Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  I knew better than to ask Seth to help us, much as I wanted him on the team. He was my second in command (I guessed – I wondered if Roderick being around so much had put a dent in that) but a year earlier I’d found out he was one of the elders, too. Rather than join their mad plunge into the darkest heresies they could gin up in hopes of surviving the rebellion of their own offspring, Seth used his access to that same power to be forgotten by his peers. He disappeared into the ranks of the young vampires who otherwise would have wanted him dead and adopted a life of quiet anonymity in Raleigh, a small city in a not-especially-special state. When I told him I knew, he made his priorities very plain: if the elders ever brought their fight to his doorstep so he was forced to choose, he would simply walk away. To call him up and ask him to come here would be to send him as far away as he could possibly get.

  I didn’t want that, for any number of reasons, not least of which is my general agreement with the notion a body ought to be left alone if they want. Seth made it clear he was no threat to me, no threat to the others in the city, and had no interest in picking any fights nor even in finishing them. After all the trouble with the Transylvanian up in Asheville and then with Dmitri and El Diablo in Durham the year before, it was kind of refreshing to hear of a vampire who knew of the old conflict between young and old, ancient and modern, whose reaction was a hearty no thanks.

  Beth and Old Shoe, however, were potentials. It was a little unfair of me, perhaps, to call in Beth because she and Seth are some degree of an item – vampire relationships are complicated and rare and hard to characterize – but she owed me and I wasn’t above calling in a favor when I needed it. Beth had washed up in Raleigh fifteen years earlier, not entirely sure what she was and maybe not entirely sure who she was. I’ve never known who her maker was, as she or he seemed to have abandoned her on my doorstep immediately after I took power. I’d wondered at the time if that meant she was the pet of my predecessor, the last boss, the one whom I murdered myself after laying a trap. It wouldn’t have been beyond him by any stretch. He took great pleasure in trapping others and seeing what they thought of their cage. It would have been just like Bob The Third (that was how he signed things, written out like that: “Bob The Third,” he was such a bastard) to ensnare someone – anyone who took his fancy for five minutes – and leave no provision for them in the case of his own demise. Hell, it wouldn’t have been beyond him to load her up with hypnotic triggers so she’d forget everything, burning off her original identity like a self-cleaning oven, just to play one last cruel prank on whoever came after him. There are urban legends of that, among vampires: of bosses who use the hoodoo to booby trap the place they run so everyone is afraid to knock them off for fear of whatever mindfucked mortals will come out of the woodwork.

  It’s plain that Beth was a dancer. I don’t know if she worked in a ballet or a strip club or both but she has the grace and balance of someone trained to that sort of performance. The time I got Seth and Beth to join me at a ballet performance, the night I first encountered El Diablo, Beth sat in silent, hypnotized fascination as the dancers moved in slow arcs. Beth gets by now as the owner of a club on the outskirts of Raleigh. It’s a strip club, yes, and she has a silent partner whose name is on everything – and is probably purely a legal construct, as are most of our identities on paper – but she runs the place, takes care of her dancers, and has the sort of reputation one only hears about in whispers. Rather than be regarded as someone low on the totem pole of our increasingly vocally misogynistic society, denigrated for using her body exactly the way the woman-hating men who run most things seem to want her to do, she’s seen as an artist whose work and humanity make people a little bit afraid. Guys go to her club expecting to have a dirty good time, to feel a little guilty and also a little smug about not feeling too guilty. Instead they experience awe and the shock of discovering they still can experience that awe. I don’t know why, but patrons of Beth’s club leave feeling more in touch with humanity than before and they don’t quite know what to think about that. According to Old Shoe, they sure as hell do go back.

  Old Shoe wasn’t that dissimilar, in terms of his situation when he arrived in Raleigh, but at least he knew who made him and why. He lived in Wilmington when he was turned into a vampire. A college kid, just some random John Doe, he wandered drunkenly into traffic one night. A vampire ran him over. Apparently she felt guilty as hell and turned him to “save” him. Can you hear me making quotes around that? Christ alive, he looks like last week’s hamburger left out in the sun. The front of that leech’s car chewed him up like a shredder and the blood trapped him that way for eternity. In theory I imagine he could heal all those wounds – push the blood to them and make the bones knit, the skin close up all pink and new – but ultimately we get trapped in the bodies we had at the moment we were turned. That much damage, he’d be famished when he was done. He’d have to drain at least one mortal, maybe two, or go crazy from the hunger. The real kicker is he’d wake up the next night looking just like he did when he awoke the night before. The damage would all be back, the bones jutting out through shredded skin, half his insides on the outside again. I asked him once how he gets around and he said every night he wakes up and without even thinking about it heals just enough to be able to move under his own power. It’s a reflex. If he didn’t, he’d be an invalid.

  Now Old Shoe haunted the sewers under Raleigh. He was on the run from any chance of encountering the life he once knew. It wasn’t that he thought someone there might recognize him – they would not, could not – it was that he didn’t think he could handle contact with any part of who he once was. How could I turn him away? I forbade him walking the streets but I gladly gave him all the sewers he could ever want. Plenty for a vampire to eat down there, and if he wanted to turn himself into the resident bogeyman of a place here or there while he was at it, great, as long as he was mindful of staying out of the spotlight. He adapted well: a funny guy, eager to crack wise when the chance presented itself. There’s something charming about a horror movie monster with a zinger up its sleeve. I always assumed he was someone charismatic when he was alive. Maybe he was a jock, maybe he was the class clown, maybe he was Mr. Nice Guy. As a vampire he became the ears and eyes of the darkness, the vampire who knew everything about everyone. He gathered more secrets hiding in the shadows than I’d ever be able to remember in the first place. I never asked him to reveal them to me, but he hinted here and there he has the dirt piled up like a dug grave. The only person I ever asked him about was Beth and he told me most of what I just said about her. When I heard enough to satisfy my curiosity I told him so and suggested if he ever decided to write any unauthorized biographies he might want to get very far away first. I think he got the point. He owed me, too, after all: a lot of bosses in other places would have killed him on sight. He appreciated being left to gather up the bits and bobs of others’ dirty laundry. Old Shoe found a better deal in Raleigh than he could get just about anywhere else.

  Sunset Beach is about an hour from Wilmington and at first I wondered if maybe that would be too close for comfort for Old Shoe. He said he wasn’t worried, though. “You could stand me up next to a picture from my high school yearbook,” he said, “And nobody would know it was me. They’d all be too busy puking.” He laughed at that, over the phone, like it was a hilarious joke instead of a simple statement of fact. He once told me Old Shoe was his name because that’s how he smelled first thing in the evening: like an old shoe, because he lives in the sewers. Again, he laughed at a statement of fact as though it were the highest humor. Sometimes I think vampires must be the weirdest people around.

  Neither of them was going to get me anywhere with a guy who hated vampires, though.

  If I was going to get through to Deputy Rudyard, I was going to need mortals he could learn to trust. They couldn’t be thralls – I felt sure he would spot that. They had to seem like independent operators. That left me with the technopagans but I didn’t like relying on th
at one card too much.

  I was going to need the Book People.

  In the meantime, I had Beth and Old Shoe to help me work the vampire angle. When I texted them to talk about them coming down here, it turned out Roderick had already been in touch. They were already on their way and they were bringing with them a surprise guest.

  Beth left Raleigh in her little hatchback with Old Shoe and Marty Macintosh riding along, the latter having caught a ride to Raleigh from the “girlfriend” – translation: steady blood supply – he obtained against my advice. I mean, it’s his life and everything, but I explained to him once already that he would ultimately suffer if he tried to restrict himself to a single source of blood. A vampire who does that either kills their donor or sentimentally starves until madness sets in. Either way, the end result is never pretty.

  They hauled ass, Old Shoe texting me their progress, so that by 8:30 that night they were pulling up to the parking lot of a different little motel in the nearby town of Calabash: not the Surf Sound Inn, but one that had at some point been called The Wetherby. Now it was just an abandoned property in which we were squatting. I didn’t want a legit hotel and I didn’t want to tip anyone off by buying this outright. I figured I could just hoodoo anybody who looked into what we were doing there. The Wetherby put us a few minutes away from Sunset Beach but there was only the one way onto or off of the island – the tall, long two-lane bridge – and we assumed the elders would be watching that closely for at least a night or two after all the antics with the garages and explosions and the hydraulic arm thing.

  Jennifer and the technopagans had joined us there. We were all standing in the parking lot, in almost total darkness. Jennifer was talking to the quadcopter. “Xi, you have a mission. Fly across the waterway to Sunset Beach and observe it for the movements of vampires. Do you understand?”

  The light blinked once.

  “Good hunting, and welcome back to the land of the living.” Jennifer’s voice nearly caught, but she caught it first.

  The drone – I still couldn’t think of it as Xi – rose into the air to a height of 30 or 40 feet and then shot away. Everyone tracked it, heads turning, like we were all gawping at a UFO or a 747 about to crash. It was quiet and what little sound it made faded almost immediately but we all kept looking up as thought waiting for something. Finally I looked at Jennifer and spoke.

  “Okay,” I said. “There is no way – “

  Jennifer turned and cut me off with a shrug. “It’s what Xi wanted. He worked on it for months. He called it his ‘cold spare.’” She made a sound like a single chuckle, a strangled little sound unsure where it was or what it should be expressing. “It isn’t really Xi, of course, but it works based on a set of if/then statements he designed and recorded beforehand. If you read someone like Kurzweil, he breaks down artificial intelligence as nothing more than a set of decisions expressed as a mathematical formula. Take, say, the computer in a car. It decides when and how much fuel to inject into which cylinder at what time based on a formula describing all the decision trees related to that one task. That’s how artificial ‘intelligence’ for automating any one task works: break that task into its component yes/no decisions and then design a program to run through them. Xi’s theory was no A.I. he or we could build in a practical amount of time could reflect all the inner and outer workings of a human being. But maybe it could handle some social interaction and take orders if it had a big enough vocabulary and a set of priorities to go with them. He broke those down into a decision tree that isn’t universal but does reflect his own thought processes for them and then described that tree in software. It’s a way to give us a physical, mobile entity that will respond more or less the way Xi might. To him, that’s as close to immortality as is…” She shrugged almost apologetically: sometimes one’s word choices can be awkward with a vampire in the conversation. “It’s as close to immortality as we should get. He looked down on all the other methods available. No offense.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Roderick chuckled. “None taken,” I said. “But… I mean, isn’t it kind of like saying he bred a dog that will bark when you say his name? Plus, there’s…” I waffled on how to say it. “I feel like there’s a way in which this doesn’t have the, you know, the magical fireworks. It seems pretty mundane for y’all.”

  “Xi doesn’t believe the social algorithms and some sensory processing are the end-game,” Sheila said. “He thinks they’re the beginning.”

  Ramon picked it up and went on. “Xi believed it was possible his spiritual essence would re-condense around the echo of himself still in the physical world. The more like Xi the 2.0 version acts, and the more we treat it like we treated Xi 1.0, the more it will draw to itself the essence of what was Xi 1.0. Like attracts like. It’s intended to form a sympathetic bond with what was his soul.”

  “You are all speaking of it in varying degrees of past and present tense,” Roderick murmured.

  “We have differing opinions on how effective it may be.” Dan shrugged. “The only way to find out if it will work is to try.”

  “So did Xi know he was going to die?” I was still trying to wrap my head around the whole concept.

  “His personal divinations pointed to a change in memory state,” Jennifer said. She waved a hand. “Explaining it more finely than that takes a while.”

  At that moment, Beth’s car pulled up and she and three men got out: Seth, Beth, Marty Macintosh and a kid I didn’t recognize. Beth was dressed in shorts, sandals and a hoodie top. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she looked about as sane as I had ever seen her.

  Seth had his long mohawk haircut dyed bright blue and falling down in front of his eyes. He was also wearing a hoodie with the hood up and he hunched a little, as though trying to hide. I was shocked to see him that close to some of his former peers, but his loyalty to Beth must have overridden even his fear of the elders.

  Marty Macintosh looked sallow and unkempt even by the standard conjured by the phrase “vampire hermit” but he was there and that was what mattered. Marty was in baggy jeans and a stained button-up shirt. He had on a baseball cap with some meaningless corporate logo on it.

  The final one, the young man I didn’t know, was dressed in board shorts and a green polo shirt with a popped collar. He had on flip flops and a bracelet made of white coral and his brown hair was the bog standard frat cheese cut: close-cropped sides, parted and gelled so it hung just a little over his forehead. He could have stepped out of a Sears Wishbook catalogue from anytime in the last thirty years. He was Caucasian and his appearance was so ordinary as to be difficult to remember any longer than it took to look away.

  Beth was saying something to him as they walked up. “And that’s how I know my mother was born with no tonsils,” she said.

  “Fascinating,” the new kid said with what was Old Shoe’s voice minus all the scraping sounds and shredded bass notes. “Hey, boss. Did you know Beth’s mom was born without tonsils? Fascinating stuff.” He twirled his fingers next to his head, Bugs Bunny style. “Crazy, man.”

  “Old Shoe?” I blinked at him. I had never seen him fully healed from his nightly accident damage. I had never stopped to really think about it, but I had literally no idea what Old Shoe had looked like before and now I knew: he looked like everyone and no one. No wonder he wasn’t worried about his family recognizing him. It wasn’t just that he looked different when he wasn’t injured. It’s that he didn’t look like anyone in particular at all. He looked like a composite of every conformist-minded college junior I’ve seen since the 1950’s.

  “That’s me, boss.” He stuck a hand in one pocket and with the other swept his hand up and down to indicate his body and face. “Feast your eyes on it while you can, assholes. Looking this good is thirsty work. I ain’t gonna do it every day.”

  I introduced everyone around. Beth took it entirely in stride that we were working with humans. Old Shoe clammed up at first, socially awkward like he was being introduced to a set of ste
psiblings he’d decided ahead of time he probably wouldn’t like, but Jennifer was polite and Dan was outgoing and Old Shoe, for all he’s one of the most off-centered vampires I’ve ever met, tends to get along with just about anybody like a house on fire. In a matter of minutes he and they had made each other laugh and everyone seemed to relax.

  “Time for me to go,” Seth said to Beth.

  “Not sticking around?” I asked it as casually as I could, not wanting to pressure him but damn he was there and I could sure as shit use him.

  He shook his head at me once. “I need to open the bar in a few minutes,” he said.

  “It takes more than a few minutes to drive back to Raleigh,” I said.

  Seth and Beth locked eyes, ignoring me, and Seth gave her just the barest hint of a smile. “I’ll call when I get back,” he said, and then he winked out of existence with a soft metal clang.

  I mean it when I say he literally disappeared: he was there one second and gone the next, in the blink of an eye.

  Beth’s phone rang after a few seconds and she answered it. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll be home soon.” Then she hung up.

  Of course, I thought: his Last Gasp. Seth calls it “borrowed time.” He says he’s never heard of anyone else having the same power. When he kills someone by drinking from them, he gains all the time they would have had left if they lived out their natural life. He adds that unspent lifespan to a pool of personal time. He can step between two moments of normal time, from his perspective causing everything around him to freeze, then go where he wants and unfreeze it. He simply froze time, walked back to Raleigh – a hundred fifty miles if it’s an inch – and then restarted things.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said aloud to no one. “It really works.”

  Marty blinked at everything, standing close to Roderick and never quite participating in conversation. For a moment, my mind superimposed over them the images of Igor and Dr. Frankenstein from the old Universal Pictures version. It seemed clear Marty looked to Roderick for what to do and otherwise was completely incapable of participating in a situation involving this many persons all at once. All of a sudden, he turned to me and blurted out, “Roderick says you need to generate false evidence of many vampires being here at once.”