Nick couldn’t help feeling this might result with him getting shot in the face.
“I don’t know. This guy seems… I don’t know—underhanded. He intentionally pissed Dolph off for no real reason.”
“How old a guy would you say he is?”
“Mid forties, maybe?”
Lucky nodded. “I wonder,” he said and before Nick could ask exactly what he was wondering, he said, “Black draft. On second thought, walk away from this. Forget about the money.”
“Wait—black draft? What’s that?”
“The Conflict took a heavy toll on the military. They needed every viable body for the war effort and offered prisoners with combat experience a deal. Serve honorably and if they survived they’d have a clean slate. This guy Leonard is young enough.”
“Come on, that’s not true, is it? I mean, that would mean that the government set free serial killers and rapists.”
“And offered them a retirement package if they stayed on for twenty plus years.”
Maybe nothing so bad as a serial killer, although it wouldn’t have surprised Nick to learn Lieutenant Leonard had served time.
He stood up from the table and his head felt heavy. He must have swayed because Lucky was suddenly standing right next to him.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I feel weird, though. So tired.”
“That’s not a surprise with all the turkey you ate. Go wash your hands and lay down on the couch. I’ll take care of your plate.”
Nick ambled his way to the bathroom. It was a small apartment and the only other room was the bedroom. The door was shut and he was interested in seeing what was in there. Not more than he needed to close his eyes, though.
He used the toilet and washed his hands as quickly as his heavy limbs would allow. Lucky had the TV on an all-music channel, playing something called ‘Walking Through April’. At first Nick had wanted it turned off, the music was so soothing, though, all he could think about was how soft and inviting the couch looked.
When his head hit the cushion he barely felt it.
* * *
He is inside the room with his kill. Voices come from another room. He has not come for them, though. The one he wants sits a mere few feet away.
He has been particularly quiet. It is his Skill. He can walk right past people and not be seen. However, this one feels him. He turns to look and sees no one there.
“Hello?” his kill says. He turns back to what he is doing. He approaches until he is standing directly behind his kill. He looks over his shoulder, still not seeing him.
He leans down, letting his kill feel his hot breath before wrenching his head aside by his blond hair and bites into him.
The kill screams and he bleeds him. He drinks in the kill’s panic, his fear, as his kill struggles helplessly in his powerful grasp. The kill screams again when he bites even deeper, driving the fangs through his carotid artery. No matter, his work is done.
The kill's acquaintances pound at the door. There are only moments before they are in. His Skill will not work now, they will be in too excited a state to miss him. He pulls his mouth away, picks the kill up by his neck and hurls him at the door as they break in.
They see him and he cannot resist hissing at them before they charge. There are bars on the window in front of him and he tosses the desk aside and punches through the glass to grab them. They are momentarily in shock, but in another second or two they will charge. He cannot kill them, though he has more than enough strength to kill more than twice as many humans easily. He wrenches the bars left and right until they pull out of the brick wall, letting them drop out of his hands and onto the ground below.
He looks back at them one final time. The first one enters. He holds back, the others right behind him, not believing he has anywhere to go.
“You’re dead,” the first one says. “You got no place to go unless you can fly.”
The guess is better than they know. He turns away from them, lifting his face to the sky. He takes a deep breath, filling his lungs, then breathes deeper, filling the sacs that have grown along the outer lobes. He pulls himself through the window and plummets, the earth rushing up to meet him.
Chapter 4
Wednesday
Nick jolted awake.
He opened his eyes and saw his hands in front of him, fingers splayed like he was warding something off.
“Good morning,” Lucky said, walking past. “You sleep loud.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asked with a gravelly voice.
“Well, you were mumbling for a while. I think you were drinking or something and then you hissed.”
Hissed?
Bits and pieces of his dream trickled back to him. He had been in a room with someone, he’d bitten the person, then he’d… jumped out a window?
That didn’t make sense.
“I think I dreamed about the killer again.”
Lucky sat down on the recliner. “What do you remember?”
Nick told him about the man in the room and how he (the killer) had bitten the man, thrown things around the room and then jumped out the window.
“Is that it?” Lucky asked.
Nick was mildly offended. So far as he knew, Lucky couldn’t channel into anyone else’s mind.
“What do you mean, ‘is that it?’”
“I mean, what else can you recall? Were you in a house? Was anybody else there?”
“Come to think of it, there was someone else there. At least three people. They were angry at me, well, you know, him. At what he had just done to their friend. I don’t think it was a house. I remember feeling nervous that jumping out the window might not work out the way I—he—wanted. But that doesn’t make sense. Even if he survived the fall, he would be injured. And those guys, they probably would run outside and catch him.”
Lucky seemed lost in thought a moment.
“I got somewhere to be. Stay by your phone, I’m going to call you later.” He turned to leave then turned back. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He dug into his jacket pocket and tossed a beat up white envelope on Nick’s lap. “That’s your money from the other night, minus my fifteen percent. I’m going to meet a lady about another job. You still in?”
“I thought you did that yesterday?”
“Yeah. That one didn’t pan out. A bunch of gun freaks who want to shoot a vamp, see if he heals.”
“Lucky, how did you heal me after that guy Earl shot me?”
Lucky paused a beat before answering. “I gave you blood.”
He didn’t wait for Nick to say anything more, closing the front door quietly behind him as he left. Nick wanted to feel sick to his stomach, then he remembered how he’d felt so energized after waking up.
He also remembered craving something other than food when he’d gotten to Lucky’s place. It didn’t exactly bolster his belief that he was human.
Nick wanted to get his mind off eating. At least eating people. He dug out his cell and called Dolph. The idea was to squeeze some cash out of him without coming off like a blackmailer. He popped one of his pills and dry swallowed while the line rang.
“Hello?” came the groggy old man’s voice.
“Dolph? Hey, it’s Nick. Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“Wha-what time is it?” Nick looked around until he spotted the time on the microwave.
“It’s 5:32.”
“In the morning? Why the hell are you calling me now? Sunrise isn’t for another two hours.” Nick was surprised Dolph’s just-woke-up voice had the exact same diesel engine quality as his rest-of-the-day voice. He had figured the military man was an early riser. This was not the voice of someone who did more by sunrise than Nick could do all day.
“Sorry, I thought you’d be awake. Y’know, being a colonel and all.”
“I’m retired,” he said. “That means I don’t need to get up for anything anymore.”
“Well, should I call you back?”
The line went uncomfortably sile
nt. “What do you need?”
“I remembered something else. About that dream with the killer? I could call Lieutenant Leonard and—”
“No, no. Tell me.”
He had him.
“Not over the phone. I’m not sure if it’s safe.” Okay, he was definitely pouring it on some. “Maybe we can meet up for breakfast or something?”
“Make it lunch. I need to see Bunny and Randy off first.”
Nick remembered he still needed to speak to Phoebe. Phoebe would probably prefer to drop the matter.
“How about a little Thai Delight?”
“What was that?”
“Thai? For lunch? I haven’t tried the place before.”
“Oh. Sure. Be there at noon.”
The line went dead.
“Sheesh,” Nick said. He thought about calling Phoebe now, but she was probably still asleep too. He didn’t want to chance Dolph listening in on her conversation and realizing it was him on the other end.
He figured he’d have some breakfast and get cleaned up. He had no idea where Lucky had gotten off to so early. As far as Nick knew, he didn’t have a permit to be out before sunrise. Did the guy sleep? Nick estimated he’d been out for somewhere around fifteen hours and that was twice now that he’d fallen asleep in the same place as Lucky and the man had been awake both before and after.
He thought about that dream again and the one he’d had before. Nick might have even had others. He’d never had anything like those that he could recall and wondered if that was his Skill. They’d told all of them that they might develop certain abilities soon, and after several months of bupkis, Nick had supposed he was one of the ones who had been passed over. It was odd how he’d dreamt about that woman’s murder and then been brought to her corpse? There was no way he could have predicted that and he chalked it up to one of life’s freaky coincidences.
Nick made his way to the bathroom and turned on the shower. For a moment he considered a bath, then again the tub was small and looked like it might not be comfortable. He stepped out of the bathroom and opened a skinny door that turned out to be the linen closet. He took out a drying towel and wash cloth.
The bedroom door was next to the linen closet and he opened it, surprised to see there was nothing spectacular going on in here. Only a bed, a dresser with a television on top of it, and all manner of men’s and women’s shoes lining the far wall.
He shut the door and went back in the bathroom, stripping and stepping in the shower with his underwear. The clothes were borrowed and still wearable, though he’d have to get working on a new wardrobe soon. His other three outfits were starting to look worn and if he had any hope of an actual nine-to-five he couldn’t look bummy for the interview.
He hoped this thing with Lucky panned out and hoped even harder he could work something out with Dolph. Even though he shouldn’t care, he did. It wasn’t about the woman or the killer, he wanted his dreams to be an actual Skill, something he could hone that was unique to him that would be useful to society. Any vamp could be a good worker bee and if he had to, he’d be that. However, if they were his hands at the cash register, or at the line, or serving fast food, they were replaceable.
Nick wanted to matter somewhere.
He scrubbed his undies with the bar of soap, letting his mind roam the possibilities. Maybe he might even be nationally known—the famous vamp who caught killer vamps in his sleep. And who knew? Maybe other Skills would follow. Nick had known a few back at the Center. They’d been in their infancy so far as their abilities. Nick had been a nil. Now he actually had something and it was still a possibility he could have even more.
He finished washing his body and stepped out onto the rectangular rug. He stood in front of the mirror above the sink, examining his face and upper torso. Other than being on the thin side, Nick was ordinary in every way save for larger than normal irises that were black as night. He tended not to look people in the eye because it unsettled them and it made him uncomfortable that his looks made other people uncomfortable. Unless he got into a prolonged conversation with people, they tended not to know he was a vamp.
Many of the others at the Center had been the same way and he supposed there was a difference between his kind and regular humans. He had a built-in, constant feeling of shame. Perhaps that was why he got so angry when people said things about how people like him weren’t like regular people, if they even thought he was a person at all. On some deeper level, he didn’t believe it. He walked and talked, but the fact that he had to be trained to do mundane things like eating was evidence that there was a line in the sand between people who had his genetic lineage and regular old homo sapiens.
He had a skin tone that could have put him in with any number of ethnicities from black to Indian, Italian to Moroccan, Native American to simply tanned Caucasian. Truth be told, he couldn’t remember which one he belonged to. The few snatches of memory of his mother left him with the impression she’d been white, while the lone image he had of his father was devoid of any racial characteristics. Sure, he could picture the man’s face, it was still incomplete, though, the telltale signs Nick was looking for missing or obscured. His nose was thin and wide at the same time, eyes wrinkled at the corners as if he were smiling, or was he Asian, and was he dark-skinned or was it simply a trick of the sunlight filtering in the window behind him?
There was so much essential to an individual’s person-ness that he was missing. It made him feel like he was free-floating, completely unattached to anything else. Even his childhood home had been taken from him and having to roam from place to place like some sort of nomad depressed him even further.
Not wanting to dwell on it any more, Nick dug out his toothbrush and brushed his teeth. He decided against making himself breakfast naked, though the idea intrigued him. He still thought of the possibility of the apartment’s proper residents coming through the door unexpectedly and he’d have to explain why he was in their home in addition to why he was completely nude.
He got dressed and made his way back to the fridge. The thought of bacon appealed to him, the big plate of it Lucky had made swam back to mind. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. The closest thing he could find was sandwich meat. Nick scrambled two eggs and put them on a slice of buttered toast. He boiled a pot of water and poured a cup to go along with breakfast. One advantage to taste buds that were mostly on the fritz, it didn’t matter if it was tea, coffee, or plain old water; it all tasted the same.
His stomach grumbled when the food hit it. He must have been hungry. Nick wished he’d had at least one of those chocolate candy bars. The way that one piece Dolph had given him had revved up his appetite still amazed him. Food had never tasted so good. He needed money, of course, and he was also hoping the man had more of that candy for him at lunch.
Nick finished and washed all his dishes in the sink. He put everything in the dish rack to dry and checked the time. 6:45. Still a lot of time before sunrise and an even longer wait before he met up with Dolph. He needed something to do.
He plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV. A gray cartoon cat chased around a brown cartoon mouse. Nick thought a moment and remembered they were Tom and Jerry, although he couldn’t remember which was which. He hadn’t seen them in the Center, this was another memory from before, and he had no tangible context for the circumstance in which he’d watched it.
The doctors at the Center had told him he probably never would fully recover his memory. Whatever was in him had preserved his body, perhaps even made it stronger, but it had Swiss-cheesed his mind. There were simple things that Phoebe didn’t understand that he didn’t know, like how to operate a microwave or what an area code was, that she’d had to reteach him. Conversely, there were complex things he shouldn’t have known, like how to drive a car and how to tie a Windsor knot. Well, he could have been a Boy Scout or something, but he’d been too young to drive when he’d lapsed into the coma. He’d been twelve. Ten years in a coma and in that space of time he’d gai
ned skills he shouldn’t have known and lost mundane things the average person took for granted. Every day offered a new mystery to be solved.
Nick flipped through stations, looking for the news. He settled on a channel where the pretty dark-haired anchorwoman spoke Arabic. He was surprised he understood most of what she was saying. There was nothing new, except for a feel-good story or two, it was mostly the same as what he’d heard yesterday. Nick turned off the TV and checked the time. 7:01.
He figured he could risk it. Cops were probably more on the lookout in the early evening than right before the sun came up. He needed to walk, to do something other than sit around. Maybe if he could get his mind off the time it would pass quicker and before he knew it, he’d be meeting up with Dolph.
Where to go? He certainly couldn’t go home and had no interest in the Big Pig. Maybe he’d call Lucky and meet up with him. No, that wouldn’t work. Lucky liked to meet potential clients alone, had said Nick being there might cramp the sale. He drummed his fingers and thought.
And then found himself waking, a phone ringing somewhere nearby. He dragged himself away from sleep, nodding a couple of times as his hand automatically reached for his cell. He pressed the SEND button and slid it to his ear.
“I need your help,” a little voice said. “My daddy is hurting my mommy.”
Nick’s sleep clouded-brain hadn’t registered the words. “I’m sorry, who is this?”
“My name is Thomas Barker. I’m five-and-a-half years old and I live at 478 Atkins Street. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers, but they said you can help. If we know each other we’re not strangers anymore.”
“Nice to meet you, Thomas. My name is Nick.” The wheels in his head had begun turning, a little bit faster with each second. “I do help people sometimes, but what you need to do if your daddy is hurting your mommy is to call the police.”
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