Well, in this case, mother.
Here are the terms of the deal: if I’m a “good guy,” if I’m not “like them,” I’ll save Mommy Dearest. I’ll presumably do this by vamping her. Do I really need to tell you how bad an idea this is? The blood on Isuzu is already drying, or at least gluey. And there are bits of…tissue…in her hair. By the time we get to wherever her mom is, there isn’t going to be anything left to save. It’s like I’m some TV repair guy and here comes this kid, holding nothing but a limp cord, asking, “Can you fix it?” Where do I even start?
“Um,” I say, and then immediately worry that it might sound like “yum,” like the sinister noise it isn’t. Or at least not yet.
“Listen,” I add, to interrupt—to derail, defuse, deflect. To put something other than a maybe-yum out there between us.
“Sweetheart,” I continue. It just slips out without me thinking. Until after it slips out, after which I think plenty. Like: Taste-related endearments are probably just as bad as “yum.” But when I try to think of ones that aren’t, I get stuck.
Honey—no.
Sweetie—no.
Honey- and/or sweetie pie—no.
Kiddo?
Kiddo might work. I give it a try. “Listen, kiddo,” I say, starting over.
But Isuzu—my new sweetheart, my save-it-for-later yum—has already fallen into a kid trance, muttering the mantra “Please” over and over again. She knits her little fingers together so tight, her knuckles blanch. And then that praying, pleading knot of fingers starts to shake.
“Oh please, oh please, oh please…”
Her little two-tone eyes well up with tears. Clear ones, not the pink kind my kind squeeze out every so often. For show. Once in a blue moon. When hell freezes over.
I guess she and her mom must have been close or something. Go figure.
“Point,” I say, finally, when I can’t think of anything else.
When we get near to where her mother was last seen, I have Isuzu get out of the car and into the trunk. “Just in case,” I say, and she gets in without a peep. She’s good at that—at not making peeps. I guess that’s just one of those things you get good at, being a mortal in a world full of people like me. I guess you get good or you get gone.
Along the way, we’ve worked out a code of knocks, so she’ll know it’s me when I get back. Nothing elaborate—me:shave and a haircut; her:two bits —but at least it’s something. A little just-in-case, just in case.
It doesn’t take me long to find the mom or to confirm what I already know. It’s stopped raining and the full moon has slid out from behind some clouds, making the woods around me stark and skeletal. There’s a mix of trees—evergreens, never-greens, and sometime-greens—the last two leafless and bony-knuckled. Until tonight, Isuzu and her mom had been living in a hole in the ground, by which I do not mean some really run-down place or hermit’s shack, but areal hole dug in thereal ground, covered with a sheet of plywood and some AstroTurf that’s been painted brown, in honor of the season.
Inside the hole—which opens out into a decent-sized mud cellar, once you get past the bottleneck of the entrance—are two air mattresses, one large, one small, a bricked-off pit full of charred twigs, a laundry basket full of laundry, and a five-gallon jug of what turns out to be boiled rainwater. Shelves are dug into the walls and on some, tin cans stand with candles inside, while others sport small collections of books, the wizened spines bearing names like Stephen King, Anne Rice, Clive Barker.
If this were a sitcom, this is where I’d do the obligatory double take.Horror stories? Living in the middle of her very own tale from the crypt, and what does Mommy Dearest pick to read? Jesus! I guess you can’t stop human beings from being human, but still.
The rest of the hole is filled with cans of cat food, stacked in pyramid after pyramid. Isuzu and her mom were apparently living on the stuff, but before you rush to judge—stop. The dietary options for mortals are exceedingly few nowadays. For one thing, we don’t have grocery stores anymore—or rather, the grocery stores we have really don’t carry groceries, per se. We still have Kroger, A&P, and even Farmer Jack, as double-edged as that name is nowadays. But you can’t get milk in any of those places. You can’t get lunch meat or hot dogs or cans of Campbell’s soup. What you can get is soap, laundry detergent, moth balls, bug spray, lint rollers, theNational Enquirer, and lightbulbs, though nothing much above twenty-five watts.
And you can get pet food—Dog Chow, Cat Chow, Iguana, Spider Monkey, and Ring-Tailed Lemur Chow.
Vampires love their pets to death, and sometimes even farther. Of course, vamped pets don’t need Cat Chow; vamped pets share the same boring diet as their owners. But more often than not, we prefer our pets to stay disposable. They die right around the time we get bored with them, and then we get something else, working our way through the natural kingdom ever more exotically. Hence the iguanas, the spider monkeys, the lemurs of the ring-tailed kind.
I should add that it’s a pretty good time to be a pet, especially a disposable one. It’s a pretty good time because of all the leftovers from when mortals ran things. Canned food, for instance. Cannedhuman food, that is. After the change, a lot of it just got relabeled and sold as pet food. And all the cattle that were slated to become Big Macs and steaks became Alpo instead. Eventually, they’ll go back to grinding up horses, but for the time being, pet food’s not a bad way to go, if you’re a runaway human trying to keep yourself and your daughter alive.
Which brings me to the saddest part of the Cassidy hole, other than the dead mother outside it. On one wall, mother and daughter have created what I can only think of as the Shrine to Chocolate—a mosaic of empty Snickers and Mounds and Hershey wrappers tacked into the bare mud. Needless to say, candy bars do not make good pet food and aren’t something you can just buy or shoplift at the grocery store. And it’s this that confirms where Isuzu and her mom came from, before the hole in the ground, out here in the middle of what turned out to be not nearly nowhere enough.
Chocolate is what they use on the black market farms that officially “don’t exist,” but do. The farms where they breed little bonbons like Isuzu for wealthy, discriminating vampires with a taste for blood au naturel. Chocolate doesn’t enter the equation until just before the end, during the last stages of market prep. The story is that it does something “special” to the blood, lends it a little sweetness, cuts down on that rusty-salt aftertaste. I don’t doubt it. Force-feed someone into becoming a borderline diabetic and it’s bound to do something “special” in the blood department. The only problem is, messing with glucose levels works against the rush that comes when your blood’s container knows it’s going to die. Personally, that spurt of adrenaline is why I’m humoring that little blood donor locked in my trunk. But apparently, the rich don’t mind a little passivity. Apparently, they like the idea of the blood fighting against itself, instead of the little tidbit’s fighting against his or her “ultimate purchaser.” So much for roughing it. Killing a farm-raised kid after a week’s worth of nothing but chocolate is like hunting animals that have been drugged. Like shooting fish in a very small barrel.
I’m guessing that when Isuzu and her mom escaped, they left with as much chocolate as they could carry, knowing it was going to have to last them a lifetime—hell,two lifetimes, however long those were going to be. I imagine the original plan was something like “only for birthdays” or “only for Christmas and Easter.” I imagine that plan lasted about as long as a vampire swearing off blood. And so here they were, the bones of that failed plan pinned to the wall of their root-cellar home like old pornography. Here they were, the souvenirs of all life’s sweetness, chewed up, swallowed, gone.
It’s the sound of the tape, that first, long rip—that’s how they’d announce themselves, in the dark, where they could see her but she couldn’t see them. Before that, I imagine them sitting in the hole in the dark, waiting for Isuzu and her mom, waiting with their duct tape and tarp, their thermoses of lab-grown to tide them over
. They’re ready to wait till hell blows cold. It doesn’t matter to them. They’ve got nothing but time, and a taste for blood when it’s laced with human fear. They’ve already exchanged stories about other kills from way back when, the look in this or that one’s eyes when she crawled into her hiding place and found them waiting for her in the dark, where they could see her but she couldn’t see them. One of them will say it’s worth it—it’s almostalways worth it—for the looks on their faces alone.
They’d laugh over that. Nod. Wait. Consider this the delay between themselves and the gratification heading toward them, aboveground, wholly unaware that it’s on the menu tonight.
As far as what’s left goes, I’d say it was gory, except “gore” implies “blood,” and there really isn’t any. Oh, there’s the blood that got on Isuzu before she got away. And there’s the blood that managed to stain her mother’s clothes before they’d been ripped off and hung, almost neatly, from the naked branches of a nearby tree. But that’s it. They didn’t even leave enough to leave a bruise on the various parts of her, lying here, lying there. Her skin—the torn bits of it hanging in shreds, or folded back like a flap, exposing this or that ball joint—herskin looks like cold pastry dough. Apparently, nobody ever told these bozos thatproper vampires don’t need too chew.
But all I can think of at the moment is how pristine the savagery is, how spotless and bloodless, like a white china plate licked clean.
I say “they” because there are half-moons from three different sets of fangs stamped here and there on her pastry dough skin. Three dogs worrying over the same sad bone—until it breaks, and everybody’s happy. Except the bone, of course. Except the bone’s daughter, locked in your trunk praying her white-knuckled prayers not to God anymore, but to you. Her last hope. Her “savior.”
Oh please, oh please, oh please…
Spare me.
Like you ever listened to them when they pleaded.
Do I really need to tell you I wasn’talways benevolent?
I think I’ve been just about every kind of vampire you can be. During World War II, I was a patriotic one, limiting my feedings to German cuisine. A little later, I went through a monstrous phase, limiting my feedings to pretty much anything with a face. Then there was vegetarianism, with its strict diet of coma victims, followed by a streak of vigilantism, when I went around killing those folks who just needed killing. Eventually I got tired of coming up with excuses and let hunger and opportunity decide.
But then there came this time when the guilt seemed to back up on me and I started hunting in packs as these jokers have done here. The pack thing was so I wouldn’t feel personally responsible for the murders we were doing—kind of like the government, or a corporation. Everybody’s guilty, so nobody is.
The pack thing can be done with as few as two. You can make a game of it—flip a quarter, heads for throat, tails for thigh. You each take your turn, the flow of blood seesawing back and forth, your victim’s eyes ticking left and right along with it, until they begin flickering and finally roll back, waving those two white flags of surrender.
That’s the fifties malt shop version. The vampires sit across from each other, their victim in between like an ice-cream float with two straws being sipped at during that chaste first date. Sure, it’s still murder, but murder of the daintiest sort.
There are less dainty versions. More aggressive ones. Versions where you don’t say “Pardon me” and “Please” and you don’t take turns. Versions where it’s a tug-of-war played with blood and arteries. You suck, they suck, and you can feel the pull of the other. Pause to swallow and the blood in your straw reverses course. You have to fight against the current to get it back. Eventually, one of you takes his ball and goes home. Or really, one of you rips the part you’re sucking on free from the rest. This can be pretty wasteful, what with blood leaking out at both ends, like a hot dog with too much relish on it or an ice-cream cone with the bottom chewed off.
In situations like this, it’s best if someone has the foresight to bring along a tarp. Back before I was benevolent, when I was still hunting in packs,I was the tarp guy. Somebody else would sniff out the victim; somebody else would duct tape their wrists and mouth. Me—I set the table, shaking out the tarp with one good snap, laying it down, smoothing it out, straightening the corners.
Now, it might seem kind of wimpy, being the tarp guy, but that’s the part that always got the strongest reaction. Okay, you duct tape his wrists and mouth, the victim knows he’s in trouble; but when you start laying down the tarp, that’s when everything clicks. The tarp foreshadows the mess they’re in—and about to become. And that’s when their eyes start screaming from the tops of their lungs; that’s when their chests start heaving and their nostrils flare in and out. And if it’s cold, that’s when the steam starts chugging, hard and heavy, like the Little Train That Could.
Ithink I’m dead. Ithink I’m dead.
Iknow I’m dead. Iknow I’m dead.
Chew-chew…
Have you ever tried walking in a woman’s shoes? Even sensible ones, like the tennis kind? If you’re a guy with big feet—which I am, thank you very much—you’re lucky if you can squeeze your tippy toes inside. And walking! Just try walking so you can leave a clear set of prints leading away from some fake-grass-covered hole, through the mud right up to this patch of ground cover that could lead—frankly—anywhere. Just you try that. After hiding the bloody dress. After covering up its owner’s various parts. After scribbling “Mom” on a sheet of blank paper you fold in half and leave behind. The one you’ll say includes the telephone number of the place you’re both going back to—for when it’s safe again, and your orphan’s mom comes looking.
That’s right. I’ve decided to lie. Or really, I’ve decided to keep on lying. When you’ve got a little kid locked in your trunk, thinking you’re there to save her, instead of just saving her for later…well, lying’s the easiest way to go. Lie big. Lie bold. Lie like a cheap rug on the big bald head of a big lying liar.
Shave and a haircut,I knock.
Two bits,Isuzu knocks back.
“She got away.” It’s the first thing out of my mouth.
Isuzu looks at me. She blinks those two-toned eyes of hers, weighing what I’ve just said. She still has arterial blood caked in her hair. She’s been hiding out in a hole in the ground and eating cat food all because of guys like me. She’s been locked in the trunk for over half an hour, just in case guys like me were still hanging around, waiting for the prodigal daughter’s return. And now here I come with my lame attempt to keep the emotional baggage down to a single carry-on. What else can she say but what she says?
“Liar.”
If it’s possible for a vampire to get paler than he already is, I do.
“No, it’s true,” I keep on lying. Once you start down that path—even when you’re called on it—you just have to keep on going. “You can see for yourself,” I add, helping her out of the trunk.
Standing there next to her, staring at the evidence of her mom’s miraculous “escape,” even if I had the sort of insides that made my breath show, you wouldn’t see anything. Not coming out of me. Not until Isuzu says something. Or makes a peep, at least.Any kind of noise. Even another “liar” will do.
But she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she gets down on her little girl knees, reaches out her little girl fingers, and feels the craters I’ve made. Not looking at me, she says, “I can read.”
She says, “My mom taught me.”
“That’s good,” I say, wondering why I thought this particular lie was a good idea. Sure, it’ll cut back on the weepy stuff, give her something to hope for, a distraction. And it’ll make getting her back to my apartment, where the phone is, easier. But eventually, when that phone doesn’t ring—eventually, other bells will, and when they do…
Jesus!
Like it’s ever going to get that far! I’m delaying gratification, sure, but I’m not sending it off to college.
&nb
sp; Meanwhile:“K,” my delayed gratifier says.
Followed by:“E, D, S,” she reads.
“That spells ‘Keds,’ ” she announces, her finger underlining the word stamped there in the muddy earth.
“That’s right,” I say. “It does.”
And it keeps on spelling “Keds,” in every footprint she investigates, leading right up to a patch of grass that could lead anywhere—but back.
3
The Pits
I’m thinking about my dad.
I haven’t thought about my dad in—Christ,ages. And I haven’t thought about my dad as a “father”…well, I don’t know that I everreally did. He was just the guy around the house who paid for stuff, who got teased about funny things he did when he was younger, and smoked like a chimney until the fireplace went cold, way too soon. He was my whole life, and as kids will with things as big as life, I took him for granted until he was gone.
It’s Isuzu and her mom that have got me thinking like this. Thinkingparentally. Mortallyand parentally.
DSosnowski - Vamped Page 3