Blood Lines

the men in Vicki's life, her eating habits, her eyes, and her caseload.
    'Not that my caseload doesn't need fussing over," Vicki admitted, working up a lather on her hair. Money was beginning to get tight and if something didn't turn up soon…
    'Something'll turn up." She rinsed and turned the water off. "Something always does."
    'This is absolutely ridiculous! I won't stand for it!" Dr. Rax threw himself down into his desk chair, slamming the upper edge back into the wall. "How dare they keep us out!"
    'Calm down, Elias, you'll give yourself an ulcer." Dr. Shane stood in the office doorway, arms crossed. "It's only until the autopsy comes back and we know for sure it was a heart attack that killed that poor janitor."
    'Of course it was a heart attack." Dr Rax rubbed at his eyes. Trapped in a cycle of frighteningly realistic dreams about being buried alive, he'd welcomed the phone call that'd freed him in the early hours of the morning. "The police officer I talked to said you could tell just from looking at him. Said the mummy had probably scared him to death." He snorted, his opinion of anyone who could be scared to death by a piece of history clear.
    Dr. Shane frowned. "Mummy…?"
    'Oh, for God's sake, Rachel. You can't have forgotten the baron's little souvenir."
    'No, of course not…" Except that for a moment, she had.
    Dr. Rax rubbed at his eyes again; they felt as though bits of sand had jammed up under the lids. "Funny thing is, I knew young Ellis. Talked to him on a number of occasions when I'd stayed late. He had a good mind, all things considered, but not what I'd call much of an imagination and I'd have expected him to take anything he ran into in the workroom in stride." He surprised himself with a dry chuckle. "Unlike Ms. Taggart."
    Although she continued to clean the department offices, Ms. Taggart would not go into the workroom alone since the incident last summer with the mummified head. No one had ever admitted placing the Blue Jays cap on the artifact, but as Dr. Rax had made no real effort to find the culprit and had been more than vocal about the lack of depth in the bull pen, the rest of the department had its suspicions.
    'You realize this is only going to encourage her." Dr. Shane sighed. "She'll probably transfer to Geology or somewhere else without bone and we'll lose the best cleaning lady we've ever had. I'll never again be able to leave papers on my desk overnight." Escorting her into the workroom was a small price to pay when measured against the knowledge that Ms. Taggart was the only cleaning lady in the building who never disturbed office work in progress. "Speaking of papers…" She waved a hand at the curator's overloaded desk. "Why don't you use this time as a chance to catch up?"
    'The moment we can get back to work…"
    'I'll let you know." She pulled the door closed behind her and walked slowly across to her own office, brows drawn down into a worried vee. Her memories of the mummy slid over and around each other as though they'd been run through a blender and she just couldn't believe that for one moment she'd forgotten its existence entirely. Obviously, I've been more affected by that young man's death than I thought .
    The ka he had taken in the night told him of wonders greater than even Egypt in all her glory had known. The great pyramids had been dwarfed not by monuments to the glory of kings but by gleaming anthills of metal and glass built for fat-assed yuppies. Chariots had been replaced by four cylinder shit-boxes with no more pickup than a sick duck.
    Although he was unclear on many of the other concepts, beer and bureaucracy, at least, seemed to have endured. He was halfway around the world from the Mother Nile in a country that fought with sticks upon frozen water. Its queen sat in state many leagues away, no longer Osiris incarnate, although he who ruled for her here seemed to think himself some kind of tin-plate, big-chinned god.
    Most importantly, the gods he had known and who had known him appeared to be no more. No longer would he have to hide from the all-seeing eye of Thoth in the night sky but, more importantly, there were none to replace the priest-wizards who had bound him. The gods of this new world were weak and had claimed few souls. He would go among them as a lion among the goats, able to feed where he willed.
    He recognized that the one known as Reid Ellis had belonged to the lower classes, a common laborer, and that the information he had absorbed