Bloodshot

by Cherie Priest

  “Bullshit,” I told him. The word came out funny. I was salivating to a degree that could best be described as embarrassing.

  He fumbled around, reaching for something. I didn’t want him to retrieve any weapons or get a good handle on anything potentially defensive that might be lying around on the floor, so I pounced down on him, rolled him over, and pinned him spread-eagle. I tried not to drool all over him when I said, “Tell me what you’re doing here, or you’re never leaving this room alive.”

  “Just looking!” he almost wailed. “And climbing … climbing around,” he added.

  I didn’t believe him.

  Nobody dresses so thoroughly in special-ops garb just to take a stroll through an old building. But he didn’t sound like he was ready to spill any good beans, and the smell of him had me so starved that before I could even make the conscious decision to bite, my hand was over his mouth and my teeth were in his throat.

  He struggled and whimpered, but not for long. Going headfirst down the stairs had really softened him up, and I filed the information away for future reference. Violent trip down the stairs equals bruised-up victim who doesn’t fight hard and doesn’t lose too much extra blood ahead of time.

  My dad once told me that the old mob boys used bags of oranges to beat the snot out of people. I’d always thought it was strange before. Now it made a little more sense, at least from a vampiric standpoint.

  I took my time feeding on the trespasser.

  It’s rare that I take human meals—or any meals at all, anymore. Mostly I do what other vampires do and settle for whatever I can nab from a sympathetic butcher’s shop—or else bribe a blood-bank worker to slip you a little on the side (my personal preference, in a pinch). Only sometimes do I ever pick off a real, live person. I don’t need to feed like I once did. When I was first turned I needed it every night—or else. But the older I get, the less necessary it is. I suppose it’s like newlywed sex. The first few years, you get busy anytime, anywhere, baby. But after a few anniversaries, you’d rather stay up and watch Leno.

  Still, every time I’m facedown in a gushing artery, I swear to God it feels like the first time all over again—and I wonder how on earth I’ve gone so long without it. The hot, sticky taste of rust and salt goes down so smoothly, if not tidily. I’ve read that the average human body holds about six quarts of blood, and that sounds about right. Depending on how hungry I am, I can hold maybe three of those quarts. In leaner times, or in more convenient times if I had a lot of equipment, I might try to pound, squeeze, or suck the last drops out and store them. But this wasn’t one of those times.

  This was a dine-and-dash of a whole different sort.

  He was malleable and unconscious in under a minute. He was dead in twice that long.

  When I finished I sat back and panted, because it’s exhausting and exhilarating, taking a meal like that after it’s been a while. It’s also a bit disorienting—like afterglow, and there I go again with the sexual metaphors. Am I being too obvious? Well then, fine. It is sort of like sex. The biting, the fluids, the sucking, the feelings of bliss and elation (for me, if not the victim) … it’s such an easy comparison to make that naughty-minded writers have been doing it for hundreds of years.

  So I was down there still, catching my breath, and up above I heard the pattering steps of little girl feet, joined by older boy feet. Domino. I hadn’t heard him come inside and up the stairs, but that’s no surprise. I wouldn’t have heard an air horn up my ass while I was feeding.

  Their voices hummed quietly. She was explaining, he was listening, then he was swearing, and she was trying to calm him down. He was getting mad, and she was getting patient; he was talking about all the things he would’ve done if he’d been there, and she was telling him that it was okay because I’d taken care of it.

  I didn’t need to hear the exact words. I could infer.

  Guilt followed. He never should’ve left her here alone—no, sometimes he had to, and that was okay, and he shouldn’t feel bad about it, blah blah blah. Pepper’s got far more patience than I do. If I’d been up there, I would’ve popped him in the mouth.

  But I wasn’t up there, I was down in the basement with the slowly cooling husk of my latest meal. It was like a bad one-night stand. I was finished with him, and I didn’t want anything more to do with him. Ten minutes before he’d been irresistible. Now he was a mess that needed cleaning up.

  I stood and my legs were shaky, but my buzz was losing the worst of its befuddling powers and I found the light switch by the door without any trouble. I can see all right in the dark, yes, but like everybody else I see better with a little illumination. One bald lightbulb like the one upstairs gave me plenty of glow to see by; in fact, for a moment it was almost too much. I let my eyes adjust and then came back over to the battered fellow who was lying on my floor, mucking up the dust with his excess seepage.

  I sat on my heels down beside him and began to poke my fingers around in his clothes.

  Most of what he was wearing came from Banana Republic. Odd. I’d figured it for military surplus.

  I lifted his shirt and found a cheesy tribal tattoo across his belly. Unimpressed by this show of flash-art individuality, I went digging through his pants and remained unimpressed by what I found there, too. By which I mean I found his wallet, and there wasn’t much in it—thirty-four bucks and a condom, with a driver’s license that identified him as Trevor Graham.

  I immediately felt better about killing him. I’ve never known a Trevor who wasn’t a total douchebag. It’s just one of those names that goes so nicely with selfish, arrogant, malicious behavior—and really, what did I know about this guy? Nothing, except that his name was Trevor and he’d been nabbed in the midst of breaking-and-entering. That was plenty.

  The score was Raylene: 1/Trevors of the world: 0.

  This is not to say that I feel the need to justify my choices in victims—far from it. No, I’m only being practical. Here in the real world, where I do my best to remain unnoticed, it’s simply illogical to run around killing small children on their way to school, or old ladies who bake cookies for all their neighbors, or upstanding medical professionals and charity workers.

  Because those people are missed, that’s why.

  They’re missed promptly, and they’re missed badly, and they’re avenged by the media or the cops. And I really don’t need that kind of attention.

  From Trevor’s wallet a couple slips of paper floated leaf-like onto the floor. The first one was a business card for a group professing that “anyone can learn parcours, and reap the benefits of high-energy, high-interest exercise that doubles as a defensive art.”

  Sounded like bullshit to me.

  The other piece of paper had a phone number on it, next to a scrawl that read “Major” something-or-another, and the note, “about the website.” I hung on to the note and the business card, took the money out of his wallet—because hey, why not?—and crammed it back into his pocket.

  It was cold down there in the basement, and Trevor’s spilled blood was already turning black.

  I listened to the kids upstairs, and this time the talk was all about how they ought to go down and see if I was all right, no because I could take care of myself (she was right, obviously) and maybe I’d gotten hurt and that’s why it was so quiet, or maybe I’d just left and hadn’t told them, and so forth, and so on.

  Over by the wall the building’s foundation is starting to drop away from the supports, which makes my building in no way unique in the city of Seattle. Many of the older structures are suffering similar fates, due to the fact that they’re built on tons upon tons of sawdust. It’s a long, stupid story. The highlights version is this: The old parts of the city are sinking, and no one knows how low they’ll go because no one knows how much sawdust is underneath it. It’s a thrilling place to live, I tell you.

  One of these days, my poor factory is either going to need serious remodeling or it’s going to get torn down—and my money’s
on demolition.

  But back to Trevor.

  Over by the wall where the foundation is peeling away, the earth under the city is exposed and there’s a great wealth of mold, mud, moss, and general dampness. If it were warm, it’d be an absolutely God-given place to dispose of bodies au naturel; but since it’s cold under there, it’s not quite perfect. The process of decay takes a little longer when it’s chilly, but since it rarely freezes and there are fugitive wharf rats under the place by the score, I could safely bet that Trevor would be reduced to bones within a few weeks at most, a few days at best.

  I took a box lid and broke it in two, then used one side to dig the wall away a little more. Was I unbalancing the precarious stability of the factory’s structural integrity? I doubted it. It’d remained upright this long; it could remain upright with a little less footing just a little longer.

  I folded Trevor like a clean shirt and inserted him into the muddy slot like a pizza going into an oven. Then I scraped down enough dirt to cover him up good and keep the stink down.

  Small feet scampered up to the edge of the stairs out in the hall. Pepper asked, “Raylene? You okay down there?” She’s such a smart kid. She said it in a normal speaking voice, not in a grade-school holler that could shatter the ears of coal miners in West Virginia.

  I heard her, even through the door I’d closed between us. I didn’t holler back. I dusted my hands off on my pants and opened the door. I told her, “Yes, baby, I’m fine. Everything’s fine, and you can quit worrying. I’m just cleaning up down here, all right?”

  “Okay,” she said, and it was as simple as that. She said in a whisper to Domino, “I told you she was fine. Leave her alone. She’s cleaning up.”

  Her big brother kept his mouth shut for once. Both of them retreated from the edge of the stairs. I’d forgotten how they both hated the basement, but I was glad to remember it, even if I didn’t understand it. I don’t think it’s haunted or anything, though I could be wrong, and no, there aren’t any windows—but most of the windows upstairs are boarded up anyway, so it’s not very different from any other floor.

  Whatever the reason, I was glad they avoided it, and I was doubly glad now that I was hiding bodies down there. The odds were low that either child would take a spade and investigate a mushy spot in the wall even if they did find such a hole.

  By the time I’d concealed Trevor as well as he was going to get concealed, the kids were getting impatient and I wasn’t getting any cleaner. I shuddered to wonder what I looked like. I could take a guess, and that guess was gruesome.

  At least my hair was dark enough not to show any splatter—and that was one more advantage to having it short: It stayed out of tasty open wounds.

  There was no working washroom down in the basement, but there was one on the first floor, and that was where my purse was still located, anyway. I wiped my face on the back of my sleeve, hoped I wasn’t leaving some ghastly clot sitting on my cheek, and took the stairs back up to the cubbyhole where I’d tossed my personal effects.

  Pepper was there, solemn and silent, with her hands folded behind her back. She could be a creepy thing sometimes. That’s probably why I like her so much.

  “Hey.” I gave her an awkward greeting. I didn’t try to hide the cubbyhole, since it was busted wide open and the kids had surely seen it already. I reached inside and retrieved my bag, then told her, “I’m going to hit the ladies’ room. Give me a second, huh?”

  Inside the narrow water closet the kids had stuck a piece of broken mirror up over the sink. The mirror told me I’d seen better days, but I wasn’t about to instigate widespread panic with my appearance, either. I made a show of washing up and pretending that I was an ordinary, civilized woman who was, perhaps, recovering from a bad date—and who had most certainly not been hiding bodies in anybody’s basement.

  My hands had gotten the worst of it. I scrubbed as much of the muck out from under my nails as I could, splashed a little water on my face, and left the restroom with what I hoped was a friendly smile.

  “Hey guys,” I said to the pair of them, since they were both hanging out right on the other side of the bathroom door like a couple of cats. “You two, uh. Are you all right?”

  Domino answered with another question. “What the hell happened?” he demanded, his scruffy little almost-gonna-be-facial-hair swirling around on his chin.

  My smile dissolved, to be replaced by an eye roll. “Ask your sister,” I said.

  “I did. She said some guy broke in here. Guys aren’t supposed to break in here,” he informed me, as if it were a news flash. “Who was he?”

  I said, “Trevor. He was just looking around. It’s taken care of, and I’d like to consider the subject dropped.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Didn’t I just say something about a dropped subject? He left.”

  The boy fired off a frown that called me a liar. “He left?”

  “Yes. I threw him out. He won’t be coming back.”

  “You threw him out from the basement?”

  “No,” I lied. “I threw him out through the first floor, before you got here. I went down in the basement because I was looking for something. I figured, since Pepper had called me here with an alarm, I might as well be productive.”

  Domino was not convinced. He folded his arms and acted like he wasn’t going to let me past him until I gave him some answers, but I don’t take orders from teenage boys, and I moved him aside by twisting his shoulder like it was the hot-water knob in the shower. He squealed a protest and said to my back as I walked away, “What was it?”

  “What?”

  “What did you get from downstairs?”

  Damn him for being so sharp. “Nothing.” And that was the truth, wasn’t it? “I couldn’t find it. That’s what took me so long. I was … digging around.” More truth. I was practically telling the truth! Look at me, a veritable choir girl.

  “What were you looking for?” He tagged along behind me, and Pepper tagged along behind him.

  I led them Pied-Piper-style into the stairwell and up to the second floor, where they live. I said, “That’s none of your goddamn business, and you know it. What are the rules? Do I need to make a list of rules again? I know you thought they were insulting, but you’re almost a man now. It’s about time you learned how to take an insult from a woman.”

  I was mostly being flippant, but I got a bit mean because if I could piss him off, I could distract him from the original subject.

  “You’re a bitch,” he spit. I told you he was obnoxious.

  “So go find another landlord, you little shit. Speaking of which, how are the accommodations holding up, my darling illegal tenants?”

  “They suck,” he complained.

  “They don’t suck,” Pepper argued. “They’re fine. Everything’s fine, like you said.”

  “Good to hear, baby. Heat’s still running all right?”

  “No,” Domino groused. “It’s freezing downstairs.”

  “But it’s warm enough on this floor, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” he sullenly confessed.

  “Then I don’t care about the rest of the place. I can see that the power’s still working, though I owe you a new lightbulb,” I noted. The heat didn’t work anywhere else in the building, by my own design. For one thing, heating that monster of a place was fucking expensive. For another, I kept my least interesting stuff on the second floor, so the less time they spent wandering the other levels, the better. If there weren’t so much of it, I’d just haul it all down to the basement and trust that they wouldn’t touch it, but it’s so hideously damp that nothing will keep. I already have to run half a dozen dehumidifiers upstairs to keep the contents from moldering into oblivion. That’s where the rest of the power bill goes.

  I put my hands on my hips and looked around, trying to see what—if anything—Trevor had disturbed. I didn’t see anything opened or tampered with, and then I remembered that there was a short, beady-
eyed witness standing right behind me.

  “Peps, what did our uninvited guest seem most interested in?”

  She shrugged and said, “I don’t know. He was just looking around. And climbing around. He could climb real good.”

  “Yes he could,” I agreed. I hadn’t seen him do anything special, but he hadn’t made it to the machinery rail by teleporting. “I wonder what he wanted.”

  “You didn’t ask him?” Domino said, naked skepticism dripping off his words.

  “He wasn’t very forthcoming,” I murmured.

  Pepper asked, “What does that mean?”

  “It means I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. Listen, hang on, would you? Let me go get another lightbulb. I’ll swipe one from downstairs.” I trotted back down there, removed the bulb, then returned, pushing a crate underneath the contractor’s cage with the long orange cord. I crawled on top of the crate and screwed the bulb into the groove. It came on, searing my eyes with the suddenness of its glare.

  I looked away, and then back at the room underneath me.

  Off in the corner, a mattress was lying on the floor, covered with a gorgeous silk and feather-down duvet that was intended for use on my bed, only it never made it there. I’d bought it in India a couple of years before; I’d been indulging in some retail therapy in an attempt to unwind from a difficult case when I spied the blood-red bedding with pretty, understated swaths of gold threadwork. I bought it, boxed it up with some other goodies for yours truly, and shipped it back to the States to the storage facility via a museum contact of mine.

  That museum contact is another story. I’ll get around to telling it later; I’m wandering far enough off topic as it is.

  Anyway, I got home to Seattle and went looking for my box of goodies, and when I found it, it had been opened. It had been raided. And the culprits were still in the building. I rounded up Domino and interrogated him, because I couldn’t find Pepper—who back then was just plain tiny, and who has always had a gift for hiding in unlikely and inaccessible places.