Late Night Partners

by Fennel Steuert

  Over the course of ten floors up in the elevator, Roger’s foot was stepped on three times by a frumpy pale man with curly, reddish-brown hair. The man grimaced whenever he looked down and saw that Roger’s foot remained there, but otherwise he ignored Roger and talked to a tall, olive-skinned woman on the other side of him about jogging during the last earthquake.

  “Real-ly?” Roger said, exhaling on each syllables with his garlic breath. “Okay. Let me just stand here and talk to myself, then. As I breathe all of this fresh air. I mean, really, it’s like I’m in a forest.”

  As the man finally looked at him, Roger smiled. Somewhere behind people taller than her, he could see Lorraine shaking her head.

  The elevator cleared out by the tenth floor.

  “What was that about?” Lorraine said. She pressed the button for the 18th floor.

  “Some guy was stepping on my foot. A lot.”

  Lorraine looked down. “Oh.”

  The elevator beeped as it passed another floor.

  She took off her messenger bag and emptied the contents on the floor: two flashlights, one wooden stake, two pairs of goggles, a few water bottles filled with little pieces of garlic, and one half-rotten pumpkin.

  “Is the water supposed to be holy?” Roger asked.

  “God no,” Lorraine said. “Garlic is putrid enough.” As the elevator beeped again, she slipped the goggles around her head. “There’s just a lot of garlic in there. Like a whole lot.” She quickly took the cap off one of the bottles and poured it over her head.

  Roger felt his eyes burning. He fumbled on the ground, and the elevator had beeped twice when he got the goggles in his hands and put them over his eyes.

  As the door opened, Lorraine quickly doused him with the garlic water. His nostrils felt they were on fire. Out of view, something sounded like it was scuttling away on the floor.

  The floor was as dark as the sub-level corridor, with less of the light.

  “Sorry,” Lorraine whispered. Half-dazed herself, she handed Roger a flashlight.

  Managing a quick smile, Roger shook his head in an imitation of Lorraine from moments earlier.

  Taking a breath through her mouth, Lorraine wedged the wooden stake into one side of the elevator’s dual doors. She picked up the half-rotten pumpkin, put it back in the bag, and quickly threw it over her shoulder. “We only have a little while, before they send someone about the elevator.”

  Lorraine picked a spray-bottle from the floor and doused the wooden stake with the water. Then she turned on her flashlight.

  Roger did the same. The light was pale and blue. As they took a few tentative steps onto a hard floor, Lorraine held the spray bottle up in one hand and led the way with her flashlight in the other. Beyond a long glass-wall that had all kinds of equipment behind it, there were a few oil lamps in sight giving everything depth. To Roger, most of it looked like microscopes and x-ray machines.

  Lorraine had slowed down, and they found themselves walking side by side. They moved leftward on the linoleum floor along the glass wall. The sound of something scuttling along the floor continued to echo around them.

  “It wasn’t like this the last time I was here,” Lorraine whispered. “I know a guy who works on this floor. Saw him a couple of days ago. He should be here … somewhere.”

  Roger glanced over at her, then hearing more scuttling behind them, turned and swished his flashlight around. What looked like a man in a suit quickly dashed around a corner in wingtip shoes. Behind Roger, Lorraine had also turned.

  “Is this UV light?” Roger asked her.

  Lorraine quickly nodded.

  “I thought they could survive in sun—”

  Roger stopped breathing as he pointed behind Lorraine. Something seemed to scamper ahead of them. Lorraine quickly trained her light in that direction, and Roger put his flashlight on his shoulder facing backward.

  They approached the source of a whirring, ticker-tape sound. All they’d been able to smell was garlic, up until that point, but now they could smell rancid meat.

  “I wouldn’t go much further if I were you,” a man said somewhere nearby. In the laboratory beyond the glass wall, a lantern went out.

  Ahead of them, something was being dragged squeakily along the floor. Roger and Lorraine both saw it—what looked like a skinless cow’s leg being dragged by a shoeless pale woman in a blue and red dress. When they trained their flashlights on her, the woman hissed. Her red eyes steamed as she jumped out of sight. A slew of men and women in professionally appropriate attire had followed the woman only so far as the leg, which they circled and began to eat.

  The ultraviolet light seemed to have no effect on them. It did, however, make something that seemed to be stuck to all of their scalps shine a little.

  Roger turned quickly toward Lorraine. “Okay, so are vampires hurt by UV light or not?”

  “Those aren’t vampires,” she said.

  A woman called out to them, her voice mannered and professional: “When they’re done with that leg, they’ll go for you. Our master likes you, Lorraine. We’ve reduced whatever little spark they had, to the point where they’re just drones. As long as they eat, they can be so perpetually. You can be more than that.”

  Following the smear of red across the floor, one man was further behind the others. His close-cropped hair was non-existent at the back, making it look like he had a mohawk. He turned and glanced sleepily at Roger and Lorraine, until his eyes settled on the latter.

  “Oh, Lorraine,” the man with the mohawk said in a voice that was just a whisper. “Hello.

  “Hi,” Lorraine said sadly. “You still have … a spark.”

  Roger glanced around. He kept hearing the sound of something scratching paper. The noise came from the direction of the alcove that the professionals had just come from. Roger tapped Lorraine’s shoulder, then pointed in that direction.

  Lorraine glanced over there, turning her flashlight with her.

  At the sides of the alcove, tiny needles were scratching at large, turning drums – all active. In the middle of the room, there was a draft table.

  “Come on,” Lorraine said. She gave Roger the spray bottle, then took the hand of the man with the mohawk and guided him over toward the drafting table. There was half of a map of the city on it, and it looked like something had been on top of it that had been torn away, and with it, the other half of the map.

  Roger swirled the light back and forth behind them.

  “Hey, guy,” said the woman in the darkness. “I don’t think I’ve ever been around someone who stinks as badly as you do.”

  “They both do,” said another man they couldn’t see.

  “Shit!” Lorraine said. She went over to one of the drums. “There’s nothing here.”

  Over by the elevator, someone let out a screech.

  Lorraine turned toward her co-worker of sorts. “Do you know where the giant is supposed to be?”

  “I do,” said the man with the mohawk, and as he said that, he doubled over on the table in pain. Roger wanted to catch the guy, but he didn’t want to take away from whatever was keeping the red-eyes away.

  The man with the mohawk held out his hand. He tapped at a section of the map as Lorraine’s hair swished around it. Then he slipped onto the ground. Roger saw a surgical scar on the back of his head, along with some kind of shiny bump, right before the man turned on his side and held his ears.

  Lorraine quickly dropped to her knees and held him. The man with the mohawk began bleeding from his ears, but Lorraine only drew back when he became extremely rigid and stopped holding his ears altogether. With his pupils dilated, he stared blankly at Lorraine’s arm.

  “Lorraine,” Roger said. “We need to go.”

  Behind him, a few of the other ghouls had begun to draw nearer. Roger shone his flashlight in their direction. The cow’s leg was bone white.

  “Okay,” Lorraine said. “Okay. Okay … They’re not … Um, if they’re anything like Gesine ...”

>   She fumbled through her bag until she pulled out the rotted pumpkin. Lorraine held it aloft in the air and yelled, “Look!”

  They all stared at it. Roger could hear them sniffing the air. He didn’t know how they could smell the pumpkin beyond him and Lorraine as garlic personified, but they did. Lorraine put it down on the draft table, and as the other ghouls gathered around it, she grabbed Roger’s hand and they ran back to the elevator.

  The elevators’ double-doors had closed. The wooden stake was lying on the floor before them.

  In the corner of his eye, Roger spotted the red glow of an “EXIT” sign. It had to be the stairway, he thought.

  “This way,” he told Lorraine. They ran quickly to the other side of the long glass wall, past the green glow of a double helix model.

  A man was waiting under the “EXIT” sign, his eyes glowing just as red as the letters. He was pale with slick black hair, wearing a dark gray suit and tap-friendly wingtips. His eyes glowing red, he remained at his post until they shone their lights on him. Then he dashed all around the edges of where the light wasn’t concentrated – getting closer to them until their scent drove him away, and then he would come back and get a little closer. Behind them, red eyes glowed in the dark – all getting closer as well.

  “We smashed your pumpkin,” said the woman whose voice was familiar by then.

  More footsteps sounded in the dark.

  Lorraine took the cap off the spray bottle and poured more of the garlic water on both of them. “Let’s rush it,” she said.

  Roger thought that if one of the vampires could brave the garlic-ridden stake, another one might very well be able to grab him or Lorraine separately.

  “Maybe you should get on my back,” Roger said breathlessly. “We’ll weigh more together, be more garlicky.”

  He was frantically keeping the vampire at the door away with the light. The way that he and Lorraine smelled seemed to have given them a slightly wider berth.

  Lorraine nodded. “Uh, yeah, okay.” She put her flashlight on the floor behind them, so that it faced in that direction. Then he gave her his, and she seamlessly took over dashing it around the door to the stairway and its well-dressed guardian.

  Roger kneeled as Lorraine wrapped one arm around tightly around his neck. He stood up, holding her legs just above the knees. Then, with Lorraine training the light directly in front of them, Roger ran full speed for the door.

  As the vampire lost space to try to avoid their smell in, it finally stopped hopping around. His face contorted as it turned away, and he closed his eyes as Roger and Lorraine charged over him.

  They were both on top him as the skin of its face and hands were steaming.

  As Roger pushed him over to the side, the vampire fumbled away so that he was behind them.

  Lorraine tried the doorknob. It was locked.

  Roger banged on it with his fists, and Lorraine joined him using both palms. It felt like the world was getting smaller as the UV light swirled behind them, and it felt like the door would stay closed for forever – until it finally opened and Doris pulled him and Lorraine into the stairwell with her eyes closed shut.

  “Go,” she said, not looking at either of them.

  They ran down the stairs as she pulled on the doorknob, keeping it locked.

  A few stories down, the sunlight shone through. They finally sat down. They remained on the stairs quiet and vacant-eyed until a man drinking coffee burst through the door. His eyes widening, he held his nose while managing to glance at them lackadaisically.

  “Hey there,” he said on his way down the stairs.

  “Okay,” Lorraine said, taking off her goggles. “I think I’m giving Doris my two weeks’ notice. We’ll probably be okay down there with her, though. That’s her territory, and those other vampires are too new.”

  Roger ran his hands over his face. He snapped his hand in front of his face to make sure he was there.

  “That works better without the goggles,” Lorraine said.

  6

  Respite

  Present ^

  It was mid-October, a week after the first major earthquake, before Roger smelled relatively normal again. At home, his great uncle Simon had avoided him like the plague – though he seemed quite cheerful otherwise. Roger no longer saw the tan woman with the long, black hair on the nearby rooftops.

  On his way home one evening, he did pass a woman who looked vaguely like her. On the stoop of a rundown historic home that had been awaiting renovation, the woman was sitting next to a disheveled man as he ate a sandwich. Her presence seemed to be keeping some people in suits at bay at the bottom of the stairs, where the chain that secured the fence had been broken.

  “Leave ‘em alone,” Roger called out. “Unless you’re making it earthquake proof while they stick around for a while.”

  The suits ignored him. As the sort of brown woman stared at him expressionlessly, he bowed to the suits and moved on.

  If Roger could beat the sunset, the only place he went was nearby Vincenzo’s. He ran into Desmond again this time, and while Desmond waited to to play the arcade game in the back, Roger poured garlic powder all over his friend’s slice of pizza.

  “Is this about that building?” Desmond asked him.

  “It’s about your health,” Roger said, his leg hopping uncontrollably. “Don’t let all the newcomers hog this stuff. Eat up.”

  The delivery guy/store keeper, who was also the only one that wasn’t in the kitchen most nights, blinked at Roger when he asked if he could borrow one of their big containers of the stuff. But when Roger suggested that maybe he should put it on every slice of pizza, to give everyone a fighting chance, the guy squinted and him and said, “Yeah, man, you can borrow it. You okay otherwise?”

  “Sure,” Roger said.

  One day, before he went to work and the ominous side-door in the building’s lobby, he stopped off at Josephine’s book stand a few blocks away.

  Josephine Drearden had about fifteen years on Roger. Seated in a folding chair, she was dressed in light blue jeans and a buttoned-up trench coat. She had chestnut-tinted skin and low hair that she puffed out. She produced books of haiku, prodigiously, and sold the pamphlet-like collections on a table laid out like newspapers, among other books that she wrote or others that she simply liked. Everything cost $5. At the moment, her thumb was dashing across the screen of a smart phone.

  “How goes it?” said Roger.

  Josephine glanced up. “Hey, stranger. Just in time to help me figure out how to not want to throw this thing to the ground.”

  Roger shook his head. “I couldn’t help you there.”

  “What kind of young person are you?”

  “A sad excuse for one.” Roger moved over to the side as a pair of friends, a slightly tanned woman with brown hair and an Indian woman with a similar skin tone to his own, glanced at the books on the table. Roger looked away while one of them bought something.

  “The one with brown hair liked you – or what she saw, anyway,” said Josephine.

  Roger glanced in the woman’s direction as she walked up the street with her friend. “Tell me you wouldn’t think less of me if I went out with someone like her,” he said.

  Josephine shrugged. “Maybe a tad. But just a tad.”

  Roger had gotten the impression that Josephine had mixed in with that world when she was younger, to somewhat empty results. The haiku she’d written that he liked the most read, “Is it a strange world/where the substance collides/and nothing always meets?”

  Shit, he thought. He had misplaced the book sometime in the past couple of weeks.

  Josephine smiled at a woman who glanced at the titles on the table. The woman ignored her altogether, and after a few somewhat nervous taps on the edge of the table, walked away.

  “Well,” said Josephine, “at least the ground is still holding up.” She pulled up her collar. “It’s getting cold out here.”

  “Yeah,” Roger said. “And the weather’s bris
k, too.”

  Josephine smiled.

  Roger slowly shook his head, then sighed. “Actually, you know, there are times when I’ve been just as distant with people. I’ll be right back.”

  He hiked up and down the hill to work – where he got three cups of black coffee, in a cardboard holder with four spots, from the coffee kiosk in the lobby. He brought it out to Josephine, who mock-rolled her eyes in thanks as he gave her one, and on the way back, Roger thought he had tripped as he stumbled over a curb. But what had really happened was that the curb had jumped up. Nearby someone dropped their phone, and it broke apart on the ground as sidewalk, shaking with the rest of the world, was a concrete wave. Car alarms went off in unison as Roger tried to stay balanced and not drop the coffee. And then it stopped.

  It was shorter than the last one. On the way back to work, Roger walked past a street that was no longer even. Part of it had risen jaggedly, so that the street was more of a jump one way and insurmountable for any car the other way. An older woman was helping a younger one who had fallen down. There was a broken high-heeled shoe nearby.

  Roger felt pulled in a few directions, but his phone was ringing as he walked into the company’s lobby. Everything there seemed like it had held together. The call was from Simon, and as he was about to answer it, he noticed nobody in the lobby was in a state of panic. The brunette who was the co-human resources person was standing close to the doors, looking out with her arms folded.

  “You okay?” Roger said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine. That’s the word from up high.”

  Roger nodded politely, then headed through the side door and down the corridor with a sense of familiarity. He hadn’t seen Doris since she’d opened that door upstairs, but the corridors felt like an extension of her, and in the past few days, he’d stopped holding the UV flashlight on the trip to the elevators. He was just slightly garlicky, with the cap tightly on the powder version of the stuff in his jacket pocket.

  Roger’s phone rang again, and he stopped along a wall to answer it.

  “Simon,” said Roger. “You okay?”