Jared let the heavy dagger drop to the floor, climbed to his feet, winced, then limped off to the bathroom to look for toothpaste.
He located a tube of all natural tartar control with baking soda just as the sun dropped under the horizon in the west. Out in the living room, a needle-thin stream of mist began leaking out of the gash he’d made in the bronze statue. Toothpaste probably wouldn’t have fixed it.
THE ANIMALS
In the last two months, the Animals, the night stock crew at the Marina Safeway, had hunted an ancient vampire, blown up his yacht, stolen millions of dollars’ worth of art, sold it for pennies on the dollar, spent the remaining hundreds of thousands on gambling and a blue hooker, got turned into vampires, were torn apart by zoo animals, then burned up by sunlamps when they attacked Abby Normal, then turned, by Foo, back into seven guys who stocked shelves at the Safeway and smoked a little too much weed. And as it often is with adventurers, after the adventure, they were feeling a little bored, and a little worried that nothing exciting would ever happen to them again.
After you’ve battled the darkness, then become the darkness, then shagged the darkness, frozen turkey bowling and skiing behind the floor-scrubbing machine just doesn’t hold the same thrill. After you’ve shared a blue prostitute with your buddies to the tune of a half a million dollars, only to have her kill and resurrect you before disappearing into the night, swapping stories of banging babes was a bit of an anticlimax. After all, they worked nights and the oldest of them, Clint, was only twenty-three, so most of their stories were gross exaggerations, wishful thinking, or outright lies anyway. Even crucifying Clint with zip ties on the potato chip rack every other Friday didn’t seem fun anymore, and last week they had just left him hanging, thrashing in the Doritos, and went off to stock their aisles before he could even forgive them for knowing not what they did. Tragic, really, to be young, free, and mind-numbingly bored.
So when the Emperor of San Francisco came screaming out of the parking lot and slammed, face-first, into the big Plexiglas front window, rattling the Tic Tacs on every register, each of them dropped what he was working on and headed to the front of the store, hoping in their hearts that something outstanding was coming down.
The seven, the Animals, stood on one side of the big window, while the Emperor pounded on the other, the royal hounds leaping and barking at his side.
“Maybe we should let him in,” said Clint, curly-haired, born-again, ex–heroin addict who worked cereal, coffee, and juices. “He seems troubled.”
“Sí,” said Gustavo, the porter, leaning on his mop. “Troubled.”
“Seems fucking freaked,” said Drew, the Ichabod-Crane-gaunt master of the frozen food aisle and chief medical officer. “Totally fucking freaked.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Lash, the lean black guy who had become their leader when Tommy was turned into a vampire, largely because he almost had an MBA, but also because he was a black guy and inherently cooler than everyone else.
“Murder, destruction, ravenous creatures of the night, a storm of them,” shouted the Emperor. “Hurry, please.”
“He always says that,” said Barry, the balding fireplug of a scuba diver who also stocked soap and dog food.
“Well, every time he says it, it’s kind of true,” said Jeff, the tall blond ex–power forward with the blown-out knee (baking supplies and international foods). “I say let him in.”
“Look, the retriever is all bandaged up. Poor guy,” said Troy Lee, their resident martial arts expert who worked the glass aisle. “Let them in.”
“You just want to roll the little one up in a burrito,” said Lash.
“Yeah, that’s right, Lash. Because I’m Chinese, I have a deep-seated need to nosh house pets. Now why don’t you let him in before my inner Chinaman forces me to kung-fu your bitch ass.”
Because he understood that he was the leader only so long as he told everyone to do what they wanted to do anyway, and because he had had his bitch ass kung-fued in the past and hadn’t cared for it, Lash unlocked the door and let the Emperor in.
The old man fell into the store when Lash opened the door. Bummer and Lazarus stopped barking and bolted by them, and on toward the back of the store.
Jeff and Drew got the Emperor seated on one of the registers and Troy Lee handed him a bottle of water. “Chill, Your Majesty, we’ve done this before.”
“Not like this. Not like this,” said the Emperor. “It’s a storm of evil. Lock the door.”
Lash rolled his eyes. They really had done this before, and the door being locked or unlocked wasn’t going to make much difference if a vampire was following the old man.
“We got your back, Highness,” Lash said.
“Lock the door,” the Emperor moaned, pointing through the window. A fog bank was moving across the parking lot, with rather more intent than one usually expects from a fog bank. A high, yowling screech seemed to come out of the fog in a stream, as if it had been sampled, amplified, and duplicated a thousand times.
The Animals moved to the glass.
“Lock the door, Lash,” Clint said. Clint never gave orders.
The edge of the fog bank was boiling with shapes, claws, ears, eyes, teeth, tails—cats formed of fog, rolling in a wave over one another, some materializing partially, only to evaporate and roll back into the cloud, their red eyes moving through the cloud like embers out of a firestorm.
“Whoa,” said Drew.
“Whoa,” repeated the others.
“Okay, that is different,” said Troy Lee.
“My friends all over the City are missing,” the Emperor said. “Street people. They’re gone. Just their clothes and gray dust,” the Emperor said. “The cats are killing everything in their way.”
“That is fucked up,” said Jeff.
“Deeply, deeply fucked up,” said Barry, dragging one of the heavy wooden order dividers off the register and brandishing it like a club.
“Lock the fucking door, Lash!” Clint screamed.
“Jesus hates it when you use the f-word,” said Gustavo, the Mexican porter, who was Catholic and liked to remind Clint when his Jesus was slipping.
The fog washed against the window and claw marks etched the Plexiglas instantly to frost, as if it had all been sanded. The noise was like, well, it was like a thousand vampire cats clawing on Plexiglas—it made their teeth hurt.
“Did anyone bring weapons?” Troy Lee asked.
“I brought some weed,” Drew said.
A cat’s claw of fog crept under the door and raked the toe of Lash’s sneaker. He snapped the lock shut, pulled out the key, and backed away.
“Okay, break time,” he said. “Crew meeting in the walk-in.”
JARED
Across town, in the bedroom of a fashionable loft, in the fashionable SOMA neighborhood, aspiring rat-shagger, Jared Whitewolf, looked up from rubbing his sore ankle to see a completely naked redhead walk into the room. Her hair hung to her waist in a great curling cape, framing her figure, which was perfect and as white as a marble statue. She held Jared’s double-edged dagger in her right hand.
Jared backed up onto the bed in a reverse crab walk. “I, I, I, it, it, it—Abby made me—”
“Chill, Scissorhands,” Jody said. “You’d better find some of those blood bags of Steve’s fast, unless you’d like to finish high school as a pile of greasy dust. Countess is thirsty.”
8
Being the Chronicles of Abby Normal, in the Double-doomed Doghouse of Despair
Do the condemned in hell know the suffering that is a whole day of mom-guilt heaped like steaming piles of bat guano upon my spiky magenta coif? (I went with magenta spikes with electric violet tips to express my outrage at being dragged from my home and imprisoned with the cruel Mombot and my crapacious little sister, Ronnie.) Evidently, Mother feels that we were too young to move in together only a week after meeting, and live in a stolen apartment with two of the undead and their stupid amounts of cash. Although she doesn’t really know about
the undead or the cash parts, but she made her point.
’Kayso, I had like put on my red tartan wedding gown with the black veil and resolved myself to an all-day power-pout in the corner of the living room, coming up only to text Foo messages of my agony of missing him and change the channel and whatnot, when Jared called from the land-line at the love lair.
So I’m all, “Speak, corpse-fluffer.”
And Jared is all, “OMFG! The Countess is out, and she was naked, but now she’s not, and she totally got blood all over your leather corset, and you have to come right now because the rats are freaking out and we need a hacksaw and a file.”
And I’m all, “Uh-oh.”
And Jared is all, “I know. I know. OMG! OMG!”
And I’m all, “Is she pissed?” Sounding way more chill than I felt.
And Jared pauses for a second like he’s thinking it over, then he’s all, “She’s wearing your clothes and there’s blood running all down the front of her and she’s nodding and showing her fangs and shit.”
So I’m like getting some perspective now—like when you’re a kid and you think it sucks that you have to eat hydrogenated peanut butter on your PBJ, and then you see one of those starving commercial kids with the flies in their eyes, who don’t even have a sandwich—and you’re all, “Well, that sucks.” ’Kayso, I’m thinking that maybe being under restriction in the mother unit’s Fillmore stronghold isn’t so bad when compared to having the Countess busting out her wrath on you for imprisoning her in bronze.
So I’m like, “Sucks to be you, Jared. Byez.” And I offed my phone.
So like five minutes go by, which I spend in my corner going, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” and whatnot, and the land-line rings. And Ronnie is all, “Are you going to get that?” from her room.
And I’m all, “I didn’t even know it was hooked up.”
And she was all, “It’s probably Mom checking up on you, so you might as well get it.”
And I’m all, “Ronnie, answer it or I will murder you in your sleep and dump your body in the Bay.”
And she’s all, “’Kay.”
Then, “It’s for you. It’s some girl named Jody.” And Ronnie is all standing there with her shaved head and her nonexistent hip thrown out, like “So there, ho.”
And I’m all, “Fucksocks!” And I take the phone and I’m like, “Hi, I have amnesia and don’t remember anything for the last two months!” Because what do you say to someone who you had bronzed?
And the Countess is all, “Abby, I’m not angry.”
Which was a total lie, because I could hear that she was angry. She had that “I’m not angry” mom voice, even though she’s only, like, twenty-six in real years.
“So you’re not going to kill me?”
“We’ll talk. Right now I need you to get a power drill and a hacksaw with extra blades and come to the loft.”
And I’m all, “I don’t know where to get stuff like that, and Foo’s at work, and I’m on restriction, and I have to go to school tomorrow. I have a test, so I totally can’t cut class, and besides, what do you need that stuff for?”
And she’s all, “Find the tools and come now. Tommy is stuck in the statue and we need to get him out.”
And I’m thinking, Oops. But I’m chill and I’m like, “Can’t he get out the same way you did?”
And the Countess is all, “Tommy doesn’t know how to turn to mist. That’s how I escaped, but Tommy has been trapped in there for—how long, Abby?”
“Oh, like a couple of days. It’s all so foggy, after the head trauma.”
Then I hear her saying, like, “Jared, come over here. I want Abby to hear your neck snap.”
“Okay, like five weeks. Fuck, Countess, overreact much?”
“Come now, Abby.”
And she just clicks off.
So I text Foo: COUNTESS OUT, NEED HACKSAW PWRDRILL NOW
And he’s all: WTF? WTF? WTF? OUT? WTF? ACE HARDWARE, CASTRO ST
(I know. Four WTFs! Foo has deep intellectual curiosity. Last week he quizzed me for twenty minutes on what it was like to have a clitoris. I just kept saying “nice.” I know, I’m such a tard, I couldn’t think of anything else. I so have to learn French. They have like thirty-seven words for clitoris. They’re like snow to Eskimos, only you know, harder to build an igloo out of.)
’Kayso, I text him: KTXBYE <3
And I tell Ronnie to tell Mom that I think I got some anthrax on my toothbrush and I have to go to Walgreens to get a new one so I’ll be right back. Then I put on my jacket with the sun warts, in case of vampyre kitties and whatnot, and I take the F car up to Castro Street and go to Ace Hardware. And I’m totally feeling the animosity coming off the Builder Bob guy in the red apron, and I’m like, “What? You’ve never seen a wedding dress?”
And he’s all, “No, I love the dress, the jacket, the whole ensem is fabulous.”
And I’m like, “Really? Thanks. Your apron rocks. I need a hacksaw and a power drill.”
And he’s all, “What’s it for?”
And I’m all, “You want a note from my mom? A fucking hacksaw and a power drill. I’m on a schedule.”
And he’s all, “I asked because we have over thirty different kinds of power drills.”
And I’m like, “Oh. I need to release my Dark Lord from the bronze shell in which I imprisoned him.”
And he’s, “Oh, you should have said so.” And he leads me to the drill boutique and I picked out a red and black one that matched my dress, and Bob picked out a hacksaw which totally clashed, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I said it was très beau, which is French for sweet.
’Kayso, as I’m paying for my stuff, I go, “So, why are you guys still open at midnight?”
And Bob goes, “Well, you know how it is, you never know when someone is going to need to free their dark lord in the middle of the night, or tie him up.”
And I’m all, “Ewww.” Because I do not go for that shit. I am only into S&M and bondage as it applies to wardrobe. I tried cutting myself to express my heartbreak over Tommy (Lord Flood) rejecting me, but OMFG it hurts like flaming fuck. I mean, I’m into self-mutilations as much as the next person—I have eight piercings and five tattoos, some that hurt like double flaming fuck to get, but that was professional, and you can blame someone. In fact, I know a guy in the Haight who will tattoo you for free if you’re a girl and you keep yelling at him the whole time, which, it turns out, isn’t that hard to do when someone is poking you with an electric needle. When he did my bat wings I screamed at him so much I lost my voice for two days.
’Kayso, I took the F car across town and the three blocks from Market to the loft, but like holding the button on my sun wart jacket in case I got ambushed by Chet and his vampyre kitty pals, because I totally can’t run in my wedding dress because the buckles of my motocross platforms get caught in the lace, so it’s like, stand and fight or die, bitches! But no vamp kitties came.
Anyway, I make it to the loft and I come in all, “Hey Countess, here’s your drill!” All Carebear-on-crack-perky, although that might have been a mistake, because it’s a proven fact that it’s easier to murder the perky. And I’m sort of, WTF vampyress? Because she’s not her normal self, which is like hemophiliac hawt, but she’s like printer-paper pale. And I totally ignore the fact that she’s wearing one of my long skirts and my black bustier without even asking, and it’s bustiering her way more than it does me, which is kind of rude. And I’m all, “Countess, are you okay? You look kind of pale.”
And Jared is all, “You should have seen her before she drank those blood bags.”
And I’m suddenly feeling all poop on a stick, because it’s obvious that she’s all gone snowflake because she’s been locked up without feeding. So I’m like, “Sorry. I just wanted you guys to be together for eternity, and it didn’t sound like that’s how it was going to happen.”
And she’s like, “Later, Abby.” And she just takes the tools from me and goes over t
o the statue and starts drilling and sawing and whatnot.
So I’m like, “How did you get out?”
And she’s all, “Rat boy was dancing and nicked the casting with his dagger.”
And Jared’s all, “I wasn’t dancing. I had some espresso and I was telling them my novel and I lost my balance on your stupid boots.”
And I’m all, “You can’t give him caffeine, Countess. His aunt gave him a hundred-dollar Starbucks card for Christmas and we had to have an intervention.”
And Jody pauses and looks back at me, her eyes looking all emerald-like, because except for her hair, she has no color in her face and she’s like, “Tommy didn’t know how to turn to mist, Abby. I never had a chance to teach him before you bronzed us. He’s been trapped in here, fully conscious, for five weeks.”
And I’m like backing away, because I’ve seen the Countess pissed off before, like when the Animals kidnapped Tommy and she had to kick their asses to get him back, but now she’s all jaw tightened like she’s keeping herself from tearing my arms off or something. So I sort of feel for the button on the cuff of my sun jacket. Not like I was going to fry the Countess, because I wouldn’t do that, but just for security.
And she just snaps her hand out and before I can move she’s pulled the battery out of my inside pocket and ripped off the wire leads. I mean like faster than you can blink.
So I’m like, “I wasn’t going to light it up.”
And she’s all, “Just to be safe.”
But I’m not feeling safe. And I can tell that Jared isn’t feeling safe because he’s sort of sniffling like he’s going to start crying.
And Jody is sawing on the bronze like a crazy person—on the side where she used to be, so she doesn’t cut Tommy—and finally she has, like, enough sawed away that she can pull a piece away and look in.
And she’s all, “Tommy, we’re going to get you out of there. I have to be careful, but I’ll get you out of there soon.”
And Jared is like, “Do you need a flashlight?”
And Jody is like, “No, I can see.”
Bite Me Page 6
