by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
“Hello?”
“Hello, Fred, this is a friend of your daughter’s.”
He started sobbing into the phone.
“Fred,” Tessa said impatiently, “I can’t help you if you’re a mess. So calm down. Tell me something—that bitch you married that hit your daughter, you still married to her?”
“Technically,” he sniffed into the phone. “Is my baby girl all right?”
“We’ll get to that in a minute. What do you mean, technically?”
“The divorce isn’t final, but she moved out two weeks after Dana left. I was so blind to her faults. I was lonely. Please tell me if my daughter is okay.”
“She’s been through a rough time. I need you to go to the Night Flight Club in Manhattan. It’ll take a good three hours to get here. She will be there. And then you both need counseling. I’ll call and check on her in a month or so. If things haven’t changed at home, I’ll come after you. Do you understand?”
“Yes. Where is this club?”
Tessa gave him the street address and cross-street, and then she called Jorge and told him to expect the girl and her father. Tessa then hailed the kid a cab and sent her on her way.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You’re an angel.”
“No need to thank me, honey. Just don’t ever run away again. Finish school, go to college. You want out of that house and that backwoods town, do it the right way.”
The girl nodded and the cab pulled away. Tessa looked at her watch. Good deed done for the night, now it was time to find Marco.
She had memorized the address Hack had given her. The warehouse in question had windows painted black, a chain link fence topped with razor wire around it, and five snarling Dobermans patrolling the parking lot. Someone didn’t want anyone coming in. Or, for that matter, anyone going out.
Tessa landed on the roof. She moved along the tarpaper stealthily and found a fire escape. Moving down one flight, she found an unlocked window and quietly lifted it about four inches. Just enough to see an assembly line of drug-making.
An Asian man in a lab coat walked amongst the workers. She guessed he was the chemist. She attuned her superior hearing to him as he shouted commands in Mandarin. She recognized enough of the language. Then he spoke in English.
“Faster. Move faster, you lazy pieces of shit. Move faster or this is what will happen to you.” In the next instant, he had withdrawn an automatic gun with a silencer and pointed it at the temple of one worker. There was a pop as the gun went off and a woman slumped to the floor. “Faster. Faster! But do not forget to be precise.”
The workers’ eyes glanced furtively at the dead body. The man in the lab coat stepped over her, stopping for a moment to kick her body as a final act of disdain. Two men made a move to clear the body from the floor.
“Leave her there. As a reminder. Faster. Let’s see them move faster.”
Long tables were lined up, with tubes and glass containers, scales and lots and lots of white powder. Manning the tables, assembling packages and smaller dime bags of drugs were zombies. Tessa didn’t know what else to call them, but she recognized their vacant expression. She had seen that look before….
Chapter 15
Germany. 19—. It was the fourth city she had lived in over the course of the previous seven years. Every time she settled in somewhere—Venice, Paris, Athens and now Berlin—she would, after a time, sense that Marco was zeroing in on her. In Venice, she had barely escaped after spotting him in a café. In Paris, had she not booby-trapped her apartment, she was sure she’d be back in his clutches.
Sooner or later, too, in every city, she would become aware of the creatures of the night. They all had a scent, imperceptible to mortals, but a scent nonetheless, and an uncanny instinct of being able to find one another. For some, it was to form groups. In groups there was strength. Less isolation. They were tormented souls, and Tessa believed that in clusters they moved further and further away from their humanity, making it easier to accept just who and what they had become. She supposed it was not unlike mortals who commit horrible acts in gangs or in riots, losing their inhibitions and sense of morality.
Tessa supposed that was the same with the Nazis. Ideals, political positions and beliefs that would have been given no credence before, now dominated. The Nazis found strength in numbers. No one questioned their lack of humanity. In numbers, it was easier to do what they were doing. They could load Jews on cattle cars, destroy the shops owned by Jews, beat people on the street, all in homage to a nationalism that made no sense.
She leaned out the window of her apartment and looked down on a crowd of young Nazis—no older than fifteen or sixteen—who were beating an old Jewish man. The elderly gentleman wore a long, black tweed coat, and pinned to its breast was a yellow star. One boy, baby-faced and Aryan to the nth degree with pale white-blond hair and rosy cheeks, stomped down with his boot on the old man’s hand as he lay on the sidewalk. She heard the man’s cry of agony. Around the Nazis were ordinary citizens moving about their business, glancing furtively in the bullies’ direction, but not offering so much as a word of protest.
Tessa was sickened. It wasn’t just the Jews singled out, either. She had a bookkeeper whose father was in a wheelchair. The bookkeeper’s father was long gone—not part of Hitler’s vision for a perfect Germany. She knew of a camp of Gypsies rounded up. Of homosexuals beaten beyond recognition. This was what groups of evil could do.
But Tessa wasn’t interested in being part of some group—undead or living—or listening to the rhetoric of Hitler. She operated alone. Buddhism had enlightened her, taught her to keep her soul untouched by the day-to-day struggle for survival. But she believed both vampires and ordinary Germans fed into the same soul sickness. Germany was like a country of undead.
As the pro-Hitler factions became more rabid, she sensed a growing power of darkness in the city. The vampires were also gathering like storm clouds. Tessa knew it was time to leave Germany. She thought she would strike out for America if she could arrange for safe passage. But she had a mission to carry out first.
She ran a nightclub in Berlin, a jazz club actually, that she called the Night Flight Club. And as the city spiraled toward insanity, she decided she would aim to kill some of the S.S. If she had to leave Germany and be on the run in another country as the world went crazy, at least she would accomplish some good.
That night, as she had planned, Goebbels arrived at the club, along with other high-ranking German officials. Their black boots were so shiny, you could see your reflection in them. The S.S. commandeered her three best tables. They all drooled over her, and for all their talk of Aryan perfection, any one of them would have bedded her—dark hair, green eyes, questionable heritage and all.
She descended the staircase—a sweeping magnificently wide staircase that allowed her gown’s train to trail behind her—at midnight. Fifteen musicians were playing big-band standards by the dance floor, and people were jitterbugging and dancing, seemingly oblivious to how Germany—their Germany—was hurtling toward madness. But something more was wrong. The minute Tessa entered the room, she felt the hairs stand up on the nape of her neck, as if a cold breeze had whispered past her.
Of course, in a sense, everything was wrong. Yellow stars adorned the coats of the Jews, and having witnessed upheaval in Shanghai and other countries over the years, she felt like screaming at the Germans—not the S.S., but the ordinary German citizens. Wake up, she wanted to urge them, you are hailing a madman as your savior.
But tonight, she sensed a new danger. As if in slow motion, she surveyed the room, hearing snippets of conversation, trying not to focus on any one conversation with her hearing, but instead picking up on vibes. And something more. The smell of undead. There! She felt the gaze of, not a vampire, but a slave. And another. And another. Dressed in finery, but haunted, vacant-eyed. They were not yet fully turned, and they were controlled, wholly and with no mercy, by Marco. She sensed it. Her husband was somewhere close to
her. He was relentless in his pursuit of her.
She was so ashamed. How had she allowed her passions to blind her to his evilness? With the wisdom of hindsight, how could she not have thought it odd that he was never with her in daylight? How had she missed the coldness in his eyes? She would have gone mad by now had it not been for Buddhism.
Tessa realized she needed to detonate her explosives. The zombies—or whatever they were—would perish with the S.S. It was rather fitting, she supposed. A modern evil and an ancient evil would be destroyed in flames together. She only hoped Marco was somewhere in the building, somewhere where the flames would consume him, too. Fire, like sunlight, could kill a vampire.
Tessa paused for a moment. She had once loved him—or had thought she did. There was no denying the connection. She silently prayed that if she succeeded in killing him and if vampires could go on to a next incarnation, Marco would be able to atone for his misdeeds in this existence.
She strolled through the nightclub, the music lively and exuberant. She tried to act nonchalant, but she was aware of the undead, aware of the S.S., giving the acting performance of her life. She greeted each of the vile S.S. officers as if she were enamored of their manhood and virility. They lapped it up. And she casually avoided the undead, not looking at any of them. Whatever she did, she did not want her behavior to seem suspicious. She knew they were there to capture her, but she feigned ignorance.
She took to the microphone. “Thank you all for coming,” she said in perfect German. “I trust you will enjoy the band, the food, the champagne. Tonight we live to dance.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say “Heil Hitler.” She couldn’t. She had never said it. She remembered listening to Hitler’s radio addresses and hearing the masses embrace him. It had sickened her.
Standing near the bandstand, she swept her hand toward the musicians, and they struck up a Glenn Miller song. And as she stood under the lights, she saw him. There, overlooking the dance floor, on the second floor, was Marco, the man whom she had once thought to be her sexual soul mate…her husband. She faltered for just a moment, hoping her recovery was swift enough that he would not realize he’d been spotted. She walked through the high-stepping, dancing crowd on the dance floor, out of the main ballroom to a back room, where she planned to start a fire. Then she would light fires at two more key spots, with a keg of explosives scheduled to explode in fifteen minutes beneath the table of the S.S. officers, hidden beneath a floorboard.
She lit the first fire, pouring kerosene on a pile of books and taking a match to them. It was a symbolic gesture as well as a practical one—she was burning multiple copies of Mein Kempf, Hitler’s manifesto, filled with rantings. She left the back room and was racing to the location of the second fire, when Marco suddenly blocked her path, facing off against her in the hallway, three undead, expressionless monsters behind him.
“Tessa.” He exhaled heavily.
She knew that, for all his ire, the sight of her weakened him. His eyes registered that his attraction for her was still intense and palpable. She avoided staring at his eyes, which had a magnetic pull.
“Marco.”
“Have you missed me, my darling?”
“No,” she said steadily. “Not as long as you are who you are. I was young and naive when I met you, Marco.”
“Not so naive. You didn’t resist me.”
“I resist you now…. And who are these things—these beings you’ve brought with you?”
“They worship me as their father and creator. As their god. Remember, my lovely wife, how I told you not even God on His throne could keep us apart?”
“Yes. I remember, but you must know aspiring to be like God will only bring you ruin. Aspiring to be God is evil, Marco.”
“I have power like God, immortality like God. I am God…. Come with me.”
“I can’t.”
He stared at her, his eyes drawing her to him. “Do you not love me, my darling Tessa?”
“Marco, my husband…don’t do this.” She could smell the acrid smoke seeping into the hallway. The undead began squealing.
“Calm down,” he commanded them. But panic set in. The creatures, despite the finery and anatomy that made them appear human, were subhuman and unable to think or react in a human way. They were animalistic, and they ran like rats.
Marco, furious, started running toward her. Tessa was trapped. Fire was now raging behind her, the flames starting to lick the walls, and he blocked the only exit. And then, as if by an act of the very God Marco defiled, an explosion rocked the club. Tessa fell heavily against a wall, but Marco was struck by a falling beam and collapsed on the floor.
Tessa rubbed her head and shoulder, where she had slammed against the wall. She held her hand up to her nose and mouth, trying to avoid inhaling the smoke filling the air. With one last glance at Marco, she ducked into a side room, opened a window and escaped out into the streets, where people poured out of the club, teeming onto the sidewalks.
Tessa hurried across the street and into an apartment building. She ascended the stairs to the roof, next leaping to the bell tower in the center of the city square. From this safe distance, atop the tower, Tessa watched her nightclub become engulfed in flames. Smoke billowed skyward, and orange fire kissed the sky. She put her head in her hands, feeling both a sense of relief and a great sadness that the man she once loved but who was so consumed by evil and hubris, had finally perished. Or so she assumed…
Zombies. The undead. Hack had been right. Tessa peered in at the drug-making occurring under machine gun-carrying guards. The creatures’ eyes were flat, expressionless. They worked down on the factory floor with mechanical precision. She knew what they were. Marco hadn’t fully turned them into vampires. So they remained in a state between undead and living, a suspended state of death, yet still breathing. There was no freeing them, though. She could never turn them into mortals again. They would have to die, along with their master. But she hoped that in dying, their souls might be freed from their torment.
Chapter 16
“I don’t believe it. Detective Tony Flynn, the sloppiest, crabbiest son of a bitch who ever patrolled the streets of New York, is in love.” Alex Williams stated it matter-of-factly.
“Look, I didn’t tell you this so you could mock me, man. I told you because I think she’s in some kind of trouble, and I don’t know what it is exactly. I only know it has to do with Shanghai Red.”
“My friend…we’ve been through a lot together.”
Flynn rolled his eyes. “Please don’t give me that ‘I took a bullet for you’ shit.”
“I’m not.” The two men sat in a diner down near the Hudson River. Alex Williams continued. “I’m serious. When you married Diana—me, Gus, even the lieutenant, knew it was a big fuckin’ mistake. But who was I to tell you no? I mean, I haven’t been in a relationship, ever, that lasted more than three months.”
“What about Sara?” Flynn asked, referring to a gorgeous lawyer that everyone said Williams should settle down with.
“She doesn’t count. I cheated on her.”
Flynn shook his head. “You’re hopeless.”
“I know. So are you, but in a different way. Anyway, hell, we lived through Diana, through my dad’s death, through Gus losing Irene, through a bullet—all right, I had to get that in there—through perps so fuckin’ sick and ugly they haunted us at night.”
“And?” Flynn asked. “Why bring this all up?”
“You’re my best friend, and something tells me this lady…she’s what’s been missing from your life. So if she’s in trouble, if we’ve got to bend a few rules to help her, we do. She’s your woman. End of story.”
“Thanks, Alex. You surprise me sometimes.”
“Did I tell you my bullet wound hurts in cold weather?”
“Fuck off.” Flynn laughed, then shoveled the rest of his fried eggs and toast into his mouth, washing it down with black coffee. The diner was a place they frequented late at night. I
t was a mixture of drunken club kids sobering up with eggs and coffee, people coming off the night shift, cops and a few denizens of the leather bars.
Before heading down to the diner, Flynn had checked his voice mail. Just hearing Tessa’s voice had made him instantly hard. He thought her a perfect sexual match to himself. But part of him still found it difficult to believe a woman with class and wealth could really be interested in him. He only knew that when she straddled him, when they were making love, there had been a moment when she looked into his eyes and he felt as if she looked right into his soul, battered and weary though it was.
“So what’s your plan?” Alex asked.
“I want to head over a couple of blocks. There’s a veritable drug supermarket by the river. Let’s just hang and see what we can find out about Shanghai Red.”
“You got it, my lovesick puppy.”
“Fuck you.”
Two blocks over from the diner, a homeless man slumped against a trash can, seemingly oblivious to the smell of rotting garbage. Flynn’s mother had raised him to have compassion for his fellow man, and he always carried plenty of dollar bills. He didn’t go to church often enough, but he slipped a wad of singles into the poor box of any church he passed. Giving the homeless enough for a meal was his way of doing good works. He peeled off ten singles and pressed them into the homeless man’s palm.
“Go buy yourself a hot dinner, pal.”
“Did you see them?” The man was crying. “Did you see them?” He began to cower.
“What, my man?” Flynn asked, used to the mentally ill amongst the homeless. Flying saucers, the devil, Jesus—they saw them all. He even knew one homeless guy who thought Elvis was a toll taker on the George Washington Bridge.
“The zombies.”
“Zombies?” Alex asked, rolling his eyes at Flynn.
“Zombies!” the man squealed, agitated.