Tales of the Slayer, Volume II

by Various

  And cursed he’d be, as cursed he was. He had not known happiness in all the years of his adult life, and so no happiness had he brought to others. His misery held no glory, as in Job’s refusal of Satan; Charlton Muzzlewit was a living martyr to the secret cause of vampire slaying. He had not a heroic bone in his body. Would an eternal reward come to him for his lackluster service, his joyless isolation from all but a doomed fifteen-year-old girl? Throughout these shadowed hours between midnight and dawn, he tread the yawning chasm of his own existence, and that empty feeling which had made him always shun the dead of night—thereby allowing poor service of his duty and his Slayer’s duty—only reflected his deficient soul.

  Then, by the window, he spotted a short but trim figure, its back to him. Wrapped in a long black sheath of leather, with yellow hair tied up on the head in the manner of the Chinese, the creature did not move, just stared out to the street below.

  “Speak, O Spirit!” he cried. “What revelations do you have for me?”

  “London?” said this third girl in a questioning tone, but from which Muzzlewit could infer no actual inquiry. “I so believed the hype. And this is like the upscale hood. Why the Mr. Hanky swimteam backstroking down the street?” With this she turned to him, extending a hand. “Howdy, trembly British guy. I’m Buffy.”

  “You . . . what . . .,” he stammered, as uncertain of what he wanted to say as he was of what she’d just said. The black leather coat she wore clung tightly round her narrow hips, and from underneath poked pantlegs; this most bizarre of slayers, whom he could only assume came from some disastrous future, had resorted to the same subterfuge as Edward/Elizabeth Weston, but with present company any such illusion was compromised. The hair was as yellow as Weston’s, but long and tied in an Eastern fashion, the face lovely but painted in a style slightly more gaudy, or perhaps clownlike, than that of a London lady—though decidedly feminine. Just who did this slayer mean to pass herself off as? And what, dear God, what on earth was she trying to say?

  “I got a big dumb century to show ya, so pull it together, big guy.”

  “What are you saying?!”

  “Mm, whatever. You’re the one who’s been at it all night. We gotta make with the magic-carpet ride, so let’s get it in gear, ’kay?” said the girl.

  “What?!”

  “Ooh, sorry, mixed metaphor, right?” she said, wincing insincerely.

  The crimes this girl perpetrated upon the English language went well beyond this “mixed metaphor,” a phrase not to be coined until some date equidistant from Charlton Muzzlewit’s death and Buffy Summers’s birth. The language of his homeland remained the only thing intact this night, the one true guide in his journeys. Though he’d heard it abused by Germanic and French accents, he could not bear to hear it slayed outright.

  “Jumpy much?” the girl said as the Watcher burst out through his bedroom door, down the hall, and into Marlybone Road, taking care to hop—he had put on his slippers while waiting for the third apparition—over a narrow trickle of offal in the gutter before his house.

  He ran down Baker to Oxford Street, along High Holborn north of Piccadilly Circus, down past St. Paul’s. All that he had seen tonight left him with only one kindred spirit, one possible companion, the one to whom he’d been drawn by shared destiny. Muzzlewit ran through the warren of streets of Whitechapel to where he could smell the nearby river over the smell of the homes themselves, finally coming to the newly familiar tenement.

  Two of the stairs broke underfoot as he bounded up the narrow passage, then banged the door against the head of the father, who did not stir in his sleep. Muzzlewit hopped over the lame mother and into the children’s room, startling Catherine from the prayers upon which she still concentrated with such devotion. Her siblings woke slowly to this frantic and partially dressed man begging her forgiveness.

  “I’m sorry, Catherine. I had no right to treat you as I have. I vow to you that never more will I take you for granted! Please forgive me. You must understand—I’m a man of certain breeding, and we of my class are accustomed to fraternizing only with our own kind. But, oh, if only I’d been told sooner what else there was in this world, I’d have thanked my lucky stars for a real London girl!”

  Any unfair assumptions made by the young masters Hogarth regarding their sister and this undressed gentleman caller could certainly be excused.

  “The horrible past of our shared tradition,” continued Muzzlewit, “the terrifying places I fear it shall go! We must be grateful. Yes, Catherine, grateful that it is in this day and age that we fill our roles as watcher and slayer!”

  He said all this as he grasped her shoulders in his hands, shaking her lightly in his excitement. The girl positively beamed at his newfound interest in her. Suddenly he released her and urged her to kneel again as he kneeled by her and lowered his head. The Hogarth parents stood in the door dumbfounded, the mother leaning heavily on the father.

  “Dear God,” Charlton Muzzlewit said, “I beg your forgiveness, sinner that I am, and I thank you, and Catherine thanks you, for the graceful mercies you have allowed us—for pairing us with one another, instead of someone far, far worse.” He glanced up to see Catherine’s confused face as she tried to unravel the exact meaning of those last few words. Sensing possible offense, he put his arm round the girl’s shoulder, and called out, “God bless us!”

  “God bless us everyone!” she answered, smiling at him.

  Charlton Muzzlewit looked up at the faces of her parents and of her brothers, and returned his slayer’s smile. “Well, God bless us both, anyway.”

  The New Watcher

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  ATLANTA, 1864

  Deep beneath the half-dismantled Atlanta roundhouse, in tunnels designed and later abandoned by men fleeing the Union Army, Frankie Massey staked her fifteenth vampire of the night.

  The foul-smelling dust blew over her, caking onto her face and coating her hair. She kicked sideways—the Chinese kick that Reed had taught her—and slammed another vampire into the stone wall.

  She’d found the nest, and she was getting tired after hours of killing all alone.

  Another vampire snuck up on her. She could smell it, that stench of blood mixing with rotted teeth and clothing that hadn’t been changed since the grave. She whirled, stabbed the vampire’s unbeating heart, and whirled again before the dust fell to the tunnel’s wooden floor.

  Another vampire and another, her arm stabbing, staking, dusting while her leg kicked and her other arm blocked. She wore her collar up, guarding her neck, and still she could feel the pointed teeth grazing her skin, the cold hands against her collarbone, hands so cold they felt like they’d been dipped in snow on a frozen Illinois day.

  She whirled faster, staked harder, surrounded by dust and dirt and death. She fought in a frenzy, until she was the only one left.

  * * *

  Frankie climbed out of the remains of the roundhouse as the first tendrils of dawn pinkened the night sky. She sat on the steps—once indoor steps—and wiped her face, feeling the granules left by people who had died days, weeks, maybe years ago.

  Her body hurt, her arm ached, and her boots were stained black from all the filth below.

  She had never felt so all alone.

  Six months ago Reed would have been sitting beside her, offering her water from his canteen, his own face coated with vampire dust. He’d guided her. She was the weapon, he used to say, and he was the historian. He provided the information, and she chose whether or not to use it.

  Sometimes she helped with the information.

  Sometimes he helped with the weapon.

  They had been partners, even at the end.

  The real end, not the one she tried to forget, the one that occurred a few nights later, when he had crawled off a Georgia battlefield to hunt her down personally, as if his mission had changed overnight from that of protector to destroyer.

  She supposed it had. Viewed coldly, his determination to slay her, to
make her one of them, made complete sense.

  Except that he had smiled when his new mission failed, as if a part of Reed remained in the undead thing he had become.

  “Cheeky girl,” he had said, admiration in his voice as her stake pierced his sternum. “Cheeky bloody girl . . .”

  Frankie wiped her face again and felt dampness on her skin, probably from the heavy morning dew.

  Then she stood, headed back to camp for a quick cleanup and a pretend shave, and maybe, just maybe, one precious hour of sleep.

  * * *

  She got two.

  Two restless hours with vampires and long-past conversations haunting her dreams. Reed, following her on her way to enlist, whispering his objections, his fears: They’ll know you’re a woman. They’ll know you’re unusually strong. They’ll figure out that you’re someone different, someone dangerous. Vampires in boxcars, hiding behind ammunition boxes marked with the address of Atlanta manufacturers. Dead boys, sprawled in the Tennessee countryside, not a single toothmark on them, only the marks of Minié balls, buckshot, and bayonets.

  Then, suddenly, she was being shaken, hands gripping her shoulder, warm hands—the hands of someone living—and she opened her eyes to see Private McCutcheon frowning at her.

  “The major-general needs you.”

  The major-general always needed her, but that was not, apparently, the point McCutcheon was making. The major-general had sent for her, and she needed to be at her best.

  Frankie told McCutcheon she’d be right there, then wiped her face again. The dusty feeling never left her, hadn’t for years, even though she washed more than she probably should have. Most men didn’t wash as much as she did and many of them were as shy about their privates as she had to be.

  After she enlisted, she learned fast to keep her breasts bound, even at night, even when she had the luck to sleep in her own tent—or next to Reed who had somehow managed to enlist beside her, despite his obvious foreignness.

  He’d stayed beside her the entire war, until they got him. And it was her fault that they had, no matter what he had told her. She was supposed to protect him, too, and that night, she hadn’t. She had her back to him; she hadn’t even seen them drag him off. And because the vampire fight blurred with a night fight against the Rebs, she thought Reed was deep in the battle.

  Instead they had turned him. She hadn’t known that at first, and she tried not think about it—how they must have gripped the back of his neck, forcing him to drink their blood; that foul, awful stench as his face moved closer and closer . . .

  Frankie shook the thought away. It had happened because of her, because she believed in the cause. She didn’t want to be some pretty girl staying at home, not when the Rebs were breaking up the Union—and doing it to keep people enslaved. She was a fighter, and she meant to fight, whether she fought vampires or Rebs.

  Both were wrong.

  But it hadn’t been Reed’s fight. He had adopted it for her, and somehow the vamps had known it. They had even left his body for her on the field, for her to find, and they had shot him—or someone had—to hide the fact that he had also been bitten. She had only looked at the cavity in his chest, clearly caused by an exiting bullet. She hadn’t even thought to look at his neck.

  Not until he showed up a few nights later, smiling, seeming just like himself except for the emptiness in his eyes.

  Frankie splashed the leftover shaving water on her face, then turned the dish upside down. The water and soap turned the red Georgia clay into a pinkish mud. She’d never known land could be this color, never known that places as desolate as this so-called city could exist.

  Four thousand buildings here, four thousand of them, and most of them uglier than the vamps they still hid. She’d been in most of them, searching for the source of the nests she’d been finding. Somewhere in Atlanta was a vamp who turned Rebs, deliberately, so that they’d become their own supernatural fighting force.

  And despite all the southern whining about the rules of war, these Rebs didn’t fight by any such rules. They attacked good soldiers in their sleep, crossing to the Union camps in the darkness and sucking on the blood of the living, careful not to turn them (or most of them, anyway. She always sensed they had treated Reed differently because of her)—killing them instead, before the blood was fully drained, snapping necks or stabbing them (so damn symbolically) through the heart.

  No one talked about it, except in private. She wouldn’t have known until she stumbled on a cadre of them, doing their crazy nightly deeds outside of Vicksburg, and she knew then that all the rumors she’d heard had been true. Reed had even found how the vamps were coming into battlefields: via railroad direct from Atlanta, along with the percussion caps, canteens, and corn bread—everything needed to sustain a Rebel Army—food, materiel, and some undead bodies as well.

  Frankie slipped her blue coat over her long underwear, slapping the vampire dust off as best she could. Everyone serving in Atlanta was covered in dust, although most of it was red, not gray. The soldiers, some of the best fighting force in the Union Army, hadn’t been fighting these last two months. They’d been disassembling a city, brick by brick, train track by train track.

  Atlanta, which had fed the armies of the Confederacy, wasn’t going to feed them any longer.

  Frankie finished quickly and then hurried to the major-general’s headquarters. The major-general had a few makeshift headquarters, but his favorite of late was Atlanta’s City Hall. Frankie walked past the scores of men yanking ropes to pull up spikes that held in the metal tracks; carting dried goods from the basements of stores to the supply wagons; and scattering coal and other combustibles inside the munitions factories, waiting for the order to move out to some other battlefield, deeper in Reb territory.

  The City Hall building, made of the same damn red brick that filled Atlanta like a plague, rose above a hundred tents that had been pitched in its yard. The Second Massachusetts Infantry had camped there, as if thumbing its collective nose at everything the Rebs and Jeff Davis stood for.

  The camp was empty except for the cooks and the wounded, slowly healing thanks to the lull in the fighting. She touched the bill of her cap as she passed a few of the men, sitting upright despite bandaged legs or arms slung up, attempting a game of cards in the thin November sun.

  Guards stood outside the hall, a sure sign that the major-general was inside. Frankie nodded at them as she hurried up the stairs, a spring in her step despite her lack of sleep from the night before. Staking a nest gave her a euphoria that she didn’t admit to anyone, not even Reed when he was alive.

  Laughter rumbled through the corridors. She climbed the interior staircase, its white railing now gray from the hands of a hundred dirty men, and stopped just outside the big office that had, just a few weeks before, housed Atlanta’s mayor.

  The major-general used that office when he was entertaining outsiders. He liked the statement it made—the proof that he was a clear victor in a war that had had too few winners and too many losers.

  Two more guards stood outside, men she’d seen before but didn’t know. Their gazes brushed over her, then moved back to the simple stare they were trained to use as if she were unimportant.

  The other aides were already inside, along with one of the division commanders and a man she’d recognized as handling the prisoners of war. She had thought all war prisoners were gone now, shipped north in September to serve their sentences for betraying the laws of God and the Union.

  She stepped across the threshold.

  “There he is!” the major-general said.

  Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman looked official that morning. His uniform had been cleaned, the deep blue wool almost sparkling in the light from the open window. His boots shone and his unruly dark hair had been combed.

  He was leaning against the massive desk abandoned by Mayor James M. Calhoun. The desk, pristine when the major-general inherited it, was now scarred with burns and sulfur tracks, match trails delib
erately made in the surface whenever the major-general lit one of his famous cigars.

  The major-general sucked on one of those cigars now. “We were having such a fine time, and I was afraid you were going to miss it, Corporal.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Frankie said. “Private McCutcheon hadn’t mentioned any special hurry.”

  “There is none.” The major-general’s dark eyes seemed especially sharp this morning.

  The probing look he gave her used to make her nervous; she was always afraid he could see past her woolen coat and trousers to the delicate female frame beneath. At least her voice was a rich contralto, roughened now by whisky and a few too many cigars of her own.

  “But,” he said, “we haven’t had true entertainment in weeks, and I figured you would want to see this instead of hear about it.”

  She frowned, stepped deeper inside the massive office, and realized there was one man in the group whom she had never seen before. He stood before the open window, his hands cuffed in front of him. He was the only other person in the room who had no facial hair; unlike her, it was clear to anyone who looked that he could grow a beard if he wanted one. His brown hair had a stylish cut—obviously not Army issue—and his gray suit, stained though it was, pegged him for a civilian of some means.