Deader Still

by Anton Strout

  Although I was a passive passenger in the DJ’s body, I was able to look around the rest of the room even though his focus was on the turntable. Faster than I could follow, the dance floor was turning into a sea of panic, people screaming and running for their lives. I wanted to scream out for him to lift his goddamned head and see what was going on, but by the time he looked up from his turntable, half the room was writhing around on the floor as the rest of the crowd trampled over them in their attempts to get away. But from what? Looking around, the DJ couldn’t see whatever caused the commotion, which only meant . . .

  He spun around in time to catch a flash of glowing red eyes as a humanoid shape lunged at his neck, the sharp tear of fangs puncturing his jugular. Trapped in his body as I was, I could feel him dying as his blood was being drained. His chest tightened, a scream of horror catching in his throat as his heart started to slow. Caught up in the DJ’s fear, I felt helpless to pull myself out of the vision. I’d never been trapped inside someone in the throes of death before, and I wondered if there was any chance that I would die myself if I stayed in that moment long enough. It seemed I was about to find out—I couldn’t pull myself out of it and my world went dark.

  I snapped out of the vision only to hear the tail end of my own scream echoing in the now-still room. I was laid out on the floor with Connor standing over me, one fist balled like he had just punched someone—which made a lot of sense because my jaw hurt like a son of a bitch. I sat up, touching my face to assess the damage.

  “You okay, kid?” Connor said. “Sorry about decking you. You went all white and you were screaming.”

  I stood up on shaking legs, leaning against a nearby column for support.

  “I . . . I . . .” I started, but couldn’t finish. My face hurt, and my blood sugar felt abnormally low. How long had I been in the vision and how much energy had it sapped from me? My body shook with the dizziness of hypoglycemia. The faint smell of blood mixed with the overpowering fruitiness of the Life Savers I had eaten minutes ago. I felt my stomach clench. I was going to be sick.

  I fought back the urge as I staggered for the doors at the far end of the room. My feet slammed into several of the bodies as I went, repulsing me even further, but by the time I ran out onto the back deck of the ship my only concern was not throwing up all over them. I jumped over the railing and onto the pier, fell to my knees, and emptied the contents of my stomach into the Hudson River.

  I felt better the moment I was done, except for the shaking. I collapsed on my side. Although the idea of eating anything right now seemed impossible, I fished out another roll of Life Savers.

  “You okay, honey?” a voice said from behind me. I rolled over. A woman in her fifties stood there in a white, button-down shirt and blue sailor pants that rose a good two inches above her navel. A tiny gold badge from the cruise line proclaimed that I should “Come Sail Away with . . . Maggie!” Her blond hair was done up in a fifties beehive, making her look like an ancient version of the cruise director from The Love Boat.

  I nodded and rolled to my knees. The sugar replenished itself in my body, and I eventually stopped shaking. By the time I was on my feet, Connor and Davidson had joined me.

  “This,” Davidson said, “is Maggie, the woman who called in the missing boat last night.”

  “Our condolences,” Connor said. “To your guests and your crew.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head, on the verge of tears. “Thank you.”

  “Is there anything you can tell us?” Connor continued. “Anything you saw that might have been out of the ordinary?”

  Maggie thought a moment. “It was very late,” she said, “and when they towed the ship back to dock, there was a heavy fog. When it pulled in, I could hear some of the stray dogs we get down here on the dock going wild. I just assumed they sensed death or whatever . . . whatever had happened to all those people. Then they went silent and when I caught sight of them, there was a strange one I had never seen before, just standing there menacing the whole crowd of them until they all shied away. Then it ran off toward the city. And then I realized everyone on the boat was dead. Who could have done something like this?”

  The woman burst into hysterical sobs. There was nothing I could say. Davidson put an arm around her. I gave Connor a look and moved him away from them to talk.

  “Are we talking werewolves here?” I asked. I had read at least three of our pamphlets on lycanthropy, and thanks to one Five O’ Clock Shadow or Something More? I knew how rare they were in an urban environment.

  Connor shook his head. “I don’t think so, kid. If that boat was the work of werewolves, those bodies would have been half-eaten and there’d be blood everywhere. What did you see in your vision?”

  “Not much,” I said, “but enough to freak me out—that’s for sure. Everybody was panicking, so it was hard to focus on just what the hell was going on. I caught a glimpse of what killed the DJ, though. Red eyes, fangs, went straight for his throat. Drained him almost completely. This gives us enough to call it in, right?”

  “As long as you’re sure, kid.”

  I nodded. “When we get back to the office, we’ll call it in as a vampire.”

  “A vampire?” Connor said. “A single vampire couldn’t have drunk all that blood. We’re talking about a good-sized nest of them.”

  I nodded, just a little excited by the prospect, despite the tragedy I had witnessed. Being part of Other Division, you had to get off a little on the extraordinary things you ended up dealing with. Vampires were certainly high on the list.

  Davidson walked off with Maggie, escorting her back to the boating company’s office.

  “Are they going to do anything for her?” I asked.

  “For her?”

  “I think she might be a little traumatized by all this,” I said. “I know I am.”

  “It’s New York City,” Connor said with a shrug. “She’ll write it off mentally. Weird shit happens. Most people ignore it.”

  I stared at him. “That’s it? We’re just going to leave her mental stability to chance?”

  Connor stared at me a minute, but I refused to look away.

  “Fine,” he finally said. “I’ll put a Shadower team on her. If there’s any signs she’s flipping out, we’ll bring her in and put her through counseling. Happy?”

  I nodded. Davidson returned from the offices alone.

  “She’s okay,” Davidson said, his smile returning as he joined us. “I was testing out some of the spin I’m going to have to use with the media on this one. She seemed to be buying the ‘bad shrimp’ story I was planning on going with.”

  “Deadly shrimp-poisoning?” I said. “People are going to buy that?”

  Davidson nodded. “It seems a lot easier to buy than, say, vampires, doesn’t it?”

  He had a point.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “That’s for the Office of Plausible Deniability to contend with. Besides, on the plus side of this case, at least we got lucky in one respect . . .”

  I felt my anger twitch in. “What the hell’s lucky about a boatload of people dying?” I asked.

  “It could have been worse, gentlemen,” he said. “This could have been far more tragic. Luckily, the cruise was booked as an office party for a bunch of litigators. Mostly legal counsel for oil companies.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “We’ve got a boatful of dead lawyers?”

  Connor actually grinned. “So one set of bloodsuckers took out another set of bloodsuckers?”

  “Exactly,” Davidson said.

  The three of us started back up the dock. All things considered, I suddenly didn’t feel as bad as I had. Still, whoever or whatever had done this had to be stopped. Connor and I parted ways with Davidson at the end of the pier, grabbed a cab, and headed downtown toward the office.

  4

  The cab dropped us off in the East Village on Eleventh Street in front of the Lovecraft Café.

  Up front was our cover oper
ation—a coffee shop, its exposed brick walls covered with a variety of old movie posters. The furniture was a mishmash that ranged from hideous to vomitous, but there was a soothing charm to the room. A mix of regular customers and Departmental agents filled the room, and, as usual, Mrs. Teasley was reading someone’s fortune using a soggy pile of coffee grounds.

  “You okay, kid?” Connor asked. I looked down and noticed that my gloved hands were shaking.

  “I guess not,” I said. “I’m guess I’m still bothered by what I saw.”

  “Good,” Connor said, sounding almost cheerful.

  “Good?” I said. “What the hell is good about that?”

  He put his arm around my shoulder conspiratorially and steered me toward the coffee bar that ran along the entire right side of the room.

  “It’s good,” he said, lowering his voice, “because the second you see something like what we saw on that boat and it doesn’t affect you, it’s time to get out of this business. You remember that.”

  “You don’t look so spooked,” I countered.

  “I’ve got years of practice at hiding it, kid. Believe me, there’s nothing I saw there that doesn’t have me shaking on the inside.”

  Connor stepped to the counter and bought two iced mochas. He slipped one over to me. I wondered how the caffeine and sugar was supposed to reduce my shaking, but it seemed to work. We headed toward the back of the coffeehouse and entered the curtained-off movie theater that lay behind it. The old-world style of the 1930s architecture always took my breath away, and this time was no exception. The enormous and ornate chandelier high overhead sparkled as light from the movie projector danced among its many crystals. On the screen, Sigourney Weaver was sneaking around a metallic Gigeresque spaceship in a tank top and undies.

  Connor and I continued down the movie theater aisle and keycarded our way through a door marked “H.P.,” heading into the Department proper. The general bull pen area of the front offices of the Department of Extraordinary Affairs was a spacious cubicle farm. The far wall was carved with arcane runes of warding and below them was a series of doors. I had no idea where most of them went, but with new divisions springing up every month, it was no wonder. Connor and I moved past the general bull pen and headed farther back to another section, where our improvised partners desk sat.

  I say “improvised” because in reality it was just two desks pushed together so we could face each other. It seemed to help out when we were bouncing ideas off each other on a case. We dropped our stuff off at our desks, and I slipped my bat off of its holster and slid it into my top-left desk drawer.

  I looked over at Connor and then we both turned to check out the whiteboard that hung higher up on the wall and overlooked the entire room. Behind it, arcane glyphs like the ones in the bull pen scrolled along the entire wall and radiated power. But the board, while not magic, had a power of a different kind.

  It now read: “It has been 737 days since our last vampire incursion.”

  I turned back to Connor. He nodded, then gestured toward the board. I crossed through the bustling activity of cube dwellers and investigators scurrying back and forth. Against the wall was a ladder that led up to the whiteboard. I started up it, only to have someone tug on my pant leg when I was about four rungs up.

  “Someone already changed it today, Simon,” a familiar voice said. I turned to see Godfrey Candella standing below me, looking the same as he had at the dock, the neat part of his black hair matching the perfect knot of his tie and his black horn-rim glasses.

  “Someone already did that today,” he repeated. “The number’s already been switched.”

  I smiled at him.

  “I’m sure they did, God, but I don’t think they were about to do this,” I said, and continued up the ladder, my nerves tingling.

  When I was twenty feet up, one by one, everyone in the room fell silent, until the only sound was that of my shoes against the rungs of the ladder. I reached the top and from the thin lip at the bottom of the whiteboard, I grabbed the eraser and ran it through the 737. A collective gasp rose from the rest of the agents. I picked up the marker and wrote a large zero in its place.

  A nervous cheer from the crowd broke the silence. It felt strange, given the dark implication of it, but part of me was also beaming with pride for being the one to have discovered the first sign of vampires in Manhattan in over two years. Divisional leaders and members of the Enchancellors Board came streaming out of doors and down the stairs, genuine concern on their faces. By the time I climbed down, Inspectre Quimbley stood waiting for me at the foot of the ladder along with Godfrey and Connor.

  “Are you sure, boy?” the Inspectre asked, serious as can be. “I trust you have three points of collaboration?”

  I nodded. Although I had only attended the afternoon seminar “Pains in the Neck” on the subject of vampires, the one thing I remembered was that we were required to have at least three solid signs of vampirism before calling for a Department-wide warning.

  “We didn’t have a direct sighting of the vampire,” I said, “but everything else seems to match up.”

  “Let’s hear them, then,” the Inspectre said, his eyes widening.

  Godfrey pulled out a Moleskine notebook and started writing like mad.

  “The event took place at night,” I said, “so that makes it a possibly nocturnal creature. Second, the victims exhibited blood loss accompanied by the puncture wounds on their necks, but there was very little blood at the scene. Third, it was a foggy night and the woman at the docks said she had seen several dogs at the site. Animal familiars of the creature or shape-shifting into wolf form, perhaps?”

  “Well,” the Inspectre said, “your last point seems a bit of a stretch, but I think we can count the blood loss and puncture wounds as two separate things, so you still have three points.”

  I took a brief minute to tell him what Davidson, Connor, and I had discovered on the boat while the rest of the agents and higher-ups gathered closer. I felt like I was sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories, only this was a lot more intimidating.

  When I finished, there was a moment of office-wide silence.

  “So,” I said, trying to hide the nervousness in my voice, “do we gear up? Is there some roomful of vampire-slaying equipment that we get to break out?”

  Connor came over and clapped me on the shoulder. “Easy, kid.”

  The Inspectre said, “The Department of Extraordinary Affairs takes an alert like this very seriously, but there’s a lot of red tape and paperwork to put in downtown. We haven’t mobilized something like this in well over two years.”

  “Paperwork?” I spluttered. “With all due respect, sir, people are going to die if we don’t move on this quickly.”

  “The kid’s right, Inspectre,” Connor added.

  The Inspectre looked at Connor for a second, then turned back to me, staring straight at me and speaking in a deliberate tone.

  “Perhaps the two of us should take this off the office floor,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but an order barely veiled in politeness. Before I had a chance to respond, he turned away from me and headed back toward the stairs leading up to his office. The crowd parted before him like the Red Sea. He stopped for a moment without turning and said, “I believe you all have assignments you were working on . . . ?”

  The spell of silence broke and everyone scattered to the four corners of the office—everyone except Director Wesker, who took the time to shake his head at me in disappointment before heading off to Greater & Lesser Arcana. No one stopped to ask me questions. A few of the White Stripes—the agents whose exposure to paranormal activity had left them with skunklike stripes in their hair—stopped to whisper with Connor for a second, but then they left and the two of us were alone at the base of the ladder.

  “Well, that was anticlimactic,” I said. “I guess we should be getting upstairs.”

  Connor shook his head. “Not me, kid. The Inspectre’s invitation, in case you didn’t
notice, was very pointedly for one.”

  My heart leapt into my throat. “But we’re both on this case. You’ve got more experience with these things . . .”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said with bitterness. I watched his face close off from me, and I wished I had something to say that might help, but I was at a loss. “Somehow I think this has something to do with your special little club . . .”

  The Fraternal Order of Goodness. I should have thought of that myself. No wonder Connor seemed upset. He was far less bitter than Thaddeus Wesker about being passed over for F.O.G., but it was a minor point of contention between us.