“Hello, Deacon Coles.”
He rolled out to see Ymar Montez looking down at him. She had on a gathered skirt and beige cardigan. She put a foot on his floor jack, hands on her trim waist.
“Are you looking up my dress, Deacon?”
He hurriedly got to his feet, wiping his hand on a rag left on the car’s fender. “Oh, no, ma’am.”
“Buy a girl a beer?”
“Sure, sure. Just let me get cleaned up and we can go over to Muldoon’s. It’s a pretty okay joint on Lincoln.”
She jutted her head at the empty Schlitz bottle. “Don’t you have more upstairs?”
“Ah, yeah, sure do.”
“Go get me a bottle, why don’t you?”
“On it.”
He tried not to rush out of the garage. Keep it casual, he reminded himself. Just this knock-out chick right off the cover of Stag who stopped by . . . Be cool, man, be cool.
He opened the fridge, thankful that two more beers were there. He took them by the necks and an opener back downstairs, figuring to pop their tops with flair to impress her.
She was gone; Ymar Montez no longer stood in the garage.
He regarded the two beers and muttered, “Guess I can drown my sorrows.”
“Over here, darling,” she said.
He came around to the driver’s side of the Willys and gulped. There on the backseat, that A-1 gorgeous doll lounged against the passenger side door, her leg propped up on the seat. She’d discarded her skirt and top and shoes, and was in lacy black underwear. She’d hung the mechanic’s light he’d been using in such a way that her form was partly illuminated. The light swayed slightly and it was as if she shimmered in and out of existence.
Coles wanted to pinch himself to make sure this was real. Talk about a wet dream out of the pages of a girlie mag.
“You going to keep me waiting?” She stretched languidly like a big cat, rubbing her hand between her legs.
Coles was deliriously light-headed. “Oh, hell no.”
“Then come here and be with me, Deacon Coles. Be with me in your machine, your totem of power.”
The two made hot, sweaty love. As Coles moaned her name and a rumble rent his shoulders, weird visions popped into his head, making him dizzy: Images of blood running over a carved stone face; brown-skinned people in plumes and gold; a flash of silver symbols and something more within . . . He gasped as he climaxed, and she raked his shoulder with her teeth, nicking him slightly. He sat back trying to catch his breath.
“That was,” he began, his chest heaving like he’d just run five miles, “ . . . amazing.”
“Will you do something for me, my love.” She playfully dug her foot on his slick chest.
“Anything.”
“I need you to retrieve an item for me. A keepsake you might say.”
“Sure, where is it?”
“A kind of bowl. It’s at the home of Professor Edmund Muldare.”
“Dorrie’s father?”
“The same.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He stole this container among other ancient belongings, you see. They call them artifacts and put them in museums for the public, as if that makes it all right. But they certainly make sure their names are associated with these supposed artifacts.”
“I hear you,” he said.
She leaned forward, her hand replacing the foot on his chest. “It’s not his, it belongs to my people.” She pressed her body to his and he wanted so bad to protect her. “You know what it means to be denied, Deacon. You know what it means to have strangers come into your land and pillage and take and destroy your history. Try to deny your existence and accomplishments. That you were a civilization while they were still in caves.”
“Well, yeah, I guess. But Dorrie’s dad isn’t like that.”
“Really? He took what is mine and seeks to profit from it. Is that right?” Her eyes seemed to fill the space in the backseat.
“No, of course not,” he said robotically.
“Then help me.”
He blinked hard, knowing this was off. Her argument made sense but he felt like he should talk to Professor Muldare about this, man to man. But he couldn’t summon the willpower to say different. And anyway, she had his member in her hand, stroking it up and down, and damned if he wasn’t rising to the occasion again. If she had asked him to slap the greens out of his grandma’s mouth, he would have done it.
And he loved his grandma.
***
DORRIE AND HER FATHER, a widower, lived not far from Ghost Town. Nothing was that far from each other in Venice.
“He’s away at some faculty function,” she told him, head on his shoulders as they drove there in the Willys. “Dorrie is with him as he and his colleagues celebrate raping my land.”
Getting through a side window of the Muldare’s California Craftsman home wasn’t hard after they’d parked and walked over a concrete footbridge. The house was along one of the remaining canals mimicking the original ones in Venice, Italy. Coles knew black workers had helped dig those canals but were forbidden to buy here back then, though they could settle in nearby Oakwood. Homes stretched on either side, where several other canals had been filled in as the automobile become more plentiful since the late 1940s. The sidewalks were in bad shape or non-existent, quacking ducks brazenly walking or roosting about, more on land than in the water.
In the darkened study, Montez pointed to a bookshelf. “There. My prize is in there.”
Coles had brought a flashlight, and he shined its beam at a shelf where she pointed. The cone of light revealed a glass-and-wood case about the size of a breadbox, and he walked to it. There were symbols and images in silver embedded in the case. Like the ones in his vision when he’d made love to Ymar, he noted, confused.
Taking a moment, he examined the rectangular case, then swung its dual doors open. “It wasn’t locked.”
“Give it to me,” she whispered. Montez stood in the room but not near him.
He turned his head from her to what was inside. The object was gold, oval-shaped, and rested on three stubby legs, not unlike one of those Fabergé eggs he’d seen in a Look magazine once. He removed it.
“To me,” she repeated sibilantly, her hand extended like a grasping claw. But she made no move to step closer.
He went to her and the lights came on.
“Deacon?” Dorrie Muldare said.
“Oh God, no, it can’t be,” her father said. “That witchy woman in the village spoke the truth.”
He was an older man with a full head of white hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and he moved surprisingly fast for his age when he rushed forward. “We must stop her!”
“Imperious dolt,” Montez said, backhanding the elder Muldare and knocking him across the room. He crashed into a wooden globe, sending it rolling off its stand across the floor.
“Dad!” His daughter rushed to help me.
“Ymar, honey baby, what are you doing?” Coles said, disoriented as if in a dream.
“She’s a vampire, Deacon,” Professor Muldare said, having got himself up on an elbow.
“I am an Aztec queen,” Montez said as she snatched the golden vessel from Coles’ hand. “And you will lead my army of the undead, my good Deacon.” She pulled the vessel apart, tossing the top half away, which, Coles saw, had acted as a lid. Without it, the bottom half, with its three legs, was a kind of chalice, and it held black fluid. “This life essence of Mictlantecuhtli, the lord of the underworld, will give me the power I’ve craved for centuries!”
She held the chalice aloft, sneering at the older man. “And to think I have a pirate like you to thank for finding that which had been shielded from me for so long.”
“Stop her,” the archeologist protested. “She will enslave us all!”
His daughter rose, but Coles was closer. Whatever spell Ymar held over him was snapped once he’d seen her treat the older man so harshly and heard him talk about slavery. He left his feet and dove
at her as she started to drink from the container.
“No, you fool!” she bellowed as she was taken down. The dark viscous liquid was sloshed onto the drapes and carpet. She shoved Coles away, and he too was thrown back. He collided with the bookshelf, and the silver-inlaid case tumbled to the floor. Inadvertently he stepped on it, splintering the wood and breaking the glass as he got back on his feet.
Montez was on her knees, bent over, her tongue lapping up as much of the ichor as she could from the carpet. She raised her head, fanged teeth now prominent. The thick black fluid dribbled from her mouth, down her chin. She wiped at it, licking the blood stuff off her fingers, eying Coles with evil intent.
The chalice was on the floor on its side. Part of its interior was coated in a tar-like goop that must have been the residue of Mictlantecuhtli’s blood as Montez had claimed. Instantly everyone understood this substance was the most potent distillation of the ancient Aztec deity. Montez strode toward this, her body twisting and reshaping itself, like watching a tree grow on a time-elapsed film.
“Not so fast, Vampira.” Dorrie Muldare brought a heavy book down on the back of Montez’s head; it was an edition of the King James Bible—said to have been in her family since the 1700s. The Aztec queen collapsed to the ground, groaning.
“Time to spilt,” Coles said, scooping up the fancy cup.
The three ran from the house. They heard a screech and, looking back, watched in shock as a now airborne Ymar Montez ascended from the house into the moonlit night on large, leathery bat wings.
“Shit.” Coles stared open-mouthed as did the others.
“We can’t let her eat the . . . god’s jelly,” Professor Muldare sputtered.
“Right,” Coles said, cradling the golden vessel like a halfback as he ran for the footbridge leaving Dorrie and her father behind. The now-transformed Montez flew after him. She had clawed feet and hands, face elongated and distorted with bat-like features.
“Deacon,” the creature cried at as she dive-bombed him. “I will have what is mine.”
Before she could latch her claws into him, he turned and swung like Maury Wills at the plate, striking her with the chalice. She went end-over-end backward and dropped into the canal, sending disturbed ducks into the air. Coles kept running and got to his car.
Having been parked facing west, he peeled off on Venice Boulevard, then made a right onto Speedway, which paralleled the ocean. Oddly, it wasn’t named that as some believed because racing took place along the street; it was narrow and two-way. He clipped the side of a Woody station wagon coming from the opposite direction, the driver blaring his horn and cursing at him . . . until that driver saw a flying human-like creature whoosh down from above chasing the Willys.
Coles neared the Pen, the weight area where body builders worked out. His plan was to take a right off the thoroughfare and maybe lose the demon after him in the maze of streets called courts, only accessible by foot. He’d have to abandon the car, but he was too much of a target like this, he reasoned. He whizzed around the corner of the Lido Hotel, a rundown establishment, even by Venice standards. He nearly ran into two winos arguing in the middle of the street. There wasn’t enough room to get by them, and his tires smoked as he braked hard.
“Move!” Coles yelled, sticking his head out of the driver’s side window.
“Buzz off,” one of the winos said.
Coles edged forward but it was too late. With a resounding thud, Montez landed on the roof of the car.
“The angel of death has arrived,” one of the winos said. He prostrated himself before her.
Montez screeched and rammed her hand through the window on the driver’s side as Coles tried to roll it up. But it was her clawed feet that grabbed at him instead and tore him from the car, the driver’s side door ripped off its hinges as she did so. He was carried into the air, then let go to drop hard onto the ground. He landed, the breath knocked out of him. The Willys shuddered and died; the clutch had been engaged but no one was driving to give it gas. Wincing, he tried to rise.
“Oh, you little insignificant man,” Montez said hovering, then dropping on him, all four of her clawed appendages digging into this flesh. Saliva dripped from her fanged mouth as she leaned her face close to his, her forked tongue flicking his nose. The chalice with its unholy residue lay nearby.
“How would you like this tongue wrapped around your cock like I did earlier, Deacon?” She laughed at the horror on his face. “What, you recoil at the sight of me, my sweet?” she taunted. Briefly she willed herself to take on her human guise, the naked woman of pin-up delight. Chuckling, she then reverted back to her monstrous form. “Soon, your ardor will be rekindled when I make you mine, now and forever.” Her mouth opened wide, and she lunged forward to bite him and make him her vampire slave.
“It’s endsville for us, baby,” Coles said, burying a piece of jagged wood with its silver inlay inscription into the large vein in her neck.
Her eyes went wide and she reared back in shock. Coles had picked up the piece after he’d stepped on the chalice’s case, shattering it back at the house. He’d figured the hieroglyphs, or whatever they were in the silver, combined to create a barrier to her, which was why she couldn’t open that case herself. During the fight, he’d wondered, What would happen if he got the chance to stab her with a piece of the case?
His answer now was an inhuman wail of anguish as she tried to fly away, but her wings disintegrated, her body self-immolating as she became earthbound.
The professor and Dorrie drove up in their car. Together with the two winos, who were sobered by fear, they witnessed the end of the Aztec queen of the vampires. Montez’s charred skeleton caved in on itself as the fire lingered, and her ashes twinkled as they drifted skyward.
“Wow,” Dorrie Muldare said.
“Yeah, crazy,” Coles seconded.
“Indeed,” her dad said.
***
WHEN DEACON COLES WALKED into Fred Warrens’ office at the Centinela Speedway, he said, “I’ll compete in your damn show race. But if I win, then you put pressure on them ofays to hire some colored folk in the pits.”
“You got a deal, Mr. Coles.”
And when Coles raced his souped-up Willys around the track—money to improve her having come from Professor Muldare and some of his colleagues—he could hear the gas churning through the fuel line and the syncopated whine of oil and metal as the pistons screamed in the cylinders.
As Ymar Montez had burned, he’d noticed a smidgen of the Aztec god’s blood had gotten on his thumb. He’d licked it off and swallowed Mictlantecuhtli’s essence.
His super-charged senses had become knife-edge sharp, and the smell of combustion inflamed him like a beautiful woman’s perfume.
He was now the demon of the track.
* * *
Son of a mechanic and a librarian, weaned on the images of Kirby and Kane in comics and too many reruns of The Twilight Zone, GARY PHILLIPS and his pops once rebuilt a ’58 Ford Fairlane. Since then he has published various novels such as Violent Spring, the first such mystery set in post ’92 civil unrest L.A.; edited several anthologies including The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir; and published more than sixty short stories. With Christa Faust, he co-wrote a prose adaptation of the classic Batman vs. Joker graphic novel, The Killing Joke.
* * *
OUTLAWED INK
by Jason Starr
“These aren’t any tattoos,” Nick said. “These are different.”
* * *
WHEN MY COUSIN TAMMY CALLED WITH the news that my father had been killed in a hunting accident, I hated that I started sobbing. Hadn’t I cried enough for my old man? Instead of thinking about the hell he’d put me and the rest of our family through, I was feeling sorry for him?
“You okay?” Tammy asked.
Wiping the tears away with my sleeve, I said, “Yeah . . . fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
I was still sobbing, but I
didn’t want her to know. I waited a few seconds, getting ahold of myself then said, “I’m okay. Appreciate you letting me know.”
I just wanted to hang up the receiver—get on with my life.
“You want to know how it happened?” she asked.
I didn’t, but I asked, “What happened?”
“Your dad and my dad were hunting. It was early in the morning, they’d been drinking the night before, probably hungover or still drunk. Your dad was out ahead of my dad, and my dad thought he was a buck and shot him. My dad said your dad didn’t die right away. It took about a half hour before he went. You still there, Ray?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure.”
“My mom’s planning the funeral. I know you and your dad weren’t close. Hell, nobody was close with him except my dad. Anyway, the funeral will be in a few days, not sure when yet, but I’ll let you know when I know.”
“Okay,” I said, “thanks.”
“You want to tell Nick or should I?”
My twin brother Nick and I weren’t close either. I hadn’t talked to him in maybe five years.
“I’ll tell him,” I said.
“All right,” Tammy said.
Long after Tammy ended the call, I was still sobbing.
Not for the same reason, though.
***
“NICK.”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s me . . . your brother, remember?”
Long pause, then, “Dad died, didn’t he?”
“Want to know how?”
“I couldn’t give a damn.”
“There’s gonna be a funeral.”
“So?”
“You don’t wanna go?”
“Hell no. Why? You going?”
“It could be good for us,” I said. “I can drive through Albany on my way and pick you up. You still live in Albany, right?”
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