The Howling Twenties

Home > Other > The Howling Twenties > Page 9
The Howling Twenties Page 9

by Fennel Steuert


  But, thankfully, Argall had seen the potential in ghouls for something. So here Mab was, alone with what she considered to be a soulless army.

  How did Doris, who had always seemed more than alone than either her or Argall, have friends other than Gesine? Why had Robin been so enamored with her? Doris let her blackness – a thing that should have been obsolete to vampires – inform too much of her worldview.

  Mab got out of the shower and walked everywhere in the penthouse suite. It was all far too pristine. Pristine anything when one was by one’s self was pointless. She needed to get Argall back. He could survive whatever he was going through. But getting him back was going to have to wait until she fended off that snotty old world.

  8 p.m. She put on a robe and went to the elevator. She took it to the floor below, where a bunch of vampires were sitting around a table smoking like it was the twenties and the five decades after that. In the middle of all of them there was a woman, the redhead from downstairs.

  The vampire in the light blue suit was telling her something: “These cigarettes are absolutely harmless,” he said, his red eyes glowing.

  Between profuse coughing, the woman giggled.

  As Mab approached, the male in the light blue suit stood to attention. “Mab, you look wonderful. All of the doors are knocked down in the basement level. Except one. We found him. That door will be open tomorrow night.”

  Mab nodded. “Except for that one Argall liked – the one who always wanted overtime – the human employees know that they’re supposed to be gone then?”

  “No,” said the vampire in the light blue suit. “We’ve been busy. We’ve all been entirely too worried about you. Also, some of the humans that had been part of Mr. Argall’s gene splicing – they’ve disappeared.”

  Mab chalked that up to Robin and company. “Of course they have,” she said. “But was finding them more important than finding me?”

  “Not at all. Mr. Argall had always talked about important they might be to all of our kind, though.” The light-blue suited vampire’s eyes dropped to Mab’s hand with the missing finger and lingered there far too long.

  “My eyes are up here,” said Mab.

  The vampire in the light blue suit raised his gaze to Mab’s own. “I’m just sorry they did that to you. Sometimes it seems like with enough blood, we can do anything. But I guess not, huh?”

  “We have a few floors dedicated entirely to the hope of that. We can’t let them have that, too.”

  The vampire in the light blue suit nodded. “That we can’t.”

  “I meant Argall and me,” said Mab. “Make sure that all the human employees know that they’re to be out of the building tomorrow or Robin Hood might slit their throats.” She turned to the other redhead. “You there.”

  The woman was straining here eyes to see Mab. “Yes, ma’am. Um ...” She stood up.

  “Come with me,” said Mab.

  The woman nodded, looking to the vampire in the light blue suit all the while. When he nodded, she finally looked ahead. In the elevator, Mab pressed the button for the first floor.

  Soon, the woman was looking at Mab in the elevator’s florescent light. Most of Mab was covered entirely in a rusty smattering of blood stains.

  The woman jolted backward, hitting her back hard against the elevator door as she hyperventilated.

  Mab sighed.

  “It’s late,” Mab told her. “You’re off the clock. Go get some fresh air. Or what passes for it in this world.”

  12

  One Wolf and Many Wolves

  1920s

  Doris had read about lycanthropy in some of her books. It was extremely rare, partially because it was possible to simply be what was essentially a large wolf all the time, and who went looking for a large wolf? Some vampires did for sport, and it was possible they’d driven them to extinction.

  Being a wolf was supposed to be exhilarating in a way Doris could easily imagine. They had far less humanity left in them than vampires or ghouls.

  The full moon was the only time someone with lycanthropy could change from wolf to human or vice versa. The wolf, however, may have been as immortal as a vampire or a ghoul – if it could feed enough.

  Doris struggled through the tunnel. She hadn’t realized it before, but the tunnel smelled a bit like the wolf; it was entirely possible the wolf had dug the basis for it. Argall and Mab’s so-called pragmatism.

  Behind her, Gesine and Robin followed. Doris ripped off her shirt’s sleeves and tied them around her arms to stop her wounds from dripping blood. At the end of the tunnel, she stopped and inhaled the air.

  “Here,” said Robin behind her. He handed her a flask. She took it and drank every ounce of blood from it. As Gesine emerged from the shadows, Doris wanted to throw the flask at her head.

  Robin seemed to grab that baton from her mind. “I can understand the gesture, Gesine. But did you have to free that thing right then?”

  She stared at him. “No. But you wouldn’t understand either way.”

  Robin shook his head. “I wish you could imagine that giant wolf running through a place full of people you cared about.”

  “I can’t,” said Gesine. “My people would have never put it in a cage. We would have simply given it a wide berth.”

  The wolf howled somewhere from inside the building.

  “Do your business partners have anyone working late?” said Robin.

  Doris ran for the basement level office suit. She’d sometimes seen a night custodian around the building, but since she’d been back, she mostly avoided the humans except when she was with Argall and Mab.

  When she had seen the custodian, he was reading by himself on break, and even then she really only saw his silhouette, really, and that reminded her a bit of Henry, the only relationship she’d ever tried to have. It ended with him choosing a sunrise over her.

  So, generally she avoided the silhouette altogether.

  The door to the office had been broken through. Doris smelled lots of blood. There was a large spot of blood in the corner; it contained pieces of the custodian. Doris looked away. She punched the wall behind her until her fists bled and kept punching as Robin hurried upstairs, his blade in hand.

  When Gesine grabbed one of her arms, Doris swung her around into the wall and found herself hissing, her eyes red, her nails extended.

  “I’m sorry,” said Gesine. “I did not think.”

  Doris threw her head into Gesine’s shoulder. “How much death are we going to see? It’s like we’re a door to it.”

  Upstairs, the wolf howled.

  Doris bounded up the stairs.

  In the lobby, she found just the two of them, the large wolf and Robin.

  It knocked Robin on its back. As it raised its head to howl again, Doris charged hard and fast. She and the wolf both went flying into the office desks.

  The world spun around her, and Doris got a glimpse of the silver dagger. It was several feet away from her on the floor. She heard Robin scrambling to get up, the wolf’s wet, heavy breathing.

  Everything else became silent as Argall and Mab came in through the front door. Both hesitated to move any further. But they slowly did. Argall pulled the desks closest to him and tossed them in front of the doors. Mab cartwheeled into grabbing the dagger.

  Doris slowly stood up. She felt woozy. Her arms hadn’t pulled themselves back together yet.

  Across from her, Robin slowly got up as well. He was holding his torso so his guts wouldn’t fall out. Gesine was near him, staring in the direction Doris knew the wolf must be in. Behind her.

  Doris turned just as the wolf lunged at her. She fell back, clawing at its face.

  Gesine took a running leap and, with both of her fists held together, hit it on top of the head. It yelped, even more deeply than it did the first time it got hurt.

  Doris hoped Mab would rise to the occasion. But the wolf’s jaw continued to snap at her. With her nails extended, Doris stabbed at the wolf’s underside. She was
fast enough to avoid some of the clawing of its two front legs, but not all of it. Unlike herself, every time her nails pierced the wolf it always yelped. With every wound. And with every hit that Gesine threw at it before it headbutted her away. A yelp just like it did the first time it got hurt. She wondered if that first wound hadn’t led to the custodian’s demise. Maybe if it had been led away instead of wounded …

  Suddenly Mab dropped down from the ceiling, plunging the silver dagger into the wolf’s back.

  “You need to keep going!” screamed Argall. “You need to get its heart.”

  Doris slid away just as the wolf collapsed in a heap. The wolf looked sad; the anger from its eyes subsided. It almost seemed as if Sable was looking out at the world from deep inside it.

  “No,” said Doris. “We don’t.”

  ***

  A month ago, Doris and Gesine got to the south in an ice truck.

  Doris had calculated the number of ice-blocks it would take to keep them relatively well-insulated from the humidity that ate at everything – and just as importantly, that would keep their supplies of blood and raw meat fresh.

  The pale human man who drove them both in sun- and moonlight had been mesmerized by Mab. She’d developed that skill about a century ago, but had quickly used it so much that she got tired of it. She also had charm, after all. But Mab’s mesmerizing had helped build the company, and it had ensured the ice truck’s driver never opened the backdoor to the truck during the day. If he had to, he could only do so in the shade.

  When they got to Kentucky, Caden was waiting for them at night. As his letter said he would, he’d parked out in a field a mile from the gas station – near where the old Freedmen Bureau had been.

  “Mister Caden,” said Doris upon seeing him. “It’s been a while.”

  Caden had come to the north a few years ago. He originally met Argall and Mab in a ragtime club, and they had brought him back to their old brownstone company headquarters, where Doris spent her nights reading on the roof as Gesine alternately hovered on the roof’s edges watching her read or, when Caden had come around, watching him talk. Maybe it was apparent to her, as well, Doris had thought—the way Caden was humoring Argall and Mab talk about how enormously glad they were that the Union won.

  With strained eyes, Caden had extended his hand for Gesine to shake – which so very few creatures on two legs ever did. When Mab made a comment about her being a ghoul, Caden even held Gesine’s hand up like it was a bit of a jewel.

  Seeing the full moon that night had led to talk of moonshine, and several months later, Doris and Gesine were there with him in Kentucky.

  “They’d shot me up in this very truck when I driving the latest shipment to that gas station,” Caden told them. “I needed blood, and they’re hardly human as it is. There were a lot of them – like most small-minded beings, they travel in packs …. And anyway, since then I came upon them hanging a couple one night. I think I might have been able to smell the blood they were drenched in even if I were human. I do believe I lost it.”

  Mostly, he said, he had taken to sleeping underground, under concealed heaps of earth that, like the stores of moonshine, were surrounded by shin-high strings adorned with tin cans and pits.

  On their first night, he drove without headlights. Doris was a little amazed. She nudged Gesine. “We could do this too if we knew how to drive.”

  “I could teach you,” said Caden.

  Doris shook her head. “I don’t know if I’m capable of learning anything in this heat.”

  “Can I ask you something?” said Caden to Gesine.

  Gesine nodded.

  “I used to see some of your kind during the Civil War, after I got turned. I’ve never seen one of you that hasn’t been with at least a few others. You’re an Indian, right?

  “Yes,” said Gesine. “I was Shawnee.”

  “And your pigment,” said Caden with a nod in the dark. “I’ve seen that before, but not in someone who’s undead. We don’t really seem to be able to change much physically.”

  Gesine had nothing to say.

  “Maybe getting paler happens to all ghouls,” said Doris, “if they go on long enough. I guess the thing about those packs is that they require a lot of death to sustain them. But when there’s less death around, maybe they just … destroy each other, instead of drifting through the centuries.”

  “Living long enough to get pale is kind of a curse then, isn’t it?” said Caden.

  “Yes,” said Gesine, “It is.”

  It was oddly peaceful, talking so much in the dark. Until he told them about the Klan.

  “They’re so afraid of the big, bad black vampire that there’s been less lynchings, less railroading arrests. But that’s only because they fear what will happen when the sun goes down. They’re so scared that they’re not burning all their big crosses, some of them they’re just leaving it up.” He smiled. “Believe me when I say that that has made me as happy as I have ever been.”

  They’d spent weeks talking like that at night, driving without talking and even having dinner with some of the families who were making the moonshine that the company was selling up north. They were a curious bunch, thought Doris. She couldn’t tell if they knew Caden was a vampire or if they didn’t. Some of them were white humans who hated the Klan that made them retreat further into the woods, even further away from being upstanding citizens.

  “They still see you as human,” said Gesine, who usually just listened and watched.

  “I suppose,” said a woman. “But as ones without their smarts or ...” She laughed almost uncontrollably. “Hearts.”

  “You should eat their hearts out,” said Gesine.

  Doris and Caden looked at each other, laughing a little with their eyes.

  The woman nodded. “There ain’t enough sugar in the world.”

  At night they buried themselves – Doris with Gesine. Caden nearby. Sometimes Gesine would tell them that she was going to spend the day awake, guarding them and hunting possum. And the following night, she would certainly smell like dead possum. Some nights she and Caden would separately hunt game to drink blood from. After a week, they were talking about trying to find wolves, deer, or bears together.

  “Uh huh,” said Caden. “We’re like very large mosquitoes to them.”

  “Do you ever get tired,” said Doris, “of those things flying on you just to find that they think your blood is too bitter?”

  “Sometimes,” said Caden, “I used to feel so by myself here that I appreciate them trying.”

  Doris almost smiled a little. Used to?

  One evening, they awoke to Gesine waving at them with a pale human hand that still had a stake in it.

  “Sure am lucky it’s not just me here with my cans,” said Caden. “But they’ll come looking for whoever that was.”

  When they did, it was in the form of a few dozen men with cloves of garlic around their neck who took to a hill. There, they burned hundreds of cloves of garlic. The smoke fanned out into the valley where Doris, Gesine and Caden had been residing.

  Garlic became different then, like even if it was capable of hurting the palest among her kind, it would be the way of the world that garlic would have Doris be particularly vulnerable. With so much of it in the air, she and Caden were both weaker.

  Gesine, however, was physically fine. She’d just eating finished the pale hand when the search party made its way through the woods toward them.

  As Doris and Caden coughed, Gesine ran off toward the sound of the men deep into the woods.

  “Maybe we should go,” said Caden. “I think she’s giving us that chance.”

  “She is,” said Doris. “But I think there’s too many of them. She might not come back. I … I need her to come back.”

  Guns fired. Bullets zoomed past them.

  Doris ran in the direction gunshots came from, with Caden at her side.

  They didn’t need to track Gesine that way. They could see the light from the torches
from half a mile away.

  In a clearing by a barn, they came upon Gesine holding a screeching klansman as a bunch of his brethren swung their torches at her. The klansman in her arms lost anything he’d been wearing over his head.

  The garlic made Doris and Caden woozy, less fast than they would have been. As Doris and Caden charged the klansmen, one of them managed to put a stake in Caden’s shoulder. He quickly struck the man down with a chop to the neck. Doris knocked the air out of two men, launching her fists into their guts. Only a pair from this group were left – two klansmen left with the pillow sacks over their heads and their torches that they swung wildly.

  The one in Gesine’s arms continued to screech.

  Doris, Caden and Gesine all exchanged looks, then Gesine threw the screeching klansman into the pair.

  The torches drifted to the ground, and Gesine used one of the men’s limp, unconscious bodies to put them both out. Then she picked up the woozy, formerly screeching klansman.

  “You need blood,” Gesine told Caden.

  Caden shook his head. “Not that bad. He smells too much like garlic.”

  “No!” screamed the klansman, as if he didn’t hear a word Caden said. “Please. I’ve got a family. My father made me join. I didn’t even want to.”

  “You’ve got a family? I’m sure you’ve heard that before,” said Doris. She picked the man up by his shirt and lifted him so that it half-supported him, half-began to tear at the seams. “Did it make you stop tying a noose?”

  Her eyes were teary from the garlic scent, but she could see Caden in the corner of her eye, reaching out his hand. Gesine pointed to the barn, then ran off toward it.

  “We need to go,” Caden said. “Forget about him. … Just hand him over to me, and let’s get to the barn.”

  The klansman struggled to nod in Doris’ grasp.

  Caden grabbed him by the back of his collar. He didn’t hold the man up until Doris’ grip relented.

  As her anger subsided a tiny bit, Doris felt woozier ironically – thanks to the garlic.

  “What are you going to do with him?” she said.

  “I’ll put him up in one of those trees over yonder,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll start hollering for his friends, but we’ll already be on our way.”

 

‹ Prev