The Preserve

by Patrick Lestewka

  Zippo was unable to comprehend his feelings on such a profound level. What he thought as he stepped in front of his fellow mercenaries, shielding them, preparing to take the first hit, was elementary in its simplicity:

  I will die for you.

  Now. Here. This moment.

  “Come get it,” he whispered, and pulled the trigger.

  The vampires hurled themselves at the wall of holy-water-laced flames with the heedless abandon of moths at a lit candle. Those who made it through were little more than flaming skeletons on the other side. Flesh sloughed off their bones in fiery gobbets, scattering their wake like glowing breadcrumbs. Fire licked from their eye sockets and shot from their mouths. Some retreated into the woods to lick their hideous wounds. Others were undeterred.

  Beehive, her hair alight in a flaming spire, advanced on Tripwire. He backed away, fist clutching a stake. Flames gathered on Beehive’s shoulders; her outspread fingers, webbed with fire, resembled blazing gloves. Tripwire stumbled on a rock and went down on his back. Beehive grabbed at Tripwire’s neck; blisters swelled and burst on his throat. He screamed. She bent over him, mouth hot and necrotic …

  Surfer-dude zeroed in on Oddy. His esophageal cord hung like a horrid pendulum, teeth very long and very white amidst the flaming wreckage of his face. Oddy snapped off a shot that spun him sideways. The vampire swayed like a three-sheets-to-the-wind drunk, left arm hanging cockeyed, bone shattered at the elbow.

  Oddy cocked the Webley and fired again. The slug blew a flaming wedge out of surfer-dude’s shoulder. He took a knee. He got up again. Oddy drew a killing bead. Surfer-dude dove, tackling Oddy at the knees, driving him to the ground. Surfer-dude’s burning dreadlocks writhed like a ball of quarrelsome snakes atop his head. His nails punched through Oddy’s pants, into the soft meat of his hamstrings. Bellowing, Oddy jammed the Webley into surfer-dude’s mouth. The shot blew him upright, straightening his spine. Oddy saw the purpling night sky through the softball-sized hole in the vampire’s throat and thought of Dade…

  Zippo ran the flamer’s tank dry. He shrugged it off and drew the Berettas. Answer flanked him; they stood back-to-back.

  “Boy,” Zippo said fiercely, “any of these blood-suckers get their teeth into me, I want you to put me down before I start changing.”

  “You got it.”

  “Knew I could count on you.”

  Turban and KISS THE COOK stalked in on them. Zippo pumped shots at Turban, slamming slugs into his belly and knees, bullets exiting in a spray of splintered bone. Answer’s silenced Kirikkales made a snick-a-snick sound. A daisy chain of dime-sized holes spread across KISS THE COOK’s throat.

  Turban grabbed Zippo. His strength was immense: Zippo felt himself in the grip of a grizzly. The vampire’s headwear unwound in flaming spirals around his head, burning with the smell of raw spices. Zippo brought his knee up into Turban’s crotch. The vampire laughed, lips melting in ropy strings, hugging Zippo tighter. The hitman’s ribs cracked. He angled one Beretta into Turban’s crotch and squeezed off three quick shots…

  KISS THE COOK batted a Kirikkale from Answer’s hand. Answer raised the other pistol and fired. KISS THE COOK’s right eye imploded in a spurt of yellow stuff resembling marmalade. The vampire twisted away. Answer shot him in the ear, tearing the lobe off. The vampire moaned. Answer shot him in the nose. The vampire mewled, smelling of Brylcreem and fireplace ashes. His shot-out eye was a deep conical hole, black and yellow. There was a light bubbling sound where his nose had been. Answer wasn’t even breathing hard. He shot the aproned vampire through the cheek, blowing teeth between his lips. The vampire staggered. Answer took his stake and plunged it into KISS THE COOK’s chest.

  KISS THE COOK shrieked. KISS THE COOK shook.

  Then KISS THE COOK exploded in dazzling fashion.

  “Huh,” Answer said.

  Beehive was at Tripwire’s neck. Her teeth brushed his skin. I don’t want to die, he thought. On the other hand, I don’t want to live, if it means becoming one of them. He clamped a hand over Beehive’s face, fingers sinking into her flaming features. He pushed harder and the lion’s share of Beehive’s face came away in his hand, slipping between his fingers like fondue cheese. Beehive’s jaws rattled and clacked like wind-up chattery teeth. She tried to say something but could not on account of her tongue being fused to the roof of her mouth.

  “Blaa graaa lahhe,” she blubbered. “Blaa gr—”

  Tsst.

  As soon as the vampires began to attack, Crosshairs had slotted his silver bullet into the Remington. His knowledge of the supernatural was sketchy—was silver good against werewolves? Witches? Bogeymen?—but silver struck him as a strong, pure metal, effective against any creature of evil. He saw Tripwire was in trouble: a faceless vampire was on his neck like a hobo on a ham sandwich. Crosshairs centered his breathing and—

  Tsst.

  There was no other way to describe it: Beehive’s head flew apart. Fragments of skull bone exploded off in every direction like a flock of pheasants flushed from tall grass. Her headless body twitched atop Tripwire. He shoved her off and plunged the stake into her chest. It sunk to the hilt with sickening ease: like stabbing a warm loaf of bread. Beehive thrashed. Moth-like insects flew from the stump of her neck. She shriveled into ash and blew away, leaving only a faint outline in the snow. Tripwire staggered to his feet and went to help Oddy…

  Crosshairs jerked the breech to insert a new cartridge. He did not see her slinking up behind him: blonde, petite, wearing a shredded mackinaw. He did not—could not—feel her nails tearing down the back of his parka, the noise of gunfire drowning out the sound of ripping fabric. Chill wind whipped up his spine. He felt nothing. He did not feel the razor-sharp nails cutting a vertical slash above his hipbone, deep and long and red. He did not feel the blood pouring down his back, pooling in the snow.

  All he felt when she shoved her hand inside the wound was a dim sense of pressure. No pain. But he knew something was terribly wrong. Although the sensation of his organs being displaced was painless, he was keenly aware that, had the proper nerve centers been operational, he would be screaming like a motherfucker.

  “What the—?” He spun on wobbly legs. She was squatted on the ground at his feet. Her hands overflowed with…things.

  Red things. Deep purple things. Softly-shaped things that shone wetly in the moonlight.

  A yellow tube ran between her fingers, dipping into empty space, rising again to connect to…him. He realized that the tube was his intestinal tract. His mouth opened. No sound came out.

  She crammed one of his organs—a liver? a kidney? Jesus Christ, they all looked the same—into her salivating maw. She sucked greedily, like an infant. The organ changed color, purple to red to pink to peach to bone-white as she drained it of blood.

  “Oh, Lord,” Crosshairs whispered. “Oh, Jesus, no.”

  Crosshairs’s legs buckled. An out-of-place odor—French vanilla?—filled his nostrils for a second before fading. His eyes were hard and dry, like marbles. He couldn’t feel himself dying. This knowledge, the underhanded injustice of it, made him want to cry. “Give…give those back,” he said quietly.

  He shot the pretty woman in the belly. She bent forward, as if punched. He ejected the spent cartridge. His mouth was full of something. He turned and spat a pouch of black blood into the snow. He sat down and picked up some of his guts, trying to push them back inside, but they were slick and kept slipping through his fingers. He got some loops back inside but then the pretty woman crawled forward and tugged them out again. Equilibrium tilted madly. She started to suck on his intestine like it was a pixie stick.

  “Those are mine,” he whimpered. “I need them.”

  She said, “I’m sorry.” She didn’t stop sucking.

  Schrutt was the sound Oddy’s stake made as it sunk into surfer-dude’s chest. The burning vampire made a queer noise and started to melt. His face softened and liquefied, running off his bones in gelatinous strings. His ribcage cra
cked open like a bomb-bay hatch, spilling warm guts onto Oddy’s lap. Then the bones themselves melted, sagging like overcooked noodles before turning into a thick white paste that ran down Oddy’s arms. It all happened very rapidly. Oddy stood. His parka and pants were soaked with the weight of molten vampire.

  Zippo’s face was purple from the hydrostatic pressure. Blood forced its way from his nostrils and ears and the corners of his eyes as Turban bear-hugged him. The vampire gibbered in a foreign dialect, breath stinking of tabouli and rotting meat. He tore a strip of skin off Zippo’s throat and lapped at the gushing blood. Zippo hawked a blood-veined loogie into Turban’s face. Turban squeezed tighter. Bones cracked. Zippo’s body curved like a tightly-strung bow.

  “Fuck you,” he said through gritted teeth. “Fu…uuuck YOU.”

  Answer rose up behind Turban, bringing his stake around in a hard arc at eye level, burying three inches of Canadian maple in Turban’s ear. Turban’s eardrum punctured with the soggy decompression of a balloon popped underwater—thop! The vampire gasped. His grip on Zippo loosened. Answer tugged the stake loose. The tip dripped with gelid runners of brain and tissue.

  Zippo brought the Berettas up into the gap now separating Turban’s body from his. He planted the barrels on either side of Turban’s jaw and fired two pancaking rounds. The slugs cut an “X” through the vampire’s skull, exploding from his burning headgear in a swirl of cinders. Zippo jammed the barrels further into the wounds, deeper into Turban’s face, twisting, firing, twisting, firing. Slugs blew out of Turban’s head every which way, muzzle flash lighting up the backs of his eyes like Japanese lanterns.

  Answer stabbed the stake into Turban’s back. The vampire let go of Zippo, who fell to the ground, puking strenuously. Turban staggered in circles, clutching at the stake. Then he gave up and exploded like a balloon full of lasagna.

  Crosshairs fell to his knees. “Please…I need those…” The rifle slipped from his fingers. Even missing her chin, he was struck by the woman’s beauty: smooth skin, nose tapering to a delicate point, eyes black as jewelry-display velvet. A small scar above her upper lip. Her mouth and chin and cheeks were smeared an oily red. How did she end up here? the sniper wondered. Bad luck, bad karma, circumstances beyond her control? He could not hate the woman. He sensed she was once a tender person, a compassionate woman who didn’t like what she’d become. Crosshairs’ hair was swept back, his prosthesis crack-glazed with ice. Tears rolled down his cheek to freeze on the underside of his chin in tiny clear globes.

  “Please…”

  She touched his face, finger tracing the seam where flesh met latex. Her fingertips left a sickle of blood on his face. “How did this happen?” she asked, shyly, as a child. She traced a fingertip over his lips, painting them blood-red.

  He whispered, “I can’t feel you.”

  She whispered, “I can’t feel you, either.”

  Crosshairs’s guts were a small red ball coiled between his legs. They were no longer part of him. None of it was. None of this was actually happening. This was all some movie he’d once seen.

  She rested his head between her small, cold breasts. The edges of his vision were darkening. She unclasped the clips securing the prosthesis to his face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help myself.”

  “Please,” Crosshairs heard himself say.

  “So hungry…”

  Her teeth sunk into the soft flesh of the divot. Crosshairs raised his hand to her face, wanting so desperately to feel something, anything. He touched her cheek, her nose, the soft hollow of her eye socket.

  “Please…”

  Her teeth shifted inside his head, sunk deep into the gray matter.

  Then it happened.

  Crosshairs’s fingers felt…cold. He looked down at his hand and curled his fingers. He could feel the snow—feel every individual snowflake—on his skin. He brushed his thumb against his index finger. He felt every ridge and valley, felt the tiniest pressure, the wondrous friction of flesh on flesh.

  For the first time in twenty years, Crosshairs could feel.

  Sensation blossomed inside him, unfurling like the petals of some magnificent flower. Feeling sought out every outback and tributary of his body, reawakening long-dormant nerve centers. Crosshairs wondered if a Neanderthal man thawing out of a glacier would feel the same.

  Her skin in his hand, the coldness of it like slate. His toes, warm and sweaty in his boots. Ice on the back of his neck, prickling the short hairs there.

  Then…

  The gaping, raw wound in his back. Her teeth in his head, in his brain, the terrible pressure of suction.

  Pain, the glorious intensity of it, rocked Crosshairs to the bedrock of his soul.

  A massive black hand fell over the pretty vampire’s face, jerking her head back. Crosshairs watched Oddy pin her to the ground, knee jammed into her breastbone, and slam a stake into her chest. He twisted it inside her. Her body shriveled up and blew away like a burning leaf. Crosshairs gagged on blood in his throat. Pain ran a full-out blitzkrieg through his body.

  “Pacify, son,” Oddy said. He propped a balled-up sweater under his head.

  “I can…” Crosshairs hacked up a wad of red. “I can feel, Sarge.”

  “Gonna be fine, soldier. Fine as cherry wine.”

  Tripwire joined Oddy. He paled.

  “Jesus Christ. He’s not gonna make it.”

  This time Oddy remained silent.

  Tripwire knelt beside Crosshairs. “Want some morphine? One shot’ll ease the pain. Two you’ll go numb. Three to ease you out easy. You want?”

  Crosshairs shook his head. “First time in twenty years, Trip—I can feel.” His skull-divot overflowed with blood. “Feel.”

  Zippo and Answer reconnoitered.

  “Oh, Christ,” Zippo said, clutching his ribs. “We got to do something for him.”

  “I’m dying,” Crosshairs said.

  Oddy said, “Gonna be fine, son.” It was a knee-jerk response and they all knew it.

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Sarge,” Crosshairs said. He twined his hand with Tripwire’s. It felt so good, so warm. Then his face darkened with fear. “It’s just…”

  “What’s wrong?” Tripwire asked him.

  “I don’t want to end up like them…”

  “I promise that’s not gonna happen.” Zippo unhooked a pair of grenades from Tripwire’s bandolier. “Open your hands, if you can.”

  Crosshairs assented like a child. Zippo placed a grenade in each palm, closing Crosshairs’ fingers around the clips. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “About you being a candyass. That was the bennies talking.”

  “I know, Zip.” Crosshairs’s eyelids fluttered. “It’s…it’s alright.”

  The men geared up quickly. They had to keep moving. Oddy knelt beside Crosshairs and pulled the pins from each grenade.

  “If I could call a med evac for you, I would. I’d call that fucking Huey down, load you onto it, watch it carry you away someplace safe.”

  “I-it-it’s okay, S-Sarge…”

  “You hold on as long as you can, son. When it gets too cold, or starts hurting too much, just let go.”

  “I c-c-can feel my f-feet, Sarge.” Crosshairs waggled his toes as proof of this claim. The blood in his divot was thinly rimed with ice. “Feels so good, y’know? Just feeling.”

  Oddy kissed his palm and pressed it to Crosshairs’s forehead. Crosshairs closed his eye and listened to their footsteps crunch through the snow, receding, getting farther and farther away.

  Soon he was alone.

  Or…not quite.

  ««—»»

  “Go go go!”

  The men crashed through the underbrush like crazed rhinos. They ran heedlessly. They ran as if simple distance might somehow erase all they had seen and done. They ran to beat the devil.

  They did what soldiers did best.

  Ran from the past.

  “Go go go!”

  Had they looked down, they would�
��ve seen shrubs growing at their feet. Had any of them possessed a knowledge of herbs, they might have identified the shrubs by their purplish, furred leaves:

  Wolfsbane.

  There was no way they could’ve seen the creature perched in a tree high above. A small, stunted creature who watched their progress with interest and amusement.

  Watched with one large, red eye.

  “Go go go!”

  ««—»»

  Neil Paris, who would later be known as Crosshairs, shipped out for Vietnam at the age of nineteen. He left behind a girlfriend, as most servicemen did. Her name was Maria, and they loved one another with a depth and breadth that thrilled and terrified them both.

  He took her to Coney Island for hot dogs and birch beers at Nathan’s. He remembered the ocean wind blowing through her hair, whipping it around her head, catching in her mouth, between her lips. He made all sorts of excuses to touch her. Being with her made the hard truths of the world bearable, even nonexistent; when he held her, he believed, however briefly, that there were no such things as hatred, or cruelty, or pain. And when she kissed him, he knew he never wanted to kiss anyone else again, ever.

  She said she’d wait. She sent letters. In one she enclosed a sea shell. The young soldier, hunkered in a pillbox near Quoy Non, had licked it, tasting the brine. Although his mind tried to resist it, he couldn’t help wondering who might have been with her when she collected it. He punched a hole through the shell and wore it on a strip of rawhide around his neck.

  Nights in the jungle, blackness so absolute it became a living entity, he would dream of a reunion with her. She would be waiting at the bus station, hair tied back with a yellow ribbon. He would step off the Greyhound and walk to her, taking her head in his hands, kissing her small, sweet mouth. Her hands would slip around his waist, then up to encircle his neck. He would place his lips to her ear and say—these exact words, rehearsed over three Tours of desperate yearning: “Tell me anything. Tell me everything. I have crossed ocean and land to be with you. Help me forget. Help me remember.”