Kissing Corpses

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Kissing Corpses Page 8

by Amy Leigh Strickland


  “Cody!” I shouted, relieved.

  “I was worried that if it went too far, I might hit you.”

  Hot blood continued to ooze out of the wound on my neck. I clasped my hand over it. “You didn't get me,” I said.

  Cody stepped forward to catch me just before I fell.

  I woke up in a white room with the beep of monitors all around me. Geneva was asleep in the chair next to me. The sun shone in through the hospital window.

  “Gen?” I said, with a weak voice because my throat was dry. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. When she remembered where she was, she sat up quick.

  “Hey,” she said. “You're up.”

  “Is Cody alright?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Yeah,” Geneva moved to sit on the edge of my bed. “The police questioned him. He told them it was a crazy ex of yours. Defense of others. He hasn't been arrested. I don't think they'll press charges. The neighbors didn't see you run Rawdon over, but they saw him pull you out of the truck and bite you.

  “Do they know he was a vampire?” I asked.

  Geneva shook her head.

  “It's over?”

  Geneva threw her arms around me and hugged me tight. When she pulled back I touched my neck. A large, flat bandage covered the wound. I hoped it wouldn't scar.

  “They had to give you blood.”

  “Where's Gilchrist?” I asked.

  “I don't know,” Geneva said. “He took the crossbow and left the house when he saw you drive off. I heard sirens a few minutes later and then I got tired of waiting in the house and went to find you. Cody had already staked him when I showed up.”

  “My parents?”

  “They came by earlier this morning. They're with Noah in the cafeteria.”

  I closed my eyes. “Will you be here when I wake up?” I asked.

  “I called into work. I can stay all day.”

  “Thanks, Geneva,” I said. “I'm sorry I put you in danger.”

  “Don't. You had no idea.”

  “I'm still sorry,” I said. This had to be the most comfortable pillow I had ever rested my head against.

  When I opened my eyes again, Noah was sitting in the chair next to my bed, changing the channels on the TV. I don't know if the sound woke me up or if it was something else. There was a tray placed on the little table attached to my bed. It held a cup of apple juice with a foil lid, a cup of yogurt, a miniature can of gingerale, and some toast with a plastic packet of jam.

  My stomach growled. I sat up and reached for the cup of yogurt. Noah looked back at me and smiled. “You're awake!”

  “I'm hungry,” I said.

  “You should be. It's mid-afternoon. Dad and Mom had to go. Some guy he works with kicked the bucket earlier this week, and they had to be at the funeral.”

  I had to search around the tray to find a plastic spoon for my yogurt. Noah got up from his chair and punched the straw through the foil lid on the apple juice for me. “So this British guy turned out to be crazy, huh?”

  I nodded. “Among other things.”

  “Cody was being really cryptic when I saw him this morning. So was Geneva, actually. Am I missing the big picture here?”

  I stopped trying to break into my yogurt and looked up at Noah. I had put him through a weekend of hell. Geneva had set him worrying about me since Saturday night. He deserved to know the truth.

  “How about I eat this yogurt, and then we talk,” I said.

  Noah took the cup from my hand and nodded before yanking off the lid. “There you go.”

  I took my time eating. It wasn't a very large cup of yogurt, though. I managed to stretch it for five minutes.

  “Alright,” Noah said. “Talk.”

  “Right.” I flexed my hand, which was swollen with IV fluids. “So... have you seen my neck?”

  “The guy bit you, right?”

  I reached for the large bandage that covered most of the left side of my neck. Every side of it had a long strip of tape, forming a tight seal. I picked at the tape and peeled it back. My neck was sensitive to touch, bruised. I winced as I put my fingers on the holes that I couldn't see.

  “Ugh, those look like...” he trailed off. “You're kidding.”

  I smoothed the bandage back down. I could only guess, from Noah's expression, how bad it looked. “Fangs. Vampire fangs.”

  “But vampires--”

  “Aren't real? Yeah. Well, this one is.”

  “Vampires, as in, 'I vant to suck your blood?'”

  I nodded. “Only this one doesn't fly, and he shows up in mirrors when he's just eaten.”

  “And last night he tried to eat you?”

  “Last night he was angry because I kind of burnt down his house.”

  “What?!?” Noah shouted.

  I shushed him and pointed at the door. He crossed the room and closed it. “Why did you burn down his house?”

  “It's complicated.”

  Noah gave me his trademarked “oh please” look. I clearly wasn't allowed to gloss over any of the details.

  “Did you hear anything in the news about a murder downtown last weekend?”

  “Some former frat boy got shredded apart, right?”

  I nodded. “That was Rawdon. The guy had been a jerk to Geneva and Rawdon took offense. Or maybe he just wanted a snack. Or both.”

  “So you torched his house?”

  “We figured that out Saturday. But Friday night Rawdon told me that he was going to turn me, and it wasn't exactly like I had a choice.”

  “Turn you?”

  “Kill me. Make me a vampire.”

  “So we're talking about literal vampires here?”

  “Yes,” I said. The stress in my voice sent a twinge of pain through my neck. I groaned and flopped back against my pillow.

  “I just don't understand how.”

  “His heart doesn't beat. He's dead, Noah. I don't know how, either, but trust me, it's real. He doesn't have a pulse and he's about two hundred years old. He can't go out in the sun, and he has to drink blood. He's literally a vampire, and he wanted to make sure that I was literally his for eternity.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “Well, shit,” I repeated.

  We sat in silence for a while. Noah kept glancing up at the muted television. The news ticker on the bottom of the screen flashed “Cheyenne domestic dispute ends in death.” I knew it was about me.

  “It's okay now,” I said, trying to reassure my baby brother. “Cody saved me. It will be okay. It's over.”

  “Visiting hours are over,” one of the nurses said.

  “I don't really give a damn about visiting hours. This is important,” Gilchrist growled. I opened my eyes. The room was dark but the TV flashed blue light across my bed. “I need to talk to her.”

  “Sir, you'll have to go back through the lobby and come again in the morning.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Let him in. Please? Just ten minutes?”

  The nurse looked down at me. She was a middle-aged woman with over-bleached hair, just trying to do her job. She looked back at Gilchrist, shook her head, and walked back down the hall.

  “Where's Cody?” Gilchrist asked.

  “I don't know. I've barely been awake all day. Geneva said the police talked to him.”

  “That's great. So what happened to the vampire?” he paced around the foot of the bed.

  “Cody staked him with a piece of a picket fence.”

  “And then?”

  “And then... and then the police came and I passed out?”

  “What?” he stopped and braced his hands on the rail at the foot of the bed. “You let the police take the body?”

  “I'm sorry, I didn't think to protect the big secret. I lost a lot of blood.”

  “I don't give a fuck about keeping vampires a secret,” he snapped. “You staked him and then just let the police have the body?”

  “Cody staked him.”

  “Son of a bitch! Do you realize how many people you may have gotte
n killed?”

  My head pounded. “What are you talking about?”

  “He's not dead!”

  “I thought vampires were all dead.”

  Gilchrist tugged at his hair. “Staking a vampire doesn't destroy it. It freezes it. He's paralyzed. The moment the coroner pulls that piece of wood out, he'll snap to life and go on a rampage. He's gonna be wicked thirsty. He'll need blood to heal and he won't discriminate. Then he's going to come for you.”

  “What?” I sat up quickly. Gilchrist ran around the bed and pulled the IV out of my arm. I shouted in surprise. “You can't be here when he wakes up.”

  “Excuse me,” the nurse said from the doorway. “What in the hell are you doing?”

  “Checking out,” he replied before pulling me to my feet. “Let's go.”

  “Sir, you can't just take her--”

  “Shut up!” he barked.

  “How long has it been dark?” I asked

  “Twenty minutes,” Gilchrist said. “We need to find a safe house.”

  We ran down the hall to the back stairs. Gilchrist started running down the stairs and I followed, fueled by adrenaline. One of the back emergency doors was propped open at the ground floor, and we ran out onto the loading dock. Gilchrist pulled a key ring out of his pocket and clicked the remote. A couple of doctors were sitting on a smoke break and one of them shouted after us as we ran for the parking lot.

  “Excuse me,” he yelled. “This is not a patient exit.”

  Fire alarms went off in the hospital.

  Gilchrist stopped next to a silver Subaru Forester. The car looked like a Jeep and a station wagon had mated. “I think our friend Rawdy is awake,” he said, opening the driver's side door. “Better hurry.”

  When I got in the car, I found that Gilchrist had brought my bag and my purse from Cody's house. He pointed his thumb toward the back seat and told me to change into some real clothes.

  “I'm not going to change so you can watch me in the rear view mirror,” I argued.

  “I really don't care to look at your skinny twenty-two year-old ass,” he grumbled.

  “Twenty three.”

  “Don't care. You're still an obnoxious teenager to me.”

  When we pulled up outside the Plains Hotel, Gilchrist went around the side of the building to scout it out, and I quickly changed. He sent me in to rent a room. When I came back with the key, Gilchrist had loaded three large bags onto his own back and left mine in the car for me to worry about.

  “Why did we pick the historic hotel?” I asked. “Isn't that a bad idea?”

  “Nope. It's a great idea. It's the perfect location for my plan.”

  We hurried into the building. Gilchrist seemed to struggle with one of the bags, but when I tried to help him, he snapped. “Don't touch it,” he said. “You break this one, our defenses are down.”

  We entered a room decorated with barn red bedspreads and statuettes of cowboys. There were two double beds and Gilchrist set the bags on the bed closest to the door and extracted a small, red generator. He set to work starting it up. When it was purring softly (or softly for a generator) he placed it at the open window to ventilate. I watched, unmoving, as he pulled out a pair of light fixtures with long thin bulbs and hooked them up to the generator.

  “Are we sleeping with the lights on?” I asked.

  “Would you prefer to wake up in a casket?”

  I sat down on the bed closest to the window. “I suppose sleeping in broad daylight is better.”

  “Good. We'll make it through the night and tomorrow we'll talk about how we're going to get rid of him for good.”

  “What about my family?” I asked.

  “You'll only worry them if you call them. The less they know, the safer they are. Staying away is the best you can do for them. You're just going to have to hope and pray that if he goes to them, they have the sense not to piss him off.”

  I climbed under the covers of the bed I had chosen. I had undergone a blood transfusion last night. I needed my rest.

  Gilchrist pulled back the covers on his own bed and placed a device that looked like a yellow space gun on one side before putting the covers back.

  “What's that?” I asked.

  “Insurance,” he said. “It's a UV drug detection gun. It bounces ultra-violet light off of surfaces and back into the gun, enabling it to read the tiniest traces of the chemicals used to make methamphetamines. Good for busting meth dens and for freezing vampires.” He sat on the foot of the bed and pulled off his work boots before heading to the bathroom to wash his face. When he came back, his blue chamois work shirt was draped over his arm and he was wearing a worn, but clean undershirt. I could see more scars on his arms than just the vampire bite he had shown us on Sunday.

  He picked up the TV remote.

  “Don't,” I begged.

  “We need to know if he got out.”

  “We can watch the news tomorrow. Please. Just... can I sleep one night without having to think about how many people I got killed?”

  Gilchrist nodded. “Alright. Goodnight, kid.”

  “Goodnight.” I whispered, closing my eyes. “Thank you.”

  I dreamt of Cody that night. We were laying in bed, dressed in flannel pajama pants and our college t-shirts. We were talking; I'm not sure about what. Then we were making love. The touch of his hands on my arms felt warm and real. When I opened my eyes and looked into his, he had changed. Rawdon stared back at me. His touch was so cold that it burnt my skin. I screamed and fought, but he held on to me.

  I woke up in my bedroom. My body was being pressed into my bed. My lungs were constricted. I couldn't move. I couldn't draw enough breath to scream. He was standing at the foot of the bed. He was climbing over me, pressing loving kisses to my legs and hips while I fought to move my limbs and scream.

  I awoke with Gilchrist sitting fully dressed on the bed next to mine, staring at me. I sat up, rubbing the sleepy seeds out of my eyes with the odd feeling like someone had just walked in on me naked. Was he watching me sleep? Did I talk in my sleep? Cody had told me once that I did sometimes.

  “What?” I asked, put off.

  “Took you long enough,” he said. “It's nearly one.”

  “In the afternoon?”

  “Yep. And you don't even have those happy hospital drugs to blame anymore.”

  “Sorry, haven't been sleeping well, what with the vampire trying to make me his bride.”

  “Yeah, at least if you had lead a normal psychopath on, he'd have the decency to stalk you during the daylight hours, too.”

  “Fuck you,” I snapped.

  “I made coffee. You should have one. It'll improve your mood.” Gilchrist got up and walked across the room. I watched him sit down at the desk, which had held a lamp, a cowboy statuette, and a pad of hotel stationary the night before. Now it was covered in crossbows and one gleaming scimitar.

  “Gilchrist,” I started, wondering if he would prefer I call him Liam. “About weaknesses of vampires... I feel like last night can't be all Cody's fault, as you didn't give us a full run down of how to actually kill him.

  “Fire and beheading.” Gilchrist started to disassemble a crossbow to clean it.

  “That's it?”

  “Yep.”

  “What about silver?”

  He snorted. “We chasing a werewolf?”

  “No. Wait, are they real?”

  “Silver is not toxic to vampires.”

  “And garlic?”

  “It's unpleasant,” Gilchrist said, glancing over his shoulder at me. “But I would find you unpleasant, too, if you ate a clove of garlic-- not that I don't already find you unpleasant, mind you. It permeates the blood. The odor gets back into your lungs through the bloodstream, giving you terrible breath. As a vampire has a heightened sense of taste and smell, being really, really full of garlic will make you taste unpleasant to most vampires.”

  “That's it?”

  “That's it. You know, in Islamic tradition, as Satan le
ft paradise, garlic sprang up under his left footprint, and an onion under his right?”

  “And where does that leave shallots?” I asked.

  Gilchrist laughed. “Get some coffee and shower. We have to talk strategy before nightfall. You may not like it.”

  I went into the bathroom. I set my change of clothes down on the lid of the toilet and cranked up the shower. While I waited for it to heat up, I stripped down and stood in the mirror. I had always had good luck with my fair skin as far as acne and blemishes went. I never had to fight too hard to zap more than the occasional pimple. Now I stood, staring at my fair skin, my slender neck, and the white bandage taped over it. How bad was the wound underneath?

  Slowly I peeled back the tape. I looked away from the mirror as I tossed the gauze patch into the tiny hotel trash can. I counted back from three and looked in the mirror. The dark red puncture wounds from his fangs were far cleaner than I had expected. It was the bruising around the site that shocked me. Half of my visible neck was black and blue.

  He could have killed me two nights ago. If Cody hadn't been there, he would have. And what had I given Cody except a broken heart and a busted truck? No wonder he was so angry with me.

  I stepped into the shower. It was scalding, but I didn't turn it down. The memory of Rawdon's cold hand clamped over my mouth, and the even more disturbing memory of his cold body against mine, made the painful heat of the water welcome. My feet were bright red, but I imagined that it was cleansing my soul.

  I stayed under the hot water for a long time. When I finally emerged, Gilchrist was refilling the fuel in the generator. “There are more bandages in the outside pouch of the bag under the desk,” he said. “Be careful not to knock anything on the desk over, though.”

  “Why are we using a generator?” I asked.

  “In case Hale cuts power to the hotel.”

  “Oh. That's smart.”

  “I've been doing this a while.”

  I unzipped the pouch he had directed me to and found a full-blown first aid kit inside. I used the mirror by the minibar to see what I was doing as I put antibiotic ointment on the bite and bandaged over it.

 

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