by Dias, Jason
“I have faith in this.” I lifted the pistol. Aimed center mass. Pulled the trigger. Again. Again.
She crumbled to the concrete floor of the abattoir.
Enrique flopped to the ground, too, still gasping for air and now holding his head. I rushed to him, vision gray, limbs cold and weak. Blood still pumped from my neck and it felt hot on my skin. “Ricky? Can you hear me?”
He couldn’t speak – two shots to the solar plexus will do that to you – but he reached up and found my hand, squeezed it.
“It’s going to be all right now, Ricky. It’s going to be okay.”
I let him go and went to examine the body. The dress had spread out over a few feet of space. She wasn’t in it. I panicked: cheated again. But I knelt down anyway to look closer.
She hadn’t turned to mist after all. Scattered around the floor were a few bits of bone and teeth. Here I found part of a jaw; and here, next to a half-crumbled pelvis, the ball part of the hip joint.
“All the weight…” Ricky gasped the words out from behind me. “All the weight of the… the years. The guilt she… couldn’t feel. At once. Rotted her body as… her soul.”
“Is it over?”
“No.”
After
Sirens again.
Somebody had heard gunshots and picked up the phone. This time, as the sound of authorities closed in, I did not flee. I waited with Enrique. We’d made it to the BMW and sat in there with the doors open, unmindful of the bracing cold.
The police arrived first, with an ambulance right behind. I knew a bunch of EMTs and they were all insanely courageous, rolling into active scenes to save who they could. I’d had to cut in front of more than one ambulance to beat them to scenes.
“Better not say anything,” Ricky said.
“Guess you’re right. For now, anyway. You need medical care and there are questions we can’t answer.”
He nodded.
A pair of cops managed to swarm past the car, despite being only two people. Two EMT’s saw us waiting there and stopped, one to each side. We were measured, poked, prodded and thoroughly interrogated by the time the officers returned from the abattoir. They had guns out and blanched faces. I gave them my badge number – now where the fuck was the badge itself? I’d lost track long ago – and asked for my union rep and transport to the hospital.
Later. After a nice, quiet ride in the ambulance, separated now from Enrique. I had a bed to myself in a room big enough for six. Curtains prevented me knowing how many roommates I had or their condition. A drip bag hung from a pole, half empty.
A woman sat on a stool at my bedside, a cardboard cup of coffee in one hand, a digital voice recorder in the other. “Are you sure that’s the statement you want to make, Detective Sanchez?”
“It’s the only truth I know.”
“I don’t think I can help you very much, Detective. Can I call you Dominique?”
“Dom.”
“Thank you. Dom, you’ve incriminated yourself pretty severely. At this point, you don’t need a union rep. You need a lawyer. A good one. The way I see it, my job here is to connect you with competent counsel.”
“I don’t want a lawyer. That’s the statement I want to make. Please file it as such.”
She nodded. “I’m going to tell the panel what I think, though.”
“What’s that?” My eyes were slipping shut already. Two hours of telling it on top of plain exhaustion, and no telling what dripped into my veins from that bag. I wasn’t sure anymore what was dream and what was real.
“I think you’re legally insane.”
When I opened my eyes again, she was gone. A long blink, or had I slept? Nothing around me indicated the time. But I had a fresh IV bag.
A doctor came in, wearing those toothpaste colored scrubs and a white lab coat. “Awake?”
“Mostly. What time is it?”
She looked at her wristwatch. “Five in the morning. Dawn soon.”
“How’s Ricky?”
“Who? Oh, the gentleman you came in with? Reasonably good shape, considering. Had to reseat his hip joint. Lots of contusions and a few lacerations. Blood is nasty stuff; we’ll need to screen him for blood-borne pathogens. Dehydrated. Don’t you want to know how you are?”
“I don’t care.”
She checked my file, hanging on a clipboard at the end of the hospital bed. “A little hope goes a long way.”
I looked away.
“Oh. Well, I’ll hope for you for a while. When you’re ready to have hope, I’ll be ready to share it with you.” She glanced through the file a second time. “Dehydrated and malnourished. You lost a good bit of blood. Want to tell me what happened?”
I shook my head.
She pulled a voice recorder, older and larger than the union rep’s. “Patient shares low platelet count with companion patient. Officers report significant amount of blood on scene.” She put the recorder back in her pocket. “I’m going to have you moved out of emergency and up to a room. It will be quiet in there. You’re going to have to stay here a few days. I’m worried about all these abrasions and lacerations. Scrapes and cuts.”
“I know what abrasions are.”
“Fine. Especially the puncture on your foot. It’s badly infected. I’m ordering up a pint of whole blood. As soon as you can, I need you to eat something. I’ll order a pregnancy diet from food service – high calorie, high protein – and I want you to eat every bite. Iron supplements, too. All right?”
I didn’t object.
Later still. A semi-darkened room, a single-occupancy space. Someone stood over me. Intellectually, I knew panic the situation warranted panic, but my body had nothing left for such high-energy theatrics.
I mustered a weak, “Who?”
They just stood there, in the dark.
After a minute, water splattered in little droplets on my brow, my cheeks, my neck.
“Blessed are the meek, who shall inherit the Earth.”
“What is this?” I managed to rise to my elbows. It hardly helped. The room had a window, spilling white morning light down at a sharp angle behind the visitor.
“Do you wish to confess your sins?”
“Are you a priest? I’ve had enough of Catholics for a little while. Did Ricky send you?”
“Last night, you killed a vampire. Her name, a long time ago, was Ysabeau Jean-Baptiste. I have been hunting her for a long time. I had begun to despair of ever finding her again.”
“Wait. Start…” I grayed out. I could smell food nearby and I wanted it. “Start at the, uh, the start.”
“She was a liar.”
“Yes. So many lies.”
“A deceiver. Little of what she said was true. She chose you for a reason, Ms. Sanchez.”
I’d dragged myself upright, leaned against the headboard. A hospital tray lay on an overbed table. I pointed, and the strange man obliged. Under a metal cover, an ample breakfast waited. He watched me chew on bacon for a minute before going on.
“Your married name is Sanchez.”
I grunted, levered scrambled eggs into my mouth. They were bland, probably made from powder, and utterly glorious. “I know my name.”
“Before you were Sanchez, you were Veerhoven. And your mother was White. Hers was Koepler.”
“This makes as much sense as the prayer.”
“Her father’s father was Cleare, reduced from the French Clearey when the family emigrated in eighteen-twenty.”
I dropped my fork. It bounced away, under the bed. “You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not.”
That said dryly. “Turn on a light or something. You’re creeping me out.”
He did. A light came on right over my head, illuminating a smile as dry as the voice.
“She targeted you for a reason: she killed the Bishop so long ago, and exacted so much vengeance on the Church that the thrill was gone. She wanted to damn you for all time, damn you to exist alongside her, like her, for all of eternity.�
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“A deathless whipping-boy.”
“Yes, somewhat.”
“You still haven’t said who you are.”
He pointed at an extravagant cross at his chest. In true Catholic style, it depicted a suffering Jesus writhing on the cross. “I am someone who knows about vampires.”
“She said she is the only one. Was the only one.”
“She was a tremendous and inveterate liar, as you agreed.”
I thought for a while. He loomed there, implacable. “Hey, bend down and grab me that fork. I need to keep eating.”
He obliged. “I am glad you are eating. It is well. She had nearly succeeded. You hated her so much, had you died, you would have risen like her. And you were already halfway there. She had been replacing your blood with hers for some time, secretly, while you slept.”
“She said she didn’t have any – oh, right. Liar.”
He nodded, grave.
“So what do you want?” Only toast on my tray now. The ER doctor would be satisfied. If only there were coffee.
“Few people have the fortitude to come through a sustained vampire attack whole and well. I wish to ask you two things.”
“Shoot.”
“How? How did you outlast her? How did you kill her, at the last?”
“Faith,” I said. “It was fading for a while, fading fast. Gotta tell you, I was down to shooting me or shooting her. But then I just had this moment, this sinking feeling. I fell away from all the drama, all the trauma, and I remembered that bullets go where you point the gun, and it’s really that simple. Every other thought was bullshit. So, maybe not the faith you’re after, but faith.”
He nodded more as I spoke. “I see. You’ll perhaps be pleased to know that as of seven this morning, you are retired with full honors and benefits.”
“How?”
“The Church, in its gratitude, pulled some strings in the background. Your union representative was convinced not to deliver your statement. Didn’t take much convincing. Much of the material evidence had been suppressed already. You are free and clear.”
I didn’t want to be free and clear. “That seems empty, somehow. I’ll have to decide what to do. Come forward again, or… I don’t know or what.” I sighed. “What was the second thing?”
“Hm?”
“You wanted to ask me two things. What was the second?”
“Oh, yes. I thought you might like to join us. There are other monsters in the world today. Vampires and devils and worse, much worse. And, as you seem to be between engagements, I thought you might wish to help us pursue and destroy-”
“Yes,” I said.
Soon he left me alone. The periodic wheeze of the IV machine and the tumbling of my own thoughts kept me company. I dreamed a little, woke a little, wished I could languish in a sunbeam somewhere.
I thought about my ancestor, the Bishop. I thought of a young woman afraid to enter his place. She went in every day because she had to. She fell in love with a young priest and they did what came naturally. But she’d been afraid to go in there, terrified; not nervous, not bashful.
Clearey. He abused the men. Tortured them, sometimes. What about the women and the girls? Why such an interest in Ysabeau’s little girl? She never said what became of her daughter. What family they went to live with.
Clearey was one of my ancestors. That much was true. I could feel it in my blood. Some of that 22% Western European on the DNA test Jolene had given me for Christmas. But why would Ysabeau profess love for me? Why such tormented conflict between love and hate?
Already I knew the answer. I didn’t need her to bite me to put my blood in her veins; I didn’t need her to drip it into my mouth while I slept to put her blood in mine. And I didn’t need a DNA test to suggest it.
Work remained undone. Return the stolen camper. Bury her empty coffin. Perhaps try to find her last resting place and scatter the dirt. First, though, let the drip lull me into sleep. Let the drugs take away my dreams, as well as hopes and fears. For a while, float in the weak daylight, fading out of existence.
Jason Dias is a psychologist in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He teaches, does some international work, and writes incessantly.
Keep reading for an excerpt from The Worst of Us, a horror thriller set in modern-day New York City and wartime Vietnam.
Excerpt from The Worst of Us
“May I be excused, Mama?” Elbert still had food on his plate, some withered greens and a slice of toast, but his mother was busy with his little sisters. Twins, and each more than she could handle.
“Yes, go on now,” she said, trying to brush one girl’s hair and get food into the other one. The table was strewn with junk, old magazines and college books. “Is your homework done?”
“You know I’m no good at that math, not like you, Mama.”
“I’m not so good at it either,” she said. “I just work hard at it.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“And brush your teeth. When your Papa gets home, make sure he finds you safe in bed. No reading under the covers tonight, Elbert, I mean it. School comes early.”
That it did, with a long walk to start off the day. Elbert put his plate in the kitchen with the others. It never occurred to him that he might wash it, being thirteen. His mind was mostly on whether Kathy-May might have read the note he’d slipped into her locker yet, and on the copy of Amazing Stories stuffed under his mattress. He got upstairs distracted. His math book waited in his room, pencils and paper laid out. Elbert didn’t want to start on that yet.
So he took his transistor radio in the bathroom and set the volume as low as it would go while still being on. There was an advertisement for the local newspaper, and a thing about Bernie Cohen running for mayor – as though they’d ever elect a black mayor in this town – and then Jo Stafford came on. “Make Love To Me.” If mama heard that song, she’d have a blue fit.
His toothbrush was on the edge of the sink, the toothpaste in a little tin jar on the other side. He swirled some toothpaste onto the brush, not liking the feel of the dry wood on his skin. A little water from the faucet spotted with rust – seemed like everything rusted fast in Arkansas – and then he set to cleaning his teeth. The sound was loud enough to drown out half the music, so he turned it up just a fraction.
Next up was “Answer Me, My Love.” Nat King Cole. Not as racy but twice as smooth. Elbert was really done with his teeth by then but algebra made him miserable, so he just stood where he was and listened for a minute. With nothing else to do, his eyes found the mirror over the sink.
It was old. A Coca-Cola promo product his ma had gotten by sending in proofs of purchase. It claimed Coke would relieve fatigue. The lettering was faded and flaking and there were rust spots behind the glass. It barely worked as a mirror. His dad shaved in it every morning, sometimes in the evening too if he was home in time for late service. He never missed a service if he could make it. Elbert couldn’t imagine using this old thing to shave with.
But somewhere in there, behind the letters and words and in front of the rust spots, there was his own face.
He was thirteen, with just the vaguest hint of mustache growing over his upper lip. Broad nose, clear, dark skin. Thin brows that would thicken like his father’s and then take over his face like his grandfather’s one day, becoming great bushy caterpillars. And there were his eyes: clear, bright, brown like the Hershey’s syrup Mr. Redman would put in his malted milk on days when Elbert could scare up a nickel.
He made eye contact with himself and held it. Nat King Cole faded away into the background, forgotten. Elbert’s face slowly went slack, still. In those eyes, he saw something intelligent and real, and it held his gaze just as he held its gaze. That it was just light bouncing through glass and off metal didn’t figure, not then, not to thirteen-year-old Elbert. He held the eye contact, and held it, and grew more and more certain that there was an intelligence in it.
And, slowly, he came to know that it meant him no good.
&nbs
p; It was a creepy feeling, a certainty based on no facts. In that mirror, that rusty old Coke mirror bought with bottle tops in better times, was a mind. And that mind could make itself felt only through eye contact.
Elbert reached up and touched his own throat, not knowing at all what he was doing.
Thump-thump-thump.
Elbert’s heart jumped like it was bursting. He knocked the radio off the sink. It smacked onto the floor, the battery door breaking off the back. Two Duracells rolled onto the tiles.
“What are you doing in there, boy? Is that music I hear?”
“Oh, Daddy, it’s you,” Elbert said. The door wasn’t locked. He pulled it open. “I guess I just lost track of time.”
His dad was a big man, a little over six feet and wide like an ox. Grew up pushing plows, share-cropping, getting beat up by the sun and the wind. Now he was a professional man, a book-keeper, but he still had the big, wide hands and weathered face of farmer. “Son, you look like you’ve been holding your breath past a graveyard. What’s in you?”
But Elbert didn’t know what was in him. Not then. “Guess I just didn’t want to do my algebra, Daddy. I’m sorry.” And he stepped into his father’s arms. He was getting too old for such things and his father let him know it – after a minute.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll help you. But only so you’re done quickly. It’s past your bedtime.”
