“Sure.” I nodded and swallowed hard.
“Uh, the lovely Heather will fill you in on any other rules or things you probably already know.” Lee looked back at the couch.
“So, what do I get paid?” I said.
Lee motioned to a table in the far corner of the room. I walked past relics of Lee’s long life. Dying candle light illuminated phonographs, stacks of records and the occasional archaic, 1930s era machine gun. The table was covered in stacks of gold coins. Lee appeared next to me and scooped up a handful of Krugerrands. He let them fall through his fingers back onto the table.
“Help yourself,” he said. “Take as many as you can carry. Your retainer, as it were.”
He seized my shoulder. Dark gray claws retracted back into his fingertips. “What is your name?”
“Mike Ellis,” I said.
“Well Mike, good hunting,” Lee said.
I filled my pants and jacket pockets with the surprisingly heavy coins. Lee circled me.
“Now, leave us.” He pushed me toward the door. “You know what to do.”
The Brides stood to follow us out, dark blood drying on their pale bodies. Heather smirked at them. She stopped, stood on her tip-toes and put her arms around Lee’s shoulders. He smiled and kissed her. Blood dribbled down his chin. She pulled back, threads of blood connected their lips for a second. Something private passed between them and they laughed.
The doors swung shut behind us as we left. I could hear the chain knotting itself around the door handles. The vampires in the hall fell back, whispering among themselves.
Back in the ballroom, the party was over. The house lights were on. Hundreds of outraged, frightened vampires stared as we descended the staircase. Heather had violated some kind of major taboo by bringing me here. She beamed, relishing their anger.
Lee’s gold coins weighed down my pockets, clinking conspicuously as I walked. One of the door guards blocked the exit. He had removed an M-60 from it’s tripod and held it assault style with the ammunition belt wrapped around his arm. Decades of dust had been wiped off the gun. The crowd parted in front of us. The door guard stepped to the side, pointing the machine gun right at me. When we reached the door, Heather turned, hands raised, middle fingers extended, and bowed.
*****
Heather took her time, strutting proudly across the warehouse floor. I couldn’t wait to get back to my car and as far from Lee’s insane mansion as I could. I was sure that any second the shock would wear off and hundreds of vampires would swarm across the empty mill floor. They’d catch up to us in seconds and tear us to pieces.
“Come on.” I pulled at Heather’s leather jacket. “Lets go, move it.”
“There’s no point in running, at least for you anyway,” Heather said. “They would catch you easily. Also you can’t outrun a machine gun. Just play it cool and we’ll be fine.”
“Sure, if we gotta die, at least we’ll look cool.” I looked back. A dozen or more vampires had ventured outside. We were far enough away, that all I could see were their burning eyes.
“I’ll look cool. You, at least, will die with dignity.” She took off her jacket and hung it over her shoulder. She wore a ragged, purple v-neck sweater underneath, the kind of thing that was fashionable in the late Eighties. She wore nothing underneath. I tried not to stare. “Did you see those fuckers? Those posers were so scared. They didn’t know what the fuck to do.”
The Spaniard leaned on the hood of my car, polishing a huge bowie knife. He straightened up when he saw us. “Good luck, cazador.” He touched the blade to one of his bushy white eyebrows.
I dumped the gold in the center console while the Spaniard opened the overhead doors. Heather put her boots up on the ruined dashboard. She stretched and yawned, her breasts strained against the threadbare fabric of her sweater.
“That went well,” Heather said.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “I can’t believe we got out of there alive.”
“Exactly,” she said. “We made it. You got paid. It went as well as could be expected.”
“What did you do to them, anyway?” I said
“Maybe I’ll tell you about it some night, when I’m bored,” she said.
The door spooled up just enough for me to get the car under, so I floored it. My side-view mirror collided with the overhead door frame and exploded into pieces. I didn’t even slow down. The Spaniard cheered and drew his pistols. He fired a few celebratory shots into the night as we sped away.
*****
“It’s getting late.” Heather narrowed her eyes at the horizon line. Boiling clouds burned red in the distance.
“How fucking long were we in there?” I said.
“Relax, there’s plenty of time left,” she said, “for you, I mean.”
“Time for what?” I said.
“You know what,” she said. “You took the gold.”
“No, I don’t know what. I have no clue what I’m doing.” I hit the steering wheel. Deep down, I knew she was right.
“Stop playing dumb,” she said. “We’re going after the revenants.”
“Oh, you mean the other vampires from the party.” The gravity of what happened sunk in. Danny was gone. All those people, slaughtered.
“They are not vampires,” she said. “Well, they might have been vampires once.”
“OK,” I said. “Whatever.”
“You’re taking this well,” she said, changing the subject.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“When people see the kind of shit you’ve just seen, they go crazy, kill themselves or something.” She ran her fingers through my hair. “Your hair didn’t even turn white.” She laughed. Her teeth were still dark red from Lee’s bloody kiss.
We took our time, driving back to the house on Maple. I could see red and blue lights flashing, a lot of them. A shaken police officer manned a roadblock ahead. He held the local news vans and rubberneckers back.
“They’re long gone by now,” Heather said.
“Do you think Danny made it?” I said.
“Nobody made it,” she said. “When they get going, they drink blood ‘till they vomit. Then they start chewing on the bodies, trying to get the last drops of blood out.”
I twisted the steering wheel cover, until the cheap lace-on cover came loose.
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess they were like, your friends, or something.”
“Yeah, or something,” I said. “The only person I knew there was Danny. I was getting ready to leave when I saw you.”
I kept driving, according to Heather’s seemingly random directions. It took a minute, then I realized we were going in circles. Each pass took us further and further from the house on Maple. The neighborhood's grew steadily worse. For sale and foreclosure signs stood in front of empty houses. Heather pointed at a strip mall and I pulled around back to the service entrances.
“This is where they sleep,” Heather said.
Chapter 2
The mall was an island of concrete surrounded by overgrown vacant lots. Economic recovery fizzled out before the area could be developed. The storefronts were long gone and gray, weathered plywood covered the windows.
“Time to go to work,” Heather said.
She got out of the car, keeping her back to the rising sun. I had some idea of what Heather and Lee expected me to do. Part of me wanted to go for it, get revenge for my last friend. Heather swayed drunkenly and steadied herself on the car.
“Pop the trunk,” she said.
“Maybe we should plan this out, you know get some supplies, some guns,” I said.
“You have a knife. You’ll like, figure out the rest.” Heather rolled her bloodshot eyes. “Also, we, I mean you, have to get some kind of trophy for Lee.”
“Like what?” I said. “You know, you don’t look so good.”
“I’ll be fine. Just need some sleep.” She poked me in the chest and sent me back a few steps. “We’ll talk about the trophy later.”<
br />
Heather pulled the spare tire out of the trunk with one hand and flung it across the parking lot like a Frisbee. I reached in and found an army surplus folding shovel. Heather climbed into the trunk and curled up under an old jacket. She murmured something and I slammed the trunk lid shut.
I walked along the back wall until I found the one door that wasn’t boarded up. The handle was long gone. I wondered if the revenants needed to sleep like Heather. Either way I was screwed. I pushed the door open and walked in.
The smell of rotting meat and corruption hit me like a wall. The revenants, or whoever, had strung shop lights overhead that perfectly illuminated the foul scene. A massive pile of raw, bloody bones and body parts dominated the room. I held my jacket over my mouth, trying to block the stench. Some of the pieces moved and twitched. Danny’s head lay discarded on an empty torso that wasn’t even his.
I spun in a circle. There was nothing else in the room, except a huge hole in the wall. I tightened my grip on the shovel and stepped through the wall into what turned out to be an abandoned salon. The female vampire from the party was there. She slept, using what was left of Danny’s body as a pillow.
“Wake up bitch,” I said.
Her eyes flew open, burning reddish orange under the dim light. Swollen, bloody lips pulled back revealing teeth crudely sharpened to jagged points. She twisted and writhed, trying to stand. I knelt next to her and brought the shovel down on her skull like a hatchet. The revenant shrieked and clawed at me. I wrenched the shovel loose. Blood sprayed across the dusty floor. I kept swinging until the shovel cracked the tile floor underneath what was left of her head.
I stood, watching the blood pour out across the tiles and wondered how much of it was Danny’s. The revenant’s arms and legs twitched. Her claws scraped the floor. I poked at her bare, bat-like feet. They hinged at the arch and tried to grip the shovel. Claws scraped metal as I pulled the blade loose. They’re were at least two more of the bastards left. I hoped.
A faint thud cut through the silence. I spun around. The sound came from Danny’s torso. I pressed my palm against his chest. His heart was beating, still trying to pump blood that was long gone. The whole place had to burn.
The rest of the salon was empty. The revenants had destroyed the mirrored walls. I kicked over a cardboard box. Stacks of yellowed paper spilled out on the floor. I picked one of the papers up. It was some kind of billing record for the salon. Someone spent years filling those things out, perfectly. All for nothing.
I ducked through another hole, into the next store. Rows of different sized cages lining the walls were all that was left of a pet store. A gym bag full of tools sat in the middle of the room. Rolls of copper wire gathered dust next to the bag. A dusty, dessicated corpse hung from the wall, pinned in place with a pair of bolt cutters.
“You picked the wrong place to scavenge,” I said under my breath.
I found three huge cages in the back of the pet store. Two of the cages held dried out skeletons. They looked human, except for the claws and teeth. A nude woman occupied the center cage, mouth open wide, like she died screaming. A grotesquely over sized spider skittered into a funnel shaped web in her black hair. As I left the room I heard a sound, like dry leaves rustling across a sidewalk. I didn’t look back.
The last store was a dead end. Piles of watches, jewelry, wallets and purses filled the aisles of an empty bookstore.
I found another revenant when I got back to the salon. He stood with his back to me, holding the remains of the female. He wore a long, dusty leather coat. I ducked back into the salon with the shovel ready to go. Drywall crunched under my boots. The revenant straightened up and let the headless body fall. Stringy black hair obscured his bleeding eyes. It looked like he was trying to say something, then his mouth dropped open, unhinging like a snake. Most of his teeth had been replaced by blackened pieces of steel. The revenant swayed, trying to focus on me.
“Cocksucker, where the fuck did you come from?” I didn’t give him a chance to answer.
The shovel hit him right in the mouth, sending his homemade teeth flying. Blood exploded everywhere. The revenant staggered, trying to push his broken jaw back into place. I thought about Danny and his friends at the party, then I swung again. The blade split the revenants skull and stuck between his burning eyes. Blood pumped out over my hand, slicking the shovel’s handle. As the revenant fell the shovel slipped out of my hand.
Some part of the revenant’s primitive brain still wanted to fight. His head rolled uselessly as he tried to stand. I used the stuck shovel to hold the revenant’s head in place while I pinned him to the floor with my knee. His jaw spasmed, like he was still trying to bite. I took out my knife and realized that I hadn’t sharpened the blade in a over year. I pushed the revenant’s jaw out of the way and dug into his throat, sawing through sinew and muscle. Then the blood really stated to flow. I yanked the shovel loose and used it to break the his spinal column. A whole lot of built up anger and the fact that I fell off the wagon at the party left me completely unfazed by all the blood that had no doubt contaminated me. I stood up and kicked the severed head. It spun across the floor and hit the wall with a dull thud.
I stopped at the pile of body parts on my way to the other side of the mall. Reddish brown maggots writhed in the mess. They left trails through the dust on the floor as they squirmed desperately toward me. I wondered what they would grow into after eating the tainted flesh.
The maggots popped and cracked under my boots as I walked into the next store. A stainless steel table, like something from the county morgue, stood in the center of the room. Professional butcher’s tools were spread over the table, gathering dust, unused. I cut open one of the cardboard boxes that were stacked around the room. It was full of empty plastic bottles. Three commercial refrigerators sat next to a brand new diesel generator, still on it’s shipping pallet. I noted the barrels of diesel fuel for later. Extension cords criss crossed the floor but nothing was plugged in. I stared at the refrigerators for what seemed like a long time. Whatever was in there couldn’t be worse than what I’d already seen. I pulled the nearest one open. It was empty. They were all empty. The energy savings stickers were still attached.
The lights ended at the last store. A round hole, that looked like it had been chewed out of the drywall, formed the entrance. “Fuck this,” I said, too loud. I looked in, using my phone as a flashlight. Oblong shapes were piled in the corners, just beyond the weak electronic light. The walls were covered in crude drawings, rendered in what looked like black ink. Nonsense words and symbols were scrawled under depictions of bizarre creatures doing hideous things.
I staggered back outside and sat on the hood of my car for a while, hoping the sun would kill the contamination that I could feel crawling across my skin.
*****
I drove until I found a big box store. City cops passed me on the way into the parking lot. I looked down at the unclean dried blood on my hands.
None of the retail zombies noticed me as they shuffled past. I grabbed a bottle of bleach and some dish soap on my way to the bathroom. I cleaned up the best I could. My shirt was a total loss, so I threw it in the trash along with a bunch of bloody towels. Then I dumped bleach on everything contaminated with undead blood. A retail zombie in a button covered vest walked in. He saw everything.
“Shit, man,” he said. “That’s some fucked up shit, right there.”
“Long night.” I stuffed the empty bleach bottle into the trash can.
He laughed nervously and disappeared into the handicapped stall. I heard a lighter click. The smell of cheap weed filled the air.
I walked out of the bathroom wearing a wet army jacket that smelled like dish soap. I filled a cart with five gallon gas cans and a case of motor oil. The check out zombie didn’t even look up when I threw a two pack of barbecue lighters on the scanner.
I sold one of Lee’s coins at a pawn shop that I found on the way back to the mall. The old gangster behind the cou
nter lit up when he saw the gold. I knew he screwed me on the price, but I needed cash to fill all the gas cans. It was already past three when I got back to the mall. I unpacked the gas cans and left them on the weedy asphalt. Then I rolled my windows down and tried to relax. Sleep came fast.
*****
I woke up and climbed in the trunk with Heather. We embraced in the dark. Her bare flesh was as cool as silk. Her teeth ripped into my chest, cutting me to the bone.
A loud scrape, like nails on a chalkboard woke me. I grabbed at my chest and looked around for a weapon. Heather tapped her claws on the window and smiled. Deep gouges scarred the glass.
“I had the weirdest dream today.” Heather stood with her back to the dying sun. The red sky suited her.
“You’re trashing my fuckin’ car.” I got out and looked over the claw damage.
“Ugh, your car is a fucking Dodge, anyway,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I found Danny’s body in there,” I said.
“Huh.” Heather cocked her head, wolf-like.
“My friend from the party,” I said.
“The one they took from me, yeah I remember,” she said. “Time’s weird for me. It’s only been a few hours, but it feels like we’ve been at this for days.”
“You would have killed him too?” I said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I would have let it play out, seen what kind of person he really was, then decide what to do with him. He might have woken up the next day feelin’ like shit, or I might have buried him somewhere.”
I started mixing the motor oil into the gas cans. Heather stretched and yawned.
“How many of them did you get?” Heather said.
“Two,” I said. “We have to burn everything.”
“I gathered that.” She tapped one of the gas cans with her boot.
We carried the gas cans inside. Heather dropped hers and stared, horrified, at the body pile. She scanned the room, expecting the surviving revenants to swarm out at her.
Low-Skilled Job (Vol. 1): Low-Skilled Job Page 2