“There’s a committee?”
“No,” said Rivera. “He’s fucking with you.” Rivera turned back to Foo. “What about something that will work on a wider basis—like a vaccine or something?”
Foo thought for a second. “Sure, what is it, Tuesday? I’m curing Ebola in the morning, but I can work on your vampire vaccine after lunch.”
Rivera smiled. “People are dying, Steve. Lots of people. And the only people who have a chance to stop it are in this room.”
“Not you,” Cavuto said to Jared.
“Bitch,” Jared replied.
“I’ll work on it,” said Foo. “But it’s not as bad as you think it is.”
“Brighten our day, kid,” said Cavuto.
“They can’t all handle it. Four out of every ten animals that are turned vampire don’t survive to the second night. They either just break down on the spot—sort of decay from the inside, or they go crazy—it’s like the heightened senses overwhelm them and they just have sort of a seizure that scrambles their brains and they end up with no survival instincts. They don’t feed or hide from the light. The first sunrise after they’re turned burns them up. It’s like accelerated evolution, taking out the weak the very first day.”
“So you’re telling me what?”
“The cat cloud won’t grow exponentially. And the only way it will pass to other species is if they bite their attacker during the attack and ingest vampire blood—that’s why you haven’t had any more human vampires.”
“Then why no dog vampires?” asked Cavuto.
“I’m guessing the cats tear them apart before they change,” said Foo. “I’m not a behavioral guy, but I’d guess there’s no brotherhood among vampires. If you’re a vampire cat, you’re essentially still a cat. If you’re a vampire dog, you’re still a dog.”
“Except for Chet,” said Rivera. “Who is kind of a cat plus something else.”
“Well, there are anomalies,” said Foo. “I told you, this is very fuzzy science. I don’t like it.”
Rivera’s phone chirped and he flipped it open and looked at the screen. “The Animals,” he said.
“And?” asked Cavuto.
“They’re at a butcher shop in Chinatown. They say they have a way to kill the vampires but they can’t find them.”
“We can take them Marvin. Tell them we’re on the way.”
Rivera held the phone like it was a foul dead thing. “I don’t know how.”
Foo snatched the phone out of Rivera’s hand, nine-keyed a message, hit SEND, and handed it back. “There, you’re on the way. I thought you said the only people who could fix this were in this room.”
“They are, and now they’re leaving.”
“Don’t forget your sun jackets,” said Jared. “We charged the batteries and everything. Do you think you’ll be able to turn them on, or should I come along to help?”
“He’s a kid.” Rivera grabbed Cavuto’s arm. “You can’t hit him.”
“That’s it, kid. You’re out of the tribe. If I hear you’ve touched a penis, even your own, I’m sending you to butch lesbian jail.”
“They have that?”
Rivera looked past his partner at Jared and nodded, slowly, seriously.
KATUSUMI OKATA
The burned-up white girl was not healing very quickly and Okata was running out of blood. All he seemed to do was watch her, sketch her, and squeeze his blood into her mouth. While her red hair had returned, and most of the ash had flaked away to reveal white skin underneath, she was still wraith-thin, and she only seemed to breathe two or three times an hour. During the day, she didn’t breathe at all, and he thought that she might be dead forever. She had not opened her eyes, and had made no sound except a low moan when he was feeding her, which subsided as soon as he stopped.
He was not feeling well himself, and on the second day he became light-headed and passed out on the mat beside her. If she did come alive as a demon, he’d be too weak to defend himself and she would drain the last drops of his life. Strangely, he was not okay with that. He needed to eat and recover and she needed more blood.
“We will have to find a balance,” he said to the white girl in Japanese. He had been talking to her more lately, and found that he no longer flinched at the sound of his voice inside the little apartment that had been without a human voice for so long. A balance.
When it was light and she had been still for an hour, he locked up his little apartment, took his sword, and walked into Chinatown, feeling ashamed of the little, old-man steps he was taking because he had become so weak. Perhaps he would actually go into a restaurant and have some tea and noodles, sit until his strength returned. Then he would find a better way to feed the burned-up white girl.
He only spoke a dozen words of Cantonese, despite having lived near Chinatown for forty years. They were the same dozen words he spoke in English. He told his students at the dojo it was because Bushido and the Japanese language were inseparable, but in fact, it was because he was stubborn and didn’t really like talking to people. His words were: hello, good-bye, yes, no, please, thank you, okay, sorry, and suck my dick. He made it a rule, however, to only say the last three in junction with please and/or thank you, and had only broken that rule once, when a thug in the Tenderloin tried to take his sword and Okata forgot to say please before fracturing the man’s skull with the sheathed katana. Sorry, he’d said.
It had been over a week since Okata had been to the dojo in Japantown. His students would think he was testing them, and when the time came to face them, he would say through his translator that they should learn to sit. Should learn patience. Should anticipate nothing. Anticipation was desire and didn’t the Buddha teach that desire was the cause of all suffering? Then he would proceed to trounce each and every one of them with the bamboo shinai as an object lesson in suffering. Thank you.
He didn’t care much for prepared Chinese food, but Japantown was too far to walk, and Japanese food in his neighborhood was too expensive. But noodles are noodles. He’d eat just enough to get his strength back, then he would buy a fish, maybe some beef to help replace his blood, and take them home and prepare them.
After he slurped down three bowls of soba and drank a pot of green tea at a restaurant named Soup, he made his way to the butcher. Near the old man who sat on a milk crate playing a Gaohu, a two-string, upright fiddle that approximated the sound of someone hurting a cat, the swordsman passed two policemen, who had paused as if considering whether they should give money to the old fiddler or whether it might not be better for everyone if they just Tased him. They smiled and nodded to Okata and he smiled back. They were mildly amused by the little man in the too-short plaid slacks, fluorescent orange socks, and an orange porkpie hat, who they had seen walking the City since they were boys. It never occurred to them that he was anything but an eccentric street person, or that the walking stick with which he measured his easy strolls, wasn’t a walking stick at all.
It took considerable pointing and pantomime to get the Chinese butcher to understand that he wanted to buy blood, but once he did, Okata was surprised to find out not only was it available, but it was available in flavors: pig, chicken, cow, and turtle. Turtle? Not for his burned-up white girl. How dare the butcher even suggest such a thing? She would have beef, and maybe a quart or two of pig, because Okata remembered reading once that human flesh was called “long pig” by Pacific island cannibals, so pig blood might be more to her liking.
The butcher taped the lids on eight, one-quart plastic containers containing all the nonturtle blood he had, then carefully stacked them in a shopping bag and handed them to a woman at the cash register. Okata paid her the amount on the register, picked up the bag, and was pocketing the change when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
He turned. No one there. Then he looked down: a tiny Chinese grandmother dressed in thug-wear that made her look vaguely like a hip-hop Yoda. She said something to him in Cantonese, then said something to the butcher, then to the woma
n behind the counter, who pointed at the shopping bag, then she said something else to Okata. Then she put a hand on his shopping bag.
“Thank you,” Okata said in Cantonese. He bowed slightly. She didn’t move.
Being confronted by a Chinese grandmother while shopping in Chinatown was not unusual. In fact, more than once he’d had to push through a dog pile of Sino-matrons to simply buy a decent cabbage, but this one seemed to want what Okata had clearly already purchased.
He smiled, bowed again, just slightly, said, “Good-bye,” and tried to push past her. She stepped in front of him, and he noticed, as he should have before, that a whole group of young men stepped in behind her; seven of them, Anglo, Hispanic, black, and Chinese, they all looked slightly stoned, but no less determined.
The old lady barked something at him in Cantonese and tried to grab his bag. Then the young men behind her stepped up.
THE ANIMALS
“Have you been washed in the blood?” said Clint, the born-again ex-heroin addict to the detectives as they entered the butcher shop. He grinned over his shoulder. Clint was splattered head to toe with blood. Everyone in the shop was splattered with blood except the two uniform cops, who were trying to keep the three groups—the customers, the butchers, and the Animals—separated. They had the Animals lined up opposite the counter, facing the wall, their hands restrained with zip ties.
“Inspector, these guys say they’re supposed to meet you here,” said the younger of the uniforms, a gaunt, Hispanic guy named Muñez.
Rivera shook his head.
“He started it,” said Lash Jefferson. “We were just minding our own business, and he rolled up on us all badass.”
Rivera looked at the Asian officer, John Tan, who he’d worked with before when investigating a murder in Chinatown and had needed a translator. “What happened?”
Tan shook his head and pushed his hat back on his head with the end of his riot baton. “Nobody’s hurt. It’s beef and pig blood. The butcher says these guys attacked a little old Japanese man, a regular customer, because he had bought the last of the beef blood.”
“We needed it for bait,” said Lash. “You know, Inspector, like beer for slugs.” He winked.
“You attacked an old man because he bought the last cow blood?” asked Cavuto.
“He attacked us,” said Troy Lee. “We were just defending ourselves.”
“He had a sword,” said Drew, who turned back around quickly.
Officer Tan rolled his eyes at Rivera. “The butcher says the old man had a stick of some kind. He used it to defend himself.”
“Just because he didn’t draw it out of the scabbard doesn’t meant it wasn’t a sword,” said Jeff, the tall, blond jock.
“It was a battle of honor,” said Troy Lee.
“One little old guy with a stick, seven of you?” said Rivera. “Honor?”
“He told my grandma to suck his dick,” said Troy.
“Still,” said Cavuto.
“But she said okay,” Troy said.
“That shit is just wrong,” said Lash.
Grandma, who was standing with the other outraged, blood-splattered customers across the butcher shop, fired off a volley of Cantonese at the policemen. Rivera looked to Officer Tan for translation.
“She says she misunderstood what he was saying because his accent was so bad.”
“Don’t care,” said Rivera. “Where’s the guy with the alleged stick?”
“He ran out before we got here,” said Tan. “We called in backup, but we put the responding unit on finding the victim, when these guys didn’t resist.”
“Resistance is futile,” said Clint in a robot voice.
“I thought you were Christian,” said Cavuto.
“What, I can’t love Jesus and Star Trek?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake. Rivera, let’s just arrest these morons and—”
Rivera held up his hand for silence. “Officer Tan, I’m afraid I do need them. You have their names if the stick guy shows up and wants to press charges. Have all those people leave their names with the butcher. These guys will pay for their dry cleaning.”
“Yes, sir,” said Tan. “They’re all yours. You want me to clip the restraints?”
“Nope,” said Rivera. “Come along, boys.” He led the Animals, their hands cuffed behind their backs, out of the butcher shop and into the flow of the Stockton Street sidewalk—a river of people.
“You’d better bring Troy Lee’s grandma,” said Lash, rolling to the side as a vendor with a handtruck full of crates bumped by.
“Yeah, Grandma has a secret weapon,” blurted out Troy Lee.
“I heard,” said Cavuto.
Jeff, the tall jock, said, “Hey, did anyone wonder why a little old Japanese guy would need eight quarts of animal blood?”
16
Being the Chronicles of Abby Normal, Nosferatu
Well, that was dramatic. Ronnie is all crying and cowering in the other room because I drank a little of her blood. Fuck’s sakes, you mopey emo-toy, cowboy the fuck up, you have quarts! What did she expect, she got to kill me, that’s not free? I’m not like some easy death slut who lets you kill her for nothing, I am nosferatu, bee-yotch. That shit has a price. Her blood totally tastes like zit cream, too. I almost hurled.
I know, très cool, non? So, now that I am a dark and beautiful creature of unspeakable evil, I think I’m going to start a pay-subscription blog. Except I can only, like, advertise darkness and unspeakable evil, because I’m totally starting from the beginning on the beauty. First, all my tattoos are totally gone. Gone! Like wiped off. After I succumbed to the dark gift by taking a whole bottle of the Motherbot’s sleeping pills, Ronnie hid me under a pile of blankets and stuffed animals in her room, and when I awoke at sundown and crawled from my sepulcher of Carebears and Muppets and whatnot, all my tats totally wiped off. Like the ink was pushed out on top of my skin. Now Ronnie has an Epileptic Elmo with more of my ink on him than I have. And my piercings healed up. My bars and rings are all in the carpet.
Boobs? Still pathetic. I had so hoped to swoop down on Foo and totally flash my awesome vampyre cleavage on him. You know, like put on a bustier and really squish the girls out the top, then be all: BAM! “Check it out, Foo. Cower before killer décolletage, and beg me to let you rub your handsome ninja face on it.” But no! Now he’ll be all, “Oh, it looks like you dropped a couple of dimes down your shirt, vamp child. Can I help you with those?”
So I suffer.
And you can’t get implants. I saw what happens when the Animals’ blue hooker turned vampyre. You wake up and your implants are on the floor and you’re all, “Hey, I blew like a hundred strangers to get those.” I’m only estimating. I’m sure the number of strangers will vary depending on prevailing suck and surgical rates in your area. (You acquire arcane medical knowledge when your mother is a nurse.) You can’t have stuff removed either, you know, if that might be needed.
Even my makeup is ruined from where Ronnie tried to smother me with a pillow, so that’s going to take like an hour to fix. I had heard that sometimes even when you overdose on a whole butt-load of drugs, you don’t always die because your heart won’t stop, which is why you’re supposed to put your head in a plastic bag. But I didn’t want to because I had done Cleopatra eye makeup that was très elegant so I would look hawt for my resurrection. So Ronnie was supposed to put her hand over my mouth and nose, just until I stopped breathing, then like fix my lipstick if it smeared. Because otherwise I’d be all girlfriend in a coma for weeks while the Motherbot whined about how she couldn’t unplug me because of her guilt for treating me like an assbag and how she had never appreciated my dark complexity and inner beauty and whatnot, and I have too much shit to do for that.
But Ronnie didn’t even wait for me to pass out. I had just taken the pills with some Sunny D (because the nosferatu love us some irony), and I laid down on the floor like we had planned, so Ronnie could just roll my body under the bed to hide me from the deadl
y rays of the sun and Mom. So I’m grieving for the loss of my mortality and whatnot, when Ronnie, like, just throws a pillow on my face and sits on it. And I’m all, “Wait, wait, mmphff, mmphf.”
And then she burned one—right in my face—one of those foul, vegan farts—because she’s been a vegan ever since she had head lice and we shaved her head. (I don’t know why. Something about garlic and parasites. She’s insane.) ’Kayso, I decided that I could wait to receive the dark gift, and that Ronnie would have to die as soon as I got her off me. So she, like, burns another one! And she’s skinnier than me. I don’t know how she could even have it in her. And she’s laughing so hard that she falls off of me and I make my move.
’Kayso, I’m chasing her around the house, going, “I’m going to peel off your skin and make it into boots and step in dog shit with them,” and other basic super-villain threats, and then things got all wiggly and the last thing I remember is I walked into the sliding glass doors to the balcony and kind of bounced off. And so tragically, I died young, and no one was there to grieve for me or shed tears for me or kiss my cold, lifeless lips and whatnot.
But now I’m undead awesome. I think with practice, I will make a super, super-villain, and really, I’m okay with that, because there won’t be any student loans like there would have been with my other career choice of tragic romantic poet.
’Kayso, now I must fix my makeup and pick an ensem and then wander the lonely night, searching for the Countess and the vampyre Flood, and maybe drop by the love lair to totally overwhelm Foo with my haunting and eternal but still small-chested beauty.
Kthxbye. Being immortal rocks! I can type like demon speed! Fear me! L8z.
THE EMPEROR
The Emperor and the men shared a submarine sandwich on a bench by Pier Nine in the bright noonday sun as they watched a dark knife of a yacht glide into dock. She was just short of the length of a football field, all black, with stainless-steel trim—what the Emperor imagined a star-ship might look like if it were driven by sails. The sails on her three stainless-steel masts were mechanically furled into black carbon fiber shrouds, and the curved windows of her cockpit and cabin were blacked out. There were no crewmen on the deck.
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