Atl goes down the stairs. Domingo follows her.
When they reach the front door she turns to look at him and he thinks she is going to tell him to beat it. Her hands tighten around the dog’s leash. She takes a step back.
Thirty seconds later Domingo is in a comic book.
Half a dozen men pour in. The dog growls. Somebody yells. “Stay the fuck still. Stay the fuck still,” they say. Big bubble speeches.
A guy grabs Domingo by the collar and drags him out, pinning him against the ground and putting a plastic tie around his wrists.
Domingo doesn’t know if these are cops, or sanitation, or narcos. All he knows is he can hear the dog barking and he is being dragged against the pavement, then kicked towards the trunk of a car. They’re trying to stuff him in the trunk.
Domingo panics. He tries to hold onto something. The guy punches him and Domingo folds over himself.
It doesn’t really feel like he thought it might feel. Action. Adventure. Comic book manic energy.
The guy pulls Domingo by his hair and Domingo gets a glimpse of teeth, half a smile, before Atl pulls him off Domingo with a swift, careless motion that breaks his bones.
Domingo, on his knees, looks up at Atl. She cuts the plastic tie and the dog comes bounding towards her.
She’s got three sharp needles sticking out of her left leg. Blood puddles next to her shoes.
She vomits. A sticky, dark mess.
The dog whines.
“Come on,” he says grabbing her arm, propping her up.
He tries not to look at the bodies they leave behind. He tries not to wonder if they’re all dead.
If this is a comic book, then it’s tinted with red.
She’s awake. He knows it because the dog raises its head. Domingo looks at her. Sure enough, her eyes are open, though he can’t make her expression.
“How you feeling?” he asks.
Atl looks down at her bandaged leg. He knows he didn’t do a great job, but at least he took out those weird needles.
“My bag. Do you have it?”
She clutched it all the way there. There was no way he could have left it behind. Domingo nods.
“There’s a blue plastic stick in it. Small. Hand it to me.”
He does. She presses it against her tongue and shivers.
She unwraps the bandage around her leg. The skin looks odd. Blackened, as if it were stained.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“Anaphylactic reaction from the silver nitrate. Lucky for me they didn’t want me dead yet.”
Domingo blinks.
“It makes me sick,” she explains.
“You’ve been out for about an hour.”
Atl brushes the hair back from her face. She looks around at the little room and the piles of old comic books, hybrid personal protective clothing, and all the other assorted junk he collects and sells together with the bone-and-rag-man.
“Where are we?”
“My place. It’s safe. We’re in a tunnel downtown. It’s very old. I think the nuns used it. There was a convent nearby. Benito Juarez closed it fifty years ago.”
Atl chuckles. “You’re talking about the mid-19th century.”
She gives him a funny look. Domingo frowns. He doesn’t know lots of stuff and obviously she does. He doesn’t like it when people make fun of him. It’s unpleasant. Even Belen was rude at times, though there was no reason for that.
“It’s cool,” she says. “This works. It was smart thinking.”
She opens her arms and the dog rushes towards her, pressing its great head against her cheek. She scratches its ear and smiles at Domingo.
“How come your dog’s so big?” he asks.
“Cualli’s a special breed. He’s an attack dog.”
“Were those the gangsters?”
“Those were freelancers. Health and Sanitation must have tipped them off that there was something odd going on. Or somebody else did.”
“You were fast. Like really fast. Are all vampires like that? I’ve read a lot about the European ones and the Chinese, and how there’s all the infighting with them up north and if you go to Mexicali it’s like all run by the Chinese. But they say they’re all stiff, no? Jian shi and they can’t really be green, can they? I don’t know much about your type. Funny, it’s probably . . .”
“Please. Stop,” she says, pressing her fingers against her temples. “I don’t want to talk about vampires. Or gangs.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing.”
Domingo wants to talk about everything. He sits in front of her, brimming with questions as she curls up and closes her eyes.
This is how a vampire sleeps. Not in coffins. Curled up, with a dog by her feet and a boy watching her.
He gets up early and goes above ground. It’s raining, so he ties a plastic shopping bag to his head as he heads to purchase food. He buys bread, milk, three cans of beans, potato chips and pastries. He feels very happy as he pays for the stuff, like it’s Christmas.
On the way back, he scans the screens at the subway in search of news. There’s nothing about the confrontation of the previous day.
As he stands in the subway car, listening to the tired music on his player, he conjures a story in which he’s making breakfast for his girlfriend, and she’s real pretty and they live together. Not in the tunnels. In a proper place.
When he returns to the tunnel he’s humming a tune.
She’s sitting, back against the wall, browsing through a bunch of magazines. When she looks up at him, the tune dies on his lips.
“Where did you go?”
“I went to get us breakfast.”
“I don’t need breakfast. It was stupid of you. Someone might have seen you.”
“Sorry,” he mutters and then, tentatively, to diffuse her anger. “How do you like my collection?”
“It’s great,” she says quirking an eyebrow at him and jumping up to her feet, showing him the cover of a comic book. “Not a fanboy, huh?”
It’s an old-style thing with a guy in a Dracula cape. She picks another one. This is a recent clipping from a magazine he stole a few weeks before. It talks about the narco-vampires in Monterrey.
He wets his lips, struggling for words. “Why are you angry?”
“I am not a goddamn hobby.”
“Who’s talking about a hobby?”
She shoves the magazine against his chest, pushing him back.
“Do you like vampires? Huh? You like reading about them? You like looking at the pictures of dead vampires?”
“Yeah, well . . . it’s exciting.”
“Do you know how long my kind can live? Three hundred years. You know what’s the average lifespan of my kind? Thirty years. Do you want to know why?”
Domingo does not answer. She’s grabbing him by his shirt, holding him up.
“Because we’re all getting massacred. Before I arrived in to Mexico City, I was at the market in Ciudad Juarez. The decapitated body of a vampire bled onto the pavement, right next to a food stand. People kept eating. They bought soda. They were more bothered by the heat than the corpse.”
She sets him down. His feet touch the floor.
“I’m going to be a puddle of blood.”
He’s scared to say a thing. She sits down, folding her legs and staring at the wall. Eventually, he sits next to her.
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
“Hell if I know,” she whispers. “I need to eat. I need to sleep. I need to think.”
He pulls up his sleeve, offering his arm to her. She smiles wryly.
“You’re going to get hurt one of these days,” she tells him, “if you keep helping strangers like me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he replies.
She presses her mouth against his skin.
Domingo is groggy when he opens his eyes. Atl’s still asleep. He doesn’t try to wake her. He flicks a battery-powered lantern on and looks at his magazines
, feeling odd when he runs his hands across the vivid picture; the splashes of red.
The dog growls. Domingo lifts the lantern and listens. He doesn’t hear anything. The dog growls louder. Atl shifts her body, fully awake.
“What is it?” he asks.
“People,” she says.
He still can’t hear anything. Atl grabs her bag and pulls out a switchblade.
“Cualli, stay,” she tells the dog, then raises her eyes towards him. “Don’t move. The dog will keep you safe.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to take a look,” she says.
She runs out. Domingo crouches next to the dog, trying to listen for anything odd. The tunnels are quiet for a bit, then he hears loud sounds. Might be gunshots. The sounds seem to be getting closer. He’s nervous, heart beating very fast. He twists the dog’s leash between his hands.
Atl returns; she’s running and her face is very tense.
“Lead me out of here,” she says.
Domingo scrambles ahead of her, holding his lantern. He turns left and finds himself face to face with three people wearing a mask and goggles. They raise their guns. He blinks and is yanked back, thrown against the floor. The air is knocked out of his lungs.
There’s the zing of bullets; the loud blast of a shotgun. Domingo covers his ears. One of them lunges past Atl, towards him. Atl plucks him back, her claws and teeth tear the protective mask apart and she bites into the man’s face.
The man is trying to escape and Atl bites into his face like he is a ripe fruit.
The dog is also biting, tearing.
Domingo looks dumbly at all the blood.
“The place is crawling with them,” she says, angrily. “They must have followed you back. You’ve got to lead us out.”
“We’ve got to keep going straight,” he mumbles, picking the lantern off the floor.
The light illuminates a shadow, the figure of another man with a mask coming just behind Atl.
“Look out!” he yells.
The man’s head rolls onto the floor.
It literally rolls onto the floor.
Atl’s fingers are stained crimson. Brains are splattered over her jacket.
It’s his turn to vomit.
Dozens of mariachis in charro costumes litter Garibaldi Plaza. They’re waiting for someone to hire them to play a song and do not pay attention to two dirty beggars with a stray dog. That’s what Atl and Domingo look like, covered in grime and dirt after running through the tunnels.
“I’m heading to Guatemala, kid,” Atl says, her bag balanced on her left shoulder.
“Do you have friends there?”
“No.”
“Sure. I’ll go,” he says.
She stares at him.
“You’re going to need to feed,” he says. “You’ll need someone to watch your back.”
“I don’t need help.”
“I can shoot a gun,” he blusters.
“You’ve almost died twice in less than a week.”
“The life expectancy of a street kid isn’t much higher than yours,” he says, knowing he’s got nowhere to go. There’s nothing but forward.
She smirks. “Find another way to commit suicide.”
She slips a couple of bills into his hand.
“Atl,” he says.
“Keep the dog,” she replies, handing him the leash. “It’ll slow me down.”
She takes a couple of steps. The dog whines.
“Stay with him,” she orders.
“Atl,” he repeats.
She walks away. She doesn’t turn her head. He tries following her, but the square is crowded at this time of the night and he loses her quickly. She must have flown away. Can vampires fly? He’ll never know.
She’s gone.
A trio sings “La Cucaracha” while the rain begins to fall. He sniffles, eyes watery.
He pulls his plastic bag from his pocket and ties it above his head. He’s out of chocolate. He’s out of luck. He pats the dog’s head.
nothing but sky overhead
DAVID LIVINGSTONE CLINK
Everyone in the world had died, save those who were outside in their back gardens, and those who had nothing but sky overhead. These survivors spent weeks burying or burning the dead, cart after cart relieved of their burdens, passing by acres of upturned earth, smoke filling an already grey sky. People took to farms to save the livestock, to live off the land. They fished from the ends of half-constructed bridges, sandwiches made from fresh-baked bread and yesterday’s kill sitting warmly in their stomachs.
the kiss of the blood-red
pomegranate
KRISTIN JANZ
The door swung closed behind me with a click that kept ringing in my ears for seconds afterwards.
“Can I help you?” the man said. He was the only other person in the room. I stared at him. He looked suspicious.
I was still too shaken to answer. It isn’t every night you get hauled off at gunpoint to Central Park and forced to walk down a flight of stairs conjured out of thin air.
“Hello?” Now the man was both suspicious and irritated. “This area is restricted. Can I
call someone to escort you to your hotel?”
I was in a windowless room, something like the offspring of a boutique hotel’s lobby and the smoking lounge of an elderly British gentleman. About a mile underneath New York City, if I had judged the distance correctly.
My eyes met those of the un-welcoming committee. Of average height and build, in his early thirties, he had longish dark hair and that Mediterranean complexion that I had always found irresistible. He didn’t fit the setting, in his faded jeans, black leather jacket and Dylan t-shirt.
“I don’t remember the name of my hotel,” I said evasively. Who was this guy? Did he work for Hammond?
“This isn’t it. How did you find this room?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I walked down the stairs. That door was at the bottom. I opened it—” —and here I was died on my lips. My hand dropped to my side, halfway through gesturing at the door behind me. The door that was no longer there.
The man was staring. “How did you get to the stairs?” He seemed a little less wary.
“I don’t remember,” I lied, then instantly regretted it as his suspicion returned in full force. I was no good at this investigative journalism thing. I guess that’s why The Times was only paying me to be a copy editor.
The man walked over to a desk beside one of the room’s two remaining doors, opened a thin drawer, withdrew a manila folder, and held it out to me.
“Look at the picture inside. Tell me if you recognize this man.” I approached. “Who is he? A friend of yours?”
He glanced behind me to where the door had been. I wondered if he had seen it appear and disappear.
“Yes,” he said at last.
I took the folder and let it fall open in my hands. Then I tried to hide my dismay, as my last hope that I could trust the Dylan fan melted away.
Of course I recognized the man in the picture. He was the one I had been investigating when James Hammond caught up with me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. What’s his name?” The man I was talking to didn’t seem to know anything about me, but I wasn’t going to gamble on the same being true of his friend.
He snatched the picture back and stowed it in its drawer. “David Hirsch.” The look on his face said I hadn’t fooled him, but that he didn’t think he had anything to lose by answering my question. “He’s a lawyer.” Yes, he was. Of Hirsch, Goldman & Green, specializing in mergers and acquisitions. One of their clients seemed to specialize in making people disappear.
“What’s the procedure for guests who forget the name of their hotel?” I asked.
He laughed, a quick, malicious bark. His thumb jerked toward the door behind him. “Step off the threshold and you’ll have guides falling over themselves to take care of you. They’ll know
where you belong.”
Off the threshold? Was there some kind of underground cavern beyond this room? I started to make my way toward the door. “Okay. Thanks for being so helpful.” I hoped he noticed my sarcasm.
I was almost there when he said, “Wait!” and grabbed my shoulder. My heart started racing. He held me at arm’s length, staring at me. “I should give you something,” he said. “It might save your life.”
He crossed the room to a tall, antique wooden cabinet and withdrew a covered wicker basket, which he handed to me. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here. But you deserve to be warned. Don’t eat anything out there.” One of his fingers tapped the basket’s wooden lid. “This is all from Upstairs. It’s safe.”
“Okay.” Now I was even more confused. Why wasn’t the food outside this room safe to eat? Were we in the middle of an underground nuclear testing facility?
“We’ll give you more if you lose that one. There’s no shortage.”
“I thought you said the area was restricted. How am I supposed to get back?”
He scowled. “Any guide can bring you. Ask for David and Adam.”
I ducked out the door, relieved to be getting away so easily. I wasn’t prepared for what I found there.
I was standing outside on a narrow dirt road, on one side an open field, on the other a hedge of leafless trees, gaunt black arms stretching toward a featureless grey sky. The room I had emerged from was gone.
My hands tightened around the handle of the basket. Buildings didn’t disappear. There was no sky thousands of feet below Central Park.
And mysterious billionaire financiers didn’t make staircases appear out of nowhere, either.
It was night. I could see, although no streetlights were visible, nor moon, nor stars. The faint light seemed to come from everywhere and from nowhere, and it made my surroundings even gloomier than if my only source of illumination had been a flashlight with half-dead batteries.
The silence was broken by the sound of rattling and creaking behind me. When I turned, I saw a carriage approaching.
The rickety carriage was drawn by four identical horses with pale coats of an unusual colour between grey and dark ivory. Maybe it was the light, but I could have sworn I saw a greenish tinge to their ears and muzzles. The coachman, a small androgynous figure with a hat that hid his or her face, turned to me as the carriage pulled up, and cackled.
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Page 35