by Roger Keller
“You gotta’ be fuckin’ kidding me,” I said.
Heather giggled and pulled me back into the apartment. I shut the glass door and drew the blinds. Heather laughed out loud. Something big landed on the deck. Heather stood still in the center of the room. The air around her shimmered like a mirage. I backed up against the wall. A second later the deck door exploded, sending glass and pieces of plastic venetian blinds across the room. The greaser struck a Fifties pose and combed the glass out of his hair. He focused on Heather. A dark purple, forked, lizard-like tongue snaked out over his jagged teeth. The lizard tongue twitched. Heather smiled back wickedly. The greaser hissed and clicked his teeth together, puncturing his own tongue. Black blood dribbled onto my carpet. The revenant didn’t see me coming.
I swung the axe and hit the revenant right in the back of his oil stained neck. The axe sheared through flesh and bone, sending the revenant to the floor. I didn’t give him a chance to recover. A few more strokes from the axe and his head was severed. The revenant’s jaw opened and closed, as if it was trying to move the head across the floor. It didn’t get far. Heather brought her boot down on it, splitting the skull open. Spongy black matter spilled out, along with a carpet-ruining gush of clotted, dark red blood.
“Piece of shit,” Heather said.
I dropped the axe next to the still twitching body and went for the shotgun.
“You were probably never gonna see your security deposit again, anyway. They always find something to nitpick about when you move out.” Heather looked at the still-dying revenant. Chunky, syrupy blood oozed out of the ragged stump.
“The door.” Heather did her fast-running thing, stopping just short of the door. The deadbolt turned itself. “You fucker. That’s my-”
The door swung open. The bandage covered revenant stood in the doorway.
“Hunter.” He pointed right at me, ignoring Heather.
Heather drew the SOG knife from her belt. The bandaged revenant threw Heather into a wall. Eggshell white, Sheetrock and dust rained down on her as the wall disintegrated.
I leveled my shotgun at the revenant. He made a noise that was somewhere between laughing and crying. His septic tank smell hit me before he did. I never even got a shot off. He stood over me, puzzling at the shotgun in his clawed hands. I could almost hear the wheels turning in his diseased mind. He growled, then hurled the shotgun into the wall like a javelin.
“With, my, hands.” He struggled with each word. Then he roared. “Michelle.”
I backed up, watching the revenant’s claws grow. I pulled the snub-nose revolver out of my pocket. The revenant threw his head back and screamed. He stumbled and shook, then fell forward. Heather stood behind him, black gore dripped from her claws. She’d sliced him to the bone. The revenant flailed and tried to stand. His duster was torn in half. Strips of rotting, pulsating flesh hung from his ruined back. Yellow bones creaked and popped as he tried to regenerate.
Heather walked across the room, flicking unclean blood on my carpet and stopped at the smashed wall. She knelt and grabbed her knife. I pulled the shotgun loose from the living room wall and tried to get the drywall out of the barrel. Heather fast-walked back over to the wounded revenant. She grabbed the revenant’s head by the bandages. Black blood seeped into the dingy fabric as she cut into his neck. Heather used the blade to pry apart his spinal column. With it’s spine severed, the revenant finally quit struggling.
Heather dropped the blade and looked in abject horror at her bloody hands. Then she disappeared into my roommate’s bathroom without saying a word.
I walked out on the deck, sure I’d see flashing red and blue lights, any second. Somehow, I knew no one else was coming. The two, now headless freaks were it, for now. I used the plastic rod from the venetian blinds to clear the drywall from my shotgun barrel, just in case.
Heather appeared in the kitchen, naked except for a floral print towel. She brushed her wet hair back. Her clothes sat in a pile by my garbage can. I sat down on the couch and set the shotgun on my coffee table. Heather side stepped pools of blood and joined me. She opened a Tupperware container of blood and handed me a beer. I downed the bottle in a few quick gulps. Heather sipped her blood. The square container caused her to spill down her chin. I put my arm around her.
“How screwed are we?” I said.
“We’ll probably be fine.” She turned the TV on and started flipping channels.
Chapter 5
We drove to a twenty-four-hour, big box store. There was plenty of parking that night. Heather followed me across a deserted lot. She looked awkward and annoyed, wearing some of the clothes my ex left behind. The pink t-shirt with it’s playful kitten design clashed with her leather jacket, the only item of her clothing that remained uncontaminated.
“This sucks,” she said. “Your girlfriend was really lame. I hate cats.”
“We’ll find you some clothes, too,” I said.
“This night just keeps getting better.” She tied the bottom of the pink t-shirt into a knot, exposing her midriff.
“I can still see the kittens,” I said.
She laughed and pushed me.
The big box store was as empty as the parking lot. A chrome plated bell sat by one of the check out scanners, waiting to alert the employees of a customer. I checked my pockets and found the list I’d written on the back of a credit card offer. Heather checked her jacket pockets and found a roll of 1980s dated hundred dollar bills.
“Cool,” she said, “my treat.”
“We’ll meet back here at 2:30.” I tore the list in half and handed her a piece.
Heather grabbed a shopping cart and disappeared into the canyon-like aisles. I filled my cart with assorted, bulk cleaning supplies and construction grade garbage bags.
Heather met me by the self checkout lanes. She drug a squeaky hand cart, stacked with sheets of wood paneling. I looked in the regular shopping cart she pushed ahead of her. Half of it was full of interior decorating supplies.
“You find enough stuff?” I said.
“Check this out.” She held up a five gallon pail of roofing tar. “This stuff burns great.”
The self check out wouldn’t take Heather’s vintage money. I watched her ding the customer service bell about a dozen times before she flattened it like a beer can. No big box zombies appeared.
“Fine,” she said.
We went hunting. I found an employees only door. Heather pressed her hand against the institutional gray metal and nodded. She paused, then closed her hand around the door handle. The lock gave way with an anemic click. An aging gen-xer in a managers vest peeked out of the door. He was terrified, hiding in a supply closet from something his rational mind couldn’t process.
“We’re ready to check out,” Heather said.
The manager took his time examining Heather’s money.
“You don’t see these every day. I’m not sure what our policy is on uh.” He tried to avoid Heather’s gaze while he ran his mouth. “It’s been a really weird day, or night I mean. Everybody went home sick about an hour ago. The whole shift, if you can believe that. I got this feeling that something bad’s gonna happen, but I can’t leave the store unattended. You know how it is? You guys should really hurry home.”
“I think the worst is almost over,” I said.
“Don’t speak too soon,” Heather said. “There’s still plenty of time before dawn.”
The manager nodded nervously at her. Heather kept making a big deal of lifting up her arm and looking at her watch. She ran her thumbnail back and forth over the counter. A black claw split her nail and scored the cheap veneer. The manager saw it and looked at me. He swallowed hard and fumbled with the register.
“You know. You could just take what you want.” He stuffed the money in his pocket.
“That’s dishonest,” Heather said. A six inch piece of the counter fell to the floor.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Yeah, we wasted enough time already,” she sa
id.
The manager abandoned the register and walked backwards toward the supply closet. He held the store keys through his fingers like a weapon.
When we got outside, Heather stopped and turned to face the automatic doors as they closed behind her. She tapped her claws on the the glass, shattering it into countless tiny pieces.
“That’ll show ‘em,” I said, as we walked back to the car. “You know, there’s probably a camera recording us. Wait, do you even show up on film?”
“What are they gonna do, call the cops and say a vampire broke our door?” Heather said. “And yes I show up on video. There’s stacks of VHS tapes in Lee’s house with me on ‘em.”
“We’ll have to watch those sometime,” I said.
Heather smiled wickedly.
We managed to fit everything in my car, except the paneling. Heather tied that to the roof. The weight of the faux wood dented the metal. Heather gleefully stapled dozens of red plastic warning flags on the paneling. I sat down behind the wheel and took my pulse. I was shocked at how calm I was. Heather hurled the big box store’s courtesy staple-gun into the darkness just past the edge of the parking lot. I drove back home with one hand out the window, trying to hold the stack of wood in place.
*****
As we got to work cleaning up my apartment I made a mental note to buy more alcohol as soon as possible. I still had enough beer and rum to make the tedious, disgusting work ahead of me go a little faster.
I tacked some of the contractor bags over the broken deck door, while Heather sliced the blood soaked carpet into precise, six inch squares. She pulled each square up and stacked it in the kitchen. I watched her move, faster and faster, until she was a blur.
Heather refused to touch any part of the revenants, so I dismembered them by myself. Their bodies came apart with sickening ease. Decay set in before I had all the pieces bagged. Whatever force held the revenant’s flesh together was long gone. I hoisted a shockingly light, double-bagged torso and headed for the door. Heather jumped back and seemed to float down to the kitchen floor, rather than get close to the bag. It worried me to see Heather actually afraid of something.
We filled the tarp-lined trunk with body parts, bloody carpet squares and everything else that came into contact with the contaminated blood. I even found the pieces of the greaser’s face next to a KIA minivan and threw them in.
I drove out into the outer suburban sprawl until we found a construction site.
“Right there.” Heather pointed out a battered metal dumpster.
“Sunrise is about an hour from now,” I said.
“That’s more than enough time,” she said.
We dumped everything, along with a few gallons of gas and Heather’s roofing tar, into the dumpster. The bags broke open and the stench of decaying undead meat leaked out. The smell was so thick you could almost see it. A swarm of fat slow-moving flies materialized over the dumpster.
“Shit.” I swatted at them.
“Come on, light the fucker up,” Heather said.
I lit a road flare and tossed it in. The dumpster went up like it was full of napalm. A wave of heat hit us a second later. Heather jumped back and hissed. Whatever the construction workers threw in before us sent blue and green flames into the growing cloud of smoke.
“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Heather said, crouching behind me.
“Yeah, pry don’t wanna breathe that in,” I said.
I kept looking at Heather the whole way back. She laughed hysterically and looked at her hands. The corners of her mouth drew back into a shark-like, sardonic grin. I reached for the Smith and Wesson in my jacket pocket. Heather pointed at the windshield.
“Look out.” She forced the words through her misshapen mouth.
I turned hard to the right, narrowly missing a brick mailbox and picket fence.
“Shit, goddammit.” I punched the wheel.
“You don’t have to worry,” she said. “If it happens. I think you might be able to handle me.”
*****
We were back in my parking lot before Heather’s face returned to normal. She wiped dark, muddy tears from her cheeks.
“It’s kind of wasteful.” She held her hand in front of my face.
“Blood?” I said. “I can’t tell in this light.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s been a while. This whole thing’s getting to me.”
She made a fist and drove it into the door over and over, until the passenger window exploded.
“Lee’s paying for that,” I said. “It’s a work related expense.”
Heather tilted her head back and laughed. The sun rose behind us as we walked back to my building. Heather hunched over and weaved like she was drunk. She took my hand and steadied herself.
Rick waited inside the stairwell, barley able to stand himself. He held a whiskey bottle, poorly concealed in a paper bag.
“You, you two fucks,” he said. “Ray was with you before he, before what happened to him.”
He moved to block the stairs, his t-shirt riding up, exposing his hairy belly.
“You, you know what really happened.” He pointed his bottle at me. “And you. What the fuck happened to you? You look like shit.”
“Your buddy was fine when he left us.” I pushed Rick out of the way. He fell on his ass, but managed to hold onto his booze. He carefully uncapped the bottle and took a long drink.
“You fucks,” he said. “I ain’t fuckin’ through with you.”
Rick’s oldest son Ron shuffled down the hall to collect his father. He scratched his short blonde hair, rolled his eyes in disgust and offered his father a hand up. Muscles and tendons strained in the kid’s scrawny arm as he heaved his father to his feet. Ron met my eyes, his face full of embarrassment and hate.
“Come on, Dad,” he said.
“I’ll be watching you,” he said. “You fuckin’ hear me?”
A low growl came from deep in Heather’s throat. I pushed her up the steps, trying to get her back into my apartment before I’d have two more bodies to clean up.
*****
Heather was first into my apartment. She broke the door, after trying three times to use her powers to open the deadbolt. I shrugged. The handle would keep the door shut and I pitied anyone foolish enough to try and rob us.
Heather leaped over the kitchen counter and landed like a paratrooper in front of the refrigerator. She steadied herself on the open door and pulled out a container of blood. I got a good look at Heather under the florescent track lighting. Her dark blonde hair hung limp in her face. Bloody eyes peered out at me. She took off her jacket and tossed it at the couch. The jacket hit the wall and landed on the floor. I picked it up and set it on the footlocker-coffee table. Heather rubbed her bare arms. Black, spider thin veins crept up her wrists.
“I got some new clothes at the store.” She pulled the kitten shirt over her head.
Heather’s breasts were as perky as ever. They would have looked amazing, if her nipples weren’t corpse blue like a body on a morgue slab. I tried not to stare as she walked over to the pile of assorted building supplies we’d left in the middle of the room. She kicked off my ex’s tennis shoes and rummaged through the bags until she found a t-shirt.
“I couldn’t find anything good in that whole tacky store,” she said.
“Speaking of tacky,” I said.
Heather’s new shirt featured an angry eagle with rifle bullets in it’s talons. The black material stretched tight over her breasts. She smirked and tied the bottom in a knot
“I like it.” She unbuttoned my ex’s, casual Friday pants and let them drop around her ankles. I looked away. “These new jeans suck, though. It’ll take forever to break them in.”
When I looked back, she was lacing up a pair of cheap army-style boots. I turned the TV on and found the second bottle of rum in the coffee table. I didn’t remember hiding it in there. Not a good sign.
“So, what’s on TV?” Heather joined me on the couch, with he
r container of blood.
I took a drink of rum right from the bottle. Heather gulped down the entire plastic container of blood. I savored the rum. She tossed the container on the coffee table and rubbed her wrists. The black veins faded slowly.
“Wonder if I can get it out of my system?” she said. “Like, maybe I can flush it out or something.”
I didn’t ask what she wanted to get out of her system. There wasn’t anything to say. I kept thinking about the dream and wondered if I’d have to kill Heather. Lee would probably want me to keep working for him, even if Heather was gone. Killing monsters wasn’t a job I felt like doing alone or really at all.
“Look at me.” She turned my face toward hers. Bloody fingers stuck to the stubble on my jaw. “I don’t want to end up like them.”
“I’ll make it quick,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want it quick or painless. Make it original. Make it horrible. I want vampires in other cities to hear about it and freak out. I want them to sleep in fear of you. In five hundred years, I want them to remember how I was destroyed.”
I stared into her green eyes and watched the burst capillaries fade back to human. The ruthless intensity remained.
“OK,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll think up something.”
“You better,” she said. “If you kill me in some lame way. I’ll come back and haunt you.”
“Can you even do that?” I said.
“I don’t know.” She curled up next to me. “I’ll find some way.”
The vampire on my couch, the dried blood on my face, it all should have been terrifying. Instead I felt strangely calm. I realized it wasn’t because of the rum.
“I never did ask where you live,” I said.
“I live in my house,” she said. “Where did you think I lived, like in a cemetery or something.”
“I figured you lived in Lee’s weird mansion,” I said.