by Unknown
Atl lets him in, closing the door, carefully turning the locks.
The dog pads out of the kitchen and stares at him.
“Look, you’ve to get some facts straight, alright? I’m not in Mexico City on vacation. You don’t want to hang out with me. You’ll end up as a carpet stain. Trust me, my clan is in deep shit.”
“You’re part of a clan?” Domingo says, excited. “That’s cool! You got a crest tattoo? Is it hand-poked?”
“Jesus,” Atl says. “Are you some sort of fanboy?”
Domingo shakes his head. “No.”
“Why are you here?”
“I like your dog,” he says. It is a stupid answer. He doesn’t have anything better. He wonders if she’ll go with him to the arcade. He went there once and drank beer while he tried to shoot green monsters. It would be cool. Maybe she is too old for arcades. He wonders what she does for fun.
“It will bite your hand off if you pet it,” she warns him. “I’ll give you a cup of tea and you leave afterwards, alright?”
“Sure. How come you drink tea?”
She doesn’t reply. Domingo is about to apologize for being crass, but he isn’t up to date on tlahuelpocmimi diets. Except for the kid part.
A knock on the door makes them both turn their heads.
“Health and Sanitation.”
“Open it. Don’t tell them I’m here,” she whispers, moving so quickly to his side it makes him gasp.
She goes towards the window and jumps out. Domingo rushes after her, pokes his head out, and sees Atl climbing up the side of the building, her shoulders hunched and looking birdlike once more. She disappears onto the roof.
Domingo opens the door.
Three men waltz in, faces grim.
“We have a report there’s a vampire here,” one of them says.
Domingo, with the experience of a master liar and a complete indifference to authority, shrugs. “I don’t know. The guy that’s renting me the place didn’t say nothing about vampires.”
“Look around. You, I’m going to check you, give me your hand.”
Domingo obeys. The guy presses a little white plastic stick against his wrist. It beeps.
“You’re alone?” the guy asks him.
“Yep.” Domingo takes out a chocolate bar and starts eating it. The dog is sitting still, eyeing the men.
“What are you doing?”
“Sleeping.”
Domingo can hear the other two men opening doors, muttering between themselves.
“It’s all empty,” one of the other men says. “There’s not even clothes in the closet. Just a mattress in there.”
“You live here?” asks the first guy, who hasn’t moved from Domingo’s side, carefully cataloguing him.
“Yeah. For now. I move around. Been working for a rag-and-bone man lately. I used to wash windshields and before that I juggled balls for the drivers at the stop lights, but this guy I worked with beat me up and I’ve got the rag-and-bone gig now.”
“Just a damn street kid,” says the man, and Domingo thinks he must have an earpiece on or something, because he sure as hell isn’t speaking to Domingo.
The men leave as quickly as they’ve come. He locks the door, sits on the rug and waits. Atl doesn’t fly in — not technically — but she seems to jump in with a certain grace and flexibility that is birdlike.
“Thanks,” she says. The feathers disappear, leaving only pitch-black hair behind.
“How’d you do that?”
“What?”
“The bird thing.”
“It’s natural. We all do it after we hit puberty.”
She goes into her room. Domingo stands at the entrance, watching her pull up floor boards with her bare hands, taking stuff from under there and tossing it into a backpack. She rips the mattress open and begins to throw some money and papers in the bag.
“It’s been nice meeting you. I’ve got to find another place now.”
“What sort of trouble are you in? What do those guys want?”
“Those guys aren’t the trouble,” she says. “That’s just sanitation. But if they got word there is a vampire here, that means the others aren’t far behind.”
“Who are the others?”
Atl gives him a narrow look. “One month ago my aunt’s head was delivered in a cooler to our home. I left Ciudad Juarez and headed here before I also ended in a cooler.”
“Who killed her?”
“A rival clan. It’s part of our territory fights. We were trying to kill a certain clan leader and botched it. She’s got a big scar across the middle now, and she’s mighty pissed at us. I hope you can appreciate the situation,” she says, zipping her jacket up.
It sounds very exciting to Domingo. He’s only seen the gang fights from afar. Mexico City has managed to insulate itself through the conflict, partly because it keeps the vampires who are waging the wars out of the city limits, and partly because it is so damn militarized. The drug dealers in Mexico City are narcomenudistas, petty peddlers, small-scale crooks focused around Tepito and Iztapalapa. If they kill each other, they have the sense to do it quietly, without attracting twenty Special Forces ops who are ready to put a gun up your ass and shoot before bothering to ask for identity cards.
Atl goes down the stairs. Domingo follows her.
When they reach the front door she turns to look at him and he thinks she is going to tell him to beat it. Her hands tighten around the dog’s leash. She takes a step back.
Thirty seconds later Domingo is in a comic book.
Half a dozen men pour in. The dog growls. Somebody yells, “Stay the fuck still. Stay the fuck still!” Big bubble speeches.
A guy grabs Domingo by the collar and drags him out, pinning him against the ground and putting a plastic tie around his wrists.
Domingo doesn’t know if these are cops, or sanitation, or narcos. All he knows is he can hear the dog barking and he is being dragged against the pavement, and then kicked towards the trunk of a car. They’re trying to stuff him in the trunk.
Domingo panics. He tries to hold onto something. The guy punches him and Domingo folds over himself.
It doesn’t really feel like he thought it might feel. Action. Adventure. Comic book manic energy.
The guy pulls Domingo by his hair and Domingo gets a glimpse of teeth, half a smile, before Atl pulls him off Domingo with a swift, careless motion that breaks his bones.
Domingo, on his knees, looks up at Atl. She cuts the plastic tie and the dog comes bounding towards her.
She’s got three sharp needles sticking out of her left leg. Blood puddles next to her shoes.
She vomits. A sticky, dark mess.
The dog whines.
“Come on,” he says grabbing her arm, propping her up.
He tries not to look at the bodies they leave behind. He tries not to wonder if they’re all dead.
If this is a comic book, then it’s tinted with red.
She’s awake. He knows it because the dog raises its head. Domingo looks at her. Sure enough, her eyes are open, though he can’t make her expression.
“How you feeling?” he asks.
Atl looks down at her bandaged leg. He knows he didn’t do a great job, but at least he took out those weird needles.
“My bag. Do you have it?”
She clutched it all the way there. There was no way he could have left it behind. Domingo nods.
“There’s a blue plastic stick in it. Small. Hand it to me.”
He does.
She presses it against her tongue and shivers. Then she unwraps the bandage around her leg. The skin looks odd. Blackened, as if stained.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“Anaphylactic reaction from the silver nitrate. Lucky for me they didn’t want me dead yet.”
Domingo blinks.
“It makes me sick,” she explains.
“You’ve been out for about an hour.”
Atl brushes the hair back from her face. She looks
around at the little room and the piles of old comic books, hybrid personal protective clothing, and all the other assorted junk he collects and sells together with the bone-and-rag-man.
“Where are we?”
“My place. It’s safe. We’re in a tunnel downtown. It’s very old. I think the nuns used it. There was a convent nearby. Benito Juarez closed it fifty years ago.”
Atl chuckles. “Juarez is the 1800s. That happened nearly two centuries ago. Jesus!”
She gives him a funny look. Domingo frowns. He doesn’t know lots of stuff and obviously she does. He doesn’t like it when people make fun of him. It’s unpleasant. Even Belen was rude at times, though there was no reason for that.
“It’s cool,” she says. “This works. It was smart thinking.”
She opens her arms and the dog rushes towards her, pressing its great head against her cheek. She scratches its ear and smiles at Domingo.
“How come your dog’s so big?” he asks.
“Cualli’s a special breed. He’s an attack dog.”
“Were those the gangsters?”
“Those were freelancers. Health and Sanitation must have tipped them off that there was something odd going on. Or somebody else did.”
“You were fast. Like really fast. Are all vampires like that? I’ve read a lot about the European ones and the Chinese, and how there’s all the infighting with them up north and if you go to Mexicali it’s like all run by the Chinese. But they say they’re all stiff, no? Jian shi and they can’t really be green, can they? I don’t know much about your type. Funny, it’s probably—”
“Please. Stop,” she says, pressing her fingers against her temples. “I don’t want to talk about vampires. Or gangs.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing.”
Domingo wants to talk about everything. He sits in front of her, brimming with questions as she curls up and closes her eyes.
This is how a vampire sleeps. Not in coffins. Curled up, with a dog by her feet and a boy watching her.
He gets up early and goes above ground. It’s raining, so he ties a plastic shopping bag to his head as he heads to purchase food. He buys bread, milk, three cans of beans, potato chips and pastries. He feels very happy as he pays for the stuff, like it’s Christmas.
On the way back, he scans the screens at the subway in search of news. There’s nothing about the confrontation of the previous day.
As he stands in the subway car, listening to the tired music on his player, he conjures a story in which he’s making breakfast for his girlfriend, and she’s real pretty and they live together. Not in the tunnels. In a proper place.
When he returns to the tunnel he’s humming a tune.
She’s sitting, back against the wall, browsing through a bunch of magazines. When she looks up at him, the tune dies on his lips.
“Where did you go?”
“I went to get us breakfast.”
“I don’t need breakfast. It was stupid of you. Someone might have seen you.”
“Sorry,” he mutters and then, tentatively, to diffuse her anger. “How do you like my collection?”
“It’s great,” she says, quirking an eyebrow at him and jumping to her feet, showing him the cover of a comic book. “Not a fanboy, huh?”
It’s an old-style thing with a guy in a Dracula cape. She picks another one. This is a recent clipping from a magazine he stole a few weeks before. It talks about the narco-vampires in Monterrey.
He wets his lips, struggling for words. “Why are you angry?”
“I am not a goddamn hobby.”
“Who’s talking about a hobby?”
She shoves the magazine against his chest, pushing him back. “Do you like vampires? Huh? You like reading about them? You like looking at the pictures of dead vampires?”
“Yeah, well … it’s exciting.”
“Do you know how long my kind can live? Three-hundred years. You know what’s the average lifespan of my kind? Thirty years. Do you want to know why?”
Domingo does not answer. She grabs him by his shirt, holding him up, his feet off the floor.
“Because we’re all getting massacred. Before I arrived in Mexico City, I was at the market in Ciudad Juarez. The decapitated body of a vampire bled onto the pavement, right next to a food stand. People kept eating. They bought soda. They were more bothered by the heat than the corpse.”
She lowers him and his feet touch the floor.
“I’m going to be a puddle of blood.”
He’s scared to say a thing. She sits down, folding her legs and staring at the wall. Eventually, he sits next to her.
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
“Hell if I know,” she whispers. “I need to eat. I need to sleep. I need to think.”
He pulls up his sleeve, offering his arm to her. She smiles wryly.
“You’re going to get hurt one of these days,” she tells him, “if you keep helping strangers like me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he replies.
She presses her mouth against his skin.
Domingo is groggy when he opens his eyes. Atl’s still asleep. He doesn’t try to wake her. He flicks a battery-powered lantern on and looks at his magazines, feeling odd when he runs his hands across the vivid picture, the splashes of red.
The dog growls. Domingo lifts the lantern and listens. He doesn’t hear anything. The dog growls louder. Atl shifts her body, fully awake.
“What is it?” he asks.
“People,” she says.
He still can’t hear anything. Atl grabs her bag and pulls out a switchblade.
“Cualli, stay,” she tells the dog, then raises her eyes towards him. “Don’t move. The dog will keep you safe.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to take a look,” she says.
She runs out. Domingo crouches next to the dog, trying to listen for anything odd. The tunnels are quiet for a bit, and then he hears loud sounds. Might be gun shots. The sounds seem to be getting closer. He’s nervous, heart beating very fast. He twists the dog’s leash between his hands.
Atl returns running and her face is very tense.
“Lead me out of here!” she says.
Domingo scrambles ahead of her, holding his lantern. He turns left and finds himself face to face with three people wearing masks and goggles. They raise their guns. He blinks and is yanked back, thrown against the floor. The air is knocked out of his lungs.
Bullets zing; the loud blast of a shotgun. Domingo covers his ears. One of them lunges past Atl, towards him. Atl plucks him back. The man tries to escape. Her claws and teeth tear the protective mask apart and she bites into his face like he is a ripe fruit.
The dog is also biting, tearing.
Domingo looks dumbly at all the blood.
“The place is crawling with them,” she says, angrily. “They must have followed you back. You’ve got to lead us out.”
“We’ve got to keep going straight,” he mumbles, picking the lantern off the floor.
The light illuminates a shadow, the figure of another man with a mask coming just behind Atl.
“Look out!” he yells.
The man’s head rolls onto the floor.
Atl’s fingers are stained crimson. Brains are splattered over her jacket.
It’s Domingo’s turn to vomit.
Dozens of mariachis in charro costumes litter Garibaldi Plaza. They’re waiting for someone to hire them to play a song and do not pay attention to two dirty beggars with a stray dog. That’s what Atl and Domingo look like, covered in grime and dirt after running through the tunnels.
“I’m heading to Guatemala, kid,” Atl says, her bag balanced on her left shoulder.
“Do you have friends there?”
“No.”
“Sure. I’ll go,” he says.
She stares at him.
“You’re going to need to feed,” he says. “You’ll need someone to watch your back.�
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“I don’t need help.”
“I can shoot a gun,” he blusters.
“You’ve almost died twice in less than a week.”
“The life expectancy of a street kid isn’t much higher than yours,” he says, knowing he’s got nowhere to go. There’s nothing but forward.
She smirks. “Find another way to commit suicide.”
She slips a couple of bills into his hand.
“Atl,” he says.
“Keep the dog,” she replies, handing him the leash. “It’ll slow me down.”
She takes a couple of steps. The dog whines.
“Stay with him,” she orders.
“Atl,” he repeats.
She walks away. She doesn’t turn her head. He tries following her, but the square is crowded at this time of the night and he loses her quickly. She must have flown away. Can vampires fly? He’ll never know.
She’s gone.
A trio sings “La Cucaracha” while the rain begins to fall. He sniffles, eyes watery.
Domingo pulls his plastic bag from his pocket and ties it above his head. He’s out of chocolate. He’s out of luck. He pats the dog’s head.
* * * * *
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s stories have appeared in publications such as Fantasy Magazine, Tesseracts Thirteen and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. She is the owner of Innsmouth Free Press, a micro-publishing venture specializing in horror and dark speculative fiction, and through Innsmouth she has co-edited the anthologies Historical Lovecraft and Candle in the Attic Window. She has written a couple of stories set in a near-future Mexico where vampires are real and hopes to write a novel which takes place in the same universe.
Resonance
By Mary E. Choo
Peg stared through the peephole in the front door, watching as the local Health Officer retreated down the sidewalk and terraced steps to the street. When he started his car and eased it into the road, she let out a slow breath.
“He’s gone,” she said.
The slap of papers on the living room coffee table startled her. She turned to see Mark stuffing documents into his heavy briefcase.
“You’re damn lucky he didn’t raise other issues,” he said. “If you’d control yourself and stop doing such stupid things, our group wouldn’t have all these problems.”