by Dave Housley
“That’s what she said to me. Held her hand right there on my chest and said, ‘be who you are.’ What do you make of that?”
“What do I make of it?” Tibor said. He waved around the small apartment. “What the fuck do you think I’m doing in this place, my old friend?”
Chapter 14
June 30, 1995. Pittsburgh, PA. Three Rivers Stadium.
Padma waited in line for the pay phone. It was late and the girl ahead of her was crying, begging somebody on the other end to send money, to come get her, to kick the ass of somebody named Gregor.
It had been a long night. She’d scoured the lot for the van, had walked for hours then had finally gone into the show, where again she found no sign of the biker. He was either hiding or had taken off. The only surprising thing about that, she realized, is how much sense it made. Maybe he was smarter than she thought.
The girl slammed the phone and walked off in a huff and Padma picked it up, entered the numbers and the calling card information, and waited while the phone rang.
“It’s me,” she said to the answering machine. “He’s taken off. The biker, that is.” She sighed. “Actually,” she said. “As far as I can tell, they’ve both taken off.”
Chapter 15
June 30, 1995. Outside Chillicothe, OH.
Cain could feel it coming on. Not now, he thought. Not in this hotel in the middle of nowhere. It can’t be happening now. Was it happening more frequently? Had the contact with the Dealer somehow made it even worse?
He paced the narrow area between the bed and nightstand. Four steps toward the window. Four back to the door. The tingling had started on the road and he was lucky to find the motel before the pain had started up in his spine. He’d paid the clerk in cash and retreated to the room without a word. He was pretty sure nobody had seen him.
One, two, three, four steps to the window. One, two, three, four back to the door.
Not now.
The pain welled up his spine, bringing with it the familiar hunger, something deeper, more primal than he’d ever experienced before the turn, or even before his dose. Something bigger than him.
He looked out the window. Nothing but a highway and a low, industrial building ringed with chain link.
One, two, three…he looked again at the doses on the nightstand. So many questions.
Would it cure him or kill him? Either would be fine, at this point. What he couldn’t risk is the possibility that it would somehow enhance the hunger, that the episodes would come with greater frequency, require more blood, before they would subside.
What was it that bound him to the Dealer, the connection as sure as an umbilical cord the closer they got to one another?
He sat down on the bed, lay back and looked at the water-stained ceiling. Motel 6. He had spent a weekend in a Motel 6 outside La Jolla sometime just before the change. Three Angels and a girl they’d picked up in a bar. An eight ball and two thirty-packs of Coors. The girl had started off cocky, a fireplug. By the end of the weekend, she was begging Cain to kill her, and he’d calmly obliged.
Cain wasn’t proud of what he’d been before the change.
After the change, he’d done all the soul searching, the normal things, went through the stages of grief. Finally, he’d come out the other side resolved to look at the change for what it really was: a new start. The thing that got most people was the fact that there wasn’t an ending. Cain had done enough, the drugs and the crime and even what they’d done to that girl in that Motel 6, and he knew that if he was going to be able to live with himself forever, whatever that meant, he’d have to put that part of his life behind him for real, start working on living the right way. Or as close as his new biology would allow to it.
Pain wormed up his spine and into his head. The thing was overtaking him and his fingers trembled, his legs shook. He wondered what the girl was doing right now. Probably halfway to Indiana, stepping through campgrounds or under bridges looking for somebody Cain could feed on, somebody nobody would miss. This is as close as he got lately to living the right way.
The pain increased, swelled in his head until he thought it would explode. But it wouldn’t explode. This was the punch line, the eternal joke of his condition. He stumbled to the window. No traffic on the highway. He looked at the doses. If only they would kill him.
That kid. It was not the right way. But the right way had gone out the door the moment he took his dose.
He stood, stuffed the doses and his keys into the overcoat, and stumbled toward the door. The stairs seemed massive, each one a treacherous cliff. His vision was blurry, the hallway a gauzy mass of grays and yellows. He pushed the door open and lurched in the direction of the desk.
“Hey, man,” the clerk said. “Partyin’ a little up there, huh?” He was a portly little man with a ponytail and thick glasses. He had a hint of a southern accent.
Cain steadied himself on the desk. He didn’t even look behind him. “Sorry,” he said, and he leaned over the desk and let his mind go blank and felt his teeth digging deep into the guy’s neck.
* * *
Cain drove the speed limit, as always. He drove south for an hour and then headed east. He didn’t even know what road he was on, just drove. He registered small motels, dive bars, convenience stores. Eventually the road opened up and he passed horse fences on both sides. It was 4 a.m. He had an hour, maybe two, before sunup. As he drove, the doses rattled and shook on the dashboard.
He pulled out a baby wipe and cleaned his hands again. The baby wipes were an actual improvement—one of the few real signs of progress he’d seen over the past fifty years. They were clean, self-contained, could easily be disposed.
He gritted his teeth at the fact that he had a need for this kind of item. It was not him. Again, he thought of the Dealer, looked at the doses.
Up ahead, a police car, headlights on and siren off, sat waiting on the side of the road. Cain checked the speed limit, held the wheel with one hand while he moved the doses into the glove compartment. He was probably still in Virginia. Not inconceivable that his California plates would get him pulled over, that he’d get a citation for the blackout windows. Worst case scenario, they start rooting around in the van’s garbage, stuffed with baby wipes smeared with the hotel clerk’s blood. He wondered if they had a special prison for people who had gone through the change, a windowless holding cell, maybe, until they shipped him off to the federal facility he’d heard stories about. Lockmoor. An all-vampire secure facility and testing center. He had always thought it was a rumor, a dark fairy tale. Now he was one bored local cop away from finding out if it was real or not.
His body tensed, readying itself for…what? He was capable of anything. Pull the cop’s head off and drink every last ounce of blood in his body? Bite his carotid and feed until his body went limp, then stuff it in the trunk of his car and head south? He could do anything. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He was not that kind of person. Not anymore.
He drove past the police car, maintained his speed, careful to stay as straight as possible. The worst thing he could do right now was swerve, give any indication that he was a drunk on his way home from the many dive bars he’d passed. The police car remained still.
He flashed on the hotel clerk’s body, graying and jammed into the linen closet, awkwardly splayed on top of a mop and some boxes. Could he still say he wasn’t that kind of person?
In his rearview, the police car pulled out, turned on its lights. Cain’s entire body tensed. The car executed an awkward U-turn across both lanes and headed in the other direction. Cain waited until he couldn’t see the lights anymore and then pulled over in the parking lot of a run-down video store. He got out of the car and drew his breath. His body was shaking. His teeth were sharp and ready. Was he disappointed?
What had the Dealer put into him? What was it that was propelling him away from his neat and orderly life of safe choices and careful plans? Was it the drug? Or was it there in him all along—the ghost of the man
he’d been before the change—and the Dealer had simply brought it to the surface?
He remembered a time from long ago, before the change. An afternoon at the beach with a woman he had been dating. A different one than the rest, with an office job, an education. She was brunette and smart, with long legs and a sarcastic sense of humor that was unusual in those days. They had met at the laundromat, as opposed to the bar, which is where he and the rest of the Angels had met most of their women. Cain could tell that with his shoulder-length hair and leather pants, his motorcycle boots and tattoos, he was an exotic object for her, a talisman of everything that was happening at that time in San Francisco. For all her jokes and flirting, she was living a straight life. Cain was not. He had been interested in her for a while, maybe even a little bit in love. And now he couldn’t remember her name.
Angela, maybe? Angeline? He did remember the daughter. Sophie. At that time, even in the sixties San Francisco, an unwed mother was scandalous. No wonder, he thought, she had to resort to him for some male companionship. He had never spent any time around children, and was frankly nervous about the prospect. But the girl had been a wonder. She was smart, friendly, questioning. When Cain told her that the waves were caused by sea monsters, she had screwed up her face into a question mark, slowly shaken her head and said, “I don’t think so.” He suggested making sand castles and she had created a sand version of Alcatraz instead. When she finally tired and lay down on the blanket, Cain in the middle with a woman on each side, one a tiny little replica of the other, both of them smart and unwilling to let him get away with any of his usual bullshit, he had been as potentially happy as he had ever been in his life. He knew, even then, that there would be something that would come along to knock this little family idea off his shoulder, and it had happened soon enough with his lost weekend, the DEA agent and the girl and then, soon after, the change.
He looked at the moon, graying with the coming morning. He wondered what became of the woman, of her perfect little daughter. The girl would be, what, thirty now? Thirty-five?
This is not who I am, he thought. If he stayed out here, how long would it take for him to die? Would he even be able to fight it off, once the sun came out? He’d heard of it being done. The key, they said, was chains. Strong chains, and enough of them to prevent even a desperate vampire from escape. He imagined it: a few minutes of struggle, burning flesh, the amazing spectacle of the sun on his face, and then sleep.
Nobody really wanted to be like this. Some, maybe, but those were sociopaths to begin with, outcasts, serial killers, or simpletons who had little trouble making the transition. He thought about laying down in the gravel, chaining himself to the video store and waiting for sun. All of this would be over. He thought about the hotel clerk, the doses jangling in the glove compartment, the Dealer.
He got back in the car, turned around in the direction he’d come, and drove west.
Chapter 16
July 1, 1995. Northern Virginia.
Jenkins pulled the dog along the sidewalk. There was a bag in his pocket but, as always, he intended to shoo Sandy as close to the school as possible. The school was public property, and Jenkins had no trouble making peace with the idea that his taxes were paying for somebody to pick up that shit for him. “Come on, Sandy,” he said, “let’s go, boy. Let’s go.” He yanked, ran along with the dog as he sniffed a line of hedges and then squatted just over what Jenkins thought was probably the line for school property. Yes, he thought. Thank goodness for small victories.
“Good boy.”
He looked around at the neighborhood. Most houses were dark, light seeping out of a few windows. Of course, the Slaters were awake. The blue light of the television bounced around the living room. He could hear them in there, arguing as usual. Their music was a little too loud. Like all registereds, their yard was immaculate. The city mowed twice a week, no matter the weather. Jenkins thought of his own lawn, ragged and six inches high. To have the city come mow while you slept in your sealed-tight bunker in the basement, Plasmatrol deliveries once a week, government subsidy for the mortgage. The life of a registered vampire sounded pretty good some days.
Tonight he would go home, feed the dog, call Kathleen’s place in Chicago to talk to David, who would in all likelihood not be there, or at least would not want to talk. Then he would make a Salisbury steak TV dinner, pull out his notes, and pour over them until his six-pack was gone. If there was a game on, he would listen to it. Then he would brush his teeth, go to bed, wake up, and do it all over again. Thank goodness for Sandy.
He thought of Tibor. He had done the right thing. Put himself in a place where he was controlled, where the possibilities of his condition were limited. “Be who you are” is what the girl had said, and if anything, Tibor knew who he was, knew it better than anybody, and had made the hard decision that what he was needed to be managed. Jenkins knew instinctively that, if he was in the old man’s shoes, if he had slipped like the old man had slipped, he would make that same terrible decision.
Still, he could never quite reconcile the old man and his crosswords with the detective who had trained him, couldn’t quite shake the idea that there was something owed, some kind of unsaid agreement between them that he was not living up to. Every time he visited, he waited for Tibor to mention it, to put the cards on the table, but despite his modern appearance, Jenkins knew the old-world ways were hard in the old man, and he would never ask for something that he believed was simply owed.
The dog picked up the empty remainder of a juice box and Jenkins pulled it out of his mouth. Labs would eat anything. Anything at all.
He assembled the data again in his mind. He could hear the old man’s voice in his head, his thick accent: “Just put the pieces together. The information is in the data. It ain’t that hard.”
He had sixteen bodies. Fourteen of them junkies. All of them killed on this particular tour. Bodies found the next day in out of the way locations. Very few of them had family or friends. Most were just drifting along, either on tour or straight junkies, they thought, hanging around and hoping to scrounge up a high. Fourteen bodies that matched that description. And then this last one was younger, a second-grade teacher. Found in what was, for all intents and purposes, given that this was a Grateful Dead show, broad daylight. It was the equivalent of killing somebody in the middle of DuPont Circle. The other one, the hotel clerk, wasn’t exactly a second-grade teacher, but by all accounts, wasn’t a junkie either. He was nowhere near a Dead show.
Maybe this was a different killer. But the puncture wounds matched up. It wasn’t a guarantee—puncture wounds were a 90 percent match—but it was a good indication that they were dealing with the same one, that something had gone different, off the tracks, and he was changing up his operation for some reason. But it didn’t feel like a conscious change. It felt desperate.
The dog made a guttural sound. He leaned close to the grass, coughed a piece of plastic out of his mouth. A chewed-up piece of Tupperware or some kind of wrapper. He picked it up again and chewed. Jenkins pulled the thing out of his mouth, threw it behind the fence. Sandy looked at him like he’d just tossed a steak in the garbage can.
He turned the data over again in his head. The timeline was static, each murder and its attendant particulars matching roughly the same parameters, data filling the same columns in the same way, until a few days ago.
The dog found another piece of something and chewed. Jenkins knew he should pull the thing out of its mouth, but he also knew he was onto something with this line of thinking. What had changed? The vampire? But that didn’t happen. That was the whole deal—they didn’t age, decay, die, any of it. But this one. Something had indeed changed.
The dog started up again, coughing, gurgling. Jenkins grabbed at his mouth, yanked until he pulled a flattened plastic bottle out of the dog’s mouth, along with a slick pool of bile.
That was it. The vampire was acting like an animal. Through all the years, they’d been convinced that the
se things were somehow elevated, above humans somehow. The folklore didn’t help, with its urbane and tortured protagonists.
He thought of the old vampire sitting in his self-imposed exile. The man knew more about detective work than anybody Jenkins had ever met. Everything Jenkins knew—the data, the watching, the listening, carefully assembling the pieces until they told you a story—it had all come from the old man.
But still, the old man knew. He was an animal. He couldn’t be trusted. After the incident on the Mall, he hadn’t even stopped by his own apartment, had simply walked into the office and tendered his badge, filled out the post-shooting report—the closest the office had to what had actually happened—and had driven right to the facility and checked himself in.
“Be who you are,” the girl had said. Tibor was an animal. This thing was an animal. It was acting like an animal. But not just that. It was acting like an animal that had gotten sick.
Chapter 17
July 2, 1995, Noblesville, IN. Deer Creek Amphitheater.
Before he even got to the show, he noticed them. First, the stickers: dancing bears, skulls and roses, a handprint with half a middle digit. They were on VW buses and Jettas and BMWs, first a trickle and then, as he got closer to the stadium and traffic started to slow, it seemed like every car on the highway was full of Deadheads on their way to the show. Pete glanced at himself in the mirror. They had deemed the hair too short to do anything with, so they’d advised him to wear a bandana. He hadn’t shaved since accepting the position, a full week, and he scratched at his neck, pulled at the itchy hemp necklaces they’d given him. He turned up the volume on the CD player—Europe ’72, an album he was growing to actually like, despite himself—and nodded along with the song, a sped-up country western tune about a kid and his uncle on a robbing spree in the old west. The music was not what he thought it would be. He had expected something heavy, weird, something more like the Zappa albums they’d listened to in his music class freshman year. This was folk, country, a little bit of random spacey stuff thrown in there for flavor, maybe, but it was music he imagined you could play for your parents. He liked it.