Annie of the Undead

by Varian Wolf

  “Ah.”

  “It really freaked them out.”

  “Of all the rotten luck.”

  “Yeah. Does that piss you off –that I was with people?”

  “Friends.”

  “Okay, friends.”

  “No. Enjoy them.”

  “I’m not saying that I will –they’re nuts –they almost got me arrested, but thanks. Now, I want to know –I won’t ask you much, but I want to know a couple of things.”

  “Ask.”

  “I hate people right now. You know that. They piss me off, but right now they’re not special to me. Being with you has been like vacation. I’ve been pretending they don’t matter. They’re almost fun. But if I become a vampire…”

  “If?”

  “If. They’re suddenly going to matter. They’ll be everything, won’t they?”

  “Not everything, but the biggest thing. Imagine not having eaten in a long time, and everyone around you is made of fried chicken.”

  “I’m made of fried chicken to you? Freakin’ hell. I would have killed me already.”

  “Alas, the matter is not simple. Each immortal views mortals in his own way. Andy does not kill…”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “Rarely. He keeps an escort, companions from whom he feeds. That is how I remember him. I do not suspect he has changed.”

  “That lying ass!”

  “He does maintain a severe façade.”

  “I know you don’t do that.”

  “No.”

  “No… So, you have a choice.”

  “I will not delude you,” he said very seriously. “Your hunger for blood will be greedy –at times overwhelming, but I can teach you how to manage it. Whether or not you choose to emulate me will be your own choice.”

  “Okay, one more question. All this stuff that you’re not telling me, like about witches, for instance –all this insane stuff that I can feel, but you’re not telling me, will you tell me about it after?”

  “The disparity in our knowledge is no small measure, but I will share mine with you over time.”

  “Great, and you’re going to start with what Andy was about to say at the café –you know, when he was testing you to see if you would let me hear the big bad secret –the M-word? So he could see how much you cared about me, but you bit his head off, and he got his answer?”

  Miguel sat very still, unanswering. I was used to him sitting very still, but the unanswering thing was new and annoying. I felt his grip on my hand tighten.

  “You are clever,” he said, “I will endeavor not to underestimate you.”

  “Good. Answer the damn question.”

  “Yes, Naranja,” he said with a smile in the dark, “That is the very first thing I will tell you.”

  “Deal.”

  I let go his hand and lay down on the bed.

  “Now, I’m worn out, and I’m going to sleep, so if you’re going to sit around in here all night, do it quietly.”

  “Sleep, Naranja. I would not disturb your dreams for all the blood in China.”

  “Now you’re just being silly. Of course you would.”

  But he did let me sleep, and I did not recall my dreams.

  I awoke in the morning to find him gone, his daytime protector now obsolete with the new blood in his veins. But he had left on the bedside table an envelope, upon which was written, “Mi Naranja de Sangre”. Inside it I found a crystal bound with silver and strung from a leather cord. At its heart was a single dark blue spot, trapped like an insect in amber. Such a tiny little thing it was –barely a drop of stolen immortal blood, and it had caused so much trouble.

  What had been stolen from him he had taken back and now given to me. I clutched the token to my breast, accepting this trophy of the hunt in the spirit with which it was given.

  Perhaps we were both monsters.

  About midafternoon, the cell phone Miguel had gotten me rang. I had already been out, been roughed up and given some back in kind at the gym, and run seven miles before returning to the Grove to take a quick break and lay into some crunches. It was Yoki on the other end of the line. I had forgotten I had given her my number at the Gay Hippies practice. Why had I done that?

  As usual, she was speaking in hyper-drive.

  “You want to go out for lupper?”

  “What in hell is lupper?”

  “Lunch/supper. It’s like brunch in the afternoon.”

  “You miss lunch?”

  “No, I just always eat.”

  “I get that.”

  “Right, well, I was hoping to have a word you. Can I meet you somewhere?”

  “You know you complicate my life, right?”

  “What a treat. I usually only complicate men’s lives.”

  “Well congratulations on breaking the mold.”

  “Come on now. I need to speak with you. It’s rather urgent.”

  “Is it about last night?”

  “Not strictly speaking.”

  “Good.”

  “Will you come?”

  “Aww…sure. I could eat.”

  “Capital. Do you know The Chow House?”

  “No.”

  “It’s an eatery. Have you something to write with? Here’s the address…”

  She ran through it so fast I had to have her repeat herself three times, but I got it down.

  “I’m not familiar with that street.”

  She gave me directions. It seemed like it must be halfway across town.

  “Why the hell we eating all the way out there?”

  “They have Po Boys.”

  Another inscrutable term from the Brit.

  “That anything like a tea cozy?”

  “Not remotely. It’s a sandwich the size of your face.”

  “Fine.”

  I hit the “end” button before she could prattle on any more. She could prattle as long as she didn’t do it in my ear.

  I showered and dressed. Then I got in the spaceship and drove. It is extremely weird driving a spaceship, a thing that should be hurtling through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. You are constantly telling yourself to slow down, that you do not need police attention, to not be tempted by that next gear…

  Yoki had sent me halfway across town, but she hadn’t warned me she was sending me into another world. I rolled over a bridge and suddenly found myself in a place that looked worse than my old turf in Detroit. This was one of the places that Lucas had warned me about, one of the places we had all seen on the news after the storm, and it looked just as bad to me as it had then, except the water was gone, leaving a telling high-water stain at the same height on every house. Trees were dead. Abandoned houses stood dark, empty, and crumbling under the hot sun. Others had been bulldozed, put out of their misery. Spray-painted search codes still marked houses with big Xs and the letters and numbers that signified what horrors had or had not been found inside. Rusted-out cars still sat in driveways. Blue FEMA tarps lay wadded in side yards.

  In a few places I saw a house and yard that looked pretty cleaned up, with a working car parked in the driveway. Those houses had seen their owners return. The rest were only filled with ghosts. There wasn’t a person or dog or bird or anything moving in sight. It was like the place had been dusted with fallout. It was post-apocalyptic.

  At least there were fewer people around who might want to steal a McLaren.

  I found The Chow House. It was a little white-washed, cinderblock hole in the wall. The sign out front looked new, as did the white paint that covered the stains from the waterline from those fateful days in August of 2005, when Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi had come for Lupper and turned into the unwanted guests who just wouldn’t leave. The sign above the door stated the establishment’s name and depicted a big pink pig wearing a chef’s hat and an apron and stuffing an enormous Frankenstein of a sandwich down its face.

  The little restaurant stood at the edge of the neighborhood. I say it was at the edge because on its other side l
ay a vast wasteland of dirt surrounded by a chain link fence. Earth moving machines roamed the empty plain, grading and shoving and scooping the troubled soil at this end into new and unnatural topography. Farther out on the field I could see more machines working little piles of rubble that were the corpses of shotgun houses that had been bulldozed by man or storm or both. A big sign on stakes at the edge of the property read, “Ingress Development Corp”. A smaller sign next to it read, “East End Country Club – Premier Private Community – Golf Course – Tennis – Pool – Coming Soon.”

  Muttering and cursing to no one in particular, I pulled into the little parking lot wedged between the Chow House and the fenced tract that had once been part of this shrinking neighborhood.

  There were four cars pulled up to the place –probably all the residents for blocks around. I parked the coupe where I thought I’d be able to see it from inside the establishment, which happened to be beside a teeny blue Volkswagen Beetle with about a hundred versions of the British flag stuck all over it, plus one of those little plastic affiliation fish, this one with a fang descending from its pointed little face and “VAMPIRE” written on its belly. I wonder whose car that might be.

  I’d hardly gotten out of the car, when the now ectoplasmic-green-haired Yoki, Jesus in arm, was suddenly standing in the front door with the kind of look you’d expect to see on her face if it started raining men, and she’d died of joy, mouth hanging open and pupils fixed and dilated.

  She gasped. “That is not your car.”

  “It’s sort of on loan.”

  “Who’s car is that?”

  There were other people staring through the windows.

  “A friend who owes me.”

  “What does he owe you, his life?”

  Unlife. “Better.”

  I passed her and went inside where the five customers and two people behind the counter were split equally between staring at me and staring at the spaceship that I had just landed in their cracked little parking lot.

  “Aha! It is a he! Annie has a boyfriend after all!”

  “What? Like it matters.”

  “Well, the Hippies were all certain you were gay, but I told them that you couldn’t be, because I was in the shower with you, and in my bedroom, and you never once made a pass at me, which any self-respecting lesbian would have done –even some straight girls have. So I knew you must be straight as a ruler. I bet ten dollars on it.”

  “What? When was this?”

  We sat down at a cramped booth by the window. The fortyish woman with a ponytail, who moved like she’d been a server since about the time she could walk, came out from behind the counter with two menus. She wore a T-shirt with the pig logo and all caps that read, “CHOW DOWN.”

  “Last night, in the cab.”

  “You were making,” I stopped, glared up at the woman until she retreated, then continued in a low growl, “You were making bets about my sexual orientation after what you saw last night?”

  Jesus growled back.

  “Well, I couldn’t very well let them all go to bed thinking about corpses in the park, could I?” she said in her usual loud voice.

  “No man loans a car like that to a woman he isn’t sleeping with. She’s straight all right,” said one of the diners, a potbellied man in a white T-shirt and ragged overalls splattered with white paint.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” said the even more potbellied man behind the counter, red handkerchief stuffed into his shirt pocket, greasy stains on once-white apron, toothpick hanging out of mouth. There was no air conditioning in here, only an oscillating fan on the counter and a big floor fan by the door; the man was covered in beads of sweat.

  Yoki threw up her hands in victory.

  “Thirty dollars!”

  Apparently private conversations included everybody in earshot in a place like this. I guess it figured, small as the place was. I could hear the fat guy’s breathing over there, and the old woman across the way complaining about how her power bill had tripled in the last four years.

  “Can I get some food over here?” I growled.

  “Long as you tip good,” said the wide, sweaty man. He picked up the tip jar and plunked it down on the counter where I could easily reach it.

  I looked at Yoki. She shrugged.

  “People here need our business,” she said. “That’s why I brought us here.”

  “I thought you came out for the Po Boys.”

  “Oh, you can get those anywhere, but they don’t need customers the way this neighborhood does. If we don’t come out here, they’ll have to close.”

  I stared at her, contemplating homicide. I looked at the man in the greasy apron. He chewed his toothpick.

  “God damned highway fucking robbery. Lying, sneaking philanthropic British tart. Regular Robin fucking Hood…”

  I got up, digging into my pocket. I thumped a five out of the roll of cash Miguel had given me and stuffed it in the jar. I eyed the man. He eyed me. Then his eyes shifted back to the jar.

  “Last god damned time I eat here. I’d rather eat at shit-sucking Badd Burger…”

  I stuffed a ten into the jar. The man put his hand over it, slid it back across the counter, then said casually over his toothpick, “Mind your phraseology.”

  “What’ll you have?” asked the waitress back at our booth.

  I stared at the menu, intrigued by the words “breakfast all day” in the sea of deep-fried this, greasy that, slathered that other thing, and pure fat bathed in high fructose corn syrup. Breakfast tends to be safer.

  “A double with everything, and heaps of onions, and chips. And cherry soda.” Said Yoki. Apparently the grease-syrup sea was her home territory. “A plain hamburger patty for Jesus.”

  The waitress (no name tag) scribbled on her pad, turned to me.

  “Eight eggs –I don’t care how they’re cooked, no yolks; two slices whole wheat toast, no butter; and a house salad, no croutons, no dressing; and lotsa cold water…What?” I said due to Yoki’s look, “Mine’ll be easier to make than yours.”

  “Whatever,” the waitress sighed and turned away. She handed the paper to the big man, who got to work cooking.

  “You eat like an alien,” Yoki accused.

  “I drive a damned spaceship.”

  “Right. Let’s talk about that…”

  “Let’s not.”

  “So when am I going to meet this filthy rich man of yours?”

  “Not soon.”

  “Oh, come now. He must be dying to meet me if you’ve told him about me –if you’ve told him the truth, that is. I could take you both on a ghost tour.”

  “He’s a pretty busy guy. He’s got an old business associate in town…”

  “Nonsense. You must introduce me. You can’t keep a catch like that locked away from the world.”

  “The hell I can’t.”

  “So you don’t want us to meet?”

  “You’re the one who said you’re a professional at stealing people’s boyfriends. ‘Irresistible’, I’m pretty sure you said…”

  “Oh, posh, Annie. That’s not why you’re hiding him. I can read you better than that.”

  “Can you?”

  “Of course. I’m Yoki Hayashi. What is it about this man? Is he a criminal? A drug lord?”

  “Hell no. Wasn’t there something else you wanted to talk about?”

  “It can wait. This is much more important. I cannot go on without knowing what sort of a man could ever bag you.”

  “It didn’t work like that.”

  “Ooh!” she squeaked. “Tell me the story!”

  At that moment, the chow arrived, and Yoki’s –not to mention Jesus’s, attention was diverted by the ten pounds of onion-barbecue-sauce-sauerkraut-meat-pickle-stuffed-white-bun insanity that was set before her. She lifted the monster and held it in front of her mouth for a moment in awe before filling her face with the most enormous bite she could muster. She immediately started making the kinds of noises women only make in porno
s.

  Jesus Christ dug into the hamburger patty like it was the Last Supper –uh, Lupper.

  My egg whites were all neatly arranged, my plain toast and salad in order as I had requested. Nothing spectacular. I put fork to food and took a bite…

  …And, shittin’ kittens, if it wasn’t the very best egg and toast I had ever, ever tasted. It was flavorful, succulent, incredible.

  When I got over the initial shock and orgasmia, I groaned in rapture, “Sweet black Jesus.”

  After five more bites, I got up, went over to the counter, took custody of the tip jar, and stuffed a twenty down its throat. The big cook grinned at me knowingly. Then I went back and sat down to get the rest of my food before the gluttonous Jesus Christ could.

  As I downed my eggs I thought how, when I was dead, I really was going to miss my food.

  “So he’s a high-rolling poker player,” said Yoki between bites, back on her previous line of inquiry.

  I chewed my toast.

  “A tyrannical CEO.”

  I drank my water.

  “A cutthroat hedge fund investor.”

  I started on my salad.

  “A secret government contractor.”

  It was a good salad.

  “Ooh, he works for Halliburton –or Blackwater.”

  Munch. Munch.

  “Why aren’t you answering?”

  “Because I’m not having this conversation.”

  People were staring at us. A man who had come in after I did seemed especially intrigued. How could he not be, especially with things being said like what Yoki was just about to say.

  “But I’ll tell you everything about every man, boy, or geriatric I’ve ever boffed. I tell you how much money they made, how good they were in bed, what piercings they had, how big their lads were and what they named them… I don’t have any secrets.”

  No, apparently, you don’t.

  “What are you hiding? I know it’s something mysterious. Something very…dangerous. Something…a secret agent? An assassin? A sponsor of terrorists?”

  “Would a sponsor of terrorists waste money on a McLaren?”

  “Of course. Do you have any idea how much money those rich ringleaders spend on themselves? Ooh! A mafia don!”

  Even she didn’t seem satisfied with that answer.

  “Something very unique…a cult leader…a voodoo king…Oh, I know,” she chirped summarily through her last bite of Po Boy. I couldn’t imagine how it had all fit into that teeny body. She picked up her napkin for the first time.