At moments like that my special sensitivity feels like an invisible membrane holding everyone around me in a secret embrace, not of love but of compassion. I was bathed in the sensations that lay beneath secret desires and fears and hopes that no one ever fully reveals to others or even to themselves. What if I could share, just for a moment, this experience with the bustling crowd around me? Would it change anything?
The earthquake-like arrival of Teflon Boy beside me on my yellow plastic bench jolted me out of my reverie. “Hey, Mister,” he said, pulling a couple of cheeseburgers and a box of chicken tenders out of his bag. He looked curiously at the empty space before me on the table and asked, “Aren't ya hungry?” But he didn't wait for an answer, tearing open one of the cheeseburgers.
"Shit,” I thought, pulled painfully back to the task at hand as Teflon Boy started regaling me between surprisingly dainty bites with a convoluted story about his last visit to a Six-Flags America with Grandma. Any hope of invisibility was lost. Through the corner of my eye, I could see the vampire looking curiously at us before going back to his salad. Furtively, I glanced over and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw a little cup of coffee at the old lady's elbow. Oh, well, I thought, invisibility is overrated. I turned toward Teflon Boy and acted like I was paying attention to the slightly garbled words tumbling out of his mouth with the odor of ketchup and greasy beef. Being seen and disregarded, I have learned, is sometimes just as good as not being seen at all.
I sat there with Teflon Boy, trying to watch the old lady and the vampire without seeming to, and trying not to be distracted by Teflon Boy's increasingly convoluted tale about the time he and his grandma got trapped upside down in the Raptor ride, and how the fire trucks had come and sent a basket up on a crane and began cutting them out with a circular saw. “Man,” Teflon Boy said with reverence, “those firemen sure were brave. Except one was a girl, actually, which was weird. I didn't know you could cut metal like that, with all those sparks flying all over the place. It was better than sparklers at Fourth of July. You like sparklers, Mister?...” and so on.
The vampire just sat there, calmly, not talking to the old lady, occasionally glancing out the window at the parking lot or gazing around the restaurant, taking bites of his salad and sipping his soda. The old lady was hunched over her food. Even through the fog of Teflon Boy, I could feel her chewing mechanically or taking sips of her coffee, so lost in her own universe of pain that she barely noticed the bustle around her. My anxiety level rose as the minutes ticked by. Move! I thought. Move! Finally, the vampire slid his food aside, dotted his mouth with a napkin, stood up, and headed toward the bathrooms. My body tensed as he walked away, and the moment he pushed his way into the men's room I slipped out from behind my table, ignoring Teflon Boy's “Where ya going, Mister?"
I waited a moment until the old lady put her coffee cup down—I couldn't afford to have it spilled—and then I strode casually forward, angling over toward her. Passing close by, I contrived to stumble and steadied myself with a hand on her shoulder, pushing her lightly sideways against the window.
"Oh, I'm sorry,” I said, crouching down beside her, at the same time slipping a couple of tablets into the pocket of her shawl.
Disoriented, the old lady looked up and said “Oh....” Then she shook her head, glancing up at me and said, almost in a sweet friendly voice that belied the storms roiling through her body, “I'm perfectly fine, young man."
"Well, I'm very sorry,” I said again, and leaning over her as if to check and make sure nothing was broken, I patted her on the back with one hand while the other emptied the cone of crushed tablets into her coffee. Then I turned away, feeling a bit smug, and headed toward the order counter again.
But when I glanced casually around to check the reactions of the other patrons, I started with an electric shiver of fear as I caught the curious eyes of the vampire watching me from across the room. Fuck, I thought. No one can piss that fast. What the hell had happened? And I realized that he might have only gone to wash his hands. That fastidious bastard. As I entered a line to order, I forced myself not to glance at him again. I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter, that he'd forget all about me. But I knew he wouldn't have missed my startled response. Vampires are sophisticated hunters: natural experts in the subtle language of body movements, quivers in the voice, facial tics, and the like. He knew something. He knew I'd recognized him—for one reason or another. And in a couple of hours, he'd know what I'd done.
I tried to seem nonchalant as I ordered a chicken sandwich without mayo and a diet coke (Teflon Boy had made me a little weight-conscious), and then I headed back for the door. As I turned to go, I couldn't help myself and snuck a glance at the vampire's table, but he and the old lady were sitting just as they had before he'd gone to the bathroom. With relief, I saw her taking another sip of her coffee.
Then I stepped out into oppressive heat and diesel fumes. Behind the restaurant, in a cramped oven-like space between the grease tank and a recycling dumpster, I made a call on one of my pay-as-you-go cell phones. Just my luck that Shade was manning the emergency line. “You?” she said, and she hung up on me. Old romance is a bitch.
I rang again. “Don't hang up,” I pleaded.
"Make it quick."
"Nosferatu,” I said. “I think I've got a really nasty one here."
"Why don't we just let him suck you dry?” she asked.
"Look, you little bitch,” I said, losing my temper, “this isn't about us. It isn't about me. I'm on the bus with this viper, and he's got a civilian with him. Do you get it? He's going somewhere. I don't think he's a solo. I think he's taking her somewhere."
Shade was silent for a while. “Where are you?” she asked flatly.
"I'm in Bend, Oregon. A shithole, if you want to know. We're heading out in a few minutes toward Idaho on US 20."
"All right,” she said. “We'll send a team. Don't do anything stupid."
"Well,” I said, sighing, trying and failing to see some humor in the situation, “I'm afraid it's a little too late for that."
She hung up on me again.
* * * *
The Old Lady Dies
So we left the mountains behind and entered a hummocked hard-dirt land almost devoid of habitation. The shudder and rattle of the coach became almost soothing as we put empty miles behind us. Teflon Boy's voice, mumbling the words of his novel to himself, was hypnotic. Outside, the scenery changed hardly at all. We could have been watching a short loop-repeat movie of the same sprawling region of land, with its jagged extrusions and its seemingly endless gray-green encrustation of spiky sage. To my relief, the loud Hispanic lady who had been sitting behind us seemed to have departed in Bend. In fact, our party of desert travelers was significantly reduced.
Absently, I scanned slowly back and forth across the cabin, dipping for a few moments in the unique universes of intricate sensation that were the separated planets of individuals scattered across our tiny space. Most people were drowsy after lunch, subdued, although the girl with the big breasts was slowly stroking off army boy underneath the cover of his jacket in the last row of seats. Even the meth addict had managed to nod off for a while. I kept coming back to the old lady, waiting for the telltale signs. And I tried not to worry about the vampire.
To kill with elegance is an art that few learn. Most murders are quite crude affairs, with jabbing knives or ricocheting bullets making a total mess of things. Even those with the sophistication to use poison rarely take the time for a close study of the available options. Look, stupid, if your wife dies of rat poison, the first place they're going to look is to her husband. Most people, I have decided, are idiots.
It's not as much of a challenge to kill someone in a hospital or a nursing home. People die off in these places all the time, and nobody really takes much notice if there are a couple more here or there. It doesn't take much finesse. Regular folk who need to die, however, are a more difficult proposition. The direct approach is just ask
ing for trouble. Death needs to come with no connection to you, and by some mechanism that is not suspicious to the authorities.
There are two basic ways to approach stealthy murder in these cases. The first is to find something deadly that is really difficult to detect or so rare that there's little chance that anyone would test for it. The problem with this is that there isn't much out there that fits the bill. Tests have just become too sophisticated. Of course, chances are that no one is going to bother investigating carefully enough to detect the agent of death, even if it's a person someone actually cares about. That whole CSI thing on TV, with their mass spectrometers and PDR DNA tests and endless time to perseverate about a single case is really just a fantasy, even in more advanced police organizations. But why take the risk? If they do find the cause, then they know for certain that it's murder. (One doesn't, for example, generally run across rare sea-snail neurotoxins in the local supermarket.)
I prefer the second approach, which is to kill with something that they could, conceivably, have taken themselves without any assistance. Overdoses of prescribed medication are probably the best examples of this, although a little contaminated fish or poultry often does the job quite well. After much (often unsuccessful) experimentation, a combination of digoxin and verapamil has become one of my blends of choice. That's what I used on the old lady.
When pathologists don't know why someone died, they often just chalk it up to a heart attack. So a heart attack is usually the least suspicious kind of death. And that's what this little concoction produces, quite reliably. Digoxin, when used correctly, helps the heart pump better and reduces irregular heartbeats. At higher doses, however, it does just the opposite, throwing someone into severe arrhythmia and, pretty quickly, complete heart shut-down. The problem with digoxin, however, is that the toxic dose is high—more than I could have slipped easily into her coffee cup, for example. What you need, then, is a potentiator: something to magnify the effect. This is why I add verapamil to the mix. Its uses are quite similar to digoxin, but when put together, they're like a hammer blow to the heart. And it's a cocktail that a doctor could have conceivably prescribed, especially if the two medications were prescribed by different doctors (and old people go to a lot of doctors). In this case, when they looked through her pockets they would find a couple of tablets of both drugs. And why look farther than the obvious? Case closed. Doctor Death evades capture yet again (cue final credits).
About twenty minutes after we left McDonald's, I began to sense the first indications that my overdose was doing its work, a slight speeding up of her heart rate. I wondered how long it would take the vampire to notice, since he was probably also linked to her sensational state. Then the nausea began. I felt her vomit, and smiled as the vampire cursed. “Oh, bus driver,” the dapper man called out. “This lady here, she seems to be in some distress."
"What's going on?” the driver shouted back.
"Well, she just started vomiting."
"Crap,” the driver said. Nervous chattering started up around me, and people began asking what was going on. One of the little kids startled awake and started crying in a high-pitched voice. I heard the driver calling in on his radio, and I glanced back to where the vampire stood, disgustedly wiping at the spreading stains on his pants.
"Hey, I'm a medic,” the army kid called out, extricating himself from the embrace of the homely girl. “Let me take a look.” Zipping up his pants, he moved down the aisle. Pushing the vampire out of the way, he slid in next to the old woman. “Her pulse is pretty fast,” he reported. Then, “Make that really fast. This old girl's definitely in trouble."
The driver got on the intercom. “Okay, people,” he said, “we seem to have a medical emergency on the coach. Central tells me that there's an emergency drop-in clinic about thirty miles up ahead in Haney. So I want to ask that everyone just stay calm and stay seated."
Teflon Boy craned his head around to look and then he turned to me and started asking a rapid-fire series of questions. Not out of fear, of course. Just basic curiosity. “Is she gonna die? What's the matter with her? You know I've seen dead people. They buried my other grandma. Will they bury this lady? You know, the newspaper said cremation was a ‘creasingly popular option. What do you think?..."
I ignored him. Closing my eyes, I let myself enter the old lady's body. As if from a distance, I heard the dispassionate voice of the medic, “I think her heart's stopped. Help me get her into the aisle.” Through her nausea and dizziness and confusion, I felt her body being roughly lifted and then laid flat on the floor. I felt the medic wipe her mouth and then begin CPR, felt a rib cracking under the compressions. At the same time, her body began to fill with peace, with a calmness that I'm sure she hadn't felt for years. Her body seemed to relax in a wave, from top to bottom. I could not see what she saw, but everyone's heard of the light that dying people see. She was probably seeing it too. And then there was the moment of release, almost like the popping of a balloon, although it's really indescribable. And she was gone. Blessedly gone.
I opened my eyes again. Teflon Boy had gotten up and was standing beside his seat, watching the medic going through the motions of CPR and chewing on another red rope. I slid into his seat and leaned over to watch as well. He was good, this army guy. Methodical. No sloppiness. Even though he must have known she was gone. I've done good work today, I thought.
I looked up, without thinking, into the eyes of the vampire. Caught unawares in his intense calm gaze, for a moment I couldn't look away. He nodded to me, his mouth twisting into an odd quirk of a smile.
* * * *
Conversation with a Vampire
A few hours later, I sat sweating in the heat on a low concrete wall in the shade of the crumbling one-story adobe building that housed the clinic and a long-abandoned diner. Across the highway hunched an ancient two-pump gas station in what looked like an old peeling farmhouse with a convenience store in the front room. That's all there was to Haney, Oregon, although I could see a couple of chimneys and scattered evidence of tumbled wood structures peeking out of the brush all around us.
Most of the other passengers were huddled together in the cooler air of the clinic's waiting room. The vampire had persuaded the driver to let him get his bag from underneath the bus. I had watched him go into the back of the clinic to change his pants, but I hadn't seen him since. My only companions outside were the two little kids with their mother who were playing in the gravel with plastic cars from their Happy Meals, and Teflon Boy, who was tossing rocks at one of the crumbled houses and hooting when he hit a plank. Otherwise, it was almost eerily quiet except for the barely audible cries of distant birds I couldn't identify, the rustle of the wind across the parking lot, and the faint ting ting ting of some rusty metal signs hanging from the walls of the gas station.
The bus driver said we couldn't leave until the State Patrol released us, and only shrugged when someone asked how long that would take. So we waited. The other passengers were surprisingly calm. The guy in the leather vest started telling anyone who would listen how much the delay would “botch up” his vacation plans, but even he shut up after a while. The day felt empty of possibility, as if we were poised in some alien space aslant of real life, waiting patiently for the world to grind its way into motion again. I should have been planning my next move with the vampire, but I was tired. Head propped on hands, elbows on knees, desultory in the heat, I dozed and daydreamed about cool rain.
I jerked away suddenly at the touch of something against my neck, almost tumbling off the wall. I turned, and the vampire was standing behind me, holding his hand out where my neck had been, watching me with a querulous expression.
"Don't touch me,” I spat without thinking, stumbling upright and backing away from him. Even in that brief moment of contact I had felt the slick tendrils of his perception slipping easily into me like wriggling strands of seaweed and out through me momentarily into the sensoriums of the rabble around me. I felt invaded, exposed, as I had nev
er felt before. And I hated it when people snuck up on me. Nobody could do that.
"Well...,” he said, looking down at his hand and shuddering a little in pleasure. “You are something special.” He smiled. “We haven't yet been acquainted. My name is Arthur. And I have the pleasure of meeting...."
I ignored his hand and didn't answer, watching him warily. To my side, I heard the mother quietly calling her children inside.
"Oh,” he said, “the silent type. Well, that's okay. Because I think we're going to have plenty of time to get to know each other."
Don't talk with vampires. That's what I'd been taught. Often slick and cunning, they'll tease and seduce you to their bidding. But I suppose I was curious. And bored. And tired of always running away. And cocky—always too cocky. But I was also hoping he might make a slip, that he might get too cocky as well, and give me a clue about the location of his nest.
"I doubt that,” I replied, finally.
He laughed. “Take a walk with me,” he said. “I've got something you'll quite enjoy, I think.” Then he turned, settling a round-brimmed green canvas bush hat jauntily on his head. He strode out from the parking lot into the knee-high sage. I hesitated for a moment, and then followed. After a hundred yards or so, he paused for me to catch up with him. “Here's the path, right over here,” he said, pointing to a pair of shallow ruts that indicated vehicles occasionally passed this way.
FSF, May-June 2010 Page 13
