“I know you.”
Bryce shuddered.
“I have just what you want.” She receded into the apartment’s dark.
Bryce reached behind him, put his hand on his gun, and followed her inside.
The place smelled just as it had before—sweetness and dirt. Like it had been closed up and not aired out for decades. Bryce tried to hold his breath. She led him through the dim living room and to the back room—the kitchen. There an orange light cast shadows on the wall. On a table, several boxes with candy clearly labeled with prices sat. She turned to him.
“Here.”
Bryce peered at her. Small. Frail. Hunched over, bent by time and age, Momma Shug didn’t seem threatening. He released the gun and put both hands into his hoodie’s pockets. His cheek throbbed and his mouth felt full of warm blood.
“This isn’t what you want, is it?” Momma Shug asked, removing her glasses. “Be honest. You aren’t here for these kind of sweets...”
“No, no ma’am, I’m not. I thought...” He stopped. What did he think?
She stood up to her full height, the hunch vanishing before his eyes. Bryce stumbled backward, his hands failing to grab the gun. “What the hell are you?”
Momma Shug grinned; this time her mouth held nice, neat rows of teeth. “You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?” Bryce’s hand shook as his hand found the gun at last. He pulled it from its hiding spot and felt the calm of power steady him. “Huh? Know what? That you killed all them kids? Sucking out souls like some demon.”
Momma Shug laughed, a thousand voices flattened into one. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Liar!” Bryce squeezed the trigger.
Firing this close to Momma Shug should’ve dropped her like a sack of potatoes. Instead she flickered like a faulty light switch and became solid once more. She peered at him with eyes now clear and free of cataracts.
“Between feedings you tend to forget. You love the sugar high, but the crash makes you blank out.”
Bryce shut his eyes. “What? No, no...”
“Yes, son...”
Son. Son? The gun shook in his fist, but fell to the floor. Memory flashes sliced with sharp, stinging precision. The kiss he and Cyndi shared out behind the rec center. Her screams. Her blood siphoned like a Slurpee. All consumed until only the husk remained. Bryce’s hand scattering crinkled wrappers across the body. The visions blurred. Then rail Marquis in his arms. Bryce’s feeding tubular stabbed Marquis’s ear. Gut-wrenching gurgling as Brycetook huge sips of his life. The delight he took in consuming their sugar-drenched blood wrecked through him.
Bryce fell to his knees. “No. It-it’s a trick. A mind trick!”
At that moment, the burning in his cheek flared. Something else moved in his mouth, and it wasn’t his tongue. Screaming, Bryce opened his mouth and out shot a flesh-tone tubular. It searched the air, seeking sweetness, hungry. Momma Shug wasn’t hungry. He was! Holding his hand over his cheek, Bryce shuddered as the cold realization filtered over him.
Him.
It had been him all along. Tears fell to the floor.
“You lying!” He roared through the tubular. “LIAR!”
Momma Shug opened the pantry’s door and inside a bound and gagged Tasha Hix wiggled and thrashed. Not traditional food in this pantry, but a living and breathing girl.
“You brought her over right after the funeral...” Momma Shug fingered one of the girl’s curls.
“No!” Bryce shut his eyes tight to banish the nightmare. Tasha’s muffled whimpering broke through and wrenched him mentally back into the room. Had it all been true? His head hurt and he staggered to his feet. The long appendage hanging out of his mouth spoke to the truth. It was real. Gooey and seeking substance. That hadn’t been a trick.
Tasha’s eyes widened when she saw him, but not in relief—in fear.
At this, his memory block broke and out poured truth. Momma Shug squeezing his hand. Scores of countless faces filled his vision. Scoops of flesh. Hunks of humans. Greedily consumed, happily munched—by him. He’d witnessed decades dawn and set. No teenager, but infinite. Bryce looked up at Momma Shug. She fed the stock candy to sweeten their blood so when they fed, it was delicious—marinating the meat. All those faces and countless surprised expressions frozen in time. Those sweet treats they scarfed down made them tasty—er. Little flesh cakes filled with delicious, dark red filling. He reeled in his tubular, now on reflex as his true nature returned.
“You remember.” It wasn’t a question. She stepped back from Tasha. “You must’ve come home seeking something sweet.”
Bryce nodded. “Thanks, Momma.”
Momma Shug came to stand beside him. With her hot breath on his cheek, she patted his shoulder. “You always had one hell of a sweet tooth.”
Just Pretending
Linden Flynn
There’s a dead body in the living room. A dead body in the living room and bottles of blood in the fridge. Real bottles of blood. Not that stuff I’ve been telling people are bottles of blood.
The body belongs to a girl named Miley. Or Mary. God, why can’t I remember her name? I remember little details of her like the color of her eyes and the smell of her skin, but I can’t remember her name. There’s a block in my mind, a Mary-shaped hole that’s screaming about why there’s a dead girl in my house and real bottles of blood in my refrigerator.
And all I can think is why, why is Mary dead in my living room?
***
I meet Mary where I meet most of my girls, in a 24-hour coffee shop. She’s on her computer, and I’m reading an old paperback with brittle, yellow pages that smell of age. When she looks over her screen at me, I’m watching her like prey, which would be an infinitely more creepy gesture if I weren’t attractive. Instead, she flushes.
The one thing I’ve learned about dating is that to succeed you just need to be attractive. Rule No. 1: Be Attractive. Rule No. 2: Don’t Be Unattractive. Therein lies success.
I’ve practiced these moves so many times it’s easy for me now. I bite down on my bottom lip with a pronounced canine and let my eyes drift down to watch the pump-pump of the blood in her throat. She shivers, but it’s the good kind of shiver, the kind girls get when they see a hot guy who looks a little dangerous. Or, in my case, a lot dangerous.
After that, it’s a series of dance steps. I look away. I pretend to catch her watching me. I apologize for our eyes meeting so many times. She engages in conversation, usually about the Wuthering Heights book clutched in my manicured fingers. We discuss books, and I decline to discuss movies and television shows as being too modern.
When she moves to my table, I know I’ve won.
Mary, like most of my girls, is young. She’s probably seventeen or eighteen, old enough to give consent but young enough to find my routine charming. She talks about how no one her own age understands her, and I tell her I understand. I sympathize with the fact that it’s very difficult to find friends who are our intellectual equals. She asks me how old I am.
“Nineteen,” I say. I haven’t been nineteen in a very long time.
I offer to drive her home. Mary instead takes a bike. I tell her that I very much would like to get her phone number but that I don’t have a phone. Instead, we make plans to meet back at the coffee shop the next night. And the next.
For the next week, we meet at night. I decline invitations during the day, but she becomes so accepting of our routine that she lets me pick her up at her parents’ house, sneaking out the window to hop into my red Ferrari. When she asks me about how I pay for our dates and my car and my attire, I tell her about my wealthy parents. She seems suspicious.
At the end of our second week together, I follow her up to her bedroom, perched on the roof like a feral creature, not knowing whether to enter or leave. “Can you invite me in?” I ask.
She laughs. “Why?”
“I have to be invited in or I can’t enter,” I explain. Some would take the opportunity to look away and flush at this revelation, but not me. I never fail to meet her eyes. Mary’s are brown.
She invites me in, but I decline to crawl into bed with her. Instead, I watch her sleep, promising that I’m really only there to watch over her and protect her from nightmares. I don’t explain that I am the nightmare.
After three weeks, I invite her back to my apartment. It’s sparse and clean as a whistle. When she makes to look through the fridge, I back against it as if I have something to hide. She is becoming tired of my secrets, of my refusal to meet during the day, of the way I have not made any physical moves like other boys her age.
I apologize but don’t explain. We have a fight, and I allow it. When she storms out, I don’t go after her. I know that doing so will only increase the time “between.” If I sit very still, if I refuse to do anything at all, she will return in two days or so. Mary comes back in only one.
I look as disheveled as I ever will. Face always clean-shaven, but I am wearing a folded shirt that hasn’t seen an iron in weeks despite the fact that I had seen her not twenty-four hours before. I try to look repentant as she apologizes. I apologize, too. I tell her that I am merely afraid, that I am scared if I tell her the truth, she will no longer care for me.
“Tell me the truth,” she begs.
I relent, tell her that I will explain it all. I show her the fridge, filled with nothing but glass bottles of a thick red liquid. Her eyes light up as she looks back at me. “I’m dangerous,” I admit, finally letting my gaze fall from hers. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“What are you?” she asks.
I don’t look at her. Not until in one breathy whisper she says, “Vampire.”
Then we are kissing. She takes me in her arms and runs her hand through my ruffled hair to comfort me, and she dares to lean her lips to mine. We kiss passionately until I break away and stare at her neck. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I repeat.
“I trust you,” she says. She really shouldn’t.
It is usually in the fourth week that she decides that she is ready to sleep with me. A week after she has learned about my ‘condition’ and accepted it. She begins to talk of forever, as if forever really exists for us. I allow it with a small smile.
“How are you so warm?” she asks as we tumble about in my bed, hands clasped and lips against lips.
“A spell,” I say, letting my hand rest against the red gem on the necklace that I never remove. “It helps me pass.”
She accepts it with kisses.
When I hover over her naked form for the first time, I tell her that I’m hesitant. She tells me that she’s sure. She wants to give me everything, to be with me forever. When I slip into her, I whisper it into her ear with each thrust. “Forever, forever, forever.”
Forever only lasts a couple more days. We spend most of them in bed, and when I finally grow tired of the conquest, I pack my things. I exit without another word. I put my few belongings in a couple of boxes, throw them into the backseat of my Ferrari, and take off to a new city, leaving girls to wonder what has happened to the vampire they gave everything to.
I like to pretend that they come up with their own narrative. I leave nothing for them and nothing behind. I believe that they think I’ve been staked, that I died in the sunlight, that my guilt has become too overwhelming. Regardless, I’m off to a new city, and they have no idea how to find me.
Now for the truth. Because at this point, with Mary’s body in my new place, I’m going to have to start telling the truth to someone.
I’m thirty-two. I haven’t ever been able to grow a beard, and while this was a huge embarrassment for me in college, it has helped me grow into a young-faced adult. I go out at night because that’s when the scene of the city really comes alive. During the day, I am a travel writer, highlighting not-to-miss clubs and restaurants. My apartments are temporary, rented out long enough for me to finish writing about a city before I’m off to the next one.
The bottles of blood are fake. The red stone around my neck came from a bookstore when one of the girls asked me why I still had blood flow. It only cost five bucks.
I’m not a vampire. And while I’m at it, I’ll admit that I’m not a murderer, regardless of what Mary’s body is doing in my apartment.
I wonder if I should call the cops. This clearly isn’t a suicide case. No slit wrists, but her neck has been cut. The couch is stained beyond saving and some spatters have made it onto the walls and floor, and of course there are bottles of fake blood in my fridge. I’m not exactly sure what I’d tell the officer: “Please ignore the fake blood, that’s just to get teenage girls into bed with me. I have no idea where the real blood came from, officer!” I’m sure he’ll laugh about it when he takes my mug shot. I imagine myself on television in court in a disgusting orange jumpsuit that washes out my pale skin. Beneath my face is the headline, “Fake Vampire.”
I immediately decide against calling the cops. My plans for San Francisco are ruined. I need space, time to think, so I take my laptop and go to the nearest coffee shop, because, let’s face it, old habits die hard. At least I’m not reading Wuthering Heights for the hundredth time.
Nothing seems amiss until someone plops down at the table with me. “You didn’t like my gift.” It’s not a question.
I push my Mac aside to find an all-too-familiar face staring back. Alice. Blue eyes. Seattle.
She was two cities ago and had been one of the crazier girls in bed. I had taken her virginity, but she had already gotten quite a bit of practice giving blowjobs behind the gym at her high school. I don’t want to think of her lips right now, which are chapped and perfectly thick.
“My gift,” she says more forcefully. “Why aren’t you talking to me!”
“Alice,” I say, trying to look relieved and yet not scared shitless.
“When did you get a computer?” she asks, looking at my sleek silver machine.
“Never mind that, Alice.” I lean toward her over the table. “What gift? What are you doing here?”
Alice grins. She has crooked teeth but perfect lips, and I wish she’d stop smiling or smile with her lips closed. “I missed you,” she says. “You left so quickly.”
“How did you find me?”
“What? You didn’t want to be found?” She’s speaking too loudly. People are looking. “You just wanted to leave me after taking my virginity and promising we’d be together forever?” Every few words she yells, and I quickly tuck my computer away and grab Alice’s bicep.
“Please, stop... Just let me explain.” I practically drag her outside, trying to keep from making a scene.
“Explain,” she says, crossing her arms huffily. “Explain why I found you in Portland with some other girl.”
I drop my face into my hands and rub my eyes. Not dignified, I know, and with the sensitive capillaries around my eyes, I’m sure I’ll look half-dead tomorrow. Suiting, I guess.
“I need to feed, Alice,” I say quickly, the lie falling from my tongue as soon as it forms. “Do you think I really want to shit where I eat? If I had killed in Seattle, how would I be able to stay with you?”
“So you decided to kill in Portland? Funny, because that girl didn’t look at all dead when you left her either.”
Alice’s face is defiant. So she isn’t buying my bull. Does she still think I’m a vampire? With those crazy blue eyes, I can’t tell.
“I thought it might be too close. I decided against it at the last minute.”
Alice’s face softens. I know the lie is weak, very weak, so weak that I can’t believe she’s buying it. And then she tucks her arm beneath mine and says, “So did you like the present or not? You want to eat? Now you can. She’s dead, and you have so much blood now. You can c
ome back to Seattle, right?”
I want to scream. I want to push her to the ground and run. But she really, truly believes what she’s saying. She killed Mary so that I could drink her blood.
I stay calm. If I can record her admitting this, then calling the cops might not be such a bad idea.
“Where are you staying, Alice?”
“My car.” Alice was one of the few girls who had a vehicle of her own, a shitty clunker of a truck that I’m surprised could make it to San Fran from Seattle.
“Stay with me then,” I say as smoothly as possible, tugging her back in the direction of my rental. “I’d like to somehow thank you and explain as much as I can.”
Alice practically purrs against my arm as we walk. Good. I can take her to the apartment, record her admission of guilt, and then call the cops. Alice will be as far away from me as Mary soon, and I could spend the rest of my month in San Francisco trying to forget the glassy eyes of the beautiful corpse that had been a teenage girl.
I half-expect the body and blood to have disappeared by the time I return, but Mary is still lifelessly lying on the couch. I put my bag on the table, then step away to the kitchen. Alice is watching over Mary while I turn on my phone, start recording, and slip it into the pocket of my button-up shirt, hidden well enough behind my blazer.
“So did you kidnap her?” I ask.
I turn around, and Alice is right behind me with a glass of red. “Jesus shit!” I curse. She moved so silently.
“Drink some,” Alice says, pushing the glass into my hands. “I did all of this for you. All of this so we can be together.”
I take the glass into my shaking hands. Blood. Mary’s blood. Real blood that I do not want because I’m not a fucking vampire.
“You kidnapped her, didn’t you?” I ask.
“DRINK IT!” Alice screams.
I push it to my lips and let some trickle in. Tears prick at the corners of my eyes at the bitter, copper taste. I am actually afraid of her, I find. Terribly, terribly afraid.
The Big Bad II Page 27