This chapter is named after the third part, too. :)

Chapter Seven

Six Shots by Moonlight

Our relationship actually warmed from the start. Herbert and I started doing it every day, but it wasn't every living minute of the day. There were days we didn't have time for each other, but Herbert was right that work came first; I could live with that. After our rough first time which was actually as enjoyable as I thought it would be, some days he would be soft and gentle when I needed it. He didn't seem to care which way he wanted to go, but as long as it was just me and him.

Restoring re-animation to the dead we retrieved from the graveyard since the hospital was easy for us to get caught was more difficult than ever. We lived as general practitioners by day - to be called Dr. Barbara Kane felt rewarding - the practice very delightful mostly to me because I did not get to be involved with dead bodies most of the time, but it was disappointing to my housemate and lover. I loved Herbert, but I sometimes wished he would at least love what he did with me during the day, think of the people we treated as human beings whose lives were important to us, who looked up to us as their saviors.

At night, when it was our other life, we managed to get our specimens from the field without trouble, but we couldn't take the car because the tire tracks would leave marks in the grass, and if anyone noticed and suspected attempted grave robbing or actual grave robbing, they would point to us since we were the ones who lived as near as possible to the potter's field. As soon as we would get our trophies, we brought them to the basement downstairs which Herbert set up as the laboratory far from nosy eyes. We laid them on the long table beneath the sun lamp and would inject the glowing re-agent into the brain, but because the bodies weren't exceedingly fresh as we wanted them to be and resulting in slight decomposition to the tissue cells, re-animation could never be perfect as we wanted it to be.

Our latest was a slight turn from normal, missing an arm during an amputation. Domestic violence, a battered wife who tried to leave her husband and got her arm chopped off as punishment, left to bleed to death. Her husband had been arrested for her murder. We brought her across the field and through the back door which lead downstairs to the basement lab. However, as soon as we laid the dead woman down, Herbert's strained voice broke the silence.

"I couldn't help but...feel like we were..." He trailed off, unable to finish.

I sighed. I began thinking since so often lately that he was now beginning to lose it. "Herbert, I didn't feel anything. No one was watching us. Even if they were, they would have called the police by now."

He glanced up at me. "Not that. You know what I mean." He was talking about the creature which had been our very first, whose existence we never learned about, and no reports of anymore killings of the sort like it had been with the re-animated dean, now locked away at Sefton.

"Herbert..." I walked around the table and behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist and drawing him closer so I could kiss and nibble his ear, making him moan softly; I knew his eyes were closed without looking. "...that thing wasn't nearly as smart as Halsey was."

"Don't say his name," he warned, hating being reminded of the past. I continued, undaunted.

"And it didn't see or follow us back to the house, remember? It couldn't even get out through the window. So stop being so paranoid and let's continue." I kissed him on the cheek then. He turned his head around to look me down and smile then in agreement. But deep down, the relief would be short-lived as it always was.

Sadly, the poor woman was no different than my mother had been after the plague; her eyes had opened, sans physical quivers of fright, but then they closed again and didn't reopen. No bodily movement of any sort to follow. Herbert and I decided then that because she missed an arm, we should stick to bodies with whole physical perfection. We had more luck with bodies here in Bolton than in Arkham, but the numbers were still small compared to our hometown, between September and the January to follow, marking the beginning of 2001 - the year the World Trade Center of New York would be bombed in the September to come.

The third had the needle muscular motions and shivers, but our hopes had been on the rise too high when it collapsed back into eternal rest. More to follow had been too diseased and therefore certain organs were poor, sometimes the blood itself. Herbert and I had been keeping track of every one that came and went, keeping to ourselves and making sure we weren't suspicious to another's eyes. Nothing happened to us really, but my anxieties couldn't be quenched long enough as Herbert's fear that he was being stalked couldn't. That made two of us.

And then, somewhere in early March, our luck changed when we were contacted regarding a death that did not end up going to the potter's field directly.

~o~

The season of winter was barely over by the time Herbert and I got a new body which wasn't from the location near our house. To this day, fights among workers in the factories were still common; in the old days of Puritanism, it would have been called illegal and punishable if anyone was caught.

Herbert and I were approached by one of the regular patients who was a worker at the factory and had been present at the incident but had no part in it. We were just closing up for the night when he came to us in desperation, fearfully. "They want you two to handle it in secret. The person who did it - by accident, he swears," he panted desperately, to which I gave him a Valium to calm him down for the sake of it, "doesn't want to be arrested. He really didn't mean to kill the man; the dead man got it coming to him even when it wasn't meant to be."

The one who had been responsible was Kid O'Brien, twenty-five years old and inexperienced, challenged by none other than Buck Robinson, who was a champion at boxing and had apparently challenged the younger man to see if he was big enough. To see if he was really all that tough. I hated a larger person picking on the weaker one since my younger days and I sure did now. I thought it impressive that the smaller guy had found it in him to lose it and fight back, because Robinson - called "The Harlem Smoke" by his friends and those who knew him - had been a big-time bully of the factory, but nobody did anything about it when he taunted the others around him. He'd been knocked out by O'Brien, and further inspections by myself showed he would remain that way forever.

I could feel my heart beating terribly at the thought of word getting out despite Herbert and I handling it ourselves, because once it was out, we were finished. I barely heard Herbert assuring the crowd that we would take care of this ourselves and that they would all be fine - even O'Brien - but that they would all be in trouble if they did not keep quiet about this affair. "Not just us, but all of you, as well," he warned. Everyone nodded feebly but said nothing. We wrapped the bulky black man in a sheet given to us and were aided in taking it to the back seat of the car, making everyone shudder involuntarily. They had no idea I was feeling the same, not that they should.

It was getting late when we took the thing home and into our lab. Moonlight streamed over the landscape, no snow covering the ground since last month, and there were no windows in the basement to shine through on our specimen which Herbert injected into the back of the neck. This one was much more difficult to bring down the stairs compared to the other that frightening night back in Arkham, but we made it eventually.

"We must hurry," Herbert said as he shrugged off his coat at the same time I did. My clothing was the same as his, without the tie, of course. I watched as he withdrew the needle from the back of the brown neck and lowered the head back onto the table. "We can't have the police checking in on us now, can we?" His smile was sardonic, hiding his great fear as immense as mine was. If the police spotted us at any time during the night, they would put us away for life, and that meant we would never accomplish the great goal which doctors tried to do long before our time.

Unfortunately, the black man gave no response. None of the usual to expect. Herbert swore and slammed his palm flat on the counter. "Damn! A long trip back gone to waste." He shook his head. "The brain is too damaged for any response. Might as well get rid of it." By this time, the hour neared one in the morning; we were both going to have a bad day.

"Well, we can't just leave it here in our basement, can we?" My stupid question did not make him any better.

"Of course not; why would we? We'll just dump it off in the woods, bury it and cover with leaves and vines the best we can. You know what they say about dead bodies and decomposition? They make excellent fertilizer." I shuddered at his artistic description of using natural elements and the ghastly thing on our table in one sentence.

~o~

The ground was still solid when we buried our failed specimen, covering it the best we could and keeping our hands covered with gloves to prevent our DNA and fingerprints from being left on. We'd had them on since called to the case. The police might not ever trace it back to us, that is IF they ever found the body. Bolton had a really good police force for such a small town, but then again, in small towns, people catch on quick. I couldn't help but wonder if Buck Robinson had any family to inquire his disappearance; I didn't see a ring, which told me he wasn't married or had children, but that didn't really mean anything.

Nobody reported him missing for several days, which told me he wasn't exactly a well-liked or popular fellow despite his infamy at the factory, but that didn't erase the paranoia Herbert and I shared of the discovery by the police force. Gladly, the word was ordered to keep quiet; we agreed that the workers didn't fear for us but for themselves. "Cowards," Herbert had called them, and I wholeheartedly agreed with him.

But by the sixth or so day, Herbert's last case of the day ended with a threat of peril to us both. Ravenna de Luca, an Italian woman who had relocated with her husband Giovanni to the New England colonies with their six-year-old son Giorgio, suffered a bout of hysteria when her child didn't come back home for dinner from friends. A search was on, but she wouldn't calm down, and it didn't do anything for her fragile heart condition which she'd been born with. "Please, my baby is out there!" she wailed to Herbert, whom she clung onto pleadingly. "What if he was kidnapped, Doctor?"

I gently pried her from my lover and allowed myself to be held by her. "It's going to be fine," I tried to assure her, to no avail. She was still crying and speaking of bad omens instead of fact. I wondered if she was psychic or something, because her name of Ravenna meant the raven itself, which was a symbol of bad luck and death. I tried to offer her something to calm her down, or at least check on her heart to keep her alive so her child would see her again if he was brought back, but she refused Valium which could calm her down temporarily. Her panic attacks worsened with each shriek.

"NO, I WILL NOT CALM DOWN! MY GIORGIO IS GONE, AND I SENSE IT, NO MATTER HOW MUCH I WANT TO BELIEVE HE'LL BE FOUND AGAIN! SOMETHING, NOT SOMEONE, HAS TAKEN MY CHILD FROM ME!" She stopped right there, gripping her fingers on the sleeves of my lab coat, eyes going wide and mouth parted to release choking noises. Her heart was giving out; I screamed for the nurses to take her in and set up the IV. We were going to save her now, no matter what. Herbert followed us into the emergency room, shouting that we had a heart attack case.

Unfortunately, we were too late by the time we charged the paddles and administered the amiodarone, applied oxygen and CPR. She was gone. Ravenna de Luca died at exactly seven o'clock in the evening. Her husband Giovanni exploded by the time Herbert broke the news to him and their friends.

"Hijo de perra!" he roared in his language, which translated to mean "son of a bitch". "Bastard! You were supposed to save my wife's life! You let her die! I should kill you! You AND Dr. Kane together!" He reached into his jacket then and pulled out a pocket knife. He really meant that he was going to kill Herbert, or maybe he was just so grief-stricken he didn't know what he was doing. I had to get us out of here fast, so I grabbed Herbert by the arm and led him away from the insane Italian man who was still roaring threats to him in his native tongue. He didn't seem to care any longer for his still-missing son, which made me angry. I wanted children someday, so this was wrong on so many levels.

"He won't kill you," I promised him, though I doubted my own words. I'd never encountered a man like that, so I really didn't know if he would really follow through. I had to prepare with Herbert just in case, but he didn't seem to be thinking straight as we got into the car.

"They'll be searching the woods for the boy by now," he spoke in a dull monotone. "Which means the police might find the body there if they haven't, but de Luca will come to us when their heads are turned."

"After us," I corrected gently. "If he does, we'll call it justified since he tried to attack you. His friends and the whole emergency room saw what happened; they'll call him insane."

My own words, once more, did little to comfort. I had more tense feelings, having an idea that there were more problems to face besides the police and the crazy, grieving widower himself.

~o~

We went to bed at ten, but I didn't sleep much, waking a couple times and finding myself facing the window which streamed moonlight on me and Herbert's sleeping form beside me. I wondered how he could sleep solid despite the evening's events. Maybe because I was a woman, I worried more than him, but he seemed more so than I because of the past.

My turning woke him at a couple points. "Barbara, please, calm down."

I turned onto my back and my head in his direction; his back was facing me. "If they ever reach us, we'll be in prison for a long time and lose our practice. You know what that means for our real work."

He sighed and turned around to face me fully. He blinked owlishly without his glasses. "I know that good and well. I'm just as afraid as you are, as much as I hate to admit it. But please, try to sleep for now." I rolled onto my side and let myself be taken into his arms; his lithe, lightly muscled body spooned against me and warmed me, almost doing the trick in making me fall back to sleep at three in the morning -

- until we were both startled out of our skins and the bed by the loud, dangerous pounding that we could hear all the way downstairs. At the back door. I jumped out first to pull on my red tropical themed satin robe over my red satin slip, Herbert grabbing his striped robe as well as his revolver. I did the honors of grabbing the flashlight and following him to the door. "Who do you think it is at this time?" I asked nervously as we tiptoed down the opened hallway. He shook his head.

"Might as well be a patient at this ungodly hour, but maybe de Luca has waited this late to strike." He looked down at his weapon with a slight smile. "He's a fool to come armed with a knife to a gunfight then." I had to agree with him, because how could the police come with a warrant for our arrest at these small hours of the night? The door was still rattling with each pound and the doorknob threatening to break off; we were still tiptoeing down the stairs for it, and when we finally reached it, I moved fast and got on the other side of the knob, unlocking it shakily before throwing it open fast and moving to stand beside my lover, shining the flashlight into the face of our late night visitor.

This visitor was neither manic Italian man nor investigating authorities.

The figure was a gigantic bulk we remembered several days before, one we both thought was dead and buried in the woods as we left it; it was still covered with leaves, vines, dirt and moss. It was a thing of nightmares, unseen by any living man or woman every day, the eyes glowing a surreal blend of raging red and sickly green, snarling and growling like the beast it was as it took us both in with those eyes; what nauseated me to my stomach the most was the sight of the long, slender white thing which had a hand much smaller than mine was. A child's arm. Poor Ravenna de Luca had been right, that her son had been killed by something the police would never get to in time. And it was none other than the black boxer Buck Robinson whom we tried to revive after the backstreet fight.

The dead barbarian took a step forward, uttering guttural noises and small words, as it still had Giorgio de Luca's little arm still between its pink-stained teeth, attempting to speak but could only utter a single word that surprised Herbert and me: "Huuuuunnngggggrrryyyyyyy..."

Six bullet shots rang through the night air, echoing to the trees and the acres of graves before our home, and the undead boxer with the child's limb fell before us.