The Undead Kama Sutra Read online

  The Undead Kama Sutra

  Mario Acevedo

  To the memory of my parents

  and my sister, Laura

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Find him,” the alien said. “Find the man who killed…

  Chapter 2

  I had a dead alien on my hands and twenty…

  Chapter 3

  A smooth, pewter-gray hump the width of a tennis court…

  Chapter 4

  I spent the next two nights in Fort Myers, in…

  Chapter 5

  Carmen pulled me into the alley. A vampire scent trailed…

  Chapter 6

  Thorne slowed the Bayliner as we neared the island. A…

  Chapter 7

  Consciousness slowly returned. I felt weak and spent, like a…

  Chapter 8

  I hefted the manuscript. Finally, The Undead Kama Sutra? “Is…

  Chapter 9

  Carmen’s brisk, angry steps churned the sand as we returned…

  Chapter 10

  The cold trail of Odin’s killer had grown red-hot. The…

  Chapter 11

  The Bayliner cruised out of the harbor. Carmen waved good-bye.

  Chapter 12

  Weapons chattered and their deadly stingers hissed through the air.

  Chapter 13

  A shaft of light hunted for me. I slunk back…

  Chapter 14

  Finally, the trail was once again hot, hotter than before.

  Chapter 15

  I dabbed my lips with a cloth napkin. After a…

  Chapter 16

  How to go after Goodman? I could either circle like…

  Chapter 17

  I made airline reservations for Chicago, but as I hate…

  Chapter 18

  A somber crowd accompanied me in the Savannah Airport. People…

  Chapter 19

  The Internet gave me the map grid location of the…

  Chapter 20

  I drove off, reliving the evening, thinking how my clever…

  Chapter 21

  I backed out of the trailer and closed the door.

  Chapter 22

  Karen loaded her fork with cashew chicken, pea pods, and…

  Chapter 23

  Another good lead and another one dead as well. Only…

  Chapter 24

  Water splashed across the windshield and windows. The Monte Carlo…

  Chapter 25

  The warning barely registered when something hard whacked against my…

  Chapter 26

  Once we got to Savannah, Georgia, I left the F-150…

  Chapter 27

  I turned off the laptop, clicked on the TV, and…

  Chapter 28

  I stepped aside. “How’d you find me?”

  Chapter 29

  I keep an Internet hacker on retainer. Every month I…

  Chapter 30

  We zigzagged through the drooling crowd and made our way…

  Chapter 31

  At the far end of the central pathway, a velvet…

  Chapter 32

  My reflexes kicked into vampire speed but too late. I…

  Chapter 33

  Waves broke over me, and I disappeared into the dirty…

  Chapter 34

  I bolted upright, gasping, confused.

  Chapter 35

  Carmen and I sat on opposite sides of a coffee…

  Chapter 36

  Carmen’s fangs sank into my throat. The long teeth were…

  Chapter 37

  Carmen left the office to shower. I lay against the…

  Chapter 38

  It was my turn to get cleaned up. I took…

  Chapter 39

  Carmen captured?

  Chapter 40

  Goodman took a left and followed the fence around the…

  Chapter 41

  “Colonel Goodman, you are dismissed.” The voice was high-pitched yet…

  Chapter 42

  After a moment, the smoke lost its pleasant notes and…

  Chapter 43

  The light beside the door went from red to green.

  Chapter 44

  The sound of a big motorcycle engine chugged in front…

  Chapter 45

  Jolie shuffled the drawings. “Is this going to work?”

  Chapter 46

  I climbed into the middle seat of the Chevy van.

  Chapter 47

  My crew and I pushed laundry carts filled with fresh…

  Chapter 48

  I couldn’t be too careful. What if the instant I…

  Chapter 49

  Nice move, if I were human. I swatted the grenade…

  Chapter 50

  I was wasting time. I returned to the freight elevator…

  Chapter 51

  Low above the trees raced the dark, humpbacked silhouette of…

  Chapter 52

  Antoine’s hand danced over switches and fumbled with the overhead…

  Chapter 53

  The saucer glided close and hovered a hundred feet from…

  Chapter 54

  I headed back to Colorado on I-10. I drove straight…

  Chapter 55

  I waited at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, better…

  Chapter 56

  I sat where my adventures usually began. In my office…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Mario Acevedo

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter

  1

  Find him,” the alien said. “Find the man who killed me.”

  I sat on the alien’s bed. We were on the second floor of a cheap motel in Sarasota, Florida. To get up the stairs I had to get past three hookers, their pimp, and a blind man selling pot—for medicinal purposes only, of course.

  Gilbert Odin, or, rather, the alien who masqueraded as my abducted and long-deceased friend from college, lay on his back. His jaundiced eyes looked ready to pop from their sockets. His slender body stretched the length of the mattress and his wing tips hung over the end. Iridescent blood pumped from the wound on his chest, stained his clothes, and pooled on the bedcovers. It looked like maple syrup mixed with motor oil. The stench of his charred flesh and his natural reek of boiled cabbage would’ve watered the eyes of a buzzard.

  I cradled in my lap the space blaster I’d found on the floor—I’d almost tripped over the thing when I entered.

  Odin wheezed and gasped. His mustache arched across the top of the flattened oval of his mouth. Every faltering breath pumped more of that thick, shimmering blood from the hole in his torso. The puncture looked like someone had impaled him with a white-hot length of rebar. A black ring of burned flesh surrounded the thumb-sized opening.

  Odin was dying and there was nothing I could do to help him. No use dialing 911. What could I say? “Send help. I’m a vampire and need an ambulance for an extraterrestrial dying from a ray-gun blast.”

  “Felix.” Odin’s hand touched my leg. “Find Goodman.”

  “Goodman who?”

  I’d barraged Odin with questions since I’d been here. An hour ago I was cruising south on I-75 when he called my cell phone. He asked for help, gave directions to this squalid motel along the North Trail Corridor, and hung up.

  Question one. How did he get my number?

  Question two. How did he know I was in Florida?

  Question three. Why me?

  He hadn’t answered these or any of my other questions. All Odin did was roll his eyes, squirm on the bed, and bleed.

  The lights were out and the room was as dark as the night sky outside. I h
ad removed my contacts to unmask the mirrorlike retinas—the tapetum lucidum—in my eyes and use vampire vision.

  As a supernatural, I could see the auras of the psychic energy fields that surrounded all living creatures. The color of these auras corresponded to our chakras—our spiritual centers and the level of our psychic awareness. Humans had a red aura, the first and lowest chakra, which centered on manifestation in the material plane. Vampires, orange aura, the second chakra, connection from the material to the spiritual. Aliens, third and yellow, for transformation. To what? Judging from what I know about aliens, I wouldn’t regard them as more evolved or spiritually developed than vampires.

  Auras can display our emotions more clearly than facial expressions. Since humans are blind to psychic energy, this gives us vampires the advantage when we pump them for information.

  Odin coughed. His aura faded to a diluted piss-yellow color. The penumbra of his psychic shroud tightened around his body.

  The last I’d seen of Odin was years ago, after he’d hired me to investigate an outbreak of nymphomania at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in Colorado. He knew the nymphomania was caused by a special isotope of red mercury leaking from a UFO the government had squirreled away, but he hadn’t bothered to fill me in. I had to uncover that on my own.

  Odin might exist on a higher psychic plane but he was still a liar. Something else Odin hadn’t told me was that he was an alien impostor and what he really wanted was a prototype psychotronic device other aliens had brought to Earth in violation of their intergalactic law. The psychotronic device was to test controlling humans by using psychic energy.

  Screw that. We vampires didn’t need competition from extraterrestrials. So I had destroyed the device and had left Gilbert Odin the Alien with the mutual understanding that our identities would remain secret.

  Now he was back, and dying.

  Odin reached for the nightstand beside the bed. His aura brightened as he struggled against death.

  I stood and faced him.

  Odin hooked his fingers over the drawer pull and opened the drawer. He groped inside and withdrew a letter-sized envelope.

  “Take me here,” he whispered. His thumb rubbed against numbers scrawled over the front of the envelope. Smears of his blood stained the corners.

  I took the envelope. It was heavy and contained something thick. The numbers on the front read:

  27.25 82.46

  “What do these mean?” I asked.

  “Just take me there,” he said. “Help me get home.” Odin turned his head toward me. The skin hung from around his eyes like he was starting to peel. “I have a family.”

  I had considered a Mrs. Gilbert Odin and larvae Odins on another planet. Hope they stayed there. “You miss them?” I tried to sound sympathetic.

  “Are you kidding?” Odin gasped. “That’s why I took this job.” He chuckled, snork, snork, snork.

  I opened the envelope. It contained hundred-dollar bills in a wad thicker than my index finger. “What is this? About twenty thousand bucks, right? For what?”

  Odin turned his head back toward the ceiling. The loose flesh sagged from his skull as if he was deflating. Odin had told me he had gone through cosmetic surgery to blend into human society. With his body shutting down, the alterations were disintegrating.

  He aimed a crooked finger. His fingernail fell off and left a purple splotch on his skin. “For you.”

  “Why?”

  Odin smacked his lips and worked his tongue out of his mouth. It flopped on his chin and rolled down his cheek to land quivering on the bedspread.

  Yuck. I hoped the tongue didn’t sprout eyes and legs and start walking on its own.

  “Find Goodman.” I guess Odin didn’t need a tongue to talk. The voice sounded like a trio of drunks were in his throat. He had mentioned having a trifurcated speaking passage.

  “Did Goodman do this to you? With this?” I held up the blaster. The gun had a housing the size of a large orange, with knobs sticking out the top and rear. Despite its size, the blaster felt light in my hand. The back of the housing had hieroglyphics around the circumference. A pointed barrel made of glass-like material stuck out the front. The grip and trigger seemed improvised for a humanoid hand.

  “Goodman,” Odin repeated. His aura faded to a faint glow around his body.

  Goodman who? This damn alien was loony enough the first time I’d seen him. Now, so close to death, his delirium made him incomprehensible.

  I slapped the envelope against the nightstand. “You want my services, then help me. Who is Goodman? You said, ‘Find the man.’ He’s not an alien? He shot you with a blaster. This one? Where did he get it?”

  Odin waved me close. I leaned over him and worried that he might spit a body part at me.

  He whispered: “Find Goodman.”

  What a mess. A dying extraterrestrial doing God knows what mischief on Earth. Mix that up with an assassin using an alien ray gun. But if I turned Odin away, what business did I have being a vampire private detective? Problem was, I kept getting cases that made me feel like Moses standing at the Red Sea.

  “Okay, Gilbert. I’m in.”

  “One more thing,” he whispered again.

  What was he suckering me into? “What is it?”

  “Save the Earth women.”

  I should’ve expected this. An even bigger mess. “Save the Earth women from what?”

  “No more questions.” Odin touched my face. “Tag, you’re it.”

  His hand dropped—literally, it fell off his wrist and thumped on the floor. His aura faded to nothing.

  Gilbert Odin, the alien impostor, was dead.

  And I had to find the one who killed him.

  Chapter

  2

  I had a dead alien on my hands and twenty thousand in hundred-dollar bills. I could ditch Odin and take the money, but his final words had hooked me.

  “Save the Earth women.”

  Given Odin’s extraterrestrial origins, the ray gun, and the mysterious gruesomeness of his death, I knew he wasn’t asking that I save the Earth women from bad hair days. Someone had killed Odin to get him out of the way.

  I’d come from my home in Denver, Colorado, to southern Florida. I was on vacation and after a different mystery. Over the last few months I had collected random pages from a manuscript called The Undead Kama Sutra.

  My sole vampire client had mentioned the manuscript in passing. He said the myth was that this Kama Sutra could adjust a vampire’s psychic energy and turbocharge our supernatural recuperative powers. I hear a lot of crazy things in my business, and blew it off. Later the vampire brought fourteen grainy photocopied pages of the manuscript. He told me they’d been copied from a private collection in London. Or Frankfurt. He wasn’t sure.

  This Kama Sutra showed vampires in various poses, acrobatic couplings with other vampires or humans. The captions were handwritten in English, with additional notes scribbled in Greek and Sanskrit.

  I found other references to this particular Kama Sutra on the Internet, either posted on blogs or in academic treatises. What piqued my interest, besides the interesting erotic and graphic drawings, were the allusions that sex in these poses was psychically therapeutic. But the captions were incomplete, and from what I deduced, the trick was performing sex using the proper technique in the right sequence and for the correct duration. Each cycle of poses referenced a chakra and the ailment it was meant to cure.

  We vampires know how disturbances in our psychic energy field can alter our health and humor. The disturbance that most got to us was keeping a daylight schedule, and the usual remedy for the “sunlight blahs” was an extended nap in a coffin.

  An entry in one blog mentioned the name of someone researching this Kama Sutra: Carmen Arellano. I knew a Carmen Arellano; she was the head of the Denver nidus, Latin for “nest.” Figures: if anyone was studying an erotic manuscript, it would be her.

  The blog went on to say that this Carmen was in Florida, and the
last I heard from the Carmen I knew was that she was also in Florida.

  I had called her and voice mail picked up. Carmen’s message said she was in Key West working on her “tan.” I’d bet a cooler full of arterial type-A negative that these two Carmens were the same vampire. I left word to expect me and began my road trip to Florida in my Cadillac.

  Was it possible that sex was psychic therapy? I couldn’t dismiss the idea as ancient bunk.

  An impossible story? Hell, I’m a vampire and am sitting shivah with a visitor from another planet. Tell me again what’s impossible. If this preternatural Kama Sutra was authentic, it was worth exploring to make it easier for us vampires to exist in a more crowded and suspicious human world.

  Now I had two mysteries to solve. This one and Odin’s.

  I gathered Odin and all of his loose parts into the center of the bedcovers. I bundled him and folded the edges of the blanket to keep his blood from leaving a trail.

  His funk stuck to my clothes and I doubted I could get them smelling fresh again. What would his stink do to the trunk of my Cadillac? I extended a talon and cut the thick plastic cover off the mattress. Standard issue for a business that rented rooms in fifteen-minute increments. I wrapped him in the clear plastic. Later I’d cinch the cover tight with duct tape. That should do it for now, since I wasn’t going to keep him in the trunk of my car longer than tonight.

  The two Benjamins I left on the dresser should pay for the room and the bedcovers. I put on my sunglasses to hide my eyes, though wearing sunglasses or contacts prevented me from using vampire vision.