Once I was safe from the little surprise I'd prepared for him, I reached around and pulled the syringe I'd taped to my back from under my shirt. Twisting off the plastic needle protector, I rammed it home in Arthur's butt. I thought he might have been waking up a bit by now, but he didn't even flinch as I squeezed it empty into him. I strapped his wrists together with a little duct tape I'd brought with me for that purpose and checked him over for any little surprises, not finding anything except his little survival knife. Then I just settled down on a handy rock, munching on a granola bar I'd had the foresight to put into my shirt pocket, and waited for him to become lucid enough to talk. I could feel the kid cowering out in the darkness, but he'd just have to wait.
Creating a topical knockout drug is actually a somewhat tricky problem. Most of the easily available ones don't work unless someone actually imbibes them, or unless you have the opportunity to inject them. There are some nerve agents and the like that work quite well, but who wants to mess with that? One little mistake and you and half the people around you are dead. But there's this neat stuff called DMSO that athletes sometimes use to ease muscle pains and that soaks right through the skin into the body. Mix enough knockout into a couple of ounces of DMSO and, voilà, you've got quite a nasty surprise for a vampire.
As I sat there, I tried to screen out the terror of the kid whimpering to himself only twenty feet away. I wanted to go help him and comfort him, but it was better for everyone all around if he never saw me. Life's about compromise, kid, I thought, though he probably wouldn't appreciate the sentiment.
* * * *
A Little Chat
About ten minutes after I stuck him, Arthur began to stir. I walked over and yanked him up into a sitting position against a convenient sage bush. Somehow, his stupid hat had stayed on, if a bit crookedly. It occurred to me that he looked like some baby-faced, nerdy little professor, out sampling the genetics of jackrabbits or the geology of lava cones or some equally useless pursuit. And it was still disconcerting to be staring right at him but to be unable to sense him at all. It was like watching an incredibly elaborate breathing mannequin.
I slapped his face a couple of times, and his eyes half-opened, but he seemed to be having trouble focusing, which was right about where he should have been. I slapped him again, just cause it felt good. “Okay,” I said, “talky talky time.” The syringe had been full of Sodium Pentothal—sometimes called a “truth serum."
"Hey!” I said as he shook his head in confusion. “Where were you going?"
"Going?” he muttered, “Going, going, gone,” and then he giggled.
Okay, try another tack. “Look, you little freak, where's home? You talked about home? Where is it?"
And he started singing, “Home, home is where the heart is. Oh...Hooome is where the heart is.” And it kind of went on like that. I couldn't get a single coherent answer out of him. It just made the throbbing headache he'd already given me with a rock even worse.
That's the problem with Pentothal. You see, it's not really a truth serum—there isn't actually any such thing as a truth serum. It's more like a “loosener.” It makes people talk, but they don't necessarily say anything useful; they don't even necessarily tell the truth. Delusions, fears (not that he had any of those), fantasies, they all get mixed up together. But, what the heck, it was worth a try. My calendar wasn't exactly full. So I kept this up for an hour or so, and dusk began to spread across the land as the sun met the horizon. Above us, as we had our insane little chat, the sky began to flare in streamers of orange and red and yellow.
Then, suddenly—and this never happens with normal people—he just snapped back together. One minute he was babbling on about the merits of different species of desert jackrabbits, and the next he was utterly silent, gazing up at me with a kind of detached, almost scientific interest. “Well,” he said, and smiled. “You know, we've got to stop meeting like this.” And that was it for me. I stepped back and picked up a rock the size of my shoe that I'd selected just for this purpose. He must have known what was coming, but he just ignored it.
"So,” he said calmly, “Be honest with yourself. I mean, you really like to kill people, don't you? I mean, deep down, you think it's kind of fun, right? I know you do, son. I've been inside, there. You're just a cold-blooded killer.” I stood there for a moment, watching him watching me. “We're more similar than you'd like to admit, you know,” he said.
I slammed the rock down into his forehead with both hands. Blood and chunks of skin and little bits of bone splattered everywhere. Then I stood, dropping the rock beside him. I paused for a moment to wipe the worst of the gore from my hands and face, and shook the front of my shirt to dislodge some of the bits of him stuck there.
* * * *
Teflon Boy
As the last light emptied out of the day, I stumbled back to where I'd left Teflon Boy. “Pretty sky,” he said to me, when I returned. I pulled a little micro LED light out of my valise, along with a thick package of wipes. After cleaning myself up as best I could, I led Teflon Boy back to where Arthur's body slumped. The kid the vampire had taken seemed finally to have fallen asleep. It was a relief not to have his constant terror pressing in at me.
I sat Teflon Boy down on the rock where I'd been sitting before, and I made him hold the rock I'd used, rubbing his hands across it. “He's really a mess,” Teflon Boy commented as I scooped some of the bloody muck from Arthur's forehead and kneeled before him and flicked it at him with one finger for a while until he was spattered all over. The spatter pattern, it's key. A bad spatter pattern is the first thing they notice, and even pretty ignorant crime scene folk get nervous when the spatter isn't right. But I examined him in the light of the LED, and I decided it was good enough. I mean, we were talking Eastern Oregon hick cops, here.
I backed out of the little space where the whole encounter had run its course, brushing all around the site, looking for any place I might accidentally have stepped. Then I told Teflon Boy to do a little dance around the vampire, which he did with great enthusiasm, humming the theme to Star Wars.
"Okay, Kiddo,” I said to him after he'd sat down, “in all those Dean Koontz books you've read, was there ever one where someone killed someone by whacking them in the head?"
He looked at me quizzically, as if I were stupid, and said, “'Course there is. Don't you remember that time when that nice woman was being chased by....” I let him babble on a little and then I told him that some nice people were going to come get him in a few hours, and they would be really interested in that particular story. “Be sure to tell them, tell them the whole thing. Otherwise, they're going to be disappointed."
"Oh, yes. Sure. I can tell the story. I can do that."
"Good,” I said. “Then one more thing. In a little while after I go away, you might want to go wake up that nice little boy who's sleeping behind that bush over there."
"Oh, a boy?” he said and started to get up, but I waved him down.
"Not now. Okay? In a little while. And....” I stopped for a moment. “And give him a hug for me, okay?"
I pulled my pay-as-you-go cell phone out of my valise, and checked again that there was a signal out there. I dialed 911, turned the volume down, and laid the phone next to Arthur. Then I backed away, dragging the sage branches in my path.
"Good-bye, Mister,” Teflon Boy called.
"Good-bye....” and I realized I had no idea what his real name was. Just as well, I thought. “Good-bye,” I said, again. I hoped they had a lot of Dean Koontz novels wherever they were going to put him. But, of course, it wouldn't really matter much. He was Teflon Boy, after all. He would get a good opportunity to use his superpower in service of mankind. At least, that's what I told myself.
* * * *
Emerging Again into Day
At a good distance from the deed, I hurled the branches and my stained pants away and kept walking.
The moon showed half a face in the sky, casting enough light that I was able to turn of
f my LED. Every once in a while I would halt and gaze up, astonished, at the immense scattering of stars that seemed to hang just above my head, filling all the space of the firmament. I'd never felt so close to the universe. They say it should make you feel small. But it didn't. It made me feel alive.
I had learned at least something about the location of the nest. Not much, but enough to start looking. He'd known too much about that little dry lake, about the shamans and the rock paintings and the land. His fellows were close. I was certain of that. Perhaps even closing in on his body and the kid and Teflon Boy. I hoped the sheriff would get there first, but it didn't really matter much in the end. What mattered was that we would find them. They couldn't hide forever out here.
The heat quickly fled the land as I walked and it became as cold in the dark as it had been hot in the day. Wrapped in a silver cellophane space blanket, switching my valise from hand to hand as it got too heavy, I walked through the night. I weaved through long stretches of spiky sage that scratched furrows in my bare, shivering legs; waded through little seas of bunchgrass; crunched again for a time over the hard surfaces of broad alkali flats; and skirted around the weathered spout of an ancient lava cone.
As I walked, constellations rose and fell at the horizons. The Earth spun beneath my feet and carried me through the sky as I carried myself across the empty land.
When dawn finally began to spread a purple haze across the eastern sky, I stopped and dug a shallow grave for myself in the shading lee of a cliff. I wrapped myself in my plastic blanket, clicked on the homing beacon from my valise, and pulled the dirt over myself until I was mostly covered.
I fell into an exhausted sleep, and my dreams were filled with shamans and vampires and jackrabbits as I lay in the embrace of the all-penetrating pungency of peppery-sweet sage.
* * * *
I slept the sleep of the dead, the sleep of the just, cradled mostly away from the heat of the day, and they came upon me as the sun reached the middle of the sky. I arose from my grave, shedding dirt in all direc-
tions, to meet the faces of my friends: Ant Boy and the sparkling air around lovely Lightning Bug, and, of course, the sweet, angry whisper of always invisible Shade. The blades of their helicopter thumped away where it had landed on a nearby hill. I could feel them all from inside themselves, and they felt so familiar. Just for a moment, however unwanted, Doctor Death was back in the embrace of the League.
"Okay,” I said, after coughing the dust from my throat. “Let's hunt some vampires."
* * * *
"Needless to say, the field trip program was immediately discontinued."
* * * *
[Back to Table of Contents]
Short Story: REMOTEST MANSIONS OF THE BLOOD by Alex Irvine
Alex Irvine is the author of A Scattering of Jades, The Narrows, and most recently, Buyout. He has also been doing some work in the comics field lately, including a longish essay on 1950s comics for a forthcoming book called The DC Chronicle. And he says that he got a Hahn's macaw, but as yet it does not know how to talk.
Four days after the earthquake that leveled every building in the western part of Caracol—the part built over the protests of a now-extinct tribe on a filled-in lake bed, which the seismic event turned into a geological tuning fork—Arthur Lindsay leaned his elbows on the sill of his front window, the panes of which had fallen into the street. The wall around the window was intact and even still level, unlike its three fellows, which had sagged inward as if aspiring toward the pyramidal. The ceiling had buckled, covering the floor with plaster, but the timbers were intact if no longer parallel. Arthur's hands, in loose fists, pressed into the sides of his face. From time to time he adjusted them so the points of his cheekbones fit more comfortably between two knuckles. His nose was full of the smell of garlic from his fingers. Across the street, walking in unstarched linen of an eggshell color, was the woman with whom Arthur believed himself in love. She was nineteen years younger than he was, and did not know of his existence except in the fleeting and unconscious way that she was aware of the vines growing up the side of a particular house she passed every morning. He wondered what she would smell like on his fingers.
The shattered profile of the buildings she passed made her seem like a survivor, or some kind of traveler, untouched by the ruination. Arthur imagined scenarios: she was an archeologist and he was a ghost, watching in ignorance of the passage of a thousand years. He would haunt her. She was the sole survivor of an extended family, now a row of freshly turned graves in the new cemetery cleared especially for earthquake victims, and she found her circumstances reduced to the point at which she must consider the unthinkable; he was a tourist afflicted with loneliness. He would save her.
Her name was, of course, Maria. Arthur had not known this when he conceived the notion that he was in love with her, but in his forty-four years of life he had learned that he was drawn to women named in some variation after the mother of Christ. He listed them in his head: Marie, Marja, Miriam, Marisol...Maria. Other women he had lusted after, or formed deep emotional attachments to even though he could not call those attachments love—there were too many of these to list even though Arthur was justly proud of his memory. And he had known dozens of other Marys and Mary-cognates; the name alone did not excite him. He'd been a little disappointed to find that the vision in unstarched linen, currently disappearing around a corner beyond the collapsed bricks and timbers of a smokehouse, was one more in his string of beloved Marys.
That he was not in love with her never crossed his mind.
* * * *
Arthur Lindsay lived in a Latin America of the mind. If he had been able to read Maria Rios's mind, he would have discovered that he was wrong about a great number of the particulars of the situation. She knew exactly who he was, had intuited his attraction to her—if not his own characterization of it as love—and had gone to great lengths to uncover as much of his personal history as might be gleaned from the citizens of Caracol. Maria knew that he was forty-four years old and a native of a town in the United States called Portland. He celebrated his birthday on the seventh of August by buying drinks for everyone in whichever bar he happened to stumble into. This was most often a shack called Bananana, down by the river. During the earthquake he had gone into the basement of a damaged hotel to rescue a maid pinned by a fallen storage shelf, minutes before she would have drowned in the effluent from a broken sewer main. Beyond the consensus around those facts—and it was consensus, not unanimity—lay a wealth of conflicting detail that Maria found wondrous and sad. Profirio the outfitter of tourists who came to raft the great rapids on the Rio San Antonio, fifty miles upstream from the estuary where the river spent itself in the lake whose enormous eggplant-colored snails gave Caracol its name, swore that Arthur Lindsay was a bigamist who had abandoned eleven children upon the discovery of his doubled life. Christos the Greek, who managed the factory that turned eggplant-colored snails into organic purple dye much prized by upscale North American clothing manufacturers—dye, he was fond of saying, that Phoenician kings would have conquered the world to wear—had it on impeccable authority that Arthur Lindsay was a killer for the American mafia, who had not trusted the FBI to protect him after he testified in a murder trial. And so on. Maria had instituted a policy of only believing—provisionally—what three different people told her they had heard from Arthur Lindsay himself. This offered her a baseline of credibility, though she knew she was still dealing in hearsay. But it was too soon to talk to Arthur himself, because Maria Rios had one strange conviction of her own, which was that if she ever spoke to a man before he spoke to her, he would never love her. In Caracol there were thirteen men of marriageable age to whom she had never spoken. Three of them she knew to be homosexual, and a fourth had been traveling with an oceanographic survey since she had begun to categorize him as worth further investigation.
Before the earthquake, there had been twenty-one. The last four nights of Maria's sleep had been plagued by drea
ms of the eight dead men who might have been her lovers—two each night, in what seemed to have become a tournament fought in the remotest mansions of the blood, with no winner save a dead man and Maria Rios's unfortunate tendency to fixate on the unattainable so she could justify her failure to seize what might be hers. Last night, Eduardo and Jesus. Before that, going backward: Gabriel and Alejandro; Jesus and Pablo; Miguel and Miguel; Porfirio and German. That first night, Maria, who was able to dream with some lucidity but unable to predict when this ability would be given or taken away, had asked both of them, Would you have spoken to me? And both Porfirio and German had said yes. What would you have said? she asked, whereupon these two dead men had composed fierce rhapsodies that left Maria, in the morning, dazzled and heartsick and aching. But she could not remember what they had said.
* * * *
Arthur dreamed too, but in the scattershot and incomprehensible way of a man whose life made too much sense to him. He had a recurring dream about removing a dog from a mailbox much like the mailbox that had stood in front of a farmhouse where he'd lived with a group of actors in a touring children's company when he was twenty-two. The dog, a flat-coated black and white mutt, did something different every time, and Arthur had wasted hours and days of his life in a compulsive and failed attempt to match the dog's actions to events in his waking life. Every time a week went by without that dream, Arthur prayed he'd seen the last of it—really prayed, since he was religious if not especially observant of any particular rite. His prayers were never answered, or perhaps they were answered in the negative by the dog's inevitable reappearance. His sometime lover, a schoolteacher named Dolores who was more perfectly monikered than any other human being Arthur had ever known, was of the opinion that his prayers were neutered by his lack of specific religious commitment. It was the one thing they fought about, although there would have been more if—as Dolores wished—they had seen each other more frequently and with a greater depth of nonsexual intimacy. Arthur kept her at arm's length because of Maria, although doing this made him feel guilty and occasionally provoked the dream-dog to comment unfavorably.
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