by Clark Hays
“Come back,” Elita called, “we must go to Julius.”
I was tempted to make a run for it at that moment, but that Elita let me get this far away from her meant we were probably being watched, or else she was really fast. Either way, my chances now were not good. Better to wait for something more promising, I thought. They might be crazy, but I didn’t think they’d actually kill me. At least not yet.
“All right,” I said, letting my reporter instincts take over, “let’s go have a drink with your little God Julius.”
He was waiting in the parlor, sitting in a leather armchair with old-fashioned reading glasses perched on his nose and staring intently at a book. He looked up and smiled as we entered.
“Time may have dulled my eyes a bit, but I can still see that before me are the two most exquisite creatures in the world,” he said, standing.
I looked around the room. There was another door on the opposite wall, a way out.
“You cannot escape,” Julius said.
“Could we just cut to the chase?” I said. “Why did you bring me here? You won’t get away with it. The police are already looking for you, and by this time, for me.”
He gestured dismissively. “Lizzie, my dearest, these matters are no more to us than the buzz of an annoying mosquito. Hasn’t the demise of your photographer and the cowboy convinced you of this yet?”
My heart stopped. Literally. It was dead in my chest and the room swam. Then it skipped and stuttered, barely starting up again before I was able to mutter in response. “Tucker is dead?”
I looked quickly at Elita, the bitch, why had she lied? Elita stared stonily ahead, avoiding my eyes.
Julius interrupted my hatred. “Please. This is not how I want our first conversation to begin. This is all in the past now. Your new life is just beginning. May I offer you a drink?”
“No.”
“Very well. Please. Sit.” He motioned to the stool at the base of his chair. I sat, feeling tired and defeated. Elita moved to the fireplace, warming her hands.
“There is much I need to tell you, my child, so much history, for you to understand who you are and why you will be our queen, my queen, and why together we will see the unseating of twenty centuries of Adamite rule.”
What an insipid old fool. Julius held up his hand and looked sternly at me. I couldn’t help it, my gaze hit the floor, his look was too intense, too difficult to master, like at the gallery when I had such a physical reaction to him. But my anger was building, a rage that began to completely replace my fear of this situation. Soon, somehow, I would lay waste to his little kingdom and all that inhabited it. The fool spoke and his words wormed their way into my mind.
“Let me begin with your beginnings. Seventeen centuries ago, in a very different place, your ancestors were promised to me. I have not yet chosen to claim what is rightfully mine, but intend to do so now.”
SIXTEEN
I knew my request was really putting Lenny under the gun, but I also knew if anybody could help me in my quest to kill as many damn vampires as it took to get Lizzie back, it was him.
“June,” he said, “you’d better bring dinner to the shop. C’mon, Tucker.”
The shop was where Lenny did his creating. Near as I could tell, he had a machine for everything except splitting atoms — not that I’d know what one of them looked like anyway. He opened a fridge that had been a water heater in a previous life. It was icy on the inside and stocked with cans of beer, candy bars and some vials of amber liquid I decided not to ask about. He popped two beers and handed me one. Between the horse medicine and the caffeine, my brain was in no condition for alcohol, but I started in on it anyway.
“The first thing we got to figure out is what killed that old boy. Fire or wood? Or was it the combination of the two?”
“Everybody knows wood kills them. You know, a stake through the heart,” I said. “Least that’s what Doc Near told me this morning.”
“I wouldn’t take nothing he says too seriously,” Lenny said, taking a pull of his beer.
“Why not?” I asked.
He spread some recycled paper out across the table. “Because he’s a government agent.”
I pulled a stool up and dusted it off. “Doc Near is a government agent? I can’t hardly believe that,” I said.
“Believe it. It’s too obvious. I don’t know why you ain’t already figured it out. Anyway, we got to get to work here.” He pulled out a worn-down nub of a grease pencil and sketched out a stick figure of a vampire with oversized fangs, labeling it Dracula. Across the page he sketched out a rough image of a cowboy which, despite the lack of handsome distinguishing features, I assumed was me.
“We’ve got to figure out how to get fire and wood from here,” he underlined me, “to here,” he underlined Dracula, “without you getting close enough for them to get their fangs into you.” Just for emphasis, he circled the fangs a couple of times.
“Yep,” I said, “that sounds like exactly what we got to figure out.”
His eyes started to glaze over and I grabbed my beer and wandered off because I could see he was getting himself all worked up into one of those foamy creative states of mind.
The creative process has always been a mystery to me. Watching Lenny struggle with the technical muse must have been what it was like watching Michelangelo just before he painted the Sistine Chapel. I’ve painted my share of ceilings, but they were pretty small and generally of one color. Michelangelo painted a big old church with all kinds of little pictures. I reckon the difference between us, other than I can’t paint little pictures whatsoever, is agony. Artists have to agonize. Creation springs from it. They have to torture themselves before they can work up enough interest and motivation to undertake such an endeavor. If they weren’t in agony, if they was just working at any old job and laughing and goofing around, they wouldn’t be artists. I suppose that’s what separates them from the rest of us folk. They don’t mind subjecting themselves to the tortured state from which they can sit down and write War and Peace or paint the Sistine Chapel, whereas most of us would just as soon take a nap or go have a beer.
Inconspicuous as possible, I watched Lenny. He drew stuff and talked to himself. He flipped through books and laughed at jokes in his head. He held his knees and rocked back and forth like a child. I kept drinking beer and stacking up the empties until his eyes sort of cleared. “Come back later,” he said. “I got some ideas.”
By the time I got back to Dad’s, it was getting on toward dark. The sun was setting over the mountains and staining the clouds bunched up there, so I sat in the truck for a few minutes trying to memorize the beauty.
Dad came out on the porch and waved me in. He set out a pot of beans he’d cooked up with a ham bone, along with some fried potatoes, corn tortillas, fresh tomatoes cut up and a couple of deviled eggs from the Widow Johnson.
We didn’t say much and I could tell he was troubled of mind. “I still think I should go with you, Tucker.”
“Nope. I want you here. If Lizzie comes back, you’ve got to take care of her until I can get home. I’ll give you a call every couple of days to check in. Can I borrow your Casull?”
He looked at his prize pistol in its holster hanging from the back of a chair. “What am I supposed to do if they come back for me?” he said.
“Give ’em some of these deviled eggs, I reckon.”
He sighed and slumped down in his chair. “I hope Lizzie’s okay,” he said.
“Me too. Let me help you with the dishes.”
Afterward he turned on the TV so he could read and I gnawed off some more of that horse painkiller. Pretty soon it had me nodding and I curled up on the couch, letting my mind wander unchecked until it settled on Lizzie. It felt like I was somehow spanning the distance from LonePine to New York with just my thoughts. She was the focusing point, like my love and concern were the sun shining through a giant magnifying glass and reflecting down into one tiny, burning, hopeful point. I tried to expand it,
to make it real, but a terrible darkness stole over the sun like a wet blanket.
Something tugged hard at my heart and waves of sorrow and despair washed over me like a rock had been thrown into hell’s pond, the ripples eventually crashing up to pull me down. Underneath it all I could see the evil, smiling face of the vampire I’d shot, his arms reaching out for me. Behind him, growing faint, Lizzie was beautiful and sorrowful and sinking away.
I awoke with a shout that startled Dad out of his chair. I checked the clock and it was just after midnight. “Let’s head back to Lenny’s, see what he’s rustled up.”
It was a quiet drive on a dark night because there ain’t much traffic around LonePine at midnight, save the occasional folks returning from late-night social events hosted by other folks whose husbands or wives work the graveyard shift.
The lights were all off in Lenny’s trailer so we idled on down to the shop. He had fallen asleep over the workbench, but the sound of the door opening roused him. His hair was tangled over his face and littered with shreds of candy-bar wrappers and metal shavings; a pyramid of beer cans surrounded him.
“Lenny, how you doing?” I asked.
He stretched, rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Damn, Tucker, you owe me one.”
He pointed at a bundle on the table. “That’s the best I could come up with on such short notice.”
He dumped out a bucket full of peculiar-looking shotgun shells and unwrapped a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. “I took apart these three-inch mag shells and replaced the buckshot with a seven-inch birch dowel. I sharpened it and reinforced the tip with silver so it won’t splinter apart when it hits one of them. Silver is supposed to be disagreeable to all things supernatural. Of course, you can only use them in a breech loader like this here. Watch this.”
He cracked it open and snuggled one of the shells into it, then put on some earplugs. “Hold your ears.”
We did and he shouldered it and took aim across the room at an easy chair against the wall. There was a roar and flash as bitter gunsmoke filled the air. The chair jerked backward as if kicked and the ragged end of a wooden dowel poked out of the fabric. “It ain’t much good over about twenty yards, but up to that it’ll shoot straight. But you can only shoot twice before you have to reload.” He tossed the shells into a canvas bag.
“These are from my own personal supply,” he said, unwrapping a box of more familiar-looking shells. “They shoot a thermite load which, in case you ain’t familiar, is magnesium-based and burns white hot at like a thousand degrees or something. I’d suggest one of each in the barrel. Stake ’em, then scorch ’em.” He dropped them in the bag, too.
“Lastly, and this I’m particularly proud of, are some homemade thermite grenades.” He laid a half dozen duct-taped balls on the table. “The engine case for a Volkswagen is pure magnesium. I ground one up and coated these fragmentation grenades with the powder and then duct-taped it all into place. Once you pull the pin and give it a toss, you got about seven seconds to duck and run before the grenade blows, the magnesium ignites and the whole mess rains down like lava. Expect about a twenty-foot kill zone and then add another forty feet to feel comfortable.”
“Goddamn,” I said, my mouth hanging open. “You scare me, Lenny.”
“Ain’t you I’m worried about,” he said.
“Any ideas on how to get them there?”
“Yeah. Remember June’s cousin Larry? He works for USExpress and owes me for something big enough to get this there overnight. I already called. You just need an address to ship to. Let me know how it works. I’ve got to go see if I’m still married, and if so, get some sleep.”
I stuck the ammo and grenades in the duffel along with the shotgun, after wrapping it up in my denim jacket, then tossed the bag in the back of the truck.
As we pulled out, Dad looked at Lenny stumbling up to the trailer. “You sure have some strange friends,” he said.
SEVENTEEN
“Although you may not believe me now, the information I am about to convey is critically important for you to understand,” Julius said. “Please try to listen. I shall start with some background to help you relate to us. You went to church as a child, yes?”
I didn’t answer, but of course I had gone to church. Mother made me go every Sunday no matter where we were, though mostly we attended the Church of the Holy Trinity. It was a habit I quickly let lapse after her death. Did he know this already? How long had they been watching me?
As if reading my thoughts, he smiled. I looked away.
“Before Adam or Eve,” he said, “God created good and evil as a means of separating the souls of the world.”
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “Can’t you tell I don’t care?” My voice no longer sounded like my own; it was hysterical, in spite of my best efforts at outward control.
Julius continued. “The bible called it separating day from night, a metaphor for separating humanity from vampires. God needed a place in which good and evil could be manifest. This was the actual purpose behind what Adamites call the Creation. It was not simply the dispersion of the seeds of humanity, but rather a cosmic circumstance separating good from evil.”
“You’re wasting your breath,” I said. “Can’t you see I don’t give a shit about your little fantasy?”
“My dear,” he said, shoulders slumping, “refrain from commenting unless it is to ask genuine questions.”
“I’ll say whatever I choose,” I said.
Julius sighed again and made a slight motion in Elita’s direction, a tiny nod of his head. I spun to face her and she walked toward me, smiling.
“Someday,” Julius intoned, “I will look back on this moment as Adamite parents look back on their child’s toilet-training. As with those parents, I look forward to the day when you are approaching my equal, Lizzie, and not merely a child.”
Moving faster than I could resist, Elita sharply pulled my hands behind my back and handcuffed me. I sputtered and swore as she stuffed a silk gag in my mouth.
“Learn your place, little girl,” she whispered in my ear, out of Julius’ range of hearing, “and patience.”
Bitch, bitch, bitch! I screamed inside. I kicked my feet, stood, struggled against the handcuffs, but to no avail. I was stuck, feeling more terrified by the minute.
“Thank you, Elita. Now, I shall continue.” I sat back down, but made a point of turning my back to him. At least he couldn’t see me cry. Tears dripped down my cheeks as I tried to find the switch in my mind to shut them off. When I looked up, Elita was watching me, smiling like it was all a big joke. Bitch.
“We shan’t bind your ears, at any rate,” he said. “As I was saying, vampires are a necessary repository of evil. We are, in fact, a separate race. A race to which cruelty, perversion and exploitation of the weak are noblesse.”
“This is not to say humans do not possess evil,” he said. “They do, as evidenced daily and often shown quite elegantly by some quite remarkable people in your history. However, at heart, humans throughout history have always believed good is the better of the two. At the bottom of all human evil is a nagging doubt, a recognition, an admission that what had transpired was wrong. Human evil is, thus, empty, wasteful and petty.”
He paused. I could hear, though my back was still turned, Julius taking a sip of cognac. I watched Elita’s eyes following his every movement with longing and expectation as he began to speak again. Her shoulders relaxed, almost imperceptibly. She was in love with him, or something resembling love, I thought.
“Vampires, on the other hand,” he said, “have made a virtue of evil. It forms the basis of our moral code. To the undead, with our mirror image morality, evil is our greatest aspiration. Anything good done within that framework is salted with the notion that at heart, it is still evil. Vampires are as convinced of their inherent evilness as humans are sure of their goodness.”
Julius contemplated the weight of his own words. What a pompous pig. During the flow of his soliloquy, I
had gradually turned so that I could now stare up at him, my mouth and hands still bound, but trying my best to burn my eyes into his soul.
Was there anything I could do to make him just a tiny bit uncomfortable?
He smiled down at me and continued. “In the last several decades, with the destruction of your historic moral fiber, the rise of individual greed and no replacement waiting in the wings, a moral vacuum has been created. Inside of this vacuum, human civilization has spiraled downward. For the first time, vampires are poised to replace humans as the ruling elite of this tired old globe and the morality of evil will finally replace the age-old morality of goodness.”
He smiled, a huge toothy effort and to my surprise, leaned down and pulled the silk scarf from my mouth. His hand lingered on my cheek, traced the contours of my lips. Slightly parting my mouth, he let the tip of his finger linger inside. I fought the urge to vomit, to snap the end of his finger off between my teeth, but all the while he cautioned me with his eyes. One false move, one misplaced word, and I would be gagged again.
Another almost imperceptible nod to Elita and she moved behind me, pressing her body against mine so I could feel her breasts against my back as she unlocked the handcuffs. She let them drop with a soft thud to the thick carpet.
“I’d like a glass of water,” I said. I wanted to wash the stinking taste of his finger from my mouth.
“Of course,” he said, smiling at my acquiescence. “Elita, please take care of this request. And send for a snack. She should keep her strength up. There’s so much to cover in such a short time. Your turning is tomorrow night after all.”
She nodded and left the room.
“I have a question,” I said, massaging my wrists. If I feigned interest, maybe he’d feel closer, personal, enough for me to gain some sort of advantage. Maybe I could convince him I could be his voice into the Adamite world, write a bunch of articles or something.
