Vamp-Hire

by Rice, Gerald Dean

  Nick knew he was coming off as short, however, it couldn’t be helped. He was being inconvenienced for her sake, which had turned into his sake if he wanted to maintain his freedom. He had to push to get Dolph out of his house so he could move back in and stop risking himself on a nightly basis.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Where have you been? I keep pushing, but my Pop-Po—grandfather—is stubborn. He’s convinced I’m all alone and in danger out here. He just wants to see me safe.”

  “Where are you from, anyway?” He’d been wanting to ask that for a while and risked the segue.

  “Kansas.”

  Nick had no idea why southeastern Michigan had called to her, maybe it had something to do with her grandfather being from this area. He didn’t press.

  “You need to get him to go back to Kansas, Phoebe. I can’t keep hanging around out here. And your grandfather’s ex-military. With connections. That’s only trouble for me.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. I’ll see what I can do. Maybe I can give you some money. I’ll talk to him tonight.

  “Okay, good.” The thought of taking money from Phoebe agitated him. “I don’t need any money, I’m fine.” Then he remembered what he had seen last night at the dinner table. He wasn’t exactly comfortable asking, but the question had to be thrown out there. “I need to ask you something else, Phoebe. Is Randy like me?”

  Silence. Then, “I don’t know what you mean.” The change in her tone told Nick she knew exactly what he meant. It had grown cold, much like the other night. She was being guarded again. This time he could understand why. “I have to get back to work. I can’t stay on the phone.”

  The line went dead.

  For a moment, Nick considered calling her back then decided to check his voicemail instead. Despite her coldness, they’d never actually fought and he wasn’t eager to start now.

  Lucky had left a message. Apparently, Nancy was nowhere to be found. Lucky had gone to the house and found the door open. Had it been locked Nick doubted Lucky would have described it as such. The rest of the money had been left on the coffee table.

  Weird, but okay.

  “Maybe they left in a hurry after her husband took those shots at you,” Lucky said in the message. “In the panic, they probably just left the house. It looks like it’s abandoned anyway. I doubt anyone lives here.”

  It bugged Nick that Lucky hadn’t known from the start if the house had been abandoned. They were supposed to be doing this together and if Lucky weren’t looking out for him then he wasn’t doing enough to earn his cut. It should have been a hundred fifty dollars, half of the agreed upon three hundred. Lucky’s cut was fifteen percent or twenty dollars, whichever was greater, which would leave Nick a hundred thirty.

  Lucky left his number for Nick to call him back and Nick deleted the message.

  “You gonna buy something?” the kid at the front counter asked. Nick speed-dialed Lucky, put the phone to his ear, and nodded at him, reaching randomly and grabbing a bag of Bugles. Something in the back of his mind recalled a ghost of a memory of what they tasted like and he quickly put them down. He had no intentions of ever eating those again. It was somewhere around lunchtime, though, and he knew he should be eating soon.

  While the line rang he searched around through the hodgepodge of potato chips, Donettes, Skittles, Starburst, and—

  —candy bars.

  All of a sudden, Nick’s mouth watered. He remembered the label-less chocolate Dolph had set in front of him and the heaven it had turned into the second the creamy-smoothness had touched his tongue. He wanted that again.

  Lucky didn’t answer his phone and worse still, his voicemail hadn’t been set up to accept messages. Nick would have to try him again later. He went to the counter.

  “What’s the best chocolate you have?” he asked the gumpy, crater-faced kid with a stupid-looking paper hat canted on his head.

  “Um, M&M’s?”

  “No, I want the good stuff. Premium chocolate.”

  The kid wrinkled his nose and a white-tipped zit that looked on the verge of critical mass tautened. Nick did his best to look him in the eyes. “Well, I guess we got about all of ‘em.” He scratched his head, his oily-looking dark blond hair waggling in front of one eye. “Oh, we have Godiva. Yeah, it’s kinda expensive, so I guess it’s good. I never touch any of it.”

  Nick locked eyes with him. “Where?”

  The kid pointed and he walked over to the small endcap farthest from the door. There were all kinds of high-end junk food on the racks. Nick grabbed a dark chocolate candy bar. Something about bittersweet spoke to him. He passed over all the ones with nuts of any kind, and also picked up a box of something called Pocky Stix. They looked like straight pretzels covered in chocolate and he was curious how something like that tasted.

  He grabbed a few more candy bars for good measure and realized he had two handfuls of candy. He needed actual food to go along with this stuff. Nick turned around and spotted the hot food section to the side of the cashier’s counter. He dumped all his stuff on the counter and continued over, pondering what might be good to eat.

  The doctors had told him the importance of eating healthy, but Nick was feeling a little defiant at the moment. He wanted something that was going to taste good, something that would be worth remembering. Nick wanted savory—chewy, salty, sweet.

  Just thinking about it was making him hungry and he supposed that was a good thing. He had two subs and something called a panini, and was heading back to the counter when two guys came in, ski masks rolled down on their faces.

  Crap. This was something Nick didn’t want to be involved in. He didn’t have much money, maybe he could walk right out. And he really wouldn’t call the cops. He wanted as little involvement with them as possible. “Where you going, Sweetie?” the beefier one said. He was about Nick’s height, with a tattoo of a dragon or something lizard-like with a tail on his bare shoulder. Nick’s eyes kept flicking toward it and to the weapon in his hand, a billy club it looked like. “Drop the stuff.”

  Nick did as he was told and the skinny one leapt the counter. He was all menace in his body language, sauntering over to the kid and grabbing him by the vest.

  “Please, just take the cash and don’t hurt anyone. I already hit the silent alarm.”

  “That’s interesting, because I heard a nasty rumor that stuff around here don’t work right.” The beefy one giggled and it sounded like someone had turned on a garbage disposal. “Like those cameras you got posted outside.”

  The kid’s eyes bulged and his mouth dropped open. Skinny guy gave him a shake for no reason.

  “He offered you the money, just take it and go,” Nick said under his breath.

  “What? What did you say?” The big one was jabbing the billy club in Nick’s direction. He looked at it, then at the arm, then at the body. This person was muscular and something… else. It was his shape. And then Nick knew: this wasn’t a guy at all. Despite the bluster, muscles, and torn up voice this person had been born female. He didn’t know if that would matter or change whatever was going to happen next and he began to back away.

  “Sweetie, I didn’t tell you to move.” Nick took another step. “Stop it right there,” she said through gritted teeth. “Don’t make me crush that pretty little face.” She jabbed at him with each of her last three words. Nick took one final step backward and the last of his body was out of the sunlight.

  He felt immediately different. Predatory. Nick tried to keep his face straight, clenching his teeth and tensing his body as he widened his stance.

  She was looking over at Skinny Guy, who was saying something else to the kid. Something must have given Skinny Guy away because the kid said, “Dwight, is that you?”

  Skinny Guy cum Dwight punched the kid in the stomach and he went down like a car over a cliff. Dwight gave him a kick for good measure and the boy groaned.

  Dwight and Muscle Girl laughed and she came over to the counter and snatched up one of Nick’
s candy bars, chomping into it without even removing the wrapper, all the while still pointing the baton in Nick’s general direction.

  Now he was angry in addition to whatever this emotion was pumping through him. Those were his candy bars, even if he hadn’t paid for them yet. Sure, there were more, but those were his. He could smell the blood under the skin, feel the beating hearts through the air between them and he wanted them in that moment. To tear them apart, to lie in their blood, to drink from fountaining wounds in front of their still seeing eyes.

  He smelled something else in the air. Something like him. It was her, she was a vamp too. And just as suddenly, his predatory desires fled, abandoning him to that secret place inside he hadn’t even been aware of until a few days ago.

  Muscle Girl charged him and swung the baton underhanded into his stomach. Nick’s legs turned to water and tears sprang to his eyes. His body folded and he slumped to his knees.

  The world before him turned into a watery blur and tears spilled from his eyes. He felt like he’d been impaled on an iceberg and hoped she hadn’t torn something vital inside him. The pain built steadily inside him until he thought he was on the verge of fainting or throwing up. He opened his eyes and saw he was kneeling on one of the sandwiches he’d picked out, a meatball marinara with something on it called sriracha sauce. He’d never heard of such a thing and had been looking forward to it as a surprise for his wakened taste buds after eating the chocolate.

  He felt her brushing the baton against the back of his skull almost tenderly. Any moment now she was going to bash in his skull and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Nick couldn’t even open his mouth to plead for his life. He could taste the bile building at the back of his throat and throwing up was one of the absolute worst things in the world as far as he was concerned. Fine, let her do it. What the hell had been so good about this life so far anyway?

  “Do it, P. Do it.” Dwight giggled from the other side of the counter, a high-pitched tweaky sound. Nick could still smell him, the oil of his unwashed skin, the body odor, the miscellaneous drugs oozing out of him through his sweat. Whatever in Nick that had found his smell appealing had had to do a high jump to get over all that first.

  He felt ‘P’ move above him. “Grab the cash, D. We gotta leave.”

  She stepped away and Nick’s pain began to subside. He wiped his eyes clear with a hand not rooted to the floor. His legs were probably as strong as noodles and he might still hurl if he moved around too much. He definitely wasn’t a threat to her under normal conditions.

  “I was gonna drink you up, Sweetie. I had you all eyed up when you got out of that big truck in the parking lot. I was gonna split your wig open and chug you like a can of pop. I’m not gonna do that now, am I?” Nick had no idea why she was asking him. Wait, yes he did. She’d smelled the same thing on him that he had smelled on her. They were—what was it that Dolph had called people like him? Vamps. She was one too. As far as he knew, she was the first one he’d met since leaving the Center and even though he hadn’t been told to avoid other vamps he hoped to never see her again.

  The cash register popped open and Nick risked looking up to see Dwight grabbing fistfuls of cash before hopping over the counter again. P backpedaled, looking over her shoulder out the window. Dwight giggled, lifting his mask to munch on one of Nick’s candy bars.

  “Give me the money,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Dwight said and handed it over. She turned for the door and he followed.

  “Where you goin’?” she asked. “You stay here.”

  “Oh, right. Right.” Dwight stood there as she left. She pointed the baton at Nick before pushing through the doors. “Be seeing you.”

  She ran.

  A few minutes later the police arrived, guns drawn, and put handcuffs on Dwight and Nick. The kid behind the counter hadn’t gotten up and Nick wondered just how hard he’d been kicked. Dwight offered no resistance whatsoever, he didn’t seem like the same talkative, violent person from shortly before.

  They were placed in separate cruisers while the police ‘processed’ the crime scene or whatever it was they did. Many people in uniforms went in and out before a woman eventually came to the cruiser and took his picture. He wondered when anyone was going to ask him what had happened. An ambulance had arrived quickly, presumably to take the kid away. Dwight was in a cruiser next to Nick’s and he peered over at him.

  The man looked totally gone. He sat facing forward, not moving, and as far as Nick could tell, not even blinking. Nick had heard of tweekers before, but had never seen one. He wondered if there were something more at play here.

  Someone opened the door on the other side and he turned to look. A female officer peered at him, then down at the cuffs on his wrists, then back up to his eyes. The tiny gold nameplate on her chest read ‘Finn’.

  “You gonna behave?” Officer Finn said. Nick nodded, not wanting to speak. Officer Finn stepped back and he saw another person behind her. Dressed in the same color blue, the man’s uniform was somewhat different, less bulky and rounded in the shoulders. She whispered something he couldn’t quite make out and then the man came forward, turning and bending as he stepped into the car and sat on the empty seat beside Nick.

  “It’s all right now. I’m here.” Her voice was much softer to this person than it had been to Nick a moment ago. It was almost motherly. “Tell me what you think, I’ll be right here.”

  Nick wondered exactly what this person was supposed to think or not think. The man turned and looked at Nick. His eyes were empty, his lips slightly parted. Nobody was home behind those eyes. His face was a twin of Dwight’s.

  He stared back at the man, unafraid that he would take it as some sort of challenge. The pain of P’s blow to his stomach had reduced to a warm ache just above his belly button. Nick wondered for a second why he had thought of her again when it came to him. This new person with no gold name tag on his chest was another vamp. And he wasn’t just looking at Nick, he was looking into him. He felt it, not knowing how such a thing was done.

  At first, it was a gentle pulling behind Nick’s eyes, gradually tracing back, tickling at his brain. Nick knew he could break eye contact at any moment, at least he believed he could. He wanted to cooperate, though. He wanted them to know he had nothing to do with what happened inside the Big Pig and to the kid. His left hand twitched involuntarily, then his right. It only felt weird when he took three deep breaths without meaning to before whatever was happening to him moved down to the muscles of his thighs and then his toes.

  The man broke eye contact and turned to the officer who was standing outside the car. She knelt, tucking a few errant strands of her brown hair behind her ear and inclining it toward the man’s face.

  He whispered too low for Nick to hear. She nodded once, twice, pulled back and said, “He did what?”

  For a second, Nick’s stomach clenched, the sore spot of his belly becoming more pronounced and focused before he realized she was really asking what the man had said. He whispered something else and she nodded one final time.

  “Good work,” she said to him. “Now here’s a treat for you. Let’s go over to 2-7.” She peeked in at Nick and said, “Be with you in a minute.” The vamp took the offered chocolate, removing any doubt from Nick’s mind as to what he was, and stepped out of the car. His arms raised above Nick’s view from inside the car and a moment later the wrapper fell to the ground.

  She’d called it a treat like he was some sort of crime-sniffing dog, all but rubbing his head and telling him what a good boy he was. The most offensive part had been the man not objecting to it. That probably had something to do with the general nothingness about him. It hadn’t been just his eyes, the man hadn’t smelled like anything or had any kind of feel about him. Nick had even felt a heat coming off of P—vamps did have a pulse and thus produced body heat. It was even a little bit more than that that had been absent from the man. Nick had heard people say before how they could feel someone in a
darkened room even if they couldn’t see anyone. Nick had felt that too, except he could sense exactly where the person was even if he couldn’t see him or her with his highly defined night vision. They’d devised a game to test his and others’ five-and-a-halfth sense as they’d called it at the Center and Nick had never guessed wrong.

  Sitting next to that man had been the same as sitting in the car alone. The word ‘sterile’ came to mind and it was fitting. The man left no physical trace and no mental one, either. He was the closest thing to a ghost Nick hoped ever to be near.

  Had they made him that way? Or was that a result of whatever virus they shared in common? Nick had known a few vamps with Skills (the more he thought or said the word, the more okay it seemed—did it really offend some people?) but had no clue to what extent they could range.

  Well, not until now.

  He didn’t count the levitation thing because that hadn’t been intentional and Nick had no clue if it were even repeatable. Plus, he wasn’t fully ready to accept it had actually happened to begin with.

  Whatever the man had done to or with Nick had been real and the officer’s statement after so much silence had been confirmation enough. They’d used that vamp as some sort of lie detector, not even needing Nick to speak in order to suss out whatever had happened inside the Pig.

  He could give a general description of the other person. Shouldn’t they have at least asked him for formality’s sake what had gone on? That vamp couldn’t have plucked everything out of his brain.

  Right?

  Nick looked in the back seat of the other cruiser. Dwight was still sitting there, his head turned in Nick’s direction as he was locking eyes with the police vamp. Dwight’s eyes, from Nick’s vantage point, were just as empty. His whole body jerked several times like someone was touching a live wire to his bare skin.

  After about three minutes it stopped. Officer Finn had her back to Nick and she stepped in front of the open door, breaking his line of sight for a moment as she bent to listen to whatever the vamp had to say. He couldn’t have said more than a couple of words, if he spoke actual words, that was. For all Nick knew, he used some kind of English shorthand. Maybe one or two syllables could stand in for entire sentences.