by P. T. Phronk
There was another thud. This time it was Dalla crashing into the concrete head first. When she raised her head, a flap of skin wiggled off her forehead. Above it, her exposed skull shone white.
Fox came down on top of her so hard that they were both obscured in a cloud of dust. When it cleared, only a jagged hole remained.
The roof shook. Stan eyed the doorknob. It was all he had left: the hope that he could get the God damn door open, rescue his old friend, then get the hell out of there. He had trouble keeping his footing as he yanked. There weren’t many earthquakes in New York, but Stan had been in LA during a small one, and the sickening wobbling of the roof beneath his feet felt similar. It got worse with each crash from below. He could imagine Dalla and Fox taking out walls as they fought, no regard for the damage they did. Like cats fighting in a flower bed.
Stan tugged and tugged at the damn doorknob.
The building shifted, and finally, the door popped open. Bob collapsed out of it; apparently he had been pushing from the other side, though Stan hadn’t felt the effort. He was even more charred than Bloody, with most of his clothing just threads around black-rimmed holes.
“Fuck,” muttered Stan.
He went to drag Bob back into the stairwell, but Bloody barked and pointed at the fire escape.
“Fuck,” said Stan again. “Can’t believe I’m taking directions from my dog.” He quickly realized that the last four years of his life had been spent doing exactly that. He scratched Bloody behind the ears; the fur there was as rough and scratchy as an old brush.
Bob’s eyes opened. He began to laugh. He looked at Bloody, then at Stan, and said, “really?”
Stan didn’t understand the question. A question of his own formed on his lips, but the building shifted again, and suddenly the roof was angled. Bob began to roll, too weak to stop himself. He cried out in pain when he flopped over onto his back. Stan grabbed his arms and pulled, dragging him toward the fire escape. A film of black-red flesh scraped off onto the concrete.
Smoke rose from every side of the building, walling them in, darkening the night further. The crashing, rumbling, and creaking were constant now.
Dalla burst from the hole in the roof, followed by a column of fire. Her skin looked black in the night. She strode toward Stan.
“There you are,” she said, and grabbed his arm.
“No,” he said. “Not again. Just let us die in peace.”
“Not a chance,” she said. Bloody leapt to clamp her jaws on the cuff of Stan’s jeans. As they rose from the ground, Bob shrank away below them.
“Sorry,” mouthed Stan.
She smelled like blood and burned meat. The smell should have been the last thing on his mind, with a building crumbling below and his dog clamped hard on his ankle to keep from tumbling to the ground. But really, he was getting used to this sort of thing, and she was quite stinky.
The hotel didn’t turn into a pile of rubble like it had been demolished. Rather, one side hunched down, then the other. It gave the impression that it had gone through too much, and decided to just put its head down and give up.
It was enough to send a billowing cloud of dust and smoke up around it. Then, a little hole poofed out from the cloud; Fox flying out of it.
“We need to hide somewhere,” said Stan.
The feeling of falling sideways, which he was also starting to get used to, cut out momentarily. He felt a wave of vertigo, like going around the loop of a roller coaster, even though their trajectory didn’t change.
“Wha—whassat hun?” mumbled Dalla.
“Land somewhere. Anywhere. We need to get inside, where he can’t see us.”
Their path through the air wobbled as he felt the vertigo again. Bloody’s eyes bulged with fear above the fold in Stan’s jeans that her jaws were desperately clamped onto. A trail of charred tufts of tail hair flew off behind her.
“There there. There looks like a comfy roof,” she said finally.
Stan felt another illusory loop as she landed roughly on a roof in the blue glow of a sign. Stan brushed himself off, then his heart sank when he noticed the backwards letters of the back of the sign: traM-laW.
22. Meeting in the Aisle
DALLA TORE THE BACK DOORS off of their hinges to let them in. It was a bad move, given their need for discretion, but it was too late to say anything. She lazily slapped a custodian who was sweeping the hallway they entered. His head snapped back, hit a wall, then he was out cold. She hunkered down, her mouth connecting with his neck.
Stan begged her not to kill him, but the hole she’d torn was already too big, the torrent of blood already too strong. His legs stopped twitching a few moments later. She sucked at the hole until there was nothing left.
The vampire wiped her mouth. The charred skin around her mouth flaked away to reveal raw flesh. The head wound where the white of her skull was showing minutes earlier was now a less nasty pink. She sighed.
“Our goose is cooked, Stanley,” she said.
“We’ll hide here for an hour, until the coast is clear, then get a car and drive home. He’s injured and two men down. He knows we don’t have the kid. Even if he can track us, it wouldn’t be reasonable to.”
“Your details are wrong for once. We found him. We crossed ten states and two countries to find him. Why? Because I am not reasonable. Neither is Damien. He will not forgive what we did to him.”
Dread filled Stan’s guts. “Okay. Okay, but it will take time to find us, if we run for it. You’ll be stronger. You can take the prick out for good.”
“I’m strong enough now. But no. I cannot do that.”
He stopped, grabbed her shoulders. She allowed him to pin her to the wall.
“You can. You’re not in love with him. Your stupid obsession? That was a leftover. It’s not the only one I’ve seen in you. Leftovers. Remnants of what made you human. Some are great, don’t get me wrong, some I wish you’d stick with, but this one, it’s the worst bit of humanity. It’s a child’s crush and a shallow hunger for a piece of something famous. Get. The fuck. Over it.”
The look that entered her eyes contained no scrap of humanity. It was animal. Worse. A pure intention to kill without reason or hunger. Stan tensed.
Her eyes softened.
“You may have a point,” she said. Stan used the moment of clarity to continue.
“You’ve been what you are for years. Decades. He—he’s new. He’s a baby at it.” He winced at his choice of words. “Did you see, in the hotel room, the way he was flying? He could barely stay upright. He’s drunk on the power he’s got, but he only thinks he knows what to do with it.”
“You and your observations.”
He thought for a moment. “Yeah. But he’s also … he’s insecure. Notice the way he hesitates before saying anything? He is terrified of failure.”
“Now you’re a psychologist.”
“I’ve seen enough of celebrities in their weakest moments. I don’t need psychology to see the shit going on in their heads.”
“You’re right. About everything,” she said.
Stan felt some smugness creep into his smile.
Then he felt Bloody tense at his feet, as if sensing something.
“It’s the humanity holding me back. The childish—you know—” she cleared her throat and affected a baby voice, “ooh I just wanna get a big kiss fwum the super dweamy movie star. You’re so right!”
She spit a glob of red and black phlegm onto the floor. “Fiddlesticks to that. Why would I need humanity? I don’t need any of it. This insecurity, it’s been holding me back all this time. Darling, thanks for setting me straight.”
“You’re welc—” he began.
The next thing Stan knew, he was in the middle of the Wal-Mart, duct-taped to a stack of boxes containing cheap DVD players. He remembered the last time he’d been in a Wal-Mart, buying his camera. This one looked exactly the same.
The vampire had asked everyone to gather at the front of the store. Behind St
an, her voice drifted over the intercom:
“Attention Wal-Mart shoppers. It is time to check out. Permanently, if you catch my drift. Now please—no, sir, sir, the doors are locked. You cannot leave, sir. Put down the pottery. Sir, if you don’t stop, I’m going to have to ask you to check out immediately. No, sir—” She sighed.
There was a horrible snap, then a splash, like someone had emptied a bucket of water on the floor. Stan had a feeling it wasn’t water, and that feeling was confirmed by cries of terror.
After clearing her throat, her voice came back on the intercom. “Now, Wal-Mart shoppers, listen carefully and do as I tell you, or the next checkout won’t be so quick.
“I need you to form two orderly lines. I don’t much care who goes in what line, but they each need to have the same number of people. If they don’t, I will hack at the longer line until they are even, you hear? Aisles six and seven. Chop chop.”
Stan heard murmurs from the crowd as they determined who would go in which line. A thud as Dalla struck one who must have been talking about an escape plan. Then the crowd silently shuffled around, presumably forming lines. Duct tape squeaked as she tied them up with it.
Stan wiggled his hands. They were wrapped together so tightly that he could feel them getting numb. The other swath of tape holding him to the stack of boxes was looser. As he squirmed, he could feel the boxes moving around. With enough time, he could probably get it loose enough to free himself.
There wasn’t time. He could hear Dalla rummaging around over in the Homes section. Whatever she was planning to do with those people couldn’t be good. Stan was done with futile attempts at stopping her, but maybe he could at least get far away enough to avoid witnessing it.
The vampire swooped past him on the way to the Kitchen section. He craned his neck to see what she was doing, but she had already grabbed what she needed and was back at the front of the store.
Stan saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He hefted his weight to shift some boxes enough to turn slightly. It was Bloody, over at the end of the Pets section. She was locked in a cheap metal crate. Stan managed to turn his head enough to lock eyes with his dog. Bloody nodded slightly and lifted a paw, as if to say hold on, I have a plan.
More duct tape sounds. Then silence for a while. Then gasps of shock. Then screaming and crying, all at once, a horrible cacophony. Bloody made her move. She stuck her tail out between the bars of the crate, then snapped it up, catching the sliding mechanism that held the door closed. It flapped up, but then fell back into place immediately with a clang that would have been very loud if not for the cries of Dalla’s victims. Bloody did it again, this time nudging the whole cage sideways at the same time so that the locking bar slid out of the frame of the cage. The door squealed open.
Clever girl.
She trotted over carefully, then gnawed at the duct tape enough for Stan to fall free from the boxes. Stan bit at the tape around his wrist until he was free.
“She sure sucks at tying us up, doesn’t she?” whispered Stan. He started toward the back door, hoping she sucked at securing doors just as much, then felt himself unable to do it.
If he was being honest with himself, it was more about curiosity than the desire to save the people. Saving them was impossible, but at least he could find out how they were about to die. He snuck to the front of the store, then found himself reaching for the camera in his jacket pocket. It was a jagged collection of parts, shattered at some point in the chaos. For some reason, that made him feel relieved.
He found a spot between two tubs of DVDs where he could watch her without being spotted. Bloody hopped onto his lap to watch too.
Two lines of customers and employees lay on the floor wrapped in duct tape, wriggling like silver maggots. The ones in aisle six each had one arm free. Dalla hauled the first in the line—a pot-bellied man with a trucker hat jammed on top of a mullet—onto the conveyer belt beside the cash register, then did the same with the first in line at aisle seven.
“I have always wanted to try this,” she announced.
She took a plastic tube and a funnel from a shopping cart, then taped the funnel to the tube. She shoved the other end of the tube down the man on aisle six’s throat. He gagged, but she held the tube in his mouth until he stopped struggling.
She pulled a box of kitchen knives from the cart, then peeled the plastic wrap off of it and removed the biggest knife.
With a flick of her hand, she slashed the man’s arm open from wrist to elbow. Blood poured out in sheets; each pump of his heart sent a fresh wave onto the conveyer belt. Stan winced. The people in a position to see what happened screamed and begged for their lives.
She held the knife to her lips. “Shhh,” she said. Then she plunged the knife into her own neck.
Stan found himself starting to bolt up. To stop her from hurting herself. He hadn’t felt the same instinct when she slashed at the innocent man on the counter.
Her dark blood spurted at first, then turned into a steady flow. She positioned the funnel so that the blood poured into it, then through the tube and into the man’s throat. She jammed the tube further down. Some blood bubbled up and dribbled down the sides of his face, but he had no choice but to start gulping it down to avoid drowning.
The flow of blood from his arm slowed, then stopped. He continued swallowing her blood, even when she removed her hand and he could have easily spat the tube out.
Her neck’s bleeding slowed to a trickle. She looked so pale she was almost blue. The man on the counter stopped moving. She placed the tube and funnel back into the shopping cart, then pressed the button to operate the conveyer belt. The man was carried to the end of the counter, where he jerked, then fell over the edge onto the floor.
Dalla turned her gaze to the woman wriggling on the counter at aisle seven. The vampire licked her lips, revealing protruded fangs.
When she had gulped down most of the woman’s blood, the duct tape wrapping had visibly shrivelled. Like an insect’s husk, drained of all fluids. Dalla, her face regaining some color, tossed the husk over the counter.
She hauled another person from aisle six onto the counter, then sliced the woman’s arm. This time she didn’t need the knife for herself. The wound on her neck was a grotesque open flap. She reached into the exposed gore, scratching, pulling at the meat, rupturing arteries. Her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth a tight frown. She felt it. Stan, vicariously, felt it too.
Her blood flowed again. She funnelled it into the woman’s trembling mouth until she stopped moving, then pushed the button to send her off the end of the counter. She turned her attention to a tiny man in aisle seven.
She repeated the process until the counter on aisle six was so gummed with drying blood that the conveyor belt stopped working and she had to haul the blood-stuffed victims into the growing pile herself.
While Dalla was wincing in pain feeding the next victim, Stan took the moment of distraction to leave his hiding spot and head toward the back of the store. He tip-toed to the furthest exit, at the back of the groceries section. The door was wrapped shut with a length of chain, held to its other end by a padlock. The ripped-open package that the padlock had come in lay discarded below the chain, no key in sight.
He told Bloody to stay, then slowly made his way up the aisles, scooting up to the next one only when Dalla was distracted. He knew what he was looking for only after he found it: a pair of hedge shears.
He peeked around the shelf to wait for his next chance to move. Dalla was in rough shape. She had given up on the aisle system, and was now crawling between the two lines of people on her hands and knees. Spilled, wasted blood was splattered and smeared all over the floor.
She didn’t see that, behind her, one of the aisle six victims she’d filled with her own blood had pulled away much of his duct tape wrapping. He freed himself from the rest of the tape while Dalla fed herself to someone else in the aisle, then grabbed his trucker hat from the ground and put it on.
Dal
la was obviously distracted enough. Stan sighed, then gave up on caution and clomped to Bloody in the Grocery section. He wedged the chain into the shears then leaned his weight into an arm until the chain snapped. It tinkled to the ground.
“Escape route,” he muttered to his dog. “Just in case.”
As if it would be necessary. It didn’t matter who won, Fox or Dalla; he’d die either way. Still, he hoped she won. He couldn’t say with any certainty that she was the lesser of the evils, but she was the evil he was rooting for nonetheless.
Maybe that was what love felt like.
He wandered a grocery isle, then found the perfect snack. He picked a place where he could see the front of the store, then eased himself down using the shears like a cane. Being sure to let some tumble to the ground for Bloody to eat, he mashed handfuls of Count Chocula onto his mouth and waited for the show to begin.
(SIX)
HE WAS SHAKEN BY HANDS digging into his shoulders. Every vibration felt like being driven into a bed of nails. Morgan bolted upright and screamed.
Through the pain he flashed to vague memories. Being wrenched off the roof. One of his prized steel-toed boots almost flying off his foot before he grabbed it. Escaping a hot cloud of smoke with an audible pfff! Getting tossed roughly onto the bed of the truck, beside the threat detection array.
“I can make it worsh.” Morgan opened his eyes. Fox’s face, inches from his, was all kinds of messed up; bruised, puffy, bloody. “Wake up, tell ush where to go.”
Morgan winced and swallowed the pain. “Okay, okay,” he said. “First. My bag. So ya don’t lose me forever.”
Howard appeared beside him with his bag. With a finger blackened like a burnt sausage, Morgan pointed at a vial. “That. Rub it on my back.”
The truck began to move. Fox slapped his hand onto Morgan’s back.
“No. Tell ush where to go firsht.” He pushed harder, digging his fingernails into the burned flesh. Morgan cried out. Fox eased off and took out the array’s cell phone, somehow still intact. Morgan looked at the screen through tear-blurred eyes.