Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  His apartment number was 1000. Probably a place of prominence, tenth floor, facing the front. I left the Olds and walked around the building. When I rounded the front of the building, I saw what had to be Childe’s apartment. One corner of the building was rounded, almost like a castle turret. On the top floor, the entire outer circumference of that stone curve was fitted with a huge leaded glass window. The window had to be ten feet wide and half again as high. It was hard to tell, since the room beyond was dark, but I had the impression that the inside was hung with heavy drapes.

  Now all I had to do was get in.

  I continued to circle the apartment building, looking for an entry point. The usual entrances were secure. I could have tried to have someone buzz me in, but I didn’t want to announce my presence like that.

  When I completed my circuit, I saw my way in.

  Above the rear door, overlooking the parking lot, windows looked in on a rear stairwell. The door itself sat within a Gothic arch topped with an elaborate stone shield. I looked around, to assure myself that I was unobserved; then I ran up and jumped at the door. I grabbed hold of the top of the arch, around the projecting shield.

  Levering myself up to the window was easier than I expected. I thought of the litany of aches and pains this should have ignited, and now that I was thinking of them, I noticed the lack. I lived in a forty-five-year-old body, but I don’t think I could have pulled myself up so easily when I was eighteen.

  I remembered jumping out a second-floor window. My body seemed capable of more than healing a slashed wrist.

  I stood on a small stone prominence, looking in on the stairwell. The window I faced was locked, but I saw no sign of any alarm system. All that held it shut was a small tab of metal, screwed into the wood of the frame. My first thought was to break the glass, reach in, and unlock the window, but I reconsidered.

  If I pulled myself up here so easily, how easily could I force the window?

  I grabbed the bottom of the upper frame and started tugging it down. It tried to move, and through the glass I saw the metal of the lock levering upward in response. I saw that it had been painted shut. Paint flaked from the lock.

  Then, abruptly, it gave, and the top half of the window slammed down in the sash. A small twisted piece of metal sailed into the stairwell, clattering down the stairs. I stood there for a moment, waiting for someone to react to the noise. No one did.

  I climbed though the top of the window, closing it as firmly as I could behind me.

  At Childe’s door, I wished for some lock picks, or at least a credit card. I was reduced to drawing my gun, looking both ways down the hallway, and kicking it open.

  The door blew in after I slammed my foot next to the inner edge of the doorknob. The room beyond was dark. I covered it with the Eagle as the door hit the wall. Even before my eyes adjusted, I knew the apartment was empty. I could feel it.

  I stepped in, still covering the room with my Eagle. Feelings aside, I wasn’t going to let my guard down until I saw the place was empty.

  I did a quick sweep of all the rooms. All were dark, all were unoccupied. Then I holstered the gun.

  I went back to the front and closed the door to the apartment to ward off the curious. By now I could see fairly well, even in the near-complete darkness. Well enough to read titles on the bookshelf across from the grand, draped window. Another of the fringe benefits of vampirism.

  I started searching Childe’s rooms at the bookshelf. The titles weren’t helpful except in confirming Childe’s interest in the occult. Many of the books were old, and the majority weren’t in English. I noted titles such as Directorium Inquisitorum, Ordinall of Alchimy, Heaven and Hell, De Quinta Essentia Philosophorum, and Iter Subterraneum. I noted authors from John Dee and Alister Crowley to Thomas Aquinas.

  The remainder of the living room, dominated by the great curtained window, was less remarkable. Childe had a predilection for antiques, and I had the feeling that most of his furniture, as his books, must have traveled here from England.

  What was striking was what was not here. Childe didn’t own a television, or a stereo. The only sign that he acknowledged the century he lived in was the presence of electric lights, and a telephone that occupied a table to itself in one corner of the living room.

  I examined the phone and found an answering machine. The machine held half a dozen messages.

  The first message was a gravelly voice that sounded slightly familiar, though I couldn’t place it. “I hear you look for a woman of certain qualities. There will be one at the ritual tonight, I’ve told her to look for you.” There was a computerized date-time stamp on the messages; this one had been left at 6:15 p.m. on Sunday, January twenty-sixth.

  The next message had been left over a week later, after I had already begun my search for Cecilia. The voice was unquestionably Gabriel, requesting a meeting.

  The next two messages were also from Gabriel, no longer requesting. The last of Gabriel’s messages was a virtual demand for Childe to explain himself. The dates of the calls were portentous. One corresponded to Kate’s death. The next corresponded to my own disappearance.

  The last two were from Sam, leaving a name and number. I noticed that he didn’t identify himself as a policeman, and that he left the number of his pager.

  I worked through an empty and unused kitchen and a dining room, finding little of Childe left behind. It was as if no one had ever really lived here. The furniture was all in place, but most of the drawers I opened were empty. Nowhere did I find any papers, bank records, checkbook, opened mail, phone bill, anything.

  The only sign that this was anything more than a mail drop was in the bedroom. The room was huge, and central to it was a canopied bed, which was curtained with heavy black velvet. The curtains had been drawn aside, revealing that the bed held no mattress, no bedding. The bed frame supported a flat wood panel.

  Even though the windows were curtained, I noticed immediately that this room was darker than the others. Dark enough to give my now-exceptional night vision difficulty. It was as dark down here as it had been in the sewer.

  When I pulled the curtains on the window aside, I saw why. The glass had been painted so that no light could leak into this room. I backed up to the door, and checked around it. There was a curtain rod mounted just above the door frame, and more heavy curtains hung to the side, ready to be drawn across a closed door—a door that would be held shut by a pair of heavy dead bolts that could not be unlocked from the other side.

  Childe was serious about not having his rest disturbed.

  However, I had the feeling that there were a number of other places in the city where Childe slept. This one, I felt, was here for the people who were looking for Childe, and the outfitting of the bedroom was secondary, in case Childe needed a dark place to sleep.

  It was frustrating, but not unexpected. I knew that there’d be little to find before I’d come here. Childe had been doing what he’d been doing for decades at least. There was no way he could go so long without learning how to cover his tracks.

  No papers, no mail....

  Now there was a thought. If Childe had truly disappeared with Cecilia, his mail here would have been accumulating for three weeks with no one to pick it up. Even if this was only a front, at the very least, Manuel Deité had to pay a phone bill.

  No matter how many places Childe might have, Manuel Deité only had one address in this town.

  I slipped out of the apartment and checked the time. I’d been quick, it was only four-thirty. I had some time before I had to worry about the sun.

  I descended by the rear stairwell, where I had entered the building. It may have been because I had left Childe’s apartment, or because I’d found nothing there, but I let my guard down for a moment when I reached the first floor landing. I began opening the door before looking down the hall. I saw my mistake immediately, but it was too late.

  The hall shot the length of the building, from this stairwell across to the front lobby.
The mailboxes were set in an alcove about midway down the hall. In front of the boxes stood a beefy man with slate-gray hair, who was busily jimmying one of them open. A younger man stood next to him, watching.

  I am no believer in coincidence, and I could pretty much guess which mailbox he was opening.

  The younger one saw me, shouted something, and they both started running toward me. I had a split-second to decide if I was running up the stairs or down. I ran up the stairs, hoping that at least one of them would head for the obvious exit. As I rounded the landing where I had broken in, I heard one of them yell, “Police! Freeze!”

  15

  Time slowed. The thought that I ran from the police might have made me hesitate. But it was too early to be Sam. I never got the chance to stop.

  One of them said, slowly and very deliberately, “He’s going for a gun.”

  I heard a gun go off. A bullet struck me, a twenty-pound sledge in the side of my chest. I fell into the window next to me. It shattered as my shoulder smashed against the frame.

  “Shit!” One of the cops said, a different voice than the one who said I had gone for a gun.

  Another sledgehammer slammed into my shoulder, and the windowframe collapsed around me. The dry wood gave way under my weight, and I felt the bite of winter air as my momentum carried me sidewise and my feet slipped out from under me.

  The cop’s gun barked a third time, the bullet hammering my gut. I fell across the sill of the window, tumbling forward. There was little I could do to stop my fall.

  I pitched out the window before I felt the throb of the first gunshot. Everything felt distant, as if I were watching it all from a remove. I tumbled through space for an endless instant, my body rolling so I faced the sky.

  My wounded shoulder plowed into the ground first, grinding into a mixture of snow and glass. I collapsed into a heap below the window, immobile.

  I felt so cold.

  I wasn’t breathing, and I couldn’t feel my own pulse. I could feel the cold, and I could feel the empty holes where bullets had ripped chunks from my body. Oddly, I felt little pain, just an odd pressure in my chest, my stomach, and my shoulder. The wounds were like pits, and I felt as if I was draining myself down into them.

  I could almost feel my body shriveling, and my torso tightening in response.

  I knew when they came out the rear door, into the parking lot. Not because I could see them, I felt as if I couldn’t turn my head, but because I felt a sense of distant warmth. The police radiated an inner warmth that tightened my gut.

  “You shot him!” one of them said, the cop who had spouted the profanity. I suspected it was the younger man, though I didn’t see him. My eyes were focused on the sky and the wall of the apartment building in front of me. Above me, the window gaped like an open wound.

  “Damn straight I shot him.”

  “Is he dead?”

  A face leaned over me, its heat and emotion rippling toward me through the wind-torn air. I could feel parts of my body, inside me, moving in response to the warmth.

  The gray-haired cop was ugly and rumpled, and looked at me with an expression of disgust. He still had his gun out as he knelt next to me. I could hear—I could feel—the younger one pacing behind me. The old cop placed his fingers on my neck and the feeling of pulsing heat was as intense as an orgasm.

  “I put three bullets into him. He’d better be dead.”

  The fingers stayed on my neck for a long time, and my body drew the heat—and something else?—from them. “Fuck,” the old cop said, yanking away his fingers. “He’s cold already.”

  With the touch I felt a dreamlike realization that I could move if I tried. My anger was building, as if I had to collect the shattered pieces of the emotion and piece it into some coherent whole. The shock was wearing off. This cop had tried to kill me. Hell, this SOB tried to murder me. He taken me down without a single hesitation, even down to the lie about me going for a gun.

  “This ain’t good,” the young cop was saying to my right.

  “Look, kid, this was a clean shoot. You ever say different, you’ll be in shit you don’t even know exists.” The old cop transferred his revolver to his left hand and felt around my chest until he found my holster. “Bastard doesn’t even bleed—” the cop mumbled.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Look at this fucking cannon.’ ” The old cop held up my Desert Eagle with his right hand. Its barrel glinted in the streetlight as he clicked the safety off.

  “Just plant the gun so we can call this in,” the young cop said in a disgusted tone of voice.

  “I ain’t planting it. It’s Tyler’s gun.” I noticed the old cop was wearing surgical gloves. He began pressing the Eagle in my right palm.

  I could see what this was now. These were Sebastian’s men. No, that was kind. These were bent cops on Sebastian’s payroll. This guy had probably shot me because there was a hefty sum for keeping me out of police custody.

  Thinking that allowed the anger to break my paralysis. I screamed. It was an inarticulate, primal scream that sounded as if it were torn from the throat of some wounded animal. My hand clutched the Eagle.

  The sound of the gunshot was like an explosion going off in my hand. The old cop cursed, and the young one screamed. I whipped my head to the side to see the young cop collapsing. The wild shot had caught him in the upper right thigh, and the fifty-caliber bullet had shattered his leg.

  “Shit!” The old cop’s right hand was missing the last three fingers. He was yanking his right hand in toward his body and leveling the revolver at me with his left. Steaming blood stained the snow. Its scent was a dagger into my forebrain.

  Something was happening to me.

  I got up, and everything I saw seemed to have been carved out with a razor. Blood was glowing fire, turning back at the edges where it soaked into the shimmering violet snow. The old cop scrambled away from me, pointing the gun. His skin glowed, heat and fear and anger rippled off of him, distorting my view.

  I could feel my body changing, my bones shifting as I stood. My skin emitted nothing, no heat, no emotion. If anything, it was a gaping lack that surrounded me, a desperate hunger.

  I dropped the Eagle.

  The cop’s gun fired, licking a tongue of flame at my abdomen. I felt the bullet as a blow to my midsection, but there was no blood. I could feel the slug pass through my body, tearing its way through, but that was little compared to the tearing my body was doing to itself. I felt muscles ripping and knotting back together; my skin stretched, tightened, gave way, and then regrew; the bones of my face moved of their own accord.

  I should have been screaming in pain.

  The cop put two more slugs through me before I reached him. I felt a hiccup of fluids as the first bullet shredded my right lung. And, when I was nearly upon him, I was blinded by the flash when he put a bullet through my right cheek. I could feel my jaw cave in with the impact, and I could feel my flesh and bone shred behind me.

  All of this happened, and I was only really aware of the hunger.

  Still blinded by the muzzle flash, I grabbed for the cop. I could sense where he was, his fear—his life—was like a beacon. I felt my hands, fingers much too long, grab the sides of the cop’s head. I felt the barrel of the thirty-eight rammed underneath my chin. I heard the click as a hammer fell on an empty chamber.

  My vision cleared as I felt the flesh of my face reknitting itself into a new pattern. I felt the sharp curve of new teeth as my jaw rebuilt itself.

  The cop looked at me with terrified eyes. “Holy Mother of God.”

  Nothing was left of my conscious thought. All I had was sensation, and the hunger to posses what this man possessed: heat, blood, life.

  I snapped his head back, hearing a crack in his spine. Then I buried my teeth in his exposed neck. My rebuilt jaw easily covered the entire area, and my bite severed both jugulars. None of the blood was spilled on the ground.

  When I finally gained control of my actions, I was l
eaning over the second cop, the young one. He was curled in a fetal position below me, whimpering, “Don’t kill me ... please, don’t kill me.”

  I stood at the edge of a pool of black slush. The snow smelled of blood, a scent like molten iron. Most of the blood came from between the cop’s fingers, where he was trying to hold his shattered thigh together.

  There was no question in my mind that I was about to kill this cop, just as I’d killed his partner. Then, suddenly, I was in control again. The need had receded for the moment. I actually felt warm.

  I stood there, paralyzed by what had just happened. The events had the feverish intensity of a hallucination, but even now, as I felt perfectly lucid, I could feel my body shifting inside.

  Bones moved inside me with the persistent pressure of a dull toothache. I stared at my hands.

  My hands were inhuman. Their skin was tough, leathery, and nearly black. The fingers ended in curving black nails that were almost talons. As I watched, the fingers shortened, the skin softened and regained its color, and the talons withdrew back into my fingers.

  I uttered some profanity, but the word came out as a low slurred whistle because my mouth was rebuilding itself. I put my hands to my face and it was like touching a bony waterbed. I felt what could have been a muzzle retract into my skull.

  I turned around to face the other cop.

  There was the window, blown open where I had fallen through it. There was the glass, and the remains of the windowframe. There was the imprint in the snow where my body had fallen. An imprint with no blood inside it. There was my fifty-caliber Desert Eagle, dropped on the ground.

  And there was the dead cop.

  He was sprawled in a half-sitting position, his back to the wall of the apartment building. His right hand was across his waist, fisted into a ball around the missing parts of his fingers. His left hand still clutched the thirty-eight. His face was slack, and as blue as the snow he sat in.

  His neck had been torn open down to the bone. Muscle, windpipe, everything between me and the vertebrae had been torn out as if mauled by an animal. The sight should have been gory, but it wasn’t. The living cop, next to me, was much worse with his bleeding leg. The dead cop, with the exception of a few trails from his wounded hand, had spilled no blood at all.