by Brian Hodge
This is a vampire story with no vampires in it.
From punk vampires to porn vampires to gay vampires to vampirism-as-AIDS, vampire fiction has become the Star Trek of horror. As a genre it is by and large ultraconservative, moribund, demographic, derivative, totally safe and utterly dull, dull, dull. Grave wavers who wet themselves over today's endlessly recycled bloodsucker mung might do well to exhume and rediscover the only two fundamental American vampire novels of this century–Richard Matheson's I Am Legend and Les Whitten's Progeny of the Adder. From them sprang, ultimately, the entire culture of pop vampirism as we know it today.
Distaste for such an adulterated gimmick as traditional vampirism played a big part in the creation of the abovementioned books. It's the ultimate challenge: Transcend me if you can.
It is the oversaturation of vampire lore made palatable and romantic, and the trivialist's lust to accumulate ever more of it, that is itself a new form of vampirism.
The vampire hunter of "Unlife" is a creature who feeds off your hunger to believe in vampires.
To that list of two, today, I'd add Lucius Shepard's The Golden, if only for the rich, nourishing nature of its prose.
Scoop Makes a Swirly
Scoop gagged and vented a crawful of raw sewage, heroically attempting a rollover so he might inhale, for once. The task would have been simpler had he not been securely duct-taped to a corpse.
He lolled like a harpooned manatee and the bloated dead body submerged him afresh, to reluctantly gulp whatever the millions of New Yorkers above him were currently flushing down their toilets.
Scoop would have been face-to-face with his dead dance partner if its head had been left … and that made things, well, disgusting.
The handsome young news professional who had read yesterday's broadcast of the Bulldog Edition had mentioned something about rain being on the way. That would be some grand picnic–to drown in the waste products of the Apple as its sewers topped off, bursting their ancient, crumbling arteries every few blocks and burying him, Mikey, alias Scoop, alive.
You're really in the shit now, the bees in his brain hectored.
He tried once again to revolve, a potty paddle-wheeler. He managed to suck just enough stale air to keep him alive for one more roll in the sludge.
It was during special, personal moments such as this that Mikey paused to reflect on his unique talent for slam-dunking himself into this bad neighborhood, time after wretched time. Apparently, his definition of bad stuff admitted to no ceiling. Details his memory fought to obscure were gleefully supplied by the brain bees, those pestersome voices that functioned as his own personal harpies.
The bees replayed Mikey's tapes, savoring the ins and outs of how he had come to be bobbing for turds beneath the busy city streets, taped wrist and ankle to the dead meat of a gentleman he'd only wanted to shoot in the head.
"Jesus H. Christ, esquire," said Doc Auto, frowning. He had this con-expression he always made whenever Mikey darkened the portals of his clandestine, members-only practice. Doc Auto was good, one of the best and most discreet in his slightly extralegal field, but he had a tendency to speech make. Mikey suffered the lecture while the Doe gave him the once-over, twice.
"Looks like you broke at least three toes. You've still got a nine-millimeter slug stuck in the meat of your triceps. You've also got two more holes, shoulder and calf, where the bullets punched through clean. Had to be steel jackets. You have dislocated your right shoulder. I would estimate you've pissed away about a pint of blood, not counting all the scrapes, superficial lacerations, and punctures. You want a cigarette?"
"Does it have a filter?" Mikey avoided looking at the counter mirror in Doc's examining cubicle.
"Health conscious. That's good." Doc Auto affected a capaciously-pocketed medical smock that was generously stocked with peppermints, Tootsie Rolls, smokes, gum, Hershey's Kisses, toothpicks, and antacids in three jolly flavors. Beneath the smock, the good doctor wore an Auto Ordinance .41 caliber Action Express, snugged into a Shark pop-away holster. Near his opposite armpit, Doc packed two spare magazines of ammo. He wore tiny John Lennon specs and had a lush Santa Claus beard. He acted paternal, as though the disaster area that was Mikey's body was no biggie; all in a night's work as an independent contractor.
"You win a cigarette if you bite on this for me," Doc said. He positioned a horseshoe of sterile rubber between Mikey's teeth. "Come on, you can bite harder than that."
"Teefhurtz," said Mikey.
"Just bite."
Mikey bit down as Doc Auto stuck a Number Ten hemostat directly into the entry hole on his upper arm. By the time Mikey could make an insane caveman noise, the Doc had pincered the flattened slug and zipped it free as easily as tweezing a nose hair. He held the mutilated bullet up so Mikey's eyes could see it, as soon as they uncrossed and he stopped screaming.
"What'd I tell you," said the Doc. "Steel jacket. You know, getting shot is bad for you, Mikey."
Mikey tried to spit out the horseshoe but it hung up on his top row of teeth. He had chomped into it a good quarter of a inch. "You wouldn't have an aspirin in this joint, would you?"
"Too much aspirin's bad for you, too."
"Doc, I've just about overdosed on quips and one-liners for tonight. Bad guys always use them before they shoot; everybody watches too goddamned many movies."
"So who tried to kill you?"
"Can we talk about this later? AaaaarrGHH!"
"My office, my rules." Doc continued his antiseptic swab-down of Mikey's minor injuries. "Who wanted to wax your ass this time?"
"Wentworth, first," said Mikey sullenly. "Then the Cherub."
"Whoa, lad!" Doc Auto actually jerked his swab back. "Why am I wasting my time and talent on you? Wentworth and the Cherub? You're already dead. How come you're breathing at all?"
"I'm a better shot than I used to be."
"I thought you said no one-liners." Doc decided to keep patching up. He was no longer tending good ole Mikey, he was now repairing a killer, if only an inept, half-dead one. "So…who lived?"
"The Cherub is still out there."
"Let me rephrase: Who did not live?"
"Wentworth. Mister Bart. Gitano and Jasper."
"Those two homos Wentworth uses for bagmen?" Doc Auto chuckled. "Strictly second-string. I had to yank a couple of bullets out of Gitano's pasty white ass once. He had hemorrhoids the size of your fist. Uh–no offense."
"It was self-defense, cut and dried, Doc."
"Of course it was. Hold still. This is going to hurt a little bit."
"A little bit?"
Doc Auto nodded. "A little bit like being drawn on the rack."
"Oh."
Doc re-socketed Mikey's shoulder with what, to Mikey, seemed the maximum load limit for simple agony. The Doc was fast, yet skilled, having done his basic course work as a meatball medic more than two decades past, in a field tent several klicks south of the infamous Firebase Gloria. That was a whole epic story in itself.
"Take some of these pills. Call me in the morning if you're still alive."
Eventually, the sun rose. Mikey lived. He got his cigarette reward for being a good patient. And when he at last limped forth to regret the new day, his arm in a sling, dressings dotting his body like wet snowflakes, his pocket full of illegal prescriptions, he turned his attention to the mechanics of murdering the man known throughout the underworld as the Cherub.
Because, within the next twenty-four hours, the Cherub would surely try to murder Mikey.
From curbside, Mikey could see a pair of liveried doormen twitching their heads left-to-right, scanning the street for potential hostiles. He guessed these men did not take home bellboy wages. A ragbag dude pushing a shopping cart-load of scavengings crossed the street to avoid intersecting their space.
Turf that even bums and loonies steered around was enemy territory for sure. Mikey's skin tried to reverse.
He needed an excuse to stay half a minute further away from his own fun
eral, so he loitered. He adjusted the sling beneath his overcoat, causing his throbbing arm to protest. He gulped another Percocet. He wanted to hustle his balls, but they had already scared far up into the cavity of his pelvis, for safety's sake. He wanted to touch the pistol stuffed into his waistband, to feel brave and reassured. The gun only felt cold.
Mikey had just completed his reconnoiter, strolling past with a multitude of furtive sidelong glances. He knew that backing up the two door sentries were a lobby valet, a uniformed guard watch-dogging a bank of TV monitors, several ambient maintenance-folk, and a wizened elevator operator straight out of a Forties musical. Turned upside-down and shaken out, this motley assemblage would no doubt liberate enough falling sidearms to start a revolution…safeties off all around.
Mikey had procured his own piece–a Colt Model 1908 .380 ACP from Doc Auto. The Doc had not loaned Mikey the weapon, but rented it, making Mikey sign a Xeroxed form and leave a deposit and everything, probably because Mikey's odds on returning the Doc's property truly reeked.
If you can't return the gun because you're dead, and you are taking the gun to see the Cherub, therefore … Premise, conclusion. Mikey ignored the winged ones abuzz in his head. The bees did not understand that the Cherub would be doubly suspicious of Mikey's visit if Mikey, who had no sane motivation to come calling, did so anyway without packing a weapon. The goon squad in the downstairs lobby would be especially squirrelly about any visitor who did not have at least one gun.
Complications.
Doe Auto was inflexible about his own rules, so Mikey had paid and signed for the gun. Now he was standing around weighing odds on whether the Doc actually would get the gun back.
Last night's circus had left Mikey with a pronounced limp, and his long-term aches had nested, aggravated by the cold. Doc Auto's pharmacological cornucopia had helped calm the pain, but the few drugs that could lease Mikey some courage would make him reckless and unstable.
Way up there. Mikey craned to look. Up there, at the very top of the building, was the Cherub, in his lair.
Mikey disliked heights. He would rather stay on the street than hurry to become part of it; what if the Cherub decided to hurl him off one of those wrought iron penthouse balconies up there?
He forced his feet to move him. He crossed the street. Identified himself. Was relieved of the rented Colt. Patted down, then scanned with a hand-held metal detector by the phony janitor.
"So you're that guy. You're him?" The grandfatherly elevator operator checked Mikey out, beaming. "Yeah. You're him. You're more than a day late."
… and short by nearly a hundred large. Unspoken, yet forever present, that addendum–the cartoon safe of Mikey's life, waiting to plummet and squish him just for existing.
"So you want to go up." It was not a question.
Mikey nodded. So did the elevator operator.
"So, like, I heard stuff about you." The old man pawed around inside the depths of his embroidered coat, which featured epaulets. He fished up a worn silver cigarette case. "So, normally I don't do this, but listen."
"I could use a smoke about now," said Mikey.
"So, it ain't smokes is in here, my friend."
Within the case Mikey could see an assortment of gel-caps, half-black, no control imprints or numbers, filled with a grayish, granular powder.
"So, them there is what we in our trade call as terminators. Just in case you lose your nerve, don't want to deal with … you know."
Mikey cracked a mannequin smile and automatically pocketed the capsule out of politeness. Kill himself? Why do the Cherub's job for him? "Why for me?" he asked.
He shrugged. "So … you just sort of look like a nice fellow. Probably don't deserve to die. Don't mean you won't."
Floor numbers lit, extinguished.
So, why did you bother to stroll right into the waiting arms of calamity in the first place? Nobody had asked Mikey that one yet.
Why. Question mark.
During the previous evening's scoop shovel shootout, Mikey had experienced something he felt rarely, if ever before in his life–a sense of victory. The dreaded Wentworth and her scary gang of thugs had turned out not to know every damned thing, after all. Mikey had turned their upper hands, one by one. And in spite of all his personal injury and pain–or perhaps due to it–he had traversed some lake of baptismal fire. He was still high on yesterday's clear win, so high, in fact, that he might have ingested every mood-enhancer in Doc Auto's Encyclopedia 'O Drugs already, for all the metabolic stress he was putting himself through.
Mikey had come to see the Cherub under his own power because the Cherub was unfinished business, dammit all. Last night, he hadn't had a chance. Tonight his prospects were similarly shitty … so his odds were even.
Ding. The doors parted and all the spit evaporated from Mikey's mouth.
"So, good luck," said the old guy, like an omen.
Past two flat-headed robo-guards there was the Cherub, who was impossible not to see. But the first person Mikey noticed upon entry into the sanctum sanctorum was the guy with a light bulb for a head.
Vast and colorless, the Cherub had not suffered genuine daylight for longer than it took to hustle his big Moby bulk from the back of his limo to the lobby of the building he had owned for two decades. The Cherub's right arm and war counselor, Cobbler, had in another life been possessed of a goofy Italian name with so many syllables that no one, not even the Cherub, could pronounce it properly. Thus, Cobbler.
Cobbler had recently lost his mind, sort of. His advice and intuition remained as lucid as white neon, but this was the first time Mikey had seen him since he had begun wearing a lamp on his head. More properly, it was one of those milky streetlamp globes generally found in miniature above bathroom sinks. Cobbler had been party to some unspecified mystic revelation regarding light, and the value of being surrounded by it at all times. Since the Cherub preferred illumination only by proxy, Cobbler had devised this method for liberating himself from the earthly distractions of what he termed "visual noise." With the white collar of the globe neatly sized to his neck, Cobbler could see naught but clarity and the power of purest light, all around, a full three-sixty. Later he added a couple of fins to the upper contour to make his movements more aerodynamic.
It was easy for Mikey to ignore the weirdness factor. One met all sorts on the gridiron of drug politics and crime money…although it was a bit of tickle for Mikey to observe the way the Cherub's musclepersons studiously paid no attention to the big light bulb that dispensed corporate think-work. From the neck down, Cobbler was positively natty, vaguely British in tailoring and comport, the Windsor knot in his tie, perfection to envy. A study of stress in silk and symmetry. A flawless triangular knot.
Plus light bulb.
Mikey couldn't help it. He snorted.
"That man has a light bulb on his head," he said, demonstrating the professional tact that had doomed him from the cradle.
"At-hum," said the Cherub. He uttered this more than any other Cherub utterance. It was a clearing of the throat, an opportunity to change topics, a critique, a damnation, an indictment of folly. Right now, it was a window signaling Mikey to press onward. Translation: Overlook Cobbler's moonstone head if you ever want to smoke again, yes?
When the Cherub made the at-hum noise, the bulldogs flanking the entryway reached in a blur for their weaponry. Mikey did not see this motion, which took place ten feet behind him. His hackles pricked; the skin on his back sure knew what was going on. SOP for paranoid gofers. Suddenly, soberly, Mikey could comprehend how Cobbler could perceive things he was unable to see.
The Cherub was applauding. Slowly, mockingly.
"Bravo, Scoop. Quite competent, for a change. I didn't know you had it in you."
"Had it in me?" The mind bees enumerated choices. A bullet? A blade? Some convict bruiser's reedy little dong?
"Wentworth, Scoop. I speak of last night's business with Wentworth. The late Ms Wentworth."
"It's after midni
ght," intoned Cobbler. "Technically, two nights ago." His voice was metallic and hollow, like a broadcast from a flying saucer in a 50s sci-fi flick.
"The late." Mikey repeated, lying to himself that he was holding back, seeking a strategic conversational advantage.
"From what I glean regarding your relationship with her, or lack of relationship, I estimate you have risked coming here because you feel you have something to barter, yes?"
"He's come to bend knee and beg to have his life spared," clarified Cobbler.
Mikey shrugged noncommittally, making sure the Cherub could see it. He was learning. He was also fighting to quell the urge to scratch the phantom itch madly burrowing into the center of his back, where he imagined the first bullet would hit … if he slipped up.
"Permit me to recap. Please feel free to interrupt if I misrepresent the truth. At-hum."
The mind bees kept the death itch going full bore.
"You owed the late Ms Wentworth a delivery. Two deliveries, both overdue. Concurrently, you also owe me a bit of mad money to cover certain gambling mistakes. Not quite six figures, but a substantial sum for someone like you, yes?"
Mikey gulped. Nodded. Awaited the first gunshot.
"In the real world, your failure to remunerate either Wentworth or myself far past your allotted deadline, plus grace periods and interest, would be sufficient grounds for, shall we say–"
"Retributive action," suggested Cobbler.
"At-hum. Do you agree, Scoop?"
"I agree I still owe you several big dinner tabs, if that's what all this fancy language means," said Mikey.
Cobbler made a gaseous fart noise of contempt.
"I also agree that Wentworth was the biggest pain in the ass going, as far as hampering your network, uh, sir, and I think that the fact I've come to you–"
Cobbler overrode. "He wants you not to kill him in exchange for his elimination of Wentworth."
The Cherub massaged the lipid folds of his pale walrus neck. "Is that why you've come, Scoop?'
