Anyway, I was just glad that Jody took his dagger away from him, because someone could have lost an eye if he was still holding on to it when I swept his feet out from under him with the same stainless-steel torchiere lamp that the Countess had used on Tommy. (Although it was kind of bent now.)
And he’s all, “Ow, ow, ow.”
And I’m all, “Your cross-dressing sissy-man kung-fu is no match for my superior household lighting kung-fu.”
And he whines like, “I’m going home. You hurt me. You suck. This sucks. I have to go have family dinner—with my family—and I’m going to school tomorrow so you can just fuck off and die, Abby Normal.”
And I’m like, “Fine, give me my boots.”
And he’s like, “Fine.”
And I’m like, “Fine.”
And it would have been way better if he could have just stormed out right then, but it took us about a half hour to get my boots off of him, with me sitting in the sink and him on the counter, guarding me with the tennis racket, because it turned out that I have a pretty low tolerance for rat fog trying to bite me, too.
’Kayso, we got my boots off of Jared and he decided to stay and help because it turns out that even a stream of biting rat fog is more fun than family dinner. So Foo had the Shop Vac all scienced up with sunlight LEDs and whatnot and he turns it on and starts sucking in the mist with most awesome suckage. (Gay Builder Bob rocks hardware!) And it’s so cool, because we can see the fog go in—then we can hear the thump as the sun LED turns the rats to solid again and they hit the inside of the plastic drum.
And Foo is all yelling over the motor, “We may have to unload and put them in their boxes before we get too many. We don’t want to open this and try to deal with a hundred rats.”
And I’m all, “Why don’t we just leave them in there until sunup and then they’ll all be asleep?”
And Foo looks at me, all surprised, and I’m like, “Shut up. I can be smart and hawt.”
And he’s all, “’Kay,” which I don’t know whether he meant sarcastically, or that I couldn’t be smart, or that I wasn’t hawt. But I never found out, because right then the Shop Vac starts making this, foof-thoop splat noise, and Jared lets loose with his little-girl scream.
And it turns out that the exhaust of the Shop Vac is blowing vampy rats out the back side, which is the foof-thoop noise, and splattering them against the wall, which is the splat. And with every one, Jared is eeking. So it’s like, Foof-thoopsplat-eek! Foof-thoop-splat-eek! Foof-thoop-splat-eek! I know! It would make a totally cool industrial beat for a dance groove. But I didn’t sample it because there was stuff happening.
And Foo is all, “Pick them up and put them in their boxes. Seal them with duct tape.”
’Cause it turns out that vampy rats are pretty durable, and after they splat and slide down the wall, they are starting to pull themselves together again and sort of limp away, but slow enough to catch. But they’re still all squishy and whatnot.
So Jared and I just turn to Foo and give him our best, “Bitch, please,” look.
So Foo’s all, “Okay, then, you work the hose.”
And I’m all, “Sure, now you want me to work your hose—”
And he’s all, “Abby, please!”
Up until then I thought Foo was the most chill love ninja in the Bay Area, but it turns out that if his science gets a little sideways he goes to pieces. So I take the hose and start doing the rat suck, while Foo finds some rubber gloves and a spatula to scrape up the splatter pets.
Then Jared gets the idea of shooting the rats right into their little plastic cages, which, as it turns out, kind of works after we blast a couple of them through the plastic and he starts holding the boxes against a pillow he tapes on the wall. And Foo starts duct taping on the lids before the vamp rats can pull themselves together.
Then I’m all, “You know, if we could use this to shoot tiny dogs at the vamp kitties, we’d be finished with this nonsense in a day or two.”
And Foo and Jared both roll their eyes at me like I’m high or something, when they are the ones sealing in mashed rats for freshness. ’Kayso, by, like, midnight, we have all the rats boxed again, and most of them are kind of fixed, but some of them are still pretty fucked up from the flight, and Jared is all, “I’m going home. I have issues.”
Which I know probably means that he is going to go home and break the news to Lucifer 2 that they are no longer BFFs because Jared has lost his rodent wood forever due to our night of rat carnage, which is a good thing, I guess.
Then Foo is like, “I have to go, too. I have to meet with my academic advisor in the morning, and I have to prepare, then I have work in the afternoon.”
And I’m all, “You can prepare here.”
And Foo’s like, “I don’t think I can.” And he looks away.
I was going to tell him that I had decided to become a creature of the night, but they were bailing on me, so I was all, “Fine. You two run along. I’ll stay here.”
And Foo was like, “Wait until dawn, then give each of them a water bottle of blood. They’ll heal. But make sure you tape their cages back up so they can’t escape. Blah, blah, biology, science, behavior, science word, science word, blah, blah.”
So I kissed him like it was the last time, and went into the bedroom to lie down and wait until dawn, but there was like this huge maze made out of wood on our bed, so I went back out into the living room and chilled with the rats on the futon until dawn. I couldn’t sleep anyway, because I was thinking of all the people I was totally going to get revenge on when I was nosferatu, after I found Jody and Tommy and rescued them, of course.
’Kayso, like the Terminator (the liquid one, not the one that was governor), I will rise from the wreckage of my own metallic spooge to conquer all who oppose me. I know what I have to do. When Foo is at work, and Jared is at school, I shall use the blood that is blessed with the dark gift and become nosferatu. So suck it, bitches!
’Kayso, at dawn, when all the rats stopped scrambling around in their little cages, I found one of the syringes that Tommy had gotten from the needle exchange program when he was pretending to be a junky, and I drew blood from the most healthy vamp rat we had. Then I had to decide to drink it or inject it, and after a while, I decided to inject it, which it turns out works just like in the movies and hurts way less than getting your eyebrow pierced.
So then I lay down and waited for the vamping to come on. I thought about Foo, riding the BART all the way back to his parents’ house in the Sunset instead of staying with me, and how that was kind of an assbag move on his part. And I thought of our time together, over six weeks, and how it would be hard on him when I was a superior creature of unspeakable evil and supernatural beauty. And I thought that maybe the Countess and Flood and I might have to live together in a ménage à trois, and Foo and Jared might have to be our bug-eating minions, like Renfield in Dracula, except Foo would still have his fly manga hair and I would do him occasionally out of pity.
And I cried a little, over the loss of my humanity and whatnot, because I realized that as soon as I was done saving Tommy and Jody, and enslaving Foo and Jared, I was going to sneak into Mr. Snavely’s living room one night—come in as mist under the door—then form into my most awesome alabaster naked badassness and freak him completely the fuck out for failing me in Biology, and that it would be kind of an inhuman thing to do. And as I grieved, I fell into the deep sleep of the undead.
I know. Très awesome.
But no! Now I’m awake, and it’s still light out, and the vamp rats are still out and I don’t have super powers and my evil is still totally speakable. Fucksocks! I forgot, I have to die before I change. I looked all over for that potassium chloride stuff that Foo said they killed the rats with, but all I found was the hammer, and I was all, “I don’t think so.” So I went up to Market Street and thought I’d throw myself in front of a bus, but then, what if they left my body out in the sun and I burned up? So that was out. So then I was
like, “Oh, duh, cut your wrists?” But it hurt like holy fuck, so I only kind of cut one wrist a little bit, and I bled for like a half hour and I wasn’t even light-headed, so I was all, “Fuck this fun-free circus, I need an accomplice.”
So I called the suicide hotline.
And I’m all, “I need help.”
And the guy is all, “What’s your name?”
And I’m all, “You don’t have caller ID? What kind of lame hotline is this?”
And he’s all, “It says here that your name is Allison. Are you okay, Allison?”
And I’m all, “No, I’m not okay. I’m calling the suicide hotline.”
And he’s all, “You don’t want to commit suicide, Allison.”
And I’m all, “Exactly, doofasaurus, I need someone to take me out. I need it to be quick, private, painless, and it shouldn’t fuck up my hair too much.”
And he’s like, “But there’s so much to live for.”
So I’m like, “You’re burning my minutes, fuckstick. I need a number for a hit man or one of those Kevorkian doctors.”
And he’s all, “I can’t help you with that.”
So I’m all, “Loser!” And I offed my phone.
I can’t believe it, but it turns out that the Motherbot was right. Sometimes, the only people you can trust are family. (“’Scuse me, I barely suppressed a rainbow yawn when I typed that.) So here I am, waiting for my little sister, Ronnie, to get home from school so she can murder me, then hide my body under the bed until I return as the true Mistress of the Greater Bay Area Dark. This will be my last entry as a mortal. I have to go pick out an ensem for my death.
I wonder how she’ll do it? It better be painless or the first thing on my undead to-do list will be to open a bottle of Whoop-Ass P.M. on little sister.
14
The Samurai of Jackson Street II
Katusumi Okata had lived among the gaijin for forty years. An American art dealer, traveling through Hokkaido in search of woodblock prints from the Edo period, had come into Katusumi’s father’s workshop, seen the boy’s prints, and offered to bring Okata to San Francisco to create prints for his gallery on Jackson Street. The printmaker had lived in this same basement apartment since. He’d once had a wife, Yuriko, but she had been killed in front of him on the street when he was twenty-three, so now he lived alone.
The apartment had a concrete floor covered by two grass mats, a table that held his printmaking tools, a two-burner stove, an electric kettle, his swords, a futon, three sets of clothes, an old phonograph, and now, a burned-up white woman. She really didn’t go with anything else, no matter how he arranged her.
He thought he might make a series of prints of her—her blackened, skeletal form posed about the apartment like some demon wraith from a Shinto nightmare, but the composition wasn’t working. He walked up to Chinatown and bought a bouquet of red tulips and put them on the futon beside her, but even with the added color and design element, the picture wasn’t working. And she was making his futon smell like burned hair.
Okata was not used to company, and he wasn’t sure how to keep up his end of the conversation. He had once made friends with two rats who came out of a hole in the brick wall. He had talked to them and fed them on the condition that they not bring any friends, but they hadn’t listened and he was forced to mortar up the hole. He figured they didn’t speak Japanese.
To be fair, however, she wasn’t doing very well holding up her side of the conversation, either—lying there like a bog person dipped in creosote, her mouth open as if in a scream of agony. He sat on a stool next to the futon with his sketch pad and a pencil and began to sketch her for a print. He had very much admired the great cape of red curls that streamed out behind her when he’d seen her on the street, and he was sorry that all but a few strands had burned away in the sun. A shame. Perhaps he could draw the red curls in anyway. Make them swirl around the blackened rictus like one of Hokusai’s waves.
He knew what she was, of course. He was still healing from his encounter with the vampire cats, and it took no little bit of sketching to fill in the details, especially as her fangs were pointing prominently at his ceiling right now and they were far too long and sharp to be those of a normal burned-up white girl. He filled three pages with sketches, experimenting with angles and composition, but on the fourth page he found that a sadness had overcome him that he could not chase away with the moment created in making a drawing.
Katusumi retrieved his wakizashi short sword from the stand on his work table, unsheathed it, and knelt by the futon. He bowed deeply, then put the point of the sword on the pad of his left thumb and cut. He held his thumb over her open mouth and the dark blood dripped over her teeth and lips.
Would she be like the cats? Savage? A monster? He held the razor-edged wakizashi ready in his right hand, should a demon awake. But if he’d been able to raise his beloved Yuriko, even as a demon, wouldn’t he have? All the years that had passed, kendo training, drawing, carving, meditating, walking the streets unafraid, alone, hadn’t they all been about that? About making Yuriko live? Or not living without her?
When the burned-up girl jerked with a great, rasping intake of breath, cinders cracked off her ribs and peppered the yellow futon and water began to flow from the swordsman’s eyes.
RIVERA AND CAVUTO
Marvin the cadaver dog took them to the Wine Country. There they found Bummer and Lazarus, the Emperor’s dogs, guarding a Dumpster in an alley behind an abandoned building. Marvin pawed the Dumpster, and tried to stay on task while the Boston terrier sniffed his junk and the golden retriever looked around, a little embarrassed.
Nick Cavuto held the lid, ready to lift it. “Maybe we should call the Wong kid and see if our sunlight jackets are done, then open it.”
“It’s daylight,” said Rivera. “Even if there are, uh, creatures in there, they’ll be immobile.” Rivera still had a very difficult time saying the word “vampires” out loud. “Marvin says there’s a body in there, we need to look.”
Cavuto shrugged, lifted the lid of the Dumpster and braced himself for a wave of rotten meat smell, but there was none.
“Empty.”
Bummer barked. Marvin pawed at the side of the Dumpster. Lazarus chuffed, which was dog for, “Duh. Look behind it.”
Rivera looked in. Other than a couple of broken wine bottles and the rice part of a taco combo plate, there was nothing in the Dumpster, yet Marvin still pawed at the steel, which was the signal he had been trained to give when he’d found a corpse.
“Maybe we should give Marvin a biscuit to reset him or something,” said Rivera.
“No corpse, no biscuit, that’s the rule,” said Cavuto. “We all have to live by it.”
At the mention of a biscuit both Bummer and Marvin stopped what they were doing, sat, looked dutiful and contrite, and gave Rivera the “I need and deeply deserve a biscuit” look. Frustrated with what biscuit whores his cohorts were, Lazarus went to the side of the Dumpster and started pawing the space between it and the wall, then tried to stuff his muzzle in behind it.
Cavuto shrugged, pulled on a pair of form-fitting mechanics gloves from his jacket pocket, and pulled the cement blocks from under the Dumpster’s wheels. Rivera watched in horror as the realization hit that he was probably going to get Dumpster schmutz, or worse, on his expensive Italian suit.
“Man up, Rivera,” Cavuto said. “There’s police work to be done.”
“Shouldn’t we call some uniforms in to do it? I mean, we’re detectives.”
Cavuto stood up and looked at his partner. “You really believe the movies when James Bond kills thirty guys hand to hand, blows up the secret lair, gets set on fire, then escapes under water and his tux doesn’t even get wrinkled, don’t you?”
“You can’t just buy one of those off the rack,” Rivera said. “It’s a high-tech fabric.”
“Just give me a hand with this thing, would you?”
Once the Dumpster was in the middle of the alley,
the three dogs more or less dogpiled in front of the boarded-up window, Marvin doing his highly trained, “There’s a dead guy in here, give me a biscuit” paw scrape, Bummer barking like he was announcing the big sale event down at Yap-mart and everything had to go, and Lazarus rolling out a long, doleful howl.
“Probably in there,” said Cavuto.
“Ya think?” said Rivera.
Cavuto was able to work his fingers between the sheet of plywood and the window frame and pulled it out. Before he could even set it aside Bummer had leapt through the window into the darkness. Lazarus pawed the windowsill, then leapt after his companion. Marvin, the cadaver dog, backed away, then ruffed twice and tossed his head, which translated to, “No, I’m good, you guys go ahead, just give me my biscuit. I’ll be over here—well, would you look at that—those balls definitely need some tongue attention. No, it’s okay, go on without me.”
Marvin had a nose that could distinguish as many different odors as the human eye could colors, in the range of sixteen million distinct scents. Unfortunately, his doggie brain had a much more limited vocabulary for giving name to those scents and he processed what he smelled as: dead cats, many, dead humans, many, dead rats, many, poo and wee, many flavors, none fresh, and old guy who needs a shower; none of which would have given him pause. The smell that he couldn’t file, that he didn’t have a response for, that stopped him at the window, was a new one: dead, but not dead. Undead. It was scary, and licking his balls calmed him and kept his mind off the biscuit that they owed him.
Rivera shone his flashlight around the room. The basement appeared empty but for piles of debris and a thick layer of dust and ash over the floor, textured with the paw prints of hundreds of cats. He could see the movement of Bummer and Lazarus just at the edge of the flashlight’s beam. They were scratching at a metal door.
“We’ll need the crowbar out of the car,” said Rivera.
“You’re going in there?” asked Cavuto. “In that suit?”
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