by Dixon, Chuck
Then I ran.
With the car at my back, I ran full-out through the grass. I was somewhere out in the wilds of New Jersey. It could have been the savannas of Africa if not for the shadow of the Pulaski Skyway blotting out the stars a mile off. There were lights on some kind of smokestack on the horizon. And a conga line of passenger jets thrummed overhead on their way to a landing on a runway at Newark.
I could hear voices. Roxanne’s above the others. Doors slammed, and the Lincoln roared to life.
My shoes slapped through mud and then ankle-deep water. I pitched the empty revolver away and headed deeper into the marshy ground, ducking low in the grass.
The lights of the Lincoln washed over me ahead of the engine roar. I ran on, bent over, jinking to my right out of the harsh glare of the high beams. The water was up to my calves now.
I heard a clunk behind me, followed by the whine of spinning wheels. The Lincoln was stuck. The beam from its lights shimmied back and forth across the top of the grass stalks as the big car fought to free itself.
I kept on, not looking back. I could hear Roxanne’s voice rise to a shriek as she called after me. She stood on top of the stalled car, shouting phrases I never learned in high school French. She was a lioness roaring out her rage and frustration at the prey that got away.
The miles of marshlands led to a river. I crossed it by walking the river bed to the other side. A chain-link fence surrounded a yard full of oil-storage tanks. There were ribbons of pink streaking the sky. No time to feed. I needed to find a place out of the light. I spent the day asleep in a cargo container abandoned alongside a rail siding. I woke up hungry. I hadn’t fed the night before. I was miles from anywhere, and followed the rail tracks toward the glimmer of the city reflected from the dark clouds above. It began to rain as if to enhance my mood. It would explain my wet clothes, anyway.
There was no going back to the Bolivar. Chances were they knew about that. First place they’d look. I would need to go to ground, give myself time to come up with a brand new plan. New York was done for me. I’d need to find new hunting grounds or stay on the move for a while. Maybe work my way west to Chicago, or even California.
But first, I needed to feed. The fire in my belly was a swirling ball of need. Heaven help the first soul I came across. Man or woman. Roxanne was right about that.
I was a monster. I needed to start owning that.
42
A girl in a McDonald’s polo shirt was taking a cigarette break at a picnic table set up at the rear of a parking lot. She was talking in Spanish on a bejeweled cell.
She didn’t see or hear me coming out of the hedges behind her. I planted a hand on the back of her head and drove her face into the tabletop. I lifted her from the bench and raised her body over my head to throw her over a concrete block wall that surrounded a pair of dumpsters. I vaulted in after her.
She lay by a dumpster, stunned, with a bloody crease in her forehead. A pathetic mewling came from between broken teeth. I used the carpet knife to cut away a leg of her uniform slacks. Another slash opened the femoral artery on the inside of her thigh. I drank until she was dead-white. Lips and fingertips blue. I tipped her into a dumpster labeled for cardboard only and shifted a few flattened boxes to cover her.
I jumped back over the wall, picked up the cell phone left on the picnic table, and tossed it far over the hedges. I walked through the double line of cars at the drive-thru and into the McDonald’s at the entrance nearest the restrooms.
Seated in a stall, I did an inventory of what was left in my pockets. A pool of muddy water spread on the tile where it dripped from my soaked clothes. I still had a wad of cash, my phony passport, and my wallet.
I needed to get back to the city. I needed dry clothes and a place to hide. There was no going back to the Bolivar. They’d know about that. I had to assume that. Thousands in cash and my stash of soporifics were lost to me. I’d have to find another place. But first, I needed a few nights in the city to set everything up.
It was going to be a long night. But the hunger was satisfied for now.
A cab took me to Newark Station, and I caught a train into the city. I found a mostly empty car. I stank of the river mud soaked into my clothes.
At the K-Mart in Penn Station, I bought some dry clothes, sneakers, and a new carpet knife with a pack of fresh blades. The old knife was wet. It would begin to rust.
I changed in a men’s room stall, shoving the wet clothes into a K-Mart bag and the bag into a trash bin.
The hunger was satisfied for now, and it was still early evening. I walked down 42nd to a multiplex. I bought a ticket for some cartoon movie and moved from theater to theater, only staying a few minutes in each. Kind of a forlorn hope, but I was hoping to find Lissa in the audience. I settled down in the last theater to watch some mindless movie with lots of car crashes. When it was over, I left the theater to cruise the street down to a bookstore Lissa liked to browse. She wasn’t there.
The night moved toward morning. The traffic was all trucks coming into the city on deliveries. I walked back to Penn Station and hopped off the end of a platform into the tunnels.
The L.I.R.R. trains still sat derelict on that siding. I shooed rats aside to lie down on a bench with the least damage. I rested my head back on the stack of newspapers lying there and looked up at the folded blanket spread on the overhead luggage rack. I wondered where she was cooping tonight. There was still time before dawn, and I hoped she’d come back.
In the dismal light, I read a Wall Street Journal that was five years old. I dropped off halfway through an article about shifting trends in retail. My last thoughts were a confused mélange featuring Lissa and Roxanne. I didn’t dream anymore. But those thoughts, as I succumbed to the darkness, disturbed me. The blackness, when it washed over me, came with an unpleasant thrill of unease.
43
I found her the next night. Or what remained of her.
I breakfasted on a junkie I found nodding at the bottom of the steps down to the platform on 51st. Then I wandered the tunnels north. Somewhere after the Hunter College stop, I saw something flash white along the tracks in the lights from a local rattling to a stop at 77th.
It was the white cotton dress we had bought for her. It lay in the filth against a wall of the tunnel. It was collapsed onto scorched remnants of her bones. Tiny wrists and ankles burnt crusty-black were still wrapped in loops of chains locked tight around two support girders. Directly above were the lights and the sounds of the sidewalks on Lexington coming down through a long steel grate.
She was the lamb now.
Someone had chained her here and left her for the sunshine to come down from above. The early morning light would be muted as it rose behind the buildings. The full burning glare of it would take hours to reach the grates above.
She would have spent hours sick and afraid, waiting to be turned to ash by the killing light. She couldn’t call out. She couldn’t free herself. And the ones who left her here would be gone to their own roosts to sleep through what they left her to endure.
I stooped to pick up the dress and shake the cold embers from it. I bunched it in my fist and shoved it under my shirt.
Roxanne never asked how I knew about Vikram. She wasn’t surprised when I said his name. She didn’t ask where I’d heard it. She already knew. Lissa had been gone even before Roxanne found me. Lissa was how Roxanne had found me. While I slept cozily in my room at the Bolivar, Lissa was slowly being exterminated in this shitty place.
I needed to run and run far. It was too late that night to think about relocating. I’d need a place to hide in the city. It had to be a place I’d never cooped before.
I started north again. An express was thundering up the tunnel behind me, and I stepped onto the ballast between tracks to let it pass. The lights from the lead car struck a row of supports. They cast a shadow on the face of a girder. The shadow of a man that ducked out of sight too late. Everything about the shadow’s movement was wrong. It
wasn’t a wastoid or a junkie. It moved with purpose to hide.
It moved like a predator.
A side tunnel leading down to the Metro North tracks was behind me. I ran to it. I could hear a pair of feet crunching gravel behind me. I raced along the westbound passage tunnel, sliding down concrete steps that led deeper toward the commuter tunnels that traveled out to the bedroom counties and Connecticut. The feet scuffed behind me. Only one pursuer for now. The one they left behind to stake out Lissa’s remains, hoping I’d find her eventually.
After months of wandering underground, I had the advantage of my knowledge of the world that lies beneath the city. I could lose him before any more showed up to help him. I came out on a narrow ledge that ran along the pair of tracks the Metro North trains ran on. The tracks went north where they came out of the earth above 97th Street. I vaulted the guardrail to drop down onto the lane by the tracks. I raced south, deeper into the system heading back toward Grand Central and the endless warren of tunnels that branched out from there like the strands of a spider web.
Footfalls behind me sprayed gravel. I turned to see the shadow figure move under the cone of radiance from a lamp above. It was one of the Eurotrash thugs that had been with Roxanne. The driver. He came after me in a machine-like jog.
It was going to be a long stretch until I reached Grand Central. No side tunnels for another hundred yards. A big bastard, his stride was longer than mine. He’d catch up to me before then. Simple math. I was moving as fast as I could. His feet spattered stones behind me. I leapt the nearest rail to run along the smoother surface of concrete ties. That put a hitch in his step as he adjusted to the uneven surface. But he fell into a rhythm after a half-dozen steps and was gaining on me again.
The rails far ahead of me winked with silver flashes. A ball of light rose from the artificial horizon in a mock sunrise. The ties under me trembled, and the rails hummed. A train was coming down the track we were on.
I began making long leaps, taking three ties at a time toward the glowing ball of light. The thug fought to keep up. He stumbled once and caught himself. He raced to close the gap.
The glare in front of me expanded to fill my vision. The roar of its approach filled my ears. A horn blared above the thunder, a long blast warning us to clear the tracks. I kept moving, leaping toward the light growing higher and higher as the train raced up the slight grade of the tracks.
The thug was close. The fingertips of his outstretched hand brushed my shoulder. I flinched from his grip. He barked a huff of frustration. A new burst of speed gave him a solid grip on the sleeve of my jacket. I twisted, freeing my arm from the sleeve. I continued the twist, pulling him from his feet. The jacket came off my shoulders. I tripped, rolled, and was off the tracks as the train blasted by. I came to rest on the gravel near the other track line.
Not so lucky, the big thug. The engine hit him straight on doing fifty. Whatever parts of him weren’t dismembered on first impact were chewed to bits under the steel wheels of the next six cars. The train would take another mile or so to come to a stop. The engineer would be on the radio to his bosses, and that would bring the transit cops.
I trotted along between the tracks to reach Grand Central and the freedom of the tunnels. The thug was scattered everywhere. A leg here. An arm there. Ropey lengths of shiny black guts stretched between bits of chopped torso. Finally there was the head, regarding me with white-hot rage. The lips worked to form words, but all that came out was a wet hissing sound. As I ran by, I kicked out and sent the head tumbling over the tracks into the shadows between two lamps.
The end of a platform sat under blinking fluorescents. I climbed the steel steps and made my way into the station. I crossed the enormous vaulted cathedral of Grand Central’s main station and joined an after-theater crowd for the descent to the subway platforms.
I sat on a bench and waited for the next train to arrive and the platform to empty. People rushed on and off the cars until the platform was clear. The train pulled away, and all was silent.
But I wasn’t alone. A woman rose from a bench farther along the station to walk toward me. Hands in the pockets of her coat, a tilted smile on her lips.
I hadn’t been running away from anyone. I’d been running toward Roxanne.
44
The long blade of a machete dropped from the sleeve of her coat. She had a professional grip on the handle, and her glove leather creaked as her fingers tightened around it. She held it down by her leg so that it wasn’t visible to the people on the opposite platform.
I backed away, eyes locked on her. The eyes were dead glass. The tilted smile was frozen. I turned and ran to the end of the platform, leaping a chain barrier down to the track level. I trotted into the dark on legs that could never weary. She followed like a shadow, matching me step for step. She spoke as she followed, her voice reaching from the dark behind me.
“You blinded Anton. Did you know? I told you that we do not heal. We only endure. I ended him, as I will end you. Ours is no world for the weak, mon petit.”
“What’s the other asshole’s name?” I shouted down the tunnel.
“Paolo. Did you lose him in the tunnels?”
“Last time I saw him, the Waterbury Express had turned him to hamburger.” I barked a laugh.
“Cochon!” She shrieked it.
“Get you in trouble with the boss, bitch?”
I left her there to leap through the uprights that ran between the tracks. A train was sweeping toward us. I jumped the tracks just ahead of it to put the train between us. The rushing cars only an arm’s length away, I raced back the way I’d come to a steel ladder bolted to the wall. I was halfway up the rungs by the time the train passed under me.
I could hear Roxanne’s cry of frustration as I crawled out of a ventilation hatch on the floor above. I was in some kind of service corridor. Concrete floor and tiled walls. Atop the hatch opening was a six-foot-long steel grate hinged open and secured in place on a hook. I straddled the opening and looked down to see Roxanne standing below, her hands and one booted foot on the rungs.
“You are a child. You act as a child does. I might have taught you our ways, but we will never know now.” She shrugged. Indifferent. Those black eyes immobile on mine.
“I was a child. Born again in a seriously fucked-up way, thanks to you.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits.
“Why did you have to do that to Lissa? To get back at me? Or didn’t she fit Vikram’s idea of what a blood-sucking freak should be?”
“She did not suit the order of things. She was small and weak, just as you are stupid and weak. For the Order to continue requires darkness. Hor la loi like you risk bringing us all into the light. And there are more kinds of light than the sun, mon petit.”
“We’re monsters. Worse than that. We’re a disease.”
“And what is a germ? Une bactérie? We are a form of life. Like a flower or a moth. We are part of nature, and have been for thousands of years.”
“You’re dead, Roxanne. You really need to start acting like it.” She came up the ladder with a roar from deep inside. Teeth bared, and eyes wide with rage. When she was on the top rungs, I unhooked the steel grate from the wall and pulled it free. A quarter ton of steel grate dropped into place with a meaty thud. I jumped on it to add my weight to the mass.
Roxanne was caught, pinned, with one arm and her head above the vent opening. The hard edge of the grate bit halfway through her neck like the blade of a blunt guillotine. Her arm was severed clean off inside the coat sleeve. The machete clattered to the floor, her hand still firm on the handle. Her eyes rolled to look up at me standing atop the grate that was crushing what was left of her throat.
Her lips formed words through the bubbling black bile that filled her mouth.
I leaned close, trying to catch the last words she would ever speak.
“J’ai vu mourir les éléphants.”
I looked it up later. It meant “I watched the elephants die.” Or may
be I heard it wrong.
45
Seattle only has sunshine one out of three days. Doesn’t help me much. But it was a place to go that was far from New York. And they’re tolerant of all kinds of homeless, transients, and freaks out here.
I’ve been here a month, living off the cash I left in the room safe at the Bolivar. Changed my mind about going back there after Roxanne and her friends were gone.
Spent part of the money on a new identity. I’m Alan Chandler from Evansville, Indiana now. Shaved my head to match the photo I had. Can’t undo that. That’s the mood I’m in. Nothing lasts forever. Even me.
I have a laptop, a smartphone, a modem, and a van. I stay mobile, moving from one WiFi hotspot to another.
Signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Tumblr, Kick, Slap, and Poke. Used my real name. The name I was born with. The name I used when I was alive. I filled out all the applications the same way. Under occupation, I typed Vampire
I put links on all my accounts to a blog page where I told my story. I included a selfie video I made. I’m not in the video, and that’s the point. It shows me feeding off some wasted college student from Cornish. More accurately, some invisible something draining the life from a catatonic girl lying naked in an alley. I took her clothes off to make sure it went viral.
When I lay down to coop in my van that first morning, I had ten hits on Facebook and five on Twitter. When I woke up the next night, I had eight thousand followers on Facebook, and close to ten thousand on Twitter. Same story on other sites, along with hundreds of shares. Within three days, the conspiracy sites linked to my blog and added blogs of their own connecting back to the case of the missing corpse. By the end of the week, the Enquirer picked it up on their site, and by the following week, in print. Page one. They did the homework to uncover my connection to a string of murders in New York.
