Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  I nodded at him, stepping a little closer to him and a little farther from the rest of the group as they chattered away. Old Shoe was telling the technopagans and Roderick a dirty joke and Beth was staring at the sky. Marty and I could have a moment to discus this ourselves. “Does he? I like that idea. I would love for them to be operating on the basis of bad data.”

  “Normally what I do is interpolate from data in the wild,” he said. “I’ve never tried to seed a false impression.”

  “But you could tell us what would look like good data to them.” I noticed the other conversation had ground to a halt and the technopagans were paying attention to us now.

  “Did somebody say ‘data’ over here?” Sheila sidled closer to us. “I mean, hello, geek Batsignal.”

  Marty ignored her and the others and focused on me. I met his eye and put just a touch of the hoodoo into it when I said, “Ignore them. Tell me any ideas you’ve had on the drive here.”

  Marty reached into his pocket and produced an electronic device about the size of a standard postal envelope. It lit up in his hand and he started tapping and swiping away on it like a natural. Of course, Marty is so young this stuff isn’t strange to him. He hasn’t yet begun slipping into anachronism. A couple of years ago he was the key to me finding out about The Transylvanian. At the time I noticed a few things in his apartment pointing to the beginnings of being dated: VHS tapes, a computer monitor that’s thick like an old TV instead of those thin little things they sell now down at ÜberBargains, that sort of thing. Marty is more capable than most of us of catching up, though, because he has to make up so little ground to do it.

  “Is that the Matsuzaki TouchPane?” Dan’s voice was dripping with a very specific admixture of admiration and envy.

  “Y-yes,” Marty said without looking away from the thing in his hands. “But I installed a custom version of Android.”

  Dan cooed, “That’s my favorite phablet,” whatever that meant. The technopagans threatened to crowd around but Jennifer and I stepped between them with a quick glance between us.

  I cleared my throat to reassert the hoodoo. I didn’t want to push Marty around, just keep him focused. He looked up and nodded.

  “The available public data sources manifest vampires in three main ways: disappearances, aggravated assault and reported animal attacks. A vampire who stalks transient or ephemeral prey – either opportunistically or out of habit – either kills them, leave them grievously wounded, or injures them in a way that appears to medical professionals to be an attack by a carnivorous animal.”

  Jennifer’s eyebrows shot up and she looked at me. “I don’t remember anyone at ÜberBargains fitting any of those categories.” The night we met, she saw me feed kind of a lot.

  I shrugged at her. “What he’s describing doesn’t normally happen. Normally we make the person heal over before we let them go. If a vampire is stupid or cruel or in a hurry, though…”

  Marty glanced at her for just a moment. “As Withrow says, these are exceptions. A mainstream contemporary vampire on her or his home turf leaves no lasting injury in the interest of going unnoticed. That also leaves nothing in the datasets available to an informed researcher. Elders out to make a point or cow the local population have no such incentive to behave. They could leave a statistical fingerprint. However, I have to interpolate – to come up with a measurement from the known data around what I seek – to form a conclusion. Looking at those statistics in this area, there are very, very few vampires suggested. I would have trouble making a case for there being more than one, if that. Compared to the behavior patterns of The Transylvanian and his brood in Asheville, for instance, the data in Sunset Beach would suggest there are three tenths of one vampire present.”

  I harrumphed. “And if you expand that out to, say, fifty miles?” I was thinking of what Roderick had been told about the patterns.

  “Things get much more interesting. I would estimate six vampires.”

  I nodded. “But we already know there are more than that based just on the rental histories and the number we’ve killed ourselves in the last few days.”

  Marty nodded at me. “There just aren’t enough meaningful data points to suggest a ton of elders. Either they brought donors with them or they have covered up their tracks. The strangest thing I can find in the data is a surge in exotic animal thefts and break-ins at veterinary clinics. At this point I’m wondering if they’re even eating human blood or if they’ve gone vegetarian just to maintain a low profile.”

  I blinked at him. “Exotic animals?”

  Marty shrugged at me. “Sorry, boss.”

  I waved it away, immediately having a guess who might have stolen a bunch of weird animals, but not yet ready to talk to everyone about my brief conversation with Deputy Rudyard. “Forget it. So let’s flip it around: how do we shift those numbers to suggest as many as that, if not more, have rolled into town all of a sudden?”

  Marty looked uncomfortable for a moment. “Well, that’s the problem. What characterizes us – the population you want to suggest – is the absence of data. We are incentivized to cover our tracks. We can’t fake the absence of data points. I could fake up a bunch of other elders being here, but not a bunch of successful modernists.”

  I scratched my beard for a second. “You said successful. What about unsuccessful ones?”

  “How do you mean?”

  I shrugged. “Sloppy modernists. Ones too young to hide themselves well. What if…” I paused and looked out into the darkness for a moment. I could see Roderick’s eyes on me, glittering in the dim light of a parking lot down the street, and he smiled. He knew where I was going. “We’ve already acted once to suggest to them this isn’t being driven by vampires at all. What if we try to confuse that, now, by suggesting there are vampires at work but not us? What if we make them think we drafted a ton of new vampires and mortals. I mean, a ton. What if we tried to make them think we’ve gone out and put the Big Flush on dozens of random people in order to bulk up our numbers. They’re elitists. It wouldn’t be hard to scare ‘em by making them think we’re trying to flood the streets with our own rabble.”

  “’Occupy Vampirism’?” Roderick asked.

  I smiled and nodded once. “Exactly.”

  “Well,” Marty said, but he stopped and cleared his throat. Roderick reached out to pat him on the elbow and that seemed to encourage him. He looked down at his fancy phone and punched numbers for a few seconds. “How many?”

  “Let’s say… three dozen.” I shrugged. “Just grabbing a number out of the air.”

  Marty nodded and typed more before speaking. “I would say we need to wound one person every night, seriously maim one person every three nights and kill a person every week to suggest ten young vampires. Multiply accordingly for target numbers.”

  Jennifer blinked slowly. “Young vampires,” she said. “So the elders are doing the same stuff, just getting away with it.”

  Marty shook his head. “They would be less likely to generate injuries, though they would generate some. We have to assume a significant percentage of their prey simply are disposed of when that happens and thus are not reflected in the data available to us.”

  “Except by things like…” Ramon trailed off in his question. “Like the red pickup truck?”

  “What of it?” Roderick immediately twigged to the question.

  Ramon shrugged. “There’s a red pickup truck in the parking lot by the pier. It’s just sitting there with the door ajar, keys in the ignition. We picked that up on the cameras during our operation earlier. It’s like whoever put it there just got out and disappeared. And a couple of houses are sitting open but nobody’s home.”

  “Disappeared,” I said, flat. “But no one reports it? No one calls the police?”

  “The missing missing,” Marty said. “They’re –“

  I interrupted. “They’re people who disappear but no one notices.” I nodded. Roderick gave me an odd look for a second, as though someth
ing had just occurred to him but he hadn’t been brave enough or nosy enough to ask. I shrugged. “They’re an obsession of mine,” I said. “I don’t know why. I’ve just always found them fascinating. I mean, look around: we’ve got hobbyist drones. You probably ordered that thing online.” I pointed in the general direction of where “Xi” had flown. “It’s harder and harder not to be noticed, tracked, perceived.” I thought of the talk Roderick had with me about not hunting on college campuses because of the cameras everywhere. I thought of the stories I’d read about the NSA monitoring phone calls and emails and everything else they could get their hands on, hoarding it away in quantities well beyond even their prodigious ability to sift it for anything interesting. “But the number of missing missing goes up every year. Where do they go? And why? That has always tugged at the back of my mind.” I had kind of drifted into my own thoughts for a second as I spoke and I tried to climb back out. I shook my head. “Anyway. Yeah. So mostly, at their worst, they’re just killing their prey and disposing of the bodies and there’s nothing to report about it so it doesn’t show up.”

  Marty nodded. Jennifer shook her head in disgust.

  “Well,” I said, “We’re not going to go out and randomly maim people to show up in their data. So we have to use other methods.”

  To be absolutely clear, there was a part of me just fine with that idea. It wasn’t the part of me that pays my credit card bill and drives in the right lane and makes decisions. It was the part of me that’s an animal, the part that lives deep down inside all of us. I don’t just mean vampires, I mean all of us, including you. The difference between you and me is that the blood makes me learn to let it out once in a while to survive. You probably like to tell yourself it doesn’t exist because that’s how you survive.

  It does. Sometimes you even hear its stomach rumble.

  “We showed ourselves in a major way yesterday,” I said. “Tonight I want to observe what they do in response. Let’s not go looking for trouble. Instead, let’s just go looking. Let’s see what they do to regroup or if they try to conduct their own investigation or if they lash out in some way.”

  Jennifer nodded. “We can put eyes on all the places we hit today – eyes in the sky, even, that they won’t see unless they think to look up – and see if they’re picking through the rubble or laying low.”

  I gave her a thumbs-up. “Exactly. And there are some places elsewhere on the island I want to look into with Roderick.”

  He arched one eyebrow just enough for me to notice – he was curious what I had in mind – but he nodded. “Of course, Cousin.”

  Beth’s eyes finally spun down from the stars above us and she looked at me. “You have provoked them. They will respond.”

  “But they’re essentially paranoid ultraconservatives,” I said to her. “They’re going to want to know more before they stick their heads up out of the trenches.”

  “Paranoid ultraconservatives,” Beth said. She smiled slowly. “If we have agitated their paranoia they’ll lash out in fear. They have one really big gun, right? So, when they unleash the Rhinemaiden out of paranoia, then what?”

  Explaining all this stuff to them before they came here – about the war the rebels fought over a century ago; about how the elders didn’t want to live amongst humanity but instead to rule over them; about how hiding among them had been chosen as the humane option by people like my maker, Agatha, and the vampires in her cohort; about the Rhinemaiden: neither Old Shoe nor Beth had even once questioned the reality of what I was saying. It was like the whole story explained a lot to them, and to be honest it had explained something to me, too: where were all the old vampires, anyway? If we’re supposed to live forever, how come I’d never met anyone who did?

  It was something I’d wondered many times and when neither Beth nor Old Shoe questioned any of this I knew I wasn’t alone. Why were no really ancient vampires hanging around? The story our makers had told us was that vampires didn’t often survive past a century or two. The world was changing too fast, they said. People aged out of the world they’d understood. Eventually vampires withdrew from life until they gave up on living altogether. It was part of the argument they used to sell us on living among humans, ourselves: stay a part of the world of the living and you’ll want to stay alive yourself. I rejected a lot of that when I moved out into the middle of nowhere north of Raleigh, but the suburbs caught up to me and I found myself among humans whether I liked it or not. I didn’t know at the time that Agatha was passing along a philosophy for which she fought her own makers; or that it was intended as an antidote to the way the elders, in turn, raised her. I just assumed it was how it always was. Still, a part of the story nagged at the back of my mind: wasn’t there some set of circumstances in which just one elder might survive? Wasn’t that the idea in almost every single vampire movie and story: somewhere along the way there’s an ancient to encounter? Where were our Draculas? Who was our Armand?

  Agatha always told me there were probably a few, maybe in the larger cities if they possessed some exceptional capacity to keep up with changing society, but more likely in the middle of some absolutely barren landscape. I’ve always fancied there being an ancient in the Australian Outback, she said to me one time when I was young and she was still my mentor. I rather like that idea: such a desolate place, and in the middle of it, caged behind sand and rock and a few craggy plants in the pale moonlight, an ancient hatred wondering if it will ever again, in what’s left of its life, encounter a world it can apprehend.

  At the time, I thought she meant it as a sort of optimistic thing: an admirable example of the will to survive overcoming circumstances that had taken down all this hypothetical elder’s peers. Now I knew better. When she said “caged,” she meant it. Agatha didn’t relish the thought of an ancient still being alive. She relished the idea of it being alive in circumstances it couldn’t stand. She loved the notion of an elder vampire being tormented forever by an inhospitable setting it would never escape.

  “We hope they don’t do that,” I finally said to Beth. I realized everyone had been staring at me in the silence, waiting to be led. Shit, I thought to myself. I wanted to be the boss, not a leader. “We try to stop them before they can. And if they do, we make them regret it.”

  “She has a point, though,” Sheila said from amongst the technopagans. “And we have to keep that in mind. We don’t want to make them choose the nuclear option. We can’t pretend to be surprised if we poke them with a stick and they bite back. We shouldn’t be surprised if, when we lunge, they riposte.”

  I nodded at her. “Point taken, but I have a sneaking suspicion the elders have something else on their minds.”

  “Something bigger than getting three of their dens blown sky high in the middle of the day?” Jennifer scoffed at the idea.

  “No,” I said, “But they had a reason for being here before we did that, and it doesn’t add up that it would only be the Rhinemaiden.”

  “You think you have figured it out, Cousin.” Roderick smiled just a little. I’m not even sure a human would have detected it.

  “I think. Sort of. Not completely. But I want to see for myself, and I want to do so as quietly as possible.” I nodded at Beth and Marty Macintosh. “You two, hang out with our breathing friends. Get to know each other.” I looked at Jennifer. “Holler if Xi finds anything too interesting.”

  Jennifer looked at me with appraising eyes. She didn’t like that I wasn’t sharing my theory, but there wasn’t one to share. I just had a gut feeling.

  “Sure,” she said.

  I gestured at Old Shoe and Roderick. “You two, come with me.”

  7

  Across the Intercoastal Waterway from Sunset Beach was the sort of golf course it takes more fresh water to maintain for a season than the town could drink in a year. In a world where clean drinking water isn’t available to every child, your blood has to curdle just a little at the sight of so much of it getting pissed away twice a night so some retired hedg
e fund manager can pass the ennui of his twilight years double-bogeying his way to hell.

  I’m sure it’s good for property values, though.

  The golf course had no sandy shore on the Waterway per se, just a rocky shoreline unsuited to tourists. In the middle of the night, it was abandoned. In the distance, maybe a mile away, we could see the lights of the houses Sunset Beach and, in one corner, the massive, blindingly bright lights the cops had put on the scene of the house Jennifer destroyed as her grand finale the day before.

  Closer to us, standing across the Waterway from it, was the dark horizon of dunes and scrabbling grasses making up the Bird Island Reserve, the name of the undeveloped natural area on the southwestern end of Sunset Beach’s island property. The water between it and us looked and smelled like marshy ocean because that’s what it really was: not so much a river and not so much the ocean as it was a delta in slow motion. High reeds and low trees clung to the edges in hopes it would turn into land sooner or later. There was a sign – WARNING SHARKS – and I wondered at how exactly to read that one.

  “You know, boss,” Old Shoe said as we stood there watching Roderick strip to the skin and tuck his clothes into a big plastic bag he tied to Dog’s collar, “I don’t know how to swim.” Old Shoe shrugged at me. “Never learned.”

  “You grew up in a beach town,” I said. “You’re wearing those damned surfer coral bracelet bead things. You’re wearing board shorts. What do you mean you never learned?”

  He fluttered his lips as he let out a long breath. “Never got around to it.”