He squeezed through the crowd to the bar and ordered a Bud that he wasn’t going to be drinking, then found an inconspicuous spot to stand and watch the activity around him. It didn’t take long to spot the drug dealer supplying the room; if the guy wasn’t a drug dealer he had a serious bladder problem with the number of trips he made to the men’s room. He wore a black leather jacket, faded jeans and storm trooper boots, and had gang-style tattoos decorating his neck and shaved skull. Hooded grinning skulls wrapped in barbed wire, winged dragons and Chinese letters. He probably would’ve been good looking if he let his hair grow over his tattoos and his face hadn’t been scarred by a fire. Other guys in the bar would seek him out, and after a brief discussion, they’d head to the men’s room. The drug dealer was a big guy, but two much bigger guys dressed the same and with the same pattern of tattoos on their shaved skulls followed him into the men’s room for each transaction.
Jim waited until the drug dealer was approached by another buyer, then made a beeline to the men’s room. The band was playing Some Kind of Wonderful and the place was lively with all the attention turned toward the stage. Jim snaked through the crowd unnoticed. He found an empty stall and crouched on the toilet seat, sitting on his heels. A couple of minutes later a small crowd entered the men’s room. From the crack in the stall door, Jim saw the money and drugs trade hands. The customer left first while the drug dealer stayed behind to add more money to his roll.
In a fluid panther-like motion, Jim sprung forward, pulling himself head first through the three-foot opening between the stall and the ceiling, and landing inches behind the drug dealer. Before the dealer could react, Jim banged his head off the sink. It all happened in the blink of an eye. The sound of the blow made only a dull thud, but it was enough to get one of the bodyguards turning around.
“What the fuck—” the bodyguard started. Before he could finish his thought, Jim clanged his head off his partner’s. The bodyguard slid to the floor. His partner, though, wobbled on his feet, and stared groggily at Jim.
“You’re a fucking dead man,” he mumbled, his words coming out like a punch-drunk boxer’s. He reached clumsily inside his leather jacket, but before he could do anything else, Jim grabbed him by the collar and head butted him hard enough to knock him out. Using one hand he half-lifted and half-dragged the guy to the empty stall and propped him on the toilet so he was sitting up. Jim stood back and gave the man a hard stare. He didn’t like the fact that the guy had gotten a look at him, but fuck it, getting his head clanged the way he did probably left him too groggy to see straight. Besides, Jim didn’t plan on staying in Cleveland long, and as much as the world would be a better place without these three, it wasn’t his call. He left to get the other bodyguard, stacked him on top of the first, then did the same with the drug dealer. He locked the stall from the inside and slid under the opening at the bottom. Glancing under the stall he could only make out one pair of legs.
The drug dealer’s roll lay on the floor. Jim took off the rubber band holding it together and counted over nine thousand dollars. More than enough to keep him and Carol going for months.
A window opened up into an alleyway in back of the bar. Jim went through it and disappeared into the night.
Chapter 5
Faces of the perverts and rapists and sociopaths that Jim had killed over the last three years blurred in his mind into something generic, something almost cartoonish. Outside of that first thug who attacked Carol in Newark, it was hard for him to recall any of them. Even the latest one from only several hours before. Their faces just kept fading in and out, never quite coming into focus. He forced himself to concentrate, to try to picture what at least one of them looked like, but couldn’t do it. Whenever he came close, the image would morph into Bluto from those old Popeye cartoons. Giving up, he forced himself to count how many of these predators he had killed since hooking up with Carol. It took a while but he came up with a number—a hundred and ten, plus the two vampires that Serena had sicced on him. Fuck. If this kept up and he lived to a ripe old age he could go down as one of the deadliest serial killers in history, or the most successful vigilante, depending on your point of view. The fact that these were all violent sociopathic thugs, the worst that humanity had to offer, only slightly helped to ease his conscience. No matter how hard he tried convincing himself otherwise, it still came down to that he was robbing them of any chance of redemption. Even though he had to kill them for his survival, he probably wouldn’t be able to do it if they weren’t trying to hurt Carol. Not that he hadn’t killed before becoming a vampire.
Yeah, he had killed more than his share before that…
Shit, maybe even more than since his infection…
His thoughts drifted back to his days during the First Gulf War when he had been a member of a special forces unit that was taking out command and communication bunkers in Western Iraq. This was during the first wave of bombings when the Iraqi Republican Guard were buried deep underground. His team blew their way into those bunkers, tossed down tear gas canisters, then Jim would lead the charge. He was good at what he did and killed most of them himself before the other members of his team could get in on the action. Afterwards they would collect whatever intel they could find and blow up what was left inside. He killed a lot of Iraqis during those first few days, enough to fuck him up good for a long time afterwards.
After his stint in the army, he wandered aimlessly for the next eight years. For a while he took whatever odd jobs came his way; short order cook, bartender, bouncer, fisherman, lumberjack, even a short time as a bodyguard for one of Hollywood’s leading divas, but he couldn’t stay put in any one place for too long. He couldn’t sleep at night and was too antsy during the day to be able to concentrate on anything. After a few months in one place, the pressure inside would get to where he felt like he couldn’t breathe, like he had a knife pressed against his heart. He’d have to move then. After six years of this, he stopped giving a shit altogether. He stopped working and instead started doing smash and grabs, burglaries and purse snatches for his drinking money. Nothing too violent, but still enough too leave him filled with even more self-loathing. A short time later he started worshipping the needle and the release that gave him. The heroin numbed him out and kept him from slicing his wrists each night. For almost a year after that he was in freefall, and by all rights he should’ve ended up dead, contracting AIDS or in prison for a good five to ten year stretch, and if it wasn’t for a chance encounter in Austin, Texas, one of those fates probably would’ve happened.
That day started off worse than most of the others. He had hooked up the night before with another addict, a deathly thin blonde woman about twenty years older than him. He didn’t remember much about her other than how damn hollow her eyes looked, how her lips were so unnaturally pale with this hint of blue tingeing them and hard it was for her to find a vein to tap. When he woke up the next morning she was gone along with his roll of over three grand and his stash. There was nothing in her apartment worth any money. She wasn’t coming back. His cash and junk were long gone. He was just lucky she didn’t take his clothes, and even luckier she didn’t take his army-issued boots. He sat on the floor for a long time holding his head, needing a fix as badly as he ever did. Eventually the stench of garbage got to him and he staggered out of the apartment.
Most of what happened that day was lost to him, but he remembered that night ending up in a diner. He tried to palm a couple of bucks from the counter and that was when a burly tattooed arm went around his shoulder, corralling him.
“Hey, buddy, I think that was left behind for that pretty little waitress over there working her tail off. What do you say you put it back?”
It was said in a soft friendly rumbling tone, and the man saying it was the size of a small grizzly. Long beard, long dirty blonde hair, sunburned face, and wire-rimmed sunglasses that looked like gray coins placed on the eyes of a dead man. The man peered at Jim, who was wearing one of his old military camoufla
ge shirts.
“You in Desert Storm?” he asked.
“Yeah, special forces.”
The man nodded. “Third Armored Division. Spent some time there myself. Why don’t you put that little gal’s tip back and join me and my friends for some dinner. My treat.”
Jim put the money back on the counter. The man introduced himself as Big Daddy Larkin. Three guys and a long-haired slender gal with granny-style sunglasses and a wicked off-balance smile sat at the table, all members of Big Daddy’s rock band. The band’s name was the Walking Wounded and tried for a mix of Southern Rock and heavy metal. Allman Brothers meets AC/DC was the way Big Daddy described it. He played base, the girl, Elise, sang, and the three other guys—all Desert Storm vets also—played instrumentals. Big Daddy explained the name of the band by tapping on his leg and showing Jim that it was a prosthetic. The drummer, Kyle, was missing a hand. Stevie and Danny, who played electric guitar and keyboard, were also each missing a leg. Jim, as he listened, tried hard to keep from shivering.
“You need a fix pretty bad, huh?” Big Daddy observed.
Jim nodded.
“Can’t help you there. We’re mostly drug-free, do a little weed, but not much more than that. Why don’t we get some coffee in you in the meantime.”
Big Daddy signaled the waitress over and had her pour a cup of high octane for Jim. He ordered Jim some scrambled eggs and bacon, along with a stack of pancakes, and had her leave the pot of coffee behind.
“We’ll see if your stomach can hold down some food,” he said with a wink to Jim after the waitress left.
Jim poured a heavy dose of sugar in his coffee and sipped it slowly.
“Fuck, I hope so,” he said.
Elise was sitting next to Jim. She rubbed a small hand gently across his back. Big Daddy considered him thoughtfully.
“Our band manager took off when we were in Dallas last week. We need a new one, and with the theme of our band, I think you’d fit right in. Looking for a job?”
Jim smiled weakly. “I didn’t lose any body parts over there.”
“Maybe not, but you lost something.”
Jim ended up accepting the job. The next three days were hard ones, and he spent most of the time curled up on rubber sheets while he sweated, vomited and crapped out his addiction. He half-remembered Elise being there a lot, wiping off his forehead with a cold compress, cleaning the vomit off his face and feeding him soup and apple juice.
After those three days Jim was shaky but able to stand on his feet. “Damn good thing,” Big Daddy grumbled. “We’ve got a show tonight. About time you got off your ass and pulled your weight.”
His job as band manager turned out to be doing everything except playing on stage. He moved the instruments from the van to the stage and back, booked the club dates and hotels, collected their pay, bought their weed, among dozens of other small chores. The job didn’t pay much but it had more than its share of perks. Elise was cute as hell with a singing voice that brought a lump to his throat. Her and Big Daddy were an item, which was okay with Jim. He just enjoyed her company, and overtime thought of her as a younger sister, and fuck, Big Daddy and the other guys in the band as his brothers. They all shared the same experience of being over there—or in Elise’s case, having her fiancée over there and killed in Dhahran. Each of them had lost a piece of themselves, and more important, had survived what they lost. For whatever it was worth, they saved his life. To say he would’ve taken a bullet for any of them would’ve been an understatement.
Every four or five days Jim would pack them up and they’d travel to the next city and their next club date. The constant moving around was good for him. It kept him from feeling antsy and from having the pressure inside build up too much. He started sleeping better and his nightmares were mostly gone. There were some nights where he’d find himself blissfully out of it for as much as six hours. For the first time in a long time he was relaxing and having fun. His biggest kick came when the band performed a song he wrote and the audience went wild over it, including several panties being thrown onstage. Big Daddy brought him up with the rest of the band to take a bow. After that he worked on more songs with Big Daddy and Elise. It was the best time of his life, and not just because of the music and the sex-crazed groupies and the free lifestyle. Big Daddy and Elise and the rest of the band had become his family in a way that his alcoholic parents and the army never were.
Three and a half years ago they had a club date in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. A little hole in the wall basement nightclub that could hold maybe a hundred people, and somehow managed to squeeze in twice that amount to hear them. Elise was on fire that night and the band was hitting on all cylinders. Normally it would’ve been one of those magical nights where as band manager Jim would be able to just sit back and enjoy the ride, but he couldn’t concentrate on the music. Not with this wild looking dame standing maybe twenty feet from him. And not with the way she was staring at him. Jesus, she was something, sexy as hell in a matching yellow skintight leather pants and vest that left little to the imagination. Narrow hips and long legs and green eyes that could’ve been lasers the way they pierced through him. He wouldn’t exactly say she was gorgeous—she had this weird cat-like look about her, but every time he’d look over and meet her eyes and catch her thin impish smile, he’d feel himself growing as hard as a brick between his legs. It was embarrassing, and he couldn’t explain it. He tried not to look in her direction. His sixth sense told him to stay the fuck away. He found himself sweating, tensing, praying that she’d keep her distance. A hand touched his shoulder, then the feel of her lips brushing against his ear. It froze him. She whispered her name to him, told him that she had her eye on him for the longest time and that she was completely mesmerized by him. He knew she was mocking him, but her being so close to him left his head pounding.
He followed her to the club manager’s office. Maybe she paid the manager to leave, maybe she asked him politely, or maybe something else had happened, but whatever, the office was empty. Once the door closed she was on him, her legs wrapping around his thighs, her hands ripping his shirt as if it were tissue paper. If he were thinking clearly he’d realize that what she was doing to his shirt was reason enough to bolt the hell out of there, but his blood was pounding too hard in his head for rational thought. He barely even realized it when she worked him out of his jeans. Next they were on the hardwood floor, her nails digging into his shoulders and her tongue probing deep down his throat. His own skin had become so feverish that he only faintly realized how cold to the touch her flesh was. In a way it felt good, her lips like ice as they cooled him. Blindly, he freed her from her leather pants, and then she was on him, pushing him inside of her and bucking like a wild animal, her eyes rolling inwards until only the whites could be seen. She rode him like that until he thought he was going to pass out, all the while her moaning rising to something obscene. Shuddering as if she’d been shot, she collapsed on him but continuing to writhe across his body, her nails clawing at him, her tongue riding up his chest and towards his neck, all the while licking the blood from his scratches.
The touch of her tongue made his skin crawl.
He was in ecstasy.
He was in agony.
She bit him at the base of his neck.
“What the fuck?”
The shock of the bite brought him out of his trance. He tried to push her off him, but her arms held him like steel bands. He couldn’t believe how strong she was. Panic set in, but as hard as he fought, she held him down with ease as if he were only a rag doll. Her teeth sunk deeper into his flesh. It only took minutes before the infection came, then the sickness rolled over him.
Christ, it was bad. His heroin withdrawal was like heaven on earth compared to the sickness. Serena’s posse must’ve carried him out of the club and taken him to her converted hotel in Union Square, at least that’s probably what happened, because he had no memory of it. The only thing he could remember clearly about the next t
wenty-four hours was the intense agony he went through. It was unlike anything imaginable—as if every fiber of his body was on fire and being pulled apart. How he, or any of the other vampires, survived the infection stage without going insane was beyond him. Only fragments of that time stuck in his consciousness. The swatches that survived in his brain were things from a horror movie. Images fading in and out. Him in wrist and ankle restraints. Being fed blood through a baby bottle. Him greedily sucking on it, his throat so damn dry as if it had been burnt with a flame. The vampire who he would later learn was Metcalf arguing with Serena about him, claiming she had no right to infect anyone without his permission, and her insisting she had every right to her toys. Metcalf appearing with a samurai sword and slicing off the legs of one of her posse, telling her that he needed to maintain the status quo. Those legs that were sliced off continuing to move on their own while Metcalf cut off the vampire’s arms, then carrying away what was left, the whole time the bloody thing screaming like a banshee.
The fever broke. Consciousness seeped in and he became aware of where he was and what was happening to him. God, he hurt. Especially his throat. Fuck, he was hungry.
A familiar woman’s voice, soft and amused, commented, “The butterfly has broken free from its cocoon.”
Blinking, he craned his neck. Serena sat naked on a chaise lounge pleasuring herself. He realized he was naked also, and even in his pain, felt himself growing hard.
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