Familiars

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

“Since when does the Gentry micro-manage?”

  “They don’t usually, it’s just… what’s the sudden interest?”

  “If you’re working somewhere it’s good to know the business from the ground floor up, right?”

  “Thought you were quitting.”

  “I’m hedging my bets.”

  A moment and then Lucy smiled and nodded. She reached in the Audi and grabbed a small black backpack hidden under her seat. It was an old canvas thing with a wonky zipper that was acquired at a county fair in Northern California. It housed her “tools”: a tiny UV light, a pry bar, a CO2-powered ballistic knife that held three long silver blades, a fist-sized pistol, and a small centrifuge-like contraption that was taped to several vials of liquids.

  Evan hated the idea of actual violence and because the backpack symbolized that to him, he loathed it. He’d dreamed of tossing the thing away and had gotten up the stones to hide it a time or two, but in each instance she’d found it.

  “You’re actually bringing that?” he said of the backpack.

  “You wouldn’t expect a cop to walk a beat without cuffs and a Glock would you?”

  “But we’re not cops. We… we’re Familiars.”

  Her face fell at this.

  “That’s certainly an archaic term and has been since ‘The Change,’ which you’re well aware of, mister.”

  “We’re glorified bullet stoppers.”

  “Bullets can’t stop them.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Whatever, Evan. I’m tired of the snark so if you’re coming let’s go.”

  Lucy checked the pistol’s magazine and then secreted the weapon near the small of her back. She slipped on the backpack and signaled for Evan to grab the handcart and follow. The pair soon found themselves standing in shadows cast by the ships that were so dense they nearly turned dusk to midnight.

  Evan followed Lucy who consulted a map on her smartphone as the two nimbled over a path made of wooden planks the width of a large man’s shoulders.

  The sounds of men conversing and jawing mixed with the whine of engines on lifting machines somewhere off in the distance. Lucy and Evan steered away from this, moving to an older section of the port.

  The ground was soon spongy and small herds of insects flew sorties around Evan’s head as he swatted ineffectively at them. More vessels were visible up ahead, smaller ones, older, far less impressive than the mighty ships they’d seen before. They made their way to a sad-looking dry bulk cargo container whose exterior was tagged with Turkish lettering.

  Evan pointed at the lettering.

  “Is that Turkish for ‘Demeter’”?

  Lucy ignored this, moving around the side of the ship. There were two ways onto it: a metal ladder bolted to the side, and a ramp that had been lowered on the aft of the vessel.

  They entered the hold via the ramp and the tiny hairs on Evan’s forearm immediately stood at attention. The air dripped with the miasma of decay and nothing stirred. Not even an insect.

  Evan looked back and could see clouds of gnats hovering just outside the ramp. It was as if there was some invisible field that prevented them from moving inside.

  He looked ahead to see boxes and containers of all sizes strewn across the hold.

  “We better hurry.”

  “Cool your jets,” she said while hunting through the containers.

  “You know what happens when the sun goes down.”

  At this, she glanced back.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know how their kind is.”

  “‘Their kind’?”

  “You’d prefer I say-”

  She held up a hand to silence him.

  “Don’t – do not call your Uncle that.”

  “He’s not my real Uncle.”

  “And you’re not to use that word. The ‘V’ word. It’s offensive to them. It – it’s a slur, okay?”

  “What would you have me call him?”

  “How about his name?”

  “Gideon Redmayne?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “Right, because that totally doesn’t scream the ‘V’ word at all.”

  “You’re a snot, Evan.”

  “Come from a long line of ‘em,” he replied, turning, scanning the things in front of him. He set the handcart down and spied crates of clothes from Indonesia, barrels of Olive Oil from Greece, and cases from China overflowing with plastic dolls.

  One of the dolls had spilled through a gap on the case, a tiny female baby with a lazy eye that was fixed on Evan. For an instant the doll’s visage resembled someone Evan had seen in the past. A nameless face from one of the young, usually pretty women that he and his mother had periodically disposed of. There had been a few men as well, a teenager in Arizona and a middle-aged father in South Carolina, but the women always came back to him.

  There was the redhead in Sarasota, for instance, and the tall one with the gapped teeth and excellent legs in Chicago, and the young girl from back on the beach who made cameos in Evan’s nightmares every now and again. She’d been about his age when it happened.

  Evan heard the low throbbing of drums. They weren’t real of course, he knew that. The sound began as little more than a whisper and increased in intensity depending on the circumstances. Lucy and the doctors had chalked it up to some kind of tinnitus or Evan’s fascination with drumming, but Evan thought of it as, among other things, his natural “Spidey Sense.” Whenever danger was near, the drums would start to thrum.

  “Bingo,” Lucy said and Evan nearly jumped out of his shoes.

  He backtracked and vaulted over a heap of wooden boxes to the far corner of the ship. Lucy had a penlight on, sweeping it in the general direction of a long, nondescript pine box. The box was nestled amongst a series of metal lockers in an area of the ship cloaked in shadows.

  “The shape. It looks… different,” he muttered.

  “They’re using irregular boxes now,” she replied with a nod.

  “To avoid detection?”

  “To reduce waste. These new ones use twenty-percent less material than the old ones.”

  A snicker escaped from Evan’s mouth.

  “They’re being eco-sensitive?”

  She looked back at him and flashed the light in his eyes.

  “They’re the original recyclers if you think about it.”

  She thought this was awfully witty and offered a smile to Evan that wasn’t returned.

  “You gonna help me here or what, bub?”

  Evan stepped toward Lucy and the air near the box felt charged, like it did before a summer squall. Evan’s goosebumps soon had goosebumps and in the final few steps a deep coldness gripped him and he noticed a dead bird lying at the side of the box.

  “Don’t you need to check or something?” he asked, Lucy sliding the lifting straps under the box.

  “Yes, sometimes I check.”

  “Well, we should probably do that now. We don’t wanna hump the wrong dude out of here, right?”

  Lucy stared open-mouthed at Evan and then she slid her pry bar under the outer edge of the box. She found the smallest of gaps and jimmied the bar in and then tugged back. The wood groaned and then the staples holding the wood together pulled free.

  Lucy gripped the box’s lid and a funk, an almost biological stench, seeped out as the lid eased back. The interior was veiled in darkness and then a sliver of illumination from Lucy’s penlight ricocheted off the boat’s ceiling and reflected the pearlescent eyes of the man who slumbered inside.

  Evan immediately thought of a time down in Texas when he’d spooked an opossum with a fireworks sparkler. The man in the box had the same kind of eyes which appeared to be covered by some kind of marble-white membrane.

  Aside from his eyes, the man in the box was large jointed with a shock of sandy-colored hair, of indeterminate age, and his long face and high cheekbones gave him the look of a someone who was famished. He simultaneously sickened and intrigued Evan.<
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  “Jesus,” Evan whispered.

  “What?” she said, closing the box’s lid.

  “It’s been a while, but… he looks so old.”

  “He is.”

  “I mean old even for his kind.”

  “Don’t say that. You’ll hurt his feelings.”

  “Dad always said they’re like bears. In hibernation. Can’t hear a thing.”

  Lucy snapped off the light and used the heel of her shoe to press the staples back into place.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Evan and Lucy hefted the box and with some effort hauled it onto the handcart and then worked it slowly back outside until they were able to place it in the rear of the Audi. Lucy made sure to shroud the box with a set of old curtains she’d copped from the ship. When that was done she climbed into the car and slumped in the shotgun seat. Evan stared at the dashboard.

  “Are we evil, Lucy?”

  She blinked and then her eyes found his.

  “How could you say that?”

  “We just picked up a man who’s been alive for, like, several hundred years to hide him in a basement from people and things that want to kill him. It’s a reasonable question given the circumstances.”

  “Can you just drive?”

  “Can you answer the question?”

  “You have a way of making things sound so… sinister sometimes, Evan.”

  Evan keyed the ignition, but didn’t put the Audi in gear.

  “Fine, okay,” Lucy said, drumming her fingers across the dashboard. “Let me ask you a question. Are zoo-keepers evil because they toss meat to the lions?”

  “No, I guess not,” Evan said after some thought.

  “Because they’re just facilitating what comes naturally to the lions, right?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “So there you go.”

  “So that’s what we are? Facilitators? Zoo-keepers?”

  “In a sense.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Lucy’s eyebrows elevated.

  “It’s the family business, son.”

  “Since when is indentured servitude a family business?”

  Lucy wouldn’t dignify that with a response, preferring instead to stare straight ahead. Evan studied her face and knowing there was little percentage in continuing the discussion, he wrenched the Audi into gear and drove off.

  Chapter Four

  After navigating the downtown city streets north of the port for twenty minutes, the Audi stopped before a string of rowhouses in an area the locals called “Sandtown.” Sandtown was once known as the Harlem of Baltimore, but had, like most parts of the city, fallen on hard times.

  More than a third of the houses in Sandtown were abandoned, unemployment was at twenty-percent, and it had more people in prison than any other neighborhood in all of Baltimore. It was a place where people hid or hunkered down before moving on to other, better places.

  It was nearly dark out and the streetlamps were sizzling to life, casting light over a passel of older men that Evan watched from the Audi. They were shooting the shit on sagging stone stoops while delegations of younger teens rode bikes or tossed around old footballs. Beyond the outer edge of the light, however, Evan could make out more sinister happenings: older teens smoking and throwing mock punches and exchanging small objects that he couldn’t quite make out.

  “Jesus, could you have picked a sketchier place to drop anchor?”

  “You’re always complaining.”

  “I think this is where they filmed ‘The Wire.’”

  “Well, it is largely African American and that’s a good thing. They’re not as nosy as white folks, Evan, you know that. They’re also more understanding of differences and distrustful of the cops which means less chance of them reporting us.”

  “Pretty sure that’s some kind of soft racism, Lucy.”

  “The world we live in,” she replied with a shrug. “There’s an alley around back where the movers delivered our stuff.”

  Evan drove through the alley, piloting the Audi between a chain-link fence that protected a backyard garage made of warped, wooden planks. A set of stormdoors had been thrown up on the back of the rowhouse.

  Lucy and Evan exited the Audi and grabbed the pine box and lugged it across the backyard. In the past they’d taken great pains to conceal the placement of the box when moving out in the open: covering it with blankets or causing a distraction or waiting until the blue of night to move it in. Recent experience, however, had taught them that you were less likely to get noticed doing something that seemed part of your regular routine.

  They paused near the stormdoors and Evan looked into the basement. The floor appeared to be equal parts crumbling cement and dirt, the walls made of quarried stone.

  Evan hated places like this.

  He hated how they had basements with sodden walls built of disintegrating stone or saturated cement block that seemed like an afterthought. He hated how you could close your eyes and listen to things dripping and smell the sour old funk of disuse. He hated their ancient, uneven floors and small rooms and copper wiring that frayed and caught fire if you turned on too many electrical thingies at once. And he hated, perhaps most of all, how they spoke of his (and his mom’s) station in life.

  Amongst the Familiars and those they served there was a caste system. People didn’t like to talk about it, but it existed nonetheless. If you worked directly for one of the original families you lived in castles and high-rise apartments and yachts and mansions overlooking great bodies of water. You served and protected the kinds of graceful creatures you saw in movies and books. The ones possessed of the vague melancholy of the born beautiful, prancing around in velvet suits and silly hats to show off gym-torqued bodies as they frolicked with starlets and the well-heeled. The underworld’s version of the one-percent.

  If, however, you worked for the offspring of these core families or (God forbid), the offspring of offspring, you slummed in places like Sandtown. You were, in the world of Familiars, little more than a blue-collar laborer who served things that were sloppy and unbalanced and intentionally kept out of sight in third and fourth-tier cities.

  Oh, there were always stories about Familiars working their way up the ladder, but usually those kinds of things happened to younger people. Lucy was on the wrong side of forty and had lost her husband in the line of duty so the way things were was how they would probably always be.

  Evan sighed.

  “Nice digs.”

  “Don’t knock it,” Lucy said, “free room and board.”

  There didn’t appear to be a light anywhere so Evan whipped out his cellphone as Lucy raised a finger in protest.

  “Relax,” he said, “it’s not like I’m gonna put him up on Instagram or something.”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Social media.”

  “My guess is it’s neither social nor media,” Lucy replied with a snort.

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty going on eighty.”

  Evan waved the cellphone to get his bearings and then he and Lucy lifted the box and dropped down a short set of wooden steps. They moved across the basement and wedged the box near an old boiler, much like they’d done in countless other buildings on more occasions that Evan could remember.

  They backtracked and stared at the wooden box. Lucy folded her arms across her chest. A small congregation of rats scurried near their feet.

  “Free range, organic rodents,” Evan said. “Nice.”

  “No, not nice at all.”

  Lucy frowned and pointed to an area near the box where the Gentry’s movers had dropped off some of their belongings, including several metal lockers. They both knew that the lockers contained dry ice and a healthy supply of blood for Gideon.

  The boxes were on their sides, either dropped or errantly unloaded. There was a gash in the side of each and red liquid could be seen seeping out.

  Evan groaned.

 
“Don’t even tell me-”

  “We need to make a run tonight,” she said.

  They retreated back up the steps and closed the stormdoors. Lucy reached in her pocket and pulled out a chain-lock. She fastened it around the door’s handles and then tugged back on the lock to test it.

  “C’mon, mom, I’m gassed.”

  “You think I’m not?”

  Evan’s head dropped. He knew she was going to ask him about the places he’d researched online. The ones that potentially housed food for Gideon.

  “You have the address?”

  He turned and stared down the street, catching sight of someone staring at him from a window. The person (he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman), quickly vanished behind a set of curtains.

  “Yeah,” Evan finally said, “I found us a place.”

  “How well is it stocked?”

  “It’s solid,” he said softly. “Chock full of the red stuff.”

  Chapter Five

  A little after eleven, the Audi slipstreamed through the inner portions of Baltimore. It dipped down through a naughty part of the city, easing past a block of neon-bathed juke joints and peel parlors on Baltimore Street, then lapped up and around Saint Paul Street. Lucy stared outside until the Audi stopped near a veterinary clinic housed in a semi-industrial area.

  “Sure they have a supply?”

  “Four people on Yelp say they do.”

  “We’re relying on Yelp now?”

  “You asked me to gather intel.”

  “I meant reliable intel.”

  “Next time specify.”

  She grumbled as he pulled the car over in a parking lot outside a dormant earth-moving company. Lucy and Evan sat in the car, staring at the vet clinic. There was a single light on inside the establishment, but no sign of movement. Better yet, there was no fence around it and no bars on the windows.

  “Think they’ve got security?” she asked.

  “What kind of lunatics want to steal animal blood at night?”

  “Just you and me, pumpkin,” Lucy said, manufacturing an oversized smile.

  They crouch-ran down the street, making sure to keep to the shadows. Evan carried an insulated duffel bag while Lucy clutched a small attaché case that contained several items that allowed easy access into most places: a set of lock-picks (including one fixed to the end of an Oral-B electric toothbrush), a small screwdriver, a pry-bar, and a long, thin knife.