by Unknown
For those of us who’d spent years exposed to microwaves, phones and mp3 players, the levels weren’t high enough to kill quickly. But during the day, any kind of skin exposure brought up blisters in minutes and tumors shortly after that. It didn’t take many of those episodes to add up to bad news.
It was one of those low rent blood fiends that we found that morning. He was tucked away in a basement that we’d been told was a warehouse for stolen water, which turned out to be untrue. But, in scouting around, Kelly found the body in a dim corner.
“I’ve got something you have to see,” he said.
It was a dead vampire. Nothing unusual there. We found them all the time, OD’d on hits of fake plasma cut with cleaning products, melted candle wax or radiator fluid. What made this one different was the blood around its mouth. With vampires, there’s always some, but this puppy looked like he’d ripped into a full unit of O Positive. “Whose blood is that?”
Kelly reached down and pulled back the upper lip. The absence struck me immediately. “Well, well,” I said. The usual startling whiteness was missing. The vampire’s fangs were gone, probably ripped out by the roots with a pair of pliers.
“Nasty,” I said. “What do you think happened? Bad trick?”
“Gambling debt?” Kelly said.
“In-law trouble?”
We both laughed.
Maybe someone had taken the fangs and made a necklace like people did with shark teeth. Neither of us cared. All we had to do was drag the corpse into the sunshine and in a few minutes the problem would disappear.
But there was something that nagged at me; no sign of shoot-up gear. When we flipped the body over, just in case he’d fallen on his kit, we saw that his head had been beaten in. That was something new.
Two days later, we found another one. Head bashed in and teeth ripped out. Even though cops aren’t called upon to do much detection anymore, by the time the fourth toothless vampire turned up I was starting to sense a pattern.
We filed reports, but nobody cared about dead vampires. But the incidents nagged at me; what was the defanging about? I ruled out the obvious right away: Revenge for a child or loved-one bitten and turned. Revenge for one of the blood infections vampires so often spread, despite all the hype about safe biting. Neither felt right.
I went to a peeler bar for a drink. Strip joints had become increasingly popular in recent years. With the necessity of keeping every square inch of skin covered up all the time, the opportunity to glimpse bare flesh in public was precious.
Maybe it was all the toothless vampires I’d seen the last few weeks, but before I looked at anything else, I found myself watching the strippers’ mouths as they danced. I saw the same thing over and over: a fixed smile, like a rictus. And then one of them flashed something different, a gold tooth. She was leggy and not overly emaciated. But what struck me most was that her left fang had been replaced by a golden one. I knew it couldn’t be real gold because that baby would have bought enough plasma to feed her for a year. Either that or someone would’ve ripped it out of her head, and that would’ve been a crime that made sense.
“I want to see her,” said the floor boss.
Guillermo looked doubtful. “There are better,” he said. “Much better, special for cops.”
“I want to see her. In a private room.”
Guillermo opened his mouth and I got the sense that he was going to say something else, but what came out was, “Of course. This way.”
I was only alone for a couple of minutes. “What happened to your tooth?” I asked as soon as she closed the curtain behind her. I was never one for prolonged romance.
“You like it?” She touched the tooth with her tongue.
“I don’t feel one way or another about it. Just want to know where it went.”
“Why?”
“Tell me or I’ll keep you up past your bed time.” Funny that no matter how bad it got for most vampires, they always choked on the idea of dying for real. Me, in their situation, I’d be outside waiting for dawn with open arms.
“I lost it,” she said.
When she got up off the floor, I asked her again. “Keep lying to me and you’ll lose the other one, too.”
“I sold it.”
“Why?”
“This guy wanted it.”
“What guy?”
“I don’t know. Never saw him before.” That smelled like the truth.
“You’re still doing this, so he can’t have paid enough to change your life.” I handed her some cash. “Doesn’t it affect chow time?”
“For the better. It’s like using the cutlery you keep for special guests.” She looked me up and down. “Or, in your case, using cutlery at all.”
Toots was playing at a basement joint called Bloody Sunday. He was a jazz harmonica player who had a way of covering holes with his fangs so he could play three notes at once. If he hadn’t been a plasma junkie, he could’ve been famous. He also knew most of what was going on in the vampire world.
Toots limped off stage to indifferent applause. I took out a bag of China Red and put it on the table in front of him.
“What’ll that cost me?” he asked.
“I got dead suckers turning up with their big teeth ripped out. You get wind of anything like that?”
“Nothing else done to ’em?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
Toots grunted. “There’s a rumor. Not saying it’s true, but it’s what’s in the wind. They say someone’s collecting teeth and using ’em.”
“Using them for what?”
“Grinding ’em up is what I hear.”
“Go on.”
“Grind ’em up, mix ’em with blood.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know more than that. Just that there’s a market for fangs. Lowlifes are on the hunt to collect the bounty.”
“Who’s paying?”
“Folks I don’t want to meet.”
We heard muffled screams, as if from a mouth partially gagged, and moved cautiously towards the sound. One of the first things they teach cops is never to rush in. Most of the time it isn’t worth the effort. Better to get there too late than to wind up in a situation.
Then I thought about the fangs and who and why and I started moving quicker than usual. Kelly grabbed my arm. “What’re you doing?”
“I want to check this out.”
“Let’s wait’ll it’s over.”
The screaming became more shrill and insistent. It didn’t sound like there was much time. “I’m going now.”
“What the hell,” Kelly said and, though he probably didn’t want to, followed.
As we went down the alley the screaming grew agonized. A piercing wail got me running. Two men held a writhing vampire while a third reached forward with a pair of bloody pliers. Blood streamed from the vampire’s mouth.
I could see one fang gleam but only darkness where the other should have been.
“Stop,” I yelled. “Police!” To make sure they understood, I shot the man who held the pliers. The other thugs dropped the vampire and ran. Kelly and I shot them, too.
With the vampire alternately screeching and sobbing behind us, we searched the bodies. In the pocket of the one with the pliers I found the missing incisor, some cash and a business card. I took them all.
Before we walked away, Kelly looked at the vampire. “There’s nothing we can do for him.”
“Put him to sleep,” I said.
When I got up the next afternoon, and everyone else in Alan’s apartment was gone, I looked at the tooth. I’d never examined a vampire fang up close. It smelled slightly rancid, and was not as sharp as I would have expected. But beneath the coating of dried blood, the tooth was the same vivid white as all vampire fangs. No matter how bad their health, those teeth never yellowed or decayed.
The cash amounted to all of sixty bucks, just enough for a couple of imported beers. All the business card said was Clive — Collector, and gave a text address.
I sent a message. “Need sum1 2 c my teeth.”
All the reply said was, “I’L bite,” plus a time and a street corner.
The car pulled up in front of me right on time. “You got something to show me?” the driver asked.
I held up the fang, shining in the twilight. The car door opened.
The man sitting in the back wore dark glasses, and his head was white and smooth. “Show me,” he said. I got in and the door closed.
I held out the fang. The man took it between thumb and forefinger. He twisted the tooth around, gazing at it intently, then, placed it between his teeth and bit down gently. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
“At a crime scene. I’m a cop. What’s going on with these?”
“This was stolen, then, from its previous owner?”
I explained the circumstances and the fang was handed back. “It’s a lovely specimen that I would like to have, but I must return it.” He reached into his coat pocket and removed a small jar. “All of these have been obtained through legal means.”
“Yeah, well, the guy who had your card had just ripped this out of a reluctant vampire’s head, so you may not want to be so trusting in future.”
Clive smiled and held the jar up and the teeth inside it shone like precious stones. He shook the jar and the sound was a tinkle, like bells.
“Why did you buy those?”
“Once upon a time people believed that rhinoceros horn, ground to powder, could cure impotence. The same was thought to be true of a bear’s gall bladder.”
“People believe weird shit when they’re desperate.”
“True enough. However, sometimes folk remedies have substance.” Clive shook the jar of teeth once more. “It’s amazing how white they stay, no matter what.”
Suddenly the car door opened. I had the feeling that he’d told me something significant, but I knew I wasn’t getting it, and I wasn’t getting any more information, so I got out. I spent the rest of the night visiting strip clubs and looking for peelers with missing teeth, to no avail.
Two days later I got another message from Clive. We met at the same intersection as before.
“You were right,” he said. “I was too trusting and now I’ve been robbed.”
“That’s too bad, but it happens.”
“I want you to find them and retrieve what they stole.”
“Why should I?”
“You’re a cop.” He sounded serious.
“Sorry for laughing, but there has to be a better reason than that.”
“If you do this, I’ll give you something that will change your life.” He sounded serious about that, too.
I spent the rest of that night sitting in bars and listening. Thieves tend to have trouble keeping their mouths shut, and when one of them scores off someone as uptown as Clive, silence would be impossible to maintain for long. But I heard nothing until I went back to see Toots.
“I think I got your tooth thing figured out,” he said as he sipped some high-grade synth that I’d slipped him. “Somebody’s making sunblock. Stuff that really does the job. I’d say hit the streets looking for chicks wearing tank tops.”
The only place you saw tank tops these days was in the Museum of Daylight, along with the croquet sets and lawn chairs and other relics of more moderate times. If anybody had a secret sunscreen that actually worked, he was smart enough to keep it to himself.
“How do you know this?”
“Couple guys shooting their yaps about something they claim they found.”
“And it works?”
“Man, they say it works like it’s nineteen fifty.”
The thieves were not hard to find once we knew where to look. Kelly came with me but I had told him nothing. We went to a small bar where the two idiots were laughing and shouting.
“What do you want?” one of them demanded.
“We’ll discuss that outside.” Kelly and I were holding our weapons.
The thieves reached for their sun gear. “You won’t need that,” I said.
The taller of the two looked confused. “It’s noon, man,” he said, as if he assumed I was reasonable.
“Too bad for you. But if you’re using what you stole, hey, no worries.” We pushed them out the door.
The sun hit them like water on the verge of boiling. They whimpered as their skin turned pink and then reddened. We just stood and waited. In minutes, blisters bubbled up on their faces and necks.
“Please,” the tall one said, eyes closed against the ravaging glare. He stopped talking when the sun caught the exposed tip of his tongue. Bending his head down to protect his face, his neck erupted in sores that soon turned black and smelled of roasting flesh.
“Give me what you stole,” I said, “and you can go back inside.” That was all it took. He reached into his pocket and handed me a small container. Kelly knew better than to ask.
“I’d get that seen to before it turns into something nasty,” I said.
The two men crawled towards the door of the bar like roaches scuttling for a dark crack.
In the back of his car, Clive opened the container. The ointment inside was creamy and pink.
“What is it?”
“It’s freedom,” he told me. “Have you ever felt the sun on your skin?”
“What are you, nuts?”
“Here,” he said, closing the container and handing it back to me. “Try it.” He told me what to do and it sounded impossible.
“From blood and fangs?” I asked.
“More or less, if correctly mixed. Try it. If you like the results, let me know. We can work something out.”
It took a lot of self-persuasion before I worked up the guts to do as Clive had suggested. I pulled my shirt back to reveal a small patch of shoulder, bone white and freckle free, and rubbed on a tiny amount of the thick pink cream. I had no idea how much to use but, given the amount of SPF 500 we’d all taken to slathering on before that stopped working, I went over the area again and again, until the cream was invisible. It was slightly gritty when first applied but, once rubbed in, left no trace, no residue, no greasy sheen.
I stood by the door, took a couple of slow deep breaths and then I slipped outside into the sun bathed yard. When I was sure no one was looking, I took in another breath and peeled back my sun suit, exposing the cream-coated shoulder.
The sun felt wonderful, warm but not hot. There were no instant blisters, black and oozing where the rays touched. It felt so impossibly good I almost laughed but caught myself. It was seldom good to be overheard laughing.
Inside, I sent Clive a text. Then I went out and bought some pliers.
* * * * *
Peter Sellers lives in Toronto. He occasionally writes short stories. Several of these have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. His dark fantasy work has appeared in the Northern Frights series, edited by Don Hutchison. In addition, he has edited thirteen crime fiction anthologies.
Symbiosis
By David Beynon
Damp gravel crunched beneath the soles of a shuffling set of ragged New Balance running shoes. The upturned collar of his denim jacket did nothing to keep the constant drizzle from crawling down his neck, biting him with an unaccustomed chill.
There was a time when his eyes would have burned in this near darkness with unparalleled clarity. Not now. Now he squinted like a feeble myopic old wretch, struggling to focus on his hands eighteen inches from his face.
They were ghastly, skeletal things, his hands. Gaunt and pallid, the skin hanging from his long, brittle fingers glistening in the drizzle like the belly of a frog. He tried to steady them, but they trembled and with each tremble, each stuttering tremor, he could feel his life slipping away.
Starvation.
Oh, he’d known hunger. Many times. Hunger and Ray were age old acquaintances. He well knew the gnawing, persistent ache, the yearning in his jaw, the burning of his throat, the coiled tension in the pit of his stomach. The
se he knew well and could deal with.
But starvation… Starving was another beast entirely.
Ray touched his face, his fingertips navigating an alien landscape. His eyes were sunken into pits with harsh, sharp edges. His cheekbones were a pair of mountains that descended into valleys etched deep into the sides of his face. Beneath cracked lips, he could feel receding gums set against a wall of loosening teeth.
This can’t be how it ends.
Ray looked up. To his left stood a wooden post crowned by a white mailbox. Stenciled in black paint: “A. and B. W. Smith”.
He peered down the driveway into inky blackness. He caught a pang of something down that darkened drive that was both compelling and forbidding. He breathed deeply through his nose, exhaled a staccato whimper and made a decision.
At the end of the driveway stood a neat, well cared for house with white siding and black trim. Ray’s gaze drifted to the porch steps, then higher to the unadorned front door. He tilted his head and sniffed the night air.
No dogs, he thought, and then looked above the door. No sentry lights, either.
Expending a staggering amount of effort, Ray climbed the three steps onto the covered front porch. He began to run his fingers through his tangled hair, abandoning the effort when he encountered hopeless tangles.
Gaunt, bony knuckles rapped against the wooden door.
He heard a host of sounds from within the house: A rustling, the snap of newsprint being briskly folded, the scrape of a chair against the floor. There were footfalls beyond the door, then a click; the porch light sprung to life. Ray winced, turning his face away from the dim illumination.
Beyond the door, Ray heard a man clear his throat. A deadbolt shifted and the doorknob turned.
The man framed in the doorway looked Ray up and down, then opened the door completely. “You don’t look too well,” he said. “In fact, no offence, you look like shit. What can I do for you tonight?”
Ray sniffed, rubbed his face, and then spoke in a raspy voice. “I guess … I guess I’m here to beg.”
