Night Road

by A. M. Jenkins

  He didn’t even pause. He wasn’t in the mood to chat right now, and there would be plenty of time tomorrow night to see everyone. After all, he hadn’t come here to socialize.

  As to just exactly why he had come—well, it looked as if he’d have to wait another evening to find out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EARLY the next evening Cole got his laundry started in the basement before heading back up to Johnny’s.

  He wondered whether it might be best to feed here in the Building again, to save time. There was no telling how long a discussion he was in for tonight.

  When he walked into the living room, Sandor was sitting on the sofa talking to Mina and Nell. They all turned at the sound of the door, and the room seemed to erupt in welcome.

  “Cole!”

  “There you are!”

  He was a little taken aback—Mina and Nell had actually risen to greet him. He was used to not being noticed unless he intended to be noticed.

  “Good evening,” Sandor said. “Did you sleep well?”

  “About like I usually do here.”

  “What a welcome you had last night,” Mina said as she gave him a hug. “Sandor was telling us what happened.”

  “You didn’t even come out to say hello.” Nell hugged him in turn. “Shame on you.”

  “Sorry. I was tired.”

  Not only was he being noticed, he was being noticed for himself. He was used to pulling omnis in with his smile and his gaze. Omnis were all surface, and he’d lived among them for so long that he felt oddly naked to be looked at with such familiarity. It made him feel as if his flaws and his past were tattooed on his face.

  “Is Johnny around yet?” he asked, nodding toward the patio.

  “No,” said Sandor, “he is slaving away in the office, as usual. I just left him pawing through about a million envelopes from Merrill Lynch.”

  Cole wasn’t surprised. Johnny usually worked on business in late afternoon and early evening, rising while the sun was still up so he could make phone calls before the omnis’ working day ended.

  Mina and Nell sat down again. Cole lowered himself onto the broad arm of one of the overstuffed chairs.

  “It is good to see you, Cole,” Nell said. “How have you been?”

  “Good.” Cole liked Nell; she was frank and matter-of-fact. The only thing she seemed to change about herself over the years was the style of her glasses. He remembered the thick horn-rims, which had given way to big buglike plastic frames, which turned to wire rims, and which now seemed to be a sort of tortoiseshell.

  “Traveled out of the country?” Mina asked.

  “Not lately. I was in Toronto back in the midnineties, but that’s about it.” Cole turned to ask Sandor how Gordon had come about, how the change had happened, but Mina continued.

  “Toronto’s beautiful in the summer. I’m assuming you went in summer—as I recall, you don’t like snow.”

  “Not much, no. You’re right—I left when it started getting cold.” He waited a moment, but she seemed to have finished that line of conversation and he turned back to Sandor. “So, how did it happen?”

  “How did what—oh. That.”

  “Yes, that.”

  Sandor shook his head. “It was most regrettable.”

  “But what happened?”

  “Ah.” Sandor looked embarrassed. “Well, you know. Long story.”

  “I’d like to hear,” Cole told him, although he knew he’d have to keep reining Sandor in and calling him back to the subject in order to get the story out. Sandor loved to talk.

  “Well,” he began, “I was in Missouri, of all places. It should have been nothing out of the ordinary. I was at one of the colleges, you know.”

  “So what went wrong?” Cole asked. He preferred college campuses himself. They had well-fed students wandering around at all hours and populations that changed constantly. “Were you in the dorms?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. I was just getting settled in. I had checked into one of those cut-rate hotels—you know, the places where the relatives come to stay for football games and such. Look at you, so serious, trying to see where I made my mistake. But I tell you, it was just bad luck.”

  “You had checked in…,” Cole prodded.

  “Yes. I put my bag in the room, and then I walked to a bar across the street from the college. It was a sad day when they raised the drinking age, my friend. There was a time when a bar near a campus was full of drunken kids. Now, half of them drop out or graduate before they have even a chance to get shit faced in a public place.” Sandor shook his head, sorry for the unwillingly sober teenagers of America.

  “Go on.”

  “But you know me. Charming fellow that I am, I managed to get enough to hold me for a night or two. So I was feeling good and had time on my hands, and since it was early, I thought I would look around and see how the campus was laid out.”

  Cole nodded. Again, this was what he would have done.

  “The hotel was across a small park from the main campus. The usual sort of thing—a playground, a creek, trees. And on the other side of the park, the college. It was a good night to be outside—sometimes I don’t understand why the omnis don’t roam at night. They always hurry like little insects from their cars to the store to the bar to the apartment, little bugs scurrying for shelter. Don’t they ever take time to look up at the stars, to wonder?”

  “They’re afraid, Sandor. Go on with your story.”

  “Ah, yes. I went into the park, and there was a path that led down to the creek, to a small bridge that crossed it. And from there, up to the parking lot by the dorms and the English building and so on. I walked around the campus and looked at the place. They had very nice fountains. One by the architecture building was especially nice; it looked like a pyramid with waterfalls—”

  “And that’s where things went wrong?”

  “Oh no, it was just a nice fountain. I like the sound of running water. No, where things went wrong was when I started back to the hotel, when I got to the parking lot and left the sidewalk to go down into the little woods to cross the bridge. It was such a small woods; what harm could come to anyone there? Even a rabbit or a mouse wouldn’t have felt—all right, I see you don’t care for my thoughts on these matters, so I will try to stick to the facts.

  “As I was walking down the path to the small bridge, I heard footsteps behind me, and I turned to see who it was, and it was a teenage boy. And I said to myself, ‘Why Sandor, God has placed this beautiful boy for you to have a little treat; why not take a small sip and enjoy the night a little longer?’ So I slowed my pace to let him catch up with me, which he did, just as I stepped off the footbridge.

  “Let me tell you, I was smiling. I smelled the wet earth beneath us and heard the wind in the trees above us, and I was about to have a taste of young boy to round off the pleasant evening, then perhaps go back and watch a bit of television before having a nice restful sleep. I was listening to his footsteps on the bridge, and I thought he was about to try to pass me.

  “But he didn’t. ‘Don’t turn around,’ I heard him say. And at the same moment I felt something sharp prod me in the back, something exactly like…a knife.”

  Sandor looked around at his audience, drawing out the moment.

  “I laughed, I tell you. A knife! The hunted hunting the hunter! It was too amusing. I thought, ‘Will he be surprised before this night is through! Yes, this will teach him not to go poking people with knives, the silly boy.’

  “So I played along, I did as he asked and did not turn around, and I tried very hard not to laugh. And I did not laugh—until he ordered me to give him my wallet. Then of course I could not help but give a small chuckle. That made him angry, I think, because he cut me with the knife a bit, just in the small of my back, a tiny jab to frighten me; and I laughed even more as I told him, ‘I’ll not give you a thing, little fellow.’ And do you know what he did then?”

  The living room was quiet, as all three of them
listened. Cole knew he must be the only one who had not heard this before, but Sandor was quite the storyteller, and he enjoyed holding them all in the palm of his hand.

  “He stabbed me,” Sandor said. “Right between the ribs. The blade slid into my back as if it had been greased. Now, my friend, I have not been stabbed in a long time, and I hope not to be again for many years more, because it hurts like the devil, let me tell you. Of course, because of the pain I was surprised, and while I was surprised that little shit grabbed my hair and pulled my head back and slit my throat.

  “Now, I ask you, is that any way to behave? Trying to kill someone just because they don’t want to give you their wallet? I don’t know what the world is coming to.”

  “So this boy was Gordon?” Cole asked. He thought: Wonderful; we have a conscienceless killer among us.

  “I’m coming to that. Now the wound in my back had already healed of course; as soon as he jerked the blade out I could feel the edges of flesh pull back together. But my throat! Have you ever had your throat cut, Cole?”

  “No, Sandor, I have not.”

  “Let me tell you, it is like a suitcase being unzipped. Not only does it hurt as badly as being stabbed, but everything pours out so quickly that you lose large quantities of blood even before the wound heals. I’ve never felt anything like it. I remember I put my hands up, without thinking, trying to hold it all in. It was extraordinary. He halfway took my head off. My windpipe was cut, and I could not speak, only gurgle, and even that only down in my chest. I actually got dizzy—dizzy! Woozy, like when I was a boy and we used to take turns rolling down the hill in a barrel. I did not fall, but I staggered, and do you know what that boy was doing all this time?”

  “What?”

  “He was rummaging my pockets. He was quite focused on his mission, I must say that for him. I was wearing my overcoat, you know, because it was chilly, and he was going through my pockets—ah, don’t look at me like that, Cole; you know what they say: Cold hands, warm heart.”

  “I was just thinking that if this was May in Missouri, you must have looked rather out of place in your overcoat. If the police had found you lurking in the woods, they might have thought you were a flasher.”

  “Maybe that’s where the police were, out looking for flashers, because they certainly weren’t looking for murdering robbers too young to even shave! That boy should have been home playing his video games, not out cutting honest men’s throats.”

  “But go on, Sandor.”

  “Yes. Well, he took what he wanted, and then he pushed me. I staggered a bit, you see, and he pushed me—and I lost my footing and fell. I rolled and slid down the side of the ravine, while that little shit got away with my wallet. I had to get Johnny to send a new driver’s license, and I had to call and cancel the credit cards! Did you know you have to pay for the first fifty dollars of whatever they steal? It’s a terrible cheat if you ask me.”

  “Did you chase after Gordon?”

  “I did not say that was Gordon. You’re getting ahead of the story. So I was lying there on my back, listening to his footsteps as he ran away, and I was looking up at the stars through the branches. They look like lace, you know—branches—and in the city the stars look faded—the ones that you can see. They must be quite determined to be seen at all, the stars in the city.”

  “Sandor.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Anyway, I was drained. Almost completely drained. Have you ever been drained, Cole?”

  “No. Not after the first time.”

  “Well, I was. Perhaps you remember how your heart pounds and how your head clears to make you an animal, with animal sharpness. The air becomes so clear, every sound distinct and separate. Do you remember that, Cole?”

  “Yes.” Of course he did. They all did.

  “Then also you remember how the Thirst drives you, how you can smell blood and flesh on the breeze, how you can hear the pulse of other beings, because all there is in the world is their blood and your emptied veins and your empty stomach and your empty mouth.”

  Cole nodded. He remembered—but he didn’t like to. It was something he lived to avoid.

  “My throat had healed, but I was empty, and in this state I smelled an omni before I heard him. He smelled of alcohol, and laundry detergent, and cigarette smoke, and leather.

  “And then—you know. I was on my feet and moving, low to the ground. I could not help it. You know how one cannot control oneself at times like that.”

  “Yes, I know. So that was Gordon?”

  “Yes. The poor fellow was drunk. He was coming down to cross the bridge but was too inebriated to walk properly. Just before I took him down, he collapsed—his knees folded right up, and together we tumbled down the bank next to the bridge. I remember he was holding beer cans, because they fell with us, and as I fed they were spewing into the dirt.”

  “Wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Oh yes. Poor fellow. But I look at it this way; at least we don’t have a thieving murderer in our midst, because that’s who I would have gotten to first if Gordon hadn’t shown up at that very moment.”

  “Instead we have a drunken frat boy.”

  “Now, be fair, Cole; he’s not drunk now and never will be again. Poor boy, I was completely wild. It was…regrettable.”

  Sandor’s voice was low now. There was a lot he was not saying, and didn’t have to say. Everyone knew it, because everyone had felt it at least once, although not to the death as Sandor had.

  Feeding to fill emptiness—it was glorious, it was gluttony, it was madness—and once begun, a heme could not stop.

  Mina and Nell were silent, perhaps thinking of their own first times.

  Cole wondered how Sandor had handled the problems that must have immediately arisen with Gordon, but before he could ask, someone came out of the little hallway next to the stairs.

  Johnny was here.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “EVENING, Cole,” said Johnny. “I see Sandor’s been telling you his tale. Unfortunate, that.”

  “Yes,” said Cole, standing up.

  “I didn’t get a chance to thank you for your help last night.”

  “How’s the girl doing?”

  “Christine,” Johnny reminded him. “She’s not happy about being barred from feeds for a while, but other than that she seems fine. I expect she’s outside. Shall we head that way?”

  As they approached the glass door, Cole saw that Frederick was in the same seat he’d been in last night. This time an omni was seated on a stool at his feet, looking up at him with an expression of adoration, as if Frederick were a god. He held the girl’s hand in his as he spoke, playing absently with her fingers. Frederick had always reveled in the devotion of his omnis, whom he kept like pets.

  Johnny slid the door open and stood back, letting the others go first.

  “Cole!” Elise stood up to greet him.

  “Lo, the prodigal has returned,” Frederick said. He did not stand up.

  “It’s been too long,” said Alice, nodding. She didn’t get up either, but her lap was full of papers.

  The omnis quietly watched the hemes greet each other. Besides Frederick’s pet omni, Mary Kate was there, her eyes intent on Cole. There was a man in a black leather duster wearing black-and-silver boots up to the knees. Christine, the girl from last night, still looked a little pale—but otherwise healthy—and tonight she wore nipple rings connected by chains apparent through the light gauze of her dress. A scrawny owl-eyed kid in a black cape had drawn an ankh on his cheek. They were glaringly, obviously omni; hemes could not afford to make fashion statements.

  Johnny still stood by the open door. “Christine, Kendra, Boris, Mary Kate, and Shayne—”

  “Osiris,” corrected the kid in the cape.

  “Yes, sorry—Osiris. Would you all mind stepping into the house for a bit?”

  As they reluctantly began to obey, Cole saw that there was one omni Johnny had not mentioned, sitting in the shadows in a corner next to the wal
l. She was so old that her skin appeared to have shrunken onto her skull and her head wobbled, but Cole recognized her. Helene, who had been quite wrinkled the last time Cole had been here; she was still alive, amazingly enough.

  That was Johnny all over. Johnny did not get rid of his omnis, not as long as they wanted to stay. They could be in diapers or bedridden and still Johnny would keep them. And when they finally died, he would pay for the funeral and the headstone. Johnny was ruthless when he had to be, Cole knew—but he could also be tenderhearted.

  Right now Johnny was still at the door. He had stopped Christine to ask how she was, so Cole made his way around the chairs and squatted in front of Helene.

  Her skin hung from her bones like powdery spider-webs, soft and white from all the years away from sunlight. “Helene,” he said, “do you remember me? Cole?”

  Helene’s eyes latched onto him. “Of course I do,” she said firmly, but there was no spark of recognition, and her eyes were uncertain. “Do you want to feed?”

  He looked down at her hand on the arm of the chair and saw that the skin over the knotted blue veins was thinner than paper. He patted it and said, “It’s good to see you. How are you feeling?”

  “Not good,” Helene said fretfully. “I joined the army, you see, but they aren’t giving me my money, and I have to pay rent or they’re going to put me out.”

  “No one’s going to put you out,” Cole said. “This is your home.”

  “But I don’t have any money.” Her voice scaled up, urgent.

  “You don’t need to worry about money, Helene,” Sandor said, pulling up a chair for himself. “Remember? Johnny’s taking care of everything.”

  Helene sat forward suddenly, eyes focused on Sandor, sharp as a bird’s. “Would you like to feed?”

  “Not right now,” Sandor said calmly. “But I thank you.”

  She looked at Cole and opened her mouth—but he shook his head no.

  Her eyes went vague again, and she settled back in her chair.