Annie of the Undead

by Varian Wolf

  “Don’t want a run in…I’ll call the cops on him!” Hector declared.

  “No you won’t,” Jonathon chided. “Don’t you dare get Stanley into trouble. He’s a good neighbor. He’s not hurting anyone. They’d lock him up for sure. You know how hard the city’s gotten on people like him.”

  “And people like us,” Lucas added cheerlessly as they reached the stairs.

  “Screw the city,” grumbled Hector in a Texan drawl. He went on, “I don’t even want to live here anymore. City’s ruined. Neighbors are gone. We’re almost gone too. Goddamn Renewal Union can kiss my ass. Goddamn shakedown…”

  Hector suddenly stopped bitching mid-bitch, for Miguel had knelt down beside him with vampire grace and gently slipped the errant flip-flop onto Hector’s bare foot.

  “Your slipper, my lady?” Miguel said sweetly.

  “Oh…gosh,” said Hector, Miguel’s presence dawning on him for the first time with breathtaking effect. His imperative frustration was immediately forgotten.

  “You see, Hector? Now that’s manners!” said Jonathon.

  Lucas looked to Miguel appreciatively and patted Hector on the back, “There you go, Cinderella. All better? Now you see, everyone should be nice to each other.”

  So Miguel’s foretold opportunity had presented itself. He had won over the natives. I wanted to puke from all the saccharin –but not before I beat some sense into my vampire.

  “Lucas,” Jonathon said as though he was about to give him a new car, “This is Manuel and Annie. They’re going to stay with us. Isn’t it great? What rooms do we have open?”

  Finally, down to the heart of the matter. If I had to listen to this big gay porch party any longer I was going to start screaming and running down the street with all kinds of things flying in the breeze too. Man, I couldn’t wait to get whip this soft body into shape. I could run outside down here and not freeze parts off.

  “Oh, we’ve got at least three open right now. We’ve got the big one in front –that has access to the upper balcony and an attached bathroom –and a king-sized bed,” Lucas told us brightly, “and we’ve got the one at the top of the stairs; it’s a bit bigger, but it’s bathroom is just a step across the hall. This is a restored house with all the original rooms left intact, so they’re kind of all over the place…”

  “Do you have a room available across the courtyard?” Miguel asked.

  “We do, but they’re smaller than the rooms in the main house. Those are the slave’s quarters,” Lucas said with a thrill in his voice. “But they all have windows and queen-sized beds. They’re connected to the main house by an outdoor staircase, and there’s a hot tub in the courtyard you can use…”

  “The slave’s quarters sound ideal,” Miguel said.

  “How could we stay in New Orleans and not stay in the slave’s quarters?” I added, realizing the appeal that a privately situated room opening directly to the courtyard must have to a vampire.

  “Well, come on then, kiddies,” Lucas said to everyone, helping Hector up from the wicker chair in which he had plunked down. “Don’t want to be loitering out here in the dark where the werewolf can get us.”

  “Werewolf?”

  I looked at Miguel. He didn’t seem interested.

  “Oh, you haven’t heard? The state has its own serial killer now, on top of everything else. He rips people’s throats out. He’s killed at least eight people since the hurricane –that we know about. They call him the Louisiana Werewolf…”

  “Come on, Jonnie Boy,” sighed Lucas. “Are you trying to scare away our new guests before they even get checked in? Next you’ll be telling them we have the ghost of a confederate soldier pacing the halls. Here,” he presented the larger man with the scissors he had confiscated from Hector. “You can finish giving our little brat prince here a haircut while I get our guests checked in. Drinks anyone?”

  Our hosts clearly would have loved to keep us up until dawn, extolling the virtues of their beloved city, flirting with Miguel, and getting me drunk. I did consent to drinking some vodka-rich fruity concoction before bed, because the trio were horrified that I had never been to the south or gotten drunk in it. They assured me that I hadn’t lived, and I silently agreed with them, though I seriously doubted they were up to the task of rectifying that situation.

  I noticed how Miguel politely accepted a drink and then proceeded to look like he was drinking it without ever making the level go down. Guess vampires don’t do the human stuff at all.

  After what seemed like days, decades, of gay New Orleans gaiety, Lucas led us to the slave’s quarters and our over-cordial hosts let the “lovebirds” be.

  Our room was on the third floor above the courtyard, the most remote and obscure room in what turned out to be quite a sizeable complex, a main house and a rear house connected by a roofed, outdoor staircase that overlooked a cozy, dimly lit courtyard garden. Ours was the only serviceable room on the third floor; the rest had not yet been renovated and at present remained locked. No one ought to be on our floor except us.

  The room was small and oddly shaped, but as lavishly and traditionally furnished as the rest of the house, with heavy, flowered draperies (good for blocking sunlight), a fourteen-foot ceiling, a shiny, well-worn wood floor, and a pleasant painting of what I would learn was a bayou in an ornate frame above the headboard of the bed.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked as we plunked down our belongings –I’d have to sneak that shotgun in later, during the day, when everyone was asleep.

  “Now, I hunt.”

  “Oooo. Can I come?”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “Begging does not become you.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it is the most dangerous thing that I do. I must be swift, silent, and undetected. You are mortal.”

  “What if the Louisiana Werewolf attacks you? You’ll need backup-“

  He looked at me.

  “Well, there are vampires, aren’t there? How am I supposed to know that werewolves are made up?”

  I could see that line of argument was getting me nowhere. I kicked the dresser. After everything we’d been through…

  “Come with me,” he consoled, “I want to speak with you.”

  “What, we aren’t right now?”

  “Not here. Come out with me, into the city. There we will talk.”

  It was a warm night, which mystified me after having nearly frozen myself to death only a few days before. The tropic weight pants and workout shirts I’d purchased were going to be very useful here. And with the balm, so were the cornrows.

  We went into the city, into the neighborhood that I would come to know was Faubourg Marigny, with its quiet residential streets lined with quaint architecture, lumpy old trees, and the more than occasional oddity of some object or other bizarrely repurposed, such as a toilet filled with soil and overflowing with flowers in a front yard. We wandered down Frenchman Street, through the crowds of a healthy nightlife and what I considered excessively happy people. Live music issued forth from various doorways, and people gathered outside in the heat where there wasn’t room enough to swelter with the rest of the crowd indoors.

  We went to the French Quarter, where the buildings crowded in on one another, forming a seemingly endless façade along each side of the street. Vines knotted through iron fences, and trees dripped with what beads a few years of Mardi Gras could replenish since the hurricane tore a century’s worth down. We passed immaculate Spanish townhouses with bright paint and clean-swept porches decorated with neatly-pruned potted plants, and their seedy next-door neighbors with broken Venetian blinds drawn, an equally seedy-looking guy lurking in the shadows of the front porch of one, smoking a joint as advertisement to his nighttime clients. The old was mixed with the new here, the high and the lowlife, inextricably intertwined –so different from Detroit, where the wealthy had fled the city for the green grass of the suburbs.

  We wandered from the residential part of
the French Quarter to where business was entertainment, and entertainment was business. Light spilled from lovely windows, backlighting fine artwork for sale, gaudy tourist trinkets, mood-lighted restaurants, and bars galore. “Good Mister Goodwin” posters dotted signposts, doors, and walls. The streets smelled of savory spices and cooking food everywhere but where they smelled of strong libation spilled outside bars or garbage accumulating with nowhere to go. The French Quarter smelled like a medieval city, not like a city built on internal combustion engines, their fuel, and its exhaust.

  We passed busy restaurants, emanating all savory smells, and the Place de France, where a golden statue of Joan of Arc cut a valiant figure in the spotlights, little worse for the wear for having been murdered by power-jealous zealots. We passed Jackson Square, a broad park dotted with huge, gnarled trees and loitering bums, and lit by streetlamps that harkened to antiquity. A life-sized statue of the man on his horse stood on a block at its center, illuminated to striking effect –as backdrop: the pale spires of the St. Louis Cathedral reaching up to god. Miguel scanned the scene with his eyes. I had the feeling, though, that he was more interested in the people than the park.

  We walked along the hulking darkness that was the river, with the lights of boats dotting its expanse, moving north to colder climes or south to the sea. We walked slowly, easily –Miguel’s pace. He was immortal, after all. Time was not an enemy. He seemed to wander without any purpose other than soaking in all about him. I could imagine that he knew another sensory world than I did, the way he gazed around, above and beyond everyone, everything, but still so very much enveloped in it all, the way his head turned to follow the interwoven threads of music played by so many musicians on so many street corners and in so many bars. He seemed utterly in this moment. Was this the way he wandered the world? Experiencing. Living. More than I ever had. What an irony.

  We walked out among the people, which made me keenly aware of the undead man who walked by my side. I was the only one anywhere with such an escort, a superhuman who could leap who knew how high in the air, and who could subdue strong and vital prey. Of that, though I had not witnessed it, I had no doubt he was capable. It was a strange feeling being in this unfamiliar place with him. It was so far from anything I had known. It was out-of-body. Did I even have to be tough with him beside me? I didn’t know how to be anything else.

  “This is one of the best places on this continent,” said Miguel as we walked by a cart drawn by a mule dressed in a hat with silk flowers all over it. “For my people.”

  “You’ve been here before, I take it.”

  “Yes. It is a favorite of the one for whom we wait.”

  “Your friend.”

  “Yes. His name is Andy. We were lovers.”

  “Oh.”

  “I am no longer homosexually inclined.”

  He paused as a young woman in a long, cotton dress brushed past him. His lips slightly parted as though he was testing her scent. A fleeting look of pleasure passed his face.

  “Really,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought you’re born gay or born hetero, and you stay that way.”

  “Perhaps it is so with mortals, but I have changed. I am no longer sexually inclined at all.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised, “Because you’re dead?”

  We wandered up to a brick-paved plaza patterned in red, white, and blue, with a majestic fountain at the center and encircled by stone benches. The Mississippi lapped and hummed only forty or so feet away. A quaint but large white ferry boat lay sleeping along the shore. Opposite the river, in stark contrast to the architecture I had so far seen, towered a sky-scraping modern hotel. Upriver was the shiny hulk of a modern shopping mall. Its glitzy maw belched young people, dressed in their newly-purchased clubbing best for a night on the town. Girls in tube-tops, painted-on jeans, and daring heels. They gabbed and gazed about, observing each other. They too were clean, shiny, and modern.

  “With death the drive to copulate is lost. Some lose their sexual interests completely upon becoming immortal. For others, the special fascination with the trappings of reproduction, or with a particular gender or other fetish, lingers on. My love for Andy was somewhat associated with sexuality in the beginning. Later that aspect of our relationship died in me. It did not, however, die in him.”

  “Are we really talking about this in public?”

  “No one is listening.”

  “Miguel, why are you telling me all of this?”

  “You will likely meet Andy if he comes to me. I seek to prepare you.”

  “Prepare me?”

  “Our good relationship does not guarantee you two will interact civilly. In fact, I doubt events will happen that way.”

  “What, your ex is gonna hate my guts?”

  “In essence.”

  “Miguel, why is he gonna hate my guts?”

  I glared at a pair of tall, hot shopping chicks, all dolled-up for imminent clubbing, meandered dangerously near to Miguel, making googoo eyes. I jealously took his arm.

  “Miguel?”

  “He will be resentful of what you mean to me. He was not prepared to let me go when I brought our attachment to a close.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Not long enough.”

  The girls were still there giggling. Did I really look like such easy prey? I gave them my most ferocious look, but it only seemed to amuse them more. I just wasn’t pretty enough to intimidate them.

  So how could I intimidate a vampire?

  “Miguel, that’s crazy. I’m just a chick. You and he are…more. How on earth could he let me bother him?”

  “Because of how I care for you.”

  “And exactly how’s that?”

  I took my eyes off the little vamps in order to give him the hairy eyeball. He seemed like he needed help saying something.

  “What, Miguel? Your killing me. Out with it, damn it.”

  The vampire’s eyes scanned the flow of people with a manner of long practice as he spoke. “Annie, I have been very long in this world. I have trod the soil of more nations than now exist, and I have heard the attributes of the human spirit sung in a thousand languages. I have seen you people in every context.”

  “Hey, you gotta be careful how you use ‘you people.’”

  He went on, unperturbed by my interruption. “I know every variety of you: nobles and beggars, lepers, kings. You fall into taxonomy. I can categorize you almost in seconds, often before you open your mouths to speak your beloved words. I know you far better than you know yourselves. And in all this I find that, though you think yourselves exceptional, you are very alike one to another.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  Miguel turned to face me, his weird eyes penetrating. “But not you, Annie. In my long night no one has ever done for me what you did in that room. You cannot know the fate you saved me from, or the peril you risked yourself. You proved yourself in that moment.” He smiled down at me. “though even before it came I had identified what you are.”

  “And what am I?” I asked narrowly

  The breeze blew spray from the fountain our way, bringing a surprising chill to my bare arms on such a wickedly hot night.

  “You are the one kind of person among millions with whom I would willingly share this life I know. A fire burns in you that even I cannot ignore,” his tone had grown intense, and as he spoke he looked at neither party girls nor strolling couples nor any passersby. That intensity was focused all on me, “I cannot allow you to pass me by, to become merely another face in the endless ocean of my memory, gone but for your residence there –I must not. You must understand how it would gnaw at me, as events only can upon my kind –we who cannot forget even the smallest of things. I refuse to condemn you to that fate, and I refuse to condemn myself.”

  “Oh shit, Miguel. Are you about to…Oh, shit.”

  “Annie,” he said, taking my hand. “I want you to join me in eternity.”

  It did
n’t sound like an offer. It didn’t sound like the vampire was asking me anything, but requiring it of me. But it didn’t matter, not to me and not then, maybe because of some New Orleans hoodoo, or the southern balm, or those irritating girls edging so near. Maybe I would have felt differently if the vampire had not come upon me when he did, snatching me from my life on a night when it was reduced to only a .45 and a heart as cold as the northern October air. Perhaps if every moment of every day of my life had not been a kind of steel-edged pain, I would not have responded the way I did that night in the spray of the fountain and with the ships of the Mississippi groaning by. But things are only what they are.

  “Hey,” I said. “Why the hell not?”

  Some kind of tension fractured within him. A smile broke across his face, and he drew me to him, passing his mouth over my neck, so close. I shivered from the top of my cornrows to the tips of my toes. He lingered there, inhaling, and I felt his hands clench, but he did not touch me. He drew me back just enough to look into my eyes. The depths of his nearly drowned me.

  He exhaled slowly, utterly in control, and I could see his teeth.

  I had a pressing matter to address.

  “Did you see that?” I said to the girls who stood by, lurking. “He eats cunts like you for breakfast, but me? Me he won’t even touch without permission. How ‘bout them apples?”

  When I looked at Miguel again, he was looking at the heavens, as though imploring them for help.

  “You’ll get used to me,” I said.

  Then I stood on tiptoe and locked lips hard with my vampire, treating all spectators to the most scandalous show I could muster on such short notice. People all around broke out into applause and cheers. This sure wasn’t Detroit.

  When I finally released him, he looked drunk. I had cut my tongue on his teeth, so maybe he was.

  I smiled up at him.

  “You’ll have eternity, after all.”

  6

  Breathing

  Let me tell you what it’s like to wake in old New Orleans with a vampire by your side. It is not the touch of a body beside you alone that wakes you. It is the realization in your slumber-fogged brain that the skin you have come up against is not warm as it should be, but cool as the air conditioner that cools your room. It is the realization that that man beside you is not alive, not a corpse, not explicable by the laws of nature at all.