by A. P. Wayne
“Hey there.” Jordan smiled. These days, it was looking more pitying than glad to see him. Maybe she was just depressed out of her skull.
“Hey.”
She carried a plastic container of salad she’d probably picked up at the deli at work. She tapped his feet, meaning he should sit up and give her room. She sat down beside him, rested the container on her lap. She was still in her uniform—khaki pants and green golf shirt, hair pulled back into a ponytail. He liked it.
She opened the container and the little cellophane sleeve containing a napkin and plastic wear.
“How was work?” he asked.
“Oh, you know. The same.”
As though the small talk were destroying her, she pulled the short sleeve of her right arm up to her shoulder.
“Thank you.”
She rolled her eyes. “I guess I just figured we should eat at the same time.”
She took a bite of her sad little salad. He pulled a scalpel from the couch cushions. He wasn’t strong enough for his fangs to come in yet and if he just tried biting her, it would be grisly. He made small cuts on her and drank just enough to satisfy himself. He tried to keep the cuts in discrete locations but, since Jordan was a seventeen-year-old girl, there were fewer and fewer places that could be dubbed discrete.
They’d been doing this for about a year. At first, they’d made a kind of game out of it. Usually it was part of their foreplay. Whenever she was on her period, she’d just spread her legs and let him do his thing. She’d at least pretended to enjoy it. Of course they’d been living with her parents at the time. It wasn’t as much of an effort to come to him. Her parents had thrown him out after her father had walked in on them fucking. Walker was sure the only reason he still had all of his teeth was because her dad felt sorry for him.
Now Jordan just ate her salad while Walker suckled at her upper arm like some kind of grotesque infant. Occasionally she would bat at him and say, “Too hard.”
Since there wasn’t a TV and the sex had tapered off, there was a lot of empty space to fill. Jordan wasn’t allowed to stay past midnight and her arrival time had gotten later and later, minimizing their time together.
She stared around the mostly empty living room.
“You saw it, didn’t you?”
“The offering?” She took another bite of salad.
“Yeah.”
“Do I have to call and talk to the police again?”
He took his head away from her skin. “You probably should. I mean, I can call, if you want me to.”
“I’ll do it in a few.”
“Thanks.” He turned his attention back to her arm. He kind of wanted her, so he tried to put some amount of sensuality into it but she either wasn’t picking up on it or didn’t care.
“Why don’t you just sell this place? You could probably make enough to rent an apartment downtown for years. Then you’d be closer.”
“I can’t sell it until Mom and Dad are legally declared dead. Besides, it’s not really that far away from you. It’s even closer to the store. You would have practically passed right by me if you’d just gone home.”
“It feels like it’s really out of the way. Soon you’re going to run out of stuff to sell. Then ...”
“Then I’ll get a job.”
She laughed a little, almost choked on her lettuce.
“What do you want me to say?”
She pushed his head away and closed the lid on her salad. Tugged her shirt sleeve down and put the salad on the floor.
“What? Did I do something wrong?”
She looked like she was about the cry. “No. You didn’t do anything. That’s my point. You never do anything.”
“So what should I do? Help me out here, Jordan. I don’t exactly have a ‘normal’ person’s perspective on things.”
“I don’t know. It just feels like you’re ... prolonging the inevitable.”
“What’s inevitable? That I become one of them?”
She sighed, licked her lips, sat back on the couch completely resigned. “You already are.”
“I refuse to believe that.”
“Okay. Maybe I should have added delusional to prolonging the inevitable.”
“Delusional?”
She held up her hand and began ticking off on her fingers. “You don’t eat people food. You sleep all day.”
“Not all day.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t leave the house.”
“I leave the house. Today I went like ... really far.”
She shook her head. “You drink my blood and that keeps you alive.” She quit ticking off her fingers and just threw her hands out in front of her. “You drink my blood to live. That makes you a vampire. That makes you one of them.”
“Well that’s because we sold the fridge and the stove on Craigslist.”
Jordan gritted her teeth. “That’s why we sold them on Craigslist.”
“Okay, I was just kidding.” Walker stood up. He had more energy now. “But you’re being defeatist.”
“If I were being defeatist, I would have quit this scene a long time ago.”
“Quit this scene? Who talks like that?”
“Left. Okay? I would have left a long time ago.”
“You’re ignoring the facts.”
She lay down and sprawled out on the couch, now exhausted as well as resigned. She closed her eyes. “What are the facts, Walker?”
“That woman and her thugs bit me and I changed. You remember that, don’t you? That time when I killed my parents and one of my dad’s best friends and that boy who wanted to do dirty things to you. Remember that? Just a little more than a year ago. Oh yeah, I almost killed you, too. I remember it pretty well.”
“Okay, yes, I remember it. You don’t have to shout.”
“I’m not shouting.”
“You’re talking really loud then. So they bit you and you changed. Now you’re one of them so ... what am I missing?”
“I drink your blood every time you come over and you haven’t changed.”
“But you don’t bite me.”
“Because I don’t have fangs because I’m not one of them.”
“But I think you are.” She reached out and patted his leg. “I think you’re just a pup and I think you drink only enough blood to keep you alive so you’re never strong enough to be like they were. Or are. Or whatever.”
“But I was. Why did it reverse when we killed that bitch?”
“Because you were directly under their influence. You were devouring a person a night. You had fuel.”
He threw his arms out to his sides. “So what should I do? We’re back to square one.”
Jordan sat up and swung her legs onto the floor. “Also, we don’t know that we killed that woman. We know she wasn’t the only one. We only closed one of the doors. Your brother said that all of Lawrence was a door.”
“It’s still debatable that you actually had that conversation.”
This time she punched him on the leg.
“Ow. So okay. What now?”
She moved close to him and pecked him on the cheek. “So now I think you need to decide if you want to join real society or if you want to admit that you’re one of them and start behaving appropriately.”
“Appropriately?”
She chomped her teeth at him.
“Oh no,” he said. “I’m not doing that.”
“Then don’t do anything and see what happens.”
“I’m not killing people, Jordan.”
She dramatically pounded her fists lightly against his chest. “But you’re killing me.” It was as close to playful as she’d been all night. “Besides, you wouldn’t have to kill anyone. You have a whole gaggle of teenagers ready to do your bidding.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have my suspicions.”
“Maybe you should tell Bowsman that when you call?”
“I’m waiting to read the obituaries in the paper. But I will call
on my way out ... Which is now, I think.”
“Jordan.”
“Walker. I think I’m done for the night. I’m tired and I have school tomorrow. Besides, you got what you needed.”
I need company, he thought. But he wouldn’t say that. More specifically, he thought he needed her company but it had been so long since he’d talked to anyone except her or Bowsman that he couldn’t even really say anymore.
Five
Hunter pulled up in front of the farmhouse. His parking job was shoddy and his blood was up. In fact, he had stopped at Chef Uncle’s. He was hoping he could goad some local redneck into a fight but the only people in there were a couple of harmless old drunks and some gross skanks who were taking turns snorting pills in the bathroom. He’d had a few shots of Jack and a couple of Buds and decided that was the least he needed to face his parents.
Maybe it was just his wounded pride that had him so riled up.
Yes, he’d written a book and gotten it published and that was something to be proud of. But that pride had dissipated nearly the second he’d received his first royalty check. Everything else was just icing on the humiliation cake he’d baked for himself.
The reason he was back in Lawrence wasn’t any type of reunion or homecoming. His marriage had slowly unraveled and, just yesterday, he’d signed the divorce papers and attended the hearing in the same day. He hadn’t lived with Alison and Major for the past six months. He’d lived in an apartment that he’d barely been able to make the rent on. And now that the divorce was finalized, he’d be expected to cough up child support for Major. He was happy to do that but he couldn’t do that and continue to pay rent for himself. Not on the instructor salary he was getting in Illinois. So he’d looked at colleges around his parents. Even a part time gig at Dunham was more than he was used to making. And there were a couple of community colleges in the area. Maybe he could continue working on his doctorate and eventually become an adult who was able to provide for himself and his family.
Of course, he’d neglected to tell his parents about any of this. His mother called every couple of weeks mostly because she was sad and lonely. His father never listened to her and she just wanted someone to talk at. Hunter usually just told her he was fine and handed the phone off to Major as quickly as possible.
He wasn’t nervous or anything. It had taken him thirty-five years, but he was sure his mom and dad were both waiting for him to fail miserably and he felt it was his birth right for them to put him up when he needed it. He would pay with the pain of being around them that many hours a day.
Maybe he’d have to hit up Chef Uncle’s more often, try and find a skank who didn’t make him want to vomit to take him in.
He popped the trunk and turned off the engine. He got out, went to the trunk, and grabbed his suitcase and the two boxes he had his belongings in. His relative laze coupled with the space of the car and the inevitably small confines of whatever hellhole he would potentially inhabit gave him the ability to edit his possessions with rabid ferocity. He burned his manuscripts, donated most of his clothes, and simply walked out on everything else. Let Alison deal with it. He was done. He had a couple changes of clothes, his laptop, mp3 player, and phone. If he could, he would have Major too. But everything else was superfluous.
Standing on the porch, he thought he could probably just walk right in but liked the idea of pounding on the door and ringing the bell at midnight even better.
So he stood there in front of his boxes and waited. They’d probably been asleep for a few hours so he thought he would give them a few minutes to clear their rotten heads and come down and open the door for him. He called his mom “Old Bitch” and his dad “Dick,” even though his name was Robert, and had ever since he was a teenager. They took it like the troopers they were.
Still no answer.
Odd.
He looked back at the driveway to make sure their cars were still there. His father was always threatening to retire to Florida and they took a lot of vacations.
Both cars were still there.
Hunter nudged the boxes to the side and opened the door. The door fell off its hinges and came to lean against his shoulder.
Had he not had a few drinks in him, he would have probably immediately bolted for the car and tried to figure out what had happened later. But with this liquid courage flowing through him and his anger not reduced in the least, he put one foot up on his box and bellowed into the house.
“Hello!?”
They obviously weren’t in there. It was stupid of him to even bother yelling. An attempt to look into the house made him remember how dark it was out here in the middle of nowhere.
He accessed a flashlight app on his phone and shined it into the house. The damage his cursory glance revealed made him rethink his approach to the house.
He turned and walked off the porch, stopped in the yard, and turned to look at the house.
He didn’t know if it was the dark or his familiarity with the house but he’d overlooked something.
The house had been burned.
Most of the roof was gone. Black smudges bloomed around the broken windows.
Hm, he thought.
This had to have happened within the last couple of weeks. If his parents had a cell phone he would have tried to call it. But they only had a landline.
Even as he thought it was a stupid idea, he pulled their information and pressed the call icon.
He didn’t hear it ring within the house.
Standing there in the yard of his ruined childhood home, he didn’t know what to do.
He guessed he would call the police.
He got the number from Google and called.
“Lawrence Police. This is Earl. How may I help you?”
“Hi, uh, Earl. My name’s Hunter Jenkins and—”
“Ah, there you are.”
“Here I am.” That wasn’t exactly the response he was expecting. He thought he would have to do a bit more explaining.
“You should probably come down to the station.”
“I’m looking for my parents. Do you know if they’re okay?”
“You’d better come to the station, Mr. Jenkins.”
Not okay, he thought. Having grown up surrounded by the people of Lawrence, being a person (at least formerly) of Lawrence, he knew not to press the issue with the deputy or the receptionist or whatever Earl was or it would just make him retreat into his shell.
“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“You know where it is?”
“Yeah, I know where it is.” He’d been there a couple of times during his teenage years. He ended the call, retrieved his suitcase and boxes, and put them back in his car.
Six
There was a pounding on the door. Probably Bowsman.
Walker crossed the living room and opened his door. Bowsman wasn’t even wearing his uniform. He was barely wearing clothes. Just swim trunks, a towel slung over his shoulders, and a pair of flip flops.
“Sorry about this.” He motioned down to all of his exposed girth. “I just came from the swim club.”
“Sorry about this.” Walker motioned down to the bucket of blood.
Chief Bowsman looked at it.
“You’re doing the right thing. That’s why I’m handling this case special.”
“I really appreciate it.”
“Just don’t want anybody botching things up.”
“Have you made any progress so far?”
“About?”
“The blood. My parents.” The violence? The disappearances? The mysterious deaths? “Anything?”
“I think your parents are somewhere in the town. Probably dead, but still here. We’ll find them. The blood? It has me at a bit of a loss.”
“Have you analyzed it or anything?”
“Oh, uh huh.”
Walker figured he probably hadn’t. “And was it human blood or animal blood? Something else?”
“I’m afraid I can’t release that inf
ormation at this time.”
It’s because you don’t fucking know, Walker thought.
“As soon as I know anything about either your parents or the blood, I’ll give you a call.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“I’ll give Cathy a call.”
“Jordan.”
“Yep. Sweet girl.”
“The best.”
“I guess I’d better get this cleaned up and tagged. Photographed.”
“I’ll leave you to it. Hopefully this will be the last time you have to come out.”
“Hopefully.”
Walker shut the door. He went into the kitchen and parted the blinds just enough so he could see Bowsman. He dumped the blood over the porch and shook the bucket until it stopped dripping. He almost walked off without the note, stopped and turned around, and came back for it. He crumpled it up and put it into the pocket of his swim trunks.
Walker thought maybe he should let Bowsman know he was watching him but he didn’t think that would engender him to the man at all. Walker figured the buckets were probably just filled with animal blood and were really no more than a nuisance for him. But he knew Bowsman thought he was guilty of killing his parents and, provided Bowsman was looking into the case, Walker didn’t want to give his suspicions any more cause.
He went back to the couch to pick up the Murakami book he was reading but he was having a hard time concentrating. It wasn’t the brief encounter with Bowsman. Over the past year he’d had a number of similarly laconic, equally disinterested meetings with the Chief. First dealing with his parents and now the offerings. It also wasn’t just Jordan’s abrupt departure. It certainly wasn’t the first, but it had been happening with more frequency. That bothered him but he didn’t know what he was supposed to do about it. He loved her and was closer to her than he had been with anyone. But she was the first person he’d ever had sex with, they’d gone through a horribly traumatic event together and ... well, things had been unraveling ever since. She was only seventeen. At this point in her life, she should be having fun and looking forward to going away to college. He was a burden. It seemed inevitable. He could only do what he was able, which wasn’t very much.