The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  * * *

  So, OK, hers is a scent of sickness, not in a twisted-and-malicious way but in a patient-in-a-hospice way. I should pity her. But she’s got…that classic Mary Sue look—that’s what my boy calls them—all nice and normal, a little plain, a little plump. A cross round her neck, or a crucifix maybe; I can’t tell from here. She’s not pretty enough to be popular, not strange enough to be an outcast, just a mannequin of mediocrity, blandness and banality, desperate to be made more by her Ghoul Boyfriend Forever.

  As fucking ever.

  * * *

  As for him? Yeah, he’s got the boyband looks…if you trust your eyes. Which ain’t a good idea.

  Truth is, ticks got a sexy rep these days, all that Byronic bullshit, teen girls swooning over brooding tortured souls, but if you think vampires are hawt, you ought to read the motherfucking lore. These are corpses, fuckhead, my alpha told me way back. Rotted, stinking, fetid corpses that walk as men. Shit, it takes them years of feeding to even get to that.

  So this tick sure looks like some pale poetic catwalk cutie, but I can smell his soil.

  5.

  Here’s how this vampire started. It started with some manipulative leeching bastard dead in a grave, some kiddy-fiddler or wife-beater, some Ponzi scheme merchant—or, worse, politician. It started with someone so deep into using people they couldn’t stop even six feet down with maggots eating their tongue. It started with their ghost haunting the people they’d abused, feeding on them even from the grave, sucking this…energy—chi, my alpha called it, or kundalini.

  It was just a spectre at first, dig? No fangs, no frilly fucking cuffs on flouncy shirts. Just a mindless parasitic poisonous miasma.

  * * *

  There’s a stink of the pulpit on this one, oak and ink, sermons scribbled by lamplight. It’s old; shit, the victim probably wasn’t even born when this fucker came seeping up from its silk-lined coffin to carry on its spiritual vocation, polluting the living with dreams of death, fears of the flesh and all its sordid passions. It’s the smell of chickenshit, that stench, of something so gutless in the face of life and death it can’t face either, has to deny them both. There’s nothing uglier than the mockery of a human being you end up with then.

  * * *

  Fuck, let me tell you how much of a heartthrob the first tick I tracked was. Baby, my alpha took me to a cemetery, and I could smell the fucker from the gates, smell the stench of misery, even before this reanimated rotting corpse—this ghoulish, mummified, zombie thing—came digging its way up out of the earth with the bones of its fingers. It was more filth than flesh, blood-sodden graveyard dirt packed round bones, and the first thing it did was make a bee-line for a nearby field, to feed on a fucking cow.

  Real romantic.

  * * *

  —Stage two, said my alpha. If your vampire can feed enough as a spectre—suck juice from some debt-ridden fuck till he blows his own brains out in the depths of depression, or drive some insomniac mother to drown herself and the sick child she doesn’t have the strength to care for—if the tick can bleed just enough vitality from the vulnerable, it can dance its own corpse like a fucking muppet.

  —Only ticks look even half-human are stage threes plus, the ones who find some sad bastard, eat their insides out, wear them as a motherfucking skinsuit.

  6.

  The tick and the Mary Sue sit down at a table over near the door, holding hands, gazing into each other’s eyes. They’re the centre of their own little world—scratch that; they’re the centre of everyone’s world. You can smell the delusion wafting from them, the psychic smokescreen that lets a tick like this walk into a high school without a single question. Me, I got fake transfer papers, but all a tick needs is confusion and conviction. The glamour that makes everyone buy his new kid bullshit. Give him time and he’ll have the whole town believing it.

  * * *

  You see…fuck, the reason most ticks don’t come out in the daytime is cause you can see the skinsuit’s stitches even with the glamour. Yanno why ticks and mirrors don’t mix? Really? Because even stage threes puke at the sight of themselves.

  But then there’s these stage fours.

  —A tick can pass, my alpha told me, if they can just find some human sick enough to swallow that glamour so commitedly they put every ounce of their own energy into bolstering it.

  An amp for the signal, dig? With a Mary Sue beside them, that tick can fucking dazzle.

  * * *

  So he looks just like our missing kid, just like the victim, but creepily…‘better.’ Ice-blue eyes and blond hair, cherry lips, skin smooth and spotless as an angel’s ass. Fingernails manicured to metrosexual perfection. Every girl in the cafeteria, or near enough, is either gazing at him with wonder or looking daggers at Mary Sue. Some of the guys too, though they’re shiftier about it; one of the indie kids over at the till is outright obsessed, the poor fuck, stinking of adolescent lust. No shame in his spicy scent, at least, but he’s way out of luck.

  * * *

  Another high school job, a few years back, just before the…accident that sent me back to the Pound and a new handler, to my boy—which was totally a great thing in the end, really, cause there’s no way that sort of thing would happen with him—I got into a beef with these football fuckwits. They were yacking on about how their girls were all into tick-lit.

  —Vampires are totally gay, one of them said.

  So, yeah, I kicked the crap out of him.

  These days, for most ticks, there should be an ex- in that sentence.

  7.

  Jared Swift. That was the kid’s name. Not the tick’s name, mind. You think I give a fuck about this motherfucker’s name? No, I’m talking about the kid in the photo, grabbed by the tick some night, in some dark place the boy wasn’t meant to be, dragged off into the woods to be devoured. And worn.

  Quiet kid, the report said, sorta sensitive. No girlfriend. Journals and sketchbooks found after his disappearance indicate suicidal thoughts.

  Jared Swift. That’s the only name that matters here. Not the tick’s or the Mary Sue’s, not mine or my boy’s. Just Jared Swift.

  * * *

  What monicker the tick’s going by here isn’t worth shit; he’ll have snatched it from Mary Sue’s dreams while she was sleeping anyway, as he lurked outside her window, jonesing over her emptiness, or crawled in to crouch by her bed, whispering bitter nothings in her ear, watching himself glow radiant with glamour in the mirror of her dresser. If he did it over enough nights, he probably fucking glittered by the time he showed up as a late transfer in school to take her breath away. She, of course, being the only girl this gorgeous hunk had eyes for.

  * * *

  I can smell what little of Jared Swift is left in the skin worn by this ghoul. I can smell the shreds of soul in it, the despair and desire the tick has strung together into a semblance of self—behaviours born of terrified restraint, habits of shame—the salt of tears and spunk that tinges the tick’s own bloody stink. I can smell a fucking moment, the words oh, Jared’s not really interested in girls yet echoing as Jared casts his eye across a different cafeteria, fixes it on a different girl. Someone unattainable enough he’ll never need to…

  * * *

  This would be the point where I realise I’m snarling, top lip curled back, teeth bared. Not that it matters in a blowing-my-cover sorta way; ticks don’t have the wits to even know there might be hellhounds on their trail, and if the Mary Sue notices, all caught up in the glamour of her Ghoul Boyfriend Forever, she’ll likely just write me into her self-centred story as another possessive potential, out to own her like her beloved does, jealous of the competition.

  It does finally spur the dickwads into action though.

  —Freak.

  —Faggot.

  Fuck yeah. At last!

  8.

  I ignore the detention because, well, you know, the principal’s bad puppy voice just doesn’t carry the tone my boy’s does; like I’m gonna play cowed to som
e yapping cur thinks he’s top dog. Besides, we’ll be out of here tomorrow if we get the job done tonight. So, out by the parking lot, skulking out of sight behind a dumpster, I watch them climb into a car that reeks of her— him in the driving seat though, naturally. And as they pull away, I take a deep slug from my hipflask. Strip the t-shirt off. Unbuckle my belt.

  * * *

  They always play it as painful in the movies, like some hideous Jekyll and Hyde transformation, man being remade as beast in wrenching agony. Shit, it’s more ecstasy than agony, and I mean that in the chemical sense, a fucking buzz. Skin-tingling shudders running up and down your spine, every inch of you alive with sensitivity. It’s not so visual, natch, but if you can imagine a psychedelia of smell, that’s how it rushes in on you when you turn wolf. When my alpha took me through my first shift, man, I thought he’d spiked the punch with acid.

  * * *

  Bones crunch into new shapes, muscles shift, and wolfskin furls tight to my form, binds to my naked skin, becomes it. No doubt my boy’ll bitch about me leaving the leathers in a dumpster yet again, but it’s the handiest hiding-place, boss, and it’s either that or a halfway wolfman look that’s bound to sparks some stares loping down the streets and through the woods after the car. Whereas I might get away, in this form, with just a few confused souls wondering if they really did see that motherfucking massive…husky? Cause it couldn’t really be…could it?

  * * *

  I run like that car’s a supercharged stag but I got a turbodrive in my adrenal glands and a hankering for venison. I run like I have a whole pack at my heels, betas splitting off to flank the quarry. I pound the tarmac with paws that move so fast, so light, they barely make a sound. I leap walls to cut through yards, crash through bushes and fences, pace never slowing, gaze cold and keen as steel on my prey as long as it’s in my sight, flared nostrils directing me when it’s not.

  I fucking love chasing cars.

  9.

  I’m kinda disappointed when he parks the thing at her place—he opens the door for her; hugs her but baulks when she moves in to kiss him; spins her a spiel about how he’s scared he’ll hurt her; strokes her cheek— then sets off on foot for his hidey-hole. I’m kinda disappointed cause ticks move slow as humans, mostly—slower even, sorta floaty—which is just plain boring. Stalking is OK, but it’s nowhere near as much fun as chasing.

  If it wouldn’t lead to a seriously stern bad werewolf! scolding, I’d take him down here and now.

  * * *

  But no. I got my part of the job, and my boy got his. If the ticks are a fuckload less impressive than some would have you believe—if they’re feeders not fighters, if they don’t tend to offer that much in the way of struggle once you’ve torn their limbs off, decapitated them with your teeth, and spat their head across the room—well, there’s putting them back in the grave and keeping them there. So there’s all that clean-up afterwards, with the garlic and salt. And quicklime. Handler stuff.

  And there’s the whole…loyalty thing. I suppose.

  * * *

  So I prowl through the brush behind gnatboy, hanging back in the shadows of early evening, following him to a fancy house out past the edge of town, all clean-lined concrete and glass…real modern. Swimming pool out back, and an SUV out front. I can smell rotting bodies inside, but not so’s I can make out how many. More than two, I reckon. He spider-crawls up the side of the house and in a window.

  After a quick sniff and a piss-tag on a tree, I turn, lope off. Lassie come home, motherfucker. It’s chow time.

  * * *

  —Hello hello hello hello! I love you!

  —Yes, I know. I love you too.

  —But I really love you! I missed you so much!

  —And I missed you too. Yes, I did! Oh, yes I did! Now, down you go. —But I missed you!

  —I know, but we have work to do. Did you find the lair? —It was easy! Come on. Grab the gear and let’s get this tick squished. —OK, hang on.

  —Hurry up!

  —You know, maybe you should put some pants on.

  —Don’t need them. Hurry up! Come on!

  —I’m coming.

  —Come faster! Hurry up!

  —Stop. Pulling.

  10.

  The last guttural purr of the engine as we pull into the driveway; soft clicks and thuds of doors opening and closing; crunch of gravel underfoot; snick of the trunk unlocking: my ears pricked even in human form, all of it’s acute, carved in the quiet like radio play sound effects.

  He pulls my spare hipflask from his pocket, hands it over, starts loading up with his own kit—crucifix, holy water, carbon-quarreled crossbow, gun with silver bullets. None of it actually means shit, we figure, but every tick’s so convinced of their damnation these empty symbols mostly work.

  * * *

  —Ready? I say.

  He nods, closes the trunk on the canisters full of disposal substances, and we look into each other’s eyes for a moment, saying something that can’t be put into words. Somewhere in there is the story of how he signed up for this gig, how he got sucked into this weird world, how he came close enough to living death to spit in its face. But you don’t have to hear that story. All you have to know is that it’s maybe something like Jared Swift’s, but not.

  I’ll fucking never let it be that story.

  * * *

  Soft and easy, padding on feet half-human, half-wolf, I take point, leading my boy in through the splintered front door, muzzle twitching, senses taut. I can hear the flies buzzing, count the corpses by scent, even before we hit the dining room. I can even tell that the tick isn’t in there; but we go in anyway, to remind ourselves why we do this.

  Rippling with maggots, Mom and Dad and three kids sit at the table, the family dog an autopsy or feast upon it. Both.

  Sanity is the first thing a tick takes from its victims.

  * * *

  The Zoroastrians have this ritual, you know; when someone dies they bring a dog to the corpse, and no matter what the doctor says, no matter how it looks, the person is only declared truly dead when the dog treats it as such. Way I hear it, it used to be one of us. Way I hear it, that might even be how the agency started—werewolves and their handlers brought in to make sure the dead will stay that way—but no one really knows the grand story of the origin. Or cares much.

  We care about the corpses.

  11.

  I follow the stench into the basement, my boy at my back all the way. I know he’s thinking about Jared Swift, about the thing that’s wearing his skin now, the ghost become a ghoul become a glittering glamour of humanity, cold and dead inside, empty as the not-so-pretty head and hollow heart of a Mary Sue who can’t read between the lines. Can’t see what’s under this sketchy fantasy of self-denial and overwrought passion.

  In the broken concrete of the floor, a dirt mound marks where the tick has burrowed, its grave.

  I piss on it.

  * * *

  —Softening the earth? says my boy, but I’m already snarling, ripples of the shift running up my spine as I hit the dirt with furious claws, in a shape barely hominid, scrabbling, tearing, rending the earth. You could call it digging, but that would be like calling a hurricane breezy. The scent of vampire rot is so rich it thickens the air, turns my stomach. I want to tear this fucker up from his sleep, rip him apart, and roll in the filth of what’s left so I will stink of his ending.

  A white hand bursts from the muck.

  * * *

  The rest of him follows in an explosion of dirt, an eruption of flailing inhumanity, leaping for the walls, the rafters, a corner of the ceiling, to cling there, hissing and hollow-eyed. Still glamoured to fuck, it’s every inch the smooth Adonis, skin of white marble and blue veins, lithe and limber as a fucking cat but its twisted perching a mockery of a true predator. This is a fucking parasite, a tapeworm from the bowels of humanity, a leech with limbs and a face. Spitting, thoughtless, ravenous loathing.

  —I will eat you and shit
you out, I say.

  * * *

  —Really, no, says my boy. I’m not cleaning up that—

  And in the second I turn, it’s fired itself at him, over my head, not baseball-fast, but fast enough; and his quarrel goes wild, but at least the holy water doesn’t, like acid in its face, stripping glamour to raw horror. And by then, I’m launched, hitting the tick just as its jaw opens like a snake’s. A glimpse of ragged shards, broken bone for teeth. I slam into its side, slam it the fuck off my boy and into a concrete wall. There’s a sick thud, splattering gore.

  12.

  The fucker’s already broken though, been broken since before it was dead, and it rolls away, scuttles back and whirls. Its lolling head snaps back into place, for all that its brains are oozing down its back. Fuck, it’s a tick; whatever brains it has it likely scavenged from sewer rats, just so’s it could ape the life it fucked up when it had the chance. Its eyes lock on my boy again, and I’m thinking, fuck, I hope it didn’t get a taste of him there—at the exact same moment I scent his blood on the air.

  No.

  * * *

  Then the smell of him is rich in its scent. I can hear him fumbling, cursing, losing the trust in himself to handle this, handle anything; I can smell the fear of failure, smell it in the tick’s breath as it sucks it in, shrieks it at me, a searing mockery, cause if he can’t handle this, he can’t handle me, he’s just a boy, not a boss, just a boy, not my boy and—

  I snarl as we leap, the tick and I, my claws ripping through the air, rending its belly, swatting the fucker clear across the basement.

  * * *

  I come down hard, something stolen from me in the touch. Shit, the smell of panic is so fucking physical, I stumble. I shake my head but I can’t get rid of it, look to my boy but that’s where the fucking problem is. He’s choking, collapsing, and if he’s weak, I—I don’t know what to do. I want to snarl in his fucking face. I need you, you fucking fuck, need you to fight for. A boy and his werewolf, motherfucker. Loyalty. I need your fucking purpose, need you and fucking hate you for it.