Jinn Nation

by Caroline Barnard-Smith

  Dylan was hunched over the RV’s miniature sink. His stony face was focused on the window yet his eyes were unseeing, refusing to take in the warped, skeletal tree and slowly rusting car parked against the kerb outside. His hands gripped the sides of the sink, flexing sporadically.

  Christa watched him from the bed, a cigarette at her lips. “Why didn’t you just make more?”

  “More what?” The words were harsher than he’d intended. He hadn’t appreciated having to haul an extra body into the backroom of Fairwood Urban. The bodies had been carefully packaged amongst the boxes of new stock, hopefully preventing their discovery until he’d driven the RV far away from town. Still, the teenage girl was now yet another missing person. She would be an extra call to the police, an extra warning sign for the local authorities. His patience was stretched perilously thin.

  Christa blew out smoke, tapping ash into the plastic plant pot. “I was thinking about this. You made yourself jinn because you didn’t want to be alone, but why didn’t you just make more vampires? Wouldn’t that have been a whole lot easier? Not to mention far less painful.”

  “What has that got to do with anything?” he roared, finally turning away from the window. He expected Christa to react, to start with fear or surprise, but she remained delicately poised, serene amid the cigarette smoke. Dylan shook his head and exhaled, trying to calm himself. “I’m worried about the risks I’ve been taking,” he explained. “I’m trying to figure out if I’ve left any sort of trail behind me. A neat little breadcrumb line of mutilated corpses. But all you can think about is why I didn’t make more vampires?”

  “Why do you care if anyone stumbles on your trail of bodies?”

  Dylan laughed, short, sharp and sarcastic. “The very nature of my being demands anonymity. Why the hell do you think I care?”

  Christa carefully stubbed out her cigarette in the plant pot and sat back on the bed, eyeing Dylan coolly. “Who would come after you, anyway? A small town sheriff? A grieving civilian? Don’t you think I’d be able to silence anyone who came looking for you?”

  Dylan lapsed into silence. He tried to think of a circumstance in which his enigmatic travelling companion couldn’t help him. He didn’t want to feel like an idiot, unable to grasp the very advantages of Christa’s power that he had urged her to grasp for herself. He could think of no such circumstance and so he sat on the bed beside her, defeated, and reached for a cigarette.

  “I don’t trust them,” he finally said, lighting his cigarette and inhaling deeply.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t trust other vampires. Being undead changes everything. Vampires can become selfish, stubborn. You don’t have to listen to anyone or heed advice because you will live forever. Apart from being hunted down by an angry mob with dead loved ones, few things fill the undead with real fear. Vampires are arseholes. Hard to control. That’s why I didn’t try to make any more of them. The jinn are arseholes too, but they’re simple arseholes. They’re easier to predict.”

  Christa nodded slowly. “Perhaps joining a book club really was a better idea.”

  ***

  The tunnel smelt of softly rotting rubbish and stale urine. It was a rare occasion when Dylan cursed his heightened vampiric senses, but this was one of them. The pungent aromas seemed to strip away the soft tissue in his nostrils, they were so acute and vile. Bile filled the back of his mouth and coated his tongue with a tinny, foreign taste.

  “Are you sure about this, Christa?”

  “Can’t you feel it? We’re close.”

  She pressed on ahead of him, lifting her skirt above what could have been a badly decayed cat or the last death splutter of a fugitive tramp. Dylan watched her in dismay, wishing they could just turn around and head back to the RV. They could be in the next state by morning if they left now. But Christa was adamant that the underground tunnel linking one half of Fairwood’s Main Street to the other led to a jinn club. Dylan wondered if it was simply a nest she was leading him to; a dank hideout for jinn to lay low in while they spun out, gorged themselves or simply avoided the police. Either way, he didn’t want to barge in on them. He wasn’t in the mood for a fight. Miserably, he looked down at the new boots he’d picked out that afternoon in Fairwood’s only department store.

  “It’s filthy in here.”

  “Worried you’ll spoil your new clothes?” Christa chided.

  Dylan grunted and began to follow her, carefully picking his way between the discarded coke cans and used condoms.

  Near the end of the tunnel, the strip lights that stretched along the length of the ceiling came to an abrupt halt, leaving a short segment in complete darkness. It was here that Christa stopped. As Dylan drew closer he could make out a door, concealed by the brief darkness and set back into the tiled wall.

  “In there?”

  Christa nodded eagerly. “There’s easily a hundred jinn in there. I can hear them.”

  Even when he listened intently, all Dylan could hear was the far off scratching of a rat, rooting around in a yellowing hamburger box. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “Of course you can’t. I can hear their inside voices. They have mortals in there, too. Their inside voices are screaming. I heard them all the way from the RV.”

  She had indeed. She’d heard those screaming voices so loudly and brightly she had insisted they wear their new clothes and head out into the night.

  “Aren’t you bored of doing nothing but driving?” she had argued. “You became jinn to find companionship, so let’s go and meet your companions.”

  Now Dylan stared at the innocuous door, hidden in darkness in a putrid underground tunnel, and sighed. “Let’s go then.”

  Christa grinned at him before reaching up to knock loudly on the door. There was no handle on their side. After several long moments, it swung inwards to reveal a huge, broad-chested man. The music emanating from the cavernous room behind him exploded out into the tunnel, so loud and brutal that Dylan wondered how the hell he hadn’t heard it before.

  “I smell jinn,” the bouncer said, staring at Dylan. Thick tattoos scored into the side of his neck pulsed and contracted when he swallowed. “But who the fuck are you?” He bent down towards Christa, bringing his face close to hers.

  Dylan stepped between them. He was easily as tall as the bouncer, but the man outweighed him by at least three stone. “She’s with me,” he said. “Is that a problem?”

  The man straightened and regarded him coolly. “Whatever. Put her in the back with the others.” He stepped aside, barely giving them enough room to edge past him.

  Christa couldn’t keep the triumphant smile from her face as she surveyed the room. “I was right,” she said, reaching for Dylan’s hand and squeezing it in her own. “I told you I could hear jinn.”

  The room was dimly lit by mouldering, bare bulbs swinging from the ceiling, vibrating amid a bass beat so heavy it was almost a tangible force. Everywhere, there were jinn. Thin jinn youths in tight black jeans danced and clutched at each other. Heavily made-up jinn women preened at the bar and perched on the tables running around the perimeter. Jinn stood with their backs to the walls, drinking whiskey and vodka as they watched the dancers and nodded in time with the music. Dylan had never seen so many of his new kind in one place. He was momentarily awestruck. The jinn buzzed with their own intensity. The stones nestled in their stomachs, the magic baubles that gave them their strength and virility, sensed the immediacy of others and reacted with a charge like golden static.

  Christa began to move through the room and Dylan followed, his hand still grasped in hers. Towards the back, in a low pen built for housing livestock, was a group of mortals. They compressed themselves into small balls of terrified, shaking meat, backs against the wall, arms wound tightly around each other. Christa stopped before the pen and stared. Dylan studied her face, expecting to see shock or disgust. Instead, her eyes glowed and a small smile touched her lips. She was entranced by the spectacle.

  A tall,
broad-shouldered woman, vivid mass of bright red hair piled on top of her head, elbowed past them and bent to unlock the pen. Her perfume lingered in Dylan’s nostrils, a mixture of sickly vanilla and sweat dried on leather. She reached into the pen and grabbed at the hair of a hollow-faced young man. He screamed and struggled, reaching out for his companions. The other mortals shook, wailed, and slunk away from him, grateful it was not yet their turn. The woman yanked her hand back and took the young man with her, his feet kicking and quivering with pain as her fingers ripped at his hair. She dropped him at her feet and placed a stiletto clad foot on his back as she bent once more to secure the pen.

  “Let me go,” the young man screamed. “This isn’t happening. Get the hell off me.”

  The woman hauled him up by his shoulders and set him on his feet. “This is happening,” she told him, her southern accent thick and honey-toned. “Now be a darlin’ and behave for Ms Bee.”

  Ms Bee turned, one arm tight around the man’s shoulders, and regarded Dylan and Christa. “You want to put her in there?” she asked Dylan, indicating the pen. “I’ve got the key.”

  “No, she’s not here for that,” Dylan said. The woman’s breasts were obscenely large, even beneath the leather coat she had buttoned up to her neck. He was finding it hard not to stare.

  Ms Bee stared back, dark red lips turned up in a half-smile. “We all share here,” she said. The young man at her side briefly scrabbled against her. He shook away her arm and turned to run, but the larger woman deftly caught him by his shirt collar and wrenched him back towards her, making him squeal like an injured pig. “Put her in with the others and I’ll share this little puppy here,” she continued seamlessly.

  When Dylan didn’t answer, she pretended to sulk. “Everyone wants to sit at table with Ms Bee,” she purred. She traced a long, perfectly manicured fingernail down the length of his shirt. “We are a handsome one, aren’t we? Such pretty eyes.”

  At his side, Dylan could feel Christa bristle. Her hand tightened around his own. “She’s not here for that,” he repeated. He wasn’t sure if he was angry or just deeply amused.

  The seductive smile vanished from Ms Bee’s face and her eyes hardened. “Listen Darlin’, you’re new here, so I’ll forgive you this one indiscretion. But nobody refuses to sit with Ms Bee. That’s just the way it is.”

  Christa pulled her hand free from Dylan’s and stepped forward. “He won’t be sitting with you, you old hag,” she said. Her voice was low and dangerous, like the measured hiss of a cobra readying to strike. “I’m his guest, and will be treated as such. You ought to buy us a drink to apologise for your rudeness.”

  Ms Bee nodded slowly and smiled a forced, plastic smile. A smile reserved for dentists or police officers. “No problem, Little Darlin’. You are just the cutest thing, I could eat you right up.” She registered the look on Christa’s face and tried to laugh the comment away. “I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t. I’m about to get my fill of the puppy here.” She shook the young man beside her and he whimpered, streaming eyes turned to the ceiling. “Now, follow Ms Bee. You are to be my personal guests. Nothing but the best for attractive out-of-towners.”

  She began walking to the far corner, pushing the hapless young man before her. The crowds silently acknowledged her and stood aside to let her pass, leaving Christa and Dylan free to follow. Dylan looked down at Christa, trying to fight the sudden urge to laugh.

  “I thought she was going to rip my clothes off right here,” he said.

  Christa seemed less amused. “She should be careful,” she said. “The fabulous Ms Bee could end up in pieces scattered throughout a storm drain one of these days.”

  Dylan paused. He was undecided about joining the fabulous Ms Bee. It could lead to further, more violent examples of Christa’s wrath. But as he watched, the anger that had darkened her features passed and gradually, she smiled.

  “She was sort of funny,” she admitted.

  “You want to go with her?” Dylan asked.

  “Fuck yes. Bitch owes me a drink.”

  ***

  Ms Bee had seated herself at a large table on a platform overlooking the room. She grinned when Christa and Dylan approached. “Time for some fun,” she said.

  Before her, spread-eagled on the table and tied by his wrists and ankles, was the hollow-faced young man. His shirt had been ripped away to expose a thin, pale chest, sprinkled with golden hair that had rarely seen the sun. His eyes were squeezed shut and his mouth was silently moving. A final prayer, Dylan guessed. That, or a desperate curse.

  Christa sat opposite Ms Bee and pulled Dylan down to sit beside her. She seemed unperturbed about the man tied to the table before her, trussed up like a Christmas turkey and shaking uncontrollably.

  “Tell me your names, Darlin’s,” Ms Bee said. “I do so love making new acquaintances.”

  “I’m Christa,” Christa said. “This is Dylan. He’s with me.” She smiled widely at the older woman.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Ms Bee said. She nodded approvingly. “You make such a handsome couple. Why, I could take a picture of you right there, so pretty they’d put it in a magazine.”

  Dylan wondered if the magazine in question would leave the half-naked body of the man on the table in the shot, or subtly airbrush him out.

  “And what brings you here?” Ms Bee continued. “We don’t see many new faces here at The Beehive. Folks usually stick around, we’ve got it good here in Fairwood.”

  “We’re travelling north,” Dylan said. “We didn’t actually expect to find any jinn here. I suppose that explains all the empty towns.”

  Ms Bee laughed. “Yes, my boys do have an appetite, that’s for sure. I’ve actually had to start laying down restrictions. We have to respect the human population. If they all disappeared, we’d have to move on.”

  The man tied to the table began to scream and pull against his bonds, back arching and sweat running from his temples.

  Ms Bee sighed and stood up. “I do apologise,” she said. “Looks like the puppy’s getting frisky. Right in the middle of our nice talk, too.”

  She reached behind her and pushed a button in a striped yellow and black housing that Dylan hadn’t noticed before. The music cut off and the crowd stopped dancing, drinking, talking, all turning as one to the table in the corner. Even the hollow-faced man stopped screaming. The jinn faces crowded before them were rapt and anxious, stretched, toothy grins hovering in the dark.

  “Hungry?” Ms Bee shouted.

  Nobody shouted back. Instead, an insistent drumming sprang up towards the rear of the room. It was the sound of feet thudding rhythmically on the wooden boards of the dance floor, insistent and chilling in the echoing silence. The other jinn soon took up the beat, making it grow steadily louder and faster.

  Ms Bee bowed majestically before them and took a flat, square butcher’s knife from a hook on the wall. With a banshee-like wail, she brandished the knife above her head and brought it down with devastating force, cleaving the hollow-faced young man’s chest open with one hard stroke. The man screamed again as bright white agony flared though him, shaking against his ropes and choking on the blood welling up through his body. He spluttered, spraying fine red droplets across the table and narrowly missing Dylan and Christa. They leapt up from their seats and edged away from the table, eyes fixed on the grotesque display.

  Ms Bee brought the knife down again, eyes wide and lips drawn back in a feral snarl. The thumping beat on the floor intensified as the knife came down for a third time. Blood was steadily pumping from the man’s deep lacerations, but still he did not die. His body quaked with the force of a seizure, eyes rolled back into his head.

  Ms Bee finally laid the knife down on the table. Out of breath and sweating, she bent over the trembling body and plunged her hands deep into the long wounds she had made. Grunting, she pulled the flesh apart. Dylan heard the unmistakable sound of ribs breaking and glanced at Christa. She was shaking, her hands balled into fists. He was ab
out to put an arm around her, to comfort her, when he realised that she was shaking from barely suppressed excitement. He could smell her arousal and to his utter astonishment, felt the first stirrings of his own.

  Before them, Ms Bee was elbow-deep inside the man’s weeping chest cavity, pushing aside shining organs and red tissue. With a last, guttering convulsion, the man fell still at last. Dylan craned forward, trying to gain a better view. He was sure that Ms Bee would rupture the stomach at any moment, she was tearing into the body with such fervour. He waited for the tell-tale smell of warm bile, for the acidic tang of undigested food, but it failed to materialise.

  Ms Bee emerged, triumphant, with a long gleaming object in her hands, brown and threaded with tiny veins. She held it above her head before throwing it to the waiting crowd who fell upon it with shrieks and cheers. Again and again, she ripped out whole glittering organs, pieces of anatomy for which Dylan had no name, and threw them to the swaying jinn. Once the chest was all but empty, she stripped slimy flesh from the exposed ribs and flung them before her like grisly confetti. When she was done Ms Bee laughed and clapped her hands, scarlet with gore, before pushing the button on the wall behind her. Music screamed back into the space, covering the noise of frenzied feeding and the cries of the terrified mortals watching from their pen.

  With precise delicacy, Ms Bee cleaned her hands with a napkin and sat back down at the table. “Come, sit,” she said to Dylan and Christa. “I’ve saved the best for us, naturally.” She regarded Christa, her head tipped to one side. “I know you won’t want to partake. How about a drink instead?”

  Christa smiled and sat down. “About bloody time. I’ll have a beer.”

  “You heard the Little Darlin’,” Ms Bee called to a tall, long haired man standing near the bar. “Will you go fix that for me, Ramon?”