The Lesser Dead

by Christopher Buehlman

  A couple came down the sidewalk, then a black guy who gave Gua Gua a quarter. It only cost a quarter to get down that street safely.

  The next one who came too close to the alley was for Gua Gua. Kind of a badly shaven PLO sympathizer guy with a— What’s that word for the Yasser Arafat scarfy thing? I don’t know. He looked all hard and flinty, hawk-faced like he practiced it, though I only saw that look for a second before Bug and I caught him and flung him in. Mapache pillowed him, but he was strong, wiry-like, punched me a good one, which started me laughing. Like he finally gets to hit a Jew and this is how it goes for him. Anyway, nobody bit this one. Mapache pulled out a little knife and did his wrist, bled him down into a plastic McDonald’s glass with a picture of the Hamburglar on it. Then Gua Gua coughed twice and Bug draped a big garbage bag around us and we lay still. A laughing, carousing bunch went by the alley, somebody saying something Spanish, somebody else belched real loud like on purpose and kicked a bottle. Then three more coughs and we finished with Arafat. Bug licked his bleeding wrist with the flat of his tongue, it’s the spit that makes the wound close up, and sure enough the well sputtered and went dry. We stood him up, straightened up his kerchief, and Gua Gua charmed him off home. Then Mapache pulled out a little bottle of rum and poured some in the glass, stirring with a straw. He gave us each a sip—rum and blood is good, they called it ronrico—then wiped the rim with his shirt and passed it on to Gua Gua. Cvetko and I fed next, then we moved on to another ambush site, splitting up on the way there, moving in ones and twos. Always Mapache and his brother.

  Oh, I forgot to tell you, Mapache walked with a cane. Made him look a little like a dirty, smiley pimp. I really liked these guys and their system; getting into somebody’s house was safer, but this was downright fun, like trick-or-treating. Give the fat man a quarter or else! Even Cvetko seemed amused by it.

  Until they peeled a guy.

  I didn’t like that either.

  They jumped a very brown, white-haired man on his way home from working at a taquería or some beaner place, he smelled like beef fat and beans and olive oil, he must have been fifty. Too old for a job like that. But he was alone and more interested in his beer in a paper bag than in his surroundings, so they flipped him up into a Dumpster next to an old broken couch and started drilling him to make more ronrico. But he was a little drunk and stubborn, wasn’t taking well to the charm, even when Gua Gua tried it—sleepy drunk is good for charming, angry drunk is not. He yelled a lot, he wouldn’t shut up, and now people were coming. Mapache full-on cut his throat. Just cut it. We put him in the old couch, which had about a thousand mice in it, we had to shake the mice out, and dumped him in the river. When it was done, Cvetko made that uncomfortable face he makes where really he’s just not sure what to do, but it looks like maybe he smelled a fart, and it’s easy to take it the wrong way. Mapache was a guy who took things the wrong way.

  “What?” he said.

  “We aren’t supposed to kill them.”

  “No, viejo, we aren’t supposed to kill them and get caught.”

  Cvetko should have shut up then, but he was so smart he was dumb, one of these guys who couldn’t let something go if he knew he was right. And mostly he was right.

  “Not to differ, but we need not get caught for the body to be discovered. If a great many bodies are discovered, the police will increase their scrutiny of this area.”

  Cvetko really should have shut up.

  “Hey! I don’t know where the fuck you’re from, but I’m from here. People die here. Every day. As long as they’re poor or brown, and that guy was both, the cops could give a shit. That poor motherfucker couldn’t get in the newspaper if he flew to the moon.”

  Shut up Cvetko shut up.

  But he was going to say something else. I knew he was.

  “Still,” he said. Just that one word, but one too many.

  Mapache walked over, stood real close like he does, making Cvets pull up his lip in that uncomfortable, fang-showing sneer like a dog waiting to get hit with a rolled-up magazine.

  “What the fuck are you makin’ that face for, man? And talkin’ that talk? Police will increase their SCREW-TIN-KNEE. Fuck you, man. This is how it is, and you know it even if you wanna act like a priest, fuckin’ maricon vampire priest. What, you never peel nobody? It was a accident!”

  Cvetko just sneered, actually closed his eyes like maybe his aggressor would just go away if he ostriched.

  “Mapache, please, he doesn’t mean it,” I said.

  Gua Gua walked over, said something in Spanish, put his huge, white hand on Mapache’s shoulder. Mapache relaxed a little, started to turn around, then fucking face-touching, fucking autistic Cvetko had to burp out some more wisdom, eyes still closed, one hand held halfway up as if to stop a smack.

  “We have to work together, we have to try to agree on common governance . . .”

  Mapache, quick as hell, and I mean this guy moved more like a panther than a raccoon, grabbed the machete off his brother’s belt and came at Cvets. I stood in his way but he pushed me aside, grabbing Cvetko’s hand with his free one and then swinging the machete down. He lopped Cvetko’s hand off, lopped it right the fuck off. Tossed it in the water.

  Cvetko and me just stood there.

  “It’ll grow back, man,” Mapache said, a scrawny olive branch if ever I heard one, and the four of them walked away. I wanted to kill that fucker but knew I couldn’t, not him. Not now.

  Cvets just stood there bleeding, his hand already re-forming off the bone, the severed one down in the river doubtless dissolving, unmaking itself. A regular hand, crabs would already be fighting over that, but not one of ours. Animals don’t eat us. I used to cut my fingers off and throw them at track-rabbits to see if they’d eat them; they never did, the fingers just bubbled away like butter in a hot pan at the same rate the new ones grew in.

  Cvetko was already wriggling the new hand, touching his thumb to the new fingers.

  What kind of bully do you have to be to hurt a guy like Cvetko? But some vampires were like that, hated weakness. Hell, a lot of people were like that, too.

  “You okay?” I said, a stupid question but I couldn’t think of anything else.

  “As they say, nothing hurt but my pride,” he said, trying to smile, but it was so pathetic I was almost glad when he gave up and let himself look real sad.

  “My ring,” he said.

  I never noticed one on him. I mean, I knew he had one, on his pinky, gold, but I never really looked at it.

  I guess I wasn’t much of a friend.

  “My wife gave it to me.”

  THE GARGOYLE

  When we got back to our tunnels, Margaret was waiting for us. She perched up in a brick niche like a gargoyle, holding her shovel. Her head-taking-off shovel.

  “Did . . . Did you want to speak to us?” Cvetko asked. She just squatted up there in her shitty bathrobe with her fangs showing, her shovel idly scraping the wall, staring at us. I opened my mouth to speak but then shut it again. That was the thing with Margaret, you always felt she was looking right through you.

  “Just get into your boxes and shut them real tight,” she said. “There’s a meeting tomorrow night, Eighteenth Street station, early, and then we’re going on a little walk in the park. All of us.”

  She watched us go to our cells. She waited. It was a while before I slept, knowing she was out there, but I dead-dreamed her sitting there in her niche until she turned into an actual gargoyle, opening her mouth so blood came out of it, and out of her eyes, like rainwater, filling the tracks until they flooded and I knew she was going to flood the city that way.

  * * *

  There’s a boulder in Central Park, I’m not telling you where, but it’s a boulder that a pack of vampires can lift. Barely. So they did lift it. This pack of vampires rolled a shopping cart up and the weakest of them, that would be me, du
mped the cart while the rest of them grunted, holding up the boulder, and then they let it down so heavy the earth moved under their feet. There’s three stiffs under that boulder, but nobody’s ever going to find them. They’re as flat as stingrays now. They’re part of the park and that’s all they are.

  I’ll back up a bit.

  Turns out not all of us went to Belvedere Castle, but most of us. Ten. We approached the building from all sides, probably nine o’clock or so, didn’t bother going up to the top windows, just peeled the boards off one big window and walked into the first floor like we owned the place.

  “Fuckin’ animals,” Baldy said.

  The elementary class of night school had been busy.

  A bigger woman, bag lady type, lay spread-eagled like the X on a landing pad for a helicopter, all chewed up, dead about a day, her raw-sausage-looking ankles stuffed into too-small sneakers with the backs cut off. She was staring at the ceiling with her lips pursed together, like her last out-breath had been a horsy noise. Less fresh than her was Mr. Combs, crumpled in a corner starting to look black, his eyes dusty and sunken. He had worms.

  Want to groove on Miles?

  How had nobody smelled this place? Were people so used to how rotten the park was that they didn’t even care anymore? Had no cops come by? The flies were thick in here.

  I led the way up the stairs, knowing as I went the kids wouldn’t be there. They had cleared out. But I smelled something familiar, something that filled me with dread. I knew what it was even as I poked my head around and looked.

  The Negro cop. Handcuffed to the chair, his head twisted all the way around, his sad-bastard, uneven mustache an upside-down horseshoe that caught no luck. He was missing teeth. This was bad. This was going to bring SCREW-TIN-KNEE. I felt his cheek. Warm as hell.

  They saw us coming, popped his neck, got out without us seeing. The cop’s mouth was still drooling bloody drool.

  “Well,” Margaret said, addressing mostly Billy Bang and myself. We were the two loudest ones arguing not to hurt the small fry. She said it again.

  “Just, well.”

  * * *

  After we cleaned up the mess, we all fanned out across the park in twos. Cvetko and me headed southeast; I picked the direction.

  “You seem to have a hunch, Joseph,” Cvets said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We were supposed to get one of them, any one of them, and bring it back to our loops so Margaret could talk to it and find out where it came from, besides England. Did I mention Margaret didn’t like England much? Cvetko had objected, pointing out that they might all be together, that it might be dangerous. “If two of youse can’t handle a pack of little children who don’t know nothing yet besides peelin’ bums, then you deserve what you get.” Me and Cvets felt dubious about this, but we saluted and marched like good soldiers.

  Really, we all but sprinted because of my hunch, and then I caught their scent. I was right.

  “Brilliant,” he whispered when he saw where I was taking us. He patted my shoulder.

  The children’s zoo.

  Whatever else they were, they were children, and children love a zoo.

  IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

  “You have come to play, you have!” Peter squealed, smiling so I got another good look in his mouth; something I haven’t mentioned yet is that Peter had been about eight when his clock stopped, so now he was stuck with this cluster of gaps and mismatched teeth around the very sharp, yellowy fangs in his mouth. Now he was smiling this mess at me in pure, innocent joy, sitting huddled with the others. Five others, just as he said. Six dead children in the belly of Whaley the whale, who served as the entrance to the children’s zoo they put in like ten or fifteen years before. There used to be aquariums and all in the whale’s mouth, but these were empty now and the place was graffitied and trashed like most of the rest of the city.

  “Gimme that,” I said, scared of them, but not too scared to snatch the cop’s hat off Peter’s head.

  He made a pouty face and grabbed my nose, hard. Like he was going to rip it off for me. I twisted out of it and he laughed, grabbed the little girl’s nose instead.

  I put the cop’s hat under my jacket.

  “We were playing at jacks,” he said, and a little ginger boy held up a red rubber ball. I smiled. Then I saw what they were using as jacks and I stopped smiling.

  “Look,” I said, “I need one of you to come back home with me. Would you like to see where I live?”

  “Where do you live?” Peter said, the look on his face suggesting this had best not be boring. I had the idea they were still trying to work out if I was a kid like them, thus worth associating with, or a square like Cvetko, who they pretty much ignored. Cvetko was hunkered down next to me, looking like a teacher in his suit, looking like someone to be disobeyed, mocked, run in circles around.

  “Someplace cool,” I said. “But first I got a better idea.”

  “What, what?” said the ginger boy.

  “What?” said the little dark-haired girl, almost too softly to hear.

  “Yes, what?” Cvetko said, cocking an eyebrow at me.

  The smaller little blond boy, who had ignored everything else as he tried to bend a penny with a pair of pliers, now looked up.

  “Let’s go see a movie!”

  Clearly Cvetko didn’t want to go see a movie. Neither did I, if the truth be told, but I needed time to think.

  Want to know what they were using as jacks? A couple of jacks, sure. But also bullets, six of them.

  And teeth.

  * * *

  I knew as soon as the epic symphony music banged up and the little ones all jumped that Star Wars was the right movie to keep them still for at least half an hour while Cvetko and I thought about what to do with them. The Astor Plaza Theater in Times Square was the last one in Manhattan still showing Star Wars, and only for late-night screenings. Peter had wanted to go see another movie, A Hard Knight’s Night, because there was a knight on the poster and he liked knights, but that was at another kind of theater altogether, the kind where middle-aged guys sat by themselves in raincoats.

  Thank God for Star Wars. What else were we going to watch, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan? Sure it had kids in it, but it sucked, and sucked big. Corvette Summer? They weren’t going to sit still for that. Not a bad film for what it was, though. I had jerked off at least twice about Annie Potts. I’d love to meet Annie Potts. Still, you almost felt bad for Mark Hamill trying to be somebody besides Luke Skywalker. Fucking Star Wars.

  Funny the power of that film—everybody clapped when it started, they often clapped. The little ones were staring at it openmouthed, whispering among themselves, pointing. At one point during the fight on the Death Star, the littlest one crawled into Cvetko’s lap and hugged his neck like he was Grandpa, which seemed to really embarrass him, so the girl pulled the kid off. Point is, they loved it. Hell, I loved it. I had seen it nine times already and I never got tired of it.

  I was so into it that I almost felt bothered by Cvetko asking me, “What do you think our next step is?” I was holding a bag of popcorn just for appearances, no butter, it’s not really butter anyway and it smells like shit. Darth Vader was holding up the rebel guy by the neck, smoke everywhere, and Princess Leia was about to get caught.

  “I dunno,” I said.

  He went quiet then, thinking, didn’t say anything else until the stormtroopers stopped the speeder with Obi-Wan and Luke.

  He said, “Let’s take them back home. All of them.”

  A guy behind us shushed him, and I did something just to show off—I turned around and said, “Move along,” charming the guy. Not a second later, Obi-Wan charmed the stormtrooper, saying “Move along,” and the stormtrooper said it back twice, Move along, move along. The kids loved this! The guy I charmed stumbled all over everybody’s feet moving along like I tol
d him to, I don’t know where to. His woman friend said his name after him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Home. But after the movie.”

  Turns out we didn’t go home right away.

  When the movie was done they were hungry, really hungry, despite having fed so recently.

  I guessed I was, too.

  And I knew just the place.

  I hailed a cab.

  * * *

  Poor Mrs. Baker.

  Can you imagine? There you are, suffering insomnia or whatever, three pillows behind you, reading The Thorn Birds with a penlight while your man snores beery snores and then you look up and I’m walking up on your bed as quiet as death by carbon monoxide, all shiny-eyed with six shiny-eyed little children behind me.

  She jumped and went to shout, her arm knocking over the lamp, but I stuck my hand in her mouth and killed the shout and the red-haired boy caught the lamp. Fast little thing, they all were. Mr. Baker made that can’t-breathe, snoring-gag sound drunk sleepers make and lifted his head, but no sooner had he done that than the Indian boy, Peter, and two others were on him, Peter lying across his nose and mouth and hugging his head, all but smothering him while the others latched on to his neck and wrists. The quiet little girl had gone into the other bedroom to tap the boy. I heard a brief struggle and then soothing words from Cvetko. I charmed Mrs. Baker and then Mr. Baker and they settled back, let us feed. I could hear Gonzalo in the other room, moving back and forth on his wooden bar.