“Mr. Kim!” Wendy’s voice hissed from somewhere. But he disregarded it, fixated as he was on his sister’s prone form.
I started toward them, tripping over something soft in the dark, coming down on top of it on my knees.
“Oof,” someone groaned. “Get the fuck off me, you little bitch.”
It was only as the cursing began, I realized who it was I’d stumbled upon. I lurched backward. “Fishhook?”
“Who the hell do you think it is? You been following me, right?”
“Well, yeah. No need to make me feel stupid.” I reached into the band of my skirt and tugged out a candle and the matches. “What the fuck is goin’ on? This cave? Those people? Honey?” I struggled to light a match but the man’s hands covered mine extinguishing the only one to catch.
“You’ll show ’em where we’re at.”
“Where’s Wendy?”
“Down there … somewhere,” he whispered. “With them.”
There didn’t seem to be anyone around the pit, at all. No movement as far as I could tell, but still, it was certain that the family was lurking.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“They’re business people, that’s all they’ll say. But it’s what they sell … that’s the sick part.” He turned and took my chin between his fingers. “People. Blood.”
Everything came together in those words. People. Blood. The family was providing vampires with taps— convenient fresh blood at reasonable prices and right to your door. The mushrooms must keep the taps in line.
“They keep you drugged so you won’t resist,” I added.
“Yeah. It’s horrible.”
I thought of the men that Gil kept, men who’d willingly give up a pint for a night with my homeboy. It couldn’t be that bad.
“Aren’t you being a little dramatic?” I asked.
His mouth dropped open, snapped shut. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You’re just like them. Monsters.”
“There’s just no talking to you when you’re like this.” Dismissing his words, I swiveled to get a better look at the table. “What are they doing to her?”
“Running tests, looking for rare blood parasites. They fancy themselves vintners. Specialists. Masters of their trade. Their clients pay millions for just one tap, and they expect the perfect bite.”
“Well, yeah. For a million, sure.”
His face pickled, disgust spreading across it.
“So why would they kill Becky and Tad?”
“Simple. Wrong blood type.”
“How would they know?”
“Those awful kids of theirs approach prospective taps and lure them back to the trailer. At least, that’s how it happened with me. While there, they slip you some black ones—mushrooms—and while you’re out they check your blood type. Too common and you’re out of the running. But you also know too much, so they kill you. Do you want to know how?”
I thought of the werewolf claws, the bodies. “No. I think I got it.”
“They must have found a gold mine in that little girl down there. Just like me. This is where I come. They picked me up off the highway in Denver—cold as hell as I remember it. The rest went all blurry after the mushrooms kicked in. You get addicted, you see?”
“Is that why you stole Tad’s truck?”
“The way I see it, that truck was in need of a new owner. Plus, I had to get me some leverage. Tad must have been their dealer. I don’t know why it is they turned on him, but they did. Anyways, I got that stash hid away real good. They’re going to have to do business with me now.”
Just then, the boy, William, I guess, passed through the room, checked something on the machine and sauntered over to a fissure in the cavern wall.
“Sh,” I warned.
The boy was saying something to someone, but the distance was too great to figure out what. He punctuated his communication by spitting in the direction of the fissure. I had no doubt a loogie was dripping down Wendy’s face. He turned and bounded off in the direction he came.
“Let’s go.” Fishhook moved forward scrambling low over the rocks until he reached the level of the pit. I followed, darting toward the crack in the wall as I made the floor.
Wendy seethed with anger. Her face was, in fact, dripping with the boy’s spit.159 Her wrists were bound to a hook in the wall by what looked to be a man’s belt, but could likely have been some sadomasochistic shit from the back room of the Pink Cave.
“Oh thank God,” she said as I worked at the buckle. “I thought we were dead for sure.”
“Well Honey might still be, but you my dear are …” I loosened the strap and she wriggled her hands free. “Stinky as hell, but free.”
She threw her arms around me then and squeezed, sending shivers of pain throughout my chest, down my spine. Fucking everywhere. I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming.
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” She jumped up and down shaking my cracked rib all the more.
I pushed her away. “Knock it off, you’re fuckin’ killing me.” I opened my blouse and showed her the wound.
“Oh, sweetie.” She cocked her head, smiling. “That’s nothing a pitcher of martinis and twenty grand won’t fix.” And then her face changed. Shock spreading.
I turned in time to see Mrs. Cleaver pounding toward me with a claw raised over her head. I reached for the gun in the waistband of my skirt and felt nothing. It must have come loose in the fall, I thought, and ducked. The claw whizzed by slicing through several locks of hair, at least six inches long each. They floated down in front of me like a slow motion nightmare.
Oh no. Bitch didn’t just cut my hair.
Instead of standing, I dropped all the way to my hands and lunged forward, ratcheting open my jaws and chomped off the woman’s right leg at the knee. She teetered for a moment, a ghostly white pallor spreading across her skin, and then fell over onto her hip, screaming. Her wails echoed through the cracks and fissures, alerting the men. Wendy sprang for her, then, chewing through the woman’s neck, sending an arc of blood high in the air, and her head scooting across the cave floor. The silence was immediate.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the boy moving in the shadows, heard the scuffling of his feet. He was following the curve of the wall toward something. A glint of steel in the darkness.
A gun?
I decided I’d best beat him there and bolted, snatching his mother’s weapon from the ground. He started to run and we came on a small table set into a niche in the wall at about the same time. I slashed at him and his arm went flying. He pivoted blinding me in arterial spray. The prick.
I backed off and wiped at my eyes. When I opened them, I had only a second before the boy was on me, pummeling me with his fist before stabbing me with a hypodermic needle.
Silly kid.
He screamed. I grabbed his throat, shutting him up. He kept plunging the needle in pricking at my flesh over and over.
“Those veins don’t really work anymore.” My face shook as I spread my jaws.
“No!” Another voice screamed. His father.
I had no sympathy or nostalgia for family, not while my friend was watching his sister bleed into a machine in a secret cave lair. I dropped the boy with one swift bite to the head. He fell to the ground with a thud and half his brain rolled from his skull, tracking black and wet across the ground.
Mr. Cleaver dropped to his knees, his head thrown back and howling as though tortured.
“Do you expect us to feel sorry for you, man?” I walked toward him. Wendy flanked me. “With what you’ve been doing to these people?”
“It was for the good of mankind.”
“What? You gotta be kidding me, right? It was for the good of your bank account.”
“No.” His voice was soft now, measured. “That was strategic.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We were hunters. Slayers. Vampire killers. The taps were our bait. The best blood around and once the vampires g
ot a taste, were they ever willing to pay for it. We knew they couldn’t afford our prices unless they went in together on the bill. It was always going to be a large coven that kept a tap. After the deal went through we’d stake out their spots and take ’em out one by one. Made it look like werewolves were doing it, had to keep up the stereotype that those fuckers were uncontrollable.”
“Well that’s just sick,” Wendy said. “A bunch of crazy-ass Buffys probably killing just as many people as they did vampires and calling it noble. I’ve seen it all now.” She walked over to the table and started checking out the machine.
I pointed at Honey’s body. “What do I need to do to let the girl go?”
He looked up from the floor then, sneering. “Perhaps you could eat shit.”
“Uh … only as part of the whole package, but not separately, that’s just gross.” I kicked him in the head and he fell back, scuttling off into the dark like a crab. When he reemerged he brandished werewolf claws in each hand and a triangular bruise from my shoe on his forehead. He snarled, as if he were an actual werewolf. The effect would have been laughable—particularly in the light of his olive sweater vest and dress shirt— had the light not glinted off those terrible nails.
He lunged and I fell back, turning, readying myself to run.
A shot.
And then Ward’s body hit the ground next to mine, blood and gray matter pouring from a tennis ball-sized hole in his forehead.
Fishhook emerged from the darkness, Honey’s gun in his hand. “You ruined my plans, you know?”
“No we didn’t,” I said. “We just changed the buyers. Seattle has plenty of lowlifes that will be clamoring for that stuff. You could probably cut a deal to keep a supply coming from Madame Gloria’s place.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
I half expected some sort of attack, but the man just spun the gun around and handed it to me.
Fishhook took Honey’s pulse, as neither Wendy nor my fingers were sensitive enough. “It’s there, but fading.”
Wendy had disconnected the girl from the machine during the final showdown with the insane dad. Blood still dripped from the various tubes into little puddles around the cart. Honey was pale as death and Mr. Kim wailed in pain.
It was too much.
I seriously liked Honey, the girl was tough, didn’t take shit from anyone. And we all know I love her brother. But could I do it to her?
It.
Could I force this undead afterlife on a nineteen-year-old girl? Might she not be better off passing on to wherever it is dead people normally go? Mr. Kim’s eyes suggested that was the right course of action. He met my gaze and darted away, only to come floating back.
Just let her go, I thought.
“She fit in so well,” Wendy whispered.
“She did.”
Before I’d even made up my mind that I was going to give her the breath, my hand was moving to her face. For the second time this trip, I was asphyxiating someone, this time someone I’d grown legitimately close to.160 Her body began to convulse, her throat constricted.
I leaned down and let my lips hover over my hand and let go. Honey gasped with every bit of strength and will to live that was left in her.
I exhaled.
The tentacles of white smoke filled the space between our lips, lapping at her cheeks like tongues before forcing their way down her throat. I clutched my sides and squeezed pushing every ounce out of me with such force that another rib cracked, or simply moved— the bone was probably already broken in the fall.
When it was over, Honey lay there still. Fishhook checked her pulse again, but this time there was nothing.
I was beginning to think I was too late when …
Honey’s eyes snapped open and a pink flush burnished her skin, probably for the last time. She sat bolt upright on the slab and stared into the dark.
“Dae-Jung?” A tear rolled down her cheek.161
“Hyon Hui? You can see me.” Mr. Kim’s eyes darted toward me, but did not meet my gaze. Ashamed that he’d gotten exactly what he wanted.
I suspect.
“I can see you. I can totally see you.” Honey beamed.
Fishhook climbed up the rocks toward the cave to the surface.
Wendy and I hung back, opting for a view of the reunion.
“If my damned tear ducts worked I might actually be crying right now,” I said.
She scowled at me. “Well you are weeping from all those needle jabs, that’s gotta count for something.”
“Totally.”
“You were pretty bad-ass,” she said, brushing my now shoulder-length hair away from my, apparently, injured face.
“Self-defense is for pussies. I prefer a good old fashioned offense.”
“Mmm hmm, girl.”
“Hey, no one cuts my hair, without giving me a mani/pedi first. It’s just not right.”
“Amen.”
158 Don’t judge. A little innuendo never hurt anybody.
159 Don’t these kids learn anything from Flavor of Love?
160 Don’t worry, I’m not through with Scott, yet.
161 If that were the only fluid she secreted in her death, we’d all have been very lucky. Sadly this is the real world and … well … you know what happens when you die. Don’t make me say it. Oh. Okay. Piss and poop. It’s not dignified but, hey. We all do it. Now. Back to our poignant moment already in progress.
Epilogue
Postcards from the
Road Trip
Supernatural or not, it is always important to practice good etiquette. Travel is no exception. When you’re winding down after a busy night visiting haunts, feasting on local delicacies and sidling up to the bar for a horse cocktail, why not do the polite thing and send your loved ones postcards from each locale you visit? Death is not an excuse.
—Ethel Ellen Frazier, A Manners Guide for the Afterlife
So, you’re probably looking at that chapter title and thinking—or possibly even saying aloud162—“Epilogue? But they’re still in South Da-fucking-kota. What happens? What kind of crazy antics do the girls get into on the way home?” And … oh yeah, you’re totally including Gil in that, when you ask it.
Well the truth is a whole lot of stuff went down on the way back and since then. Some of it’s for other books and some of it’s for right now. So here are some postcards from the road trip back, just so you’ll feel special.163
1. Rapid City, South Dakota to Cody, Wyoming (of all places)
We packed Scott, Randy and Darryl (yes, all three alive and healing) into the camper and made the decision to drive only at night. That way Ethel and Gil could actually do something other than congratulate each other on being the most fabulous creatures ever. Gag.
Our first stop was Devil’s Tower, which looks like absolutely fucking nothing in the middle of the night, and certainly not the hotbed of alien light shows, as I’d been led to believe by an overzeal-ous Wendy in full-on tourist/U.F.O. geek mode.
In Sheridan, we stopped for a bite to eat and to gawk at the world’s largest spool of human intestines. Quite an achievement for the elderly curators of the attraction, Roberta and Gregory Walthers, who were so damn cute I would have eaten them had they not been a couple of rotting corpses. Still, I highly recommend the joint. That bobbin was totally huge and Roberta made us some bomb-ass meat margaritas.
Somewhere atop the Big Horn Mountains, west of that big Indian tourist attraction named after a wheel, Gil nearly tore the car apart trying to get out and pee. I know what you’re thinking: vam pires don’t pee, right? Well get some bad blood in ’em and watch ’em go. He screamed through out the entire thing and the steaming puddle looked like autopsy run off, swear to God. There’s a lesson for ya. He never did figure out where he got the bug, but I suspect it was that creepy hitchhiker back near Sheridan.
2. Cody, Wyoming to Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park
Were you aware that Wyoming has drive-through liquor stores and cocktail loung
es? Well they do. It’s the weirdest thing, but so convenient, particularly when you’re driving cross-country three vehicles deep. So. We were at this one in some town that could barely support a grocery store— but sure enough the liquor store was open164— when a car pulled up behind us. Gil and I were in the Volvo, while the rest were sorted between the RV and the Mustang. Well, we have a big order, obviously, and the guy behind us starts honking. I mean crazy honking like he’s got somewhere to be. When Gil got out to confront him he pulled away. He was driving a blue Dodge Dart. Keep that in mind, it’s important, later.
Yellowstone was magical, the scenery is amazing and we did run into a pack of werebison that were hospitable and worked as seasonal help for the lodges. Nice kids.
3. Old Faithful to Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Gil let me in on the Oatmeal Scotchie incident while we watched a predawn geyser explosion at Old Faithful, said it reminded him of the experi ence, which—you’d be proud—only made me gag a little. It seems Markham played a trust game with his associates. Scott denied it, but I suspect he might be covering up. Apparently, Markham was an enema freak, but rather than water or something equally hygienic he used oat meal—something about the way it “squished”.165Well, if he was dealing out millions, he’d demand that his business associate play a game of “hold the oatmeal” (the “scotchie” came about as a re sult of the massive amounts of single malt the Beaver King consumed and always seemed to be toggling in a lowball). They’d stand over metal tubs and hold that breakfast food inside as long as they could, before finally … well, you know. Can you believe Gil told me? It’s like he wanted Oatmeal Scotchie as a nickname.
4. Jackson Hole, Wyoming to Boise, Idaho
Thank God for Jackson Hole, it was the first real shopping of the trip, though unfortunately for Wendy, they had a Häagen-Dazs. I kept my promise and my mouth shut. But most of that day Honey and I were alone, if you know what I mean.
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