Nerves of Steel

by Lee Hayton

  I threw the rock at the side panel as hard as I could, and felt a pang of satisfaction when it dented inward.

  “That’s how you do it, kids,” I said with satisfaction, though they were too far out of earshot to appreciate the wisdom. “You don’t tease the little fuckers, you let them know straight up, who’s who.”

  The vehicle sped up and veered away. Its suspension was buggered—a separate injury than my tiny dent—and one side of the chassis scraped close to the ground.

  Some poor owner wasn’t going to best pleased when he got to his garage tomorrow morning. Still, it’s his own fault for sending it out to pick up fares when it should be stored away like a treasure, safe at home.

  I turned back to the building, looking up at my apartment window out of habit. A pale face stared out at me. Even from five levels up, I could see the dreadful longing in Norman’s face.

  The stupid boy shouldn’t be hanging about at the windows. One look at his porcelain white face and anybody can tell he’s a vampire, clear as day.

  There was nothing I could do about him being trapped—a virtual prisoner in the tiny apartment. Instead, I focused on the dressing down he was going to get for putting himself in danger that way.

  “How many times do I need to tell you to keep yourself hidden?” I yelled by way of greeting as I stomped in through the door. I dumped the bike on the dining table that neither of us had ever eaten at, and chased Norman halfway back toward his room.

  “Don’t you walk away from me, young man,” I said, in the most adulting voice my Barbie voicebox could manage. “It’s not any fun for me, going out at night and working my ass off so we can stay here, but you don’t hear me complaining.”

  Actually, it was frigging awesome to head out at night, after spending all day cooped up in this slovenly apartment. No use telling Norman that, though. Oftentimes truth wasn’t the way to win hearts and minds.

  “I only looked outside for a second,” he grumbled back.

  An expression of pure hatred flitted across his face. It would have made me pause if that wasn’t the dominant emotion his teenage features chose to wear.

  “If you’re not going to keep out of sight for your own safety, then at least think of me once in a while.”

  I plonked myself down on the sofa, remembering a moment too late about the melting chocolate bars in my back pocket. “I could earn a fortune turning you in if you’re really that bored with being free.”

  While I fished the chocolate’s strangely molded new shapes out of my jeans, leaving behind a smear that would take far more washing know-how than I possessed to get out, Norman stamped his foot.

  “I didn’t ask to be stuck all day in this fleapit,” he spat out. “But of course not. You never let me make any decisions.”

  “It only looks shambolic in here because you never tidy.” The logic was sound, just omitting the fact that I never did, either. “If you’re looking for something to do, why don’t you start with cleaning your room?”

  Holy shit! I thought I’d left my mom behind when my teenage ass first ran away from home, but apparently, she’d followed me. A hundred years later, here she was, coming straight out of my mouth.

  “I need feeding,” Norman said and sat down on the sofa next to me.

  Well, actually he sat down as far away as he could manage, practically falling off the overstuffed arm. It was a small couch, though, so I could still reach out and ruffle his hair.

  “Get off,” he said, throwing his arm up in self-defense.

  “Oh, but you’re so cute when you’re angry.”

  “Stop demeaning me, okay? I’m almost forty years older than you!”

  It was a good point but coming out of his thirteen-year-old face, the jibe didn’t land with as much force as Norman had intended. Especially since his scowling countenance suited the age he appeared, rather than the number of years he’d been around.

  “Fine.” I stuffed half of the melting chocolate bar into my mouth and went into the kitchenette to search for the rubbing alcohol. The needles in the fridge were always where I’d left them, but the alcohol and swabs seemed to have a mind of their own.

  “Did you get the refill bags from the pharmacist?” Norman asked. “The old ones are starting to degrade.”

  “Nope,” I called back. I’d completely forgotten. “It won’t matter this time, will it? They only need to last until the end of the week.”

  “I can go and get them if you want,” Norman offered. “It’s cold out, so I could probably go undetected with a scarf pulled up around my throat.”

  Luckily, from the kitchenette, Norman couldn’t see my facial expression. Not wanting a repeat of my mother’s voice to come calling, I fought to maintain a calm façade.

  “Don’t you think that’s a bit risky?”

  I amazed myself with how polite I was? The words weren’t even a little bit close to the statement I wanted to say.

  “It’d be nice to leave the apartment for a change.”

  Living on a tropical island would be good, too, but it wasn’t something our current circumstances could stretch to just this second.

  “Don’t you think the assistant would notice the color of your eyes?”

  They gleamed as pink as an albino bunny caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. Of course, the assistant would notice.

  I hoped that Norman’s suggestion was just more evidence of his grumpy mental state than a genuine idea he wanted to pursue. The latter might mean he’d finally tipped over the edge.

  “It was just an idea,” he said, the sharp tone of his voice cutting through the air like a razor. “If you don’t want me to go outside then you need to make sure you’re picking up the stuff we need.”

  An excellent point, but it came too late in the day. I couldn’t be bothered going anywhere right now.

  “I’ll get them tomorrow,” I said, hooking up the old bags, feeling queasy. Despite the number of times I’d done this, it still turns my stomach to watch my blood flowing out of me.

  I tilted the bag toward the light as it filled. The soft plastic looked okay to me. There weren’t any holes or other signs of wear and tear.

  “You said that yesterday,” Norman muttered, then slipped away into his room and slammed the door.

  Welcome home, Asha. How was your day?

  Later that night, Norman sat sucking on one of the newly filled bags while I munched on a bag of peanuts that seemed to be about fifty percent salt. Back in the old days, when we were first knocking about together with no idea where we’d end up, I used to feed Norman directly from my veins.

  He’d lay his head on my breast, and his eyes would close as he suckled from my wrist. I’d swap them out to keep the scarring down, but by the time he was halfway through, they’d ache with the motion of his mouth and the stroke of his rough tongue.

  We stopped that the first time he got an erection. The same pervert who installed my baby doll voice went to town on the rest of my body. I looked like a blonde teenage girl, most popular in class. The one who knows the route to the family planning clinic by heart.

  I never blamed Norman, but it made him feel uncomfortable. Now it’s the sterile bags, the rubbing alcohol, and a pang of nostalgia for past days that’s so strong it steals my breath away.

  The salt was good. It sent all the moisture in my body streaming into my cells, so they plumped up nice and fat. Water was free, and so long as I didn’t let my thirst get out of control, it always made me feel much better. Otherwise, I’d stay weak for hours after draining myself dry.

  “There’s a change of government coming up,” Norman said. He was watching the news on his retro tablet. “If you can talk to the voting machines again, we could try to get a surge going for our candidate. See if that helps with the push for a new equal rights charter.”

  Norman’s idealism was sweet, really. I raised an eyebrow and gave a “hm,” then looked over at his screen.

  There he was again!

  The vampir
e I’d spotted from the roof was standing to the right of the screen. He was beside and a step behind the political candidate talking to the reporters—his face half-hidden behind a scarf, a hat throwing shade on the rest.

  A vampire. In a political party. Standing in front of TV cameras in the middle of the day.

  Chapter Three

  I grabbed the screen out of Norman’s hands and stared at the glowing images. The damn vampire was hanging out behind the actual candidate, who spurted the usual mumbo-jumbo.

  “What’s the matter?”

  I shook my head and tapped my ears, silence. I wanted to turn up the sound, but the button was located on the remote in Norman’s hand.

  “Who’s that guy to you?” he demanded, stretching his body to keep the controls out of my reach.

  I looked back to the screen as there was sudden movement, then the image changed to another story. I shrugged and handed the screen back to Norman, my pretense of nonchalance far too late.

  The vampire’s skin had been darkened with makeup, to keep the curious eyes of the gathered journalists off him, no doubt. Instead of glowing porcelain white, it approached a Scottish tan—pale, but not uncomfortably so.

  If I hadn’t already seen the same features strolling into a pub where they had no business going, I wouldn’t have looked twice. The crowd pressing close around the vampire obviously hadn’t.

  Norman alternated between frowning at the screen and scowling at me. He pressed a sequence of controls, perhaps trying to bring the previous picture back. Whatever he was after, judging by the grimace of disgust, it didn’t work.

  “Here,” he said at last, thrusting the device at me. “Do your thing and get the footage back. I want to see the speech again.”

  “I can’t,” I said, shoving the device back Norman’s way. “I can’t order the internet around.”

  “Thought you were the machine whisperer.”

  “The internet isn’t a machine.” I sighed, we’d been over this before. “I can’t even lift the blocks the empire puts on it. There’s no way I can ‘command’ images to reappear.”

  “Just answer me then. Who is that man to you?”

  “He’s no one to me. I just saw him out on a job tonight. Thought it was interesting, that’s all.”

  “Bollocks.”

  I shrugged and stood up, stretching until my spine popped. Usually, I’d slump on the sofa for the entire evening after donating blood. Tonight, I didn’t think that was such a great idea.

  I faked a yawn that turned into a real one. “I might turn in now. I’m knackered.”

  “I’m thinking about moving on,” Norman said. His words cut my theatrics off mid-act and my entire body sagged in dismay.

  We’ve been together for decades now. Two against the world. It’s lonely being an outcast from society, always checking over your shoulder for the sneaks, spies, and agents who might be following up behind. I ducked my head, so Norman couldn’t see the tears forming.

  Don’t be such a stupid girl. Crying? He’s not really going to leave. Not without taking his food bag with him.

  But I’d been alone before. I might be close to indestructible, but loneliness nearly killed me. I can’t risk it.

  “I saw him when I was out on my job,” I repeated slowly. Even in the midst of my distress, I measured the words out in small spoonfuls so I wouldn’t use up more than I needed. “He’s a vampire, and yet he was walking around the street. I thought it was odd, that’s all.”

  Norman sprang forward, going chest to chest with me. I jerked my head up and back, out of the way. The tears tipped and spilled down my cheeks. Caught out.

  “You saw a free vampire on the streets?” Norman poked hard at my breastbone, tapping off the rigid metal plated under my skin.

  His voice dropped into a register that prepubescent vocal cords could seldom reach down to. The resulting timbre sent an icy spear shooting up my spine. “You saw a fellow escapee, and it didn’t occur to you to tell me?”

  “I’m telling you now,” I said, my voice so weak and soft it irritated the fear and sadness out of me. To combat sounding like Bambi, I cleared my throat. “I would have told you, but I don’t know what it means. No use getting it stuck in your head if the vampire’s anomaly is nothing more than a blip on the landscape.”

  The excuse meant nothing, both of us knew that. These foolish charades help to keep our lives running smoothly on track, though, so Norman nodded and took a step back.

  Behind him, the edge of his door moved forward, the gap between it and the jamb widening. I pushed Norman behind me for shelter, then raised my hands up in a defensive stance. I squatted, lowering my center of gravity for greater stability. For a second, nothing moved, then I caught a streak of ginger from the edge of my eye.

  “Who the fuck let a cat into our apartment?”

  A stupid question. Whose room did the feline ran out of? Who stuck around this building alone with his destructive thoughts all day long?

  The ginger-striped cat sauntered past me, taking a moment to rub its neck against the side of my ankle. Cute. Except transients didn’t keep pets. Not when we needed to be able to vacate on the turn of a dime. Instead of patting it, I turned around to glare at Norman instead.

  He scooped the animal up and held it under the forearms. An awkward position that drooped its body straight down and showed me clearly that it wasn’t a tom. It was a lady.

  “She needed a home, so I thought that here was as good a place as any.” He held the cat’s face up next to his. Even from my position a yard away I could hear the hum of its satisfied purr.

  “Just so long as you realize that I’m not looking after it,” I said. “It stays in your room, and you’re in charge of feeding and watering it, agreed?”

  Norman nodded and tucked the animal under his arm, like an accessory that would catch on in the new season. “You won’t even know she’s here.”

  A rather lame observation, considering the revving on the new cat’s motor. Norman escorted the feline companion back to his room, turning when he reached the door.

  “I hope you find something out soon,” he said. “Otherwise, I’ll have to go out there and try to dig up information for myself.”

  I nodded, but he’d already closed the door behind him, this time managing it without a noise rather than his usual slam.

  “And see,” I shouted after him, determined that since I hadn’t retained my dignity, I could at least have the pleasure of the last word. “I do let you make decisions.”

  Joe’s Bar was the logical place to start digging up dirt on the free vampire. There was also no way in hell I would be caught dead walking through their doors. In that meeting place for low-life scum, the bounty on my head would flash in bright neon. I wouldn’t last ten minutes before somebody called me in.

  Instead the next day, I called into my main haunt down in midtown—The Waterside—instead.

  Despite its name, The Waterside was surrounded by matte gray roads inside an expanse of bare concrete. Tilt slab buildings—thrown up around it when a property developer got greedy—had started to crumble into disrepair. Even with maintenance, the shoddy cut-price cement mixes they used to construct them was showing.

  Give those one-or two-level boxes another decade, and they’d disintegrate into dust. Either that or somebody would bowl them over with dreams of a new metropolis in their eyes.

  The manager, Mike Traleigh, insisted that the bar was named for the Waterside riots. He couldn’t pinpoint which one, or even settle on a country, but his fervor had led to the walls being hung with black and white still-shots from a dozen different conflicts.

  It did add some tension for anyone wandering inside the doors. Nobody was ever going to pop their head into The Waterside and mistake it for a wine bar or someplace for a quick pint after work.

  The men and women who frequented it were already working the minute they step through the door. Some chose to invest their time in hard-drinking, others making deals and
assignations at the smoky tables in the back.

  Not that you were allowed to smoke, vape, toke, or whatever the hell else you do to pollute your lungs with whatever substance was fashionable these days. The smoke was from a dry ice kit. Mike said it was for the ambiance, but in reality, it was to cover the money changing hands.

  No undercover cop had ever got a clear photograph of trouble going down at The Waterside. Every image taken was clouded out by Mike’s “ambiance.”

  I had a particular fondness for this joint. It wasn’t the place I got the biggest money jobs, since the clientele couldn’t reach for the readies necessary for something high-level, but it felt safe. I didn’t mind doing the scramble of a few lower-class tasks, so long as I got to wind up afterward, sitting in the bar flush with new cash and spending it all on the top-shelf.

  A woman had to have her pleasures in life, and The Waterside combined mine just right.

  Mike wasn’t working front-of-house when I walked in, but I raised my eyebrows at the barmaid behind the counter. The woman jerked her head toward the back corridor leading to his office. I gave her a nod of thanks and headed straight for his door.

  “Hey, Mike.” I leaned against the door jamb as though nonchalance was my middle name. “How’re things going?”

  He grunted and kept staring at the papers in front of him as though they’d grown eyes and were glaring back.

  “What are you doing?”

  When he didn’t respond, I walked a few steps closer, since my stance in the doorway wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. The papers were lined with small squares with tiny figures filled in. The neat lines and columns apparently weren’t adding up the way Mike wanted.

  “You need a hand with your accounts?” One of the advantages of being part-computer was that all those numbers were a breeze. “I could help you out, maybe?”

  I hedged the end of that sentence, so I wouldn’t sound too eager. There were bars after this one I could try, but none that would give me as good a reception. Chances were that if I struck out here, I would strike out all over town.