by Z. Rider
When he climbed aboard, Wayne, slouched on a couch with a can of Dr. Pepper propped on his knee, said, “What’s up?”
“What’d you think of the show?” Dean asked.
“Balls fucking out. Whatever you guys were on up there, you need to sell it by the dime bag.”
Dean smirked. His teeth felt big in his mouth, strange against his lips. Like he was a wolf. He ducked his head, turning sideways to get by Wayne’s jutting leg.
The bus shook as Nick pounced up the stairs, Shawn right behind him, smiling. Dean leaned over to look out a window, his mouth closed, hiding the mouthful. Their scents wafted toward his nostrils—not helping.
Outside, Jessie had his arm around a girl’s waist, saying something in her ear that made her laugh. Janx squeezed by them to get on the bus. Mike strode from the building, clipboard in hand. He caught Jessie by the shoulder, and Jessie grasped the girl’s hand, making her a promise he wouldn’t keep as he backed up the steps.
As the bus rolled out, the guys talked about the show—for an hour they talked about it, going over the highlights, then going over them again. Arguing over which other Mercy song to slide into the set tomorrow, with Mike arguing against adding a second song from an album nobody could get hold of.
“So, they’ll make bootlegs,” Shawn said. “That’s not a bad thing.” He reached between his feet for his drink. “Not a bad thing at all. If ‘Can’t Win’ does what they’re saying it’s gonna do, we’re gonna be stuck with High Class. Maybe some bootlegs will prompt their asses into releasing Mercy.”
“Fucking album we paid to make rotting on a fucking shelf,” Nick mumbled, shoving his leg into the aisle. Slouching down with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops.
“Have you considered maybe it’s time you made your peace with them?” Mike said. “You guys have been fighting the label as long as I’ve been working with you.”
“Longer,” Jessie said. He sucked a swallow off a plastic cup of whiskey
“So maybe if you stop fighting them and start working with them—”
“Don’t even start,” Shawn said.
“Is there any chance of tanking ‘Can’t Win’?” Jessie said. “I mean, it almost feels like they knew we were trying to leave and paid off whoever they had to pay off to move us up the charts—you know, just to keep us hanging on their line.”
“I can’t even believe we’re annoyed our single’s charting,” Shawn said.
Dean, leaning in the bunkroom doorway, faked a yawn behind his hand. The last thing he felt like he needed was sleep, but this was all just talking in circles, and talk wasn’t going to do anything for them one way or another.
“What are we supposed to do,” Shawn said, “tell people to stop buying our single? ‘Don’t buy our fucking album?’”
“I’m hittin’ it,” Dean said.
As the others broke long enough to say goodnight, he held up a hand, turning away, dragging the door shut behind him.
The hallway had the light scent of fermented meat, stronger when he slipped into his bunk. He put his back to the curtain, his front nudging the blanketed torpedo. He propped his chin on his hand.
What now? he thought to the biker. The biker didn’t answer.
He reached under his pillow until he found the smooth wooden handle of the biker’s knife. He dragged it out, its end cap dangling from a thin chain. Dried blood streaked the wood.
He closed his hand around the handle, opened his palm to test its balance.
The others kept talking outside the door. Someone turned the radio on while Mike was in the middle of making a point, cranking it up until Van Halen was a garbled mess coming through the wall.
He moved the pommel back over the handle and clicked it into place, making it look like just a knife again instead of a miniature stake.
He settled his head on the pillow. It was tight in the bunk with the biker sharing his space. The garbage bags crinkled softly under the blanket as he shifted his hip.
He wanted to tell the body it was its own fault. The asshole should’ve just left him alone to begin with. Should have just told him didn’t have any weed. Or at least let him run off when he’d gotten away.
He held the knife above his face.
It was his now, he supposed.
What next? He thought to the biker again.
What the fuck am I supposed to next?
He needed to get rid of the body, before he was forced to explain it. And since he couldn’t do it right then, he just studied the knife, the feel of it in his hand. Its real purpose hidden under that engraved end cap.
One thing it told him was that while vampires may or may not be afraid of people—he didn’t feel too afraid of people himself—other vampires, that was a different story.
2.
* * *
The black road rushed beneath Carl’s tires, hypnotizing. Leaving him with nothing but space between his ears to replay the thuds and grunts from that dark back lounge, the wet squish of wood forcing its way through organs.
He pulled off the exit and up to a McDonald’s drive-through, tapping the steering wheel while he waited for his food to be bagged. He looked from the shadows of the parking lot to the gaping drive-through window, empty while the guy working it walked off to get his fries.
His imagination brought a vampire to the window, grinning around a mouth full of fangs. He pictured it launching itself over the ledge, reaching into Carl’s car to grab him by the throat.
Trees crowded the edge of the parking lot, their dark leaves drooping like sleeping bats.
The pimply kid handed the paper bag through, and Carl got back on the interstate without touching his food, needing to put miles between himself and his imagination. Needing to get road moving under him again.
The realization was sinking in hard: vampires existed. And they were mean motherfuckers.
He clamped his soda cup between his thighs, a chill seeping through his jeans.
His car filled with the smell of French fries and Quarter Pounder.
By the time he’d settled enough to eat them, they were cold, and eating was just a masticating of jaws, a contraction and release of throat muscles. He washed the food down with watered-down Coke.
The road fed under his tires, endless and black.
After an hour and a half, the Coke wanted back out.
He hit his turn signal and banked down an exit toward a truck stop, turning on his wipers as fat drops of rain splattered his windshield. He’d take a piss and refill his soda cup, then jump right back on the road. He pulled around the pumps—all of them self-service, and there was no way was he standing outside long enough to put gas in his car, not until he had to.
A rig with a cab and trailer as black as night chugged around the side of his building. He hit the brakes, heart thudding all over again.
If you were a vampire, wouldn’t trucking be a good occupation? Drive all night, go from shithole gas station to shithole diner to shithole rest stop—plenty of victims, plenty of anonymity. With a sleeper cab in the back, you could hide all day. Made a whole lot more fucking sense than riding a motorcycle.
The longer he watched the lumbering truck, the easier it was to imagine the driver, with his grizzled, sunken-in cheeks, hunting down food at lonely rest areas and three-a.m. truck stops. Feeding on throats. Grinning as he wiped blood from his chin.
As soon as the way was clear, Carl zipped around the pumps and right back onto the interstate. His bladder could wait.
A stretch farther down the road, the asphalt—slick with a light rain—wavered. He leaned his elbow on the door. Opened the vents to let cool air in.
Drove and drove, until he came awake with a jerk behind the wheel. He tightened his grip, guiding the Cougar’s front end away from the shoulder.
Another five miles, and he couldn’t fucking make it. He’d kill himself trying.
A motel sign loomed. He drifted toward the exit, his exhaustion drawing him down it, the tires on wet pavement tryi
ng to whisper him to sleep.
The act of parking made him a little more alert—the fact that he was going to have to step out of the car. The motel, one of those thin L-shapes, was mostly dark, but the office gave off a warm, if dim, yellow glow, and one or two of the rooms had a little light peeking around their drapes. Across the street sat a closed café and a couple of dark stores. To his left, the interstate; to his right, the main road heading into town. No cars on the go. Nothing but quiet.
He stepped out and eased the Cougar’s door into place, soft rain hitting the back of his neck. The dome light stayed on, the latch not quite caught. He leaned on the door with his hip, every nerve ending aware of the darkness and shadows just beyond the motel’s lot, until it clicked into place.
Seven strides to the office. A bell on the door tinkled as he let himself in. The front desk was unmanned, and he shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking for a bell, looking for signs of life—imagining the worst, that the vampires had already arrived, killed the clerk, and were just waiting for him to show up.
Crazy. How would they know?
Shuffling came from the hall. Carl crossed his arms, hugging himself. An older man made his way through the doorway, his gray hair like a neat Brillo.
“Help you?” He had creases around his mouth, eyes that drooped like a basset hound’s. He at least didn’t look like a vampire.
“Could I get a room?”
“Just yourself?” His teeth were square and a little yellowed.
Carl nodded, chewing the edge of a thumbnail, watching the parking area beyond the doors.
“Be twelve dollars. Checkout’s at eleven.”
Carl nodded again, dragging out his wallet. Fingering through the bills he had left. The clerk licked his thumb before he counted them, tapped them into a neat pile before opening the cash drawer.
“Do you have anything close?” Carl asked.
The desk clerk laughed. “Close? Close to what? We don’t got anything closer than this place right here.”
“Close to the road, I mean.” Away from the edge of trees in the back, nearer to the lit-up office. “My car’s right out front. Is that first room open?”
“One over from that is.” He turned the registration book around for Carl to sign before searching the wall of keys for a fob with a number two on it.
Thirteen quick steps, staying close to the building. He missed the keyhole the first try, the back of his neck crawling with a feeling like he was being watched. He got it in, got the door open, slammed it shut once he was inside. A loose chain swayed against the wood, and he hooked it in place. Flipped on the lights. Every light. Checked the little closet, peered under the bed, swept back the shower curtain.
Let out a breath of relief.
As he pissed into the toilet, something tapped the edge of the bathtub.
His hip banged the sink as he swung around.
A Japanese lady beetle struggled on its back on the edge of the tub, its legs dancing in the air.
He pressed a hand to his chest and decided he’d just take off his shoes and crawl in bed, fully dressed. Getting naked and showering could wait until the sun came up.
3.
* * *
After the bunks filled with slow, shallow breaths, sleepy mumbles, and Teddy’s snores—after the front lounge had gone silent—Dean slipped from his bunk. The smell was getting to him—plastic, adhesive, and dead vampire.
The sheath for the biker’s knife was taped in with the biker. Dean carried the weapon in his hand to the back lounge, a pack of cigarettes in the other.
Rain pattered the bus’s roof.
Sitting on the back couch, he ran his thumb along the edge of the blade. His skin opened with a thin sting. He turned his hand over and watched the edges of the cut meld back together before more than a slight line of red could well.
He looked toward the door, sure no one was up but self-conscious anyway. Then back at his hand. Holding his breath, he laid the edge of the blade against his palm and drew it across. His lips tightened. His teeth felt odd but not huge, not like before.
He watched his skin open up, the insides gray like wet ash. A thin strip of blood oozed, and the skin started knitting back together, starting before he even lifted the knife away.
He licked the blood, leaving nothing but saliva and a fine, pale line where the cut had been.
He dropped back on the couch, an arm behind his head, the biker’s blade tapping his thigh.
A low moan came from one of the bunks, the sound thick with sleep.
No one stirred. In a moment, there was only the sound of the road again, wet under the bus’s tires.
He lit another cigarette.
He needed his brain to stop jittering so he could figure out how to handle his problem, but he was still high. Every thought was slick and fast moving—any he tried to grab hold of popped like a soap bubble as soon as he touched it. The biker, the guy with the stakes, the teeth, the album, the single, the fucking record company.
The smell of blood, hot and rich and enticing, making his nostrils flare as he tried to just sit there and breathe.
4.
* * *
Light filtered through a gauzy curtain hung between the drapes Carl had forgotten to close. He pulled his pillow closer, sliding his knee up the mattress. He had morning wood and a full bladder again, and his tee shirt was twisted around his middle, but he didn’t want to get moving yet. The bed was the most comfortable place he’d been in days.
Kids ran by his room, their footsteps quick and light, one of them calling to the other about the pool.
There was a pool?
The mother—he assumed it was the mother—said swimming season was over, and one of the kids yelled, “But the pool’s still open!”
“And you don’t have a swimsuit! Don’t go out in the parking lot.” And then she was talking to a man, and it was going to be endless, the noise. The world was fucking awake.
He rolled onto his back.
Normal. That was the word he was looking for to describe the feeling he had right at that moment. Not a fleeting sort of normal either, but a this was how life was going to be now kind of normal. The obsession, the thing that had driven him, was gone. Behind him.
Soph was avenged, and he hadn’t even had to kill anyone.
In the soft morning sunlight and bland beigeness of the hotel room, it was hard to grasp that he’d battled with a vampire the night before. He was losing it if he thought that’s what the biker had been.
And in any case, it was over.
His life was his again. His future his own.
He stretched to turn the alarm clock toward him.
Shit.
Well, he deserved a late morning. You know what else he deserved? A fucking shower.
While the spray beat the back of his neck, he decided he’d call Tim and tell him he was on the way home. ’Bout fucking time, Tim would say. Tim, he’d imagined, had spent the week staying up till three, the glow of old horror movies ghosting his face as he ate chips and tacos on the living room couch, wrappers piling up around him. Or he’d slipped out to the “nowhere” he sometimes went, pulling his windbreaker on, lacing up his tennis shoes. Where you going? Nowhere—just need to get out of this box for a while. He never said, Want to come? and Carl had been fine with that. He hadn’t wanted to go much of anywhere.
That was going to change. He had new ideas, rising up and folding around him like the steam in the shower. New ideas for his new life.
He hiked across the street with a pocket full of change to the little café—now open—and fed quarters into the pay phone on the outside wall. He punched in their number. It took a second for the first ring. The first became a second. He watched the motel parking lot, his Cougar dull with road dust, its long nose pointing at the building. Four rings, five. At nine he hung up.
He’d lost track of what day it was. Tim could be in class. He consoled himself with a plate of pancakes at the café, smoked his las
t two cigarettes, and as the waitress dropped off the ticket for his meal, he found himself torn between the itch to talk to Tim—talk to anyone—and the desire to just be home. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to tell Tim everything that had gone down—the story of the night before felt like a weight he didn’t want to disturb. He’d already sounded crazy enough the last time he’d called.
But he wanted to tell him his new plan—investigative journalism. He had an ambition now, to travel, to poke into things. Maybe eventually he’d be the one to reveal that vampires actually existed—or prove to himself that they didn’t. A momentary break with sanity might have been all he’d had. At any rate, going back to school would give him access to news reports from all over the country, if not the world, as far back as he wanted to look. He’d start with research. Move on to interviewing people who’d been affected by anything that looked like vampire activity. Starting, maybe, with bodies that had been dumped like Soph’s.
And if he didn’t find proof that vampires were at work, maybe he’d find proof that solved some of those cases.
He’d learn how to take photos—not like Tim’s Polaroid, but with a 35 mm. Eventually he’d go back to that bar in New Hampshire. In the daytime. Taking precautions, the most important of which, he was sure, was finding someplace secure to be at night. He’d do an exposé on the biker gang, whether they were vampires or not, because they were definitely up to shit. Definitely causing trouble.
He needed to save up money. When he’d withdrawn the cash for this trip, he’d left three hundred and sixteen dollars in his bank account. All he had to his name. Two years ago, he’d had a little over eighteen grand. When his sister had been killed and the money Soph had gotten from their parents had been transferred to him, that stash had more than doubled.
He’d blown through nearly forty thousand dollars between school and living and hunting down the biker. Forty fucking thousand dollars.
