Crime Rave

by Sezin Koehler

  “Fast forward to the recent past, 1997. I am now living in Los Angeles. Why travel when I have access to peoples of the world right here? I go to raves. The girls and boys are young and stupid. The lights are low. Nobody notices me in the corner, drinking away vitality. But what’s this? All of a sudden I feel so much. The music moves through me and within me. I must dance, I must stroke their hair, this feeling of love surges in me that we are all connected. Even my inhuman, monster self is connected to all the life revolving around the music, the throbbing bass, the warmth of their skin.

  “Ecstasy, you see. First I had it through their blood and it irrevocably changed me. Then I got myself a pill. The feelings intensified. The pain I felt for all the lives I took washed over me in a tsunami.

  “I wanted to die for what I’d done. I decided to kill myself, meet the sun for the first time in two hundred and two years. But I couldn’t. The love! There is so much love in this world. My soul had been returned to me, the one that whore stole centuries ago.

  “I changed. No more killing. I would drink animal blood. I could survive. But women…How I missed the feel of them in my mouth. Their flesh under mine. And then one day I smelled my solution. It had been there all along—a way to drink human blood without hurting anybody. Menstruation. So obvious. Why had I never thought of it before?”

  Günn feels sick to her stomach. Red Feather is fascinated, remembering stories his grandfather told him by firelight of men who aren’t men—men who drink blood, eat human flesh, shapeshift.

  “In fact, my menstrual trend catches on fast. Who knew there were so many other walking dead—oh yes, so very many of us hiding in the shadows—who also carried a burden of guilt for past transgressions, searching for solutions? The other vampires call it Ichorism, and I became its unwitting prophet. We do not kill to feed, not even animals anymore. Our diet of menstrual blood is sufficient for us to survive, and thrive on lifeblood. Live and let live.”

  Lazlo pauses, lost in thoughts of his journey. Red Feather clears his throat, waking Lazlo from his reverie.

  “Forgive me, Detectives. When you’ve lived as long as I, it’s easy to dwell on the past. I have so rare an occasion to share these morsels of my history, as you can imagine. But you want to know about the party. Yes. So, I went to the rave alone. I was hoping to make some new acquaintances. When I drove up the parking attendants told me to park anywhere. There was no order, no rhyme or reason, cars were haphazardly placed. I remember wondering how we were going to get out. I guess we weren’t supposed to, were we?”

  Red Feather shrugs, “Could be.”

  “The inside of the mansion was insane. Again, no order to the architecture, as if twenty different people designed the structure all at the same time, and each was on a different hallucinogenic. An Escher painting come to life. The water was free, and that struck me as strange as well.”

  “Why?” Red Feather furrows his brow, confused.

  “The sale of water is a huge profit point for a rave. I’ve been to parties where they’ve charged ten dollars for one tiny bottle. And people pay it because you need the water. If you’re on E and dancing, you can die if you get too dehydrated. I’ve seen people collapse in seizures. That they were just giving it away was très bizarre. I took some, drank down my pill with it. About thirty minutes later I realized that the water was spiked with some kind of hallucinogen I’d never experienced before. When I started tripping, I had the feeling—like when I was outside—that someone wanted everyone at that party to be under the influence. The high felt strange. There was something in the air, a kind of malevolent electricity. It was everywhere.”

  “That could’ve been the drugs,” Günn says, her forensics kneejerk.

  “Maybe, but like I said, I felt it outside even before I took anything,” Lazlo rebuts.

  Icarus remembers—but does not tell the detectives—a foyer filled with paintings. The smell intoxicates him. He realizes the art is painted with menstrual blood. He has the urge to put his tongue to the canvasses, but restrains himself. He tells one woman about the unusual painting material. “Gross!” She says. He tells another, one dressed as the pink Powerpuff Girl, and she is enthralled. She touches the painting. Icarus has never been so aroused in his life. There is something about her, too. A scent of fecundity, blooming. He can almost see the swollen lining of her uterus, flowing, releasing delicious blood and tissue. She’s different, her scent stronger than most. Icarus imagines she has more than one uterus, all the more space to produce the nectar he craves. She is high on a cocktail of Ecstasy and spiked water. He invites her to take a walk. Taste! He wants a taste! They traipse over a running creek, the stepping-stones in the shape of books that leads to the Mansion’s library. She is captivated by the shag rug. He can wait no longer. She says, “No, I’m on my period.” He says, “I don’t mind, I like it.” His face moves down to her source, he removes her tampon, puts it in his pocket for later. He drinks. She moans. He drinks more and more. Yes, this is no normal woman; her uterus is boundless. Icarus has never tasted lifeforce so sweet. His rapture is ultimate.

  That’s when the creatures pop out. Small, birdlike girls, three of them, dressed like Charlie’s Angels. Icarus goes berserk. What kind of woman is this? Things living inside her? Offending him as he drinks of his pleasure. Rage sweeps over him, heightened by the blood and chemicals coursing through his body. As he watches, the three creatures grow, grow, grow to full size.

  Icarus attacks. His instinct is to kill these aberrant creatures. They join hands and fire shoots from them. He burns, alight with their freakishness. Icarus collapses, comatose.

  Icarus averts his eyes from the detectives and the camera. “I passed out at some point, now that must’ve been the drugs.”

  Günn knows he’s hiding something. She smells burning flesh and has to keep herself from gagging. She looks over at Red Feather, giving him her look calling bullshit.

  But how can only this part be a lie? How can he be a vampire at all? Günn’s eye starts twitching again in tandem now with her shaking legs.

  “When I woke up it was nearly midnight. Things started to get really weird. DJ Fetish started spinning—”

  “Spinning?” Red Feather interrupts.

  “Sorry, playing records. Spinning music. You know, how the turntable spins around?” Lazlo finds their ignorance of party culture adorable.

  Red Feather nods. “Please continue.”

  “The DJ started spinning and just like that people were dropping dead. Blood oozing from their ears. All these people, screaming and holding their heads, falling to the floor. The smell of blood was overwhelming, I haven’t had a drink in four years—that alone was crippling.”

  “Why didn’t you get out of the mansion?” Red Feather asks.

  Icarus gives Red Feather a long and serious look. “I tried. The smell of blood and death all around me, the pain in my head. I tried to get out of the mansion but I couldn’t escape the music. Speakers everywhere. I couldn’t find the front door. I kept opening doors and seeing stranger and stranger things. Perverse things. Gateways into hells I’d never imagined and don’t even want to think about. But no exit. And then the mansion exploded.”

  “You remember that?”

  “I felt the ground rumble, turned into a roar, like a troupe of Hell’s Angels passing through, then BOOM, a bright light. I felt my skin and eyes burning. The next thing I remember is waking up in dust, covered in ash and choking. But somehow, I felt fine.”

  Red Feather closes his notebook and runs his hand through his hair. Icarus studies him, trying to unpack his mixed racial heritage, while Günn studies Icarus.

  “Detective, may I ask you a question?”

  “Go for it.”

  “Why did he want to kill everyone?”

  “He who?”

  “The motel fellow, Mr. Crane.
It was his mansion, right? He sponsored the party, why would he want to drug and murder everyone? Or is that why he threw the party? To kill us all?”

  “We’re working on that.” Red Feather takes a photo from his pocket. “Did you see this man at the rave?”

  Icarus looks at the face of a man aging badly. Gaunt face, eyes sunken in the hollows of his cheeks, sallow complexion, radiating bitterness. “Is that he?” Lazlo asks and Red Feather affirms. Lazlo turns his full attention to the man who tried and failed to kill him. He’s never seen him before in his life, Lazlo shakes his head no. Red Feather nods, pocketing the photo along with his notebook.

  “Can you think of anything else, Mr. Lazlo?”

  Icarus shakes his head, then says, “Do you believe in God, Detective?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You’re Indian, right? Oh, apologies, Native American.”

  Red Feather nods. “It’s fine. And yes I’m half Lakota.”

  “Your people believe in a sole creator?”

  Red Feather nods. “But we also have other gods for different aspects of life who also play parts. Why?”

  Lazlo considers the question. “I was raised Catholic, though I never was a believer, mainly because of that nonsense about Jesus rising from the dead. But now, I’m starting to wonder. How else did I survive? Who brought me back? And why me?”

  Red Feather and Günn have no answer.

  To prevent herself from dwelling on the question, Günn busies herself with the video camera, removing and labeling the weirdest victim interview ever known to the LAPD. Or so she thinks.

  Red Feather hands Icarus his card. “Thanks for your time. Please call if you remember anything else.”

  Icarus nods and moves closer to the early rays of sun that have started streaming through his window, basking like a lizard at first dawn: his first day in the sun since he was turned and thus far the most marvelous side effect of his resurrection.

  The Angel Curiel

  You watch the vampire settle into the sun, one of too many errors in the crossover. What kind of monsters will he breed now that he’s a daywalker? What have you done?

  Without you as catalyst there’d be no survivors. Mother, The Ancient One gave you the touch that sparks miracles, the power to bring the dead back to life. Now look. Only four full-body survivors. How disappointing. But, you were under duress. Under normal circumstances you require time. The smog goddess Kaleanathi kept her monstrous plan under the radar. Nobody suspected a thing. Not even Prophesia, goddess of visions, had the slightest clue. How could you not have suspected?

  Mother, The Ancient One set down rules before her big sleep. You broke all of them. You should have known better. You thought this would help.

  And now look. Bringing a survivor back in fowl-human hybrid form, pure mishap. And then the screamer—she’s proving far more dangerous than anticipated with her power unchecked. You can’t figure what went wrong. You didn’t know that Kaleanathi depleted The Source. How could you? You underestimated her.

  You walk in and out of each survivor’s room. The werewolf, still asleep. The vampire, who now no longer need fear the sun.

  You try to comfort the woman who screams her losses in her sleep by giving her a vision of her daughter. It only makes matters worse. Nurses rush in, hands over their ears and increase her tranquilizer. Leave this for The Ethereals, you tell yourself. They’re the ones with the power, yours is just the finishing touch.

  The bird girl has a fit when you walk in. She thinks you’re a ghost. You can’t blame her, with your dark clothes and translucent wings casting threatening shadows behind you. Her eyesight altered in the transformation, another disaster. You leave her be, she’s scared enough.

  You try to convince The Ethereals to leave it alone. Don’t bring back the others. You beg them. This bickering between ancients must stop. Now is the time for heroes, after all. Now is the time for the old gods to shine, not drown in petty squabbles. Mother, The Ancient One expected better of us all.

  But The Ethereals will have none of it. They’re going ahead. Do your job and keep out of theirs.

  You always disagreed that the gods should meddle in the lives of humans; you were once human and suffered at their demanding hands more times than you care to remember. And after all these years—thousands of them—Mother finally decreed that the gods stop interfering in direct proportion to human belief. Humans developed their materialism and capitalism and no longer needed to look to the old gods. So the old ones lost interest in them in turn. Stopped breeding with them. Abandoned the creatures; Mother’s plan all along. The gods, watchers, and angels retreated into their Valhallan bubble, where there was still plenty to keep everyone busy.

  You were finally happy. Let the celestials and the humes live their own existences, each free of the turmoil of the other, free from the tenuous bond that only brought pain to both sides.

  Your heart seizes as you realize Mother, The Ancient One has awoken early. Kaleanathi has opened the multiverse’s Pandora’s Box. If you could feel cold, you’d be shivering.

  The humans wrote about Mother in their Old Testament. She is wrath incarnate. She is vengeance personified. She is death.

  There will only be hell to pay.

  Mother will want the old ways back. She’ll dismantle the celestial democracy she installed before her rest and re-throne herself as Queen of All. She will destroy everyone who disrupted her slumber, all of us who have broken her trust. And the human world will be her collateral damage.

  You weep for the imminent end of times. And wonder if there is time still to stop it.

  5:20 AM LAPD Forensics Lab

  Four stories above the morgue where Guy Severin watches and listens to body parts creak back to wholeness, Stacey Chang, lab tech extraordinaire, pulls test tubes from a centrifuge and waits for the printout of DNA and tox results. Stacey’s entire backlog has been put to the side until all the results of the Crane Massacre remnants are IDed and her report sits atop the captain’s desk. She even gets to use the fancy new machines, the ones reserved for only the most high profile of cases.

  Usually there are two other lab techs with her, bumping elbows and generally irritating her loner spirit, but they haven’t shown up to work today and neither called in sick. Stacey tries to remember if they ever mentioned going to raves. Unlike many of the other teams on her floor, hers never really gelled and conversation in the DNA lab was limited to the cases at hand and what take-out people wanted for lunch. Their one attempt at group bonding resulted in Carl getting wasted, hitting on her, and having a hard time taking no for an answer. Awkward City ever since. More so after Carl’s petition for transfer was denied.

  The machine chortles and spits out a series of colorful pages. Graphs, bars, and zigzags adorn the flimsy computer paper. The tox results are off the charts for each body part sample: high levels of ecstasy, and LSD. Some of the samples contain marijuana, and one shows high levels of Psilocybe cyanescens, colloquially known as magic mushrooms.

  The DNA results take longer, and by the time Stacey’s done it will have cost the City of Los Angeles upwards of fifty thousand dollars for the dozens of analysis kits. One of the lab’s five monitors makes a ding ding and Stacey rides her office chair across the room to take a gander. Clicking through the results and sending them to the printer, her first impression being that each sample noted as a body part by on-site CSIs is a unique individual, no family members or relatives.

  She gets a hit in the DNA database, common alleles to Rosemary Green, likely the mother of one of the victims, but deceased. Rosemary is also a witness and victim in an assault case. Another hit on the same sample leads to Xavier Marsh, a convicted felon known as The Parking Lot Rapist, serving life in prison, who also shares alleles with what Severin sent up from the morgue. How sad, Stacey thinks, wondering why the woman
didn’t abort. Click click, the printer whirrs and churns out more sheets of paper.

  The next hit comes with the name Karma Devi, whose DNA was connected as a person of interest to the investigation of one Kevin Danville’s death. Stacey clicks through and reads that Danville turned up in the ER, his testicles removed. Died of sepsis shortly after. DNA samples of almost a dozen women were found in his apartment along with evidence of sexual misconduct, the details of those included in the hefty case file. Print, print, print. Whir, whir, whir.

  Stacey’s computer freezes and red words strobe across her screen:

  Access Denied

  flash

  Security Clearance Required

  flash

  Insufficient Authorization

  “What the hell,” she mutters to herself. Three files have been flagged; she cannot open them. The pseudo coat-of-arms with winged creature logo blinking on her screen is one she doesn’t recognize. Not DOD, not CIA, not FBI. She takes many screen shots and calls her boss, Pete Mazzotti, to give him the heads up.

  What she glimpsed of the results just before the freeze-out was enough to turn her blood to ice: the samples did not have either human or animal DNA.

  5:30 AM Spruce-Musa Hospital

  Detectives Red Feather and Günn smoke a cigarette in a hospital stairwell illustrated with a prominent NO SMOKING sign. She knows she shouldn’t, but her legs won’t stop shaking and she needs an excuse like nicotine in case Red Feather notices.