He stood behind her, one hand on her waist, the other sliding up to rest on her shoulder. Cole, sitting at a table not far away, resisted the urge to remind him to count to twenty. Instead, he started counting to himself, keeping track silently.
But along about thirteen, he noticed something strange. Gordon’s fingers were moving on the girl’s shoulder. He looked as if he was giving her a one-handed massage. It was an odd way to feed—poor technique, wasted movements, drew attention—and Cole was a little perturbed until he saw the reason for it.
Gordon was looking down her shirt. He must have a good view, Cole thought—she was well endowed, and the top three buttons were unfastened. Gordon didn’t even seem to be aware that his fingers were moving. Next, Cole thought, he would start drooling. Or playing with himself.
Gordon was keeping track of the time though; he released the girl at the proper moment and stepped away.
Then he continued playing pool with her as if nothing had happened.
Sandor nudged Cole. “That was well done.”
Cole just shook his head.
When the game was done, Gordon came bounding over. He had lost at pool, but he didn’t seem to care. He sat down and pounded the tabletop with his fist. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” he said, beaming at Cole. “Not some smelly guy. Not some wrinkled old hag. Wow. You know, those girls back at the Building, they let you do anything at all. But you could do it out here too, couldn’t you? And they’d never know! I could have put my hands—”
“No, you couldn’t,” Cole cut in. “I saw you thinking it, but you are not to do it. You’re a parasite, not a predator. And definitely not a pervert.”
“But nobody’s going to know—”
“Your job is to remain as invisible and unobtrusive as possible. That does not include fondling your feeds in a public place.”
“Okay, but in private—”
“You are not going to molest people. You’re going to treat your feeds with the same respect you’d give them if they were aware.”
“But what difference does it make? If they don’t know—”
“Because you are a human being and not an animal. Because our lives are built on their backs, and we owe them civility at least.”
Gordon’s jaw set. He picked up his beer, took a sip—and choked, then spit the mouthful back into the glass. “I’m not really a human or an animal, am I?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m a vampire.”
Silence, frigid and sudden, dropped over the table.
Sandor’s mouth tightened, and he would not meet Gordon’s eyes. Cole didn’t care to look at him either, right now, but he could feel Gordon’s confusion, his gaze darting from Sandor to Cole and back again. The kid knew he’d said something wrong.
Cole said nothing. He kept his own face smooth and expressionless.
Sandor and Cole got up at the same time. Gordon followed suit, every line of his body filled with uneasiness.
No one said a word as they walked to the car.
“We do not use that word,” Sandor said when they were all inside.
“Which word?” Gordon asked, huddled in the backseat.
“The one you said. The one that starts with a V.”
“But why not?”
“Because it is not who we are. It bears a thousand connotations that have nothing to do with us.”
“It’s degrading,” Cole said, his voice curt. “It’s demeaning. It’s a caricature. Got it?”
“I—I guess so.”
“We are hemovores,” Sandor explained. “Hemo, meaning blood. Vorare, meaning to devour. You have heard the words carnivore, herbivore, omnivore? We are hemes, all the other people are omnis.”
“This is not a cartoon,” Cole said. “It’s life. Your life is not a video game, or a movie, or a book.”
“Life seldom is,” Sandor remarked. “Even for omnis.”
“Sorry,” said Gordon faintly. “I didn’t know.”
Cole gave Sandor a look. For over two weeks the kid had apparently gone around thinking he was Dracula.
“It hadn’t come up,” Sandor explained, apologetic.
Cole fastened his seat belt, and started the car. “There is nothing magical about us,” he told Gordon, watching in the mirror to make sure the boy buckled up. “Nothing supernatural.”
“We have a disease,” Sandor explained.
“But I’m not sick,” Gordon said.
“Sick is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a very smart germ that creates us. Surely a viral infection, like AIDS or malaria, but transmitted by saliva in the bloodstream. But this virus is a clever one. It changes your metabolism; it makes you heal, and you don’t age. Foolish viruses destroy their hosts. This one makes you live.”
“If it’s a virus,” Gordon argued, “then why doesn’t everyone catch it?”
“Obviously,” Cole told him, “it can only be transmitted at—or right before—the moment of death.”
“Around the time your heart stops beating,” Sandor corrected. “Notice you were not dead enough to have brain damage.” He sat up as if struck by an idea. “Gordon. You should continue your college education, study the matter. Not enough is known. There are a couple of Norwegian hemes who have been doing research, but they are very thorough and move slowly. You could join them, and be the one to learn all!”
“Me? I’m new to this. Why not you?”
“Oh, I’m not smart enough. And I like my life the way it is. I don’t consider myself to be a problem that needs a solution, and I certainly don’t need the answer to every question on this earth. Life would be dull if one had all the answers, do you not agree?” He turned back to Cole. “Guess what Gordon was studying in college?”
“I have no idea.”
“Premed!” Sandor said. “Now isn’t that interesting?”
“How were your grades?” Cole asked.
“Um. Not so good. The teachers, they give tests, but they only tell you about it once, like at the beginning of the semester. So if you forget you’re screwed.” The lights from passing cars slid over Gordon’s shoulders and face, dropping into shadows.
“Did it ever occur to you to write it down?”
“Well, you know. Sometimes I kind of overslept, and I’d have to run, and then I’d forget my notebook and stuff.”
Cole could not for the life of him think of anything to say to that. He wondered if Sandor’s throat-slitting pickpocket was this clueless.
Sandor, however, seemed really taken with the topic. “Once you get used to all this,” he told Gordon, “you could take some night courses. You don’t have to give up your education.”
In the rearview mirror, Cole saw Gordon open his mouth, then shut it. It looked to Cole as if Gordon would like more college about as much as he would like to swallow more beer.
“You should stay with premed,” Sandor added. “Work hard, get good grades. You could study this question of whether we die and then tell Cole that he is wrong!”
Cole snorted.
“Why do you laugh like that? Of course we will die,” Sandor informed Cole. “It’s part of the cycle of life.”
“We are not part of the cycle of life.”
“Don’t be silly. If nothing else, one day the sun will explode and the earth will be destroyed along with it. We’ll have to die then, won’t we?”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Look at it this way,” Sandor said. “What if, like Harold, your head got cut off? How could you live with your body unable to receive any messages from your brain? And what if a train fell out of the sky and crushed you flat as a pancake? Of course you would be dead.”
“Unconscious, maybe.”
“When I was a boy in Boravia, you know what they did to the strigoi? First they dug them up. Then they cut off their heads, which they threw into a river. And then they burned the bodies that were left. Now you tell me those people weren’t dead! Of course, they were already dead to begin with, but if
they hadn’t been, I guarantee they would have been by the end of the day!”
“If they were already dead,” Gordon asked, “why did anyone dig them up?”
“Oh, those were the days when they thought plagues and such were caused by the strigoi, the vlkodlaks. So they dug the poor people out of their graves.”
“Even if they weren’t already dead,” Cole said, “it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they just went into sort of a permanent hibernation.”
“With their bodies burned up! You mean just the heads?”
“Yes. Think about it, Sandor. What happens when we die the first time?”
“Oh, we don’t really die then, Cole. Not completely. Our hearts and lungs take a little break, but they start again before our brains are affected. It’s just a pause. There is no such thing as a permanent hibernation. Every living thing must give and take—air, water, nutrition—you name it. Everything must interact with its environment. That’s being alive, by definition.”
“What if a living thing could go a long time between giving and taking—like, say, centuries? Millennia?”
“Cole, it is a very good thing you have us with you. You come up with such strange ideas on your own.”
“Just because you don’t agree with an idea doesn’t mean it’s strange.”
“In any case,” Sandor said, turning to Gordon, “I thought you did very well tonight. Wouldn’t you agree, Cole?”
The evening had been encouraging. And it did seem that the kid had only needed some structure and a firm hand.
But it was still too early for unqualified praise.
“Except for the pawing,” Cole answered. “Except for the ogling and the major breach of etiquette.”
Gordon had been leaning forward, listening to Sandor’s tale of dug-up strigoi. Now, in the mirror, Cole saw him sit back—whether thoughtful or stung Cole could not tell.
Either was fine with Cole.
CHAPTER TWELVE
GORDON seemed to be catching on. Each of the next few nights, he fed on his own after a couple of attempts, with only one try fumbled badly enough to make the omni screech. It was more than Cole had hoped for—he’d figured that he and Sandor would have to get a feed started for the kid fairly often at first.
“Anyone want to scout out locations for tomorrow’s feed?” Sandor asked as they wheeled their suitcases down a carpeted motel hallway. “I saw a nice-looking place down the street that might—oh, never mind. I can see that you’re both tired. We’ll just stay in and watch TV then. Gordon, how about that?”
“Fine with me,” Gordon said.
“Me too,” Cole agreed. He was tired. Tired of being responsible. Tired of playing bad cop. And very, very tired of lecturing. Except for an occasional put-upon sigh from Gordon, neither he nor Sandor seemed to be bothered by it; but Cole was sick of the sound of his own voice.
However, lecturing was what he was here to do. “Notice that we try to stay in a hotel with an inside hallway,” he told Gordon, as their suitcases whined along the carpet. “If there’s a choice, you don’t want a room that can be entered from the outside, because maids have been known to ignore the Do Not Disturb sign—and when they open the door, in comes the sun. Okay, here you are. One forty-five. I’m in one forty-seven.” He stopped outside their door, wanting to make sure they went in.
“Cole, why don’t you come over in a moment, and we’ll play a game or something. Does this hotel have video games in the rooms?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Nevertheless, you will come over anyway?”
To his surprise, Cole found that he wasn’t averse to the idea. He’d forgotten that he enjoyed being with some of the other hemes, especially Sandor. Forgotten that it was actually amusing to argue and debate with someone who took a strong position but never got angry or offended about being disagreed with.
Being alone wasn’t something he’d undertaken on purpose. Somehow it had just seemed to come about gradually over the decades. The others liked to settle down for weeks or months at a time and Cole didn’t, for the most part.
The truth was, he’d gotten into the habit of spending hours watching the road roll toward him, disappearing endlessly under the front wheels, while he thought about other things. He hardly even noticed the landscape anymore: Sometimes there were dark mountains looming outside the car windows, sometimes stars stretching down to meet open plain, sometimes lights from suburbs or squares of farmland under the moon. It all ran together into a blur.
Not for Sandor. Even just driving along a few nights ago, Cole had already zoned out when Sandor exclaimed, “Oh, I love this part of the state!”
Cole had blinked, looked around at the trees pressing up against the sides of the highway. It took him a moment to realize that Sandor meant New Jersey and that yes, this was an attractive spot, especially compared to the more utilitarian area where he’d parked his car while in the city.
“Will you come?” Sandor asked again.
“I was planning on being off duty for the rest of the evening.”
“Then for the rest of the evening,” Sandor said, straight-faced, “I give you permission to be as uninformative and uninstructive as you wish.”
“All right, then—”
“I swear to you: If you say something even slightly edifying, I shall cover Gordon’s ears so that he cannot hear.”
“Okay, Sandor. I’ll be there as—”
“And if you forget yourself and we accidentally find ourselves in the midst of an educational moment, I’ll leap up and start singing Boravian folk songs to drown you out. Ah, look, Gordon. That is the first nonfeeding smile you will have seen from Cole thus far. Charming, isn’t it? I promise; he will loosen up more and more as your progress wins his approval.”
“Right,” Gordon said. “Well, if it helps, I promise that I won’t learn a thing.”
Cole looked sharply at him. The kid had cracked a smile. He was joking.
Come to think of it, that was the first nonfeeding smile he’d seen from Gordon, as well. Still nothing like his brother Guerdon’s quick flash of a grin, Cole knew, although precisely what that grin looked like he couldn’t recall. He could only remember the essence, the feeling of it.
“I’ll come over in a minute,” Cole told Sandor and Gordon. He waited to see them safely into their room before going into his. As he unpacked, he let himself think about Guerdon a little bit. He remembered some of the events of his childhood, but mostly as something in a story, blurred and wrapped away under layers of years.
One crystal clear picture he had was of the long night after Guerdon’s death—of watching over the body with his mother and sisters and the neighbors.
The women would dip the cloth in cool water with soda and, wringing it, lay it over Guerdon’s face to keep away the flies. This Cole remembered, because of the intensity with which he had watched the clinging wet cloth make a featureless mask of his brother’s face. He’d been eleven or so, a year older than Guerdon; and he’d sat rigidly upright, unmoving, waiting and hoping to see the cloth rise or collapse when Guerdon started breathing again.
That was neither here nor there though.
Anyway, Gordon’s hadn’t even been a real smile, now that he thought about it. More like a half smile. Almost reaching the eyes but not quite.
A little bit later, when Cole walked into Sandor and Gordon’s room—a mirror image of his own—Sandor had moved the desklike table over to the bed and pulled the hard-backed chair up to one side. Gordon was seated on the bed on the other side.
Sandor sat down in the chair. “Look, I have my cards,” he told Cole, holding up a deck. “Shall we play gin rummy?”
“Gin is for two players,” Cole told him.
“Not when I play. When I play, it is for as many people as I want.” There was a hotel pad and pen on the table in front of him. Sandor picked up the pen and wrote three names at the top of the first page.
But Cole was feeling restless now. He wasn’t r
eady to settle into a game of cards just yet. “It’s a little hot in here, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Set the temperature anywhere you want,” Sandor said. “Then come sit down.” Cole walked over to the thermostat and adjusted it down a few degrees. He didn’t go to sit down but wandered over to the window.
“What city did you say this is?” Sandor asked Cole, shuffling the cards.
Cole pulled the curtain aside and looked out. “Harrisburg,” he said. Below, gated amid concrete, there was a hotel swimming pool. It was dark, the lights off. He liked swimming; it was one of the few things he truly enjoyed and looked forward to.
“Pennsylvania?” Sandor was asking.
“Uh-huh.” That’s what he wanted to do tonight. He wanted to go swimming.
“That is one thing about being on the road, Gordon,” Sandor informed him, shuffling the cards. “Places run together in your mind. When you are able to be more independent, you can stay somewhere for years at a time if you wish. Then you can remember where you are.”
“Will we be staying anywhere more than one night on this trip?”
“Yes,” said Sandor. “Soon. You’re doing very well, Gordon, you know.”
Cole did not agree, not out loud. Didn’t want the kid to get cocky.
He leaned one shoulder against the wall, focused on the pool area. “Don’t deal me in just yet,” he told Sandor.
“Yes, you must brood at the window first, of course. Cole is one of those brooding hemes,” Sandor said to Gordon as he dealt the cards: slap slap slap. “In spite of it, he’s good company. But as I was about to say: Sometimes I remember a place if there’s something interesting about it. For example, if it’s the Pumpkin Capital of the Midwest. Or there’s some kind of roadside attraction, like…What was the name of that place with the swimming pig?” he asked Cole.
“I can’t remember.”
“A swimming what?” Gordon asked.
“Pig,” Sandor said, picking up his cards and spreading them into a fan. “His name was Ralph. Are we playing for money? Not yet, perhaps? Here, I’ll go first. Anyway, Ralph the Swimming Pig is what it said on the billboard. But we never got to see him.”
Night Road Page 9
