Dead Surround - The Julia Poe Vampire Chronicles

by Celis T. Rono

  Thinly spread doggy muscle and tendon flexed in her hand. Tense Penny was about to snap like over-wound fiddle string. Poe could almost feel those yellow teeth chewing on her bones. She didn’t have enough bullets to exterminate the packs of mastiffs, bulldogs, and dotted, mutated mutts. How many could she realistically kill before one of them clamped down her throat?

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  “This is the last time we go exploring, Penny,”

  Poe whispered to her uncowed and growling dog.

  “Really sorry for mixing you up in this.”

  A Doberman twice removed and a couple of his Rottweiler friends were especially annoyed by Penny’s sass. Poe’s medium-sized companion wasn’t at all daunted by the larger dogs’ scars of seasoned street fighters. Masticating, Penny continued to snarl at them. She tried to leap at the growling creatures three times her size but was held back by her friend.

  They’re waiting for some kind of command, Poe thought. Otherwise we’d be lamb stew by now. Lucky for Poe and Penny, the rest of the bunch took a step back. Before the words “we’re dead” crossed Poe’s mind, the pissy Rotts with pink herpes mouths lunged at the punier Penny.

  Bedlam hit and Poe found herself shooting at dogs at close range and having a miserable time of it.

  The rifle proved to be too long and inconvenient for the melee. The blunt end bludgeoned implausibly thick skulls that seemed to get denser with each thwack. Within seconds Poe’s windbreaker looked like shredded wheat. Her arms dripped blood and saliva as she reached for the Glocks in her shoulder holster concealed beneath her quickly disappearing jacket.

  An ankle buckled, held captive by a motley dotted creature that could possibly have belonged to the collie family. Sharp teeth obstructed by bone dug deeper. Like a spit laden chew toy, Poe was dragged nastily to the ground.

  It was like off-roading. Instead of a sturdy jeep, there was Poe’s sweaty back. Tail-waggers that had merely stood watch suddenly angled in to join the 13

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  frenzy. She fired at those closest to mangling her flesh.

  What vampires couldn’t accomplish the past thirteen years, the flea bags put to rest in a span of seconds. Dogs snapped their jaws at Poe, embedding crusty teeth into her skin. The older ones lost rotten teeth in their haste to take their share. Their breath, akin to freshly squeezed dumpster surprise with a dash of sewer, made her want to faint.

  Before the shrill cries of a whistle put a halt to the melee, the dogs managed to bite Poe more than a dozen times, an amount greater than her kill tally.

  Fresh lines brimming with blood covered her arms and legs and overlaid old scars.

  At least they didn’t get my face, Poe murmured thankfully. The deep, five-inch scar running from forehead to cheek courtesy of a vampire’s slash when she was a kid was quite enough decoration. The slightest more would have been overkill.

  Penny, to her knowledge, remained uneaten.

  Around her silent friend several dogs lay dead or twitching, their necks and bellies oozing. Poe was amazed for a medium-size dog to still be standing after such a skirmish. Penny’s mouth trickled with blood and bits of flesh from dogs she’d thrashed. Not quite done, Penny continued to gnaw on the convulsing body of a mangy Spitz, its blood like pungently thick sangria sprinkled indiscriminately on tangled fur.

  “Hey, enough of that, perro!” Poe gently kicked Penny in the rump to get her attention. Poe hopped backwards when her own dog snapped on instinct.

  “Hey! Dog’s dead, Pen. Calm down. No need to eat him to boot!”

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  Penny eyed her as if irritated by the interruption.

  “I’ll have to check you out for injuries later, Pen,” she said unevenly, trying to catch her breath.

  “After I kill the whistle-happy jerk that set the Cujos loose.”

  It took exactly three whistle commands for the dogs to stand down. A delay would have found Poe sprawled on the floor, her major veins spraying the hot cement of the Venice boardwalk.

  

  What kind of chupacabras could command hundreds of killer dogs? It can’t be a vampire. That’s for sure.

  Dogs can’t abide the dead.

  Dainty of step and supple of hips, the creature Poe wondered about materialized as if in answer to the girl’s question. Mouth slack from surprise, Poe watched the most exquisite woman she’d ever seen in her life slowly strut to where she stood. Her movie-memory pegged a glimpse of Sofia Loren at her most fetching with rounder flesh and wider hips. Excitable dogs drooled and danced around her. They, too, seemed hypnotized by her presence.

  Her face was immaculate, brushed with burnt rose rouge, bronze powder, and other beauty essentials that brought out the fine panes of her cheekbones and the slight opulent puff of her lips.

  The woman’s skills were surely lifted from Kevyn Aucoin, make-up artist extraordinaire whose books she had happened upon at the West L.A. public library.

  As the woman drew nearer Poe noticed the dark lashes that curved around her tremendously wide 15

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  brown eyes. Her russet skin emitted a floral smell that clashed with the dizzying stench of dogs. Poe couldn’t help but feel like a bug trapped in a spider web, waiting for the final puncture to do her in, but for the life of her she couldn’t stop looking.

  She has so much hair – triple mine at least. And she’s so tall! Amazonian goddess in the flesh.

  The woman was all curves. And height. Her body was a number 8 with emphasis on the lower half. Her tiny waist blossomed into size 44 hips.

  Without shoes she stood over six-foot-two, roughly the same height as Sainvire. With the yellow open-toed heels that hugged her feet, she would easily tower over him. The gold whistle about her neck brought Poe back to reality. It was twice the size of the silver one Poe wore around her neck. The altitudinous woman’s shrill whistle could order dogs to kill at her will.

  “Um, you’re human right?” Poe asked tentatively. She breathed hard from the beating she had received from the woman’s dogs. “If you’re one of those leech caretakers for vamps, then I’ll need to shoot you.”

  “Yes, I’m human. Passionada Cruz is the name,”

  she answered with a secret smile. “I’m supernatural in looks, so I’ve been told. But I’m no vampire puppet.”

  Poe remained guarded. She ogled the yellow high heels that kept the voluminous woman upright like stilts supporting ornamental Hollywood Hills homes.

  “Tried wearing a pair of those a couple of times.

  Just playing around,” said Poe as she nodded at the shoes. “Both times I injured my ankles.”

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  “Hmm. Well not every woman can handle heels.

  It’s an art. You must be Poe,” the dark woman proclaimed lightly.

  Poe, having swallowed spit the wrong way, coughed.

  “How the heck do you know that?” she asked when her throat finally cleared. She could feel the veins in her eyes throbbing.

  “No offense, girl, but the missing earlobe and the scar’s a big giveaway,” she said with amusement.

  “And people didn’t exaggerate about your raspy voice, either. Oh don’t look so shocked. Everybody knows about you on the Westside,” she said jovially.

  “And quite possibly all of California.”

  “H-how? Who told? I thought I was alone,” Poe blurted all at once, tugging self-consciously at the ear with a flap eaten by a wiseass part-vampire halfdead infatuated with capoeira, a laughable martial arts dance in her opinion.

  “Girl-child, who do you think planted those fist-sized tomatoes you love to take? And the nice yellow squash that plump up like a man’s arm two blocks from where you live?”

  “I, I thought they were wild,” Poe said, her voice wavering.

  “No inkling, really? Even when you found a perfectly suspect skateboard with shiny Swiss bal
l bearings two houses away where you pick up fresh eggs?”

  “Um, no,” Poe shook her head, paling. “I thought it was a gift from my brother. From the grave, you know. He was into skateboarding.”

  “You’re serious?” the towering woman asked.

  Seeing the girl’s mortification and finally accepting 17

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  that Poe was probably not quite one hundred percent in the head, she nodded. “Right. You mean it.”

  “How come nobody tried to contact me?” And why didn’t the reliable voice in my head let me know I wasn’t alone?

  The woman shook her head and tapped the gold whistle resting closest to the mound of her left breast.

  “Because you have a bad reputation, girl. Granted you’ve saved lives, but you’ve also taken a few to the grave.”

  Poe swallowed. The woman’s reminder released an unpleasant stink in the armpit of her memory.

  She’d killed innocent vampires in a fit of rage, and they had been loyal to the cause of Plasmacore, the alternative food source Sainvire had been trying to introduce until the Vampire Council put an end to it.

  “Don’t worry about it, Poe,” the woman said with kindness. “You’ve been allowed to stay because you’ve more than made up for your mistakes.”

  “H-how?” Poe asked. Her old stutter had resurfaced. In case the words ‘torture’ and ‘revenge’

  factored in the woman’s explanation, Poe tightened her grip on her guns.

  “You’ve helped extricate hundreds of human cattle from blood farms and most significantly, from that bastard, Trench. It also helps that you had a hand in decimating the fascist Vampire Council in L.A.

  with your sharpshooter skills.”

  Little Penny snarled a warning to the sweet-smelling woman that she was getting too close to Poe.

  “Easy there, Penny,” Poe ordered wryly.

  “Interesting dog you have there,” the woman remarked. “Likes to eat dog flesh, does she?”

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  “Sometimes, I guess,” Poe said distractedly. “I don’t usually let her, but more times than not she scouts ahead of me—” Clearing her throat, she stirred the conversation back on course. “Sounds like I have quite a few neighbors. They must’ve peed on the produce I took.” She shuddered at what they might have used as fertilizer.

  “Maybe. But they never forgot that you were off limits, even when you penned their chickens and ate all the eggs.”

  “Hmm, the chicken. Nice of them,” Poe said with derision, wiping her bloody arms with the bottom of her t-shirt. The protein from the albumen and yolk kept her well fed. “I guess it didn’t matter that I never ate the chickens.”

  “Nope.”

  “So who threatened to grind their bones and eat their kidneys if they lay their hands on me?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  She could think of only one powerful enough to keep her breathing. He had gray eyes, and he was dead.

  “Is the cotton candy machine still inside that store?” Poe asked, evading the answer. She pointed with pursed lips at the dilapidated shack behind the tall stranger.

  Once the pulse of the boardwalk, Dino’s, a hot dog and junk food dive, looked weather beaten and diseased with its tagged metal roll-up door. Over a decade after the death clouds had poisoned most of the population, the storefront looked affronted but alive.

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  “I’m not sure,” she answered with a shrug. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in there. I keep away from boarded storefronts because of the rats.”

  “Can you step aside then?” Poe asked brusquely.

  She swallowed her disgust. She had her unwanted share of rats and their droppings. Limping, she studied the door.

  With careful aim Poe fired three shots at the medium-size lock corroded with age to bust the lock loose. She couldn’t help it. She peeked at the reaction of the woman in a yellow dress. The lipsticked diva’s smile never floundered.

  “I have a craving,” Poe explained, “for cotton candy.”

  “Ah. So that’s why you’ve braved spiked fences and a sea of dogs.”

  “Can’t fight PMS.”

  The lady thinks I’m nuts.

  “So I take it you get your menses pretty regularly?” asked the woman bluntly.

  Reddening, Poe shook her head. “Um, no,” she stumbled. She never had the opportunity to talk about that stuff with her mother or Sister Ann. “I’m lucky if I get it once a year. I substitute ‘PMS’ for ‘craving’, I guess. Stupid thing to do.”

  “Language confusion is common nowadays. The younger ones are switching and substituting meanings of words because no one was there to educate them. Sister Ann had the ‘talk’ with you, right?”

  “Huh?” Poe said. She was astounded at the candor of the built woman she’d barely met. Sister Ann had taught Poe how to shoot with precision among other things. She and a giant black man 20

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  named Goss had completed her education and more.

  The mention of their names cast a gloom in her mood. Following Goss’ sober instruction, Poe had decapitated him when she found him bled to death.

  Dear Sister Ann had been stabbed in the eye fighting Trench’s people, and Poe dreamed about exacting revenge on the foppish master vampire every waking hour.

  “I mean about your monthlies and other delicate things.”

  “Um, I saw the movie Carrie when I was ten, and it was pretty much self-explanatory. The rest I learned through trial and error and watching videos and DVDs.”

  Instead of continuing with awkward pleasantries, Poe pushed up the metal barrier and limped inside the dark store smelling of rot and staleness. The contact left bright orange rust on the palm of her hands.

  From her pack she took out two solar powered lanterns, the kind that needed to be pumped ten times an hour, and placed them in convenient locations to illuminate the store.

  “There it is,” she said with relief at spotting the cobwebbed cotton candy machine. The blood on her arm stopped her from touching it. She attacked the wounds on her body first, dousing them with alcohol gel and smearing them with Neosporin. Next she pulled cleaning rags and paper towels from her pack.

  Poe took a good hour to clean the Floss Boss, a compact cotton candy machine, as it was crusted with crystallized sugar and rat droppings.

  All this time the dog woman hovered over her shoulder, watching with interest and sometimes bringing a fresh bucket of water from her private well 21

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  and charcoal filtration system. Occasionally grungy dogs padded up for a petting. Poe wondered if she trusted the woman enough to keep from stabbing her in the back.

  “All the sugar seems to have morphed into amber. That’s going to be a problem,” said her curious audience. Passionada inspected the melted chip bags and pebbly slush machines with a frown.

  “I have some in my pack,” Poe said, proud at her foresight. “Got some pink and blue food coloring, too.”

  When the electricity didn’t spark to life, irking Poe to no end, the woman wheeled in her own mini-generator.

  “Thanks.”

  “I want a piece of the action, girl. You’ve whet my appetite.”

  Lumpy pink clown-hair monstrosities that weighed about a pound were produced to the disappointment of all. Poe finally got the hang of maneuvering the stick clockwise in unhurried circles while hot air blew strands of sugar on the side.

  Sparing drops of color and loosened sugar did the trick, and Poe was able to replicate perfectly decent cotton candy.

  The fluffy snack put Poe in a sociable mood enough to ask, “So has anyone figured out the gray miasma since I retired?” The poison that had wiped out almost the entire human population had never been solved. It had struck like the hand of death itself, suffocating the nonimmune with their own blood and mucous.

  “I don’t know what to t
ell you, girl,” shrugged Passionada. “No one’s left that’s smart enough to 22

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  figure out what happened. The usual germ warfare-slash-hand of God theories still abound. Who knows why so many died and we didn’t? It doesn’t matter now. We’ve got bigger problems, like keeping ourselves from becoming cattle for vamps to feed on with their straw attachments. Downtown vamps now resort to drinking minority blood since all the white blood cattle have been rescued. We’re considered prime rib, Poe.”

  “I guess you’re right. More important things to worry about than what killed my mom and dad,” she agreed. “I hate racist vampires who made non-whites into janitors to clean up their shit. I hate them even more now that they want to eat us, too.”

  Dimples showing, Poe proudly handed the woman a fluffy cotton candy head the size of a basketball. She bagged about a dozen for later consumption. Poe made extras for herself and for the stranger, but she spared the food coloring. She didn’t like the bitter taste it left on her tongue. The goof-up batches she gave to Penny who already had her fill of dog corpses.

  In silence Poe and the woman stuffed their faces with quick dissolving sugar and grunted in satisfaction while sitting on a bench facing the electric blue Pacific. The sun combined with ocean wind had an uncomfortable blow dryer effect on their skin. Poe’s scalp tingled from the heat. Her conductor mass of black hair didn’t help her, either. Their view was obstructed by billboards and rolling dunes and distracted by frolicking, fornicating dogs which didn’t seem phased by them one whit.

  

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  “It’s been bloody, these retaliations,” Passionada Cruz told Poe as she licked her thick but strangely delicate fingers clean without marring her perfectly glossed red lips.

  If I had that lip gloss I’d look like I’d just gnawed on a pile of greasy pork chops, Poe thought.

  Not sexy at all.

  “Like for instance last month thirty cattle were retaken from a rehab farm,” Passionada continued, daintily dabbing the edges of her lips with tissue.