We chased them.
I admit it was good to see them running.
From us.
Behind us, a light. A train was coming.
Luna.
I heard the squeal of its brakes, knew the driver saw her, would try to stop even though he knew he couldn’t, not in time.
Luna!
The train ground behind us slower, slower, raining sparks. People on board were yelling, they had seen the fire, might even have recognized that its fuel was boy-shaped. With the train and the fire blocking things up, we couldn’t go back in the tunnel if we wanted to. Whatever happened next was going to happen by the platform in Union Station, out in the open, under the lights. With an audience.
* * *
They turned. The children. They might have kept running, they ran like greyhounds, they could have left us farther and farther behind them until they dropped out of sight. They might have slipped like ghosts into one of the side paths or crawlways about which they seemed to have encyclopedic knowledge, but flight was not their goal. They were just regrouping, choosing their ground. They wanted us gone, all of us, the strong ones dead, the weak ones so badly frightened we’d never dream about returning, except perhaps years later, after they were gone again, to write a warning on the wall. NO, REALLY, DON’T TRUST THE CHILDREN.
So they turned.
Imagine you were on the platform that March night in 1978. Cold outside, so you were wearing a scarf, a jacket. If you’re a girl you probably had on tall boots, they were really in, maybe hair feathered back like Kristy McNichol or a Bee Gee. An older, heavyset guy with an unfeatherable comb-over blew sax, really good sax, but the crowd was cheap that night. Nobody wanted to take off their gloves or take their hands out of their pockets. He had a few crumpled dollars in his beret from the people who got on the last several trains, he had a few quarters and nickels, a strange abundance of dimes, but this particular crowd just wasn’t playing ball. Not the student-looking kid with the pile of Art-Garfunkel-kinky red hair, the big Adam’s apple, and the glasses that covered half his face. Not the blond guy in the powder-blue suit with his pants too short, showing just a little too much of the argyle socks that didn’t quite match the rest of him. Not the old lady clutching the purse with the strap like the St. Louis Arch against her stomach as if to stop someone from punching her there, and what was she doing out this late anyway? Not the black woman with the Dutch Chocolate lipstick and the opaque leopard-print scarf that looked too fragile to have ever been near a leopard. The guy on the horn wasn’t playing anything in particular, just letting it caterwaul like the soundtrack to some detective show. Over the horn, you heard something else, was it yelling? Next came the unmistakable squeal of a train’s brakes, and yes, definitely yelling. The sax stopped. Some looky-loos were actually crowding closer to the platform, stepping all over the beret full of dimes.
“Look there,” someone said from the platform. Another one shrieked; there were several shouts of “Get a cop,” “Call an ambulance,” and the like. A quintet of bloody children spilled out of the tunnel, their clothes in tatters.
“There’s been an accident!”
“Oh my God!”
A brutalized teenager and three equally bloody adults, one of them a savage woman with a shovel, followed after the children. Now smoke poured out of the tunnel, smoke that stank of chemicals. People started going for the stairs, tentatively at first, then like they meant it. Behind the smoke, the nose of a train slowing to full stop, like a snake that poked its snoot into a rabbit hole and decided to park there.
What was this?
Nobody bombed New York, but this looked like IRA shit, PLO, Red Brigade. Could it have come here, that foreign germ of violence as food for newspapers? No. This was something new. Or perhaps something so old and awful it had been forgotten on purpose. Because now four of the bleeding children (and they weren’t really children, were they? Had their eyes not shone in the tunnel?) turned around to face the bleeding adults running at them. They curled into balls like kids in a duck-and-cover drill from the fifties, their hands clasped behind their necks, their heads tucked between their knees. The madwoman with the shovel stood over the dark-haired little girl and rose up like King Arthur about to drive Excalibur into its stone; she was on her tiptoes, almost on point. “Stop!” a hysterical cop next to you yelled, his revolver almost next to your ear. He was going to shoot. Thank God you got your hand over your ear in time. Not because your partial deafness would have been such a big deal in the grand scheme of things, what with so many people about to die so strangely, but had you been deafened, you might not have heard the sweet boy who would speak in a moment—but not yet, he was just making his way to the platform.
Now the cop shot at just the instant the lunatic drove down with her shovel. The shot caught her in the hip, turned her just a little, but she caught the kid in the knee, clipped the leg off, and even sparked the running rail beneath, but the kid didn’t scream. The woman screamed. You couldn’t know, of course, that she screamed not because she was shot but because she missed the child’s neck. That her aim was decapitation. That the child had gambled that even this brutal, crazed woman wouldn’t be strong enough to cut her head off with her limbs protecting it, not with one blow, but that the little girl who was so rarely wrong had made a millennial mistake. The woman was that strong. Would have taken the girl’s head and arm clean off, drawing a very long, sad story to its end.
Only she missed.
And she wouldn’t get another chance, even though she raised her bloody shovel once again. The cop must have put his time in at the range; even jacked up at what he was seeing, his second shot was better, took part of shovel-woman’s head off, but she didn’t fall. She just looked momentarily confused, like she was struggling to say a word she had forgotten. She looked at the blade of her shovel as though it might be written there. The other adults were doing violence to the other children. People were yelling at them to stop.
Now the sweet boy climbed onto the platform and held his hands up. Everyone looked, you looked, too. He left small, bloody footprints behind him. You wouldn’t remember his face, it would blur in your memory, but you remember that his face was sweet, as was his voice.
“Everyone! Listen! Help us! The grown-ups are hurting us! You must pull their heads off! You must hold them down and shock them on the bad rail!”
Yes, we will!
Such a sweet boy, who could want to hurt an angel of his rank?
“Do not let them speak!” he said, and you resolved to keep them silent. Your eyes spilled over, tears streamed down your cheeks with the pathos of it, your mouth opened and you drooled on your shirt or sweater or tie, your saliva ran like you were starving and someone had tucked grains of salt under your tongue. No time for salt, though. You had to save these angels from the murderers on the tracks.
Was that how it happened? Was that why you did it? I’m only guessing here. I only know what I saw.
What you saw, I think, was a triumph of mankind, of Manhattan, manna from above, the end of bystanderism forever, I am my brother’s keeper, we are, all of us, going down onto those tracks. And you did. One big wave of you in your sport coats and London Fogs and turtlenecks; in your saris and jumpsuits and Grateful Dead T-shirts under peacoats and down vests and leather, in your wool caps, deerstalkers, and babushkas, smelling of Old Spice and Marlboros and sub-polyester sweat, you poured over the lip of that platform, elbowing each other out of the way for the privilege of tearing the killers apart, especially the one with the shovel. The mad are supposed to have inhuman strength, and these were no exception. The wild black man in the funky vest tore a man’s arm off trying to save the woman. The very pale one in the olive jacket used his knife, tried to cut his way through the crowd and save the woman. But there was no saving her, you were all over her, a swarm of you. She brained the first ones, busted teeth and jaws, she swore and bit in a fury wit
h teeth that belonged on a tiger, she was a tiger, but you bore her down, those of you up front, took her shovel from her, stuffed your hands and arms in her mouth though she bit and bit deep. You turned for a moment to see those in the back handing up the children, and a miracle happened, didn’t it? These bloody things who seemed too hurt to live were healing before your eyes. The little girl got passed backward over heads; nobody could find the leg that had been cut from her, but that’s because it was on again! Now you turned front and the vile tiger-woman-thing was closer to the rail. It was as slow as tug-of-war, moving her there. A POP! and sizzle as a woman in a fox-trimmed coat touched the rail, jerked, and smoked, her fox smoking, too. A man in a security-guard outfit made contact next, jostled into it by the crowd, his life ending in a violent spasm that curled him so the back of his head almost touched his heels. And then it was her turn. You saw her face before she went, her skin the color of ash, her gorgon’s eyes, her mouth open in a snarl. Her teeth like a tiger’s. A vampire? Why not? Who else would want to hurt that honeyed boy?
“Die, you fucking monster!” you yelled, though you don’t normally swear.
And die she did.
The saxophonist, grunting and drooling, wrestled her foot into the lethal rail. Her hand had been gripping the running rail, so the current went fully through her, exploded her hands, popped off her head, set her hair stinkingly ablaze.
A common noise went up of gagged cries and shouts; all those train-moving amps and volts were hungry, they didn’t stop with her. The saxophonist jerked and burned as well, his ridiculous comb-over standing on end. The guy in the powder-blue suit caught fire; he kicked his loafers off and wiggled his argyle-besocked feet almost comically. Several others who had been wrestling her died, though none so spectacularly. A good dozen, maybe a score were injured.
You were not among these; you had not been strong or early enough to get to the front. But here came the teenaged boy, the dirty one, spared because the sweet boy had said the grown-ups are hurting us, and, whatever he was, this one was no grown-up. He looked you in the eye.
* * *
I looked at you, I don’t know which one you were, I looked at so many. I saw Margaret burning. I saw Old Boy down, his hands on a grenade, half a dozen hands on his, holding them together, holding the pin in, and here came the college boy with the mane of frizzy red hair and the shovel. I tensed to spring down but saw that I was too late. The shovel fell. Old Boy died the death, the college boy holding up his trophy while the tongue in it moved in and out, as though the last taste in its mouth were unpleasant. The boy yelled a nasal, unlikely war whoop, then stood slack.
Billy Bang had disappeared.
Good for him. I mean that. Good for him.
The crowd seethed, unsure what to do now. Some began to snap out of it. A woman screamed, the old woman with the huge purse, but she seemed less like an old woman than like a child who had gotten separated from its parents in a room full of monsters.
“Forget what you saw here,” Peter shouted, his voice carrying throughout the station. All heads turned to him.
“Tell them you just don’t remember what you saw.”
Alfie took Old Boy’s head away from his killer, tore the fangs out with pliers and kept them.
Of course. However the authorities explained this clusterfuck, the explanation was not going to involve vampires.
Camilla told the policeman to shoot himself. He put his gun in his mouth, but hesitated, crying. She stomped his foot and told him to again. He did. His hat flew off. Peter picked it up and put it on.
Duncan saw me now, and said, “Grab him! Bring him here!”
He was drooling, showing me fangs no one else could see.
I ran, up the stairs, over people, out of hell.
He didn’t chase me.
A COIN WITH THREE SIDES
Joseph Hiram Peacock had never been to a foreign city, but that’s what New York looked like to me as I sprinted through her streets. I ran in no particular direction, through the East Village, past the tattoo parlors and record shops in St. Mark’s Place, past seedy bars and into Tompkins Park, then down through Little Italy and into Chinatown where I thought about slipping underground into the tightly packed labyrinth of tunnels used by the Tongs, but Margaret kept us out of those because the Chinese mob still used them, and I kept out of them now because underground didn’t sound so good. So I ran west through Tribeca, then into the warehouses and art lofts of SoHo; I knocked people down, ran over the hoods of taxis, jumped into Dumpsters and hid; I had to keep moving or hide till I found new clothes, I was a mess. But I had an even more pressing need. When I realized I was in SoHo, all the exertion caught up with me and my limbs went cold, the hot hole framed with burning coals opened in my gut; I needed blood. When people get tired, they pant and sweat, they need water and sleep. We need only one thing; all our strength comes from that one thing. Cvetko said it was the life force in blood, the magic in it that kept us alive, since we didn’t have moving parts inside anymore, no circulation, no metabolism, no need to breathe. And where was Cvetko? I immediately felt guilt for leaving him down there, with them. I had the impulse to turn around and look for him; I pictured him hiding underground, touching his face somewhere in total darkness, hoping he wouldn’t see the lights of their awful little eyes coming for him. Probably just like in the war, hiding from Germans, or Italians. Maybe he knew how to survive from the war. But there was nothing practical or savvy about Cvets; I was just making excuses because I was scared. He needed someone to tell him the party was over, help him out of there. You should have seen the state of him when he first came to us from Bushwick because the neighborhood had gone to hell; he was helpless. Like one of those special kids who gets a routine and you’d better not deviate from it. Now the neighborhood had gone to hell for real and everything, but everything had to change.
Whether I was going to find the balls to help Cvets was a problem I would have to work out after I fed. I scanned the windows for one with a light on, found it. It even had a fire escape, not normally a factor, but in my weakened state, sticking to walls wasn’t going to be a picnic. Up I went, using the stairs like a citizen, still cat-quiet. The balcony faced the street, too, so I was going to have to be quick about getting in. I kept my eyes peeled open because when I shut them I saw bad things on the insides of my eyelids. Margaret, Luna, Old Boy. Fuck this whole circus.
It was a war.
We didn’t know it was one until it was too late.
And we lost.
I shook that off, I was starving. I peeped in the window. A woman in an orange raincoat painted a huge, abstract cat in purple oil, a window behind it open on the moon, in the painting I mean, and the yellow on that moon was beautiful. I had seen the real moon through a telescope once, rising, after I was turned so it was very bright to me even though it was still low and yellow, and it was one of the prettiest things I ever saw. This woman, she had the cat, and a table and a teacup, and in the cup, in the tea, the moon shone there, too. It was definitely abstract, definitely what you would call modern art, but it was actually good. Who was this broad, was she in the Guggenheim? Why the raincoat? Was she cold? I touched the glass, felt no warmth in it. I noticed she had rumpled jeans on under the raincoat; I thought maybe she had two pairs on, tucked into the tops of those yellow work boots with the rawhide laces people who like John Denver wear. She breathed out; she had been holding it in, using a tiny brush to put moonlight on a whisker, and I saw her breath puff out. No heat. She was poor. No Guggenheim for her.
She turned around and looked at me then; I think she saw my reflection in the windows opposite. She was maybe fifty, mouse-brown hair, pretty once was my first thought, then I realized she was still pretty. I had just seen such ugly things that this cold loft with its naked brick and bare lightbulbs and a mattress on the floor with a pile of books for a nightstand was beautiful, and she was beautiful for making it t
hat way and keeping it as nice as she could and for not having the heart to throw away the Gerber daisy wilting, already dropping petals from its place in the Coke bottle on the counter by the stove. And she was beautiful for wearing a raincoat with a sweater under it because that was all she had. I didn’t even know I was touching the glass. I didn’t know I was sobbing, either, until she looked at me and I was embarrassed. I was ready to jump because I knew how I looked, that my skin was waxy and dead from hunger and that my hair was dry and dull, that my clothes were bloody, burned, and filthy, hanging off me like I was an accident victim, a bum, and a war refugee rolled into one, which, at this point, I was. I was sure she was going to call the cops, if she even had a phone in this joint. She saw me and froze. Scared, but not for herself, I think. She patted the air twice with her hand like stay there and wiped her brush off, put it in a little jar of cloudy liquid full of brushes. She came over, the light from the bulbs flashing once on glasses that made her look like an owl.
She opened the window.
“Come in,” she said. I hadn’t charmed her, nothing. She just saw me and asked me in. I was still sobbing, so hard I thought I might retch.
“What happened, do you need an ambulance? I don’t have a phone, but my neighbor does, I just heard his door, he’ll be awake.”
I shook my head no. She looked at me more closely. Held the side of her glasses like that was going to help her see some microscopic something she was searching for on my face. Her eyes traveled all over my face. I just sat there, the sobs slowing down. But I couldn’t move. It was like she had charmed me. She put the back of her hand against my cheek, felt how cold I was, then put that same hand under my armpit to make sure. Then she said, “Oh.” She put a finger near my mouth. “May I?” she said, and I didn’t say anything, just sat there. She put her finger under my lip and felt my fangs, like the Wild Kingdom guy feeling around in the mouth of a drugged cat.
The Lesser Dead Page 26
