The Howling Twenties

by Fennel Steuert

  Some faction of vampires had stopped them, but that was not in the woman’s book.

  Gripping the motorcycle’s handlebars, Gesine stared blankly at the drive-thru order box; she waited for the mildly static-plagued voice of a woman reading from a script to pause.

  “I will take a burger,” said Gesine. “No cheese. Just make it very rare … please.”

  “We don’t really customize burgers,” said the woman.

  Gesine, who was used to this reply, told the woman it’s less work.

  “You could also get sick if a burger isn’t cooked properly.”

  “No,” said Gesine. “I could not.”

  “If you want a rare burger, go to a diner.”

  Someone in a car behind them honked. Doris resisted the urge to try to help.

  Gesine looked at her watch. “Please,” she said stoically. “I have to meet a friend soon. Me being hungry … it’s very hard to concentrate, or see what’s good.”

  “See what’s good?” The woman sighed. “Fine. It’ll be slightly rare.”

  At the drive-thru window, the woman strained her eyes from Gesine to Doris and then back to Gesine again. “That’ll be five fifty,” she said, holding a bag.

  Gesine sniffed the air. She quickly turned her head forward and rode the motorcycle out onto the street.

  Doris didn’t need to ask. She hadn’t smelled a trace of blood. Her ability to smell that much did not dull with the cold.

  “I’m sorry,” said Doris, picturing Gesine eating rats. “You shouldn’t have given me a ride.”

  “No,” said Gesine. “I’ll take you all the way. It’s close to where I have to meet Desmond … We’re running out of money, anyway. There’ll be something free to eat around there.”

  ***

  Ten years in construction, and the foreman had never done night work so late. Mostly the winter meant work would start at the end of night and end at the beginning of another, but it was nine p.m. and he was operating one of several bulldozers himself. They were supposed to be clearing out the rubble of an old warehouse that had been converted into some kind of art complex (not unusual), but everyday they would return and find that, though the rubble had been carted away, the ground level had been restored to where it had been when they started.

  “It’s like its being filled in from deep below,” he’d told Mab, the redheaded woman who continued to overlook construction.

  She closed her eyes, more disappointed than in disbelief, when she said, “Keep trying.”

  Her company had been a loyal-if-sporadic customer, inquiring about craftsman work in addition to larger-scale jobs, and the post-earthquake jobs were already drying up. The foreman’s life at home was quietly desolate, anyway. No one really talked to him anymore, and he looked more forward to being able to watch TV than to coming home to the other people who were so separately busy.

  So they kept trying.

  From the bulldozer’s cab, the foreman could see Mab on the sidewalk where the front of the building used to be. Her red hair rustled around her whenever the wind picked up amid the light snowfall.

  In the past few days, they had to remove a couple of feet of snow along with blocks of cement that had been part of the building’s foundation. At the rear of the site, two other workers were using bulldozers along with the foreman in his. As he shifted the controls so that the blade had scooped up some dirt with remnants of wood, the foreman heard one of the occasional critters that scampered about. He was never sure if it was just his mind playing tricks on him. But then, by the bulldozer’s headlights, he saw a flash of something.

  The foreman hopped back as a woman with long black hair ran past the beams of light.

  He picked up his walkie-talkie. “Everyone stop what you’re doing!” he said. “There’s someone on site!”

  The tracks of the bulldozers ground to a halt. The foreman looked up to the front of the building. Mab, who had supervised their work every evening for the past month, was gone.

  ***

  Doris was in the shadows of a lot across the street, more than fifty feet from where Mab had been standing. As soon as she’d seen Mab, she knew there was little progress in getting Argall dug up from beneath the rubble. However battered he might have been, however painful it was, as long as his heart was still mostly there, Argall would just need blood. Doris needed Mab to see her, for a moment. That’s when Gesine skirted along the edges of the site before diving in and looking for an aberrant mouse or critter. Gesine didn’t carry pieces of fresh meat in her pockets like she used to, and though she could tax herself with hunger, it made her space out in a way that could be scary.

  “What are you doing here?” whispered Mab across the street. The question was rhetorical. Mab pulled her phone out and put it to her ear. “Yes, that is her,” she said into it.

  Doris sighed. A black car was about to pass between her and Mab, and as Doris turned for the lot, the car sped and swerved into it. Doris ran as the doors popped open. The two vampires that emerged were old, strong and fast, like her. They were pale, tall and in suits – not the showy business kind, more like some kind of high-ups in law enforcement. Doris stopped running when she got into some adjacent street light in the lot.

  She bit her lips. It was cold, the other vampires were too close, and this was a sparse part of town. No human was around.

  Doris could hear Mab’s voice:

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Doris. A vampire that betrays its own kind … Even if you gave him the gift.” Mab nodded to herself. “He’ll understand.”

  The eyes of the taller of the two vampires turned red. “Make this easy on yourself,” he said. “She’s had us lingering around her for quite a while, instead of letting us haunt you … Mab’s a little too kind that way.”

  “You ruined a lot of meal tickets,” said the slightly shorter vampire. “Not everyone is lucky enough to have some company whose employees they can siphon off.” He shook his head. “But you wouldn’t give your brethren one measly giant pool of blood … Get in the car.”

  Doris flexed her fingers. Her nails had become more claw-like. She glanced behind her as Mab crossed the street.

  “I guess we’ll have to do this the hard way,” the taller vampire said.

  The slightly shorter vampire pulled out a gun, and as he did, he smiled, his own eyes glowing red.

  Doris charged at him. She’d gotten her nails into the armed vampire’s shoulder when the taller one grabbed her. He pushed her into the range of the armed one’s flailing hands. He fired the gun off wildly, and a bullet went straight through Doris’s shoulder.

  “It’s all right!” yelled Mab. “I saw everything. You were well within your right –”

  Someone grabbed Mab from behind and pile-drove her face into the concrete. A flash of black hair whirled above Mab’s red head.

  Doris’ hand was yanked out of the armed vampire’s shoulder. He dropped the gun, and it went off again. One of Doris’ knees was on the asphalt as the two vampires tried to secure her. The taller one grabbed her by the throat, and she spun her head around and bit into his arm. She drank as much blood as she could, even though vampiric blood was almost sickening. He would be that much weaker.

  She used the one leg she had on the ground to hop up, and she spat out some of the blood into his face as the taller vampire pulled her over his head and threw her to the concrete. Some of the asphalt shattered around her. Where was Gesine? she thought. It had to have been Gesine who’d gotten to Mab.

  She glanced upward for a split second. Mab had taken off her heels and put them in Gesine’s back. Her face remaining so typically emotionless, Gesine reached out to Doris in between kicking at Mab.

  For herself, Mab alternated between holding onto Gesine’s legs and trying to claw them off.

  Doris was lifted up to her feet by the two vampires, whom worked in tandem even as the formerly armed one’s eyes sought something along the ground. Doris sighed. The gun, of course.

  “Wh
at kind of a vampire needs a gun?” said Doris. “Or man for that matter.”

  “Your kind has gotten so very lofty,” said the taller one. They began to slowly drag her to the car.

  Doris closed her eyes. If this was the end, she was going to make sure that at least one of them was utterly broken for it.

  Doris heard the sound of a stake. She opened her eyes and watched as it was run through the tall vampire’s heart. His teeth protruded and his eyes steamed with tears as rigor mortise quickly set in.

  Stumbling, Doris jerked backward at the site of red hair – but no, she thought. It definitely didn’t belong to Mab, who Gesine had just kicked away on the ground. This redhead was close enough for Doris to smell his scent, even before she got a clear look at him. Robin.

  The formerly armed vampire ran back for the car.

  Mab hit the ground repeatedly with her fist.

  If Robin was here, Doris wondered if they all hadn’t angered the old world.

  Robin threw another stake over to Gesine. As the formerly armed vampire got into the car’s driver seat, Gesine leaped feet-first through the car’s rear window. The car took off and swerved wildly until it nearly crashed into the hole.

  Robin tried to help Doris up. She pushed his hands away.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “I see you’re still hanging around with Gesine. That much is nice to see.”

  Doris blinked at him. She wanted to run her hands over his face, just to see if he was real.

  “Well ...” said Robin, “‘mox adventu,’ and so here we are.”

  He motioned up toward the roof, where several figures watched them silently as little more than silhouettes.

  “The new world is becoming a lot like the old, and at least in some small part, the old is finally learning from the new,” said Robin.

  “Hey,” screamed a black-haired man who was graying at the temples. During the commotion, he had climbed up from the construction site to the sidewalk. “What’s going on?”

  Doris’ mind screamed, “Blood!” But she let herself pass out.

  3

  Ragtime

  It was 1927 and Doris and Gesine were returning north after having splintered off from Argall and Mab several months ago to ensure that they would be able to count on the boon of their moonshine racket. It had been compromised by the Klan, whom thought of alcohol as unchristianly. Doris and company’s business partner Caden, who’d been a soldier for the Union in the Civil War before being turned, was finding it hard to contain the ripples of being run off the road by men who tried to kill some dark-skinned human they thought was entirely, fleetingly mortal. Caden needed blood, after all, and sometimes his own truck was shot to pieces. So as their numbers dwindled against what seemed to them should have been a single mortal man who was black, they thought they were dealing with the essence of unnaturalness – a genuine demon.

  Doris had been eager to go. She knew whoever was black and near would be scapegoated. And Gesine went with Doris because of course she would. The trip amounted to Caden being gone, replaced by a pale-faced human with a soul more atrophied than either Doris’ or Gesine’s.

  Now they were both in a lobby just after the sun went down on a fall evening, and Argall and Mab were there waiting. The place was still busier than Doris would have liked. Company-wise, Argall, Mab and herself had switched buildings every decade or so, and for a century and a half now Doris was merely seen as Mr. Argall’s secretary – a position she held entirely due to a whim on his part. (“What a passionate advocate of the Negro!” some would say.)

  Argall and Mab hugged her, and though Doris felt it was part-show of modernity for the employees, it also felt like she really did have something like a home beyond holes in the ground with Gesine.

  As far as any showy element their warm greeting was supposed to have, Gesine was not of much help.

  She stood there limply, dressed like a factory worker, as Mab and Argall each took one of her hands. She let them hold them for a few seconds, before pulling away and wandering toward the door to the cellar.

  “Oh, Gesine,” said Mab. “Always the air from the balloon.”

  Doris shook her head. “No … Not quite.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Argall,” said another woman who was black. She had not been there when Doris and Gesine had left.

  “That man came in for the second time – the one who asked what our latest hours were. He says he’ll be waiting to get a word in with you.”

  Argall sighed. “Thank you. But he can keep waiting. All the old world fools want in on our modern racket, don’t they?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the woman.

  Doris looked at them quizzically. Argall’s definition of old world was broader than the popular one.

  The four of them – Doris, Gesine, Mab and Argall – later gathered in a large room in a corner of the expanded cellar. In it were a few barrels of blood that had been nestled into blocks of ice.

  Argall went over and stiffly poured Doris a drink. “It’s good to see you again, maker. I’m sorry we don’t have anything for Gesine.”

  Doris took the glass and tried to imagine the people that the collection of blood in it came from; Argall had some quack going along the docks convincing some of what he called the bigger brutes that bloodletting could be a cure for what ails them. Doris had stopped talking to him, until he limited those ailments to colds, and expanded that particular quackery to the leafy green streets where the city’s most fortunate lived.

  “We want stories,” said Mab.

  Doris bit her bottom lip. “How about … ‘There was once a man named Caden who became a vampire named Caden, and is now gone.’”

  Mab and Argall turned toward each other, then looked away.

  “We’re very sorry to hear that,” said Argall. He blinked, the pupils of his eyes turning red for an instant, like his vampirism was stuttering.

  Mab closed her eyes. “It must have taken a legion of them … people. Human beings.”

  “The one who slayed him will act as the ghost of his work,” said Doris. “And not just that job you gave him.”

  Argall nodded. They sat there in silence for a while. Gesine fell asleep with her head on Doris’ lap. Doris watched her for a bit – ghouls so rarely seemed to sleep around others, and when Gesine did, her chest heaved up and down like a hummingbird’s, like she was still in the wake of her tribe’s last stand and had gotten a wider range of emotions back. Doris looked over at Argall.

  “How is your new brace?” she said.

  Argall smiled faintly. “Not as strong as my vampirism, dollface.”

  Mab lightly hit him.

  Doris smiled a tiny bit, too. She looked down and brushed the hair from Gesine’s face.

  “She’s becoming paler,” said Mab.

  Doris nodded. “To her dismay.”

  “And rightfully so,” said Argall.

  Mab shrugged. “It’d be nice to see her more animated.”

  Argall rolled his eyes. “I agree, but I don’t know what her being whiter has anything to do with that.”

  Dawn was a few hours away. A part of Doris wanted to see what new lights the city had to offer from the roof, but she also felt okay enough to sleep. And it was then, during Doris’ downtime, that Mab somehow thought it would be a good idea to cut Gesine’s hair.

  “Doris!” screamed Mab.

  Doris sprung up, her eyes as red as everyone else’s in the room except Gesine’s.

  Doris blinked. Was it really Gesine who had Mab pressed up against the wall? Her black hair was short, almost curly.

  Mab managed to spin both herself and Gesine around, so Gesine’s back was then against the wall. “Get her off me!”

  Argall approached them slowly with his hands up. “Doris, I don’t think there’s any way for us to make her understand … It’s just hair.”

  Gesine swung Mab around so that she went through the doorway. As Argall tried to grab Gesine, she backhanded him and sent him across the room. His
metal brace creaked as he hit the floor.

  Mab was gone.

  Gesine smashed the wood under the door’s lintel, grabbed a pointy piece with a bloodied hand. She ran off without glancing back.

  Doris stopped in the doorway before she followed her. She whispered to Argall: “You’ve been worse off, I’m sure.”

  “Just go,” he said. “Make sure one of them isn’t the end of the other.”

  She could hear the slant in Argall’s voice, the one that certainly was in Mab’s favor.

  “It wasn’t just hair,” said Doris. “Like Caden wasn’t just a driver.”

  Even “just hair” is a lot to some people, Doris thought as she gave chase. As much as a straight spine.

  “You don’t think I know that?” Argall yelled after her.

  Mab and Argall must have had some workers pretty busy.

  Doris ran through new tunnel extensions in the dark. Some of them were for moonshine’s sake, if the smell of alcohol was any indication. She followed the faint sounds of grappling and quick foot steps, until she could hear the faint sound of music. She stopped and turned her ear in its direction. Amid a commotion, ragtime was beginning to turn to some genre called jazz.

  Doris quickly moved ahead. Her eyes were accustomed to outlines in the dark; a vampire’s eyes, so tied to their other senses, just naturally got the gist. The tunnel was getting lower. The music was getting louder, almost antagonistically so. Doris crouched as the air blew against her knees. She could smell both Gesine and Mab’s blood. The music – a cacophony of saxophones, trumpets and piano – was jovial.

  Braving joviality, Doris made her way through a two-foot tunnel onto a dimly lit stage.

  To her right, a band was playing – pleasantly vibing with each other – as a red-headed man held Mab’s own ginger-tressed head to his chest, the two of them standing over Gesine as she sat on the stage, half-starved, frozen in a daze.

  A spotlight blinded Doris, but to her left, a man in a suit was sitting in a cage, smelling faintly of garlic. He was holding a microphone.