by Drew Stepek
“I think that the girl is very sick,” he said.
“You think or you know? I thought that she was in remission.”
“She has been holding her stomach and groaning. You are shaking.” He handed me his jacket. “Please, take my cloak.”
I looked at the black plastic trench coat and waved it away. “I see you brought your costumes with you.” Even out in the middle of nowhere with just him and a little girl, I would never have put that thing on.
He pulled it back and carefully draped it over his lap. “Whether you appreciate the fashion or not, it will keep you warm.”
I hugged myself and rubbed my arms. “I’m not shaking because I’m cold. I’m shaking because I’m buggin’. I hate fucking meth and I hate sherm more. For the past week, all I have been doing is coming down from both and it’s exhausting.”
“The angel dust was all your doing.”
“My doing?” I got up off my seat and kicked at a log at the bottom of the fire. “You’re kidding me, right?” I flicked my finger in his face over the crackling flame. “You are the one who called your pal and told them we were in town. You sent me in front of a firing squad, Eldritch. You fucked me.”
He scoffed. “I think that the accuracy of your confrontation with the Chaplins is grossly exaggerated.”
“Grossly exaggerated?” I paced around the fire. “Oh, fuck you, dude. I did what I said I would and got us a vehicle.”
He pointed to the remains of the dogcatcher truck. “That is not the appropriate form of transportation for us. Paulina is not a pet and neither was her sister. We need to speak about what is important.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Heroin is important.” I pried my eyes open with my fingers to show my hunger. “I need heroin and I need it now.”
DaMn straiGht.
“That is exactly what I am talking about.” He folded his hands over his coat. “You need to decide if saving Paulina is more important than that.”
I put my elbow on my knee and put my head in my hand. “I told you we shouldn’t have taken her. Why did we even take her? And we left the dog there.”
He softened his tone. “Someone will take in a dog before they’ll take in a child. We took her because you slew her guardians. We took her because I have a way to give her a better life.”
“I killed her parents because they were fucking scumbags.” My face remained in my hands as I scratched at my twitching right eyebrow.
“As you are not to blame for Bailia’s demise, I do not believe that they were either.”
I peeked out from behind my fingers. “Don’t bring up Bait, asshole. I tried to save her because she reminded me of me. On the shitty streets. No parents. No anything.”
He threw the jacket over his shoulders. “But she is why we are here, correct?”
“Again,” I repeated, “This is different.”
“It is only different because you created this predicament.”
“Do you have any handcuffs in your wardrobe?” I half-joked. “Why don’t we just handcuff her to the railing outside the police station and then track down the real assholes responsible for her sister’s death. It’s pretty obvious that I can’t take care of a kid, and unless you raised a litter of wolf pups, I don’t think you can take care of a kid either.”
He closed his eyes and cracked his neck. I was wearing him down.
“Why aren’t we trying to find Dez?” I argued. “Where’s The Habit?”
He changed the subject. “Do you remember back in Los Angeles when you told me that you wanted to save Bailia because ‘it was the right thing to do’?”
“I did say that,” I admitted. “It was different. Bait wanted to be with me. As for Pinball, we didn’t have to take her. They would have found her a home. She’s a tough kid.”
He rotated his neck the other way and cracked it again. Maybe I wasn’t wearing him down, after all. Maybe I was just pissing him off. “She has leukemia, RJ.”
“She had leukemia,” I reminded him. “Her perverted parents kept shaving her head after she beat it so they could fleece people for money and sympathy.”
“I suggest you do not go down this road,” he muttered. “You need to decide if saving this child is as important to you as it is to me.”
I backed down a bit. “What do you need me to do?”
“Unfortunately, she is not fond of you. We need to go into the city and find passageway to Rodderick.”
I grimaced and tossed a piece of wood into the fire. “Yeah, well he’s still a fucking druggie.”
“As are you. How do I know that you did not go into Austin while looking to commandeer that—” he pointed to the dogcatcher truck again, “—and found someone to sell you PCP? Or did you kill someone for PCP?”
“This again? I tore those weirdos to shreds. I’m sure it’s all over the news. Turn on the radio in your Batmobile.”
“It will not be in the news,” he insisted as his eyes followed my restlessness. “It will never be in the news. They cleaned it up if it happened the way you say.”
I strutted in front of him and bent down so I was looking him straight in the eyes. “Who is ‘they’? Is The Cloth here?”
“The Cloth is everywhere.” He stared right back at me. “They are in every city where beings like us walk among the living. In Austin, they are called the Minutemen.”
“How do you know so much about them?” I could hear my teeth chattering, so I started warming my arms again with my palms. “And don’t lie.”
He shushed me and pointed back to the barn.
I walked back to my log and sat back down. More quietly, I asked again. “What do you know that I don’t? I saw my file at The Cloth’s church. I have to be the only one of us who knows exactly what I am. Reminder: we aren’t vampires. We’re walking drug addicted abortions.”
“You do not remember?”
“Remember what? The Cloth? Sure I remember.”
“My father was a Lutheran Pastor in Duluth,” he began.
“Aha!” I shot back up and clapped my hands. “I knew it! I knew that you were from Duluth and I didn’t just imagine you telling me that when I was wasted. Raised by wolves. What a crock of shit.”
He put his head down. “That is the thing, RJ. I have told you all this several times. It would seem that nothing about me is important enough for you to remember. If you must know again, my mother had cancer and died before giving birth to me. My father prepared for such an event. He was aware of the acts of the Catholic Church that led to your birth, your life. The Cloth was at my mother’s death bed and I was prematurely born. Then, as I am sure is the same case as with you, they brought me to life.”
I deflated.
He stood over me. “Do not concern yourself with my past. I have come to terms with what I am and how I came to be.”
“So, the wolves, the mountains, Canada?” I asked as I looked up to him.
He smirked. “All myth.”
“Eldritch, why are we doing this? We both know better.”
“Because, it is the right thing to do.” He sighed as he started to head back to the barn. “I believe you when you tell me that your vengeance in Peoria was justified. I believed you when I followed you to the Salton Sea that you wanted to save Bailia. I am glad you are choosing to follow the right path.”
The freezing terror of withdrawal grabbed me by the tailbone and tugged. “Easier said than done.”
“Hold it over the fire.” He pointed to the log next to me. He’d left a rig filled and pre-mixed with blood. “It will get you through the night.”
I picked up the syringe and using the fire as a nightlight, I looked at the contents. “This doesn’t have meth in it, does it?”
“I already said that I do not want to kill you. Goodnight, RJ. I recommend you sleep outside. The Little One has had enough trauma for one day.”
“Hey,” I called out before he closed the door. “How’s the weather up there in Duluth, anyway?”
He
smirked. “As bad as the weather in the mountains of Canada.”
I sat by the fire for a while and injected the drugs into my arm.
It’s methADone, idiot. Not Good enouGh.
After charging our phones and ditching the hearse in an alley outside of town, we turned onto Rundberg on the East side of Austin. I looked around for a second, noting the Starbucks. “This is hardly a fucking ghetto.”
“Fortunately, there aren’t any real public squalor areas in Austin,” Eldritch hummed as he posed under a street lamp. “They have done quite a magnificent job sanitizing the city.”
“You told me that a gang runs out of here. When I hear inner city gang, I expect a shithole. You know, like Los Angeles.”
He pointed to a real estate advertisement on a bus bench. “Shall I commandeer agent Tom Daniels and ask for a dirty, African American part of town?”
“Oh whatever, Eldritch. I’m not being racist.”
He plucked a moth, which was hovering around the light, out of the air above him. He opened his hand to Pinball and gently gave it to her. Her eyes lit up with delight as if he gave her a butterfly.
He patted Pinball on her wig and let out an exhausted sigh. “They have Starbucks in South Central, RJ. According to several local reviews I have deciphered on Yelp, this is the worst Austin has to offer.”
I spat near his feet. “Deciphered? Were you on the fucking Latin Yelp site?”
The moth flew out of Pinball’s hands. In an attempt to recapture it, Eldritch batted it out of the sky, landing it on the front of my black t-shirt. “I don’t understand,” he snarled.
I caught the moth. “Of course you don’t. You didn’t decipher anything. You read some reviews on Yelp. You’re not Indiana Jones, dude.” The moth sputtered around in my closed hands. Following suit with everything else I touch turning to shit, when I tried to hand it back to Pinball one of its wings fell off. It turned on its side and fell to the ground. It leapt around in a circle, struggling for a second. I decided to step on it and put it out of its misery.
She licked the gap in her front tooth. “Why did you do that?”
“Because it was gonna die.” Furthering my statement, I crushed it around under the sole of my boot like a cigarette butt.
Eldritch broke out from the haze of the street light and grabbed me by the arm. “Do not!”
I looked down at the remains of the moth and snickered. “Don’t what? It was gonna die. Besides, it was a fucking moth.”
Eldritch curled a foggy-eyed Pinball to his side. She turned down her lip in a pout at me. “It’s my friend. You shouldn’t kill things,” she said.
Rather than continue down the path of trying to explain my attempt at mercy for a bug, I began walking away from them.
“Halt!” Eldritch shouted.
I stopped walking.
“You need to answer Paulina,” he continued. “You must explain to her why you slew her friend.”
I turned to face them and gave Pinball a delicate smile. “I’m sorry, Paulina. I didn’t think that the moth was going to make it. So, rather than have it suffer, I put it out of its misery. In my opinion it was the right thing to do. However, we shouldn’t kill insects just to kill them. I feel bad and I apologize.” I glared at Eldritch. “I didn’t realize it was your friend.”
Pinball wiped her eyes. “It’s okay. It was just a dumb moth.” She took her wig off and pointed to small hole under the right side of the bangs. “They eat my hair.”
I continued to stare at Eldritch. “Yes, they’re rotten fucking insects. Still, you shouldn’t kill something because it can no longer fly and therefore be able to eat wigs and clothes. Let’s go.”
I turned around and continued to walk down Rundberg as I heard Eldritch grunt. They hurried to catch up to me.
As we came up on a strip mall, Pinball rubbed her eyes again. She was tired. I was certain that she hadn’t slept well in days and now that she was somewhat comfortable around her abductors, she was letting down her guard.
Eldritch pointed to the center of the mall. “This is what we seek.”
“It looks like a mansion compared to the Knuckler’s garage,” I said.
The sound of a metal pipe knocking on cement sang out from behind the shopping center followed by the emergence of young kid, probably eighteen, in overalls and riding a rusted BMX bike.
I tapped Eldritch on this PVC sleeve. “Are they expecting us?”
“I do not believe so,” he scoffed. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know, because you seem to have called everyone in the area to alert them that we’re here.” I blew his smoke back in his face. “Remember when I got stomped by that other gang? It sure seemed like they knew who and what I was.”
“I disagree with your assumption,” he continued. “Maybe you would not have ended up in such a predicament had you not been walking around comatose shouting that you were a vampire.”
“That’s not the way it happened. At least I don’t think that’s how it happened.”
The kid pumped his pedals furiously as he drifted directly toward us. He got closer to us in a matter of seconds. I looked over his shoulder. Several shadows emerged in front of, and on top of, the plaza.
Eldritch bent down to my ear. “Looks as if the welcoming party hath arrived. This shall be fun.”
Right before the dope on the bike was about to crash into me he bunny-hopped sideways, kicking up a little bit of gravel onto my boots. The kid took his foot off the pedal, and, as if he were advertising it, rotated his calf around while he whistled back to his boys. There was a horrific gash from the top of his foot all the way up to the middle of his leg. The leg bones were fully exposed and woven with deteriorated cartilage and muscles. Around the edges of the wound, black skin began regenerating in front of our eyes and suddenly a large chunk of tainted flesh abandoned the lacerated area, much like a snake skin shedding from its host. Eldritch coughed up a little in his mouth.
I surveyed the eaten-away leg a little more. The regenerative process accelerated so quickly that pieces of body were appearing from thin air. I didn’t know what kind of vampires these jokers were, but it seemed like they weren’t going to be easy to take down. “You might want to get that wound looked at there, dude.”
Without missing a beat, he jumped onto the pegs on the front spokes and then hopped again a few times as he stared at Pinball. Eldritch brought her in close to him and tucked her into his vinyl trench coat.
“Is this a member of the gang?” I asked.
Eldritch nodded. “They seem different.”
I turned back to the BMX bandit. His eyes were strange; they drooped downwards in the corners like the eyes of a child with fetal alcohol syndrome.
He teetered backwards, then spun the bike into a tail whip and threw himself onto the pedals after the bike completed a three hundred and sixty-degree rotation. He sped back toward the strip mall.
“What the fuck was all that?”
Eldritch put both his arms across his front, shielding Pinball in his coat. “I suspect he was a runner.”
“Not the guy,” I whimpered. “That fucking huge gash on his leg that was rejuvenating right in front of us. Are these guys more advanced than us?”
“Not that I am aware of. I have never seen anything like that, either.”
A muffled voice came from inside the trench coat. “That was gross.”
I turned back to the mall. The BMX kid stopped short of going inside to talk to the central figure, who I deduced was their leader. A street light flickered on, revealing an entire gang in beat up overalls.
“Who are these guys, Eldritch?”
“They go by the name the Real McCoys. They are a lesser gang in the hierarchy of the Austin underworld, but I figured they could relay a message up through the ranks, eventually reaching Rodderick.”
I started whispering as to not scare Pinball. “These guys are small time? I find that hard to believe. You saw that leg. That wasn’t vampire healing
.”
“Although I agree with the astonishing rapidity that his leg was healing,” he flicked a mosquito off his shoulder, “I do not believe we will have a problem with these young men.”
“Way to practice what you preach. I put the moth out of its misery for a reason; you just killed that bug.” I raised my voice. “You hear that, Paulina? Eldritch just killed a defenseless mosquito.”
Pinball squirmed inside his jacket. “I hate skeeters,” she said. “They’re itchy.”
The McCoys began walking toward us.
“Are these pricks gonna sing ‘Come on Eileen’?”
Eldritch raised his eyebrow and pondered my question. He then looked at the approaching McCoys in their overalls. He sneered. “Indeed. Dexy and his Midnight Runners. Well played.”
Pinball poked her head out from his jacket. “Mister Eldritch, why are those boys dressed like that?”
“Yeah, Mister Eldritch. Why are these terrifying freaks dressed like that?”
He looked down to his stomach. “I imagine it is because they are all on the same team.”
She put her hand on her head to guard her wig from falling off and bent her head back to talk to him. “Like a soccer team?”
“Yes, Little One. Exactly like a soccer team.” He lightly pushed her head back inside the jacket.
I started whispering again. “Who do they play for, fucking Transylvania? This is a bad idea, Eldritch. This is the single worst idea other than—” I nodded to his trench coat stuffed with Pinball.
The leader stopped about twenty feet in front of us and the rest halted behind him. I could see the entire gang now. All of them had huge open wounds all over their bodies. They were all reconstructing and rolling their heads around, ripping at their own skin and shaking.
“Who are y’all?” the scrawny, greasy leader asked. The right side of his face was eaten away and you could see his teeth and gums move as he spoke. Skin started self-grafting and building over the open area, filling in and covering the rot.