by Dave Ring
The other Tower details got dealt out as Letty shot me a long glance across the mess tent, where we were shielded against the locusts that swarmed lights. Like everyone said: the insects would survive the apocalypse. Everyone was at least right about that.
What they weren’t right about was most of the rest.
Once Corporal was finished and the socializing started, I stepped outside. Stepped out and down the ramp, out onto the asphalt. Camp was set up in what had been a parking lot, the abandoned vehicles cleared and scrapped decades ago for space and materials. There was a big building behind us that we used once, but, “We don’t go in there no more,” Corporal said to me a while back. “Roof keeps caving in on us. Don’t got the means to fix it.”
She knew me then; she knew me then like she knew me now. Knew I would come out here alone, ‘cause I heard the wheels of her chair hit the ramp, then hit the asphalt behind me. I turned to find her looking up at me with that steel gaze that had fixed me to her long ago. Letty was still inside. She was a social animal; Corporal and I weren’t, we never had been. We traveled solitary, or in pairs.
This remained, even when I was with Letty.
Or not with her.
Corporal was betting on this when she reached up and took my hand in a friendly, platonic gesture. Her blue eyes piercing through the haze of her safety goggles, her smile visible despite the scarf over her face. Still, gone was all the heat and immediacy of her movements. That desire that had pulled me to her, made me tell her the lies that I wanted her to believe about me. That I wanted anyone to believe.
“Careful with that one, Marrin,” Corporal said. “Don’t want you to go breaking her heart. She’s a lot more fragile than me.”
Corporal ran her thumb across the back of my hand, and then took off, glancing once behind her as she went. The memory of her kisses were hot on my lips: hard and fast, like she meant them as much as she meant everything. Letty’s kisses were tentative, but her grip was sure. She always took me to her like I was the last kiss left in the world.
Me? I was desert silt: wispy and forming against either of them in a way that suited them, until they brushed me off. And both of them brushed me off: Corporal once, Letty more times than that. But like silt, I kept coming back.
Sun never rose anymore. In books it did, in stories it did, but not here. All the sun could manage to do now was edge over the horizon and light up this grey haze just enough to set everyone coughing.
I was already on lookout at Eastwatch Tower when the elevator shuddered behind me. Its shrieking doors opened to reveal Letty, all five foot four of her, dressed like me in dark clothing. Both of us with our bandoliers of wooden stakes, and gunbelts built for two six shooter revolvers.
We wore scarves over our noses and mouths. Mine was a dull grey, colored that way from lackadaisical washing habits. Letty’s was black on black, like the rest of her clothes. Like her hair. Like two of her teeth.
“I hate that thing,” Letty said, motioning not to me, but to the giant gasoline beacon lighting up both our faces.
“Same,” I said.
“Makes me smell like diesel for a decade.”
She grinned at me, boots hitting the corrugated metal platform like her hyperbole. Letty was small, but she took up as much space as an argument. I had a weakness for women that overwhelmed me like this.
She grabbed my offered binoculars and looked at me, her face lit from the beacon firelight. Her face took on a softer quality lit up this way. Softer than when in the mess hall, in the haze of the day, under the fluorescent lantern in her tent. But Letty wasn’t soft—there was nothing soft about her, from the callouses on the tips of her fingers down to the steel toes of her boots, she was all hard edges.
We were all hard edges anymore.
“Vampire problem,” I said. “What else is new.”
“It’s Tuesday,” Letty said.
True, but the days ran together now. Every day was Tuesday anymore.
Vampires struck in the late hours of the night, or the early hours of the morning, depending on one’s point of view. My heart always struck at the same hours, reminding me of what I’d lost, what I’d given up, just to come here, just to be a part of this camp.
Letty had thrown me out of her tent three times, three times after three whispers of “I love you, Marrin.” Three displays of vulnerability, rawness so real she couldn’t let me have it, hold it, or believe it. My belt struck my thighs with the same rawness, the same vulnerability, when she threw it at me.
“Get out,” she also whispered to me. Three times.
My mother used to whisper poetry to me. Her own dangerous words of the sea, as I was named after people lost at it, wandering at it, the same way my mother wandered through her life. The same way I wandered through mine.
We often become our mothers, so the legends said.
“Marrin,” my mother said so often, so much. “Listen. Stop squirming.” And she would go on about her black and broken heart at the bottom of the ocean. Childless and free. And dead. It was too much for a child to bear, but I carried that heart in my pocket until she left me on the cracked and sundered sidewalk, left me to find my own way in this chaos.
A vampire knew its own way, so the stories said. They knew their codes and ways of being. They stayed to their communities tied to a morality so strict in antiquity there was no other way to be. It was almost romantic, if one still believed in romance. I didn’t: the world was too dead for romance now.
Still yet, sometimes, late at night, I’d wander the desert beyond the shoddy camp walls, out of reach of the beacon lights. I’d wander with my bandolier and my revolvers—a safety net. But what I was looking for was anything but safe.
I was looking for a way out, like my mother did all those years ago.
I was looking for a vampire.
Letty kept the binoculars up, old heavy ones that showed off the thin musculature of her forearms. I leaned over the edge of Eastwatch Tower, peering out to the edges of where the beacon fire didn’t reach. I was looking for a whisper of movement, a promise of action, but my own vision was clouded by the locusts and the scratches on my safety goggles.
By Corporal’s orders, everyone wore these. Too many bugs.
Mine had so many scratches that they hid my expressions. With the scarf and the scratched safety goggles, Letty said they hid the truth of me. That the ugly parts that I didn’t want anyone to see only came out in the harsh fluorescent light of her tent. Which is why she probably cast me out after whispering in my ear.
She never liked what she saw.
Letty brought down her binoculars and brought up her own safety goggles. They hid the mask of her. Made her dark eyes look softer, more innocent, which was the truth. Her vulnerability, her quiet tenderness, was what she wanted to hide from the world. Magnified by the scratches and blur of the safety goggles, now blinking back at me.
“Got one,” she said. “There.”
She passed over the binoculars and I took a look. Out in the darkness of the desert was a tall, lanky individual who looked too out of place for the desert. No scarf, no goggles. Sitting comfortably on an old vehicle uniframe in scuffed up boots and a long hoodie so holey it should take up religion. They were smoking a cigarette and looked like the sun hadn’t touched them in years.
Totally a vampire.
“We should call in backup,” I said.
“No need,” Letty said. “We got this.”
She’d already turned to call the elevator. Its bowels shook and ratted in its ascent, answering my own fear. The desert wasn’t the only one with a vampire problem—Letty herself had one. Or more of an obsession. She had the highest vampire kill count out of anyone in Corporal’s camp.
I had never killed a vampire, and Letty knew it.
“There might be more, Letty,” I said.
“There might be more, Letty,” she mocked back at me. “Then bring them on, Marrin. We can take them.” She fingered a wooden stake at my bound chest.
“We can take them together. You and me.”
And just like that, my heart skipped into my throat and I entered the elevator with her, our faces plunging into the orange safety lights, together.
Corporal had taken interest in me when I was patching asphalt. She wheeled up to me when my back and arms were all sweaty and said, “Take five, you. Can’t have the new person getting worn out on their first day in camp.”
I looked at her, her blue eyes piercing through her safety goggles, disarming me.
“I’m not new here,” I said. “I’ve been here for three years.”
“Well, well,” Corporal said. “Then take five with me, old timer.”
We cracked open beers and then cracked open memories. She’d inherited the camp from a man who’d inherited the camp from an old soldier, back when there were soldiers, back when there was civilization. She also inherited the title from him.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Dunno,” she said. “But I like the sound of it. What the hell does Marrin mean?”
“It’s short for Mariner,” I said. “My mom liked stories about the ocean.”
“Where is she now? Mom?”
I shrugged. She shrugged. Then we chugged our beers.
Some secrets have to be kept deep, deep in the drink.
Corporal said she liked me cause I had mommy issues, like her. I told her I liked her cause she took no shit, like me. But really I liked her cause when I was with her, I didn’t ever have to second guess who I was or what I was. I was Marrin, Corporal’s partner, and she held me to her so close it was like a secret kept deep, deep in the drink—one she never wanted to let go.
We were tight together, for a time. Corporal and Marrin, an item. Whispers went around the camp like a sandstorm, pitted and painful. They hit me harder than they hit her, or so it seemed. If Corproal was bothered, she only showed it in how much more she drank when we were alone, or in the looks that became more critical as we talked late and late into the night.
As she unraveled me, story by story.
Frown by frown.
I wasn’t the person she wanted me to be. I was Marrin, the person with the mommy issues who came to Camp looking for a place to belong and forget their life. I came to be alone and work; work myself into a community that would let me forget everything that had come before. Work myself into a community where everything, like surviving, was only forward.
Until Corporal. Until I fell into her needing me and she realized that what she needed wasn’t me. Corporal needed someone who wanted a hero for a girlfriend. Someone who would let her save them from their wretched past, like some kinda knight. Still though, I couldn’t be that for her, I still wanted her. I wanted the heat of her kiss, the grip of her hand around mine, the feel of her watching me from across the thoroughfare.
Maybe, though, I was wrong.
Maybe, just maybe, something in me did want to be saved.
‘Cause when Corporal let me go, I hit the ground like sunset. Sudden, but with plenty of warning. I just refused to see it coming. The comments and whispers that came after dug in deep and necrotic, and I retreated more into myself than before. I had to find the source of these wounds, dig deep into what had turned me so wrong.
Had turned my heart to black.
It’s easy to lose yourself in a person, the way the world lost itself in ending. Or at least people believed it did, for a while. And then we rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt. Generations later, we’re still here: with greenhouses and protection from the bugs, living in tents in parking lots, taking shelter from collapsing roofs.
Like I said: the legends were partially true. Cockroaches and locusts are a constant reminder that we’re just tenants around here. But the stories were mostly wrong. We’ve got chemists and botanists that engineer medication, and ramps and elevators and safety ropes cause they’re just a good idea. People persevere. Despite what anyone ever said.
We’ve got wind power and batteries. We’ve got storytellers and history. We live despite everyone and every legend that told us it was impossible—even my mother. Like the locusts, like the cockroaches, we refused to leave.
There are only the skeletons of skyscrapers and sunsets and moonlight serenades, but we are more than that. We persevere as the meat and skin and breath of what is left by catching lightning bugs. With hot kisses out of reach of the beacon fire. With vampire hunts.
Like the one Letty and I are going on right now. And she’s fifteen steps ahead of me.
Vampires hadn’t changed much from before the world ended. Stories said they were still blood-sucking negative energy drains that thrived on destruction and hate. All they ever did was take, take, take (or so the stories said). That they hung around camps like ours to disrupt us, to harm us. So we had to work to spite them. But mostly, because of them—we had to work together. Word was that vampire camps didn’t work together, that they were sites of pure chaos, pure destruction.
But word and stories had been wrong before.
So much had been wrong before; it was hard to know what to believe.
Corporal’s camp was this bright center of positive energy where everyone may not have liked their assignments or may not have liked their neighbor, but it was a society, and working to build and maintain the camp was how Corporal’s society functioned.
“Don’t like it?” she’d say. “Go join the vampires.”
But bad people joined the vampires. Good people stayed in the camps.
Everyone said that.
I followed behind Letty as close as I could while she continued on her mission to break her ankle or break the sound barrier, whichever came first. I kept a torch up to try to light our path, smelling like diesel and old socks—cause that’s what I had on hand to make it. My heels blistered against my boots as I continued on, an excuse for my slow pace.
Letty’s hands were shadows above the hilts of her revolvers. She was stalking ahead like it was high noon, closing in on our nemesis—her vampire, our vampire. They sat on the uniframe ahead, the cherry of their cigarette glowing intermittently in the black, quiet desert night. A quiet night punctuated only by the grit of our boots on the concrete, the scuttle of a leftover lizard, and then.
“Here for me, I assume.”
It was them. The vampire.
“Hell yes we are.”
It was Letty. My would-be girlfriend.
“Well, let’s get on with it,” the vampire said.
They stood, finally illuminated in my torchlight. They were tall, as tall as me, with hair just as long and lanky. Their face was longer though, storybook long, with a nose that came down and hooked at the end. It stood in contrast to their wide, wide eyes that stared at me from across the expanse of Letty whose revolvers were drawn and now pointed at our vampire prey.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait a second.”
“Why,” Letty said. More of a bark than a question.
“Don’t you want to know where they came from? If there are more of them? If they have a camp nearby? We need information.”
“We don’t need shit except this asshole dead.”
“Dead-er,” the vampire corrected. “My name is Aurin. And I am one of many, yes.”
“See?” I said.
“How many?” Letty was seething. Her words hissing through clenched teeth.
“Very many,” Aurin said. “But I didn’t come for your camp. We don’t want so much as all that. We’re happy where we are; how we are.”
“Then what do you want?”
Aurin looked at me. Their eyes still wide, wide and black as everything around us. Black as the ocean depths my mother wrote her poems about. Black as the wound that her leaving had left festering in me.
Black as my moods lately.
“I think they know,” Aurin said.
And then they pointed at me.
The last time Letty had whispered that she loved me I had almost let myself believe it. Until she tossed my pants and my belt at me and told me to
leave her alone, like she did the other two times. Taking that whisper and drowning it in her exterior machismo.
Earlier that night, when she was drunk and playing with my hair, she told me that she heard that there had once been flowers called buttercups, and white girls would hold them up to their chins to see if they were pure.
She told me she wanted to be pure.
When she pulled away, I watched her remove the dirt under her fingernails with the kind of precise hatred she reserved for broken glass on the thoroughfare, for locust moltings on her water bottle.
I told her she was pure. I lied. I lied to Letty all the time. I told her what she wanted to hear, because I wanted to be that person for her. She liked who I was when I did, wanted me around: person she could hold hands with, spend time with, have in her company.
When I was me—when I wasn’t lying—that’s when she tossed me out.
That’s when she mocked me.
Corporal wanted something I couldn’t be, something I wasn’t, and she let me go. It made sense—this was how relationships worked. But Letty—Letty wanted a piece of clay; she wanted desert silt. So for her I was the partner who let her be soft when she needed to be soft, who let her shine for her brief moments of vulnerability, and then let her close the door on me.
And I never complained.
Not to Corporal. Not to Letty. Not even to my mother when she read her sad, sad poems to me about never wanting to be a mother. Not even to my mother when she told me the whole world deserved to die, so we might as well all just let go.
I had been always not enough, or too much.
And Aurin knew that. That’s why they’d come for me.
Letty’s guns were still pointed at Aurin, still leveled straight at their chest with every inch of threat she had on her body. She was stoic rage, steel-toed boots planted into the desert gravel. But Aurin was unshaken by Letty’s solid steel and gunpowder focus, they were looking only at me, their arm outstretched. Clipped, yellow fingernails pointing past Letty, past her shoulder, beckoning me to them.
