But another fire was lighting in his guts; it surged past the dying ember in his heart to race through his throat. Bill froze a moment, staring sickly at the dark alleyway just ahead. As his binge lit to purge, he dashed for the privacy of the narrow street.
Ten minutes later, exhausted and slumped on the ground near a pool of bitter vomit, Bill pulled a tissue from his jacket, wiped the tears from his eyes, and blew the acid from his nose.
“Feel better?” a voice whispered, grating from the darkness. Bill’s heart leapt at the unexpected sound. He squinted at the uneven bricks and shadows around him. The dim outline of a man began to take shape from the depths of the darkened street.
“Not really,” Bill answered, wondering if, after all this, he was now going to be mugged. Or killed. Preferably the latter, a voice within him begged.
“Tell me,” the voice asked, its owner settling just far enough away that Bill couldn’t make out his face. A white flash as the man spoke, a glint from eyes turning down. That was all. A hint of a face.
“Tell you, what?” Bill snapped. “That I feel sick inside? That I just wasted 30 bucks trying to drink away reality? Please leave me alone; I’m not in the mood for company.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not anybody’s idea of company.” The hint of a face blurred, shifted, moved closer. Bill caught the sour odor of alley trash and felt his belly kick in complaint.
“Tell me why you’re here, while you still can,” the voice demanded. The roughness of its tone sent a chill through Bill’s neck. If this guy was going to beat him up––or worse––what difference did it make why he was here?
“You want to know? I’ll tell you,” Bill began, slipping easily into the words, recounting events he had already relived a hundred times this night.
“Seven months ago, Lissa, my daughter, was walking home from school. We live just a few blocks away from Sanders High, and she always walked home––in the rain, in the snow, in the summertime. She liked to walk. And she always came straight home. But on that particular afternoon, she didn’t come home on time. Cheryl, that’s my wife, worried a little, but figured Lissa had stopped off to talk with someone. When it got to be dinnertime, Cheryl started calling the parents of Lissa’s friends. No one had seen her. After I came home from work, and she still wasn’t home, we checked the hospitals. Then we called the police.”
The shadowed figured nodded slowly, as if hearing a familiar story.
“They found her the next day in the woods behind the school. She was naked, her body smeared with blood. Her own. Her eyes were open. I think that hurt me the most. She was aware of every touch, every violation, I know she was. Her skull was crushed––she’d been hit on the head with rock. Then raped. But she felt every minute of it. Her eyes were screaming.
“They caught the boys who did it––a couple of seventeen-year-olds who thought they could just knock her out with a rock, then rape her and leave before she woke up.” Bill’s face wrinkled in silent agony; he coughed out a sob and shook his head clear.
“But they hit her too hard,” he finally continued, tears now wetting his cheeks. “And somehow, she didn’t fall unconscious. I wanted them to die like my daughter died. I watched them smirking to each other in the courtroom during the trial, and I pictured myself smashing their heads together until their brains pulped through my fingers.”
He paused, unclenched his hands and laughed sadly.
“The violence I planned for them! I wanted to castrate them, bash in their brains, stab holes in their hearts. Every night during the week of the trial, I cried myself to sleep. And when it was all over … the boys walked away free. Their lawyers managed to get every scrap of evidence the police had found thrown out of court on technicalities. They walked away free while my daughter rotted in the ground.”
A flash of white, as the stranger’s face nodded once again, inched closer.
“The day after the trial was over I stepped on my front porch to get the paper. And found these.”
Bill pulled two triangular shapes from his coat pocket. They glittered in the faint light filtering into the alleyway from the street. “Lissa’s barrettes. I know the boys left them for me to find. A joke. It was all a joke to them. And I hated myself, because instead of going after them, instead of giving them what they gave my daughter, I tucked these in my pocket, went back in the house, and cried some more.”
The pale face again shifted closer, its outline now distinct, long in the heavy shadow of the alley. “Revenge is an expensive enterprise,” it whispered, near enough that Bill could see the stranger’s lips move. They seemed crooked, off-kilter. The alley stench had grown stronger; its character was led by the nauseous aroma of rotting meat, but filled out with the bitter taste of old milk and neglect. Bill began to breathe through his mouth.
“Well, I wish I had paid the price now,” Bill retorted. The fire in his chest had flared briefly with the retelling of his child’s murder, but now flickered lower than before. He was beaten. It was over. He couldn’t avenge his daughter and the remaining foundation of his life, which he’d spent years building upon, had, just today, been swept away in an instant.
“You’re not here tonight because of your daughter,” the voice breathed. Bill heard a pain in that tone that sounded not unlike his own. “Tell me,” the stranger demanded softly.
Bill looked up in surprise at the stranger’s appraisal, then nodded. It seemed right. He wanted to tell someone everything. And so he did.
“My wife looked into my eyes this morning. I thought she looked sad, and I asked her what was wrong. She just kept staring at me, and a tear rolled down her cheek. Then she kissed me. I knew something was bad. Real bad. She’d been so quiet since Lissa died. Actually, she’d been quiet before that, but I hadn’t noticed––until I thought about it tonight.
“ ‘I don’t love you anymore,’ she said. Her eyes were blinking fast and her voice cracked.
“ ‘I’ve been trying to find it for a long time, but I’m sorry, I just don’t. It’s gone,’ she said. I looked at her then, and maybe saw her for the first time in years. It’s funny, after awhile, you start to see your wife as part of the furniture. She’s there, you know? But in that instant I saw her, Cheryl, the woman I met at a beach party 20 years ago. And in her eyes I saw an unknown woman––still with all the mystery of a first date. I thought I knew her inside and out, but quite suddenly I realized that all I really knew about Cheryl was her skin. That I knew by heart. And her routines. But her? The woman staring at me with tears and pity in her eyes, I didn’t know. And the man who cried, and begged, and finally fled to the Ale’s Head Tavern … I’m ashamed to know.”
A hand patted him on the shoulder and Bill looked up into the startling eyes of the stranger. They were milky white, shot through with veins. They had no pupils. They rested in a face that seemed to move and shift in a manner no muscles could control. The rest of the man was cloaked in a long grey coat which didn’t hide his gauntness. His bony fingers were also covered in half-gloves, hobo-style.
“And what are you going to do about it?” the stranger asked, his breath crossing Bill’s nose in a putrid wave which made him realize the alley stench was not of the alley, but of the bum.
“Nothing,” Bill whispered. “I just want to die.”
“That wish, I will grant,” the stranger answered, and with a leap, pinned Bill to the ground. He didn’t struggle.
“Go ahead,” Bill said, all resistance leaving him. “I don’t really care.”
At close range, the stranger’s oddly twitching face appeared mottled with sores, violent explosions of purple standing in grotesque relief against bone-white skin. The hands, which pinned him to the gravelly asphalt, were cold, sticky.
“I can give you the tool for revenge,” the lips offered, mucousy spit dripping from them to moisten Bill’s face. “Or I can simply kill you. I give you the choice because it wasn’t offered to me. I would have chosen death. The cost of revenge, as I said, is great
.”
Deep in the burnt-out shell of Bill’s heart, a tiny flame guttered higher. An insane thought crossed his mind. This was not your ordinary alley bum. Looking into the bloody whites which passed for the stranger’s eyes, seeing the pus oozing from the cracks in his neck, smelling the decay which was not garbage, not bad breath, but trench-coated the bum’s rotting flesh, Bill concluded that this was the devil himself. And suddenly that long unslaked thirst for revenge poured gasoline into his heart.
“I’ll pay the price, whatever it is,” he gasped through gritted teeth. “If it’s my soul you want, take it, I don’t care.” Anger flooded his mind like the bile still lodged in his throat. “I just want to make them pay. All of them.”
The being hesitated a moment, and a word of warning gurgled in his throat. His eyes lowered to stare into Bill’s own. The stench was overpowering. Bill’s stomach threatened to lose whatever acid remained trapped within when the eyes suddenly pulled away and then with a watery cry, the man buried his mouth in Bill’s neck. He only got out one yelp of surprise and pain, and then the night sky blurred. His body went rigid and a stream of cool ice froze in his head. He could hear the stranger slurping, hear the beat of his own heart: thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud … thud … thud … thud. Thud.
Thud.
* * *
The stench. God, it was bad! Bill lifted his head from the cushion of a plastic sack and stirred a hive of flies from somewhere below. They swarmed across his face and landed on his lips. He shook them away and realized in doing so that, amazingly, he had no hangover. But where was he?
Rolling off the bag, he felt the surface shift beneath him with a metallic heave as bags slid away and his feet scrambled to find purchase on solid ground. Reaching above him, his fingers met cool metal that lifted with a push. He rose to full height, his back and legs creaking at the unaccustomed stretch. A garbage dumpster. He was standing in a garbage dumpster! In a dark, stinking alley.
And then the events of the night returned to him: the drinking, the stranger, his story, and then––an attack? He reached up to feel his neck. Sure enough, there were two big sores where the bum had bitten him. Bracing his hands on the side of the dumpster, he vaulted himself to the ground and brushed off his clothes. Something moved in the dark and he froze.
It was the expectation of hearing his heart pound wildly in his chest from fright that tipped him off.
His heart wasn’t beating fast.
Odd.
He put his hand to his chest, felt around. It wasn’t beating at all.
Odder still. But the worst part was, while intellectually he expected to break down into hysterics at any moment, the fact that his heart was not pumping blood to feed his fear didn’t bother him. In fact, he felt very little. Rubbing an index finger along his neck and jaw, he realized he could feel the texture, but it was dulled––the equivalent of a black and white movie versus color.
The shadows stirred again. The stranger from last night emerged from a lean-to shelter behind the dumpster.
“Well, you asked for revenge,” the bum said in a grating voice. “Now is your chance. Don’t waste it. You don’t have much time.”
The blotches covered the stranger’s face now; a tattooed blur of motion, its lips twitched out of sync with its speech, which was now slurred and indistinct, as if his mouth was slow to respond to the twitch of his muscles.
“Who are you?” Bill asked, his eyes drawn with abnormally detached interest to the shivers coursing across the man’s exposed flesh.
“My name is Lawrence,” the man said, milky orbs meeting Bill’s own. “And, as you’ve probably guessed, I’m a vampire. You wanted revenge, so I gave you some of my blood last night.” He pointed at the bruises covering his cheeks. “And this is the result of my thirst. This is your blood.”
Bill thought that he should have known anger, should have smashed his fist into the pruneface before him. But his head remained cool, empty of rancor. He’d been attacked and bitten by a man with a revolting skin disease, and here he was shooting the breeze with the same guy.
“I think you’re just a sick bum with an S&M side,” Bill laughed bravely, already trying to figure out if he should attempt to gain entrance to the couch at his house or head to a hotel for the rest of the night.
“You’re dead,” the voice before him gurgled. “And you don’t have long to act if you want your revenge.”
“Uh-huh,” Bill said, starting to step away from the stinking, disease-ridden bum. But Lawrence shambled quickly to block the exit of the alley.
“Pull my finger,” the bum begged, holding out his left palm. Bill laughed at the incongruous offer.
“Humor me,” Lawrence demanded, ice in his tone.
Bill stared at the outstretched hand, its wrinkled whiteness a thoroughly unhealthy looking offering. Deciding that the faster he did what the transient wanted, the faster he could get to a bed, Bill grasped the extended finger and jerked.
And found himself holding the finger.
This appendage wasn’t one of those trick pieces from the magic shop. This was real skin, real bone. And the red-black ooze at its disconnected end was, Bill suspected, his own blood.
“You’re dead,” Lawrence croaked. “Live with it.”
Bill threw the digit away from him with a frown. He was now becoming somewhat disturbed at the situation. Things were looking, well, unreal.
“Okay, let’s say I’m dead. What happens now?” he asked.
“The same thing that happens to all dead people,” Lawrence returned, stepping away from the alley mouth. “So get your revenge. Fast. And stay out of the sun. It won’t kill you, but it will make you unpleasant to be around a lot faster.”
Lawrence turned and disappeared behind the dumpster once more, leaving Bill alone. He felt again for his heartbeat. Dead. Stepping out onto the street, he decided to find out just what a man with no heartbeat could get away with. Remembering his impotent rage at the two boys who had stolen his daughter from him, he began walking towards the southeast end of town. There was a growing burning in him that sought release, a fire that consumed not only his heart, but his limbs, his head, his lips. At last, he thought, I will have some justice.
* * *
It wasn’t hard to find them. There were only a couple of likely teen hangouts in this part of town, and the Angel’s Park basketball court was one of them. Taking the bum’s advice, he’d slept the day away in a cheap hotel, waking with the dusk to smooth his trash dumpster-scented clothes and step out onto the street once again. He briefly considered stopping at a McDonalds, and then realized that not only wasn’t he hungry, but the idea of grilled beef made him somewhat nauseous. A drink wouldn’t hurt though, he thought, and ducked into a Walgreens to buy a pint of whiskey.
“Is something the matter?” he asked the aged woman behind the register inside the store. She wagged her head ‘no’ while staring at the stubble on his cheek. Her nose crinkled obstinately in complaint. Bill smiled as he accepted the paper bag. Her hand shied from touching his in the exchange. “How quickly we devolve,” he thought. “Two days ago she wouldn’t have looked at me twice.”
Outside the store he opened the bottle, tilted it back. The amber liquid slid easily down his throat––but lacked any kick. It might as well have been grape juice. He felt it travel his throat, detected a thin hint of flavor, and that was all.
By the time he’d reached the basketball court the bottle was empty, and he’d realized that, as liquor lacked any ability to warm his palate, so did it lack the power to make him drunk. “Maybe it will preserve my insides longer,” he thought. And then he noticed the dark stain spreading down the insides of his pant legs. Droplets fell to the sidewalk from his cuffs with each step. No control, he realized. If he drank, it simply ran through him. If he ate, it would probably putrefy inside him.
His attention was suddenly wrenched from his deteriorating condition to the fenced-in asphalt lot before him. The two punks he’d come looking
for were here! They dashed from side to side wrestling for the basketball with a group of other teens. Bill settled unobtrusively on a bench just outside of the lot.
He could wait.
It wasn’t a long one; it was already dark. The boys played under the blinding white glare of the park’s lights for 15 or 20 minutes after Bill’s arrival, and then began to fragment. Soon, only his quarry and two other boys were playing two on two. And then, they too split, two of the players passing him on the way out of the lot, while the two Bill was after hopped the back fence and headed through the alley towards their homes. As soon as the others had passed him, Bill jumped from the bench and sprinted to the back of the brightly lit court. He vaulted the fence easily, and saw the boys just a block down the alleyway. The tall one––Marcus, he remembered––was punching the shorter blonde kid’s shoulder. Terry, that was his name. As if I could forget, Bill shuddered. In the courtroom they had appeared like negatives of each other––Marcus tall, black, beanpole-skinny; Terry short, squat and blonde. But both had maintained those smirking “you’ll never nail me” expressions that were so maddening as it became more and more apparent that they were completely correct. Well, maybe not completely, Bill thought as he began running down the alley after them.
As he ran, that hot feeling in his heart and gut began to build once more––the thrill of the chase could at least still reach his deadened nerves. And then he was on them, slamming open palms into each of their backs just as they began to turn to see who was pounding the pavement behind them.
Best New Vampire Tales (Vol.1) Page 10
