Generation V

by M. L. Brennan

  “All I have are twenties,” he said with a shadow of his old self, peeling two out of his wad.

  I didn’t say anything, just looked at him. After a long second, he silently pulled out a third and handed it over.

  I took the money, then let him go and stood up. “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t sure what the appropriate action after extorting funds was, but that felt right. I turned and walked out.

  There were no sounds as I collected what I needed out of my room and headed out. But just as I was closing the front door behind me, Larry’s generally dickish nature finally reasserted itself enough for him to yell after me, “I’m deducting that from the rent!”

  I let the door slam shut.

  The Fiesta felt lonely without Suzume there to chatter, and with my radio gone there was nothing to listen to except the sounds of traffic and the steady crinkling of wind whipping the plastic taped over the remains of my back window.

  I pulled into the parking lot of Kravec Firearms. After the financial downward slide of the last couple of months, to say nothing of the depredations of the last few days, my wallet felt unusually fat in my back pocket. I also couldn’t deny that there’d been something incredibly satisfying about seeing Larry so begrudgingly fork over that money. No matter which way I looked at it, I couldn’t help admitting that Larry had more than had that coming.

  The last time I’d been in a gun shop had been with my foster father. The store had also doubled as a bait shop, a coin collector’s shop, and as a must-see for anyone who was on the hunt for a 1766 Charleville musket or other examples of antique firearms. The owner had been our local Cubmaster, and my memories of going there were fond, particularly since it was next door to a frozen yogurt shop.

  This trip required an element of speed that would simply not be attainable if I went to that particular shop. With my luck, I would end up cornered by old Mr. Dunkerly and spend two hours looking at pictures of his grandchildren and hearing about the entire career paths of every other boy in my old Cub Scout troop. That had led me to Kravec Firearms, whose sole recommendation had been that it was, according to the Yellow Pages, close.

  Inside, it was very different from the gun shop of my childhood. Instead of a jumbled assortment of fly-fishing rods, antique muskets, coin displays, dusty ammo boxes, and stacks of white foam containers with their wormy contents documented on the side in Sharpie marker, Kravec Firearms consisted of several very long display cases filled with handguns, and a few racks of shotguns. Everything displayed was sleekly modern, and security cameras were mounted in every corner. Behind the counter sat a balding, middle-aged man built roughly on the scale of a rhinoceros, flipping through a magazine whose cover was displaying the assets of a young lady who must’ve made her home in a very tropical environment, judging by her choice of attire. Or lack thereof. From the clerk’s look of complete disinterest, either this was an old magazine or the contents were failing to meet his standards.

  There’s always a certain awkwardness when addressing a clerk holding a porno magazine, but after years spent scouring the most bargain-basement car parts stores to maintain the Fiesta, I’d figured out that the only way to proceed was to pretend that the magazine did not exist. As I walked up to the counter, the man glanced up and pinned me with a flat “do not fucking waste my time” glare that only reinforced my earlier rhino comparison.

  “I’d like to buy some bullets for a .45 automatic,” I said. In a certain kind of store, it’s often best to lead with the fact that you plan to be a paying customer, rather than a pain-in-the-ass window shopper. Given the miniscule brightening of the clerk’s face (going from completely grim to slightly less grim), that was clearly the right opener.

  “Standard round?” he asked. His name tag might’ve read YURI, but this man had clearly spent his entire life in the Boston area.

  “Actually, I need something a little heavier duty than that.” I said it as coolly as I could, but Yuri’s bushy eyebrows rose in the same shenanigans-calling arc that liquor store clerks used when faced with the blatantly underaged.

  “Got a particular reason in mind for that?” And now we were back to the rhino impression.

  Shit, he was calling me on this. Whatever sense of being a badass that I’d carried over after the successful shaking-down of Larry left me, and my voice squeaked unfortunately upward as I said, “Just exercising my Second Amendment right to shoot stuff, sir.” Oh yeah. That was smooth.

  Yuri stared at me blankly for a long second, then burst out in a deep, belly-clutching laugh. I smiled and laughed as well, grateful that he had chosen to be amused rather than stomp me into the floor. “Good one, good one,” he said once he’d finished, wiping a hand over his eyes. Then he leaned forward, and it was clear that I’d managed to break the ice, and we were back to business. “No, seriously. You have to match the bullet to the job, and if a regular full-metal-jacket round-nose in a .45 isn’t doing it for you, we’ve got to find the right one.”

  “Well,” I said cautiously, “I’d been thinking of hollow-points…”

  “Oh, those make a nice big impression, no doubt.” And we exchanged laughs again, his a knowing chuckle and mine just trying to keep up. One of his giant hands dipped under the counter, and without even looking, he came up with a box of .45 hollow-point bullets.

  “Yeah, yeah…because I’m dealing with…” Here my mind raced frantically, trying to come up with some legitimate and totally nonillegal reason why I was trying to purchase this. After a long pause, I finished, lamely, “…bears.”

  Yuri paused, and that lie-detecting eyebrow started inching back up. “Bears?”

  Well, I was committed now. I pushed forward, forcing confidence into my voice as I spun lies as fast as my brain could supply them. “Yes. My girlfriend has been seeing this black bear in her backyard lately, and she’s starting to get worried.”

  “Oh, out by the state forest area?” Yuri’s eyebrow lowered to resume its bushy post beside the other, and he relaxed a little as he helpfully filled out my mistruth.

  “Yes,” I responded. Because that clearly made a lot more sense than bears in the middle of Providence. “Yes, right around there.”

  “Bet she put out one of those damn bird-feeders, right?” Yuri was now nodding knowingly with that universally acknowledged Those Silly Darn Women expression.

  “Yeah, yeah, that was absolutely the start of the problem.” I was right there with this now, returning that expression and raising it a What Will You Possibly Do With Them? head shake.

  Yuri shook his colossal rhino head in commiseration. “Might as well call those things bear-feeders. Nothing better to start a problem.”

  Now that the backstory was completely agreed upon, I tried to shift the conversation back to business. “So, the hollow-points…”

  Yuri actually guffawed. “Oh, definitely not the hollow-points, son. Not for a bear.” With another of those quick movements that belied his sheer size, he swept the box off the counter.

  “Really?” I asked, startled.

  “Really. Hollow-points are great for thin-skinned critters like us. Absolutely great. They just peel open and cause incredible damage. Fantastic on a human.” I nodded encouragingly to him while he entertained these happy, reminiscent thoughts. “Problem is”—and his sharp eyes fixed on me from under those massive eyebrows as he raised one thick finger to emphasize his point—“on something with a good fat layer or a tougher bone density, like your black bear, it just causes a little surface abrasion and pisses the damn thing off. Which if you or your girlfriend are in an area with a bear is really not what you should be going for. What you need”—again, without even looking, he reached under the counter—“is stopping power.”

  He smacked two boxes of ammo down on the counter. “So I’m recommending either full or semiwad cutters.”

  “Huh,” I said, looking down at the boxes. Sure enough, both were marked for a .45. This was clearly a guy who believed in organization.

  “Yep. A
nd since you’ve got an automatic, I’m going to lean you toward the semi. Better ballistics on them. The great thing on these bullets is that because of these flat-edge areas a lot of energy gets transferred, and the bullet just mushrooms out and punches a hole. If you’re close enough to your target, this won’t just penetrate—this will come out the other side and leave one hell of a hole.” He gave me a wide smile that promised awful things for whatever my gun was aiming at.

  I considered what he’d said. Bone density is one of those things that makes vampires different from humans. Basically, once we mature, ours is way the hell better. And it might not have looked it, but I knew that Chivalry had tougher skin than I did, because he seemed endlessly flummoxed by my ability to get paper cuts. And even if I was wrong, really, if it got to the point where I had to shoot at Luca, a bigger hole was probably a better hole. I nodded at Yuri and said, “I think you’ve got yourself a sale.” We shared a manly handshake (perhaps too manly on his end—he had hands like Bigfoot), I handed over the cash, and then I was the proud owner of two boxes of bullets. As my foster father used to say, you don’t want to need a spare clip and not have it. Better to be prepared.

  As I was heading out the door, Yuri called, “Oh, and, kid?”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “Head or throat. You do not want to be aiming for a shoulder when you’re dealing with a bear. You put a round in its shoulder and it’ll just keep coming and absolutely mangle you.” Yuri gave me a grim look that suggested that he’d been hunting a few times, and for something a bit more aggressive than deer.

  “I will remember that,” I promised, for the first time telling him the honest truth.

  Following my marked-up map of Providence, I found a parking spot as close to the true midpoint between the Maria and Jessica locations as I could, and sat for a moment in the car, not quite certain what to do. This far away, I couldn’t even feel Chivalry and Prudence. I tugged at Madeline, and felt the faint echo of her, fifty miles away in Newport. It wasn’t much, but I knew what direction she was in. Letting go of Madeline, I reoriented myself, trying to keep that slightly skewed mind-set that I’d fallen into to locate her, and then just started walking. I circled the block completely, feeling around for any whispers of Luca.

  Three hours later and I was sitting in a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint, gulping down water and eating a reheated slice of cheese pizza, feeling frustrated and dispirited. There hadn’t been anything, no tugs, no whispers, no tickles in my brain for the entire time that I’d combed around the area, working in a grid pattern to try to cover all the middle ground between the two sites.

  I pulled out my map again. I’d crossed off all the streets that I’d eliminated in my search, but it was a pitifully small area, and I might have just wasted three hours. Luca could’ve been sending Phillip from any point from the sides of the dump sites, or he could’ve gone farther the first night that he dumped Maria, and not as far the night he dumped Jessica, meaning that Luca could be hiding out somewhere beyond the Jessica point. Or it was the wrong direction entirely, and he was somewhere beyond the Maria point….

  My hands tightened, crushing the sides of the map. There were too many possibilities, and I wasn’t capable of covering nearly enough ground in my search. Suzume’s nose led her on a straight line, point A to point B, but here I was, fucking around with geometry, when two points weren’t enough. I needed a third point, but Luca had only provided me with two.

  I paused and considered, looking at the map again. Each of those points was someone that Luca had killed. But he’d killed more than two people since he arrived in Providence—he’d also killed Jessica and Amy’s parents. And he’d done that the same night that he’d gotten rid of Maria, within two hours at the most, in fact. Possibly even closer, since it had taken so long for each to be discovered.

  I pulled out the police report and tried to read it. Suzume had apparently been conserving paper, because she’d sized it down to the smallest font she could find, single spaced, and double-sided it. I had to squint to read, but the information I wanted was at the top of the page. Looking again at my map, I carefully wrote in a new X at the location of the Grann house, then sat back and considered it.

  The Granns had lived on the edge of a residential area. A block down the hill from them, the area turned to businesses and industrial. Three blocks farther it became the revitalized strip of clubs and bars that Suzume and I had walked through on our way to where Maria had been found.

  Luca hadn’t been in the city long at all, I reminded myself. He’d had to present himself to Madeline the same night he arrived. That wouldn’t have given him much time to find the Granns, that family with its beautiful young daughters who seemed so tailor-made to appeal to him.

  I doodled a little on a napkin, making notes as I thought through the timeline. He’d killed Maria after he learned that she was useless to him, then gone to the Granns. Given when he’d left Madeline’s mansion that first night, the earliest he could possibly have made it back to Providence would’ve been midnight, since I’d left barely ten minutes after him, made good time, and pulled into my parking lot at twelve thirty. According to the original news article, the police had placed the murders of the Grann parents at just after two in the morning. That gave Luca about two hours to locate his newest victims, but the times weren’t matching up. A family like the Granns would’ve been safely tucked away in their beds between midnight and two, safely out of view of a child-molesting vampire on the hunt. He must’ve seen them earlier.

  He was older than Chivalry, not as old as Prudence. If their preferences held true for him, then he’d avoid the worst of the afternoon sun and come out in the early evening or morning. It had happened on Wednesday, so when would he have seen Jessica and Amy together, that perfect pair of golden girls? I closed my eyes and tried to think. We’d been nailed by snow this last winter, and school was just finally coming to an end with all those snow days to make up, so maybe he’d seen them waiting for the bus together, or getting off the bus at the end of the day. But that was a little chancy—it meant arriving early enough to see them and at just the right time, which seemed a little unlikely for a guy just coming in from Italy. And school let out around three—a very uncomfortable time for a vampire his age to be out strolling.

  Something tugged at me, and I thought back to that dinner at the mansion. He’d said something when Madeline asked him how long he’d be in the area…something about…it sprang into my mind—he’d wanted to “see the sights.” Now, if I were a pedophile in a new city, what places would be at the top of my list of sightseeing?

  I looked back at the map. There was a little park two blocks away from the Grann house. The kind of park that parents might take a pair of active girls after they finished work for the day, or maybe even the kind of park where softball games were played. The kind of park in the city that was filled with all the neighborhood kids on hot summer evenings, just the time that an out-of-town vampire would be getting up and looking around his area. For a pedophile, it would’ve been catnip, and the first place he headed. If the girls caught his eye there, it would’ve been easy enough to shadow them home, since they were so close that they would’ve walked there. So he would’ve known exactly where they’d be later that night, after he’d killed Maria and been feeling sulky because all his “sacrifices” in keeping her around after he didn’t want her anymore had been for nothing.

  I drew a circle around the park and the Grann address, keeping its edge at where Maria’s body had been found. He would’ve been in a hurry that night, eager to get to his new toys, and Maria would have been dumped quickly. The next night, getting rid of Jessica, he would’ve been more cautious, more like vampires were told to be, and instructed Phillip to take her farther away, to draw the eyes of police to the wrong area of the city.

  I played with that thought for another second—the wrong area of the city. Maria and Jessica had been in dirty alleys, near bars and clubs and businesses. Luca had plann
ed this trip. A predator trying to avoid attention might be interested in abandoned warehouses and neighbors who wouldn’t be around at night, but Luca had seemed to fit right in with my family, who tended to be pretty picky about their personal surroundings. I couldn’t quite picture him walking around on old concrete floors and sitting on boxes. Chivalry had come to visit my first off-campus apartment once, and when he’d learned that I was sleeping on a bare mattress on the floor that I’d bought off the previous tenant for twenty dollars (which smelled only mildly of cat urine), he’d been so acutely horrified that he’d gotten right on the phone and paid double to have a new mattress delivered within an hour, and I’d found myself marched straight over to a furniture store for a new bed frame.

  Prudence or Chivalry would probably have stayed in ritzy hotels if they were traveling, but they weren’t in the habits of raping young girls, so anything with that kind of oversight and security was probably right out the window. Apartments have shared walls that are usually the same thickness as paper, and somehow I didn’t think Luca was interested in having neighbors who might overhear any suspicious noises.

  I tapped the map again, but I couldn’t think of anything to narrow my search circle down any further. Maybe a town house like Prudence preferred, maybe a rented house, but I needed to hurry up and find him. Older vampires aren’t exactly sleeping in coffins when the sun is out, but it can make them a little logier and sluggish. I’d take any sliver of an edge that would give me.

  I ran all the way back to the Fiesta.

  Parking wasn’t exactly plentiful, so I finally parallel-parked in a residential-sticker-only area and hoped that I’d be gone again before some irritated local called the cops or the traffic officer rolled through. It was easier to focus on little things like that than consider the really stupid thing I was about to do.

  I went straight over to the park, the city kind with one baseball diamond and a small playground area. There were a lot of kids running around, but also plenty of anxious adults keeping watch, and I got more than a few nervous looks as I passed by. The police might not have realized how important this park was, but the parents were very aware that it was a local girl who was missing.