by Chris Lowry
I twisted off the top of one, handed it to Kiko and popped another for myself.
Lenny held out a paw the size of a frisbee for the bottle caps.
"This will work," I said and sat back on the couch. I didn't drink from the bottle either.
"Thanks for the beer. Want to tell me why I'm here?"
Vega swirled the red liquid in his glass. Too thin for blood, but maybe a mix of something. Blood and gin? Blood and vodka?
"I am curious myself," said the vampire. "It seems I am suddenly infested with a witch problem."
He looked at me over the top of the
glass.
"Witches," I sniffed my bottle. "Always up to no good."
"A recent phenomenon here, I assure you. And here you are. The Marshal of Magic. Are you come to solve my problem?"
"This isn't a pleasure trip," I said.
"Then perhaps I can offer assistance."
Vega studied me with dark soulless eyes.
"What sort of assistance?" I said.
"We're used to working alone."
"We?"
He glanced over my shoulder where Elvis hovered.
"It's a royal we."
He nodded and the smirk made an appearance again.
"The things I share with you, I share only in the confidence that they are words for your ears alone.”
I raised my eyebrows and nodded my head sideways toward Kiko.
“Ix-nay on the secrets, Mr. Vegas. There’s an extra set of ears on the couch.”
He smiled, fangs punching over the edge of his thin bottom lip.
“Kiko and I have an arrangement that goes back,” he said. “She is in my confidence.”
He said it with a certainty so I let it go. I didn’t really feel like blasting my way through his house if he meant to kill her for being with me.
But I was willing to admit there was more than I knew going on.
Probably a lot more.
“Then lay it on me,” I told him.
His eyes lit up again.
“We have a supply and demand problem here,” he said. “As you are aware, The Vegas is an oasis in the desert, and as such, our resources are limited.”
He wasn’t talking about water.
“Marshal,” he leaned forward. “Something is stealing our food and that is going to cause problems for me.”
CHAPTER
We stepped out of the mansion and Kiko took a small gasp of surprise.
Her Caddy waited in the circular drive, the toothless bartender leaning against the fender.
"Come," Vega said from behind us.
The bartender gave us wide berth as he scurried up the steps. Vega folded him in his arms and led him inside his home.
Lenny Two raised one eyebrow in our direction and closed the door.
"Can you believe that?" Kiko slid behind the wheel. "Do you know how hard it is to get his permission to operate here?"
I cracked open the passenger door and plopped on the seat beside her.
"You know I don't need his permission, right?"
"Keep telling yourself that," her eyes glimmered in the light as headlights splashed off marble statues and columns on the grounds.
"I'm not telling me, I'm telling you. The badge opens a lot of doors."
She made a noise, half between a grunt and a snort.
"It works," I told her. "I've been here an hour and I already know where to start looking for the witch. The badge works."
She snorted again.
"Or I do."
"Huh?" It was my turn to make a funny noise.
Elvis leaned up from the backseat so his head was between us.
"She arranged the whole thing," the ghost said. "She set up the bartender to get you the meeting with the man who knows Vegas better than any other creature around."
"I took you to the bar to a guy who could make the meeting happen," she said.
She glanced at me out of the corner of one eye.
"You don't know what you don't know, but I know what you don't know."
Her face was shimmery hazy from the ghost between us, but her words were clear.
"I have no idea what you mean," I said. "But good job on getting the meeting. Now take me to the Morlocks."
"What are Morlocks?" she turned the wheel back toward the Strip.
We could see a mish mash of lights on the horizon, a glow against the backdrop of the night sky that looked starless.
"You don't know Morlocks?" I asked. "Underground people. H.G. Wells?"
"I'm not a nerd," she told me.
"And I'm one because I read?"
"I read."
"Just not H.G. Wells."
She peered at me for a second, long enough for me to want to tell her to keep her eyes on the road, but she looked back before I could.
Swerved to miss an armadillo that waddled across the pavement.
"I have read books that would blow your mind," she pouted.
"Just not the good ones. It's okay," I said. "They may not translate Wells into Japanese."
She shot me a look, hard to read in the glow of the dashboard lights. Almost fear, almost rage.
"Morlocks," she growled and punched the gas.
The giant Cadillac roared as it surged up the highway. The wind whipping into the car from the open drop top made it impossible to speak without yelling.
I figured she decided we were done talking for the rest of the ride.
Turned out I was right.
CHAPTER
Vegas has multiple personality syndrome. You could almost call it a disorder. There is the tourist part that everyone knows. The Strip and downtown.
There are the normal parts where it’s almost like every other city in America.
Except hot. Damn hot.
But suburbs and strip malls, a University and apartments, a hundred streets that could be picked up and placed anywhere in the USA and they would fit.
There are the Strip Clubs and unlicensed brothels, most on side streets off the main Strip, and there is a hidden secret in Las Vegas.
An underground city.
Vegas has a flooding problem, but it only happens once every year and sometimes not even then.
To move all that water from the surface streets and neighborhoods, city planners built massive tunnels underground.
They crisscrossed the grid in an intricate design to move water fast.
Take it from the city and spit it into the dessert.
And it worked.
Except the homeless found the tunnels and moved in.
Vegas had a lot of homeless.
I’d read the estimate was in the thousands but watching the tunnel entrance behind a strip club made me think they were off by a factor of ten.
Maybe more.
Kiko parked the Caddy in a small gravel pull out on the side of a road.
Calling it a road was generous. It was a path wide enough for a car and a half, probably built as an alley based on some city planner’s design that never quite came to fruition.
There were ruts in the path made by work trucks that serviced the tunnels. Sprigs of brown desert grass meant they hadn’t been used in a long time.
“You want to go in there in the dark?” Elvis breathed into my ear.
I shivered.
“You are jumpy,” Kiko observed. “We should wait until morning.”
“I’m not scared,” I said.
“I didn’t say you were afraid,” she corrected me. “Just that you are jumpy. Besides, the denizens down there are nocturnal. They are on the streets, which means what you are looking for will not be in the tunnel hunting.”
She curled her legs underneath her on the seat and leaned against the door.
“Vega said something,” I told her.
“He said many things.”
“About you and him going back? How long?”
She scrunched her nose as if there was a bad smell and peeked over the dash toward the tunnel opening.
; A shadowy figure limped from the darkness and crawled up the scree slope of the ditch across from us. It didn’t pause at the top of the hill, just turned toward the city and kept limping.
“He spoke true,” she said.
“That’s not quite an answer.”
“It’s rude to ask a woman how old she is,” Kiko said as her eyes closed and she settled back on the door.
“Stakeout’s go a lot faster if you talk,” I said.
She sighed, drawing in a deep breath and letting it out slow and steady.
“Alright Marshal,” she said, eyes still closed. “I’ll tell you the story of what I know.”
And then she did.
CHAPTER
A Conestoga wagon rolled across the arid landscape, driven by a lonely emaciated man.
He spied a snake slithering across the rocks, jumped from the driver's perch and chased it down. He picked up a rock and beat the rattler, smashed its arrow shaped head.
A giggle escaped his parched throat, and he lifted up the six foot body that still twitched and spasmed in the desert sun.
The man used his thin fingers to rip the partially detached snake head from the body and tossed it away, more fodder for the insects and other creepy crawlies that lived in the almost lifeless landscape.
He pinched the skin of the rattler near the neck and peeled it back in one practiced swoop.
It came off in one piece and he dropped it at his feet.
His boots puffed up tiny clouds of fine dirt as he stepped away from the kill site and went back to the wagon.
As he walked, he poked a grimy fingernail into the meat of the long thin muscle and drew a line straight down, spreading it apart to spill the slimy guts onto the ground.
When he reached the wagon, panic widened his crusty eyes.
"Oh no," he muttered and circled the wagon.
One of the rear flaps had come untied and fluttered in the arid wind.
He tossed the snake carcass up onto the driver's seat and tied the flap back down, double checking the openings to the interior on both front and back of the wagon.
Satisfied it was as tight as could be, he climbed back into the driver's seat and clucked the horses forward.
The two tired beasts plodded in exhausted trudge toward the far side of the valley.
A narrow range of mountains cut across the horizon, their destination a cut between the rises, seen only as a dark slash as the sun settled toward it.
The driver began humming. He curled the reins around his forearm and picked up the dead snake.
Blood and juice ran down his ragged beard as he started chomping on the meat, chewing with worn brown teeth, and giggling as he drove.
An arrow arced out of the sun and slammed into his shoulder.
He screamed and pitched back into the thick canvas of the wagon cover.
It held him upright as a second arrow whizzed into his chest.
He slapped the reins and the horses bolted as a group of Indian braves appeared around the wagon racing after them.
It was a short chase that ended near a small green meadow, an oasis in the desert.
The smell of water startled them, and the horse veered toward the grass.
It took them into the path of one of the braves who leaped from his horse onto the back of one hitched to the wagon.
The lithe man drew up on the bridle, hauling the wagon to a stop near a shallow rock cave, hand built to define the spring.
The driver fumbled for a rifle under the seat, but three more arrows arced into his body, and he tumbled from his perch and landed with a splash, one hand near the muddy ground that defined the artisanal spring that bubbled underneath.
The braves ignored his fallen body and went to work on the wagon with practiced precision.
Two unhitched the horses and led them to a shallow puddle to drink.
Two more untied the tight flaps and opened the dark interior to the setting sun.
The Conestoga was empty but for a coffin.
The party of braves had robbed wagons before, and sometimes the pioneers buried treasures with their dead.
It wouldn't be much, and they couldn't return to their village with such a small discovery, but still they had to look.
The two men hauled the box out and pitched it out of the back of the wagon.
It flipped over, hit on the corner at an angle and broke open.
The Indian braves yipped in victory, quick sharp noises as they hopped from the wagon and turned the now open coffin over.
A man inside howled as the sun hit his skin.
The dark black suit that covered most of his body protected the unexposed parts, but the drifting bright rays that hit his hands made the flesh bubble and boil.
His eyes flew open, and the Indians screamed.
The monster had no pupils, just pure black orbs that scanned the scene, saw the dead body of his most faithful servant and the sun still above the mountains.
The braves fumbled back, trying to notch arrows to their bows, but the creature flew at them.
Long nails lashed out and slashed throats, a trail of smoke the only sign of its passage.
Blood fountained out of their still standing bodies, as the braves collapsed.
Trickles of crimson rolled across the hard ground and into the pool of water that reached into the narrow cave, barely wide enough for a body.
Occupied now by the creature, the man with long fangs and black eyes, hiding in the shadow.
The skin of his face was burned and melted, his hands a scarred mass of tissue.
But his eyes were clear as he stared at the bodies leaking his sustenance into the water.
As he watched, the puddle turned a shade of pink, and then darker as more blood slowly made its way into the water.
The horses ran off, all of them.
He could hear their hoofbeats pound the earth as they sought to escape the scent of death that permeated the meadow.
The creature bent forward and slurped the bloody water into its mouth.
The burned skin started to heal.
He drank more, taking his time to pull handfuls to his lips and sipping as the sun slipped behind the mountains, bathing the valley in twilight.
He pulled himself from the rock cavern and stretched as he sniffed the air.
The bodies of the braves were worthless.
His razor sharp claws had cut too deep, their lifeblood drained into the spring.
But his servant still had blood.
The arrows killed, but also plugged the wounds so they crusted over.
He rolled the body and feasted on the grimy man's neck.
The man had served him for over a decade in his life, the promise of immortality taunting him to madness.
The vampire smiled as he slurped blood from the body. The man served him still, even in death.
His eyes caught a glow in the distance as he stood from the drained corpse.
He could make out a campfire, and a cabin, a two room structure on well packed dirt trail, an intersection.
Of course his servant would ride away from the trail to minimize their chances of discovery, but the simple minded fool did not stray too far from it for fear of getting lost.
That the Indians attacked so close to the post spoke to their desperation, and the fact that more might come.
He licked his lips in anticipation of that happening and began walking toward the trading post.
He could smell bodies on the wind, and moisture.
This area of the valley was dotted with springs that created small pocket of meadows in the desert.
He knew where they were by that sign. He had seen it on the maps he studied.
Maybe he wouldn't need to keep going to San Francisco, if western bound travelers could come to him through this place.
He would think on it this night, and stay for a few others, if only to gather more information on the place the Spanish referred to as the Meadows.