The Lesser Dead

by Christopher Buehlman

  Mr. Vogel has offered a $20,000 reward for any information leading to his daughter’s safe return. Renotta is five feet tall, has auburn hair, and was last seen wearing a green wool sweater and a white knit cap.

  It figures this was one of the few news articles Margaret missed that winter. She was the first generation of her family that could read, so she gobbled up newspapers like she was trying to prove something. She moved her lips, but you wouldn’t want to be the one to tell her.

  Anyway, she missed that one. We all did.

  I don’t know that it would have changed anything.

  But it might have.

  OUR TRIBE

  1978

  LATE FEBRUARY

  Margaret was squatting, looking at me. Cvetko was looking at her, rubbing his hands a little like he was washing them in slow motion. Ruth was standing near her, Old Boy working a toothpick around in his mouth where he would have had a cigarette a few years ago. Smoking’s no good for us; all that breathing gives us a headache and the nicotine does nothing because our blood doesn’t run much, it mostly just sits there. Most turned smokers try for a month or two, then get tired of it.

  Margaret said, “We’ll need to call a town meeting. Tomorrow night, an hour past sunset. Tell everyone you can find.” And with that, Margaret McMannis strolled off into the tunnel with her escort, the three of them briefly silhouetted by the light of an approaching car. The other two scooted forward into niches for workers, but not Margaret. She kicked her thong sandals off and moved left, fast. By the time the train reached her, she would be up on the roof of the tunnel, hanging over it so the passengers didn’t see her; when it was past, she’d drop like a spider and fetch her sandals, Old Boy and Ruth falling into place on her flanks like Thing One and Thing Two.

  Cvetko and I retreated back into the darkness that led to our abandoned service rooms, then made our way upstairs. “I’ll tell Billy. You tell Luna,” I said. Cvetko nodded, said, “Thank you.” Luna would be working close to where his latest rash of letters had gone, and, after he found her, he would have time to go socialize with his bridge-club biddies and drink their moldy old geriatric blood.

  There were fourteen vampires in our group, all sleeping in little clusters or alone but nobody more than a ten-minute walk. Cvetko and I were in workrooms next to each other; most were in proper rooms a little bigger than mine, quarters for the construction crew when they were building all this.

  Margaret, of course, got the sweet spot. The mayor’s apartment. Like the governor’s mansion or the White House or Buckingham Palace, only under New York City and fitted out for a vampire. Really beautiful place, the cream of nineteenth-century engineering and architecture. Back in the day, they tried out all different kinds of subway cars and tracks before they figured out the system they got now. But instead of getting together and talking it out, all these fat cats just started digging their own tunnels. This one failed experiment was supposed to be high-end, and Margaret’s vault was where they were planning to entertain the press and eat caviar with the mayor and all that, only they ran out of money. Of course they ran out of money, tiles from Spain and that green velvet couch and all, a mahogany bar and little statues of angels, I mean Margaret’s digs were sweet. Her box was behind the bar, nice and snug, she had it lined with fur. Just on the other side was a fancy door leading to a station platform that never got used except for one demo run by a car that now sat abandoned off its rails (that was where Old Boy lived), and then there was this half mile of tracks before a hole in the wall that opened on a big, deep pit that collected groundwater and stank. We called that Purgatory. That was where we put what was left of people we peeled. There was a rolling cart on the tracks that worked just fine for body dumping.

  All of this was on the far side of our little colony, about ten minutes away at a stroll, though I could get there much quicker if I had to. Much quicker.

  RUTH AND OLD BOY

  Ruth had been friends with Margaret since about 1945, but Ruth was old. Not Clayton or Hessian old, but suffragette old. Born about when Cvetko was (1890?), fifty-five-ish when her clock stopped, square, grim head like a monument, like the Statue of Liberty or Blind Frowning Fucking Justice. Everything on her is square, mannish, solid. Even her fangs are less sharp than most; she has to tear more when she bites, like a dog with a sock. If you think Cvetko’s a drag, this woman could have killed the mood on V-J Day. Which was right about the time she got turned—some bughouse-crazy black woman vampire bit her up in Harlem, had the idea she was Margaret Sanger (different Margaret), the woman who opened a colored women’s clinic up there fifteen years before. Point of fact, the woman had seen Ruth running messages to the clinic, Ruth did work for Sanger. Just not real recently. She had been in Harlem that day to visit a woman who used to work there but now had leukemia. The vampire who jumped Ruth told her it was for coming up where she didn’t belong trying to get rid of all the black babies. Only Ruth’s disappearance made the paper, complete with “her colored assailant seeming to embrace her intimately,” and, like I said, our Margaret reads the paper. Scours it for vampire stuff, and this was a bull’s-eye. She went up there looking, asking questions, found Ruth. Taught her. Tore the head off the one who turned her. That was the first time she used her shovel, and adopting Ruth was one of the smartest things she ever did. Nobody loves Margaret like Ruth. Ruth doesn’t talk much, but she’s determined and strong and if Dr. Van Helsing himself were coming for Margaret McMannis, he’d have to get through Ruth first.

  Another thing about Ruth. She looks dead, even when she just fed. Clayton said older vampires use a constant, automatic low-grade charm that even works on other vampires, even works on themselves, to look the way they did when they were turned. It’s the same kind of charm that hides our fangs, only even more automatic; the only thing it doesn’t hide so well is the way our eyes shine like cat’s eyes when light hits them in the dark. He said it only drops when a vampire is frightened or dying, or when he wants it dropped. He said that he had seen himself and didn’t want to again—Clayton was really old. But Ruth, she had learned to relax that. Her skin was greenish-gray and her irises were too light all the time. Except when she hunted. She would charm herself warm-looking like the rest of us to hunt. The thing about Ruth was she hated a liar, which I could understand.

  I hate a liar, too.

  Old Boy, now here was another beast entirely. Like Baldy, we’ll get to Baldy later, Old Boy’s name is deceptive. He actually had a boyish face, only got turned in 1972 or so. Wouldn’t say who did it, but we all know it was Margaret, she told me. Only Margaret was allowed to turn people whenever she wanted. If one of us wanted to, we could ask, but she almost always said no. She didn’t want anybody else having divided loyalties, and a lot of loyalty comes with being turned, even if it’s a hostile act. Very conflicting stuff, take my word for it. I hated Margaret when she stopped my clock, but I loved her a little bit, too. I couldn’t imagine hurting her, and not just because she could kick my ass for twenty years before I got a lick in. There’s something instinctual about it. Anyway, Old Boy was a good choice; he was young, but dangerous. He’d been in Vietnam. “Old Boy” was what they called him in his Marine recon unit, and he was really out in the shit, where people took ears and dicks and fingers as trophies. He was good with a knife and stealthy as a mother even before he got turned. Now? Now he was like a breeze you couldn’t even feel. He was like a nothing that would kill you before you knew you were in trouble. Big fangs on him, but he used his knife, cut and suck. He watched out for Margaret, sometimes close, sometimes at a distance, and if Ruth would take a bullet for her, figuratively speaking, everybody knew it would be Old Boy who’d get revenge if somebody had two bullets.

  He had been working as a security guard at the port. He hated it. He was close to killing himself because he didn’t understand life back in the States, preferred moving in the darkness out where you had to machete your way through the mo
squitoes and the only friendlies were Hmong and beardy Green Berets who’d half gone native. No, America didn’t fit him anymore. Where most guys had nightmares about Nam, he had nightmares about the United States. One of the rare times he talked to me for more than five minutes, he told me he dreamed about having to walk across open places with a tight suit on and everybody looking at him from every window and he couldn’t hide anywhere. He’d wake up in a cold sweat dreaming about being drunk in a house full of children, reeling from room to room with tiny children in his way, knowing it was only a matter of time before he hurt one of them and then he’d go to the electric chair. He had Nam dreams, too, but they didn’t bother him like that. He woke up from dreams about burning hootches and covering himself in mud to wait in ambush and then he’d wake up and get sad when he realized he was just in his shitty apartment and he had to go out and talk to people he wasn’t allowed to punch. He actually spotted Margaret while she was hunting, followed her, kept up with her. That she was able to climb on the sides of buildings didn’t surprise him much after the shit he had seen. She didn’t even know she had grown a tail. For a while. When she realized a warm body had actually gotten the drop on her, she was intrigued. They sat by the water and talked. She gave him a choice. He took the one that sounded the most like being back in-country.

  LUNA AND BILLY BANG

  Luna was our closest neighbor. Luna was a prostitute, which, as you can imagine, is a profession that lends itself to vampirism. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that as many vampires become prostitutes as prostitutes become vampires, but of course I have only my own bullshit to back this up. Think about it, though. Darkness, privacy, secrecy. It’s perfect. They probably start off pretending to be hookers to hunt, but soon they’re going through with it because sex and feeding go so well together.

  But I don’t mean to confuse the issue; Luna was a prostitute first, had a real fucked-up family. Not that all prosties do, that’s a cliché. Plenty of them do it just because that’s how they’re built. But with Luna, the cliché was true. The dad broke the older brother’s arm when he found out he was visiting Luna in the basement, but not because it was wrong; because he was jealous. Dad was visiting Luna in the bath. The only people who know where she goes are me and Cvetko; she always lets us know where she’s going in case she gets arrested and can’t get away. I can’t much imagine the scenario in which she wouldn’t be able to get away, but the idea of waking up in a cell scares her senseless, so she drops off a piece of wide-ruled notebook paper with the neighborhood she intends to prowl Flair-markered in so we’ll know what precinct to bail her out of should she not turn up by four A.M. or so. Of course, this has never happened. The one time she almost got arrested, a john flashed a badge at her and she was so startled she punched him in the mouth rather than charm her way out of it; she hit him so hard she heard one of his teeth hit the window. Backup cop was a lady, pulled a gun. Luna was still freaked-out, showing her fangs, so the cop panicked and shot Luna, shot her right in the forehead. That stunned her, it takes a second to get the brain going again, but lady cop was stunned, too. First time she’d used a gun on something three-dimensional that bled. By the time she stopped making a goldfish mouth and went for the radio, Luna was back in business. She sprained the lady cop’s wrist taking the gun from her, threw it in a trash can, and, blinking her own blood out of her eyes, told the cop, “This didn’t happen. Go home!” She went home. The male cop was still conscious, so Luna charmed him, too, told him to ram his El Camino into a fire hydrant and forget her face. He did. Case closed.

  The notebook paper tonight said,

  TIMES

  I kinda had a crush on Luna when she moved in down the tunnel. Okay, I never completely lost it. Okay, I never lost it at all. She was pretty in that Goldie Hawn way; the other Times Square girls hated her because few of them looked as good as she did when she put on makeup, but they knew better than to fuck with her and so did the pimps. Clayton brought her here from Milwaukee, I don’t think she’d been a vampire long, she never said much about that. He was old, though, like I said. He’d been doing this since Mark Twain was barefoot Sammy chasing Missouri grasshoppers; he got night fever and went sunbathing. More about night fever and Luna later. Luna was Cvetko’s business. Billy was mine.

  I went up into the tunnel not far from Union Square, waited for a train. I was wearing a black leather jacket, lambskin, really suave, but when the train went by I turned my back, tucked my head, and squared my shoulders. People don’t think rectangular shapes are people, it’s a ninja trick. Okay, so I had a paisley purple-and-blue scarf on, I loved that scarf, but nobody would know what they were looking at should they see that flamboyant little jab of color, not in the split second they might see me from the train window. I timed it so I turned with the train as it went by me, switching from ninja to torero, letting it glance off me a little and leaping up onto the platform just behind it, turning my landing into a kind of a groovy little dance step. Anybody who caught sight of me would think I had been there all along and they just hadn’t noticed; nobody jumps up on a subway platform in midgroove and keeps walking all funky and casual. Nobody but Joey Peacock. That’s not ninja stuff, or maybe it is, but I like to think I’m the originator. Did I mention I had numchuks? I was pretty good with them, too. Though that’s Korean, I think, not Japanese. Ninjas use sais and shurikens. That means throwing stars. I had been practicing with those, too.

  I made my way through the station, momentarily confused by the blizzard of smells and colors and all the bright light. I kicked a mashed-up half hot dog out of my way, then immediately regretted it because I was wearing my nice zip-up ankle boots. I grabbed a piece of the New York Post and wiped off the little bit of mustard and relish, close enough to the 14th Street entrance now to hear Billy. He was playing “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” by Bill Withers. Billy has a taste for the ironic. I like Billy. Even though he got Luna. They were splitsville now, but he definitely got her. You know what I mean when I say got her, right? Yeah, I thought so. Billy got everybody.

  Anybody else walking up on Billy Bang would have thought he was just a particularly good busker, one of those world-shakers you just know is only stopping underground for a little spare change and a laugh on his way to a recording contract in L.A. or Nashville. Billy was a black guy, mostly, maybe some Puerto Rican. He played his steel guitar like something he stole from angels and he was going to wring one more song out of it before they came to confiscate it. He was a handsome vampire; it was hard not to envy him, twenty-eight forever, wearing only a suede vest on his trunk even in this cold, mirrored sunglasses over his eyes, an ironic cowboy hat on, a foxtail hanging off his fret. Tight jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots. You get the idea. Only Billy wasn’t a world-shaker, he was a bloodsucker, and he would never get to Nashville or L.A. because his gig in the tunnels was just too sweet and the blood was too easy to leave behind. Billy was still passionate about music, you could hear it, but it was his second love and always would be.

  I walked up to Billy behind a fat lady so he wouldn’t see me at first. She bent down to put a quarter in his guitar case and I popped around her side like a tugboat around a freighter, shaking my hand slowly and O’ing my mouth as if to say Big Spender! Billy smiled just a little, finishing “Ain’t No Sunshine” and tipping his hat for the loose semicircle of listeners, who clapped and came up with another couple of bucks between them before slouching off to their unguessable destinations.

  “Joey Peacock! My man!” he said, flashing fangs only I could see, closing his guitar case and giving me some kind of soul handshake I never properly learned my half of. “What’s shakin’?”

  “Town meeting,” I said. I told him when and where.

  “What’s up her skirt now?”

  “Kid vampires.”

  “Up her skirt?”

  “For all I know. But definitely on the cars. Hunting.”

  I told him what I saw an
d a big smile crept onto his face. He peeked over the sunglasses, showing his big brown eyes.

  “You wouldn’t be fuckin’ with Billy Bang now, would you?”

  “Scout’s honor,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “So, we kick their little asses and make it clear they ain’t welcome. Can’t be huntin’ on the cars where everybody can see. Don’t need no new tenants downstairs, neither.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “We really havin’ a town powwow over this? This sounds like light work.”

  “Yep. But you didn’t see them.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing for them.”

  Now a slightly chubby part-Asian-looking fellow stood staring at us, holding a Slurpee cup. Denim jacket. Poker visor, don’t ask me why.

  “What. May I do. For you?” Billy said, putting on his fake-ass cordial DJ voice without actually looking at him.

  “Are you done? Your set?”

  “Did you see me close my guitar case?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Then, my good sir, I am done. My set.”

  The guy was shy. This was hard for him and Billy wasn’t making it any easier.

  “Oh . . . Well . . . I was hoping . . .”

  “There’s your problem right there. HA-HA!”

  “Hoping you might play . . .”

  “Get it out, Oddjob.” I don’t know how he made that sound friendly, but he did.

  “Something by the . . .”

  It became clear to me that poker visor wasn’t just shy—he had something like a stutter. Billy didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  “. . . by the Dock of the Bay?”