Thirsty

by M. T. Anderson

  Suddenly, as if cued by Rebecca’s beauty, the air is filled with the cooing of distant police sirens, like pretty birds rising all around from a Persian palace court.

  And I am by her side.

  “Rebecca,” I call. “Rebecca!”

  “Hey, Chris,” they all say as I run up.

  “What happened to that girl?” says Chuck. “Lolli whatever?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant but looking wildly over my shoulder, past the Dizzy Caterpillar. “She’s trying to find me. There’s safety in numbers.”

  “Especially ten, in the Cabala,” Rebecca offers idly, looking sideways. “That’s the number of the Sephiroth.” Everyone finds that a bit of a conversation stopper. For a minute, we all think of what to say next.

  Then Andy says, “Hey, want to go on the tilt-a-whirl?”

  Everyone says yeah and starts to head over to it, Tom and Andy and Chuck looking back at me and whispering among themselves. They are whispering: Why is he running away from Lolli? Boy, if she were looking for me, man, I sure wouldn’t be hiding, it would be ollie, ollie in-come-free. Jerk trudges beside them, looking guilty and upset at hearing bad things about me. Kristen walks up between Tom and Chuck.

  “Rebecca,” I say. “I —” For the moment, that seems enough. Then I continue, “Rebecca, I need to talk to you.”

  She stops. She hesitates, poised as if standing on top of a column. “What’s wrong?” she asks and follows the lines of my face with her eyes. “You look really sick.” She turns all the way toward me.

  I shrug. “I need to talk to you,” I say helplessly. “Could we talk?”

  “Of course. I told you . . .” She nods. “You could come with me on the tilt-a-whirl.”

  I look ahead at the tilt-a-whirl. It flings people around at fifty miles per hour, their hair streaming, their mouths open, their hands clutching at the sides of the car. I admit, “I’m not sure we’d reach any definite conclusions after talking on the tilt-a-whirl.”

  Rebecca nods. “Just a sec,” she says in shorthand. She jogs up to Kristen and whispers something in her ear.

  Kristen points at me and says something to Chuck, Tom, and Andy. The three of them start laughing and glancing back at me.

  I don’t care. I glance up at their necks, craned back to look at me, and at the wiry tendons there, and I think a passing thought about how pleasant it would be to kill them and feel their blood moving through me.

  But now Rebecca is at my side, smiling uneasily.

  “Come on,” I say to her hoarsely. “Come on.”

  “What is it?” she demands. “What?”

  “Come on!”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Please,” I say.

  And I think my eyes are so desperate, as are the corners of my mouth and other regions of my face, that she silently follows me.

  We run through the crowds.

  People are wolfing down fried dough. People are prowling in packs. A child is screaming by the moonwalk, “My arm is broke! My arm is broke!” People are shoving and grabbing.

  Lights spin over us. There’s screaming all around. And above it all, voices booming out over the gruesome disco from the merry-go-round, “We damn him in his thought. We damn him in his speech. We damn him in his being. Our hate is ranged against him.”

  The crowds push; people sing; someone barfs behind a tent. His back heaves again and again, as if it’s being wrung.

  “A hot dog! A hot dog! I wanna hot dog!” yowls a child dragging a bear by the ear, but her parents are lost in the crowd.

  And I lead Rebecca through it all to a grove of trees off to the side.

  And we stand there, together, in the warm summer’s night.

  The moon is pale above the whirling lights and is fringed by silver wings of cloud. The trees rustle softly above us, as if anxious with sap.

  The smell of the grass is sweet, and the night feels wide and the adventure good; and I feel we can, together, do something. We will pound on desks; we will point at the map and direct the police and use words like “zone six,” “ETA,” and “triangulation.”

  Finally.

  “Chris,” she says, stepping toward me. “You are so strange sometimes.” She says it gently, so gently it’s like she’s stroking my face. (She isn’t.) She leans back against a tree trunk, her legs stiff. Her toe is touching mine. I don’t know if she notices. I wriggle my toe closer to her toe. Softly, she urges me, “I’m ready for your revelation. Whatever it is.”

  Finally. Finally.

  “Rebecca,” I say (I can’t believe I’m saying the name!), “it is very hard to talk about.”

  She nods her head. “I can see. Don’t worry.”

  “I have to explain something.”

  She laughs lightly. “Yes, you do.”

  “But I will explain myself.”

  She pushes herself up with her hands outspread, so she is standing close to me. “You have to be brave,” she says.

  She is standing very close to me. Her arms are at her sides, but they don’t need to be. If they moved up any, they would be around me. My arms would be around her. She is looking up into my face and searching it; her lips are parted.

  Her neck is turned to look up at me, and I can almost feel its silky grass-sweet skin, follow its curve down past her collarbone and the fluting of her throat to her soft chest. My teeth are moving. They are becoming fangs. I need to talk quickly.

  “Rebecca, there’s something . . . You’ll have to trust me.”

  Her skin is beautifully cool and white in the moonlight, as cool and white as a tomb. And beneath it, her blood races. “Look, Chris, you’ve got to stop beating around the bush.” She puts her hand on my arm and rubs it up and down to reassure me. It does not reassure me. My teeth are swelling because of the blood. They’re enormous. They’re crowding the rest of my mouth. I can barely move my tongue.

  It is now. Now or never.

  I reach up and almost take her hand. Leaning toward her, I murmur urgently, “Rebecca, you have to underthtand — under —”

  “What?” She leans toward me, holding my arm.

  My teeth are huge. “I thaid, you — I thaid —”

  “What?”

  “I, uh, it’th jutht — it’th — ohhhhhhhhhh, thit!” I wail. I turn from her and smack a tree ineffectually. “Thit! Thit! Thit! Thit! Thit!” I hide my mouth with my hand.

  My teeth are mammoth; tusklike; throbbing; barely crammed into my mouth.

  I am filled with rage. I don’t even know at what. Rebecca looks at me, maybe even frightened. I stagger back away from her like a cowering animal. “Chris?” she says.

  I am ready to pounce. Her neck is spread out, her arms, her chest — I want to feed on her. I want to kill her. I back away. I run back toward the fairground, screaming petulantly, “No! No! No! Oh, thit, thit, thit, thit, thit!”

  Back through the crowds of screaming teens, back through the teeming maze of stalls.

  “Chris!” she calls.

  But I am all alone; I know that now. I am all alone with the Forces of Darkness ranged against me.

  I lope down the littered aisles, wild with longings.

  Lolli — I am thirsty; and she is evil. Kill two birds with one stone. That is my plan: Kill two birds with one stone. Drink Lolli’s blood. I will drink Lolli’s blood to stay alive.

  As I run on, the thoroughfares are empty, the fairground air dank with chill. Something has happened. Now no one smiles in the sweet-smelling stable decay of the tents and tarps; a few fat faces gawk as I stumble past stalls; and they turn and talk.

  I notice now that grandparents grimly grab their sticky charges as I hurtle past and on and on, past the narrowed eyes of lone fair-folk, leaning against their machines — the ferris wheel deserted, the teacups drained to the dregs — past a gaggle of girls, their limbs ripe and red; past a cluster of couples holding babies (sacks of blood as succulent as grapes) — I am thirsty; she is evil — kill two birds wi
th one stone — I tear through the fair, gasping for breath, greedy for gore, I sprint across the lawn to the Rigozzis’, stumble up the steps, almost crowing for the kill . . .

  And silence greets me.

  The house blares with light, but there is no sound. There is no sound but the agitation of crickets that have seen things.

  The door is ajar.

  I slip in.

  The music is off. Overturned beer cups drool on the carpeted stairs.

  Something is wrong.

  I step gingerly into the living room. The stereo is on, but the CD player mute. No one is there to listen. Paul’s camcorder lies crumpled and kicked on the floor. Chairs are overturned; the table where Lolli danced and bucked is broken; and I look up and see, splattered across the wall, the stains where a head with blood-wet hair slammed down and slid.

  Carefully, I approach the blotch. It is already beginning to dry.

  The beer keg drips in the silence.

  Plick. Plick. Plick. Plick.

  I examine the first impact where the head must have hit, the trail where it smeared down to the baseboard.

  Plick. Plick. Plick.

  The sprinkled droplets are drying to black.

  Plick. Plick.

  “This is not a good party.”

  I whip around; I stagger backward. The voice is coming from the other side of a sofa turned away from me. Carefully, I approach. Some sophomore stoner sits there, staring vacantly away from me. I can tell at a glance that he is baked. He looks tiny slumped on the sofa, lost in a pool of his own huge clothes.

  “Who is that there?” he asks. “Knock-knock. Knock-knock!”

  “No one,” I whisper. “No one thpecial.”

  I back away to the wall.

  I draw my lips together. I crouch down so I’m below his line of sight. I’m hunkered next to the wall, ready to sprint.

  “Man,” he says. “Ma-ha-ha-ha-han.” He sighs. “Ma-ha-ha-ha-han.”

  “What happened?” I ask, almost in a whisper.

  For a minute, he just sits there, still staring in the opposite direction. I can no longer see him over the back of the sofa. “This . . . She didn’t show up on film. She. Pete Gallagher. He. You know Pete?”

  I want to get him talking. “I know Pete,” I say. “What happened?”

  Carefully, watching the back of the sofa, I lean and put my cheek against the wall. I stick my tongue out and begin licking the blood.

  “Man, ma-ha-ha-ha-han.” I hear him shift slightly. “He was taking this video, you know. There was this, and it, this guy with her. He started to. You know. Beat out of, I mean, the crap out of Pete. The crap.”

  I’m crazed and nervous in the quiet, just listening to the monotone of his idiot voice over the distant crickets through the open door. I press my cheek closer to the wall and keep lapping silently at the salty scum.

  “They started to punch at first. Then it turned into this whole big fight. This whole big fight. Chaos. Complete chaos.” His voice is sliding up the scale, getting higher and whinier. “He killed Pete, I think. I think Pete is dead. God. I think he’s . . . bought the farm. A hundred and twenty acres of the best, man. Cattle and pastures. With a ding-dong here, and a ding-dong there.”

  My tongue rasps against the drying clots. I realize he’s stopped talking. Got to get him going again. I open my eyes, panting, draw my tongue in, and ask, “Tho what happened then?” Go back to licking.

  “Then that bitch. What’s her name? She ran and tried to get away. She and this guy, running down the driveway. People thought they were just going to get away?”

  Faintly, from upstairs, I hear careful footsteps.

  They start in Kathy’s bedroom.

  “Tony, he . . . There. He got in his car, drove full speed into her. Bam! She couldn’t be killed but I guess that did . . .” He sighs again, and shifts slightly. “The trick. She went flying, man. Flew. Broke her back. She was out. Knocked out. They called the police. Took her into town for a . . . you know. Execution. Formally.”

  The footsteps stalk down the carpeted hallway toward the stairs. I don’t know who it is, but it sounds as if whoever is making the footsteps is walking softly, so as not to be heard.

  “If I ever see that bitch again,” the stoner drones, “man, I’m not going to give her the time. Not the Time. Of. Day. No way.”

  I really want to run, but the blood is too good, even in dried flakes like fish food. I rise. I bob down to get a quick last lick at the scab, then briskly make my way toward the front door. The footsteps upstairs pick up.

  “Can’t. How can she do that to Pete, man? Just do that. To, like, the captain of lacrosse.”

  The footsteps are racing down the steps from upstairs. I hurtle out through the door.

  Down the steps. I pound down the driveway toward the main road.

  Looking back, I see a shape throwing itself down the front stairs. Someone is running after me, arms flailing with speed.

  I’m almost down the driveway, darting through little pools of light from lamps among the rhododendrons.

  My feet slap the tarmac. I’m hurtling down the slope toward the road.

  I am on the main road. I turn left, the direction of the fair.

  The streetlights along the narrow road cast a ghastly sheen over the cracks and rubble where the road fades to forest.

  Gasping for breath, I pound toward the field where people are parked.

  I have to reach a crowd. I have to reach a crowd.

  I have to tell them not to kill her.

  I can hear footsteps clattering down the driveway.

  They have to stop the killing. For one thing, she knows where to find the convocation of vampires. So I have to stop them.

  My shirt is untucked, my mouth hanging open, dragging at the air.

  My tongue, in spite of everything, still stings and squirms in happy memory.

  I hurtle toward the fair.

  I jump roadkill.

  I look back.

  Bat, sprinting toward me. Suddenly slowing and stopping. Looking past me.

  I turn; look.

  Right behind me, Chet flickers and solidifies. His teeth glint like iron in the dim light.

  He grabs my wrists and yanks them up above my head.

  He shakes his head like he is disappointed, and chides, “Christopher, you’ve got to stop running.”

  And from behind, I hear the doom-filled tread of Bat’s Keds on the tarmac.

  Chet stands before me, the whites of his eyes faintly glowing with a sick pearly light. “Almost midnight,” he says. “Almost time for all Hell to break loose.” He yanks my arms again, and I twitch in pain.

  “Who are you?” I hiss.

  “My name is not important, Christopher. We’re going to see your handiwork now. The fruit of your labor. Couldn’t have done it without you.” He’s clearly enjoying himself.

  Bat steps out of the shadows, his stubbly face weird with snarls. He points at me, yells, “BASTARRRD! He’s mine. Miiiiiiine! Give me the bastard. Give him to me, Chet.”

  “No, Bat,” says Chet. “I can’t do that.”

  “Give him to meeeee!” Bat screams. “MEEEEEE!” He swings his fists. “He’s the reason they’ve got her! GIVE HIM TO MEEEEE!”

  Chet drops my arms.

  “They don’t have her anymore, Bat,” he says lazily. “I’m afraid your succulent, truculent friend was executed just three and a half minutes ago. You can see the footage on the news. They took her to the town center.” His voice harsh with pleasure, he continues, “I understand her body started to knit back together on the ride over. By the time they got her into town, she was awake. She started struggling. The police went to take her out of the car and transport her into the courthouse. Unfortunately, she lashed out. One of the officers tripped and fell. The crowd couldn’t be controlled. It was a mob scene. They found sharp things. Someone must have found a stake. They killed her where she fell, with her head and half her back on the pavement and the lower half o
f her body trailing in the gutter. She didn’t even die on level ground. Somehow that hurts particularly, don’t you think?”

  Bat looks lost. He’s pale. Pale as a ghost.

  “Sorry, Bat. She’s not here anymore. She’s gone. Damned.”

  Bat is limp. “I’ve got to talk to her,” he whimpers. “But I’ve got to talk to her.”

  Chet shrugs. “Okay,” he says. Suddenly, his voice is high — his voice is hers — and he screams, “Help me, Bat! Help me! I’m in so much pain!!!” He smiles blandly, and says, “It goes on like that for a while. All eternity.”

  “You bastard! YOU BASTARD!” yells Bat, moving toward Chet. He slaps his hand down to his belt and pulls out an ornate and ancient switchblade, rune covered and flashing with little sparks of fire.

  Bat yowls and throws himself at Chet, raising the wild dagger.

  He flies across the clearing.

  Chet waves his hand, and Bat disappears.

  The woods are in turmoil. The trees still warp and shudder in the wind, and the leaves still spin as if propelled.

  “Where did he go?” I ask, breathless.

  Chet looks up and down the empty road, obviously pleased with himself. “He was no longer useful,” he says. He claps once. “Now I want to see what you’ve made possible, Christopher. They’ll be sacrificing the final goat soon. So step lively. Move.” He grabs my shoulders, turns me, pushes me toward the woods. I stumble between the trees.

  Chet lifts his legs above fallen branches; he holds back the spiny limbs of saplings for me to pass. The road gets smaller behind us. We’re headed down the slope toward the bank of the reservoir.

  “What’s going on?” I demand.

  “On?” says Chet.

  I shove through a stand of pine that writhes with our passage. “Tell me what’s going on,” I say.

  “Isn’t it a little late for that question?” Chet asks. “Maybe you should have thought of that earlier.”

  “I did,” I say sourly. “I was tricked.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I’m very sorry to hear that you were tricked.”

  The night is uneasy and electrical as we pace along through the forest at a furious clip. The clouds are low and discolored; but the moon still shines. Through the trees, the lake burns an electric blue. Strange currents slip along power lines and rock the trees and prod the crickets to chirp like clockwork mechanisms.