Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  My body had stopped changing, and I looked down at myself.

  I saw five bullet holes in my shirt, two showing powder burns. I felt underneath, and my chest was intact.

  Of course, it’s intact, I thought.

  “Please don’t kill me ...” the cop behind me whimpered again.

  I felt sick over everything that had just happened. I had just killed a cop—a bent cop, but still a cop. The guy with the wounded leg had watched every minute. Shadows moved at windows above me, and in the distance I heard sirens wail.

  The man beneath me was the only witness to what had happened. And by Gabriel’s Covenant, I had to kill him. He had seen what I had done. If I left him to witness against me, I’d have more than the police after me.

  I knelt down and pulled him up to face me. I held the sides of his head like I had his partner....

  He was sputtering and tears of fear and pain ran down his cheeks. I felt his terror. Whatever I had become, I couldn’t kill him. Not like this, and not in cold blood.

  There has to be another way. There had to be, Gabriel had told me that it wasn’t necessary to kill for blood. How then did any vampire take blood without revealing his nature?

  It was a combination of impulse and memory that made me shout at the terrified cop, “Look at me!”

  The memory was of Bowie’s reaction when he looked into my eyes. Everyone seemed to have a reaction to my uncovered gaze. The impulse was totally unlike me, possibly inspired by my talk with Gabriel. I remembered thinking, who is this man-this human—to defy my will?

  He looked at me, and when our eyes met, his gaze didn’t shift or turn away. He didn’t even blink. “You did not see who shot you,” I said to him, bludgeoning him with the words. “You saw nothing of what happened. You do not know what happened to your partner. Tell anyone what has happened here, if you even remember it yourself, you shall surely die....”

  I felt a flash of memory, someone’s stony voice saying, “... if you even remember it yourself, you shall surely die ... I was gripped by the feeling that this had happened before.

  I had no time to dwell on it. The sirens were closing on me. The young cop nodded like a zombie, and I let him slide to the ground. I ran back to the building and grabbed my Desert Eagle and its one spent casing. Luckily for me, the cop was using a revolver and I didn’t have to go hunting for his brass.

  After holstering the Eagle, I grabbed the collar of the dead cop and dragged his corpse to the Oldsmobile. I tossed him in the back seat because I didn’t have the time to wrestle with the trunk.

  I drove away, relying on whatever psychic impression my will had made upon the young policeman.

  16

  It was almost five in the morning when I drove out of Lakewood with a corpse in the back seat. I didn’t pass any police cars in my escape. I only stopped once, on a side street, to steal a manhole cover. I was caught up in a rush of action which gave me no time to reflect.

  The central part of the Cuyahoga River had yet to freeze, and the cop’s bloodless corpse found its home in a plunge from the Detroit-Superior Bridge. He slipped under quickly. His legs were bound to the stolen manhole cover with the Olds’ jumper cables.

  When he had slipped beneath the dark waters of his ultimate dim Thule and I had driven away, my mind was free to think beyond the next five minutes of my future.

  I began to appreciate what had happened. I had slaughtered one policeman, and shot out of the leg of another. It had been Tony all over again.

  I ran my hand across my face. I was shaking.

  “What have I become?” I whispered.

  I had no justification for killing the policeman. His bullets could not harm this thing I was. I had been in no danger from him, and I had known it when I had risen from the ground. I couldn’t see the circumstances to rationalize dropping my gun and mauling his neck. It was all too much like what had happened with Tony. I had murdered Tony, and I had murdered this cop.

  There was one major difference between the cop’s death and Tony’s. With this man I didn’t even have the excuse that I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew what I was, and I had known what I was capable of, and I did not stop myself.

  I felt as if, on some level I had killed both of them, Tony and the policeman, because their existence had offended me.

  I pulled the Olds to the side of Superior, just past Public Square, because I had begun driving erratically, and the last thing I needed was to draw the attention of any more police. Once the car was parked, I put my face in my hands feeling that I had lost Kane Tyler completely.

  When I bent over, something small and black tumbled onto the passenger seat.

  It was a thirty-eight slug, or the biggest part of one. It was flattened and coated with a thin layer of gore.

  I picked up the slug. It looked as if it had struck bone on its way through, a bone that should be broken and splintered. It was covered in my blood, but the only holes were in my clothing, not my body ...

  I had left the human universe, physically as well as morally. I thought of Gabriel’s society and wondered how anyone could live like this, live in that world, and remain sane.

  Perhaps sanity was only a human concept—

  “Stop it,” I whispered. “We all come from the same place, all of us.” I was still Kane Tyler, a Kane Tyler who had undergone a physical transformation of some sort, but I was still the same man.

  Thinking that only made the deaths that much worse.

  Wind whistled by the car, the sound low and loathsome. Garbage rustled by the car, scuttling across the snow in front of the Olds. I thought of the cop slipping into the black waters of the Cuyahoga and wondered if he had any family. Was there a widow out there, perhaps a son who was trying to understand where his father had gone?

  As Gail was trying to understand why her mother had gone?

  How could I face my daughter, when I was becoming what I was hunting? I sat in the car a long time, wondering if this life after life was worth what it was eating out of my soul. I sat trembling as I stared at the sky, which had lightened from purple to a deep aqua.

  According to Gabriel, all I would need to do was await the transit of the sun, and this would all be over. I would have no more blood on my hands....

  The sky ahead of me, to the east, began to take a yellowish tint to the clouds.

  I couldn’t do this. My life didn’t belong to me. I couldn’t make Gail an orphan, and I couldn’t abandon Cecilia to her fate. If I gave up now, the deaths on my conscience really would be pointless.

  I revved up the Olds and started down Superior. Now that I’d changed my mind, the coming dawn filled me with a growing fear. I needed to get inside.

  I drove through the shadows provided by the buildings downtown, but a furtive glance in the rearview mirror showed me the first molten light washing the tops of the skyscrapers downtown. The eastern faces of the towers were washed in gold, and reflections off the mirrored glass seared my eyes. The sight burned like a brand, scattering purple dead-spots across my field of vision.

  I was driving toward the sun.

  The Olds swerved as I blinked my eyes clear. Twice-reflected dawn sunlight—Cleveland dawn sunlight, in winter—was as blinding to me as a magnesium flare.

  In a matter of minutes, the long shadows of the buildings would crawl across the Olds, leaving me bare to the sun. Worse, something in the ambient light, the light that reached into the shadows, was hot, numbing, and brought with it a crushing fatigue. I felt an urge to pull to the side of the road and go to sleep.

  I turned off of Superior to find a darkened bolt-hole. I found an underground parking garage that offered all-day parking for ten bucks. When I pulled into the driveway, the sunlight had reached the second floor of the building. I waited by the gate and peeled off a fifty from the cash I’d liberated from the hotel room.

  There was a guy sitting in a booth by the gate, and I waited for him. And waited. And waited.

  When the sunlight reached dow
n to the top of the garage’s entrance, I laid on the horn. The guy in the booth to my left looked up and gave me a sour look. He didn’t move. I laid on the horn again.

  He stepped out of the booth and yelled at me, “We ain’t open till seven-thirty.”

  Fuck. I looked at my watch. It was fifteen after.

  I rolled the window down the Olds and tried to shout at the guy, but it came out as a wheeze. I panicked for a moment before I realized that I had to consciously start breathing again. As I did so, I tempered my anger. “Come on, I’m only a little early—”

  The guy looked peeved, but he stopped yelling, “Look, you have to wait.”

  “Only fifteen minutes.” The dawn was drawing across in front of me, a blinding curtain of light washing across the front of the garage. I could feel my skin tightening. I wanted to shrink into the shadows the Olds provided. But I leaned out the window and flashed the fifty at the guy.

  I looked him in the eyes.

  The guy squinted as a line of sunlight began crossing his face, “I don’t know, my boss’d can me.”

  I extended the fifty. “For a few extra minutes? Come on, open the gate.”

  We stared at each other as the sunlight crept toward my hand. I wanted to flinch, but I sensed withdrawing the fifty—or any sudden move—would break whatever spell I was trying to weave.

  “I don’t know....” Blinding light toughed the edge of the fifty. Light so bright that I was surprised that the bill didn’t burst into flame.

  It was slow, so damn slow. It seemed an age before he said, “Okay,” and grabbed the fifty.

  I snatched my hand back, but as I did, I felt the brush of sunlight across its back. The touch of direct sunlight was not as dramatic as I thought it should be. My hand didn’t burst into flame, or crumble into dust.

  What happened was frightening because it was so subtle in comparison. I felt my entire hand flare with pain, fall asleep, and go numb. It was as if I had plunged my hand into a vat of boiling Novocain.

  As the gate opened, I had to drive with one hand. My left hand was limp, paralyzed. I drove into the darkened garage as if the gates of hell were behind me.

  Whether I was entering or leaving was open to question.

  I found a space in the lowest level of the garage, a place that had never even seen reflected sunlight. I maneuvered the Olds into a dark corner, into a space half-concealed by a concrete pillar. I was as far from the elevator as I could get.

  Once I parked, I looked at my hand. The skin was white and numb. It could have been an inanimate lump of meat for all I could do with it. I was still staring at my hand when fatigue crashed over me.

  More memories, older ones, kept me company as I fell into my not-sleep.

  I don’t want to be in this man’s office, I resent it. Haven’t I’ve been through enough? Dad’s dead. What the hell is this guy supposed to do about it?

  “Hello, Kane,” the doctor says. “I’m pleased to finally meet you. ”

  “I’m glad someone’s enjoying this. ”

  “Your mother thinks you need someone to talk to.”

  I sigh. “You mean she wants me to talk to someone. What if I don’t have anything to say?”

  “I find that hard to believe,” the doctor says. He glances down at the desk in front of him, where he keeps his files. “You seemed to have a lot to say to your classmates—enough to get you suspended.”

  I shook my head. “That wasn’t me talking.”

  The doctor makes a note in front of him and asks, “It wasn’t you? Are you saying that you did not step up on a desk in your physics class and shout poetry?”

  “I’m saying that those weren’t my words. Mr. Franklin asked what something meant. I quoted something that seemed to apply.”

  The doctor makes another note. “Mr. Franklin felt you were being disruptive. ”

  “Sometimes the truth is disruptive.”

  The doctor nodded, but I didn’t make the mistake of thinking he agreed with me. I was here because no one seemed to agree with me. Somehow I was wrong. We were all supposed to accept death, and pain, and loss. Give it some higher meaning, and go on.

  “So what was it you quoted to Mr. Franklin that got you in so much trouble?”

  “It’s by Edgar Allan Poe. ‘The Conqueror Worm.’ It’s part of a short story he wrote.”

  Another note. “How does it go?”

  I sigh. I’m surprised that the doctor doesn’t have it in his files there in front of him. But then, I am here to perform. Why disappoint him? I stand and recite the poem from “Ligeia, ”first stanza to last.

  “‘Lo! ’tis a gala night / Within the lonesome latter years! / An angel throng, bewinged bedight / In veils, and drowned in tears, / Sit in a theater, to see / A play of hopes and fears, / While the orchestra breathes fitfully / The music of the spheres.’”

  As I speak, the doctor scribbles, I find that annoying. He requested this, he should be giving undivided attention to it. I raise my voice a bit.

  “‘Mimes, in the form of God on high, / Mutter and mumble low, / And hither and thither fly—/ Mere puppets they, who come and go / At bidding of vast formless things / That shift the scenery to and fro, / Flapping from out their Condor wings / Invisible Wo!’ ”

  Scribble, scribble. He was worse than Mr. Franklin, who had stood in the midst of his cosmology to stand looking at me agape. He was worse than the other students, who had laughed at things that weren’t funny.

  “‘That motley drama—oh, be sure / It shall not be forgot! / With its Phantom chased for evermore, / By a crowd that seize it not, / Through a circle that ever returneth in / To the self-same spot, / And much of Madness, and more of Sin, / And Horror the soul of the plot. ’ ”

  Damn him. Listen. Stop that infernal scribbling. I climb onto the chair in front of him, as I had in Mr. Franklin’s class. The doctor is like the others. He just refuses to see.

  “‘But see, amid the mimic rout / A crawling shape intrude! / A blood-red thing that writhes from out / The scenic solitude! / It writhes!—’ ” I begin shouting, “‘it writhes!—with mortal pangs / The mimes become its food, / And seraphs sob as vermin fangs / In human gore imbued.’ ”

  I jump upon the doctor’s desk to grab his attention. Finally he looks up from that infernal notepad of his.

  “‘Out—’” I shout. “‘out are the lights—out all! / And, over each quivering form, / The curtain, a funeral pall, / Comes down with the rush of a storm, / While the angels, all pallid and wan, / Uprising, unveiling, affirm / That the play is the tragedy, ”Man,“/And its hero the Conqueror Worm.’”

  The doctor looks up at me and asks, “How did you feel when your father died?”

  “Dad!” she says to me. Her expression shows exasperation, as if she doesn’t understand.

  “Where the hell were you?”

  “With friends—come on, it’s only one o’clock.”

  I’m standing out there, more angry at myself than at Gail. I’d just gotten home from a bad day, a really bad day. I look at her, feeling powerless. “I’m sorry, I overreacted. You weren’t here and....”

  Gail looks around me and says, “Where’s Mom?”

  Now I feel guilty as well. “She’s upstairs, we had a fight. ”

  In her face I can see she understands now. I see her take an unfair share of the weight between me and Kate. “Oh, Dad—it was about me, wasn’t it? I’m sorry, I should have left a note or something. ”

  “Shh—”

  Gail pushes past me, her hands balled into small fists. “I don’t want to give you and Mom something else to fight about. ”

  “No, no,” I reach out and place a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not about you. It’s me. ”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “It’s not your fault.” I say. “It’s never been your fault.”

  As I hold my crying daughter, I can’t help remembering the girl I’d found today—a girl no older than Gail, who had slowly died on a filthy mattress
in a condemned hotel. She had died clutching a dirty needle. In the end, she had lacked the strength to force the needle through her paper-thin skin.

  I’d been thinking of Gail ever since I’d told the parents.

  I look up from my daughter, and I see Kate framed in the stairwell above us. Our eyes meet and I know our marriage has ended.

  17

  I wasn’t going to put Gail through what that dead child had put her parents through. I wasn’t going to put Gail through what my father had put me through. I would see her, and somehow I would make some explanation.

  I sat up and felt a tug on my left arm.

  I looked down.

  I’d been slumped against the driver’s door allowing my left arm to slip between the door and the seat. My left hand was snow white, and its thumb was caught in the metal under the seat, twisted at an ugly angle. I stared at my hand for a long time, stared at the white, waxy skin.

  I didn’t feel a damn thing. My thumb was bent back past the wrist, a position that meant a sprain, a dislocation, or even a break, and all I felt was the tension in the muscles of my arm.

  The shock of the sight brought back the memory of sunlight on my skin.

  I used my other hand to free my thumb from its trap. Touching the skin of my hand was like touching ice. I leaned back in the seat and rested my hands on the wheel, comparing them. I couldn’t move my left hand at all; it was only some residual elasticity in the tendons that pulled my thumb back into position.

  The skin was dead-looking, slightly puffy and taut. If I hadn’t known how it had happened, I would think frostbite. The sight was scary, not just for itself, but because the injury was still there, still affecting me.

  Everything else that had happened to me since I had come out of the ground had healed, everything from bullet wounds to the slashes on my wrist put there with a beer bottle. But what the sun had done—that had lasted through the day.