by Z. Rider
“Yeah. The same thing. It wants blood.” He pressed his hands against his eyes. “Blood shuts it up.”
“What the fuck’s ‘it’?”
“The bees. The buzzing. The headache. That fucking thing did something to me when it was on my neck. I knew I’d felt it bite me. It did something, and now everything’s all fucked up.” He slid his hands down his face. “I was stalking my neighbor this morning. I was going crazy, wanting to go down there and get blood from her. Jesus, she has this little girl…can you imagine if I had? This little girl watching her mother be attacked?”
“Much better you saved it for me. If we get in my car, could you ride the two minutes to the hospital without trying to kill me?” He pushed against the wall, getting to his feet, one hand still clutching his arm.
Dan gave his head a violent shake. He could absolutely make it two minutes to the hospital—if that first time he’d lost his mind was any indication, he could make it almost a week. That tech’s blood had kept the bees at bay awhile, unlike his own. But what would happen when he got to the hospital? What would they do with someone who attacked people to suck their blood? “I’m not going to the hospital.”
“Danny…”
They could feed him blood, there was that. Or they could refuse him blood, lock him in a psych ward, stuff him with pills. Strap him down to keep him from attacking the staff. Dope him up. Declare him violently insane, and he’d never see freedom again. Now there’s a life. As Ray tore paper towels off the dispenser bolted under one of the cabinets, Dan said, “There’s nothing about this on the internet except crazy people.”
“When they see what happens to your eyes—”
“Yeah, then they can say, ‘He’s not crazy, he’s just got some insane thing wrong with him. We’ll pin him to a board like a bug and study him. I’m good now. I just needed, what—a teaspoon of blood?” He couldn’t have gotten much more than that off Ray before Ray got him pinned down. “I’m good now.” His face prickled. He knew he was being an idiot, but Jesus. He did not want to go to the hospital. First they’d run tests, then they’d call in the shrink, then when they realized they had something real on their hands, he’d never see the fucking light of day again.
Ray crouched a good six feet from him, bleeding through the paper towel clamped over his arm, and Dan said, “What about the band? If I check into the hospital, what happens then? ‘Two Tons of Dirt Bass Player Afflicted with Mysterious Blood-Drinking Disease.’”
“What happens when you attack someone on the street and that makes the headlines instead?”
“Help me,” Dan said. “Keep that from happening.”
Ray clutched the bloodstained towel in his fist.
“I can’t go to the hospital.” That scared him more than the bees. The memory of stalking Janice through the floor was detached—ridiculous in retrospect. A dream he’d lived. He could keep this under control. There was no need to let it get this bad again, not if he had help.
“I don’t know what the fucking alternative is,” Ray said.
“It’s just a little blood. Just a taste is enough to shut them up.”
“Today,” Ray said.
“If it gets worse, I’ll go to the hospital.”
“You say now. You know who you sound like?”
Anger flashed. “I’m not fucking Jamie.”
Ray watched him a while longer, Dan feeling like that bug pinned to a board after all, until Ray finally stood and dropped the towels into the trashcan. “I don’t know, man.” He ripped a few fresh ones free, dampened them under the tap.
“You wouldn’t go,” Dan said. Ray hadn’t been to a hospital in his life, not as a patient. Wouldn’t even go to the doctor unless he was sure he’d just get a script for antibiotics and be sent home.
“Yeah, well,” Ray said, on his way to the door with the wet towels held to his arm. “I mind losing myself a lot less than I mind losing you. Give me a call if you need a ride to CMC.”
“Thanks for nothing,” Dan said as Ray popped the screen door open.
“Thanks for the hole in the arm.” Ray let the door slam shut behind him.
† † †
He had a week to figure it out, he figured. Less if he didn’t want to reach the point of stalking the neighbor again. Maybe he could pay for it—find a hooker, a druggie, give them some cash and a razor blade. Teenage girls cut themselves all the time. How big a deal could it be, aside from the risk of AIDS? It would be an awkward conversation, but if you were talking to hookers…surely they’d had more awkward conversations.
And with the bees gone and his head cleared, he felt like he could do it. He felt like he could do anything.
He searched the apartment for his phone, finding it, finally, shoved between his mattress and the wall. A couple new texts, including one from Ray saying he’d be over soon. He shoved it in his pocket, texts unanswered, and got his shoes on. He needed groceries—pig’s blood, chicken blood, actual food to eat. Maybe cow blood didn’t have whatever it was that shut the bees up. It was worth a try before he had that awkward conversation with a few prostitutes.
It was too bad Jamie was in detox. He could have worked something out with him—drug money for blood. All the addicts win.
He passed his guitar on his way through the living room. Shit. They were going to work on songs today. He would have liked to do that. Later. He’d figure his problem out, then go to Ray and tell him it was taken care of, and they could get back to what they do.
He jingled his keys on the way to the car. There were options, damn it. People lived on medication, dialysis, all kinds of medical interventions. That’s all this was. A condition to be managed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Saturday Ray called. Dan said, “I’m good. I’m fine. Really.” He hadn’t tried the chicken or pig blood, but they were both sitting in his fridge, the meat laid on top of butter knives on plates so the blood would collect below them—you know, because…raw chicken. He’d rather just drink the blood. “How are you?”
“Hoping I don’t turn into a vampire myself is how I am.”
“How do you feel?” Dan asked, worried that what he had might be passed through bites.
“Annoyed,” Ray said.
He pushed a hand into his hair. “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it. What’s done is done. I just want to know why it’s always gotta be me you’re beating on.”
“There’s the CT guy too.”
“Great. We’ll start a club. I wonder how he’s doing.”
Dan hadn’t thought to wonder, but now he crawled with it. Did he dare call the hospital and ask? He didn’t even know which fucking hospital it was, he’d been in such a hurry to get out of there. Carey’d know.
“Any bees?” Ray asked.
“No. You?”
“No.”
“You want to get together?” Dan asked. “Work on that problem with the Dallas bridge?”
“Is it safe?”
“I’m fine. If it’s like last time, I probably have close to a week before it gets bad.”
He listened to silence on the other end, picturing Ray leaned back in the armchair he’d rescued from the side of the road, with its brown plaid cushions and nicked wooden arms. In the image, Ray had a hand over his face, the way he did when he was wrestling with something.
“I wish you’d go get checked out,” Ray said finally. “We can both get checked out. I don’t think the bite’s infected, but hey. Better safe right?”
Well that was monumental, Ray offering to go to a doctor. Monumental, but not enough to move Dan into going. He said, “If it gets bad enough I’ll go.”
And got nothing but silence from the other end.
“Have you heard from Jamie?” Dan asked, thinking about that trade: blood for drug money.
“Nope.”
“Maybe he’s doing rehab after all.” How he’d get the blood from Jamie—or anyone else—he hadn’t worked out yet.
“That’d be smart.”
The tone of Ray’s voice implied Dan wasn’t.
People cut themselves, he thought. On purpose. Maybe he just needed to find a cutter…somehow.
The silence from Ray’s end grew heavy as a lead weight.
“Call me when you want to get together,” Dan said.
“Yeah.”
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Dan said. “Really. I’m working it out.” One way or another.
† † †
Saturday night, a light band of pressure slipped around his head. The pig blood had no effect, and the chicken blood had made him heave. Dan was unsure whether it was that the blood wasn’t “alive” anymore, or that it wasn’t human. Or maybe he just had a headache like a normal person. He drew a razor blade across his skin, wincing as he watched the thin red line appear in its wake.
He sat up all night, cross-legged on the bed in the glow of his computer, trying to work out his options—all of them shitty. For a while, around four a.m., the hospital started to look attractive, but when he woke from a few hours of sleep on Sunday morning, he was back to thinking he could manage it himself, somehow.
After he was dressed, he made a cut with a razor blade, had a little taste, and felt fine, except for the lingering headache. Since it didn’t go away, he assumed it was a real headache—and no fucking wonder. He tossed back ibuprofen then grabbed his jacket and keys. He’d just had Ray’s blood the other day. He could do this.
When his great-aunt had broken her hip a few years ago, his mom had moved her into an assisted living facility. Aunt Cathy’s furniture, the pieces she’d insisted on taking from her home when his mother sold it, crowded the small room at Elder Haven: towering armoire, poster bed. Two wingback chairs sat angled in front of the window, a claw-footed table between them.
The place was spotless, but only one person could move around in it at a time.
Despite the blinds levered shut at the window, Aunt Cathy wore enormous post-surgery sunglasses. The little peak of her nose stuck out below them. He waited until she’d shuffled to her favorite of the wing chairs before kissing the top of her white hair.
No bees, no buzzing. He smiled a little in relief and took the other seat.
Her thin fingers, the joints swollen with arthritis, felt around the chair arm as she said, “So what’s new with you, Danny boy?”
“Not a thing. We just got back from the road. Time to make another record next, then do it all over again.”
“You get that from your great-grandfather, you know, wandering all over the place. He was a Bible salesman, though if you ask me, he did more than sell Bibles house to house.”
Dan smiled. This was not new news. Aunt Cathy had always been of the opinion—and not shy of voicing it—that his great-grandfather had left children all over the Northeast, several of who she insisted had been in attendance at his funeral, strangers who’d hung at the back and left before anyone could say anything to them. His mother, who’d been a girl at the time, had no recollection of this. Aunt Cathy’s answer to that was that she’d been too short to see over people’s heads.
Not that at four-foot-ten Cathy had had much more of an advantage. “I was taller then!” she’d say, her back stooped.
Now she said, “I hope you didn’t inherit his other proclivities.”
“They make better birth control these days.”
“Oh, you.” She swatted his arm, her head still facing forward in those dark glasses, like she’d gone blind.
“How’d the surgery go?”
“Great, they say.”
“And you say?”
“It beats a bypass. If your next question is going to be about my blood sugar and whether they’ve changed my meds yet, I’m going to start calling you Faye and kick you out. They want to replace my bed, did you know? With one of those ugly hospital beds. Laziness is all it is. Makes less work for them. Tell me something interesting. All anyone ever talks about around here is what hurts and what’s for dinner.”
“I got attacked by a bat in an alley down in North Carolina,” Dan said.
“I hate those things. They get in your hair. Did it bite you?”
“I don’t know. It felt like it did something, but there was nothing there.”
“Maybe you just got a pinch. Was it during the day? That’s a sure sign of rabies, in which case you are damned lucky if it didn’t break the skin.”
“It was at night, after a show.”
“I knew a girl who got rabies once,” she said. “Silly thing thought she was saving a mouse from a cat. Should’ve let the cat have it.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died.”
He felt clammy suddenly. “She didn’t happen to have a thirst for blood first, did she?”
“I don’t think it was a vampire mouse.”
A ding went off on the nightstand, and Cathy said, “Poop. Pill time. Hand me that plastic box, will you?”
It rattled as he carried it to her. Three compartments were already flipped open. He popped the lid on the next in line, and she let him dump pills into her shaky palm.
“Water?” he asked.
“Would you?”
She had a glass turned over beside the bathroom sink. He let the water run, the way she liked it. The bathroom smelled like Jean Naté and old lady, the way her bathrooms always had. He filled the glass and brought it to her. While he waited for her to take the handful of pills, one at a time, he itched to pull his phone from his pocket and look up rabies symptoms.
“You’ll bring me a copy of the new album, won’t you?” she asked as he replaced the pillbox on the dresser.
“Always.”
He made it to his car before giving in. Rabies: discomfort, general weakness, headaches. A prickling or itching sensation at the site of the bite. He rubbed the back of his neck, queasy suddenly. There’s no fucking bite, though. Cerebral dysfunction, anxiety, confusion, agitation, delirium, hallucinations, insomnia. There’s no fucking bite. And no mention on the CDC’s web page of a taste for blood.
It did say that by the time the symptoms showed up, it was fatal.
He leaned back, closed his eyes, and swallowed bile.
There is no fucking bite. And if he had it anyway, there was no fucking help.
He opened the car door and threw up on the pavement.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Look who’s here!” His mother gave him a hug at the top of the split-level’s stairs.
“Who are you talking to?” With her arms around his neck, the bees murmured, their faint buzz tickling his vertebrae. The day gets better and better.
“Myself,” she said with a laugh, oblivious. “That’s what you get used to doing when you rattle around a house all by yourself.” She pulled back, holding him at arm’s length. “Are you sleeping enough?”
“Too much.”
“You look as ragged as you did when you dropped the equipment off.”
“I stopped by to see Aunt Cathy.”
“Oh good. I’m sure she appreciated it. Hope you’re hungry—I have a lasagna in the oven. We can split the leftovers.”
“Sounds good.”
In the kitchen, she gathered scattered sections of the Sunday edition of The Boston Globe and dropped them in a box.
“How’re things?” he asked.
“Well, you know, the usual.” She smiled as she went around the counter. “Work, upkeep, a little television and reading in the evenings. Set the table while I start the salad, would you? When are you starting work on the next album?”
“Soon. We have seven or eight songs half ready to go. Or at least we think so, till we hear them again.”
“Are you feeling all right?” She took his arm as he gathered silverware from the drawer, turning him. She touched the cool back of her hand to his forehead. Far away, the bees hummed.
He ducked, forks and knives in hand. “I’m all right. Just coming down with a bug, I think.” He rounded the counter and started setting out the napkins and flatware
.
“Do you have a scratchy throat? I hear that’s going around.”
“No, I’m good. Just a little tired, a little headachy.”
“You probably just need to eat.” She touched his forehead again as he passed on his way to the dishes cabinet.
“Are we having garlic bread?” he said.
“Of course. Get out of your coat already. No wonder you look flushed.”
After laying out the plates, he shrugged out of his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair.
“What do you want to drink?”
“Water’s fine.” The buzzing, right at the base of his skull, welled and ebbed like a thick heartbeat. He pulled out the chair and sat, rubbing his palm against the edge of the table to distract himself.
Rabies.
Untreatable once the symptoms start.
“Here’s some orange juice.” She set a glass in front of him.
“I said water’s—”
“Just drink it and be quiet.” She headed back to the cutting board to work on a cucumber. “How’s Ray?” The knife went chop-chop on the cutting board.
“Fine.”
“And Jamie?”
“Ray and I took him to detox a few days ago.”
“Oh? How’s he doing?”
“I don’t know. Good, I hope.”
“Can he get letters?”
Dan rubbed his nape. I’m going to die from rabies if that’s what I have. “I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask.” He took a swallow of orange juice, sweet on his tongue, cool in his throat.
“I got this new jalapeño ranch dressing.” She ruffled his hair as she set the jar on the table. The bees kicked up a storm at the touch.
“Excuse me.” He pushed back his chair, knocking his fork to the floor. The pressure around his skull swelled as he bent down.
“I’ll get you a new one. Are you sure you’re all right?”
He caught the fork between his thumb and finger and stood. “Yeah. Just need to use the restroom.” He made his way to it, where he shut the door and leaned against it. Shit. Shit. Shit. He had a twenty-five-minute drive back to Manchester, and he was losing it. Not completely. Not collapse-into-unconsciousness losing it, not yet. But still.
