Rivera nodded. “There’s something down there, one of us has to.”
“You’re a goddamn hero, Rivera, that’s what you are. A real, dyed in the worsted wool and silk blend hero.”
“Yeah, there’s that, and you can’t fit through the window.”
“Can too,” said Cavuto.
Five minutes later they were both standing in the middle of the basement, fanning their Surefire ballistic flashlights through the dust like they were wielding silent light sabers. Rivera led the way to the steel door that the hounds were going at as if someone had duct taped it to a fox.
“You guys, shut up!” Rivera snapped, and much to his surprise, Bummer and Lazarus fell silent and sat.
Rivera looked back at his partner. “That’s spooky.”
“Yeah, and praise Willie Mays that’s the only spooky thing going on here.” Cavuto was a deeply religious San Francisco Giants fan and genuflected whenever he passed the bronze statue of Willie Mays outside the ball park.
“Good point,” said Rivera. He tried the door, which didn’t budge, but it was clear from the arc plowed into the dust and ashes that it had been opened recently. “Crowbar,” he said, reaching back.
Cavuto handed him the crowbar and at the same time drew his gun from his shoulder holster, a ridiculously large Desert Eagle .50-caliber automatic.
“When did you start carrying that thing again?”
“Right after you said the v-word out loud at Sacred Heart.”
“It won’t stop them, you know.”
“It makes me feel better. You want to hold it while I pry the door?”
“If there’s a—one of them—in there, they’ll be dormant or whatever you call it. It’s daytime, they can’t attack.”
“Yeah, well, just in case they didn’t get the memo.”
“I got it.” Rivera fit the crowbar in the door jamb and threw his weight against it. On the third push, something snapped and the door scraped open an inch. Bummer and Lazarus were up instantly, with their noses in the gap. Rivera looked back at Cavuto, who nodded, and Rivera pulled the door open and stepped away.
A pile of shelving and junk blocked the doorway, but Bummer and Lazarus were able to thread their way through it and were in the room, barking in frantic, desperate yelps. Through a gap in the junk, Rivera played the beam of his flashlight around the small storeroom, over barrels, shelving, and piles of dusty clothing.
“Clear,” he said.
Cavuto joined him in the doorway. “Clear, my ass.” The big cop kicked his way through the barricade, holding his flashlight high in one hand and the Desert Eagle trained on a row of barrels on the right side of the room, where Bummer and Lazarus were currently indulging a hurricane-level doggie freakout.
Rivera followed his partner into the room, then approached the barrels while Cavuto covered him. Beyond the barking, he heard a faint metal tapping coming from one of the barrels. The barrel was upside-down and had held some kind of solid, the label said something about water-filtering mineral. It was sitting on its lid, which was only partially crimped on.
“Something’s in there.”
“Plug your ears,” said Cavuto, cocking the hammer on the Desert Eagle, and aiming for the center of the barrel.
“Are you high? You can’t fire that thing in here.”
“Well there’s can’t and there’s shouldn’t. I probably shouldn’t fire it.”
“Cover me, I’m pushing it over.”
Before Cavuto could answer Rivera grabbed the edge of the barrel and shoved with all his might. It was heavy, and fell hard. Bummer and Lazarus rocketed around to the exposed lid and were pawing at it.
“Ready?” said Rivera.
“Go,” said Cavuto.
Rivera kicked the edge of the lid and it clanked off, then landed with a dull thud in the thick dust on the floor. Bummer rocketed inside while Lazarus frisked back and forth outside.
Rivera drew his weapon and moved to where he could look into the barrel. He was met first by a gray storm of hair, then two crystal blue eyes set in a wide, weathered face.
“Well that was unpleasant,” said the Emperor, around the sloppy bath of dog spit he was receiving from Bummer.
“I’ll bet,” said Rivera, lowering his weapon.
“I may require some assistance extricating myself from this container.”
“We can do that,” said Cavuto. Cavuto was fighting back a very bad case of the empathy willies, imagining himself spending a night, maybe longer, upside-down, shoved inside a barrel. He and the Emperor were about the same size. “You in pain?”
“Oh no, thank you, I lost the feeling in my arms and legs quite some time ago.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t get in there on your own, did you?” said Rivera.
“No, this was not my doing,” said the Emperor. “I was roughly handled, but it appears to have saved my life. There wasn’t enough room in the barrel for any of them to become solid. There were hundreds of the fiends around me. But you saw them as you came in, I’m sure.”
Rivera shook his head. “You mean the cats? No, there are tracks everywhere, but the place is empty.”
“Well that’s not good,” said the Emperor.
“No, it’s not.” Rivera was distracted. He’d been playing his flashlight beam around the room, looking for something to help them get the Emperor out of the barrel. He stopped the beam on a spot by the shelves where the dust hadn’t been stirred by their rescue efforts. There, as clearly as if it had been made in plaster of Paris to send home for Mother’s Day, was a single human footprint. “That’s not good at all,” he said.
From outside the window Marvin barked three times quickly, which Rivera thought was a warning, but translated from dog to: “Hey, can I get a friggin’ biscuit out here, or what?”
15
Head in the Clouds and Vice Versa
TOMMY
It was the words that brought Tommy back. For a week with the clutter of vampire cats, and for several weeks before, while trapped inside the bronze statue, the words had left Tommy. His mind had gone feral, as had his body after he escaped. For the first time since Jody had turned him, he turned to his instincts, and they had led him to the huge, shaved vampire cat Chet and his vampire progeny. Running with them he learned to use his vampire senses, had learned to be a hunter, and with them, he took blood prey for the first time: mice, rats, cats, dogs, and, yes, people.
Chet was the alpha animal of the pack, Tommy the beta male, but Tommy was quickly reaching a level of where he would be a challenge to Chet’s position. Ironically, it was Chet who led him back to the words, which led him back to his sanity. In the cloud, merged with the other animals, he felt what they felt, knew what they knew, and Chet knew words, put words to concepts and experiences the way a human did, the very thing that had kept Tommy from being able to turn to mist in the first place. As a human, with grammar hardwired into his brain, he put a word to everything, and as a writer, if he couldn’t put a word to an experience it had no value for him. But to become mist, you simply had to BE. Words got in the way. They separated you from the condition.
Feline Chet had not been a creature of words, as his kitty brain was not wired to file that kind of information, but as a vampire, a vampire sired by the prime vampire, his brain had changed, and concepts carried words for him now. As the cloud of hunters was streaming under the door to attack the Emperor (toward the smell of dog and recognition, for Chet had known the Emperor in life) the word “dog” fired across Chet’s kitty mind, and in turn across the minds of all of the hunters, but for Tommy, it was transformational, as words, meaningless to the cats, cascaded across his mind, bringing with them memories, personality, identity.
He materialized out of the cloud in the dark storeroom, where he could see the Emperor in heat signature, huddled in a corner, holding his knife at the ready. Even if the room had been light, Tommy moved so quickly it would have been hard for the Emperor to see what was happening. The vampire scoope
d up the old man, stuffed him into the barrel, crimped on the lid with a grip that crushed the metal edges, then placed the barrel so the weight would rest on the lid. Instinct and experience told Tommy that the hunters wouldn’t find enough space inside to materialize as a whole, so even though the barrel was not air tight, the Emperor would be safe as long as the lid remained intact. There wasn’t enough room in there, literally, to swing a cat, and that would save the old man.
Tommy melted back into the cloud and moved out of the room, trying to will the concept of danger to the rest of the hunters, putting an image to Chet’s word “dog” that the kitty minds would recognize, and slowly, the vampire cloud, its various tendrils having tested the room for prey and finding none accessible, snaked back under the door and away to look for blood that wasn’t sealed so tight or smelled quite so dangerous.
They streamed up the elevator shaft, through the building, and out onto the street, where a few cats and Tommy solidified and dropped out of the cloud. Tommy, self-conscious now, looked around, realizing that he was naked. Everything he’d experienced from the time he’d been released from the bronze shell was a sensory blur in his memory, now that he was thinking in words again. But he remembered the Emperor, who had been one of the first people he’d met in the City, and who had been kind to him; had in fact gotten him his job at the Safeway, where he’d met Jody.
Jody. Both words and instinct overwhelmed him at the thought of her, memories of joy and pain as pure as the hunter state of mind. He searched in a whirlwind of words and images for a way to contain her. Jody. Need. That was the word.
He’d need clothes and language to move in the world where he’d find Jody. He didn’t know why he knew that, but he knew it. But first he needed to feed. He loped down the sidewalk after the hunter-cloud, tuned again for prey, and for the first time in weeks, the word blood lit up in his brain.
The words brought him back.
THE NOTORIOUS FOO DOG
“Your car’s all fucked up,” explained Cavuto.
“I know,” said Stephen “Foo Dog” Wong. He stood aside and the two policemen walked by him into the loft. “Your jackets are done.”
“Your apartment’s all fucked up, too,” observed Cavuto, looking at the plywood fastened across the front of the loft where the windows used to be.
“And full of rats,” added Rivera.
“Dead rats,” said Cavuto, shaking one of the plastic boxes with the lid taped on. The rat inside rolled around like—well—like a dead rat.
“They’re not dead,” said Jared. “It’s daytime. They’re undead.” Jared wore a SCULL-FUCK SYMPHONY band T-shirt, over skin-tight black girl’s jeans, with flesh-colored ACE elastic bandages running from midcalf to the midsole of his black Chuck Taylors. His Mohawk had been lacquered into magenta Statue of Liberty spikes.
Cavuto looked at him and shook his head. “Kid, even in the gay community there are limits to tolerance.”
“I hurt my ankles,” whined Jared.
Foo nodded. “We’ve had a few rough days.”
“I gathered,” said Rivera. “Where’s your creepy girlfriend?”
“She’s not creepy,” said Jared. “She’s complex.”
“Home,” said Foo.
“As was agreed in her black covenant with you,” said Jared, as ominously as he could manage.
“Did you get an English accent all of a sudden?” asked Cavuto.
“He does that when he wants to sound more Gothic,” said Foo. He was trying to stand in front of the ruins of the bronze statue of Jody and Tommy, but since it was twice his size, he only drew attention to it.
Rivera pulled a pen from his jacket and ran it over the sawed edges of the bronze shell and pulled it back with the red-brown clot on it. “Mr. Wong, what the hell happened here?”
“Nothing,” said Jared, without an English accent.
Foo looked from one inspector to the other, hoping they would see how hopelessly smarter he was than them, and give up, but they wouldn’t look away. They just kept looking at him like he was in trouble. He went to the futon that served as their couch, pushed a bunch of boxes of undead rats to the floor, sat down, and cradled his face in his hands.
“I thought I’d found some kind of scientific bonanza, a new species, a new way for a species to reproduce—hell, maybe I have, but everything’s so out of control. The fucking magic!”
Rivera and Cavuto moved to the middle of the room, and stood over Foo. Rivera reached down and squeezed his shoulder. “Focus, Stephen. What happened here? Why is there blood all over that statue?”
“They were in there. Tommy and Jody. Abby and I had them bronzed when they were out during the day.”
“Then they never left town like you said?” asked Cavuto.
“No, they had been in there all the time. Abby said that it wouldn’t be bad for them, that when they were in mist form it was like they were dreaming. Mist form! What the hell is that? It’s not possible.”
“And you felt bad so you cut them out?” said Rivera.
“No, Jared let Jody out.”
“Totally by accident,” said Jared. “She was kind of a bitch about it, too.”
Foo explained about Jared releasing Jody, Abby and Jody releasing Tommy, Jody throwing Tommy through the windows, and Tommy running off into the night, naked.
“So he’s out there,” Foo said. “They’re both out there.”
“We know,” said Cavuto.
“You do?” Foo looked up for the first time. “You knew?”
“She was seen at the Fairmont Hotel, and we found bags of blood in a room there. We’ll find her. But the Emperor saw Tommy Flood, naked, sleeping with all the vampire cats. He said that the one cat, Chet, isn’t really a cat anymore. Explain that, science boy.”
Foo nodded. “I figured something like that might happen. The rats are smarter.”
“That helps,” said Cavuto.
“No, what I’ve found is that the vampire blood carries characteristics of the host species. The further from the prime vampire, the old vampire that turned Jody, or that’s who we think is the prime vampire, the less change takes place. Abby said that Chet was turned by the prime vampire, so he’s picking up human characteristics. He’s going to be stronger, bigger, smarter than any of the cat vampires. He’s turning into something new.”
“Something new?”
“Yeah. We found it with the rats. The first ones I turned from Jody’s blood are smarter than the ones I turned from those rats’ blood. Each generation away from her is less and less intelligent. I mean, we haven’t had time to really test them, but in just the amount of time it takes them to learn the mazes, it’s clear that the innate intelligence is higher in those closer to the human vampire sire. And they’re stronger, because Jody was only one generation from the prime vampire. I thought I’d figured an algorithm that described it, but then they all turned to mist and merged and fucked up everything.”
“Sure,” said Cavuto, “we’ll nod and act like we have some idea of what you’re talking about until you tell us what the hell you’re actually talking about.”
Foo got up and waved for them to follow him into the bedroom. There was a plywood maze that covered the entire bed, with small blue LEDs dimly lighting every intersection. A sheet of Plexiglas covered the top.
“The UV LEDs are to keep them from turning to mist and escaping the maze,” Foo said. “It’s not enough to hurt them, just keep them solid.”
“Oh good, a toy city,” said Cavuto. “We have time for this.”
Foo ignored him. “The rats who were turned from Jody’s blood learned the maze more quickly, and remembered it faster than the ones turned from rat blood. It was consistent, until they all got loose and merged into a single cloud. After that, they all knew the maze, even if we had never put them in it.”
Rivera bent down and pretended to be examining the maze. “What are you saying, Stephen?”
“I think that they share a consciousness when they are
together in mist form. What one knows, the others know. After they had merged, they all knew the maze.”
Rivera looked at Cavuto and raised his eyebrows. “The Emperor thought that Tommy Flood was in the same cloud as the vampire cats.”
“We’re fucked,” said Cavuto.
Rivera looked at Foo for confirmation. “Are we fucked?”
Foo shrugged, “Well, from what I could tell, Tommy wasn’t really that bright.”
Rivera nodded. “Uh-huh, and if your girlfriend didn’t have a crush on him, would we be fucked?”
Foo flinched a little, then recovered. “I think they’d be limited by the brain capacity of the species, so the vampire cats would be still be cats, but they’d be very smart. Chet, on the other hand—”
“We’re fucked,” said Cavuto. “Say it.”
“Scientifically speaking, yes,” said Jared, who stood in the doorway of the bedroom.
“How do we stop them?” asked Rivera.
“Sunlight. UV light will do it,” said Foo. “You have to find them while they’re dormant or they’ll just run away. They’re not invulnerable to physical damage. If they’re dismembered or decapitated it will kill them.”
“You did experiments on that?” asked Cavuto.
Foo shook his head. “We had some accidents when we were trying to get them back in their cages, but I’m basing that hypothesis on Abby’s description of the swordsman who showed up in the street.”
“He sounds badass,” said Jared. “Did you find him?”
Cavuto took Jared by a hair spike, steered him into the corner, faced him there, then turned back to Foo. “So, these jackets you made us, they’ll take them out?”
“If you’re close enough. I’d say they’re lethal to about twelve feet. I suppose I can rig something higher intensity, like a high-capacity UV laser flashlight. You could cut them down from a distance with something like that.”
“Light sabers!” said Jared, his voice going up. He hopped around in excitement, then winced at the pain in his ankles. “Ouch.”
“That’s it,” said Cavuto. “You’re too much of a nerd to be gay. I’m contacting the committee. They’ll revoke your rainbow flag and you will not be permitted anywhere near the parade.”
Bite Me Page 12
