DSosnowski - Vamped

by Vamped (v1. 0) [lit]

  I decide to change gears. When you’re dealing with a twelve-year-old holding a bottle of gasoline and, presumably, matches, it’s best to take her as seriously as she takes herself.

  “How you planning on finding them?” I ask, and she tosses me a copy of theDetroit Free Press Metro section from the night before. She’s circled the face of a local businessman being honored for something or other. A hotshot. A bigwig.

  Shit.

  “Key,” she repeats, her hand out.

  What I’d like to do is just ignore it. Question her ability to recognize any of her mother’s killers, after all this time. Problem is, that excuse won’t work. Not anymore. Whatever snapshots Isuzu has shock-flashed into her brain are as good as the night they were taken. There’s no need to compensate for age, the passage of time. Clarissa’s killers lookexactly the same as they did when they did the deed—and always will. Unless…

  Well, say you’re me. What’s a loving father to do?

  What do you think of capital punishment?” I ask Father Jack. Isuzu hasn’t gotten the key. Instead, she’s been locked in her bedroom, sans cord, gas, and knife. There are no windows through which she can climb, and even in her current state, she knows better than to make the kind of noise that would be required to break down the door. Sheis giving her Screamer vocabulary a workout, however, muttering under her breath, and into my ear, thanks to the power of cellular technology and a foster father with an increasingly unsavory tendency to eavesdrop.

  “Conflicted,” Father Jack says. “On the one hand, if it weren’t for capital punishment, I’d be out of a job.” He fingers the crucifix pinned to his lapel, just in case I missed the point. “On the other hand, you know what Gandhi said about an eye for an eye.”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  “It leaves the whole world blind,” Father Jack says. Quotes. Paraphrases.

  Maybe that’s why we don’t have the death penalty anymore. Not officially. It’s considered too barbaric and too unusual in a world where death is no longer inevitable. What we use, instead, is humiliation. Stockades, for example, have made a comeback. Ditto, tar and feathering and stoning, but with sponges soaked in something awful. Banishment, of course, has never really gone out of style; its use has just been codified now. But the most popular form of punishment by far is leeches.

  The number and placement depends upon the severity of the crime, and the penalty schedule looks like an old acupuncture chart, with the arrows running to various body parts labeled not with maladies but with malfeasances. Genital application, for example. Genital application involving a half dozen or more, applied publicly and borne for two or more nights in a row—though rare—is the vampire punishment for rape.

  But how many leeches do you think someone who’s killed your mother deserves?

  Exactly. Fuck the leeches.

  “Why this sudden interest in capital punishment?” Father Jack asks. “It’s pretty esoteric, no? Just a wee bithistorical ?”

  “I’m just thinking about some of the stuff I used to do,” I say, and then regret it immediately.

  “Oh goody,” Father Jack says, rubbing both hands. “Tell, tell.”

  This is what I contribute to the relationship. I bounce my euphemistic problems off Father Jack as a sounding board and in return, I tell him stories of what it was like, back when vampires still had to hunt for a living. Father Jack’s a bottle-fed last-waver, and these stories are like vampire pornography for him. And when he’s in one of these moods, he’s like an English professor whose one guilty pleasure is cheap pulp noir detective stories, full of bad-news dames and other clichés he’d mock in the classroom or condemn at the pulpit. But here, now, in his off time, he’s all goody-goody.

  “It was great, Jack,” I say, feeling like I used to feel, getting ready to tell Isuzu a bedtime story.

  “I remember this one time, I couldn’t make the guy die.”

  “No…”

  “Scout’s honor. He kept on flopping around, holding his neck. Then he starts trying to crawl after me, grab my ankle. I finally had to drop a cinder block on his head.”

  “Ouch.”

  “And itdoes sound like an egg, you know. Like a big, thick-shelled ostrich egg.”

  Father Jack nods. Rubs his hands.

  And so we walk, I supplying the gory details, Father Jack all wrapped up in his vicarious reliving of the Wild Wild West of Vampirism. Isuzu’s still swearing in my ear. I do it mainly just to monitor now, though I’ve noticed some changes in the things I’ve heard. When you’re talking to someone face-to-face, you tend to focus on the words, the expressions, the body language. But when you’re listening to someone over a wire—someone who isn’t talking to you, who doesn’t even know you’re listening in—you can focus on the things that might be considered rude, face-to-face. Like timbre, tone, pitch, the voice as abstract sound instead of the medium through which the words are conveyed. And what I hear in my ear, over the wire, through the angry muttered “Fuck this’s” and “Fuck that’s,” is this:

  Isuzu’s growing up.

  Her voice is getting deeper, richer, less kidlike. More womanly.

  I don’t want to know this. I don’t want to hear it. And so I rest my hand in my pocket. I keep walking. I keep talking. I find the volume wheel on my cell and thumb it all the way down, trying not to think about what’s coming next.

  Here’s some irony for you. Vampires are wimps when it comes to death. Now that they’re immortal, they’re more afraid of death than they ever were when it was inevitable. And when one of us dies, the loss is immeasurable, the grief among those left behind immortal in its own terrible way. A widely publicized vampire death—and almostall vampire deaths are widely publicized, whether or not the deceased was widely known beforehand—wounds the world for weeks, sometimes years. TV news shows pick apart the deceased’s tragically abbreviated biography, from birth to vamping, and they all choke up at that point, no matter the manner, no matter the details. They’re all like Walter Cronkite, and every dead vampire’s another JFK.

  The funny thing is, the media itself has probably gotten more vampires killed than almost any other cause, including car accidents. It’s the media that makes suicide an attractive cure for vampire ennui. That orgy of attention is a powerful thing. Just knowing that the entire world will be thinking ofyou, thatyou will be lodged in their hearts and minds, thatyou will be the reason why every raindrop they see for the next several weeks reminds them of tears shed. Is it any wonder some vampire suicides leave behind media kits instead of suicide notes, complete with bios and video ready for broadcasting?

  Of course, if you don’t know you’re going to commit suicide, you take what you can get.

  It wasn’t hard tracking that first one down. Isuzu provided the main clue—the one the article she gave me euphemized around with references to his “stature” in the community. He was a Screamer and not much taller than she was back then. He was the one they put in charge of holding on to Isuzu while the rest went after the mother. He was also the first one she pulled the bread knife on that evening, before stumbling away in shock to be found later by yours truly.

  So how was I supposed to find a rich Screamer of the male variety? Easy. All I had to do was park across the street from the Necropolis, a “gentlemen’s club” a notch or two above the places I used to haunt. He’d toddle along soon enough. And after a few nights of me casing the joint, he does.

  He steps out of a limo with blacked-out windows, wearing a trench coat that scrapes the ground when he walks. The greeter out front tips his hat, pulls open the door, and gets a fistful of crumpled bills in return.

  Following a few minutes later, I find myself tipping a gauntlet of hands along the way to a table just behind him. My victim. My first victim in decades. I can feel something inside rising just at the thought of it and have to remind myself that this is for Isuzu. To protect her and avenge her andnot for this oh-so-delicious rush rushing through my veins.

  He’s got
a cherub’s face, my victim. It’s lit by the stage he’s craning up at with so much longing and desire I almost feel sorry for the little shrimp. Until he starts mock-fanning himself with a spread of hundred-dollar bills, that is. He smiles at the dancer onstage, winks one of his black, black eyes, and loosens his tie. He’s got almost no neck at all—not that that’s the way I plan on taking him out.

  “Is this seat taken?” I ask, interrupting my victim’s reverie just long enough to take the seat next to him.

  “Do I know you?” he asks, his piping little voice full of financial compensation.

  “Not directly,” I say. “But we have mutual acquaintances.”

  “Do we?” he says, arching a brow with interest.

  I nod. “What’re you drinking?” I ask. Two guys who know guys doing the quick-bond thing.

  “Same ol’ same ol’,” he says, playing along.

  “You don’t look like a same ol’ same ol’ kind of guy.” I smile. “You look like you might like it a little fresher than that.”

  And the shrimp plays it cool. He takes a sip. Says nothing.

  So I play it cool right back. Say the same nothing. Look where he’s looking, which is back up onstage.

  “What must it be like,” he says, suddenly, “to have legs that long?”

  “It’s not that great,” I say. “You know, the whole bigger, farther-to-fall thing.”

  “Don’t talk to me about falling,” he says, placing his tiny hand to his tiny heart, pat, pat, pat. “I do that every freaking night of the week.” He pauses, spins his little butt around on the chair. “So,” he says, “what did you have in mind?”

  Long legs and bare breasts are one way to keep a Screamer quiet. And duct tape’s another.

  “Quit squirming,” I snap, fishing the munchkin out of my trunk at the top of the parking garage we’ve driven to.

  He kicks at me with his stubby little legs until I pull out the ax I’ve brought along. “Don’t make me make you shorter than you already are,” I say, and the kicking stops.

  I’ve left his hands and legs free, by the way, because duct tape would be a dead giveaway when his body’s found later. As for the strip over his mouth, I plan on pulling that off right around the time screaming will be the natural thing to do.

  “Think of it this way,” I say, as we head to the roof of the parking structure. “This is the last falling you’ll ever have to do.”

  Listening to myself, I can’t help smiling. I sound like a regular bad-ass. God, I forgot how much fun this could be. And so I remind myself again—this is for Isuzu.

  Of course,this is just hearsay without proof. That’s where the ax comes in. Before pulling off the duct tape, before letting gravity do my dirty work for me, I take a little something to bring back for Isuzu. Proof, and maybe something else. With his tiny hand pressed down flat on the concrete ledge, I heft the ax and bring it down. His thumb rolls away from the rest of him. I stoop, pick it up, drop it into my pocket. He won’t be needing it where he’s going, even though his vampire biology is already busying itself, trying to restore the damage. It doesn’t know how much damage it’s got coming.

  “Any last words?” I ask, preparing to pull off the tape, preparing to let go of the trench coat I’m using to hold him up.

  He nods. I rip.

  “Thanks,” he says. And then he lifts his unbound hands high over his head. His arms slip through their sleeves and I’m left holding the empty black ghost of his coat.

  All the long way down to the pavement below, my Screamer doesn’t scream. He doesn’t make a peep. The only sound is the ripple of his clothing as his body slices through the night air.

  It seems like forever before his skull cracks open against the sidewalk, letting out all of its time. I look down and see his splintered bones jutting up and out of his suddenly ill-draped skin. Even for a vampire, it seems like there’s too much blood.

  Turning away, I decide to lie to Isuzu. “He screamed his head off.” That’s what I’ll say. “He cried like a baby.”

  So?” Isuzu says, when I let her out of her room.

  “Here,” I say, fishing the Screamer’s thumb out of my pocket. Its wound has healed over but it’s still twitching, looking like nothing so much as a big pink jointed caterpillar—with an impeccably trimmed thumbnail where the head should be. I place it on the table and it inchworms along blindly right up to, and over, the edge.

  “Jeezus, Marty. What is that?”

  Closure, I think. “Them,” I say. “One of them. What’s left.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Stick pins in it,” I say. “Burn it. Smash it with a hammer. And in the morning, get rid of it.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, I think you know, Sunshine.”

  And she smiles. She smiles as bright and deadly as the sun itself.

  It’s not enough, of course. A thumb. A thimbleful of revenge. But it will have to do. Isuzu’s still got a soul to lose, and murder—even a justifiable homicide—is a good way to lose it. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem. And so I do what service I can.

  The media, meanwhile, has its field day. The TV news magazines start running special segments on vampire depression, and the special problems of Screamers, who on TV are called “the prematurely vamped” or “our most special vampires.” Friends and relatives of the departing contestant are interviewed.

  “Him,” Isuzu says, pointing at the screen.

  “And him,” she says, pointing out number three.

  A house fire blamed on bad wiring. That takes care of number two. And number three? “What happened to his air bag?” the TV wants to know. “Why did his brakes fail? What caused the accelerator to stick like that? Should there be a recall?”

  An investigation is launched. I’m guessing that they’re probably interviewing his friends and relatives, too, just as they did with the others. But Isuzu and I have stopped watching the reports. We’ve fished our limit.

  It’s time to let the healing begin.

  18

  Ebola

  Father Jack and I have a little routine we do when we first see each other. It starts with me asking, “How’s life?”

  “Still taking forever,” Father Jack says back, full of vampire weariness.

  That joke has never seemed less true.

  Not nowadays.

  Not with Isuzu in my life to remind me of how fast time can move. Not with Little Bobby Little on the TV for comparison, still little, still cute and bouncing around his little kid’s bedroom. He’s obviously computer generated, or taped for broadcast later—over and over again, year after year. Why others haven’t noticed his mysterious lack of aging, who knows? Childhood seems to last forever when you’re a kid, and vampires, with their imperviousness to the ravages of aging, have fallen back into that kid sense of time. Maybe his not aging seems right to them. Maybe it’s just because they don’t have an Isuzu in their lives to let them know better.

  In the old movies, they used to visualize the passage of time by showing a wall calendar, shedding days and dates like autumn leaves. That’s how it feels around my apartment nowadays. I sometimes feel like our hair should be blowing back, or some cartoonist should ink in long, straight motion lines behind our backs, to illustrate just how fast things are going, how fast one of us is growing up, while the other one just stands there, blown back by the gust of her passing.

  Take tonight, for instance.

  I’m in the living room, reading a book about the mating habits of insects, and Isuzu’s bivouacked in the bathroom, a place that seems to have become her base camp, from which reconnaissance missions are occasionally launched for a quick snack, a quick “Hey,” a quick grab at the clicker to see if there’s anything better on TV than the program I’ve decided to watch, and then back to whatever it is she’s doing in there. I’ve just read that the female praying mantis decapitates the male during sex when Isuzu lets out a scream that chills my already cold blood.


  “Marty, help!” she adds, as if I haven’t already flung the book aside and bolted for the bathroom in the half a heartbeat it takes between her scream and elaboration. The door’s locked, but I’m a vampire on a mission, and the lock was really never more than a symbol of privacy. I’ll fix the hinges later.

  “Izzy, what is it?” I call, terrified at what I might find. In the same half a heartbeat it took me to get to the bathroom—and the other half a heartbeat it took to rip the door from its moorings—all I can think of is the bathroom window. The glass is stippled, of course; you can’t see anything from the outside. But it’s obviously a bathroom window and she’s been spendinghours in there lately. Obviously, she hasn’t been spending those hours in the dark. And a lit bathroom window that stays lit for hours—that’snot vampire behavior. An outside observer might come to wonder about that. Might make note of it, keep track. Might come one night to investigate for himself, pulling the window out, smashing it in, finding it unlocked, maybe. He’d be a vampire on a mission, too, and he’d find my little Isuzu.