Long Dark Night

by Janci Patterson

  “Look, I’ll call them, okay? I can sit with you while you talk to them.”

  Talking to the police would be like sending up a signal flare to let Vance know exactly where I was. He didn’t get away with the things he did without having deep connections. I stood up and took a step toward the door. “I can’t,” I said.

  Jack stood with me, holding up his palms in surrender. “Okay, okay,” he said. “No problem. I have an envelope for you, from Zeke.”

  That was it. That was why I was here. “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know. I never opened it. He said to give it to you if anything ever happened to him. I thought that was weird at the time, but Zeke could be kind of dramatic, you know?”

  I knew. I wasn’t sure what would fit in an envelope that could help me, besides money. But that would be a start. “Can you get it for me?”

  “Sure,” Jack said. “It’s downstairs in my room. Come down and I’ll give it to you.”

  My neck twitched—maybe from nervousness, or maybe the beginnings of hunger. He was putting conditions on giving me the envelope. I could have it if I came downstairs. Where I might not be able to escape.

  “Can I wait here?” I asked.

  Jack looked at me for a minute, like he was weighing me in his mind. He considered me differently than Lyle Browning had, though. He didn’t seem like he was looking to use me. But he might have been deciding how much of a risk I presented, since I’d showed up announcing his friend’s murder and insisting he didn’t call the police.

  If he was scared of me, he was smart. It also put us on equal footing.

  “You can stay here if you want,” he said. “But I’m going to have to search for it, so I might be a minute.”

  My temples throbbed. I missed the days when my stomach hurt when I was hungry, instead of my skull.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” I asked. “Then I’ll come down.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “They’re both at the end of the hall. Bathroom on the left. Stairway on the right.” He waited for me to go first.

  I walked to the end of the narrow hallway, and stepped into the bathroom. The toilet lid was covered in one of those shaggy toilet seat covers, and a matching rug carpeted the whole floor, gathering around the bottom of the base.

  Jack headed down an even more narrow set of stairs behind me, and I shut the door. I pulled the blood out of my pocket and sat down on the fluffy toilet seat, carefully puncturing the sealed edge of the bag with my fingernail.

  As soon as I opened it, I was sorry. A rancid smell assaulted my nostrils, and I held the bag away. I’d thought it smelled stale before, but with the plastic open, the blood was positively putrid. It must be old, or have gone a while without refrigeration. No wonder it was sitting on an unattended cart. It was probably on its way to the trash.

  I held the bag at arm’s length, like a container of tuna gone moldy in the fridge. I couldn’t eat this.

  I swallowed, hard. That wasn’t entirely true. A starving person could eat the spoiled tuna, if it was that or die. I could drink this blood if I had to.

  I pulled the bag closer, sniffing it again. If I’d had a gag reflex, I would have vomited. A starving corpse might be able to eat it, but I wasn’t starving. Not yet.

  I could try to put the blood in the freezer, but if Jack came up the stairs I wouldn’t be able to hide the open bag without spilling it. Freezing it might cut down the spoiled taste, but it would also take longer to eat, especially without a blender and a really thick straw.

  I really didn’t want to explain to Jack why I was making a blood slushy in his kitchen.

  I’d have to hide it, and wait until desperation set in.

  Poking around the cabinet under the sink, I found a place to set the bag of blood—propped upright between a can of Comet and a bottle of Windex, so it wouldn’t spill. Jack wasn’t going to feel a sudden need to scrub the bathroom with me still in the house. The blood would be safe for a little while. I could smell it through the cabinet doors, but a normal person wouldn’t notice it.

  I flushed to keep up my cover, glad to be able to open the bathroom door and get away from the stench. Half an hour might be long enough that I’d be able to eat the blood. I wouldn’t be putting Jack in danger in that short a time. And he still had to find that envelope.

  I descended the stairs into Jack’s basement and found him leaning over a table piled with papers and comics wrapped in clear plastic.

  “It’s here somewhere,” Jack said. “Don’t worry. And, um, sorry about the mess.” He kicked at a pile of laundry, partially shoving it under the bed.

  The basement was only one room, which Jack had set up to be a combination bedroom and game room. In one corner he had a large table blanketed in green carpet and covered in soldier figurines. The shelves next to the door were covered in decks of cards, handkerchiefs, coins, cups, lighters, and some elaborate looking techno-style hand lights.

  “Zeke told me you were into magic,” I said. “Like, the real kind, right?”

  Jack laughed. “Depends on what you mean by real,” he said. “I’ve been doing magic tricks since I was a kid. Did I never show you any when you were in the store? I used to set stuff on fire on D&D night, but the owner made me stop after I torched her signed photo of Nathan Fillion.”

  “No,” I said. “You never even talked to me.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “That’s because Zeke said he would kick my ass.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. He kept his tone light, but I could tell he was still eyeing me, trying to figure me out. “For a guy who never mentioned he even had a half sister before he brought you by, he was really attached to you. He threatened everyone who looked at you like you were eight years old or something. Must be hell on your love life.” He looked at me for a reaction again, but I just shrugged. Any chance I’d had at a love life had died along with me, even if I could stomach the idea of letting someone touch me.

  I turned away from the magic tricks. Against the opposite wall, Jack’s bed was surrounded by a foot-deep pile of dirty clothes, which was now only somewhat concealed beneath the bed. Behind a couch and two deep chairs, his TV sat surrounded by cords and controllers and consoles. The systems stacked so deep I couldn’t tell how many there were, but most of them were out-of-date.

  “Are all of these hooked up?” I asked.

  “Most of them. I’ve got a couple splitters behind the TV.” Jack picked up another stack of papers and riffled through it.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “You play?” Jack asked. He held up yet another pile of papers, flipping them over one at a time.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Shooters, mostly.”

  “Figures. That’s what Zeke was into.”

  Jack lifted a stack of comics and uncovered a Snickers bar. He waved it at me. “Want half? I mean, it’s not old or anything. It’s left over from a LAN party last week.”

  “Please,” I said. Chocolate didn’t slake the hunger, but it calmed the nerves.

  He bent the bar in half and handed part to me, caramel stretching between us.

  As he bit into his half, he cringed. “Listen to me. Your brother is dead. I should have given you the whole Snickers.”

  I knew I should leave. I was taking a chance believing I could be starving enough to eat the rancid blood while I still had enough faculties not to attack a living person. But Jack had that envelope for me, and I didn’t have access to more blood tonight. Not without going back to the hospital, which I couldn’t do.

  And that meant I either had to eat the rancid blood or find a willing victim.

  “Tell me why you need to leave town,” Jack said. “Someone’s bothering you?”

  That was an understatement. It was only reasonable that Jack would want to talk about it, but it’d been six months since I’d talked to anyone near my age who wasn’t dead or kidnapped. And before that I was in high school. The kids there weren’t this nice. The only rule
Zeke had given me for interacting with the living was "don’t,” so I had to off-road it a little.

  Not that Zeke had been such a shining example of keeping that rule.

  “His name’s Vance,” I said.

  “And what does he want with you?”

  I shivered. “He likes to control people.”

  “Oh,” Jack said. “One of those.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know Zeke’s dead, if no one else does? Maybe he took off for a couple of days.”

  “No,” I said. “I saw his body.”

  Jack took a deep breath. “Where?”

  He could use this information for the police, but they probably wouldn’t find anything. Vance would have cleaned up the body by now. “At our apartment. He was dead when I came home.”

  “Zeke was into some bad stuff these last couple of years, wasn’t he?”

  I hesitated. It would have taken a special kind of oblivious not to notice that something had changed with him. “Yeah.”

  “Was it drugs?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Look, I know you don’t know me very well,” Jack said. “But you can trust me. I volunteer at a crisis hotline. I hear about this stuff a lot. Plus, everyone at the store tells me their problems. I’m the resident amateur counselor. You’re not going to shock me.”

  That was a challenge, but I wasn’t ready to take him up on it.

  It wasn’t fair to him for me to stay here, putting him in danger. But I was a danger to everyone if I didn’t eat, and Jack was into all this fantasy stuff, what with the game store job and the toy soldiers and the video games and the magic tricks, which meant he might be willing to believe me about what I was. If I was going to have to feed from him, I knew I needed him to be okay with it, but the human part of me quietly hoped he wouldn’t be that kind of freak.

  When I didn’t respond, Jack sighed. “You’ve been through a lot,” he said. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. Have a seat, okay?”

  I sat down on his couch, facing the mountains of game systems, and hated myself for it. I shouldn’t even be thinking the things I was thinking. What was the difference between feeding from him and feeding from Lexa? Last time I saw her, she was lying dead on the floor. Was her body still there? Would Vance bury her, or dump her somewhere? She didn’t have family in town, but at least her mom would miss her. She might never know what happened to her.

  “Here it is,” Jack said. He pulled a white envelope out of the plastic sleeve covering a comic book. “I knew I put it somewhere safe. It was in my copy of The Killing Joke.”

  He brought the envelope over and sat down beside me. My monster hissed. It began to circle, slowly. Vance didn’t feed you this one, it said. What harm could it be?

  I ignored the tension in my temples. I had at least an hour before I got thoroughly sick, maybe as many as three before I started to lose control.

  Instead I focused on the envelope in Jack’s hand. It was made of regular white paper, like you might mail a letter in, but it was thick enough to require more than one stamp.

  “I knew something was up even before Zeke gave me this,” Jack said. “But after that, I figured it had to be something really dangerous.”

  “You shouldn’t get involved,” I said.

  “You’re probably right. But I can’t walk away right now, can I? Not while you need help.” He handed the envelope to me.

  I took it. There was nothing written on the outside.

  “You’re sure this is it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  I tore it open. Inside was a stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills, and a note.

  April, it said. Your ticket to Paris is in Baker, California. Give the money to Thorpe. He’ll take care of you. An address followed.

  I stared at the note. I’d been hoping for some kind of letter about how he knew he was gone now, and he was sorry that he hadn’t taken me to Paris himself, and that he didn’t want me to feel guilty about surviving. But no. Zeke wouldn’t allow me self-indulgence, even in death.

  I shoved the money and the envelope in my pocket. I had no idea who Thorpe was. Zeke had never mentioned him. But I needed to escape Vance, and this was my only lead. I’d take it.

  “I need to get to Baker, California,” I said. I might be able to take a bus, but buses were slow, and I’d need to be inside by sun up. “Do you know how far that is?”

  “It’s three hours past Vegas,” Jack said. “Give or take. What’s there?”

  “A guy who can help me. I hope.”

  Vegas was a six hour drive by car. That meant getting that far by bus would be a problem. The hours would have to line up just right, and if there were any delays I was screwed. I’d have to do the trip in two nights, just to be sure.

  “I need to go tonight,” I said. “Do you know where there’s a bus station?”

  “I have a cousin in Vegas,” Jack said. “I stay with him sometimes. I could drive you.”

  I looked at him. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because I think you might hook me up with a gig on the strip,” Jack said. “I’ve always wanted to be a Vegas magician.”

  We stared at each other for a moment before I realized that this was a joke.

  “Because you clearly need help, April,” Jack said. “Are you sure I can’t call the police?”

  “No,” I said.

  He nodded. “Then at least let me give you a ride.”

  I shouldn’t do that. But I couldn’t turn him down, and I knew it. By this time, Vance might already know where I was, which meant I’d be endangering Jack more by leaving him here than I would be by taking him with me.

  Or I would be if I wasn’t hoping to eat him.

  I was a monster. Jack wanted to help me, and I sat here thinking of asking him to bleed for me.

  My neck muscles pulled tighter.

  “What about your parents?” Jack asked. “Are they still in Salt Lake?”

  He was talking about Zeke’s parents, of course. Zeke never mentioned them.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know where they are.”

  Jack was looking more concerned by the moment. He was such a bleeding heart that he probably would open a vein for me.

  This was ridiculous. I couldn’t feed from a guy like this. I would down the rotten blood, and then this wouldn’t be an issue.

  Yes, that’s what I would do. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I didn’t even look at Jack, just stood up and headed up to the bathroom again.

  But the stench of the rotten blood was abominable. I couldn’t even bring myself to open the cabinet. I tried plugging my nose; I tried holding my habitual breath. Nothing helped.

  I couldn’t eat this. And there was only one other source of blood nearby.

  I hated myself for what I knew I had to do.

  Seven

  When I descended the stairs to Jack’s basement again, the corner of my eye twitched, and I was beginning to feel a slight sense of vertigo.

  How much sanity did I have left? Did I have a few hours, or less?

  I picked up a penny from a coin jar on his shelf and popped it into my mouth, mostly for the taste.

  Jack looked at me and shook his head. “What are you on?”

  “What?”

  “What drugs are you on?”

  I sniffed. “I’m not on anything.” Drugs would have no effect on my undead metabolism anyway.

  “Look, I don’t care, okay? Like I said, I deal with this stuff all the time. Last week, this guy called in, and he talked to me for an hour about what it was like to watch his friend OD. I can help you.”

  “No really. I don’t do drugs.” I wondered if corpses ever called in to his crisis hotline. I’d never thought about doing that, myself, but it would probably be good for stiffs. Social support with total anonymity and no chance of anyone getting hurt.

  Or eaten.

  “What then? Are you sick?”

  I should h
ave told him I was high. I knew I had to explain the whole thing to him if I wanted a meal, but I just couldn’t think of how to start.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  I didn’t notice Jack reach out until he already had his hand on my wrist. I jerked back.

  “Sorry!” Jack said, getting up off the couch. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You just startled me.”

  “You’re cold. Like, deathly cold.” He rubbed his palm on his jeans, probably to warm it up.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “Why aren’t you wearing a jacket, anyway? Isn’t it snowing?”

  “I left it somewhere.” It was still in the closet at the apartment. Bringing it would have made me less conspicuous.

  Jack’s face etched with concern. “Those are some messed up drugs.”

  At that moment, I wished that Jack was a jerk. That he’d brought me down here to hurt me; that he was too selfish to give me a ride to the corner, let alone the six hours to Vegas. Anything to make me feel better about what I had to do to him. “I told you, there are no drugs.”

  “Can I drive you to the hospital then? You might be going into shock. I probably would, too, if I’d found my brother dead.”

  I shook my head. “What are you, a doctor?”

  “No, but my mom’s a nurse. I’ve picked up a few things. I could call her. It’s a couple hours later in Virginia but she could—”

  “No,” I said.

  I could smell Jack’s blood, hear his heart beating. I must have looked scared, because he backed off.

  This was it. If I wanted his blood, I had to tell him the truth. If I walked away, the need would just grow stronger and stronger until it ate me alive. And this time I wouldn’t have Vance’s cell to hold me in.

  There was really only one choice. “I’m dead,” I said.

  Jack waited, like he expected more of an explanation. When I didn’t give one, he gave a nervous laugh. “What, like you’re a ghost here to haunt me from beyond? Because if so, I have some questions for you.”