Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “Of course,” the vicar looked contrite, and the name-dropping had completely erased the querulous frown. “I do hope I did the right thing. Should I have kept hold of the…”

  “No, that’s fine,” Tommo turned back towards the doors. “They had the papers. I’ll sort it out.”

  He paused when he got outside, standing in the steady, dreary rain and looking at nothing in particular. He didn’t so much mind the rain, not once he was out in it. He subscribed, however subconsciously, to the philosophy that a person could dash from overhang to overhang and still get wet, or ignore the elements over which they had no control and maintain at least a little bit of dignity. Tommo was a great believer in dignity, not that a casual observer would know it to look at him and even his good mates in The East Fremantle Riverboats cricket club would be surprised to learn. He stood, and watched the downpour, and thought long, unanticipatedly convoluted, disastrously inevitable thoughts. He looked at his watch, then at the low grey sky. Then he sighed, put down the long duffel bag on the church’s front step, squatted down, and opened it.

  Back when they’d been in school, Barry had occasionally said of Tommo that his heart was in the right place. It was just a pity his brain wasn’t.

  He’d used to say it … Tommo supposed he still did. Or would, if Tommo managed to find him and get him out of whatever mess he’d gotten himself into. Tommo didn’t suppose he was quite as close a friend of Barry’s as Seam had been – was – but they were still mates. And mates looked after each other.

  He looked down at the long, pale cricket stumps with their dirt-crusted metal points, and sighed again.

  Then he rose, closed the bag up and slung it back over his shoulder, and headed across town through the rain towards the nightclub that had until recently been called The Night Train.

  “It’s broad daylight,” he muttered to himself as he walked. “It’s pissing with rain, but it’s broad daylight. The sun’s still up. Broad daylight,”

  He stopped at the boundary of chain-link fences and yellow-sand piles, looking at the nightclub and continuing to think his inevitable thoughts.

  We don’t even know if the nightclub’s involved. I thought it was weird, but Nails didn’t seem to think it was anything.

  It’s just a weird coincidence. Das Wampyr’s. Demons and Angels.

  Nails goes Angel, Nails kills a super-old Vampire over in Sydney, Nails brings back a Vampire chick and a dead Vampire’s skull, a place called Das Wampyr’s crops up overnight and announces a Demons and Angels opening party, the skull disappears, Nails disappears, the Vampire chick disappears…

  Heh. ‘Overnight’.

  Yeah. Probably all a coincidence. They’re probably right, I’m just making connections with nothing.

  I’m deffo not doing this to prove them wrong. Deffo.

  Ignoring the glances of passers-by with a tremendous expenditure of willpower, Tommo hitched the bag on his shoulder once again and headed into the still-under-construction front entrance as though he belonged there.

  There didn’t seem to be much in the way of security. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any security at all. The entryway of Das Wampyr’s was airy and had a little waterfall in one corner that Tommo was dead-set certain was going to get chundered in before midnight Saturday. The whole area was also wide open and completely deserted.

  There was a reception desk, or some sort of counter where the ticket checker would sit, but there was nobody sitting there now. Tommo crossed the polished granite paving, past the desk and the area where people would queue up and mill around, past the coat-check to a pair of glossy staircases leading up to upstairs dance floors and VIP lounges. The stairs were also polished granite, with some sparkly strips of sandpapery grip-tape that would absolutely not stop thirty drunk-arse people from falling down them in the first weekend, and need to be replaced with thick padded rubber shit after a visit from the inspector.

  Between the staircases, a small and businesslike-looking elevator stood. Employees Only, a small silver plaque read.

  The elevator dinged open even as he approached it. Tommo stared at it suspiciously for a second, then stepped aboard. Must be connected to a motion sensor or something, he thought. That’s a security issue they’ll want to fix before tomorrow night. With a final look around the empty lobby – there was some really expensive building equipment stacked against one wall and a computer on the desk that looked way too state-of-the-art to be a cash register – he stepped aboard. He examined the control panel in bafflement for a moment, then extended a finger towards the highest button he could find. High-Flyers Lounge.

  No, he thought, wait. Vampire.

  Very much against logic and common sense, but very much in keeping with his friends’ regular declarations that he was a bloody idiot, Tommo lowered his hand and pressed the button marked B2.

  The light went on under the button, but went off again as soon as Tommo lifted his finger. That was when he noticed the swipe-card thing. Maybe security was better than he’d thought. He pressed the B1 button, and this time the light stayed on. The doors dinged again, slid closed, and he was descending into the monster’s lair.

  Nothing to worry about, he thought loudly to himself, not willing to risk hearing his voice tremble. It’s not a monster’s lair, it’s just a poxy old nightclub getting a facelift. The doors will all be locked and there’ll be builders down here and they’ll tell me to fuck off and that’ll be that. If there are any other smart Vampires here, they’ll be down in that sealed level. They won’t just be lying around with the doors all open. Anyway, Nails killed Canon, and the dumb ones weren’t dangerous. Not to young, healthy people.

  He paused, frowning, as the lift came to rest.

  I’m young. Vampires won’t attack young people. And she isn’t a Vampire at all yet.

  Deffo not doing this to prove them wrong. That’d be stupid.

  But the doors down in B1 were open – not just unlocked, but actually wide open. And there wasn’t just more building equipment and plastic-wrapped furnishings down here, there was booze. And a lot of it. Crates of wine and champagne bottles, cases of whiskey and rum, and keg after keg of different beers for the Dwamps taps. Tommo slowed dreamily as he made his way past the shelves and stacks, lending serious consideration to the available space in his duffel bag. This was the sort of misleading trustfulness, the additional and most unwelcome thought occurred to him, that only the very rich and very vicious could afford. He decided he was probably better off maintaining the moral high ground on this one, even though an opportunity was unlikely to repeat itself. He was, after all, already breaking into a probably-entirely-innocent place of business for difficult-to-determine reasons. Better not add any more black marks.

  As he made his way from the elevator and into the warren of storerooms, Tommo asked himself – again – what exactly he was hoping to find here. Sure, if there were sleeping Vampires down here, the dumb kind, he could try staking them. If he found the girl, the … what had Barry called her? A pupating Vampire? Well, if he found her, he could either stake her or rescue her or leave her. Barry himself had seemed uncertain as to what he should do with her, and Barry was an Angel. Shit, maybe the two of them had vanished at the same time because he was taking her back to France. Without telling anyone.

  What was he doing down here?

  He turned down a passageway that was crowded on one side with a wall of ventilation and water pipes, the roof ribbed with bundles of electrical cables. He detected a faint, musty odour in the air, and looked down at the floor. There was a thick layer of plaster dust and sawdust, and Tommo was rather proud of himself when he spotted bootprints. He had no idea what the bootprints meant, of course, except that people had been walking back and forth in the passageway.

  So much for pride.

  Shrugging to himself, he opened the first closed door he came to and peered into the gloom. Groping, he found a light switch and bathed the stark little room in harsh neon light from the strip in the ce
iling.

  Laetitia’s black-and-silver coffin sat just off-centre on the cheap rubbery carpet, and Tommo stood in the doorway and looked at it for a long moment, hands sweaty on the strap of the duffel bag. Triumph over being right – not that he was here to prove that – was quickly replaced with what-the-fuck-now terror. He was no longer just worried about what kind of dangerous brain-fart had made him come here, alone, to look for the kid or any other Vampire connection. That had been an understandable, even almost-logical, progression of ideas following their discussion of the topic at cricket practice the night before. He’d decided to go to the church during the day when all his mates were working. Whether he’d done it just to show that he could be useful, or on some deeper level to show that he had some honest-to-goodness nobility, and could help a female without some sort of sleazy ulterior motive … he didn’t really examine the reasons. As to why he’d come to Dwamps when the church had been a bust … okay, fine. That had been because he’d thought there was a connection, and Nails and the others had been unconvinced. Alright.

  Now that he was right, Tommo was more worried about who had brought the pupating Vampire here in the first place. Even with Canon gone – apparently gone – somebody had set up this whole nightclub refurbishment, taken Laetitia’s coffin from Preston Point Anglican with all the paperwork necessary to convince an eighty-year-old man of the cloth, and brought the coffin here. Was it organised crime? Tommo found himself hoping it was actually Vampires. He didn’t know if a wooden stake would stop a Vampire, since he hadn’t thought to clear that up with Nails … but he knew he’d have less trouble sticking something into a shambling undead than a pissed-off bricklayer. Much less a Mafioso.

  And why would the mafia be involved in Vampire transportation, unless there was some sort of connection to the Imago?

  The best idea, he thought, would be to leave now. Go back up, get out, and report to the others that Laetitia’s coffin was there, that it had clearly been taken from the church and brought to the nightclub by some Vampires or Vampire minions, and that whatever else was going on, that meant there were still Vampires tooling around Fremantle. Maybe pull a bottle of expensive scotch off the shelf on his way out, as a trophy. The moral high ground he was now on, as infiltrator of a known Vampires-or-Mafioso lair, was pretty much unassailable and stealing from them was practically a civic responsibility.

  Yeah. That’d be the smart move.

  He squatted beside the not-quite-adult-sized coffin, ran a hand down the silver spirals at edge and handle, and wondered just what the fuck he was supposed to do. Shaking his head, he shrugged the duffel bag off his shoulder onto the floor, and unlatched the lid.

  With a throaty, primal shriek and a thick wave of body odour, an entirely unsexy young French teenager launched herself from the coffin, threw wiry arms around his shoulders, and bore him backwards onto the carpet. Taken completely by surprise, Tommo tumbled, then made the mistake of trying to ease the girl up off him as if she was a hysterical human being. She wasn’t. Fingers like iron bands pinched his arms, a skinny leg jackknifed up and planted an excessively pointy knee into his testicles, and then her teeth found his neck.

  It wasn’t like the movies. Tommo didn’t swoon in an excitingly passive way as she delicately and sensuously drank from him like a baby suckling at her mother’s breast. She bit, and worried her head from side to side, and bit down again into the wound, while Tommo gurgled and bubbled blood through his mouth. Then she opened her mouth, dislocated her jaw with a wet snap, and sealed her cracked and gaping lips around the hole.

  Laetitia fed.

  TOMMO SITS UP

  Tommo sat up on the hard rubber-matted floor, opened and closed his mouth a few times, and put a hand to his neck. There didn’t seem to be any holes. In fact, there was no pain, no sign of damage, nothing but a fading memory of all-encompassing horror.

  All a dream, he thought. “Blugh,” he said.

  “Allô,” a soft voice purred.

  He blinked, and stared at the girl squatting on the edge of her upended coffin, watching him with bright, bitter indigo-blue eyes.

  “Wg,” Tommo replied unhelpfully. Not a dream, then. “Do you … um, er,” he rummaged mentally. “Par-lay-voo-onglay?”

  Laetitia shrugged. “Leedle.”

  “Leedle,” he muttered. “Brilliant.”

  The girl started to jabber out a swift, mildly erotic stream of French, her expression interrogative and angry and pleading by turns.

  “Hey,” Tommo snapped, “hey. I can’t understand you, okay? Shh,” he put his finger to his lips in what he hoped was a universal gesture. Fortunately, the girl fell silent with an unhappy little pout. “I’m Nails’s – Barry’s friend. You know? Le Barry? Angel?” he floundered, and then waved his arms vaguely behind him to indicate wings. In a moment of inspiration, he added a halo around his head with a finger, although Nails didn’t have one of those. Still, she seemed to understand.

  She burst into another quick series of questions in French, and Tommo was fairly sure he heard the word l’ange in there that he thought might mean Angel.

  “Yeah, he’s a friend of mine,” Tommo said, and nodded exaggeratedly. “Yeah. Wee wee. You got it. Um, we need to get out of here,” he pointed at the door, then frowned in thought for a moment longer, and then surprised himself by laughing. He only knew one other piece of French, and he’d gotten it from an old Labelle song. But it suited his purposes, in a creepy sort of way.

  “Voo-lay-voo-koo-sher-avec-mwah?” he asked, not entirely hopefully.

  “Oh man,” a voice said from the door. “That was the worst line I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard my dad at art gallery openings.”

  Tommo turned to see a young bloke in a cardigan standing in the doorway. Tommo’s duffel bag was open by the kid’s feet, and the kid was holding one of his cricket stumps.

  “Uh, hey,” Tommo said. “Nice to meet you?”

  The guy, apparently a Yank, hefted the stump in his hand and shook his head. Laetitia, meanwhile, had scrambled away across the coffin and was now crouching behind it, staring at the young bloke with wide eyes.

  “This is nice,” the kid said. “And you’ve got a whole set in there. Did you really get these made just to kill Vampires?”

  “I … no,” Tommo said. “They’re cricket stumps. You know … cricket?”

  “Oh. Oh,” the kid laughed. “Right! Jolly good show, nice cup of tea, chim-chimenee chim-chimenee, right?”

  “Uh, right,” Tommo said.

  “I forgot you guys were all British.”

  “Steady on,” Tommo replied, but all of a sudden felt the moral high ground – any ground at all, actually – sliding out from under him. This kid was somehow even scarier than Laetitia, and Laetitia had just torn his throat out with her teeth. He wondered if this was an Imago Vampire. It couldn’t be night yet – he glanced at his watch and saw that it was only half-past four – but did that matter when they were down in a basement? Yeah, this could be a new Vampire moving in on Canon’s turf. Shit, he could be hundreds of years old and still look like a zit-faced teenager, couldn’t he? “Um, so, hi. I’m Tommo – Thomas, um, Smith,” he said, amending his surname at the last second.

  “Thomas Smith,” the kid said, grinning. “Sure. Okay. I’m Troy. Troy Smith, what a coincidence. What are you doing here, Thomas Smith? Come down into my basement to play a spot of cricket?”

  “So this nightclub is yours?”

  “Well, actually it belongs to a friend of mine,” Troy said, “but I’m kind of his boss. He’s not here right now. He’ll be here in an hour or two, but I was the one who redirected security and opened the doors and let the elevator work for you and stuff. Didn’t want you all the way downstairs, but I figured Laetitia might need a meal by now. She’s been stanking up that coffin for days.”

  “Are … look, no offence, but are you a … are you a Vampire?” Tommo asked. “I mean, an Imago one?”

  “You know about Imago, do you?” Troy
said, tilting his head. “Lace-wearing velvet-tailcoat motherfuckers. Campires, I call ‘em.”

  “Campires,” Tommo said, relieved. “Hey, that’s good, that’s a good one. But you’re not…?”

  “Oh Hell no,” Troy chuckled. “No, I’m not a Vampire.”

  Well then, Tommo thought, then reconsidered his immediate urge to rush the kid. He wasn’t sure how much blood Laetitia had taken from him, but he’d been unconscious for a good while and he felt weak. Maybe he was still strong enough to take a skinny teenager who couldn’t have weighed more than seventy kilos … but he wasn’t sure he wanted to risk it.

  Besides, remembering what Laetitia had done made him think of something else. “Am I a…?”

  Troy laughed again. “You don’t turn into a Vampire by being bit by one,” he said disdainfully. “Not even by getting bit three times. It’s a whole different process.”

  “Do I need to drink Vampire blood?” Tommo asked, thinking of an Anne Rice book he’d read once.

  “No,” Troy laughed again, “that’d just make you sick. Why – do you want to be a Vampire?” he grinned as Tommo shook his head. “Lots of people do. Even I sort of did, once upon a time. You know, it sounds like fun … but it’s a lot of hard work if you want to be a Campire instead of one of the…” he stuck his arms out and lolled his head, gaping vacantly.

  “Right,” Tommo nodded. “Yeah. You, uh, you know a lot about it all.”

  “Sure,” Troy shrugged. “Oh, and as you can see from Laetitia, the whole thing takes years,” he leered over Tommo’s shoulder, and abruptly launched into a long, dazzlingly fast stream of French. Laetitia cowered further down behind the coffin.