by Roger Keller
Heather hoisted the lifeless body over her shoulder and carried it out onto the deck. The railing groaned as she climbed over with two hundred fifty pounds of dead weight on her back. She held the body steady with her left arm and descended the wall like a spider. Her claws dug into the brick facade, sending red dust flying.
I stood on the deck, beer in hand, and watched. The first raindrops of a coming storm hit my face. Heather was barley visible as she darted across the parking lot. Ray’s lifeless legs flopped against her back. She stopped at the dumpster, propped the body against the green metal and put the carpet knife in his hand. Heather looked around, then disappeared into the night.
I left the deck door open and sat back down. Heather’s gangster movie was over so I found a horror movie. It seemed appropriate. I took another drink of room temperature, imported beer.
“Guess I’ll have to get used to warm beer, since someone took over my fridge,” I said to myself.
I heard Heather’s claws on the wall, before she appeared on the deck. She cleared the footlocker that doubled as a coffee table and landed on the couch. I watched Heather comb her sopping wet hair back with her fingers. Her ragged sweater was clingy and wet. She caught me staring and shot me a jagged smile.
“I can’t believe you put him by the dumpster,” I said. “That was cold.”
“There’s a drain by the dumpster,” she said. “I put the carpet knife in his hand. It’ll look like he killed himself and all the blood went down the drain.”
“Sure, it’ll be fine as long as the cops don’t talk to any of Ray’s friends,” I said, “who, will direct them right up here, where they will find a refrigerator full of DNA evidence.”
“Don’t worry about it.” She rolled her eyes. “Cops always look for the simplest answer and they really have their hands full right now.”
I thought about the haunted cop, manning the barricade by the house on Maple Street. He’d seen enough to last a lifetime. I could only imagine what those poor bastards were going to find, sifting through the ashes of the strip mall. I grabbed a warm beer and snapped off the cap with the edge of the footlocker. Heather pulled at her soggy sweater.
“I’m gonna take a shower,” she said.
“Use my roommate’s bathroom, he cleaned it before he took off.” I said, wondering why I cared if she saw my messy bathroom.
Heather got up and walked over to my washer dryer combo. She started undressing. My mouth went dry. I’m not sure what I expected. Heather looked like a 1980s centerfold, airbrushed corpse white for some kind of special Halloween issue. She left her clothes next to my overflowing laundry basket.
“I’m not washing those,” I said.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she padded away. I heard the shower running a few minutes later.
“Your friend left a bunch of stuff in here.” Heather called out from the bathroom. “I’m gonna use his shampoo.”
“Go for it, he ain’t coming back,” I said.
Heather already had a lot of blood, so I figured it was safe to fall asleep at some point. I took out my knife, just in case, and set it on the cushion. I shut my eyes for a second.
*****
It was broad daylight when I woke up. Heather walked into the living room wearing my roommate’s green bathrobe. She shrugged the robe off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Sunlight washed over her tan skin. This was a version of Heather that might have never existed. The sight gave me the energy to drag myself off the couch. I left the knife on the cushion.
“What’s going on?” I said. “Did you get cured, or something?”
She embraced me. Her breasts pressed against my chest. We kissed. My hands explored her warm smooth flesh. I felt her lips on my neck while I buried my fingers in her thick blonde hair.
Then the room went dark. Heather’s fangs sliced into me. Claws tore open my back and shoulders as I pushed her back. My blood poured out of her mouth splattering her now pale breasts.
I had to get to a hospital. A puddle of blood grew around my feet. I looked around for my keys. Dead bodies, human, vampire and things I couldn’t identify, littered the apartment. Arcane graffiti and esoteric symbols covered the bullet scarred walls. Time was running out. I reached for my knife. A battle worn AK-47 waited on the couch in it’s place.
“What the fuck?” My voice cracked as the pain sunk in.
Heather knocked me to the floor. Her claws tore into my chest, shearing skin and muscle right down to bone. She snapped my ribs loose like matchsticks. Her clawed hand closed around my beating heart. I screamed and writhed in real, inescapable pain. She pulled, but thick arteries held fast. Heather opened her mouth, too wide. Her fangs extended. I could make out tiny, shark-like serrations on each tooth. Her head snapped forward and she buried her teeth in my heart.
*****
I screamed out loud and fell off the couch, scattering empty beer bottles everywhere. Throbbing pain worked it’s way across my chest. I sat up, wiped the tears from my face and groped around for my knife. My hand closed around it’s grooved aluminum grip. I pulled my shirt up, but couldn’t find a single bite mark. It was overcast outside instead of sunny. The neon bar-clock on the wall read one o’clock.
I downed a warm bottle of Newcastle to blunt the edge. After two more my hands stopped shaking.
“Aw shit. The gold.” I jumped off the couch. Even after everything that happened, I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten the gold. There was a gang that worked the apartment parking lots. They broke into cars at least once a week. I was pretty sure Rick’s oldest son, Ron, was a member. They usually passed over traditional targets like stereos and focused on anything with personal information. But, I was pretty sure they’d make an exception for my gold.
I found an old laptop case, slipped the knife into my back pocket and headed for the parking lot.
I saw the police lights before I got down the stairs. Yellow tape marked off an area by the dumpster. An unmarked car blocked the place where Heather had laid her prey to rest. Two plainclothes officers stood by the tape and argued with my neighbor. Rick’s hairy beer belly jiggled as he shook his finger at them. The tall plainclothes officer wore a bolo tie and snake skin cowboy boots. He spit chewing tobacco between Rick’s sandals. Rick saw me and pointed. He shook the smaller cop’s sport coat. I kept walking and pretended to ignore them.
I looked at some of the coins as I scooped them into my bag. There were South African Krugerrands from the Seventies and Mexican Eagles from Pancho Villa’s time. I dropped the last coins in the case and looked up to see the cowboy cop standing there.
“Sir, we need to speak with you.” He rapped on my window.
“Uh, yeah, sure.” I zipped the case closed as conspicuously as possible and opened the door.
“Did you know Ray Sikorsky?” he said.
“Uh, we hung out with a guy named Ray last night.” I clung to the case feeling guilty as hell. The smaller cop kept circling my car, adjusting his hipster fedora and admiring his own reflection. I really wanted to punch him or at least invite him up to see Heather. A gust of wind blew the cowboy’s jacket back, revealing a stainless steel 1911 in a Miami Vice style shoulder holster.
“Who’s we?” the Cowboy said.
“Me and, my girlfriend,” I said.
“She around?” the Hipster’s eyes lit up.
“She had to work,” I said.
“What do y’all mean, hung out?” The Cowboy shot the Hipster a look and narrowed his gray eyes.
“Drinkin’, watching movies,” I said.
“What was Mr. Sikorsky’s state of mind last night?” the Cowboy said.
“The guy seemed really down, complaining about his life and stuff,” I said. “He drank a lot of my booze. I remember that.”
“Smells like you’ve been drinkin’ too, son. I hope you ain’t driving anywhere.” The Cowboy stroked his mustache, while the Hipster stared at my case.
“No sir. I just came to get my stuff.” I wond
ered if Heather would help me escape from the county jail. “What did this guy, Ray, you said, what did he do? Should I be worried he’ll come back?”
“He ain’t comin’ back. He killed hisself. Over by those dumpsters.” He pointed at the taped off area.
“Damn.” I stood up, ready to make a break for the building.
The laptop case weighed down my right side as I walked across the parking lot. The Cowboy’s eyes burned holes in my back the whole way.
“I heard they found bones at the Hillcrest Mall fire,” the Hipster said, “lots of ‘em.”
My heart skipped. I dropped my keys by the stairway door. I saw the Cowboy lean on my car and run his fingers over Heather’s claw marks. His eyes narrowed, like he was trying to put something together.
“Shit. I hate this fuckin’ door,” I said under my breath.
“Lots of bones, you say.” The Cowboy spit. His partner grimaced.
“We should be there. Or, more importantly, the house on Maple Street.” The Hipster stretched and cracked his neck.
“You fuckin’ kidding me, boy?” the Cowboy said.
I didn’t stay to hear the rest. They had all the pieces. I couldn’t tell if it would all click in the Cowboy’s head. Then I felt a strange calm wash over me. I though of a dozen ways I could get out of the whole mess as I climbed the stairs.
Chapter 4
Heather was lurking somewhere in my apartment, I could sense it. I threw the laptop case on the couch. The zipper split and coins spilled out on the floor. I groaned and went looking for my vampire. Heather left me a trail of bloody footprints from the refrigerator to the my bedroom. The tracks grew fainter on the carpet, then disappeared under my futon. An empty soda bottle sat in a dried puddle of blood on the carpet.
“Nice.” I tapped the bottle with my foot.
I bent down and looked under the futon. Yellow orange eyes flashed back at me from the darkness. I fell on my ass and pushed myself back.
“Dammit, Heather.” I kicked the futon. Heather growled back. The sound seemed to come from something a lot larger than her 5’ 7” frame.
I sat down on the futon with a half empty bottle of rum. Heather had left a zombie movie repeating on my TV. I’d seen it a couple of times before so I left the sound off. I remembered being a kid, afraid of something under my bed. I looked down and waited for a pale undead hand to reach for my ankles. I took a drink and threw the cap across the room. There was nothing left to do, except wait for the cops or the vampire to get me. I sunk back onto the futon and fell asleep.
Zombie noises, screams and pounding, Italian electronic music woke me up. Heather sat next to me, kicking her stocking feet, happily watching another horror movie. She swirled blood in one of my commemorative whiskey glasses.
“There’s police tape by the dumpster,” she said. “Looks like they took poor Ray away.”
“Yeah, I got to talk to the cops,” I said.
“They came up here?” she said.
“Down in the parking lot,” I said. “I forgot the gold.”
“There’s always more gold,” she said. “What did the pigs say?”
“They think it’s suicide,” I said.
“Told you.” She took another sip of Ray’s blood.
“Rick was telling the detectives about us,” I said.
“Rick?” she said. “Oh, that fat fuck. I don’t care about him. I watched the news while you were asleep. They’re lying about everything.”
“Of course they are,” I said. “I don’t even blame ‘em. The truth is too fucked up.”
“It’s hilarious,” she said. “I’ve seen them pull this kind of shit before. They’re claiming a cult killed your friends and burned the mall to destroy the evidence.”
I took another drink. Somehow, I’d managed to sleep without spilling the bottle. I decided to taper off until I knew what was going to happen next. Heather and I kept talking, without looking at each other, watching the movie play on my TV.
“I dreamed you killed me,” she said. “You drove a broken piece of this futon through my chest. Then, you cut off my head. I was still alive somehow, like I could still think while you did it. You burned the whole building down to get rid of me.” She tapped my arm. “You’d have to burn everything, ‘cause I would totally come back for revenge.”
“That’s weird. You killed me, in my dream.” I kept looking straight ahead, not sure what to think.
“Really,” she said.
“This is all fucked,” I said. “I’m talking to a vampire and I will probably go to jail.”
“Stop pretending like any of this is bothering you,” she said. “You have always been headed down this road. It was only a matter of time. I’ve known plenty of guys like you, they try to be good, but eventually…”
“Look, Heather,” I said, “this isn’t my road, or whatever. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m just playing along.”
“That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since before I met Lee,” she said.
“How did you meet Lee, anyway?” I said. “How did this happen to you?”
“We met at a concert. And, this didn’t happen to me. I made it happen.” She grabbed my shirt and pulled me close, then let go. “ Sorry.” She smoothed my shirt out.
“What are we going to do now?” I said, trying to change the subject.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “The FBI will be here soon. Some of them know about us, so we have to be careful. The problem is, the revenants don’t give a shit. They’ll come after us anyway.”
“Wait, there’s FBI agents that know about vampires?” I said.
“Oh yeah.” Heather balanced on her knees and leaned toward me. She smelled like my roommate’s shampoo, and blood.
“Are you scared?” she said.
Heather was uncomfortably close now. She tilted her head back and laughed. Her fangs retracted in her bloody mouth. I felt her cool fingers on my neck.
“I’m kinda scared,” she said.
There was only a faint glow in her eyes. Heather’s cheeks and lips were flushed with stolen blood.
“Of what,” I said, “what could you possibly be scared of?”
Heather climbed on top of me and played with my collar. Her fingernails were healthy and trim, showing no trace of being split by razor sharp claws. She ran her thumb over my jugular, testing my pulse. My heart jumped.
“You scare me.” Her lips brushed my ear.
“What, why?” I said.
“You’re a vampire hunter,” she said.
“Do you even know what that means?” I said.
“I don’t really know,” Heather said. “You’re the first one I ever met. Lee said that he used to kill vampire hunters all the time, like back in the Seventies, or something. Apparently there were a lot of them in the Sixties too. And a lot more vampires too. Karla, that black-haired bitch you saw in Lee’s room, she got a few of you guys. One hunter who went after her was from England. He was some kind of fucking communist. They trained him in Moscow to save the workers from being exploited by imperialist vampires, or some bullshit like that. He made his weapons out of silver medals given to the dead Russian heroes of World War Two. When he got to the East Coast, he paid an outlaw biker gang to back him up.”
“Why bikers?” I put my hands on her hips, hoping she’d washed her clothes when I was asleep.
*****
I looked past Heather and saw it all on my TV. For a second I thought I was having a stroke. I could still hear her talking, but the words seemed to come from another room, not from someone sitting on top of me. The horror movie was gone, replaced by a film about the Sixties, rendered in color and clarity that only those who lived through those times would have seen. A Ford Mustang, fresh off the assembly line, pulled up to the gates of a Gothic mansion. A young man wearing a waxed canvas jacket got out of the car. He had to be the vampire hunter Heather was talking about. He looked up at the overcast sky and shook his head. The vampire hunter stood fast a
s dozens of motorcycles roared past him. The bikers parked wherever they wanted. These were the old school bikers who wore ragged denim and whatever else they could scrounge. A red and rust colored truck pulled along side of the Mustang. The bikers lined up like disciplined soldiers while a huge bearded man in a raccoon coat took his place in the truck’s bed. He threw a moldy tarp back and began passing out weapons.
“Where’s the bread, man?” A short, wiry, biker chief grabbed the vampire hunter’s sleeve.
“Bread?” the vampire hunter said, in an upper class English accent. “Oh, yes. Your payment. It it locked securely in the trunk. You may have it when we finish.”
“Maybe we just take it now?” The short biker stoked his beard. Two well armed goons flanked him.
“Yeah, chief, let’s rat-pack this limey wuss and take his shit,” one of the goons said.
“Why don’t we?” the chief said.
“Why, then you would miss all the fun,” the Hunter said. “Who knows what treasures those parasitic monsters have amassed for themselves. It seems appropriate that they chose the home of a Nineteenth Century robber baron, who no doubt exploited the native peoples of this land. At any rate I promised your, eh wonderfully democratic group, a ninety percent share of anything we find. You, Mister Franco, of all people know better than the others what is waiting for us in there. Without me any attempt to attack that house would end in disaster.”
“Sure, man.” Franco shifted gears. “We were just fuckin’ around. We made a deal, we’ll stick to it.”
“There will be no time for, fucking around, in there,” the Hunter said. “Once those creatures are destroyed however, then, do what thou wilt. Now, get the fire going.”
They moved in from all sides, knocking down the wrought iron fence like an invading army. A few bikers stayed behind and cut down a dying oak tree. An ancient couple, dressed as a maid and a butler, stepped out onto the porch. The vampire hunter shot them both with a silenced P 38. Even Franco was impressed with his ruthlessness. The bikers finished the couple off with knives and bayonets. They held hands and smiled at each other as they died. The bikers spread out into the mansion. They followed the vampire hunter to a massive bank vault door, built into one of the walls.
