There were ten people seated scattershot across three times as many folding chairs. They crowded the room, which was bigger than one expected of a chintzy place like this, but not as big as most people probably wished after they’d put down the deposit. At the front of the room was a guy with the damp forehead and upholstery pattern tie of a salesman. Most of the people in the chairs were significantly older than Crew Cut – Bobby – had seemed. But there, in the back, tantalizingly close to us, was Bobby. He was sitting next to a young woman and whispering in her ear, but nothing else about their body language was intimate. They were having a conversation but it was more business than pleasure.
The salesman at the front was in the middle of trying to answer a question, apparently. “Um, well, first, let me say that’s an excellent question.” I rolled my eyes, and I could practically hear the people in the audience do the same. “Yes, the XD model comes with a separate identifier module. It makes an independent determination of what you’re detecting, which decreases the odds of you picking up trash and being told it’s buried treasure.” Then he laughed, but it was like he had to stamp out each one: “Ha. Ha. Ha.” This guy was bombing, and he knew it, and I knew it, and if I’d been paying attention I could have smelled it from outside.
What surprised me was that the audience didn’t seem to care. “And how deep does the twelve inch coil detect?”
“That depends on the metal, of course, and the size of the object. If you’re talking about a coin, that’s going to depend on whether it’s flat facing or on its edge, and the alloys involved.” The guy hesitated, and I noted it because a person who’s a professional in sales usually presses hard with the best-case scenario in order to seal the deal. This guy wasn’t pressing hard. He wasn’t pressing at all. Hell, he was leaning back. He looked a little intimidated. That only happens when a salesperson who maybe isn’t as knowledgeable as they should be encounters a prospect who’s done their homework. “In the best-case scenario, I’m going to say… three feet? For something that size, I mean. The size of a coin.” He hesitated again, and his body language was all huddled together. He wasn’t talking with his hands the way a lot of professional pushers do – rather, he was, but he was also folded up like Godzilla had wrapped a hand around his chest and this guy was waving each hand at the wrists to signal for help.
“And the fifteen inch coil?” This came from an older woman with short white hair and a completely sincere sweater vest. “I’ve read claims it can find large deposits as deep as fifteen or twenty feet.”
“Yeeeeeeees,” the salesman said, and I could tell now the rip tide had him. He wasn’t going to be able to swim back to shore on this one. “That’s true, but that’s for very large deposits. The sort of things you’d find washing up on a beach like this are not going to register on a coil that large. Not from any distance, no matter how close.” The salesman tried to escape this line of questioning by looking at Roderick and me. “I see we have a couple of latecomers.” He tried a smile, but it was having trouble getting out of bed. “No problem, please, have a seat. Tell me your names?”
Everyone – including Bobby Crew Cut and his partner in their game of whispers – looked up and around at us. The locals other than Bobby and his friend gave us a look that surprised me in how consciously appraising it was. They didn’t just shrug us off as people they didn’t know who’d wandered into the wrong room. They looked at us to size us up. They wanted to know who we were and they wanted to know why we were there. A couple of them whispered to each other as they looked at us.
It’s not in my nature to back down from a challenge. I shifted my weight and crossed my arms. “What’re you looking at?” I said it aloud, right to the guy sitting closest to me. He was in his 70’s, beer gut, thin hair worn long, but behind that easy-going beach bum look was the hardened, narrow-lidded gaze and sharp eyes of a tiger about to strike.
“I wish I knew,” he said back, and he didn’t look away.
That caught me by surprise. Mostly people back down when I come on strong. It’s one of the reasons I do it. I frowned at the corners of my mouth and said, “Well then, let me tell you.” I don’t know what I was about to say – something generically insulting, something boastful, I don’t know, but I was of course not about to say the vampire boss of North Carolina, so screw you and the hearse you’ll ride out in.
Whatever I was about to say, Roderick put his hand on my arm this time. “My Cousin and I,” he said, with the slightest smile on his pretty little twink face, in his harmless pink tee shirt, “Are here for the time-share seminar. Is this the time-share seminar? We were told there would be a gift bag for attendees. We are interested in property development.” Roderick took his hand from my arm and folded his hands in front of himself to await his answer.
I looked around at their reactions and noticed that Bobby Crew Cut had gone completely tense. I mean that every muscle in his body was as taut as a guitar string. He could have leapt from the chair and run out the door in two steps with no warning. A big bead of flop sweat burst out on his forehead and after a moment the smell reached me: it was the stench of another vampire, but it was very, very, very faint.
Well, well, well, I thought to myself. So they are making thralls, and he’s sweating it out. Madness.
I cleared my throat and stuck my thumb in Roderick’s direction. “Exactly,” I said, turning to the guy who’d been a dick to me. “We’re here for time shares and real estate. Family business. We’re looking to flip some of these old busted-ass beach houses.” I jutted my chin out at him. The houses on the island were of all kinds of sizes and ages, and a handful of them were pretty much still standing out of habit. “You got a problem with that?” I couldn’t help get in a glance at Bobby Crew Cut, though, and he had balled up his fists just in case it was a fight rather than a flight kind of situation.
The geezer with the big mouth stood – with a little effort, and I realized he was probably younger than I, but I spent the night chasing people across rooftops and diving through plate glass doors, and this guy had to strain to get out of the barcalounger – and turned to me. “This is a private event for the historical society.”
“The North Carolina society,” said the woman sitting next to him – the one who’d asked about the fifteen-inch coils. “Nice try, cocks. Now get the hell out before Herman kicks you across the line himself.”
The part of me that rose to his challenge before, that part of me absolutely leapt at the doors of its cage with its teeth snapping. It didn’t matter that this guy was nothing compared to me. It didn’t matter that he was just some wheezing old man trying to feel big one last time. It didn’t matter that I could have flipped him ass over teakettle with one pinky finger. That part of us – of vampires – is always looking for a fight to pick. That part of us is always ready to bite. I drew a deep breath through my nose, let most of it out through my teeth, and said, “Sorry to interrupt.” I worked my jaw. “Maybe the time share seminar is tomorrow.”
“Or maybe it’s in South Carolina,” said another one of the blue hairs perched on a folding chair. “You know, where you belong.”
“We shall go now,” Roderick said. His voice was very smooth. His eyes swept the room to make contact with each individual person. “Our apologies. Clearly there is something going on, of which we are not a part, and we do not wish to impose further upon you fine people.” He started to back us out of the room, and I followed, and at the door he paused. Very slowly, as if he weren’t sure he was doing it right but he was going to give it a solid try, Roderick said, “Go… Heels.” They’re the mascot for UNC. Roderick nodded after he said it, and decided to say it again. “Yes. Go Heels.” He raised one fist in a small pumping action.
Seconds later we were back in the bar, and the bartender was there, and the old guys in the corner were telling each other a story about one time when they were all out boating together, but they were all telling it at the same time as though none of the others were speaking.
> “Oh, did you guys talk to Bobby?” The bartender looked up from her phone and then shrugged as she corrected herself. “I mean, Deputy Rudyard?”
I looked at her, opened my mouth, then shut it again.
“Have a pleasant night,” Roderick murmured as we walked past, down the long, narrow room with all the beer signs I didn’t recognize, and out the front door into the night. The island was still and quiet at this hour, no cars moving, no sounds but the surf on the other side of the dunes and the creak of an occasional rocking chair somewhere far away, far enough down one or another street that only one of us could have heard it. I could hear a little dog yapping away. Smiles and Dog were sitting on the sidewalk out front of the bar, waiting for us, and Roderick reached down to give each of them a friendly ruffle behind the ears.
I turned to Roderick to say something, but the door burst open behind us. It was Crew Cut – Deputy Bobby Rudyard.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he said. He was looking between Roderick and me, back and forth, and I could have told you from a half mile upwind that he was lying. He was afraid – no, he was terrified. His voice was low, though, like it took a lot of work to get out from under all that fear and anger. “I know what you are,” he whispered. “And I am not afraid.” He licked his lips. “But you should be.”
Roderick didn’t move towards him, but he did cock his head to one side and narrow his eyes, and there was something in Crew Cut’s face that told me he had been looked at like that before – examined, the way Roderick had examined those card players inside – and he didn’t like it one bit.
“Then what are we?” I asked it, but I tried to ask it as gently as I could. I didn’t want to scare the guy into starting a fight right here. I might talk tough in the undertaker’s waiting room in there, but I know better than to pick fights with the law – in public, anyway. My voice was soft and I used all the body language of relaxation and of opening up.
“You’re vampires,” he said. He whispered it, and it shook him right down to his guts to say that word aloud. “We won’t let you take us back.” He started to back away as he spoke, and then to arc around us, and I realized he was going for his car. I thought for a moment he was going to attack us, but to my surprise he was trying to escape. “We’re never going back. And we’ll never live like that again. And we will find as many of you as we can and stop you from hurting anyone else.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, son,” I said. The look on his face told me that had been dumb, and I put up my hands in a calming gesture. “I mean, I do, but I don’t know whom. I don’t know who did what to you, or how you know what you know, but hand to the heavens, I don’t know for a fact that I have any quarrel with you.”
“You always talk sweet,” Crew Cut said. He looked so bitter when he said it. I’ll never forget how much pain, how much plain old heartache, was written on his features when he said that to me. Later, when it was all over – all of it – I painted as close as I could get to a perfect reproduction of just his eyes from that specific moment. I have it hanging in my studio, in the basement of my house in Raleigh, and I look at it any time I want to be reminded what suffering looks like. A vampire sees terror all the time, and all the other delicious flavors of fear, but it isn’t often we see the anguish of great personal difficulty. “Y’all always sound so calm, so measured, like the whole world’s just a big old set of dominos you’ve put in place and you’re ready to knock them over. But it’s always a lie.” Crew Cut opened the door to his car, climbed in, turned it on, and waited.
“Cousin,” I said. Crew Cut was just sitting there in his car looking at us, engine idling, and we were just standing there looking back at him. “Cousin,” I said again, “What the fuck is going on here?”
“We must wait for the other one to come out, and we must let them leave,” Roderick said. He said it like there was no other answer, like I’d just asked what two plus two would equal and the answer was obviously seventeen. He was right, but it had been a long time – and by that, I mean, my whole life plus my whole unlife – since someone had walked up to me, called me out as a vampire, and then threatened me.
Right on cue, the woman with whom he’d been whispering walked out. She climbed into the other Sheriff cruiser, and the two of them backed out. With her in front, they drove away.
I turned to Roderick. “I don’t even know which questions to ask first.”
“Then start listing them in no special order.” He smiled a little, but he was still looking in the direction the deputies had driven: towards the bridge, off the island, back to the mainland. The island was very quiet now, in their absence. It was the sort of quiet that sounds like people waiting for something.
“Okay,” I said, “What would vampires want with buried treasure?”
Roderick nodded once, eyes still on the dark horizon. “So we have arrived at the same idea.”
I went on. “The ghost thing – we’re bookmarking that. We’ll come back to it.” It isn’t that I didn’t believe in ghosts. I’m a vampire, we run into a lot of weird shit, but on top of that I’m from the South. We’ve got more restless dead than relations. It was more like I would rather deal with one thing at a time. It bothered me that there might be a ghost getting around, of course, but that’s an old fear I’d put away a long time ago. Every vampire with a lick of sense spends the first few months or years of their new existence scared shitless of ghosts. You can’t help but kill a few people – probably more like a lot – when you’re a vampire, and there’s that part of you that says if ghosts are real then you’re damn near guaranteed to get haunted as fuck. I mean, it makes a kind of sense.
You spend your whole life hearing spooky stories of the vengeful dead. Then you wake up one day and remember it’s night, not day, and tonight you’re going to have to go out and probably kill someone if you want to eat. You’re still shitty at it, and you don’t quite know how to keep them alive every time no matter how hard you try. Sooner or later you figure you’ll rack up quite a score on the whole vengeful dead thing. You’re a stranger in the land of the weird, and you can’t help but wonder if you’re going to find out the hard way that ghosts are as real as you thought vampires weren’t.
When it doesn’t happen and you become more accustomed to you yourself being one of the things that goes bump in the night, well… the fear of ghosts kind of fades into the background. I was realizing as Roderick and I stood there that it never quite goes away. “And why do their cars say Mecklenburg County?”
“Why does that matter?” Roderick didn’t grow up here, and he doesn’t know the whole state. He knows a couple of very specific parts of it.
“It’s the county where the city of Charlotte is located. Couple hours inland,” I said. “Charlotte is…” My voice caught in my throat, and I struggled to speak, and I didn’t even know why – hell, I didn’t even consider why. “It’s a place we absolutely do not go.”
Roderick arched his eyebrows and turned finally to look at me. His eyes met mine and held them, and I don’t know… it isn’t exactly that I felt like my mind was invaded but Roderick has a way of looking at you that makes you feel like his consciousness is, if not intruding on your own, at least pressed against the glass. “I wonder why that is?” Roderick mused on it, and appraised me, and I felt like we were standing in a crowded elevator. His mind had its elbow in my gut and it hurt. “How are your relations,” Roderick murmured, “With the vampires of the state of South Carolina?”
I shrugged. “I’ve never met them. Not a one of them. I wouldn’t even know whom to call down there.”
Roderick nodded. “Exactly.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded as ominous as hell.
Roderick rocked back on his heels. All of a sudden the pressure receded. He was just my little boy of a cousin again, smiling sweetly with the devil’s dentures
“Next question,” I said, “Is what the fuck are you drawing all the time?”
“A wea
pon. But we are not yet ready to discuss it.” Roderick smiled. I knew there was no point even pushing on that. I gave him a look, sure: one that said this had better not come back to bite me.
Roderick shrugged, as innocent as a choirboy holding a can of gasoline and a box of kitchen matches. “And now,” he said, “We should check in with the technopagans.”
“One thing,” I said, holding up a finger.
I stepped back into the bar, and the bartender looked up.
“You guys get to talk to Bobby?” she asked.
I stepped closer and looked deep into her eyes and latched on with the hoodoo. Whereas Roderick has a way of inspecting people, I have a way of giving them orders. I felt her mind yield to me and I said, “Tell me where Deputy Rudyard stays.” It was a command, and it reached deep into her mind and flipped all the switches it could find. Hell, her mind was easier than most people’s.
I should have known something was up from that, but I didn’t. Not until later.
The bartender’s eyes wavered slightly, not because she was fighting me but because she was flipping through her own memory in an attempt to comply by providing what she knew. It felt like waiting for the computer to search its databanks for an answer on Star Trek. “The Surf Sound Inn,” she said. Her voice was robotic, a little dreamy, coming from a long way away. She was digging deep for this one. “He mentioned it on the phone one time when he was here. I wasn’t supposed to hear him, but I love to eavesdrop. I couldn’t help it. Things have been especially slow this winter. No gossip.”
I filed that way, too, and nodded. “Thank you.” I felt my will detach from hers and she blinked rapidly a few times as she came back to the here and now. Roderick and I were back out the door before she’d even had a chance to say goodnight. The guys in the corner, with the card game, didn’t bother to look up from their hands as they kept telling each other that story a dozen different ways.
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 5
