The Howling Twenties

by Fennel Steuert

  Robin knelt down next to Doris. “Can it hear me?”

  Doris shook her head. “I doubt it.”

  Three figures landed on the floor near them. Holding Mab, along with another vampire, was Emilia. She handed Robin a stake.

  He took it with one hand and held his forehead with the other.

  The elevator beeped, and its doors opened.

  “Stop!” said Argall

  He approached slowly, walking side by side with Roger.

  Doris slowly managed to get to her feet.

  Mab, speechless, began to cry.

  Robin sighed. “We’ll let her live,” he said, “but you’ll have to come back with us.”

  “Why does he have to do that?” said Roger.

  “His bite.”

  “Ah,” said Argall. “That.” He went over to Mab. “Do you think you could have loved me like this?”

  Mab smiled. “What are you talking about? I’ve always had your back, no matter what it looks like.”

  Argall took her hand. He held it and winced when he saw one of the fingers missing.

  “Wait,” said Doris. “Is that what you’re being on ‘my’ side has all been about, Robin? Argall’s bite?” She felt herself getting faint again. “Shit … I really need blood.”

  Roger quickly moved over to her and put her good arm around his shoulder.

  “No, Doris,” said Robin. “It’s just the half of it. The titan is the other half. The old ones are enamored with it, and the company should have been following your lead on trying to connect with such a being.”

  Mab scoffed. “Is that why the humans that helped alter Argall’s DNA have disappeared?”

  “You took those four humans’ lives away the moment you gave them the recipe for some abomination version of us,” said Emilia. “But we spared them. They’re not dead. They’re just mesmerized. As every human who worked here and helped cursed our kind shall be. Robin is silent now because he’s not our leader. He is our equal.”

  Doris felt the building lower and Robin glowering, but her mind was elsewhere.

  Would it ever stop? Any of it, some being dying so another could rise. Or stay in their own lofty personal space. Doris hyperventilated. The world needed more space. She could feel Roger’s veins ticking with blood beneath his skin.

  “We should go while the building is still above ground,” said Roger.

  “Yes,” said Argall. “You both should.” He moved closer to him. “I’m sorry about your great uncle. It’s an interesting world he’s in, but well, it’s not quite this one. Maybe I don’t deserve it, but I’d appreciate it if you shook my hand.”

  Roger squinted. His only free hand, after all, had a stake in it.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not going to help you put a stake through your chest.”

  The building continued to slowly sink.

  “Roger,” said Doris. “May I?”

  “You may,” said Roger.

  Doris lifted the hand he had around her and bit into it. She drank all the while the building, already down by three or four floors, slowly continued to sink.

  Her eyes glowed red as she put Roger’s arm back around her, but this time she was supporting him.

  “Go with them, Argall. If they ever want that titan to ever talk with them about the mysteries of the universe, it will only be so because you’re still on this earth. It would know if he’s not.”

  “Where are you?” said Gesine in Doris’ ear. Or rather the blue tooth. “Should we come to you?”

  “No,” whispered Doris. “Not yet.”

  The building continued to sink.

  “Fine,” said Robin. He looked at Doris through one eye. “I’ll tell them to find a way to let this new thing be.”

  “I’m going with him,” said Mab. “Please let me do as much.”

  The building stopped sinking.

  ***

  When the city awakened the next day and the company’s employees made their way to work, they found that the building was several stories less tall than it used to be. The only entrance in and out were the windows.

  A few days later, the construction company with a purposeful gray-haired foreman quickly got to work building a new doorway.

  Because there was no plausible explanation for the loss of so many stories, the world seemed to simply accept that it had always been that way. It had never been so tall. Anything else had been an optical illusion.

  Roger felt kind of homeless. He had someplace to stay, but it was all so … unfamiliar.

  One late afternoon he woke up in Doris’ old library that was now subterranean, and he blinked. Was he dreaming? Would some stereo blast him out of his bed?

  A book about ghouls had been his pillow. Desmond was still out there somewhere, now part of some pack on the margins of life itself. That seemed to be the way that most of the people they knew, whether they be in their twenties, thirties or older seemed to get by. Packs. Some were fancier than others or more fortunate. The ability to think around them had never brought much Roger much comfort.

  Yawning, Roger made his way up the stairs and through the corridors. He passed an eerie door he had once passed, but this time he held his hand up to it. “You’re really missing out, wolf,” he said, not really believing it entirely. “I mean, music has never been somehow louder and emptier at the same time.”

  Upstairs, Roger made his way past the fourteenth floor, which was now more or less the first. Half of the floor had become a shelter, simply because of the say-so of the new CEO and the building’s only vampire-in-residence. Doris hired more human security, mostly because she said shelters could be horrible without someone watching over you and making sure you were warm and safe.

  She would watch over them both.

  Roger waved at the redheaded woman who was attending to the new lobby there. On the other side of the lobby, he went and helped Josephine take some books out of boxes for her shop there. When they took a coffee break, he sat in a fold-up chair, trying not to let the sadness show through.

  “Were you on your way here?” said Josephine.

  “I was on my way to see Doris, but she’ll be okay.”

  Josephine took a sip of coffee. “I’m sure she will. Do me a favor and tell her I said ‘hi.’”

  Roger nodded. He went and found Doris on the roof. He hesitated before stepping from the doorway. He wasn’t sure he had anything else, besides this. That made it scary – scarier than just a few nights ago when it had been a full moon and he was wandering around the sub-level’s corridors, looking for a bathroom.

  Roger took a breath, then walked across the rooftop.

  “All those decades asleep inside a wolf,” said Roger, “and he sees our world and goes right back to it.”

  “Yes,” Doris said blankly.

  “Sometimes I’d definitely like to get past this time … this decade to whenever life for people like us is supposed to be … okay. But then I think, well, Doris would miss out on having me around.”

  She smiled at him awkwardly. “I can already feel it,”said Doris.

  “What?” said Roger.

  “You dying. It … it hurts.”

  “I have the same problem,” said Roger. “I guess when you don’t really enjoy the present for so long ...” He shook his head. “Look, how about we just try this … to hold on to each other for now.”

  Doris shrugged. “I suppose … that would be new, just like Gesine being involved with whatever this company is now.” She smiled faintly. “… Are you enjoying the relative quiet?”

  “Sometimes,” said Roger. He walked over to her, put his head on her shoulder, and put his arms around her waist.

  He wanted to ask Doris if she thought Desmond was lost, forever in his twenties, but he didn’t. He shivered, and she pulled in closer to him.

  Epilogue

  According to Roger, a person could linger at Vincenzo’s pizzeria for hours on just one slice.

  One lonesome night Lorraine tried to do just that.
Inside, she spotted Gesine at the arcade machine in the back.

  She ordered a slice of regular pizza from Aaron.

  “How’d the pumpkin thing work out?” he said as they waited on the oven.

  “Oh, the ones Roger took were excellently almost bad.”

  “Yeah?” said Aaron. “I guess I got too many. The new crowd loved the pumpkin pizza, but then one day they just stopped ordering it as much.”

  Lorraine took off her hat and nodded. “Pumpkin stuff tends to be kinda trendy, much like ...”

  “Yeah,” said Aaron. “Yeah … Some of this new crowd aren’t very dependable. Enough about them, though. Haven’t seen Roger or Desmond for a while. Or Doris. You know them, right?”

  “I do,” said Lorraine. She turned and gazed at Gesine.

  “Will you do me a favor and bring this slice of pepperoni pizza to her?”said Aaron. “The pepperoni is cold and has never been warmed, just like she likes it.”

  Lorraine smiled. “Will do.”

  “I’ll bring your pizza over in a sec,” Aaron said.

  Lorraine nodded, still smiling, but it dissipated as she walked over to Gesine and the arcade machine.

  “Hey,” she said, siding up next to Gesine. She put the plate of pizza on top of the game’s second player controls.

  Without looking at Lorraine, Gesine quickly moved the plate above the second player controls – closer to the screen.

  “This is my friend’s favorite game,” said Gesine. “I’m playing it for him. Until he gets back, and then as well ... probably.”

  She became silent again, the light from the game reflecting in the large dark pupils of her otherwise opaquely brown eyes.

  “Oh,” said Lorraine. “I understand.”

  “I don’t think you do,” said Gesine. “I don’t own it. Nobody does.”

  As Aaron passed her by on the way to the back, he stopped, put one hand up in the air and shook it from side to side. Then he put Lorraine’s plated slice of pizza next to Gesine’s.

  Lorraine put a quarter into the machine’s second-player slot. “Can I ask you something?”

  “If it’s going to be while you’re playing,” said Gesine, “yes.”

  From the character menu, Lorraine picked a woman who was all in pieces because five sections of her were in different portals.

  “Why’d I have to go on the back of the motorcycle? It was harder for me to hold on than it would have been for Gray.”

  Gesine’s character, a black man with the wing of a bird and the wing of a bat protruding from his back, guarded. “He was still weaker than you.”

  Lorraine didn’t smile. The only part of a person she felt could belong to someone was their heart. She didn’t know if Desmond had Gesine’s, but even if he did, he was struggling somewhere to not become one part of some legion. Both of them would always struggle to not literally eat hearts.

  If Lorraine herself had Gesine’s heart, that would be a struggle, too. Even her new job with the company, which she was looking forward to, would be a struggle.

  Lorraine didn’t smile, though she was happy to be there with Gesine. And happy Gesine could see that she did have some strength.

  More fiction by Fennel

  Late Night Partners: The Doris Cycle Book 1

  Reality and Me All Capeless

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