Once Bitten

by Reinke, Sara

  As he approached, Gilbert’s mouth spread in a broad smile like they were old buddies, like he hadn’t locked John out of the marina only days earlier.

  “Uh, hey, Gilbert.” John awarded him a tertiary nod, meaning to just breeze on past, heading for his boat.

  “Hey, listen,” Gilbert said as John walked by, and John hunched his shoulders, cringing again as he drew to a halt. When he turned around, Gilbert drew back, his bright expression faltering. “Whoa, are you okay? You look awful.”

  “Thanks,” John said. “I’m fine. Stomach bug, that’s all.” He motioned with his hand, flapping Gilbert away. “You might not want to stand so close, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh. Oh, sure.” Gilbert nodded, stepped back a step or two, then a step or two again for good measure. “Sorry to hear that. Hope you feel better soon.”

  “Yeah.” John didn’t know about Gilbert and his corpse-like pallor, but he personally felt like he was frying as he stood out on the aluminum dock, utterly and vulnerably exposed to the sun’s blazing, radiating heat. He could feel it searing his skin, making thin rivulets of sweat creep down the back of his neck, stealing along the contours of his temple and brows, sliding beneath the collar of his shirt. “Well, you know, this has been really nice,” he began, “but I really need to…”

  “I wanted to tell you I got your check the other day,” Gilbert said. “Thanks for taking care of that for me.”

  John studied him for a long moment, until Gilbert began to shift his weight from foot to foot in an anxious rhythm, like a toddler in need of the bathroom. “No problem,” he said at length. “I really appreciate you cutting me some slack.”

  It occurred to him that Gilbert stunk. The heat must have been getting to him, too, because all at once, John was acutely aware of the smell of him, tangy, ripe and somewhat sour. Beneath this, he thought he could discern something else, too, a sort of bittersweet metallic scent that reminded him the pork chops in Sandy’s fridge.

  His blood, John thought with a sudden, somewhat queasy sort of fascination. I can smell his blood.

  Gilbert’s expression grew sheepish. “Look, I wanted to tell you I feel real bad about that, how things came down,” he said. “It wasn’t my idea, changing the keypad code.”

  He continued rambling, but his words faded into inarticulate mush. John watched his mouth move, his lips flapping, mesmerized. The smell of Gilbert’s blood had grown stronger, as had his awareness of it.

  “The owners have been breathing down my neck to stay on top of the slip rentals,” Gilbert yammered, and it might have been John’s imagination, but he could have sworn that he could even hear Gilbert’s blood now, the rush of it as it coursed through the man’s veins, sloshing in a heady rhythm to match the pounding of his heart.

  “They’ve got me by the balls.” He offered a shaky laugh and an aww-shucks sort of shrug. “You know how it is, right?”

  John didn’t say anything. He didn’t notice that he’d actually stepped closer to Gilbert while the other man had been babbling until Gilbert blinked up at him, uneasy, then retreated a healthy step or two. “Right?” Gilbert asked, his voice warbling a bit.

  “Yeah.” John shook his head, took a step backwards. He realized his mouth was wet. He’d been salivating, close to drooling, and drew the blade of his hand up to his wipe his lips. “Sure.”

  What the hell’s wrong with me? First I’m eating raw meat on the kitchen floor, now I’m slobbering over Gilbert Manfried like he’s a fried chicken leg.

  Then, to his start, the tip of his tongue brushed his front teeth, and for all the world, it felt like his canines had grown somehow. I’m imagining things, he thought wildly, slipping his fingertips beneath his lip, prodding at his gum line. Maybe Sandy’s right and I’m hallucinating, because that’s absolutely nuts.

  “John?” Gilbert asked in a small, uncertain voice. “You alright?”

  “I’m fine,” John replied, only with his index finger in his mouth, this came out as “Eye thine.” He could feel the sharpened points of each of his canines, and when felt in comparison to the neighboring incisors, they felt significantly longer, enough so that he wished for a mirror so he could open his mouth and peer inside.

  Even more bizarre and startling was the sudden awareness that his teeth weren’t the only things that seemed to have grown.

  What the…? he thought, glancing down at his groin.

  He’d felt entranced by the smell of Gilbert’s blood, another brown-out like he’d suffered in Sandy’s kitchen, and apparently his dick had been, too, because he could feel it now, stiff and engorged, straining uncomfortably against the fly of his jeans.

  Oh, no, he groaned inside his mind. He turned, walking again, meaning to go to his boat, lock the doors and douse himself—clothes and all—with a cold shower. Hell, no. I am not sporting a hard-on over Gilbert Manfried.

  He sucked in a hissing breath through gritted teeth when, from behind him, Gilbert called out, “So, uh, no hard feelings, then?”

  “No,” John called back without turning around. He walked as fast as he could across the dock toward the Quagmire, wanting nothing more in the world than to put distance and a couple of locked doors between himself and the marina manager. “Nothing hard here. Not at all.”

  ***

  He didn’t have to fool with an icy shower, because Ethel Merriwether’s dog took care of withering his burgeoning erection for him. He drew within about three paces of the Quagmire’s slip and then a black-and-tan Rottweiler with a head approximately the size of a toilet bowl and a neck as thick around as John’s waist suddenly appeared, its front paws propped on the top rail of the pushpit. It opened the massive, gaping maw of its mouth and began to bark furiously at John.

  Hard-on abruptly a thing of the past, John scrambled backwards, nearly falling onto his ass. Thick slobber flew from the dog’s powerful jaws at it snapped and barked.

  “Twinkles!” he heard Ethel shout, then he caught a glimpse of her behind the dog, nearly dwarfed by it as she grabbed its chain collar and tried to haul it back. “Twinkles, you stop that. Stop that right now!”

  Twinkles? Of all of the names that came to John’s mind for a dog the size of a Mac truck with an apparent penchant for trying to consume human flesh, that sure hadn’t made the cut.

  “Twinkles, you get down,” Ethel yelled, followed by a loud grunt and a heavy thud as the Rottweiler at last fell away from the rail. The dog continued barking, even as Ethel crammed it down the hatch, sending it tumbling with another loud crash into the cabin below. Slamming the doors behind it, she leaned against them and turned to John. Her hat had fallen off in the struggle with Twinkles, and her hair now framed her face in a wild and graying halo.

  “Oh, John,” she exclaimed, breathless with exertion. “What do you think of my new dog?”

  “Cute,” he assured her with a patently insincere smile. “When did you get it?”

  “Yesterday,” she replied, leaning more heavily against the hatch doors while they bounced beneath her, a series of heavy, staccato thumps as the dog, Twinkles, apparently head-butted them from below. “I got her from the pound. After what happened to Nutsy, I wanted something reliable for protection.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sandy told me about Nutsy running off. Damn shame.” Especially considering she’d replaced the miniature menace with this king-sized version. He hated to imagine the size of the shit piles he’d now find disdainfully deposited on the gangplank near his boat.

  “He didn’t just run off,” Ethel said, her expression growing mournful. “That’s right, you haven’t been here. Gilbert found him yesterday, late afternoon, over beneath the benches beside the office. Poor Nutsy. He’d started to smell, you know. From the heat. And seagulls kept coming over there. That’s how Gilbert knew to look. They kept trying to eat at him.”

  She shook her head sadly. “Gilbert said the seagulls had done it, but I know it wasn’t them. It looked like Nutsy’s little neck had been broken. His head flopped
all over the place, this way and that.” She closed one hand into a fist, then rolled it loosely on her wrist, demonstrating. “His neck was torn open, like something just picked him up by the scruff and took a bite out of him. And his body.” Now Ethel shivered. “I told Gilbert it looked like he’d been wrung out like a dishtowel, that’s how flat he was. And dry. There wasn’t a drop of blood in him. It’s like someone squeezed it all out.”

  Not squeezed, John thought, remembering the scratching noises he’d heard at the hatch doors of the Quagmire on the night Nutsy had vanished. He’d told Sandy that Lucy Weston was stalking him, that she’d come to the marina that night. He’d also told her that Lucy had deluded herself into thinking she was a vampire. If that was true, if she’d believed this enough to bite John in the neck, he doubted she would have had any reservations about biting and killing a small dog on a marina dock if Nutsy had tried to attack her.

  “Well, gosh, Ethel, that just sucks,” he said, then nearly clapped his hand over his face and groaned aloud at his own unintentional crappy pun.

  “And you’ve been away,” Ethel said. “That nice little girlfriend of yours told me you weren’t feeling well when she stopped by to pick up your things.”

  “Sandy’s not my girlfriend.”

  “It always made me feel safe to know a policeman was right next door.”

  “Actually, I’m not a police officer anymore, Ethel.”

  “With Nutsy gone, and you at your girlfriend’s, I wanted something to make me feel better alone here at night.”

  “Sandy’s not my girlfriend,” he said again.

  “So I went to the pound and got Twinkles. She’s a bit rambunctious…”

  “Gee, you think?”

  “…but she’ll be okay once she gets used to things here. She’s really a very sweet dog. Very loving.”

  “Yeah.” John nodded. “I could see that right away. Plain as day.” The sun beat down upon him, and he could swear he felt blisters forming on his arms, all along his exposed skin. “Well, gee whiz, Ethel, I’d love to stand around and chat, but I’ve got this stomach bug thing going on.”

  “That’s right. Your girlfriend told me you’ve been sick. What did you say her name was?”

  “Sandy,” he said. “But she’s not my—”

  “Such a nice girl.” Ethel smiles. “And so pretty, too. With a cute little figure like that, I bet she’s a real wildcat in bed, eh?”

  John blinked at her, momentarily speechless.

  “Anyway.” Ethel tittered, sounding remarkably like Mrs. Butterworth in the old pancake syrup commercials. “Are you feeling better, John? I’ve been worried about you.”

  “I’m fine, Ethel,” he managed.

  The companionway hatches lurched beneath her again, and she turned enough to slap her hand against the door. “Twinkles,” she yelled. “You stop that right this instant. I mean it or no Greenie Bone for you. Do you hear me?”

  ***

  John used the opportunity of her distraction to duck aboard the Quagmire and escape. The sailboat was small and on-board storage space was at a premium. It didn’t take John long to find his old laptop, because there weren’t many places in which he might have stowed it.

  It took at least five minutes and about that many attempts to get the poor thing fired up, not surprising since it was probably salt-corroded. Even though it was less than five years old, it remained a veritable brontosaurus compared the wafer-thin newer model that had replaced it. But it worked, which is more than he could say for that afore-mentioned wafer-thin paperweight still on the floor at Little Pink. And it had wi-fi capability, so he could access his email, courtesy the marina’s network.

  His cell phone began to ring, thrumming in his hip pocket like a trapped cicada. He fished it out, flipped back the lid and drew it to his ear. “Harker.”

  “Mr. Harker? It’s Michael Gough.”

  He’d been waiting for this. “Hey, thanks so much for calling me back. And by the way, please call me John. Which do you prefer, Dr. Mike or just plain Mike?”

  “Uh.” The guy on the other end of the phone sounded decidedly uneasy, as if he was trying to figure out whether or not John was going to reach through the line somehow and bite him. “Actually, it would be Dr. Gough.”

  “Yeah, say, refresh my memory. Is that a doctor-sort of doctor, or a professor sort?”

  “Uh, the professor sort. I hold a Ph.D. in…”

  “A Ph.D.” John whistled through his teeth. “You know, I’ve always been curious. What does that stand for, anyway?”

  “Uh, doctor of philosophy.”

  “Wouldn’t that make it a D.Ph., then?”

  Complete silence on the other line. Then, after a moment: “I think it’s Latin.”

  “Doctor of philosophy?”

  “No. The Latin version. Philosophiae Doctor, I think it is.”

  “Which means?” John asked.

  “Uh, doctor of philosophy,” Gough said. After a moment of dead air, he ventured, “You said you were trying to get a hold of Lucy Weston?”

  “Yeah. About that. I’m a private investigator, as I may have mentioned, down here in the Keys. Lucy’s mom has hired me to try and track her down. Seems like no one has seen or heard from her in about a week. I’m kind of hoping you can help me out.”

  “Me?” The uncertainty factor in Gough’s voice raised another notch or two. “Well, Mr. Harker, in all honesty, I…”

  “Call me John.”

  “Er, uh, John, then. Honestly, I don’t know what I can tell you.”

  “You know Lucy, don’t you?”

  “I-I’m not sure that I would categorize it as knowing her exactly,” Gough stammered.

  “That’s what you told me in your email. That and you were worried about her.”

  “I did?”

  “Mind to tell me why?”

  “Well, I mean, I just…”

  “Because in your email, you seemed to suggest that your reasons might sound a little…crazy I think is the term you used.”

  Gough was quiet for a long moment, then sighed heavily. “Look, Mr. Harker.”

  “Call me John,” John interjected mildly.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to Lucy,” Gough said. “Not with any certainty, anyway. I can only go on what she told me in her emails, the few times I was able to talk with her on the phone. She found me through an internet search, an online article about a research project I took part in a few years ago.”

  “The Ideological Mythos of Werewolves, Revenants and Vampires,” John quoted. “Tuberculosis victims in New England’s pilgrim cemeteries. Yeah, I read it, too.”

  “Etiological,” Gough corrected. “And they weren’t pilgrims. The cemeteries were from the Victorian period, the late 1800s. About three hundred years after the Mayflower.”

  “I didn’t say I’d memorized it or anything,” John muttered with a frown. “Anyway. Lucy found you through the article. Why was she looking up vampire stuff?”

  Gough didn’t answer. John could hear the soft, somewhat moist sound as he chewed on his bottom lip.

  “I know Lucy’s into something bad,” John said.

  Gough sighed again, a lead balloon slowly deflating. “You don’t understand.”

  “I was a cop in Miami for ten years. There’s not much I haven’t seen before, Mike. I know there are people out there in the world who get fake teeth, bite people and drink blood, all like vampires. I know that’s what Lucy’s gotten involved in. And you’re probably the only person she trusted enough to talk to about what’s been going on with her.”

  “Mr. Harker,” Gough said, his voice somewhat pleading.

  “John.”

  “I know you think you’re helping, but you don’t…”

  “I know you’re frightened for her,” John said.

  “I am, yes, I’m scared half to death for her,” Gough exclaimed. “But you don’t know what you’re getting into, the kind of can of worms you’re trying to open here.”
r />   “Then tell me,” John said. “Come on, Mike. Talk to me. I saw her at her apartment. She looked like a corpse, right before she came at me in a frenzy and tried to attack me.”

  “You saw her?” Some of the shrillness had drained from Gough’s voice.

  “Up close and personal. I saw the fake fangs she’s got in her mouth. What’s she on, Mike? Do you know? My guess is methamphetamines. Who got her into that? Boyd Wilder?”

  “When did you see her?”

  “Four days ago, right after her mother hired me. I saw where she’d been burrowing in her closet for at least a week, and let’s not even get into the stink that—”

  “Mr. Harker, did Lucy bite you?” Gough asked.

  “It’s just John, and I told you. She was crazed. That’s what meth does to you, Mike. It makes you a walking skeleton, which is what Lucy was when I saw her. A walking skeleton who thinks the world’s out to get them and they have to—”

  “Did she bite you?” Michael Gough all but screamed into the phone, his voice so sharp, so filled with bright, frantic alarm that John fell silent.

  “Yeah,” he said at length, his hand trailing for his shoulder, the padded layers of bandaging beneath his shirt. “On the neck.”

  “Mr. Harker, listen to me,” Gough said. “You’re in very serious danger now. You’re going to think I’m crazy, but you have to do exactly what I say.”

  Were all epidemiologists this melodramatic? John wondered. “It’s just John,” he said. “And trust me, I do understand. All I want is to—”

  “No, you don’t.” Gough’s voice was harsh again, nearly plosive. “You don’t understand a thing. It’s not something she’s playing at, some stupid game or freaky fetish. Lucy doesn’t think she’s a vampire. She really is one. And unless you listen to me—unless you let me help you, Mr. Harker—in two more days, you’ll be one, too.”