Suckers

by Z. Rider

  “The one you s-stomped g-got up and f-flew away.”

  “Fuck—seriously?”

  “M-maybe they’re gone. I mean, y-you know. In m-me.” His body gave one more shake. A laugh pulled through him, as bad as a shake. “Th-this was not how I was planning on suh-spending my n-night.”

  “Me neither. Feeling a little better?”

  “Fucking starving.” That’s what the pain in his stomach was now: hunger. Like his stomach had eaten his insides and was clamoring for more.

  “Starving we can fix. You want a burger? Tacos? I’ll go get ’em for you.”

  “Get something from the vending machine.” Those things were out there somewhere. And maybe they’d ignore Ray right now—they’d ignored him—or maybe they wouldn’t. It wasn’t a chance he wanted to take.

  “You want to head back tonight? A couple cups of coffee along the way and I’ll be good to drive. I don’t think I could sleep anytime soon after that anyway,” Ray said.

  Dan shook his head, gripped by the image of those things chasing the car all the way home, dark wings swooping through the night. “Let’s hole up till daylight.”

  “It’s a plan then. I’ll grab some chips and Cokes from the vending machine.”

  Dan’s stomach growled. Starving. He stretched his legs out and tugged the blankets closer as Ray got to his feet. Man, but he’d lucked out—because who the fuck else would have put up with all this shit and still been around to get him junk food from the vending machine? While Ray left the room, he hauled himself to his knees, taking the blankets with him. He just wanted to get on the bed, away from the fucking smell of the carpet. He got as far as kneeling at the edge before he had to rest. His muscles ached like he’d spent a long day pushing boulders.

  Ray returned as quickly as he’d promised, with Snickers bars and Doritos bags clutched to his chest. Dan dragged himself onto the bed. His legs were heavy—his shoulders were heavy. As Ray scooped a candy bar off the floor—Snickers Really Satisfies You—a wave of impatience barreled through Dan. Fuck but he was starving.

  “Here.” Ray unwrapped the bar for him, then tore open a bag of chips.

  Dan ripped a chunk off, teeth sinking into thick nougat and caramel.

  A soft drink hissed as Ray opened it. He sat by Dan, making the mattress dip.

  “See anything out there?” Dan pushed the empty wrapper off the side of the bed.

  “Not a thing, thank God. Have the chips. I got them for you. And a couple more candy bars too.” He stretched a leg out to dig in his pocket for them.

  “What about you?”

  “I ate dinner already. I’m good with this.” He held up the Coke.

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you think it’s over?” Ray said when Dan had emptied the chip bag.

  Jesus. They’d flown right out the window. All of them, right out in the world. His appetite slipped away. “I think they’ll get someone else, and it’ll happen all over again, only there’s more of them flying around now.”

  Ray was quiet.

  Dan didn’t feel like eating another candy bar. He folded the wrapper over the one he’d started.

  Ray said, “I meant for you.”

  He pulled himself up so he was slouched against the headboard. “I hope so.” He straightened his legs. He hated this fucking shitty room. “If it’s not, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Check in to that hospital in Virginia, I guess?”

  Ray put an arm around him, pulling his shoulders sideways till he leaned against his side. Dan let his head settle. He was so fucking tired. His stomach gurgled like it needed more food, but he couldn’t face eating now.

  “You want to head back home as soon as it’s light?” Ray said.

  “Fuck yes. What time is it?”

  “Early enough for you to get some rest before then.”

  He closed his eyes. He looked forward to being dead to the world for eight or nine hours solid. He hoped his body could follow through on that promise.

  † † †

  When he woke, he was alone on the bed.

  “Ray?”

  Water pattered on the other side of the wall.

  A half-eaten candy bar lay on the floor, and now it looked really fucking good. He finished it off and washed it down it with warm Coke.

  Ray came out of the bathroom, toweling his hair. “How do you feel?” was the first thing he said.

  “Tired. Sore. Hungry. A little sick—I think I ate too much sugar. I feel like we’ve gone back to touring in a van and staying in hotel rooms with not enough beds.”

  “Just like the good old days,” Ray said.

  Daylight splashed through the window. He thought of those things flying out it last night.

  “I feel like myself.” He rolled over, laying his face on his arm. “It’s not as good as how I felt after drinking blood, but it’s not as shitty as I felt when I hadn’t drunk any, and it’s kind of good to feel like myself again.”

  Ray stood by the bed, watching, jeans hanging off his hips, water droplets on his shoulders. “Good. I’m looking forward to being a musician again. This phlebotomy shit is for the birds.”

  Dan smiled. “When do you want to start working on the album?”

  Ray dragged in a breath, lines digging into his face.

  “If I’m really okay, when can we start working on it?” Dan said. “I’m going nuts with all this getting nothing done”—like their next album. Or anything fucking else in his life.

  He had to take a leak. And a shower. And get the fuck out of this place, back to normal life.

  “Well, whenever you’re ready,” Ray said, “I’m ready. But let’s give it a few days at least to make sure you’re ready? I want to fire another letter off in the meantime, about these fucking things coming out of you. For all the good that’ll do.”

  Dan pushed up. He didn’t want to think about those fucking things anymore. Just wanted to get the fuck on with his life. “Call Sound Block when we get back and see how soon we can get rehearsal space. We can at least move our shit in.”

  “You got it.”

  On his feet, he felt free for the first time since they’d entered that fucking alley. The bathroom was still steamy from Ray’s shower. Once he was standing under a stream of hot water himself, his brain started to work, asking questions he didn’t want to deal with—like, what had he just let loose on the world?

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Dan’s sleep was infested with fat black bodies whipping through in the night, but when he woke up, he had no headache, no buzzing. His body was his own—worn out, a little battered, but his own.

  Ray called to say Sound Block had space for them. They just had to get their equipment out of his mom’s barn, and for that they needed Ray’s brother’s truck. While they waited for Buddy to have a chance to lend it to them, they hung out, playing—not necessarily writing, just playing. And not talking about what happened—not with words at least. It was there, though, in the way they caught each other’s eye, in the way one or the other looked away—to light a cigarette, to tune a string, to twist the cap off a bottle that didn’t contain blood.

  Ray looked better. His face had some flesh back. His skin had color again. He’d gone back to shaving, taking a few years off with the swipe of a blade.

  Hanging out made Dan think of high school, of summer vacations, when they did nothing but hang out, fretting strings until their fingers were peeling, deeper skin hardened underneath. Those thoughts found their way to his last trip to the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner, and the classmate who’d recognized him. What a freak he must have seemed, running out of the store like that. Or an asshole.

  She deserved something nice coming her way.

  The day Ray could get the truck, Dan walked down to the doughnut shop at about the same time he’d shown up before. The place was as slow as last time. He leaned on the counter, waiting as the same woman he’d talked to before finished putting coffee in the Bunn.

/>   When she saw him, her face flashed into a smile. “Hey!”

  “Hey yourself. How’s things?”

  “Not bad.” She closed the lid on the coffee machine. “What can I get you?”

  “Large, regular. And…I really want to apologize about the last time I was in.”

  She waved him off with the towel she was using to wipe her hands. “Don’t worry about it. Hey, I looked up Ray Ford online. You know, just to see. And you”—she leveled a finger at him—“left out some info.”

  “Yeah, I…really wasn’t in the frame of mind to get into it. But maybe this will make up for it?” He drew their first CD from his pocket—Regrets Are for the Dead—signed by all three of them, a giveaway that hadn’t managed to get given away.

  “For serious?” She picked it up, beaming, then looked at him. “I looked up some of your stuff on YouTube. You guys are good. How did I not know about you?”

  He shrugged a little bashfully.

  “I’m so freakin’ out of the loop on everything. Now I’d be even more afraid to talk to Ray.”

  “Uh, well, I hope not.”

  “What? What? What did you do?”

  He glanced toward the windows. “He should be here any minute. He’s picking me up.”

  “Oh no! And I look like this? With this stupid visor on? All I did this morning was pull my hair back in an elastic!”

  “Shh. You look fine. Really.”

  “Oh God. He doesn’t remember me, does he?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t mention you. I figured that would take the pressure off. What’s your name?”

  “Patricia. Patty Donnelly it would have been then. It’s Griggs now, but only because I’ve been too lazy to change my I.D. and bank accounts all again.”

  “Nice to meet you, Patricia.” He offered his hand. When she took it in her warm fingers, he heard nothing but silence inside his skull. His smile broadened. He almost laughed.

  She looked over his shoulder, to the plate glass. “Oh no,” she said. “Oh no. It would have been hard enough if he weren’t famous and all.”

  Dan laughed. “I don’t know about famous. He’ll be thrilled you’ve heard of us.” He thought of Esmy’s shop, and the Dead Weather confusion.

  The door swept open. Ray strolled in.

  “Hey,” Dan said. “You want a coffee or something?”

  Patricia fidgeted with the displays at the cash register, almost knocking one over. He wanted to laugh again.

  “I could use a coffee.”

  “Sure. Hey, do you remember Patricia? Patty. She went to Central with us.”

  “Hi,” she said, her cheeks as red as the insides of a raspberry doughnut. She clutched her towel like she was ready to crawl under the counter.

  “How’ve you been?” Ray said.

  “Good! Well, you know, except I’m working here, and I’m twenty-eight and divorced with two kids and all, but other than that.”

  “Gotta make a living, right? Gimme a large black.”

  “Coming right up!”

  Dan, leaning against the counter, watched Ray—completely oblivious to Patricia’s startled, bird-like movements. She yelped and said, “Shoot,” as she knocked a half-full coffee over with the edge of the carafe, and Dan pressed his lips together.

  “What are you grinning at?” Ray asked.

  He lifted his eyebrows and shook his head.

  “Here you go. Sorry about the delay.” She set both their coffees down as Dan slipped his wallet out of his pocket. “Oh, no,” she said. “On the house.”

  “You gave me a whole bag of coffee on the house already.” He held the card out. “You keep giving stuff away, they’re not going to be able to afford to keep you in a job. Go on, ring it up.”

  Ray sipped off his coffee.

  “Come on,” Dan said. “I don’t want people to start thinking I’m that guy who thinks so much of himself he expects people to give him shit.”

  “Charge him so we can get out of here. Otherwise we’re never going to get this next record going.”

  “You’re working on a new record?” She punched their drinks in the register.

  “Yep.”

  “That’s wicked cool. I don’t even have any idea how that works. I mean, I guess you go into a studio and all.”

  “Eventually,” Ray said.

  “We’re in the writing phase now,” Dan said.

  “This is, what, your eighth?”

  “Counting the live one, yeah,” Ray said.

  “Well, good luck on it,” she said. “Or am I supposed to say ‘break a leg’?”

  “You know, I have no idea,” Ray said. “You take care of yourself.” He gave her a wink before he turned for the doors. Dan stuffed his wallet back in his pocket and grabbed his own coffee. He gave her a wink and smile of his own.

  Oh my God, she mouthed, and Dan laughed as he headed out the door.

  Out in the sunshine, he hooked an arm around Ray’s neck, walking side by side with him toward Buddy’s beat-up F-350.

  Ray said, “What was that about?”

  Smiling, Dan said, “Just returning a favor.”

  They had a twenty-minute drive out to his mom’s. She was at work, so they skipped stopping by the house and backed straight up to the barn, Ray letting the tailgate down as Dan popped the padlock on the doors. As he swung them wide, sunlight fell in, making dust dance in its light. He always liked the look of their equipment sitting there in the shadows, stacked up in cases. Waiting for them to come and pull it back out.

  They stripped out of their jackets and got to work, hauling speakers and amp heads and Jamie’s drum kit onto the bed. A cigarette jutted from Ray’s pursed lips. Sunshine warmed the browns in his hair as he hoisted himself into the bed to haul stuff toward the front and make room for more in the back.

  “I could get used to this.” Dan put a crate of cables on the truck.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?” Ray looked up at the blue sky. “You know what else is nice?” He put a hand on the side of the truck and jumped down.

  “What?”

  “Not looking at the fucking internet twenty-three hours a day. I haven’t opened my computer since we got back.”

  “So you don’t know if there’s any news?”

  “Nope. And I don’t want to. It can fucking wait.” He clapped Dan on the shoulder on the way back into the barn. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, but right now, I don’t want to know shit. Is that everything?”

  “Everything that’s going, I think.”

  They drove their gear back to town and hauled it into their new practice space at Sound Block. The funky smell of the carpet remnants tacked to three of the walls was almost good to come back to. The room they’d got thrown in this time even came with a swaybacked couch shoved up a cinderblock wall. They’d hang moving blankets over the bricks before they got down to serious work.

  Instead of working, they fooled around, loosening up, enjoying the sound of their amps, the noise they could make, even with it bouncing off the far wall.

  Eventually the door opened and Jamie sauntered in, a take-out cup in hand. “Like what you did with the place.”

  “Hey,” Ray said.

  “How’s it going?” Dan asked.

  “Crazy.” He examined his drum kit before wheeling his stool over.

  “How so?” Ray asked.

  “Did you hear the shit that’s going on down south?”

  Dan, staring at his tuning pedal while he tweaked one of the pegs on his bass, felt a silent yell rising. Don’t go there. Do not tell us about it. Ray hadn’t been the only one avoiding the news, and he wanted to hang on to his ignorance just a little longer.

  But Ray said, “Unh-uh.”

  “Man, it’s fucked up. There was this mob. They beat the shit out of someone. Like, beat him to fucking death.”

  Stop now. Stop now. Stop now.

  “What was that about?” Ray said.

  “They thought the guy was one of the suckers.”
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br />   “The what?”

  “The people who attack people for their blood.”

  Dan walked toward the back wall, his fingers pushed into his hair, the bass bumping his hip.

  “Was he?” Ray asked.

  “Dunno. It just happened.”

  Shit. They needed to write another letter. Send it to the news outlets. He and Ray had been avoiding posting online, even anonymously—just in case. But maybe that’s what they had to do if these people weren’t listening. Hit up Reddit. “I am a reformed sucker. Ask me anything.”

  “They had an attack in Pennsylvania too,” Jamie said. “It’s fucking moving north. I mean, the National Guard is out and all, but what are they supposed to do?”

  Dan unslung the bass. He wanted to throw it. Because Pennsylvania was his. That was his fault.

  Ray had his phone out, scrolling. Checking the news.

  Dan dropped on the couch, all the energy he’d had playing gone. Fucking vanished. “I should have killed them before they got out the window.”

  “Like you were in any condition,” Ray said without looking up.

  “What happened?” Jamie looked from one to the other.

  “I should have killed them,” Ray said.

  “So you could have gotten bitten yourself, and we could have kept going on blood drives?” Dan asked.

  “I should have killed them as you puked them up.”

  “What the fuck?” Jamie’s head whipped back and forth.

  “It didn’t fucking die,” Dan said. “It got up off the fucking floor and flew out the fucking window.”

  Jamie’s jaw dropped halfway to his snare.

  Finally, Ray said, “Fuck shit we can’t do anything about. Let’s get this song figured out.” He turned up his amp.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jamie showed up for most of the first week, sometimes late, sometimes taking off after only an hour. Then he didn’t show up at all. Ray checked on him, making sure he hadn’t been bitten. The things had made it to New York, but so far no reports of attacks in New England.

  Doctors had discovered parasites in people’s spines. Surgery was their first step, but it turned out opening up a patient’s neck caused the parasites to burrow deeper. The patients they tried it on were dead within hours. At least they were able to collect the parasites, keeping them alive in blood baths so they could study them. Dan had hope for that. They’d figure it out.