by Z. Rider
Dan’s heart picked up speed. He leaned forward, wanting to hear—finally—about someone else.
“Scared the shit out of her. They called animal control, but no one found anything. Three nights later, she went nuts on husband while he was asleep. Then a homeless guy attacked a woman at a bus stop in Charlotte.”
“This is not comforting,” Dan said.
“Now you know why I look like shit.” He clutched the lighter and cigarette. “The Spindale woman and homeless guy died in jail after attacking a few more people, but what they died of—the woman and the homeless guy—was blood loss.”
Dan’s scalp crawled. He stood quickly, pacing to keep from throwing up.
“And then there are the rest of the astronauts,” Ray said.
Dan turned. “Shit.”
“Yeah. Gone for eight months on a space mission, they come back, pass all the medical tests, go home to their families…dead within weeks, leaving a bloodbath behind.”
“Wait—all of them?”
“Have you not been watching the news?”
He didn’t have a TV, and he’d been wasting his internet time on fucking rabies and You Know You’re a Vampire When… “I knew it was that one woman…”
“Dobbs was the only one from the U.S. It took a while for Russia to admit their people weren’t appearing in public because they’d fucking gone nuts and died.”
“And it happened just like these other people?”
“At least you’re alive still,” Ray said.
He paced faster, trying to keep the contents of his stomach in his stomach. “What do doctors think?”
Ray shrugged. “They don’t know. They haven’t found anything. They’re still looking into it. The media’s blaming it on that space mission. My guess is they’re probably right.” He put the cigarette back in his mouth and stood. “The only one we know for sure was even attacked by anything first was the Spindale woman.”
“Where was the astronaut from?” The news had said, he was sure, but he had so many place names in his memory bank, he couldn’t pull that one out.
“Montreat. Not too far from Asheville. I’m gonna go smoke.”
“Yeah.” Asheville. Where the fucking alley’d been.
“Fresh air might do you good too.”
Dan rubbed his neck, looking toward the back door. “Don’t you worry?” he asked. “About going out there?”
“I worry about everything. Like if my best friend is going to be okay.” He was on his way across the kitchen. “If I’m still going to have a band tomorrow. If all this smoking is going to give me lung cancer. I worry all the fucking time.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“All right,” Moss said. “Roll up your sleeve.”
Ray raised his eyebrows; he’d already pushed it toward his shoulder and laid his arm on Dan’s kitchen table.
“Sorry. Nerves.” He tied a tourniquet around Ray’s upper arm, making it look easy. “Are you watching?” he asked Dan.
Dan paced the floor, trying not to watch. He rubbed his palms on his jeans and said, “Yeah.” He put his hands on the cool stove, leaned against it. Even with his back turned, all he could see was Ray’s pale arm on the table.
“Make a fist,” Moss said, then, “Dan.”
“Yeah.” He turned again and came back, his hands shoved in his back pockets.
Moss found and tapped a vein in Ray’s arm.
Dan looked at the ceiling.
“For someone who has no problem drinking blood,” Ray said, “you’re awfully squeamish.”
“Yeah, go figure.”
Moss tore open an alcohol wipe, swabbed Ray’s skin with it.
“Little pinch,” he said with the syringe in his hand.
Ray looked away. A flinch passed over his face.
After a few seconds, with the needle still in Ray’s arm, Moss undid the tourniquet one-handed, and Ray watched his blood spill into the collection tube.
Dan’s nostrils flared. He turned away again—not squeamishness this time. The bees hummed in his neck. His mouth, which had gotten a good taste of blood the other night, ran with saliva.
“Open your hand,” Moss said. “Hold that there for ten minutes or so.” To Dan he said, “All right. Normally there’s no way I’d want to see this, but…I want to see you do this.” He held the collection tube in the air and shook it slowly.
“Go on.” Ray held a cotton ball at the crook of his arm with two fingers.
With a nod, Dan took the tube. He couldn’t manage anything more than a nod because his throat muscles clenched, wanting that blood. It splashed the sides of the tube, streaking the plastic a thick, deep red.
Buzzing filled his ears. Everything around him looked too real. The collection tube felt realer than real against the pads of his fingers.
He closed his eyes and tossed it back like a shot. And kept his head back, savoring the taste.
Savoring the near-immediate silence.
When he opened his eyes, the room was normal again.
Moss lifted his eyebrows.
“I need a cigarette.” Ray kicked back his chair as he got up, still with his fingers on the cotton ball. With his other hand, he tried to reach in his pocket.
“Well?” Moss asked.
“That’s the stuff,” Dan said.
“How long you think that’ll last?” Ray said.
As he stepped up to help him get his cigarettes out, Dan said, “I wish I fucking knew. But that’s definitely the stuff.”
Moss shook his head, and Ray said, “Are you okay with that? Can we do that again if we need to?”
“You know where to find me.” Moss shoved the tourniquet back in the orange medic bag. He peeled off his gloves, wrapped the used needle in them, then sealed them up with medical tape. “I suppose I’m going to have to drop in and visit my buddies at the rescue squad. Dispose of this needle properly. Hopefully without having to answer any questions.”
“Sorry.” Dan watched Ray through the screen door, lighting his cigarette with his free hand, the other still holding the cotton down.
“Don’t worry about it. Listen, call me if you feel sick or anything freaky happens. Not that I can do much about it.”
“Will do.”
He stopped to talk to Ray on his way out. Dan turned the collection tube upside-down over his mouth, getting any last drops.
It fucking worked. The blood didn’t need to be so fresh that he had to drink it directly off a person. That was something. That was progress. They could work with that. He shoved open the screen door. “Hey.”
Ray and Moss looked over.
“Next time can we do two? I want to stick one in the fridge and see if it still works after it’s sat.”
Ray shrugged. “Fine by me.”
† † †
“We should tell someone what works,” Ray said after Moss left.
Dan’s back prickled. He agreed, but he didn’t want to become a lab experiment—especially not if they wanted to test what worked by withholding it to see what happened. “Can we just send an anonymous note?”
Ray studied the buildings across the way as he dragged on his cigarette. Finally, he butted it out against the railing. “Okay.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What?” Ray said the second night they spent hunched over their guitars, scraps of paper scattered around them, empty beer cans. A greasy pizza box on the floor, cheese congealing on the slice neither of them had bothered to eat.
Dan shook his head, as if to get the distant buzz of the bees out of it. He didn’t have any bees, though. Hadn’t since he’d dumped Ray’s blood down his throat. But there was a sense that they waited at the edges, ready to come back. He strummed his Cortez, a chord progression from the song they were working on—“Low Road” they were calling it. He liked it for an album title too, but Ray had thrown in Bad Things. It was premature to be considering album titles anyway. Way premature. “I think if we change this up—” He played the part between the
chorus and the second verse, only this time he went to D with it before going back down.
Ray said, “Yeah, that could work.” Nodding. Giving him a cautious eye. Dan felt like a bug under a microscope. And his neck itched. It was hot up on the third floor. Ray was in long sleeves—didn’t he feel it?
He dragged a hand through his hair, the other clutching his pick. “I think we’ll need to do it again soon.”
And Ray didn’t ask, “What, the song?” No, he got it: “All right. Tomorrow? Or sooner?”
“Tomorrow. We could probably hold off till Friday…” Damn the fucking itch. He scratched his neck, quickly, and pulled his hand away.
“But we probably shouldn’t push it,” Ray finished for him, setting his beat-up archtop aside, its familiar sunburst looking like it’d been dragged over cement sometime in the ’50s. “The whole idea is to keep you on an even keel, not let you get where it’s crazy.”
“Right.”
“Because I’d like to not get fucking bitten again.” He leaned against the front of the couch, letting a leg slide out across the floor. He tapped a cigarette from his pack and put it between his teeth before searching his pockets for a lighter.
“Next to the ashtray.”
“Thanks.”
“I wanted to thank you,” Dan said. “For doing this. If it hadn’t been for you…”
“You’d be in a holding cell for butchering people’s pets, or worse?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. Anyway, I know how you feel about doctors, so giving blood like that…”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. It’s different when I know no one’s going to be putting it under a microscope to find shit wrong with me. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not chomping at the bit to have Moss prick me again. But it beats the alternative.”
“So.” Dan pressed his hand to the back of his neck.
“So tomorrow. I’ll let Moss know.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll do the two tubes,” Ray said.
“You don’t mind?”
“Mind being stuck fewer times?” He smiled as he rolled the cigarette between his fingers.
“I guess there’s that.” Dan rested his chin on his knee. “What if it gets to be every day? What if it gets to be more than a tube every day?”
“Bridges we’ll cross.” Ray tipped his head back, blowing smoke toward the ceiling. “Actually, I think that might work, your idea for ‘Low Road.’” He grabbed the Gibson, stuck the cigarette between the strings. “Let’s see.” And he started into it, from the beginning. Dan joined in as soon as he had his own guitar back in his lap.
“Yeah,” Ray said as they moved smoothly into the second verse. “Yeah, this’ll work.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
They were quiet as they waited in Dan’s kitchen for Moss to show up. Almost a month they’d been doing this, and Ray, who’d gone from haggard to gaunt over the course of it, looked like a sack of sticks hunched at the table.
The bees were a brown hive, deep inside Dan now. No more insect feet crawling over his neck. It was the hum of a generator at the core of him. “We can’t keep doing this,” he said. Moss was going to say the same thing when he walked in and got a look at Ray. This was needing too much blood, too fucking often. And Moss didn’t even know about the secret crisscross of razor blade lines on Ray’s back, the things they were doing to stretch the days between Moss’s visits.
“I was thinking.” Ray’s hands rested on the table, blue veins crossing the backs like starved worms.
“What?”
“Maybe it makes a difference if it’s from the same donor all the time.” He caught a papery cough in a hand. His beer sat off to the side—he’d taken two sips and pulled his jacket back on. Dan had felt his hand earlier—it was like he’d been out in the cold.
Dan pulled a chair out and sat, though he didn’t know how long that would last. The bees made him restless. “Explain.” Because he knew Ray wasn’t about to suggest taking him to the hospital. Despite the letters they’d mailed, hospitals weren’t doing a great job with this. They’d tried transfusions, which was only working in the sense that people weren’t dying from blood loss, but they were still going fucking crazy. Ray’d sent a new letter, but as far as they could tell from the news, no one was trying it. So people were going nuts. People were getting hurt. People were dying, and no one was fixing it yet.
And if the acceleration of Dan’s need for blood was any indication…maybe it wasn’t fixable. Maybe they were just putting off the inevitable. It made his guts clench.
“Maybe the effect lasts longer,” Ray said, “if it’s different blood. Whatever it is, it doesn’t do good with your blood, right? Now it’s getting my blood over and over, maybe it’s started thinking it’s yours. So it isn’t satisfied. It wants you to get someone else’s, so it knows for sure it’s not eating itself out of house and home. Does that make any fucking sense? Because my shit used to fucking work, right? At least for a few days, you know? Now we’re feeding you twice a day, and you’re still on edge.”
“Well, that would be a great thing to try if we had different blood. I don’t see Moss letting you stick a needle in him anytime soon.”
“No, he wants you to go to the hospital.”
Dan rubbed his palms on his jeans. “I’m worried he’s going to put his foot down about it today. One look at you…”
Ray’s reached into his shirt pocket with two not-so-steady fingers. “If he does, we’ll do it ourselves.”
“Come on. You know as well as I do this is spiraling right down the fucking toilet.”
“What I know is we haven’t tried changing up the blood, and I’m not giving up till we’ve tried everything I can fucking think of.” He pushed up the top of the pack. A single cigarette slid to the corner. “Shit.” He pulled it out and stuck it behind his ear. “Anyway, I have an idea.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was coming up on five p.m.—four days after Moss had flipped out over Ray’s stubborn descent into anemia—when they pulled up to the curb in front of Moss’s place, Ray driving. Before Dan could get his door open, Moss came out of the house, looking up the street and then down as he walked quickly toward them with a duffle bag clutched in his hand.
Dan reached back and unlocked the door.
“Everything cool, man?” Ray asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I just don’t like lying to Debbie,” Moss said.
Dan shifted around in his seat. “Sorry we had to ask you to.”
“It’s all right.” Moss looked out the window as they pulled away.
“Did you get the shirt?” Ray asked, flicking his eyes toward the rearview.
“Scrubs. Yeah.”
“How much?” Dan worked his wallet out of his pocket.
“Nine dollars.”
“That’s it?” He pulled out a ten. “Don’t worry about the change.”
Moss pocketed it, saying, “You guys have the rest of the stuff?”
“In the trunk,” Ray said. All the needles, tubing, alcohol wipes, sterilized glass bottles. Moss had said upfront he wasn’t keeping that stuff at his house, not where Debbie would run across it and start wondering if he was using or something. That’s all he needed: his wife suspicious about shit he wasn’t even doing.
Dan pulled up some music on his phone, and they merged onto I-293 for their second two-and-something-hour drive to Rhode Island since getting home, the opening track on Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Baby 81 Sessions taking them out of the city.
“Heard from Jamie?” Moss asked.
“Got a call last night, actually,” Ray said.
“How’s he doing?”
“He sounded pretty good.”
“So he stayed for rehab?”
“That or he’s crashing with some chick he met at detox and just pretending he’s still in rehab.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me,” Dan said.
“You think that’s what he did?” Moss
said.
“Nah. He sounded like he was really there.” Ray tapped the side of his head. “And there.”
Dan threw his voice toward the back. “How’re Debbie and the baby?”
“Good,” Moss said. “Penny’s getting to be a real pro at walking. Every time we turn around, she’s into something else.”
“Did Deb freak out about you going back on the road so soon?” Ray asked.
“She wasn’t happy, but, you know, I told her with the holidays coming up… I told her you guys were paying extra for this.” Moss was getting what amounted to time and a half. The downside was the three of them would be sharing fifty-dollar hotel rooms, and of course they were stuck in a car instead of a bus, or even a van—something people could stretch out in. Moss’s knees pressed against the back of Dan’s seat.
“What if this guy doesn’t show up?” Moss asked.
Dan watched the road. It was the same question looping through his head, that and a whole stream of other what-ifs: What if it’s actually a cop? What if the guy’s got AIDS or something? What if it’s a setup to get robbed?
“We move on to the next one,” Ray said. “And the next one. Somebody’s gonna show up.”
“I hope you’re right.” Moss’s voice wasn’t full of confidence. They were finding people online, on message boards where vampire fetishists hung out and through some ads Ray had put up on craigslist.
They coasted off I-95 into Warwick a little past dark.
“Should be not too far down this road,” Ray said as he eased onto Jefferson Boulevard.
“Up there.” Dan pointed at a squat building at the side of a parking lot. As Ray put on his turn signal, Dan realized he still wanted to be on the interstate, still traveling with all the potential of the world ahead of them. A dull lump sat in his stomach, a certainty that no one was going to show up at the diner looking for an oversized male nurse and a vampire, and that if they did, it wasn’t going to go well.
They scoped the place from the outside, discussed where to put the car. Went over the plan again, making sure the pieces fit with the reality of the location. They hadn’t for a second entertained the idea of having people come to their motel room—if years on the road had taught them anything, it was that a surprising number of people didn’t know when to leave.
