by Dixon, Chuck
I was in a parking lot, moving along the rear of a strip mall. There were trucks pulled up at a loading dock behind a store, engines running. Voices came from under the awning that arched over the backs of the semis. I climbed up on the dock. Vendors were rolling carts stacked with boxes through hanging plastic straps and into golden light coming from inside the store. I stood up straight and parted the strips to walk in with as much confidence as I could muster. I tried to look like I belonged.
No one paid the slightest attention to me. A man at a standing steel desk was ticking off items on a manifest while a vendor sipped from a take-out cup. Others were moving around, stacking cartons onto hand trucks. Most had earbuds in place, bobbing heads to music only they could hear.
I snagged a clipboard from a hook and moved deeper into the rows of high metal racks piled with merchandise. No one questions anyone in a hurry with a clipboard in his hand. Not even a scabby, sickly-pale guy in a wrinkled t-shirt and jeans. At least, I hoped not.
Pure survival instinct led me to the darkest area of the stock room. I climbed up on a forklift and then up a stack of crated air conditioners to a higher shelf piled with dusty boxes marked “pool toys.” They wouldn’t be stocking these for sale for months. I crawled in, shoving the bag of clacking vials ahead of me. I lowered myself down on top of the boxes. They sagged a bit under my weight and smelled of mold, dust, and plastic. Inches above my face was the wire mesh floor of the next shelf above me.
I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds from below. Voices, the squeak of carts, and the banging of swinging doors. A whiff of coffee. The world of daylight was starting up as my night was ending. The blinking glare of the overheads didn’t reach me in the shadows where I lay.
The deep drug of sleep came crashing down on me. Before I was swept away and under, I wondered to myself what the hell I was going to do that night.
And the next. And the next. And the next.
I came awake in full dark. Check that. There was a slight blue glow from somewhere below me. I poked my head out from my hidey-hole to see the stock area was dark except for a few safety lights along the floor. The place was silent.
Hooking the bag over one arm, I climbed down to the floor. I crept along in the near dark, my head turning side to side, eyes searching for any movement. The loading dock was shuttered closed, the outside doors rolled down and padlocked. I reached a pair of swing doors that led into the store. No light came through the portholes set in them at eye level. I took a peek through the smeared plastic panes. The store beyond was mostly dark. Can lights high in the ceiling sent down cones of weak amber beams to fall in puddles on the sales floor.
I moved through the doors and across the tiles to follow aisles of bath towels, bedsheets, and pillows to the center of the place. A big-box discount store. The kind of place that stays open late. I must have slept for a long time. After the forty-eight hours I’d just been through, I guess I needed it.
But that meant that this would be a short night for me. That troubled me. I could stay in my stockroom hidey-hole for another night. That idea didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to be moving. I needed to find Roxanne.
At least dinner wasn’t going to be a problem. I drained a half-dozen of the vials to bring the hunger down to the glow. And I needed a change of clothes, and maybe a shower.
I picked out new jeans, some t-shirts, a canvas jacket, and work boots. I found a sturdy overnight bag to hold the remaining blood vials and a bag of socks. I got a wallet, a comb, and a pocket knife. In jewelry, I found a wristwatch that was down-market for my tastes but the best they had. I wound up taking a dozen of them in men’s and ladies’ styles. My taste for larceny aroused, I went to electronics and shoved as many smartphones into the overnight bag as would fit, along with a stack of pay-as-you-go phone cards.
I thought back to the scalpel I’d left behind at the morgue.
In hardware, I found a carpet knife with a retractable blade. I took an extra pack of blades, too.
At the rear of the store, there was a shower in the employees’ men’s room. I stripped down, stuffing my filthy clothes into a bin. In the shower, I scrubbed hard with soap and a washcloth. The layer of scabs left by the sun damage sloughed off to leave clearer skin beneath. Not pink, but clear of most of the discoloration left by my near-lethal sunbath. Crisp flakes of dry flesh dotted the swirl of sudsy water at my feet.
By sheer habit, I started to comb my hair before the mirror. I stepped away and simply brushed it back off my forehead. I wondered if my hair would keep growing, and decided it would not.
In fresh clothes and with a bag of swag over my shoulder, I made my way to a fire exit at the rear of the store. I paused before it to check my new watch. It was almost half past midnight. I had six hours or less to either find Roxanne or another safe place to hide.
I shoved the panic bar, and the fire alarm shrieked to life. I bolted through it into the night.
18
Forget all the places you think someone like me might hide. There are no castles here. No empty houses at the end of lonely country roads. No unlocked mausoleums stacked with cozy coffins. Nothing as creepy-cool as that.
I spent the next day sleeping in a junkyard, a sprawling place with rows of cars and trucks cannibalized for parts. I slept in a graveyard after all. I climbed the fence and found a Lincoln with a popped trunk lid. It was roomy enough. I climbed in and tied the lid down with a piece of wire.
I stayed hungry through the night, only draining two vials before sleeping. That way I could make my supply last. It didn’t do much to cool the fire. The hunger was almost all I could think about. It worked to drive everything else from my mind.
Food was never an issue with me before. As a single guy, I ate when I was hungry. Coffee and a bagel for breakfast when I had the time. Lunch was fast-food drive-through. Dinner, Chinese or pizza. I ran three times a week and played pick-up hoops games at the park near my condo to maintain my college waist size.
But this new hunger was a whole new thing—an obsession. It was an addiction that was determined to drive me to feed every hour that I was awake.
Feeding wasn’t my only problem. My life, my afterlife, was in the shitter. I had no money and no clue of where to get any. My idea of selling the watches and cell phones at a pawn shop went nowhere. I recalled that the phones and minutes cards needed authorization at the register when purchased. They were useless without that. And I’d watched enough pawn shop shows on tv to know that they’d spot the watches as stolen and probably call the cops. I threw the phones down a sewer but kept the watches for possible barter. Beyond that, I had no plans other than finding Roxanne.
That presented a whole new list of problems. I had no car and missed it dearly. Walking everywhere was a pain in the ass. And walking alone at night was only going to get me in trouble. I could only cover so much ground in a night. That made it harder to look for Roxanne.
And I needed to find her. Beyond having no one else to relate to, she had all the knowledge I needed. I was a beginner at all this and had way more questions than answers. She’d been doing this for a hundred years or more. She knew how to make this fucked-up lifestyle work. I needed her mentoring.
I sensed she wasn’t looking for me.
No one crushed the Lincoln while I slept. I took that as a positive sign.
After two vials for breakfast, I set out to take advantage of a full twelve hours of darkness.
It was raining, a cold, steady drizzle. That suited me fine. My clothes got soaked through after an hour’s walking. But the rain was cover. The streets were empty. Passing cars paid no attention to a lone guy hiking through the downpour.
I walked back into my old neighborhood. After an hour of watching the lot near my building, I followed a Korean family through the entry doors into the lobby. They were busy managing armloads of shopping bags. A cute little kid was last in line and held the door for me. His smile faded when he saw my face. I must have looked like shit, wet as a drow
ned rat and skin the color of putty. I took the stairs as he backed, eyes goggling, into the elevator where his family waited for him.
I expected to find police tape over my door. There wasn’t any. I moved fast past Cheryl and Nancy’s place. Some kind of dance music loud on their tv. I planted a shoulder to my door and pressed hard. It popped open. I caught it before it could crash against the wall. Once again, I was surprised at my own strength. A side effect of my new condition, I guessed.
Condition, hell. More like a curse. Exactly like a curse. I was cursed.
The place looked mostly like I’d left it a few nights ago. Some of the furniture was slightly out of place. Old indents in the carpet mashed there by chair legs. I had the vague sense that someone had been here. A whiff of a strange aftershave. I had an unpleasant momentary thrill that my place might be watched. I shook it off. They’d have followed me up. Or braced me at the door.
Moving around the apartment quickly, I shrugged off my wet clothes and put on dry ones. There was a jar of change in the kitchen. I shoved it into my carry-all. In the bedroom, I had an envelope of cash at the bottom of a sock drawer. It was still there. Almost four hundred bucks. Either the cops who searched the place were honest, or they didn’t do a thorough job of looking.
I pulled a raincoat from the closet. A Hugo Boss I had bought during a good month last year. Black. I probably looked the part now, although the bedroom mirror showed nothing but bedroom.
In the kitchen, I scooped ice into a plastic zip bag and set it among the remaining blood vials at the bottom of my carryall.
At the door, I stood for a while checking the peephole and listening before stepping into the hall. I got down the elevator and to the street without seeing anyone. I found a taxi pulled up to a Dunkin’ Donuts a few blocks along. The driver decided I was a junkie and told me to fuck off. I showed him my roll of bills.
I gave him directions and a twenty-dollar tip to drop me off on a surface road near where the interstate split. He peeled away, leaving me in the rain before the dark opening that led to the tent city. The place where I first fed on live blood. My hand tested the carpet knife in my raincoat pocket, clicking the blade in and out of the handle. The fire in my belly swirled, stoking hotter.
My hunger made my pace quicker, drawing me along with memories of that first mouthful of salty red broth. My mission here wasn’t just because I was thirsty. I wanted to find Roxanne.
I watch a lot of nature shows on tv. The ones shot in Africa are my favorites. If they taught me anything, it’s that predators always return to the richest killing ground.
19
I watched the tent village from the shadows behind an overpass support. A generator thumped somewhere, sending a column of white exhaust up into the frigid air. A tidy little community these pervs had made for themselves. A few of the tents were lit by the flickering blue light of televisions, the sound drowned out by the constant swoosh of traffic on the highway above. Everything was otherwise still. I crouched, stomach burning, to watch the surface road running between the porta-potty and the collection of tents and sheds. Like a lion watching a game trail down to the waterhole.
A few hours passed on my stolen watch. The tents were dark. The last of the tvs shut off. The traffic above was intermittent except for the occasional truck rumbling by. A shape separated itself from the dark between the tents and headed for the surface road. My hand went to the knife in my pocket. I took it out and thumbed the blade out of the handle. The figure, a smallish man, walked onto the roadway, shoulders hunched under a down parka.
I made to move for him and stopped. The sound of shifting gravel. A figure rushed out of the shadows of a support column to the other side of the potty shack. A long black leather coat over a hoodie pulled up to hide its features. A blade in a gloved hand caught a glint from the lights from a passing truck overhead. The figure was on a path to intersect the man in the parka.
I watched as the dark figure slipped up from the blind side of the man in the parka and took him in a chokehold grip. The man’s hands jumped to scratch at the arm pinning him. The man’s feet kicked as he was dragged into the dark behind the porta-potty.
Roxanne.
I raced back up the gravel slope to move around the back of the columns through the deepest gloom. Moving as quietly as I could on the slippery aggregate, I came on Roxanne, straddling the still form of the man in the parka. She was rifling his pockets. The blade was nowhere in sight.
“I thought I’d find you here,” I said.
The figure whirled to face me. Wide eyes in a dark face. A male face. Some kid. Nineteen, maybe. No older than twenty-one, anyway. A rat-face with a half-assed attempt at a goatee.
Not Roxanne.
“Who the fuck you?” he said.
“Shit,” I said.
“Damn right, shit,” he said. He rose off the unconscious man. I could see the parka rising and falling. The man was alive.
The kid approached me at a fast walk. The blade was in his gloved hand again. Some kind of switchblade with a long, razor-sharp needle point. With an animal snarl, he closed the distance between us and lunged with the blade.
I watched in slow motion as my hand snaked out and took his wrist. He screamed as I bent the wrist back with a meaty snap. I could feel his pulse through the palm of my hand. The fire rose from my belly. My ears rang with the thunder of his rising heart rate. His fingers sprang open. The knife fell to the gravel.
I pulled him closer, his feet leaving the slope. I brought my knife up, struck deep into the soft flesh of his throat, and tore to the left across his windpipe. His scream turned to a wet gurgle. I drove him to the ground with my weight atop him and clamped my mouth to the pumping wound. The hot, rich broth filled my mouth as I swallowed over and over again to take it all.
His body went limp under me. His face was a mask of slack horror, eyes and mouth wide, flesh ashen.
Drowsy from feeding, I stood to look around me. I was covered in the shower from his open vessel. The blood was already turning sticky in the cold air. There was blood all over the gravel in every direction. The man in the parka was still out cold. I could hear his heartbeat, regular and strong.
With as little effort as picking up a kitten, I gripped the kid under the arms and threw him over my shoulder. I charged up the long slope into the dark under the highway overpass. There was a broad, flat area of gravel fill under the roadway between huge support columns. It ended at a wall with the hoops of steel ladder rungs set in the surface. I climbed them to the top, the kid draped over my shoulder.
The ladder ended in a concrete shelf that left just enough headroom for me to walk under the rows of steel beams supporting the highway overhead. The shelf angled upward and stopped a good twenty feet in. I had to stoop way down to make it to the rear of the shelf. I dropped the kid’s dead weight in a corner. There was evidence here that someone had used the place for a home, but not for a long time. There was a flattened refrigerator box and a heap of moldering rags, the remnant of some kind of quilt decorated with once-colorful images of Raggedy Ann.
I went down the ladder to creep back down the slope to the kid’s intended victim. His wallet lay by him where the kid dropped it. I left him there to get the carry-all bag I’d left behind a column. I came back and looked over the scene. I picked up the kid’s knife, and after figuring out how to draw the blade back into the handle, put it in my pocket.
There was blood all around where I’d brought the kid down. The drops gleamed black on the gravel in the gray light from above. The sun was rising on an overcast day. I was running out of time to find a place to hole up, but I couldn’t leave the blood here. The man in the parka might report the mugging. If cops found this much blood, they’d want to look around. Maybe even bring dogs. They’d find the body. The blood on the gravel had to go.
One by one, I gathered up the pieces of gravel with blood on them.
I licked them clean, every stone.
20
I s
till had a lot of questions.
Like, what about the whole “native earth” thing? Was I covered as long as I stayed local?
The place I spent that night sure had plenty of indigenous dirt. And piss. And pigeon crap. I wrapped myself in that filthy Raggedy Ann quilt and crawled into the refrigerator box. I lay there, protected in my own personal cocoon, my belly full, and the fire tamped down to a pleasant glow. I drifted off listening for the sound of police sirens. I didn’t hear anything but the rumble and hiss of the highway traffic a few feet above my head.
It snowed during the day. I woke up to find the world was silvery white under a quarter moon sky. The body of the kid lay where I left it. It was too cold for it to start smelling. To anyone with a normal sense of smell that is. I could smell the death on him, and the cold silence that comes with the cessation of life.
The snow on the gravel slope had a good six-inch covering over where it was exposed to the sky between the two overpasses. The snow cover was undisturbed. Zero footprints. No one climbed it looking for evidence. Odds were the man in the parka came to, found his wallet next to him, and scuttled back to his tent, counting his blessings. Not likely for a registered pervert to call 911 to report a simple assault.
I was still feeling the glow of the feast from the night before. There was a gnawing sensation growing in my gut, but it was manageable. I had plenty of vials to take the edge off when I needed to. I dug through the carry-all bag to change out of my clothes. My jeans especially were stiff with clotted blood. I used my undershirt to wipe the worst of the stains off my raincoat. I tossed the clothes into the corner by the dead kid.
When the kid was found, they’d find the clothes covered in his DNA. My DNA, too. Or were my genetics the same now? In any case, it wouldn’t lead the cops anywhere. I was dead, too, remember. And besides, as quick as that kid was to use that knife, I had to assume he had a record. He was no newbie mugger. The cops wouldn’t waste much of their time looking into how he died, right?