by S. K. Een
even said. “I mean, not in a conversational sense—”
“No, we walked in. I don’t have anything with me.” The girl, Johanna, sighs. “Too many fucking tourists taking the parking spaces—”
“Breathers, your warmth, your breath—it’s why we want you, and now that want has you not breathing. I figure if I caused this lack of breath in pursuit of breath, that’s more than just an unfortunate event—” He stops only when Johanna, stares at him, her lips apart, the phone apparently forgotten. “Oh, god, I—shit, ignore that, ignore that. Steve—it’s your birthday, right? Right. Did your family in Japan—Soba, you said?—ring you? Do they always ring you—mine don’t stop. My family, I mean. Or is it like normal families, where they only ring on birthdays and when somebody’s dy—”
It occurs to Abe, with that awful word half-spoken, there is in fact something he can do. Bite.
He hears another sound then, just as Louis and Sophie, trailed by the zombie in hoopskirts, skid to a halt in front of them. A blessed, wonderful sound. Sirens.
“Greg’s here,” Johanna says to the phone, just as the ambulance comes to a halt just shy of hitting the traffic light, either a skilful feat of perfectly-controlled driving or great good luck. She squeezes Steve on the ankle. “Greg’s here, Deb.”
“I think anaphylaxis,” Abe says as the doors open, not sure anyone can trust this Aggie to pass that kind of information on. He doesn’t recognise the paramedics—it occurs to Abe, for all that this is not the time at all, that he knows remarkably few people even though he’s lived here a bit over a year—but they seem to recognise Steve and Johanna: Johanna even waves. “Probably vampire venom. And the girl, Johanna, said something about—”
“Do not worry. He knows,” the zombie says. She—smelling faintly of formaldehyde—takes Abe by the shoulders and pulls him up and aside, well out of the way, leaving space for a curly-haired paramedic to scoot in on his knees beside Steve. “It will be—”
“You were supposed to not get yourself hurt, Nakamura!” The paramedic’s voice—probably that of the oft-mentioned Greg, given the femininity of his partner, although Abe knows that’s still not enough on which to make a faultless assumption—is somehow booming, commanding and utterly relaxed all at the same time. He knows that easy prattle, talk for the sake of talk; the most ridiculous conversations in Abe’s life have happened when he was on the wrong end of a needle. “This will hurt. Don’t wimp out. So, you were supposed to kiss some boy vampire and have a good fucking time without nearly dying. Can’t you even get that right?”
He pauses only when Steve makes a sound somewhere between a low grunt and a breathless shriek, but Abe can’t see what he’s doing, just the paramedic’s shoulders and Steve’s face—and, oddly enough, for the first time in Abe’s life he’s glad of it. Ridiculous, truly: the only benefit of cancer is that Abe developed a strange and horrifying passivity towards a great deal of things that made his friends and family flinch, and after death—well, after death those sorts of things matter even less, save as something with which to while away the long night-time hours. Academic curiosity: as theoretical as death itself.
He can see it as if it truly happened, overlaid over blue uniforms and the crowd: Abe’s own fangs piercing denim, sinking into Steve’s thigh, injecting venom in that euphoric rush that is said to take a vampire in full bite. Not epinephrine—venom, venom that will kill him, still him, turn him, make him safe. Abe stumbles backwards until he hits the brown brick wall—inside, he supposes, people are still dancing as if nothing at all has changed—and shivers as he stares at the traffic lights, the people clustered on the other side of the street, the people hanging around Feeders’ steps. Safe. How can he even think that?
“You’re a fucking wimp, Nakamura. I’m telling Jack. So, you can’t even fucking just seduce a dude without turning it into a near-death experience, can you? Have you ever thought about telling this to your shrink? Now, just relax; you’re going to feel—well, you should fucking know, actually, but instead of bouncing around because you just hit the bottom of the cliff and you feel fucking awesome, lie still. Try and breathe slowly.”
He feels the rapid beat of Steve’s heart, notable even in a crowd of mildly-anxious breathers, and Abe wonders what blood tinged with epinephrine tastes like. Would the presence or lack of the other chemicals released during—fuck, no, what the fuck is he thinking? He’s the fucking vampire who almost killed the man he danced with, and here he is fucking wondering what epinephrine tastes like! What, if not that, makes him ever more truly a vampire—a monster?
Steve jerks his hand and points his right middle finger at Greg, and while that should have been a beautiful, wonderful relief, Abe feels anything but.
“Deb, I think—”
“Give me the phone, Yo.”
Abe looks up just in time to see Johanna pass the phone to the paramedic.
“Hey, Deb. How you doing? He’s giving me rude gestures, now—Nakamura, that is not how you flip off the dude that just saved your skin. Don’t come—ring Akihiko and have him meet you at the ED. I mean, assuming you’re about to run out on your job and all—funny. I’ll remember that. Anyway, bring a pen because the hospital pens are shit…”
Abe turns away. He can go now, he realises: there’s no reason in the world for him to stay. Steve is alive and looked after, surrounded by people he knows a whole lot better than just some random vampire he met at a bar. What can he do but watch like some gawking, morbid onlooker as the paramedics—Greg with the phone wedged under his ear, putting paid to everything people ever say about men not multi-tasking as he chatters away to both this Deb and Steve himself—get Steve onto a gurney, now half-wrapped in a blanket with his hair sticking up weirdly at the back?
“Here.” The zombie taps him on the arm and hands over Abe’s trenchcoat. “You should not—”
“Izzy? You right to go home?” Johanna ducks around Greg and grabs the zombie by the shoulders, kisses her on the cheek. She holds Steve’s handgun in one hand and her shirt in the other. “I’m going in with him. Moral support. Sensei’s probably going to be weird.”
“Fine.” The zombie turns, grins—a strange smile given the fluidity of undead skin and tendons—and waves. “I can ring Jack and ask him to pick you up, yes?”
Abe drapes the trenchcoat over his arm and walks down in the street in slow, creaking steps. Pain lances down his shins and ankles: it’s going to take most of the blood in his fridge to restore that kind of damage, not to mention a few hours spent in bed or on the couch patiently waiting for the blood to take effect. A few hours spent watching terrible TV or finishing Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey, no different to every other night Abe spends at home! What right does he have to complain about any of it?
“Abe!” The rasping voice doesn’t sound quite like the Steve that spoke to him at the bar, but the whistle has faded enough that he can speak. Abe jerks his head to look: Steve sits up on his gurney, for some reason paying the ambulance and the paramedics very little mind as they load him into it: he waves his left hand with frantic energy. “Situational irony is … a reversal of ex—expectations, so … I think—”
There’s no answer to that: what can a killer say to his near-victim beyond apologies? Abe almost killed Steve—worse, there’s a part of him that wants to turn him, wants to taste him at the most horrific, inopportune moment, so it’s something well beyond a forgivable accident. Abe, for all that he tries so very hard to be as close to the human he would have been, is a blood-sucking monster, the kind of monster that thinks about biting a dying man for the joy of turning him. What apology erases that? Abe just looks down at his feet and keeps on walking down a street washed with the bright yellow street lights, the green and red traffic lights and the blue and red lights of the ambulance, a street alive with the heartbeats of curious breathers, a street indifferent to the tragedy that almost occurred. Do the watchers not realise how crass it is to gawk?
“Nakamura, you will sit back, lie still, p
ut this mask on and shut the fuck up, or I will let Johanna shoot you.” The scarcity of professionalism in Greg’s voice should have been shocking, but now it tells Abe that Steve is looked after by people that care about him, even if they show it in their own unique way, and that’s all that matters. “And I will enjoy it.”
“Abe? Hey, Abe!”
The slamming of ambulance doors cuts off anything else Steve might have said. Abe keeps walking, one aching step after another, until he makes it around the corner; he doesn’t look up as the ambulances passes him on its way down Main. He keeps going down the street to the carpark opposite the supermarket, deserted except for a pair of giggling heterosexual breathers making out in the back of a small sedan and a white woman wearing the bright yellow safety vest of a registered hunter on patrol lingering by the parking metre—a standard fixture of Port Carmila come tourist season.
He pulls out his keys, unlocks his hatchback, gets in and tosses his trenchcoat onto the passenger seat.
Steve’s blazer slides out from underneath and lands in the footwell.
Abe sits there, staring at the black fabric, and wishes he could still cry.
5: Surrender
The advantage to living in a small municipality—compared to Melbourne,