by Axel Taiari
A LIGHT TO STARVE BY
By Axel Taiari
Originally published in Eternal Night: A Vampire Anthology
(Living Dead Press, 2010)
The author would like to thank, in no particular order:
Living Dead Press for believing in this story.
The ridiculously talented Boden Steiner for the cover art.
Chris Deal, Mlaz Corbier and Sean P. Ferguson for spotting a handful of typographical errors.
All the writers, readers, lurkers, and hell raisers at The Velvet.
Stephen Graham Jones, Joe Hill and Laird Barron for their terrific and terrifying stories.
You, for reading this.
“A brave man's blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble.”
-Bram Stoker
“The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him.”
-Garrett Fort
A LIGHT TO STARVE BY
The starving tore us apart. It began with a few rumbles over who would drink who and when. The arguments turned to grudges, feuds, claw fights, gang battles and then bloomed into a full-blown civil war. The more organized clans traded clean humans like rare diamonds, keeping them chained in underground lairs and milking them like your average bovine. They fed them rich meals, kept them healthy and drained their blood bit by bit every week, filling vials with their juices and selling the vials to buy more humans. Every clean human death became a miniature tragedy. The loners like me, we morphed from hunters into buyers. One night you’re emptying a schoolgirl’s tasty veins, blood gushing from your lips, a grin etched on your face, and the week after that you’re breaking into flats and stealing jewelry to pay for your next hit.
We laughed at the mentalists when their struggle started. The hum of electricity was a minor annoyance. After that, radios gave them headaches or made them puke. Then the television revolution, the tide of cell phones and the wireless Internet boom brought forth a new invisible hell. Mentalists taking the train at night would randomly shriek when the meat-sack next to them would get a call from his lover. Humans swamped the air. The mentalists, they shied away from cities, fearful of the signals. Silence became their haven. They retreated to the forests and the deserts, fighting over territory with the werewolves. Most of them starved, went insane or were murdered and pissed on by the shape-shifters. The more desperate ones would try to walk back into the cities despite the pain and maybe they’d get too close to an antenna, and their brains would gloriously erupt into flesh fireworks before splash-painting the pavement. The humans couldn’t ignore the supernatural anymore and blood and mind suckers alike became public knowledge. Still we laughed at the mentalists while we kept drinking. Then the vaccine was invented, and we didn’t laugh so hard anymore.
The Paris sidewalks gleam with evaporating rain. Saturday night in the starless city. Walk past the Saint Michel fountain as street dancers sweat and pop joints beneath chest-thumping bass lines. Nudge myself between dumb tourists and dumber teenagers, their savory warmth blasting a constellation of shotgun holes through my stomach. The streetlights unveil the dancers’ perfect bodies, heartbeats and frantic blood flow compelling their veins to stand out. Saliva rushes into my mouth and I descend into the Latin Quarter’s stinky alleyways before my mind breaks into smithereens. I slither past endless waves of potential meals as they clog their arteries with gyros and trade jokes in foreign tongues. Get the hell out of the cramped streets, head for the riverbanks. The Seine’s flat surface soothes me. Every few minutes, bateaux mouches drift past, the passengers throw waves my way and I wave back thinking, you’re nothing to me. I hide under a bridge, fuse with the shadows and ignite a cigarette to relieve the hunger. I stay still as the minutes race by and the ripening hours cocoon the city to sleep. Not too long after I finish my pack, I see her walking along the river. Alone.
She doesn’t walk straight, drunk or high. Curly blond locks that cascade down to her waist and legs that stretch on for miles. She approaches the underpass while I shrink further back into the dark. Her scent reaches me before her. Once she’s close enough, I step out and wrap my hands around her neck. She lets out a yelp of shock. I dig my nose into her skin and inhale. She smells so dense and lovely I have to bite my tongue to shreds. Force her to turn around and face me. Her green eyes lock on my fangs and she relaxes under my grip.
You...you can’t hurt me, she says. I got the shot.
I can still kill you, I hiss. Unwrap your guts and dump you in the Seine. Don’t have to drink you.
Oh god. What do you want?
Moments later I ride the metro, her wallet in my pockets, along with her phone and music player, rings and necklace. Reduced to a scavenger. I choked her and left the body under the bridge as a present for the others to find. Give it twenty-four hours and the area will be infested with hunters, courtesy of the government.
Vampires starve the same way humans do: slowly. We’re not so much dead as caught between life and the casket. Our nerves still work. Pain is very, very real. Stick a stethoscope to my chest and behold my heart Morse-coding messages of life through my torso. Mucus and tears, sweat and hair growth - our bodies mimic life. But spend enough weeks without a hint of blood and your fat and muscle flutter away, black bags pop out from under your eyes and your skin turns chalk white. You lose control of your extremities, your reflexes as torpid as underwater uppercuts, rot resuming its march and jet-lagging your neural circuits from beyond the grave. It takes months to die of starvation, but the more you look, react and smell like the corpse you are, the more likely people will spot you. What works: stake through the heart or brain, silver bullets blessed with Mesopotamian prayers, severing our heads off, fire, losing too much blood from our wounds. What makes us laugh: holy water, crosses, prayers, religion in general, begging for mercy, delusional Goth kids idolizing our lives. The sun? An itching annoyance, the equivalent of walking butt-naked through poison ivy.
I get off at Charonne and embrace the streets. A few months back, Chateau d’Eau would have been my destination, but the Ames Perdues got exterminated. Hunters blew up the reinforced steel doors and burst into their hotel, machine-gunned the Perdues down with silver bullets. Fourteen brothers and sisters gone. They freed the few humans kept in the cellar, then torched the place with a healthy dose of gasoline and ruthless arms nursing flame-throwers. They left the hotel burn on into the night as a warning, the inferno licking the skyline while they watched and patted each other on the back. A shame, but the Ames Perdues were running greedy and failed to deliver a few vials of blood to other clans. No doubt the competition got pissed and informed the authorities of their location.
I stroll the barren streets in a hurry, the hunger tracing throbbing glyphs in my insides. Fresh propaganda clings to brick walls, depicting a man looming over a city shrouded in darkness. He exhibits cartoonish fangs, along with a face smeared with white powder and ketchup-like blood splatters. Beneath him you can read, IS YOUR NEIGHBOR A BLOODSUCKER? ALERT YOUR NEAREST CHURCH FOR A HANDSOME REWARD, followed by two phone numbers: the first for the Church’s help line, the other for the police’s supernatural department.
I reach David’s place and knock on the door five times, pause, then three more times. He unlocks a myriad of bolts, opens up, takes one whiff at me and goes, shit, you don’t look so alive.
David haunts a crummy studio he bought back in the late forties. He was a salesman, a damn good one - if not the best. Now one of the last independent blood dealers in Paris, for those of us who don’t want to, or can’t, deal with clans. He uses his grandfather’s name to fake his way through official paperwork and does it well. Hordes of candles garrison the place, fashioning restless shadows all around us. No electricity or Intern
et. No television or radio. Old habits die hard: his ex was a mentalist. A pretty redheaded thing, small and thin, but strongly attuned to the static. The girl could liquefy bones with the bat of an eyelash, unbind molecules with a sneeze. She went berserk when all the white noise cajoled her away from sanity, heard the angels’ voices heralding the Rapture and she tried to kill her lover for a front-row seat in Heaven. David never talked about what he did to her then, but the fight must have been brutal: multiple reddish scars deep as craters landscape his face, mangled flesh like strips of raw meat dangling where his right ear used to be. He inserted a blizzard-white prosthesis in his vacated eye-socket.
He invites me to sit down on the stained avocado couch. He offers me a cup of jet-black coffee he heated up using a pot placed over a portable butane stove.
I’d rather have something thicker, I say.
No can do, says David. He slides a hand over his shaved skull and shakes his head.
The hell do you mean?
I’m out of blood. More busts in the suburbs, haven’t you heard.
Shit. What are you running on?
Nothing, he says, his scars writhing with each facial expression. No shipments anymore. Last meal was a couple of days ago. Found an untreated bum while I was making enquiries up north. So completely desperate I risked it, wasn’t sure if I were going to die or not. Tasted like crap but hey, you take what you get. And they’re getting rare. You?
I can’t remember the last time I ate.
He sighs and offers me a look dripping with empathy.
David, I got money. I whip out the cash and jewelry and gadgets.
Brother, he says, not even looking at the goods, I know you’re trustworthy. I just don’t have anything for you or anyone else.
What am I supposed to do?
David lights up a cigarette and doesn’t offer me one. He looks away for a short spell before saying, maybe we ought to leave town.
And go where?
I don’t know, he shrugs. Migrate with the others to some of those third world countries I can’t even pronounce the name of. Shit-holes with governments in ruin and limited access to the vaccine. I’m gonna go soon I think.
How long will that last, I say. Few years, maybe a couple of decades before they catch up and the rest of the world make the vaccine mandatory all over the planet. Then you’re back to basics, except you’re in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere.
Maybe, but it’s a few years of peace.
I’m not coming, I say. Paris is my home.
All right, all right. You want a cigarette?
No. Tell me where I can find some blood, man.
I don’t know.
Come on, there has to be something somewhere.
David sucks on his smoke for a long while after that, blowing unstable rings toward the ceiling. There’s this rumor going around, okay.
I’m all ears.
Hunters.
What about them?
They don’t vaccine themselves.
Where did you hear this bullshit?
The Pure. They captured a hunter and had one of their offspring taste his blood. Then they tortured him for a while and got the truth out of him.
The Pure are insane. They drink each other, for fuck’s sake. You believe this crap?
David thinks for a moment. Maybe. Part of the Church’s code. Something about, if you’re weak enough to get your blood sucked, maybe you deserve to die anyway.
Jesus.
So now you know. All I can offer.
Dawn will drag Paris out of its slumber in a couple of hours. Before heading home, I stop by Porte d’Orléans, on the edge of town. Stride for a while beneath the drizzle, hidden under the hood of my sweatshirt.
The house sits alone on a lost street where detritus litter the gutter and the city’s persistent roar turns into a muffled growl. A coat of dust and dirt blindfolds the windows. Frail light strains to shine through, a weak sign of life from inside. Now and again, a phantom wanders past the windows, looks outside for visitors, for painful memories to resurface, step on the porch and say hello. The ghost doesn’t notice me, lurking in the trees on the other side of the street. I watch it pace back and forth for a fistful of minutes. When it doesn’t reappear and the house falls prey to blackness, I climb down, light a cigarette, and head home.
I know this house. I bought it a lifetime ago. I have watched over it thousands of nights. Or rather, I have watched over the woman inside.
I was born in the heat of World War Two, in the south of France. Years later, growing up on the farm, my father would tailor epic tales of being part of the French resistance, stories of my mother raising my sisters and I while dad was off slitting Nazi throats and smuggling goods and missives to nearby villages. After his smoking and drinking forced his heart to yield, my mother confided he had never fought. I was the kid that saved him from the war, the fourth child allowing him to legally take care of the family. He was gone at night because he scavenged empty houses, bringing back hidden jewelry and squirreled away money to keep us fed. Half a century later, I picture a frightened man rummaging through war-torn hovels for his family’s survival, and I remember his lies with fondness.
Cell phone’s alarm chirps at seven thirty two pm, nineteen minutes after the sun disappears. Home: a rapidly collapsing hotel in Pigalle, where rooms are rented by the hour unless you punctuate your sentences with threat-laced words or promises of money and drugs. My last victim’s MP3 player paid for this week’s bill. At any given hour, women with voices eroded by tobacco manufacture gasps of pleasure or pain that slash through the thin walls. Drug dealers and pimps exchange knife wounds on a monthly basis. The receptionist greets you with a loaded hunting carbine. The police and army never come here: the French mafias control the area. Five hundred meters uphill, naive tourists saturate camera rolls with pictures of Paris from atop the Sacré Coeur, minds and hearts ablaze with awe for the most romantic city in the world.
When I step out of bed I trip over my own feet and nearly kiss the ground. I barely slept, shock waves in my intestines kept me twisting and turning. A mouth drier than bleached bones crafted nightmarish images, fountains of blood geysering out of bottomless wounds found on the bodies of dying beauties. I lean against the wall for a while, praying for the pulsing headache to evaporate and the hallucinatory locust to scatter out of view. A long cold shower and an entire bar of soap refuse to banish the stink escaping from my pores. I put on clean-ish clothes and head off into the night.
The plan for tonight is to mug more people, and try to barter with other clans. I am a well-known loner, but not a betrayer, and that may grant me access to a fresh vial assuming I can pay the price.
Sunday night turns this city into a ghost town. I sit alone in the metro and stare at my skeletal reflection, then shy away from it. Before my nightly routine, I decide to take an early detour by Porte d’Orléans. I need to see her, if only for an ephemeral second.
Out of the metro and another cigarette keeps me company. I reach the empty street, and stop in front the house. A flickering lamppost trickles yellowish light on the pavement. The house itself is pitch-black, its windows empty of life. I crouch and wait, hoping. But no light appears. This is not normal. There’s a talon hooked in my guts, but not from hunger. For more than thirty years, the house lights have been on at night, every single day of every year. When she was out - trying to rebuild a life I had ripped away from her, the light was still on. During power outages and storms, candles would replace bulbs.
This is not normal.
More minutes stutter by as the worry grows within me.
Then for a nanosecond, the blackness ruptures, replaced by a blue ray zooming by inside the house - a flashlight. I dash across the street, rogue fangs exploding out of my gums, a swarm of anger abuzz in my every muscle, into the garden and up the stairs silent as a thief and I kick the door in, blowing apart the joints, the frame slamming against the hallway wall. Crash-dive past the kitchen, where the cupboar
ds and drawers lay wide open, papers, letters, silverware and dishes strewn about, and into the living room, where a crouching man waits for me, pointing a flashlight in my face with one hand, holding a gun in the other. The shot goes off and I dodge over the couch, roll behind it as more gunshots rip through the fabric but fail to reach me. One two three soundless seconds and I jump over the couch again, another shot goes off, an arctic cold stab radiating through my shoulder, meaningless and fleeting and I’m on the intruder, my hand smacking his gun away, shouting where is she, where is she, while I dig claws into his chest, blood spilling out. He screams then hurls a legion of wild punches at my head. I grab his arm, break it and laugh at the crackling harmony of snapping bones, pin him to the floor harder then prepare myself to feed. Get my mouth close to his neck, can’t stop myself, way past the loss of control, the thirst insatiable, never ending. Lips pressed against his skin, the fat vein there waiting for me, but then the bullet hole in my shoulder blossoms into something more, an unbearable torment driving me to shriek and leeching away all my strength. I slap at it in a frenzy, cursing the internal conflagration scorching my nerves, but it spreads through me and I’m on the floor, rolling and writhing, fighting back my body’s impending shutdown, unable to comprehend. The intruder jumps on me and simply smiles, overpowering me with ease now and a tattooed cross on his forehead tells me all I need to know. A hunter. His useless right arm dangles by his side, but with the left arm he digs inside his jacket with a grin. I slam the back of my head into the wooden floor, summoning consciousness with more pain as a galaxy of sunspot flares implode beneath my skin and while he’s sitting on me, I knee him in the crotch then reach for his throat with one hand, choking him, speed jabbing him with the other. We roll on the floor and I’m on him again, break his other arm, no laughter this time, my pixelated vision crashing then rebooting itself while he screeches his lungs out, a desperate cry aborted within a split-second because I’m still choking him, crushing his windpipe. Air soon expires, his puffed up eyes roll back, and he’s out.