Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  When I slipped the bone into my inner coat pocket, Smiles actually barked.

  I snapped my fingers and he was silent, but he wasn’t happy about it: one paw raised, stroking the air, his head ducked down. I watched his reaction as I reached down and picked up a second bone. He sniffed the air and worked his mouth open and shut but didn’t whine. He knew to stay quiet when I told him to stay quiet but whatever was left of his instincts – the ones he had as a pet, not the ones he’d developed as a supernatural monster maintained by my blood – were telling him to object anyway. I had never seen Smiles struggle to obey like this, not once, since the first year I had him.

  That was 1967.

  I reached down and gathered all the bones in the little pile into one of my big, fat hands, and when I picked them up Smiles threw his head back and howled like a hound out of a Hammer film. The sound shook the bare sheetrock walls and rattled the garage doors. Beatrice hadn’t been ready for that. She threw her head back at the same angle and screamed until her lungs were emptied of all the fear she felt and all the madness she suppressed since figuring out her town had been invaded by things that go bump in the night.

  I put the bones in an ÜberBargains bag I found back in the kitchen, then washed my hands. Roderick got on his hands and knees and checked the undersides of every bed frame. Then he and I went around the plywood nailed up over the garage doors. There were no garage door openers, and the doors themselves were jammed closed with spikes. The plywood over them had a rubberized seal affixed to the edge. No sunlight was getting in that way, for sure. On the one hand, it was a rough and tumble job of securing the place, but on the other it reflected forethought and planning. The average human neighbor was not going to overcome that sort of setup.

  When we were done looking the place over, Roderick pulled out his notebook and tore a few pages from it. He used a glue stick to post some of his sketches around the room. I stepped up and looked at them: every single one was a crude drawing of Ross, the demon the elders summoned up, the demon who tempted me a year before by awakening all the lusts and passions I thought I buried forever when I became a vampire seventy years ago.

  One was of Ross being shot in the face with a bottle of seltzer water, like an old cartoon.

  One was of Ross being fired from a cannon.

  One was of Ross being stepped on by a giant shoe.

  “What the fuck?” I laughed, I couldn’t help it, and looked at Roderick.

  “Weapons,” Roderick said. “As I told you, Cousin.”

  “Weapons.”

  “One of several I wish to try.”

  I opened my mouth to ask him how that worked, but Roderick closed the door on that by walking quickly over to the real estate agent. “Thank you,” he said. “We will require copies of their paperwork.”

  “Sure,” she said. The scream had scared her worse than ever. She stood in silence the whole time we searched the room, not even looking at us.

  We walked upstairs and sat back down. Beatrice sipped from a glass of water. Smiles behaved right again as soon as I was out of the circle of wax and blood and fur in the middle of that room. The bones didn’t seem to bother him anymore once I took them out of that space – or the blood had finally asserted itself over whatever part of him was still a dog.

  I couldn’t help speaking up. “You know, these are probably not people who are likely to fall for blackmail.” I tried to shrug a little, out of an uncharacteristic desire to be nice. Beatrice’s scream had reminded me she was a person from outside the dark forest of the strange the rest of us get so accustomed to traversing. “I mean…” I shook the bag of bones so they rattled. Beatrice winced. “You’re not going to scare them off with, like, the news they did something naughty once.”

  Roderick frowned a little. I was butting in. To Beatrice, he said, “Ignore my cousin. We shall do our best to find something that will give you leverage with them.”

  “So you two are cousins? Do you mean, like, real cousins?” Beatrice looked between us as she latched onto a distraction. “I mean, the two of you could not look more different if you tried.”

  “Oh yes,” Roderick cooed, “Blood relations.” His voice abruptly took a dangerous turn of tone I wondered if only I could detect. I pondered the possibility he meant to kill her off right here and now, to eliminate someone who maybe had seen too much.

  “Come, Cousin,” I said to Roderick. “I believe we’ve accomplished our mission?”

  “Almost,” he said to me, then back to the client as he withdrew a slip of paper and a pen. “Standard contract, Beatrice. I will require a small retainer. A personal check will do, but I can also accept a card.” There was a little plastic magnetic swipe thing in his hand and he plugged it into his cell phone when she handed over a gold card.

  Wonders never cease.

  When we walked outside, Roderick’s eyes unfocused for a long moment as he looked at the sky. I followed his gaze for a few seconds, then looked back at him. His eyes closed, then opened, then focused, but slowly, and he licked his lips. “All I want,” he murmured under his breath, assumedly to me but so softly it was as though he were speaking to himself, “Is to destroy everything they have. I want every slave, every coin, every book, every journal, every photograph, every stitch of clothing: every component atom of the dead world they insist on dragging forward with them into our future. I want to pile it together and set it aflame so I might watch it burn to ash. I want to stand so close to those purifying, corrective flames, I singe myself just a little. I want to reach into the world they occupy and bathe it in a great wave of hate and destruction and chaos.” His eyes were very wide, and his lips very pale.

  I licked my own lips now. “Why?” I mean, sure, I was on board, but Roderick’s intensity was something I didn’t often see on open display like that.

  He turned halfway towards me, but not to look at me: Roderick looked instead at the closed door of the one garage bay left as it originally was, then turned again to put his eyes on Beatrice as she got in her car and drove away. “Because,” he breathed, pausing before he went on, “Because they think the world is still theirs, like we never came along, like we deserve no inheritance of our own, like it should never be our turn to rule.” He took a shallow breath. “And because I can. Because they are there.” He looked at me now, but his eyes still didn’t look right. Whatever was speaking to me was Roderick, to be sure, but it was one of his faces I don’t often see. “Because we are vampires and we take, Cousin. Because this world is full of life and I wish to taste it long, and fully, and at my whim and no other’s. I did not survive my making so I could trade one set of masters for another. I did not wait for a more interesting future to arrive so I could surrender it to someone incapable of understanding even one iota of the possibilities it presents. They do not just fail to comprehend. They misapprehend at every turn. They think the world can be turned back into something they understood some night long ago. They are like some half-wit dolt who thinks the smoke can be run back through a fire and turned into wood. They do not see the proper use of this gift of immortality. It is not the world that must change. It is we who have the responsibility – the duty – of learning to change with it.”

  Roderick blinked a few times and now he was fully back, returned from whatever vision of flame and blood had held him for a hot minute. He spoke like a philosopher but in those eyes, while those words tumbled out in a low murmur, I saw nothing but hate. Roderick’s fangs were out, but he didn’t lisp like I do. For a long time I had thought of Roderick as a vampire on whom I should take some measure of pity for being, frankly, fucking nuts. It was in that moment I realized Roderick was the one of us who was by far the better vampire. I don’t mean in a moral sense. I mean that, crazy or not, Roderick was simply better at every part of being a monster.

  He locked eyes with me and leaned close, speaking low while the wind howled around us. “Do you not see, Cousin? Do you not understand why I try so hard to have you join me in the now? The
world is changing and is going to change even more. I do not mean the normal tidal forces of time and entropy: I mean the world is discovering we are here. Take Beatrice: when she discovered obvious blood sacrifice, what did she do? She hired a private investigator. She did not run away and she did not submit to being a victim. When human society fully awakens to our presence, how shall we present ourselves? Shall we appear to them as sufficiently similar to be tolerated, perhaps even embraced? Or shall we appear so off putting, so demanding, so childishly insistent on some impossible return to a past that never was, the massed living blot us out with a sweep of their giant, crowd-sourced hand?”

  I blinked at him. “This is what you meant by the coming changes in human society? When they realize vampires are real?”

  “Of course, Cousin,” Roderick said. Now he sounded a little angry, though not with me. No, not angry: fervent. He had the gleam of a true believer in his mad, dark eyes. “When humanity becomes aware of us they will, en masse, lash out at the vampires who try to overrule them. The only chance we will have – we, you and I, the vampires we know, our allies, our friends if you will permit the use of so light a term – will be found in having allied ourselves early with as many charismatic and relatable supernatural mortals as we can. One of the changes it is our burden to accept is that one night you and I, and all we wish to survive beside us, must be seen as one shade on a spectrum of the impossible. Humankind becomes better and better at accepting, even valuing, a diversity of identity and experience but they have never permitted the survival of a single, identifiable, and entirely opposed Other.”

  “Permitted?” The word leapt out of that last sentence like a jump scare on a carnival ride.

  “Permitted, Cousin. We will one night require their permission to survive. Accept that now, or walk into the sunlight tomorrow. There are no other ways forward.”

  I blinked at him. I didn’t have the first clue where to start with a response.

  Roderick didn’t give me the chance to respond. He put one hand on one sleeve of my big black trench coat and twisted it as he spoke. “When they discover us they will also inevitably gain awareness of their own supernatural kin: the technopagans, the Book People, the Squared Circle, Blue Dawn, Winter Wheat, the Cat Ladies, shape shifters, spirits, and all the others of us and them who haunt their darkest dreams. The strangest of us will frighten them. The most alike to them will fascinate them: all the little pockets of their own kind who bleed – yes, I like that word – who bleed over into this world of magic and mayhem we occupy. What those humans – the ones like Jennifer or like Dan – think of us, and how we relate to them, will determine a great deal about how the rest of humankind react. In a world in which long-distance telephone service was the only available form of instant global communication, it was still possible for us to stay hidden. Cousin, that day is over. Remember what I told you about feeding on a college campus, of having a photo go viral, of leaving a record no one ever can delete. That same degree of connectedness, of permanence is here, now, forever – or at least for a little while. They – the mortals – are a little bit afraid of that, in part because it is no longer possible for them to take a secret to their grave.” Roderick shook his head. “Their feelings about the permanence of electronic memory are a version of the envy with which they will regard us. Ultimately this is a fear of death and the grave: there has previously at least been the assurance of any individual’s narrative finding its natural denouement and conclusion. Now, their image persists in perfect digital reproduction. Their Twitter accounts sit idle but able to be followed. Their friends write eulogies on their Facebook wall as though they were still alive. That photograph of them doing something stupid lingers phantom-like in online albums and reposted memories. The grave has become a hollow promise. The immortality now available to them is one they still ultimately must miss. I think that drives them mad, just a little, when they consider it.

  “Imagine what they will think of we who aim to have no graves at all? If we are to survive their discovery of our immortality, Cousin, we must make sure to seem very mortal, very now, when they do. That will be the difference they perceive between us and those monsters who revel in their monstrosity; between themselves and the sort of immortal experience they often wish to have but cannot. It is important you realize something about our habit of hiding ourselves: the secrecy under which you and I have thrived as vampires was not the elders’ idea. They would have humankind fear the beast in that iconic castle on the hill for all time. No, our precious secrecy is the notion of the rebels who made us after they overthrew the ancients: the generation inclusive of Agatha, your maker. They see living in secret as the safest and most humane solution in a world of newly illuminated night. They read the newspapers of their day and knew humanity would never again abide a tyrant who never dies.”

  “Come on,” I said, still parsing what Roderick had just spilled out of some dark place in his own mind. “We need to jet.” Together we walked up to Roderick’s car, having brought his big gold Cadillac this time. He slid into the driver’s seat and I took shotgun. Roderick glided out of the driveway and up the street. That same beat-up red pickup truck sat in the parking lot by the town’s only pier, and I felt like it was staring at me. Cacciatore’s front doors were still open: no crime scene tape, no sign of any official attention. The streets were more desolate than normal that night, too: houses were dark and no cars were out. To borrow Roderick’s imagery, the villagers were already wary of activity in the castle on the hill. Neon lights were on in the windows of To Kill a Sunrise but no cars were parked out front. Roderick was right. Humanity notices more now, and they react to what they notice. Maybe at first they hide or they look the other way, but it wouldn’t last forever.

  One phone call later, the rest of the vampires of Raleigh – all except Seth, of whom I had not asked it because he was a reformed elder the ancients didn’t know survived, and thus was explicitly included from Roderick’s plan – were on their way down to Sunset Beach. That didn’t amount to much, actually: just Beth and Old Shoe and whatever pocket change they had between them, I guessed. They were both young and both lived pretty close to the edge but they agreed to help with Roderick’s crazy-ass plan.

  As my cousin drove in silence I started replaying back to myself the things he’d just said. I thought of his friendship with Jennifer and wondered how much of it was genuine and how much of it was to use her as a bridge between their society and ours in case an apocalypse of awareness broke out on the human side. I didn’t buy they would find out all about us, but ten years ago I never would have guessed anyone in my neighborhood would learn of me. I wiped the memories of those who did, and at the time I thought I put the genie back in the bottle. Jennifer proved me wrong; then the Bull’s Eye; then the technopagans. Roderick mentioned the Book People. I liked to tell myself they thought I was a demon or some other type of dark spirit, but what if they knew? What if they realized exactly what I was and were just being polite about it?

  What if my crazy-ass cousin was exactly right about the coming changes in human society?

  Roderick’s phone buzzed and he glanced at the face of it. “Jennifer is working on their first action,” he said. “They begin tomorrow. And Beatrice emailed me everything she has on this ‘Hinson.’”

  5

  Jennifer was standing behind a dead gas station a couple of miles inland wearing rubber kitchen gloves when she picked up the receiver on what had to be the last payphone in the North American wilderness. It was the following day. The sun was out. It was one of those days in April when Spring reminds you summer is on its way: bright spots are warm, but the shadows still feel like the winter that’s just passed.

  “911 Emergency,” said a voice that sounded professional in the way of people everywhere whose work task is to sit through long periods of exhausted boredom waiting for something to demand their highly trained skill sets: a little resentful, a little sleepy, a little surprised. “What is the nature of your emerge
ncy?”

  Jennifer pitched her voice up and deployed a thick rural drawl she had never used unironically even once in her life. “I think there’s a fire at 425 Main in Sunset Beach it’s a gray two-story rental unit with no cars in the driveway next to a beach access there’s a big cactus in the yard at the corner by the mailbox the mailbox is silver,” she said, all in one go with no pauses for breath lest she be asked questions. Jennifer had gotten pretty far in life by being almost entirely honest with people and it had served her well. As an engineer and a technician, honesty had been a requirement of the successful completion of any task. Sometimes it had harmed her. For instance, she could never disguise when she was utterly disgusted with someone and that happened a lot at ÜberBargains. Overall, though, it had worked out way more times than it had not and that made it very hard to lie.

  “Is that location currently burning?” The professionalism in the voice of the operator was surprisingly crisp now and Jennifer found it gratifying to know people still cared somewhere.

  “Yeah,” she said, really amping up the drawl, “I’m pretty sure it’s aflame right this second.” Jennifer glanced at the watch her technopagan coven had given her with assurances it would stay synchronized to all others in the same group. Right this second was in fact when they were supposed to take the first step in their plan.

  “So there is an active fire at this time?”

  Jennifer grasped at air for a second and said, “I think ‘t’is,” she said, and then she hung up. Ramon was sitting in the passenger seat of her car and looked up expectantly as she slammed the phone receiver down and jumped into the driver’s seat.