This Darkness Got To Give

by Dave Housley

  “Let’s go, man,” the kid’s friend said. He was watching a group of spinners a few cars ahead, young girls that Cain guessed were trying on their roles for size. Maybe they would be at the next stop, Auburn Hills, or maybe they would go back to their summer jobs as babysitters, administrative assistants, lifeguards, and retail sales associates.

  The feeling in Cain’s chest was growing stronger and he wondered whether he was having a heart attack. He hadn’t heard anything in the folklore about any kind of incidents, nothing physical, nothing like what normal people dealt with every single day. It was the one undisputed upside to life after the change. And yet, here he was, still as a statue and pain clutching his chest.

  Then he saw the Dealer. He was a small man, hair tucked up and to the side in a way that would have seemed rakish on a movie star but just looked like a mistake on the Dealer. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a red shirt tucked into khakis. He looked like one of the old heads gone straight, an engineer who decided to come to a show on late notice and didn’t have any tour clothes left. He was staring right at Cain. He was unmistakable.

  “Hey, man,” the kid called out. “This your buddy?”

  The Dealer laughed and nodded his head. “You know how it goes,” he said. He slipped a Ziploc bag into Cain’s waistband, nodded once, and continued through the parking lot.

  The pain receded along with the red shirt. As the Dealer grew smaller in his vision, Cain felt his hands unclench, finger by finger, angle by angle, until he could put a hand on the kid’s arm. His eyelids fluttered and he realized that he’d been standing the entire time without blinking. His knees buckled and he crouched on the asphalt.

  “You run on ahead, man,” the kid said, nodding to his friend, who wandered away immediately. “Let me get you over here out of the market,” the kid said. “You okay to walk?”

  Cain nodded his head. They walked haltingly between a station wagon and a low-slung Ford Probe. Both were empty. Cain looked behind them, where the market went about its usual business. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a guy having a bad trip. “Over here,” he said, indicating a spot behind some straggly bushes. The kid helped him the few feet to the hedge. The pain had arrived in full, and his entire body now throbbed with it, pushing out, pulsing. He felt like he was going to explode, or shrivel into nothing and burn up like a slip of paper. The kid had such kind eyes. Cain had made it this far without hurting anybody. Or at least, minimizing the hurt with the help of the girl. How had they met again? He was surprised that he couldn’t remember. “Sit here,” Cain said. It was all he could get out.

  “No problem, man,” the kid said. He leaned over to ease Cain’s descent.

  “I’m sorry,” Cain thought. He pushed up quickly, his strength momentarily returning, and bit into the kid’s carotid artery. Cain had drank a liter before the kid knew what was happening, a surprised gurgle the only sound he was capable of before Cain pulled him to the ground and fed. In the waistband of his shorts, he felt the Ziploc bag. “I’m sorry,” he thought, as warm blood rushed into his mouth, as his body unclenched and his head went blurry and then clear.

  Chapter 5

  June 25, 1995. South-central Pennsylvania.

  Pete was washing the dishes. He watched his hands move counterclockwise one, two, three circulations and then transfer the plate to the drying rack. He picked up another plate and did the same. Then another. He was numb.

  The United States Department of Defense, Invasive Species Division. And they wanted him to start next week.

  He finished the plates and moved on to the bowls. The alarm on his watch went off. The clothes would be dry. He grabbed his keys and walked down the stairs toward the little laundry room. He had said yes without even thinking about it, with all these questions still churning in his mind, in his gut. He still didn’t really know what he had signed up for. There was something about the guy, though. Nutter. He seemed so sure. He knew so much. The guy knew the topic of his senior thesis and what his final GPA had been and he’d made not-so-subtle allusions to knowing much more.

  He rounded a corner and turned on the light. Two coin-operated clothes washers, one tumble dryer. A laundry closet was more like it. He paused in the doorway, stared at a spot on the back wall where somebody had written “BEEF” in permanent marker. It had been there ever since Pete had initially rented the room, junior year. Five years, he thought, of staring at that word while he folded his laundry, moved wet clothes into the dryer or dirty clothes into the washer. BEEF. Was it a nickname or a pronouncement?

  He took a T-shirt out of the dryer and folded it. Then did the same with another, and another, until all his T-shirts were neatly folded and stacked. Then he did the same with his underwear. Then he took out all the socks and lined them up on the shirts, matched them one by one. He didn’t understand how people could lose their socks in the laundry. How hard was it to keep your socks together? But then he didn’t understand a lot of the things normal people complained about.

  He put everything into the duffel bag and then paused. He took the card out of his back pocket: Karl Nutter, Supervisor, U.S. Department of Defense, Invasive Species Division.

  “If you can start right away,” the man had said, “we think we have a job for you. If we’ve underestimated you, if we’ve guessed wrong here, then…well, we’ll just pretend this never happened.”

  “Why me?” he said.

  The man had smiled. “If I seem blunt,” he said, “it’s only because this particular…position…is rather time sensitive. It’s also because I feel like I know you a little. The department, because of what we do, we don’t get this type of thing wrong very often, and we’ve been watching you for quite some time now.”

  “Watching?”

  “Not like that,” he said. His voice was flat, factual, no emotion in it whatever. “I find it’s best to be straightforward. Somebody like you would only come to somebody like me, we would only get to this point, after a lot of work had been done already. Groundwork laid. Research vetted.”

  Pete nodded. “While you’re being honest, I feel like I should do the same,” he said.

  Nutter motioned for him to go ahead.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Excellent,” Nutter said, with no sense of irony or mirth. “I find that’s best. If we’re both honest, I mean. Here’s how it works. You would have come up on a database at a certain point in time. You would have been assigned to a specialist, somebody who would have followed up with some more…personal research. You would have passed certain tests, qualifications, and then your file would have landed on my desk. Other qualifications passed and then, well, here I am.”

  “So…”

  “Again, pardon my bluntness. You are an orphan, Mr. Vanderberg. No family. No girlfriend. No particular attachments to anything, I believe, other than Chandler University itself. On this last matter, I’m guessing.”

  Pete nodded. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “You’re not wrong,” he said.

  “Right. As of a few minutes ago,” the man said, “you have a master’s degree in religious studies. This is another check in another column for us, Mr. Vanderberg.”

  “A check?”

  “Let’s say that our business, the nature of it. It requires a certain ability to see the larger picture. To buy in without buying in, if you know what I mean. To be engaged without necessarily becoming involved. We find that religious studies majors have that ability. Generally.”

  Pete ran a finger along the card. Invasive Species Division. He shouldn’t have agreed without knowing more. But what had he agreed to? To a meeting, nothing more. An interview. Virginia was only a three-hour drive and he had nothing to do. What were the chances? A government agency that actually wanted religious studies majors?

  He looked around at the little laundry room. It had always been one of his favorite parts of the apartment. It was warm and light. It smelled clean. It smelled safe.

  He sat d
own on a chair and pulled the duffel bag onto his lap. He took out one shirt and then the next, laid them on his belly, then his shoulders, then his head, until he was covered in warm, clean, perfumed laundry. He emptied the duffel and then reached for more, added a newspaper and then a stack of magazines. He wished for a beanbag chair or a sleeping bag. He wanted more, to be covered by a thousand shirts, for them to weigh him down and press him to the ground until he couldn’t move. But as always, he made do with what he had. He felt the dull weight of his own wardrobe covering him like a blanket and he imagined that it was more.

  He breathed in the fabric softener and he knew, more than anything else, that he was alone. Like every decision he had made since he was old enough to make decisions, he would make this one alone. He would go to Virginia, would talk with the agents, hear what they had to say, and then he would make his decision. He would do it all alone.

  Chapter 6

  June 26, 1995. Washington, DC.

  Jenkins called the number on the pay phone again. Crabtree was either wasted or had gotten lucky that evening. Either way, he wasn’t answering. He checked his watch: 4:45 a.m. Crabtree wouldn’t still be out. Unless he hadn’t come home at all. Shit.

  From the gas station, he could see the whole scene: the dark stadium, the rows of cars, the lights and bustle of what he knew they called Shakedown Street, the action retreating as his eyes made their way back toward the darker recesses of the parking lot and the river where he and Crabtree had caught the body less than twenty-four hours ago. Right in the middle of it all, the black and white had its siren on, lights swirling, but no sound, throwing a blue and red funhouse light on the action of the marketplace, people coming and going, browsing and selling like a late-night hippie farmer’s market.

  He could hear drums. Every few minutes, a kid in a tie-dye or a skull and roses shirt would stumble past, either making comical adjustments for the man in the khakis and button-up shirt—no sense pretending to be anything but a cop right now, with everything that was going on—or so wasted that he didn’t even register.

  He tried Crabtree’s number again. Nothing. Fuck it, he thought, they would hold the body, that was no problem, but soon it would be daylight and chances were that whatever had done this was already headed off to the next show, was most likely halfway up 95, or sleeping in some hotel bed in Delaware. He didn’t know why—maybe the folklore had gotten to him—but he pictured it as a high-end hotel, the kind of place he would have never been able to afford to bring the family, back when they were a family, even for just one night. He tried to push the idea out of his head. It wasn’t in the data yet, the idea that this one was rich. And bad enough as it was to start adding fiction into the data, it was worse to let these things get personal.

  He walked through a series of parking lots toward the flashing lights. As he got closer, the sound increased: drums, noodly folk music coming from bad car speakers, people shouting about burritos or cigarettes or beer. There were people laughing and crying, pulled into knots in the grass or wandering alone, staring blank-eyed and purposeless.

  A girl wearing an elaborate dress with dreadlocks and a nose-ring nodded at him and smiled. “Right on,” she said. She had stopped and was staring up at him like she’d come upon a full-size Bugs Bunny. She put a warm hand on his chest and Jenkins jerked backwards. “Right fucking oooon,” she said. “Be who you are, man. We all gotta be who we are, right?” She smiled and cocked her head to the side.

  Jenkins reached out his hand and they shook, businesslike. “That’s very true, young lady,” he said. “I’m off to do just that.” He nodded and she wandered back in the direction she had come. He thought about David. He was only, what, a few years younger than this girl? He found himself thinking that, minus the obvious chemically altered state, he might be happy if David wound up as well-adjusted as that girl. The boy was so wound up, always so frazzled, burdened with the weight that Jenkins carried now across the parking lot and toward the sirens. It was hard to tell whether it had gotten worse with the divorce, or with puberty, or if Jenkins just didn’t know his own son very well any more.

  The crowd had thinned by this time early in the morning, but there were still stragglers walking along the darkened lanes. The hippies gave him a wide berth, slinking off toward the parked cars or turning around, pretending to fiddle with something. Some simply stopped in place, or turned around and walked the other way. He didn’t have to tell anybody who he was. Just like the girl, they knew.

  “Be who you are.” It wasn’t bad advice at all.

  He made his way over toward the siren, where the two uniforms blocked a crowd of twenty or so Deadheads in various states of undoing. An old man fumbled around the edges, his beard long and scraggly like a television wizard, his eyes burning like he knew something nobody else could. Jenkins wondered what it was with the drugs. Most of them, those same eyes. Burning was the only word he could use to describe them. Burning with what, he had no idea.

  He flashed his badge at the first cop, a young guy who was clearly unsettled. Jenkins noticed a pile of vomit next to the body bag, a matching spot on the guy’s tie, and another swipe on his pants. “Glad you’re here. Finally,” the guy said.

  “Tell me what you know so far,” Jenkins said.

  “Kid over there found the body,” the cop said. “Found it right here. Says he was looking for a place to sleep. I have no…well, no reason to doubt the veracity. Veracity?”

  Jenkins nodded for the officer to continue. The guy was young, maybe the same age as the hippie girl he’d just spoken with. “This your first?” Jenkins asked.

  “First body? No,” the officer said. He looked at the crowd still milling behind Jenkins. “First like this? One of these, what they call the disappearing victims? Yeah.”

  Jenkins nodded. He was already thinking about how to get the body out of here, when he would need to call headquarters to get a van out. “What?” he said.

  “Not my first, no,” the uniform said, too quickly. An overcorrection.

  “You said what they call the ‘disappearing victims’?” Jenkins said.

  The guy checked the crowd, leaned in closer. “Or other people call them the vampires,” he whispered. “But seems to me if anything they’re vampire victims, not vampires themselves.” He made a pinching motion on his own neck.

  “Who is this ‘they’?” Jenkins said. So he was right that they were starting to catch on.

  “Just people. You know cops,” the uniform said. “Cops talk.”

  “Cops talk,” Jenkins said. He nodded. “Okay, let me get started here.”

  “Thing did that was fucked up,” the cop said.

  “Thing?” Jenkins asked.

  “Whatever did that wasn’t human,” the cop said. “Leastways no ordinary human.”

  “Motherfucker,” Jenkins muttered.

  “What?” the cop said.

  “Let me get a closer look,” he said.

  Chapter 7

  June 26, 1995. Washington, DC

  Cain drove. The DC Beltway had always confounded him and he’d learned to just get on the first exit and drive until he came to major road. It was shorter, often, than navigating DC’s supposed grid or risking an altercation in the sketchy neighborhoods that surrounded RFK. So he circled the capital city until he hit 95 North, heading instinctively toward the next stop in Auburn Hills. Detroit.

  He’d heard speculation that whoever had booked this tour had been high, and he had to agree: Vermont, New Jersey, New York, DC. That made sense. And then the southward line made a crazy loop west to Detroit, before pulling back to east to Pittsburgh and then bouncing back to the Midwest for dates in Indiana, Missouri, and the final stand at Soldier Field in Chicago. He had heard theories about the cross-country dates: promoters were getting tired of the scene, of the drugs and the kids and the arrests; that the band was losing control over management, that the tour had been booked around Garcia’s rehab schedule.

  He drove and he eyed the baggie i
n the cup holder. Ten doses. A quarter of a sheet, each square a little larger than a dime and stamped with a Superman logo. He had fought the urge to take one before he started driving, and also fought the urge to throw them away. He played the options in his mind. They could be more of the same, the Dealer’s attempt to string Cain out or even kill him. There were plenty of reasons, he thought, why somebody might want an unregistered in their service. Or they could be the antidote, the key to turning his body back into what it was before his dose, a hungry but reliable and, more importantly, controllable force.

  He saw signs for Baltimore and knew he should be looking to head west. He put a tape in the deck: a Garcia acoustic show from a few years back. “You can look around all the wild world over, and you’ll never find another honest man.”

  Signs were coming rapidly now: Laurel, Columbia, Baltimore 10 miles.

  What the hell had happened back there? There was something between them now, a connection. But the Dealer had been in control, so it wasn’t so much a connection as a leash. The poor kid was trying to help, thought he saw an old head in a bad way and was doing his karmic duty by getting him to a better place. A better place.

  They would be looking for him. He wasn’t sure who, but somebody. The junkies were one thing, but that last kid had been kind. He was somebody’s son. Those straight white teeth, the sympathetic eyes. Somebody would notice, would sniff out an unregistered, maybe put the junkies together, draw some lines on a map, and figure out that the next time this was going to happen was Auburn Hills. He slowed. Of course. He got off on the next exit and got back on 95 south. He drove for an hour and took the first interstate headed west.