Count On Me

by Abigail Graham

  “Hey.”

  Nothing. She just stared blankly at me.

  “Hey,” I said again.

  I looked in her eyes, and she snapped awake. A flood of information hit me like a slap, and she shuddered and clutched herself.

  “How’d I get here?”

  “Listen to me,” I said, softly, leading her from the door. “I’ll get you out of here. You have to leave. When I tell you I want you to run as fast as you can and don’t stop until you’re with people. Please, listen to me.”

  She nodded.

  “Come on. This way.”

  Vincent’s hand clamped on my arm.

  “What are you doing?”

  I didn’t have an answer. He already knew, anyway.

  He snapped the girl around by the arm, stared into her eyes, and she almost collapsed. Her jaw went slack and she sagged on her knees. He dragged us both inside, me thrashing and pulling at his arm, the girl walking in a daze, stumbling over her spike heels. He pushed the door open and dragged us through, into the climate controlled chill of the casino. The girl started screaming.

  Everyone inside just… stopped. Froze in place. I saw some dice clatter into a table, and the slot machines kept rolling, but the old lady was sitting there with a coin in her fingers, halfway in the slot without sinking it in. A couple, a drunken older man and a younger woman, stopped in mid stride, halted and stared at nothing. Vincent dragged us through the crowd back to the elevator, threw us inside, and when the doors slid closed I briefly saw about two hundred people stumble and stare at nothing for just a second before resuming their routine as if nothing had happened.

  How did he do that?

  The girl huddled against me. I put myself between them, shielding her with my body.

  “You’re going to be chastised for your insolence.”

  She started sobbing.

  I had to do something.

  Vincent looked at me.

  “Going to fight me, then? Go on. Do it.”

  The doors opened. He dragged her out into the penthouse and I followed. Victoria stepped out of her room, stopped, and backed inside, disappearing. I barely noticed her.

  Vincent dragged the girl around, seized her hair and forced her onto her knees on the hard marble floor.

  “Tell us your name. Your real name. You can’t lie to me.”

  “Melissa. My name is Melissa. Let me go, mister. Please-“

  “Good. I want her to know your name. You’re my new one.”

  Vincent looked at me. Looked into my eyes.

  My body just froze. I tried to move, but my limbs wouldn’t do as I ordered. It was like I was trapped in a coffin of steel, perfectly shaped to my body.

  He made me watch.

  He pulled her upright, holding her by the hair. She pulled at his wrist, trying to shake him loose. He made me watch as he tore her throat open and gulped down the blood, leaving most of it to flow over his clothes, and pool on the floor. He lifted her bodily from the floor and his throat flexed as he swallowed from the chewed-open wound in her neck, until her kicking feet went still and her gurgling attempts at screams went silent.

  He raised his wrist. He chewed into his own skin with an awful wet crunch.

  I threw myself at him with all my might. Crashed into his side, bowled him over, and rolled. I twisted around and grabbed the girl. She was still alive, clutching at her throat, trying to hold it in.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  I couldn’t save her life, but I could save her death.

  My hands closed around her head and I twisted until I felt a crunch and a wet pop and she was gone, vacant eyes staring at nothing. I felt something in them as I met her dead gaze. A flicker of relief. I screamed anyway, staring at my trembling, bloodied hands.

  Then he came for me.

  I fought. I flailed at him, pounded him with my fists, but it was like punching a stone wall. All I did was hurt my hands. He hauled me through the room by the hair, growling as he slipped on the bloody floor. He walked through the room with me in tow, clutching at his wrist to stop him tearing off my scalp.

  I couldn’t help it. It just popped in there. I thought about that poster.

  He started laughing, slowly, the sound as false as the rest of him.

  “You stupid cow.”

  He pulled me around.

  “I’m tired of you.”

  He wound up, like he was going to throw a pitch, but he was holding my hair. I felt my scalp tear and shrieked, but it wasn’t enough. My feet came up off the floor. A hollow, weightless moment stretched into eternity. The plate glass filled my vision as I tumbled through the air, and then the impact. It was like hitting solid rock, but it gave. Shattered into long, razor shards that tore into my body, opened my flesh as the hot night air threw its arms around me and dragged me into space, twenty floors up.

  Nothing under me.

  I fell.

  It took forever. It felt like hours, watching the floors rush by me, one by one. I was facing up, so I didn’t see. I only felt. I hit something, so hard I could not comprehend how much it hurt. I could only see a piece of twisted sheet metal sticking right through my belly and slutty dress both, coated in thick, congealed black blood. My right arm was snapped in half below the elbow, my left hurts to even think about. My legs were ruins.

  My skull was fractured.

  I felt every bit of the agony, but I refused to die. Couldn’t.

  I said a man’s name. Begged it, as if he might appear, finally, and after all this, save me.

  Not yet. Not tonight.

  With a strength I never imagined I could have, I rolled, ignoring the further damage I was doing to my body. I had to get that metal out. I grabbed it and pulled but it was thicker at the bottom than the top. I had to push the other way, shove it out through my back. It cut my palms. I don’t know how I was even holding it with my broken arms, but I lay on my side and in three great pushes like giving birth to a chunk of scrap metal, I pushed it out of my back, then flopped down.

  Sunrise. The sun was going to come up.

  I was behind the casino, in one of the places too hidden and obscured to bother with landscaping, grass, palm trees that don’t belong. Just dirt and scrub and enormous air conditioning condensers. There used to be six of them. Now there was five. I’d landed smack in the middle of one, and trashed it. It had some give. I think I might have died if I hit the ground itself, just smashed to pieces. Or maybe not, and I’d lay there feeling all the wounds until the sun got me. I dragged myself across the ground, not looking at the strangely clean bones jutting out of my limbs.

  It wasn’t a thought, just an instinct. The sun. Have to hide.

  With my shaking hands, I dug, clawing at the earth. I stopped, gritted my teeth, and shoved my arm back into the right shape, crying out from the pain. Then the other. My legs I didn’t even want to look at. I dug until there was a shallow pit and slid into it, and yanked on the pile of dirt I made, pulling soil and scrub grass over me, stuffing it over my face before I wriggled dirt onto my arm.

  The sun came later.

  I lived, if you can call it that.

  I woke up and sat up, hacking and coughing dirt. My arms and legs were back to normal, like they’d never been hurt at all. Somehow I knew the crack in my head was sealed, but my skin was waxy, dry, too tight and almost brittle. I crawled out onto the dirt and heard shoes scuffing in the dirt.

  “There it is. Kill it.”

  They shot me. Flashes in the dark, the bullets ripped into my body before I heard the bangs. Too loud, just walls of sound. They hit me in the sides. You’d think a vampire’s thugs would know how to kill one. They shot me in the chest. I launched myself at them, and though they outsized and outweighed me, there was no contest. I only remember bits and pieces of it. When I smelled blood, the cold void in my middle took over, reaching through me with its sharp grasping legs, dragging razors along the insides of my veins until I felt warm blood gushing past my lips.

  The
other one was going to get away. While I fed on the first I grabbed his leg, tore at his calf. He tried to call for help. I crushed his hand in mine. The phone he held cracked to pieces, and so did the bones of his hand. I fed from him too, until I felt almost sick from fullness, the heat thrumming through me.

  I wrapped myself up in one of their coats. I ran.

  I didn’t go to Las Vegas boulevard, I didn’t go for help.

  There was a souvenir shop on Tropicana Avenue. I wound around the back. Jumping over the fence behind the shop was easy, and when I pulled on the doorknob on the back door it just came off. The shopkeeper chased me out when the alarm went off, carrying a double-barreled shotgun. Until he met my eyes.

  Dully, he stood there, weapon drooping to one side, forgotten. I found a VIVA LAS VEGAS tote bag, stuffed it full of t-shirts and jeans, threw open doors in the back until I found the store’s little powder room. I locked the door and stripped naked, wiped myself off with stolen clothes and bathed in the sink, washing the blood and dirt from my skin and hair. I still looked dead when I was done, but when I put on a pair of jeans with HARD SIX plastered across the ass and a black hoodie with a picture of flamingoes on the front that glowed in blacklight and put up the hood, I could hide.

  I left the shopkeeper. He was sitting in a chair, gun across his lap. He looked through me as I left, and pulled the door shut behind me.

  He, or somebody, probably found a shredded, blood-soaked cocktail dress and heels in that bathroom, along with a pile of bloodied t-shirts, all balled up and shoved in the toilet.

  That night, I wandered. I had no idea where to go, what to do. I didn’t remember my last name, what city I grew up in or even what airport I flew here from. All I wanted to do was stay away from another vampire. They had to be out there, others like Vincent and Elizabeta and if they found me they’d kill me, I was sure of it.

  Eventually, I found my way back to the Strip, further up, towards the north end where the glitz and glam just peters out and turns back into sprawl.

  Lost in a big crowd, I just walked. A knot of people walked all at the same pace from corner to corner and I walked with them.

  One foot in front of the other. I kept walking. When they mounted a tour bus, I walked on by myself, head down, shoulders hunched. A group of toughs stepped out from an alleyway and stepped back when I passed, muttering to themselves. Something changed their minds.

  Good for them.

  Eventually, I walked into a gas station, not far from Freemont Street.

  I stared at the clerk. He froze, then leaned forward and went back to chattering into his Bluetooth, in Swahili. It must have looked odd on the surveillance tape when I broke the cash register open and took out a cool eighty-four dollars and thirty-six cents, ten of that in coins, and stuffed it in my pocket.

  The mind whammy helped. It kept the clerk at the front desk of the cheap motel where I holed up from checking my identification, or charging me to stay. I took a scalding hot shower. It got the blood off but it didn’t warm me up. I had to figure something else out from there. I wasn’t getting on a flight, and I couldn’t figure out how I’d work traveling by bus. What would I do when the sun came up?

  I paid for two nights and left the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. I spent that day under the bed. The next night, I found a used car dealer on the north end of town. I broke in, took the keys to an old Chevy, and drove. I don’t know what happened to the car, but it got me to Arizona before the sun came up, and the basement of an abandoned gas station. From there I started heading East, not quite knowing why.

  Four days in, I couldn’t try hitchhiking anymore. It felt like I’d swallowed razor blades. Everything was hazy. I had only a vague idea of where I’d come from, an even more vague one of where I was going. The way the sun came from when it rose, that was all I knew. Had to get East.

  The fifth night away from Vegas I ended up in a bar, what people call a honky-tonk. I sat down at the bar and tried to figure out what to do, when a big guy put his hand on my shoulder.

  I looked in his eyes. That little voice had a lot to say about him.

  He had a bad night.

  I slept in the trunk of his car for another few days, another few hundred miles.

  One day I got out of the car of a man I’d killed.

  I knew my name was Christine.

  That was about it.

  13

  I’m lying on the bed. I don’t feel anything, just cold.

  That’s a lie. I do feel something. Hollow. Emptied out, like something took a big bite of my middle and I can feel a chill through what’s left. When I finish speaking I just lay there and stare straight up, wondering what happens next. There isn’t much of a story after that. Everything goes fuzzy again. I don’t know how many men, how many feedings, how long it’s been. I don’t know what year or even what decade this is. It might have been six months or six years and I’d have no idea.

  He sits beside me. The way the bed dips makes me want to roll over and press against him. When he rests his hand on mine I feel warmth for a quick second before my hand just goes numb and I pull it away. He really is handsome. Beautiful, even. A warm smile, a sparkle in his eyes when he looks at me. I start to wonder what his intentions are behind all this, how he knows my mother.

  “What time is it?”

  “About three in the morning. We should eat dinner.”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “Hungry,” he corrects.

  He takes my hand and tugs.

  “Come on.”

  Sighing, I rise from the bed and follow him out of the room. He still has my hand, pulling me behind him.

  I sniff the air and catch a whiff of something. The usual smells are still there. Sweat, the sickly-sweet tang of blood, his breath on the air. I smell something else and breathe deep, drawing it into my lungs, and heat flushes through my body. I smell sweet potatoes, and gravy and cranberry sauce. Something stirs deep down in my gut, an alien sensation half remembered. He’s no longer pulling me along. I match him step for step down the stairs, around the corner and into the dining room, and stop at the door.

  There’s a long formal dining table, completely covered in food. It looks like a grocery store commercial at Thanksgiving. A turkey in the middle of the table, a perfectly sliced ham, big heaping bowls of mashed potatoes, golden russet and sweet. There’s cold salads and rolls and a tureen of steaming gravy. I stare at it and that sensation in my middle grows. He takes my hand again and stops to pull out my chair.

  I drift into the seat and stare out over the expanse of food, at the empty plate in front of me. I take my napkin and fold it in half on my lap and sit up, primly. Mike walks to the far end of the table, grabs a chair, and drags it down the length of the room. I watch him the whole time. It’s like watching an old movie I saw once but forgot, both strange and familiar. Finally he settles the chair to sit next to me and starts carving the turkey, peeling the skin back with the carving knife before deftly slicing the meat.

  The first serving is mine. He layers a few slices on top of each other. I stare at it, and sigh.

  “I can’t eat real food.”

  “I want you to try.”

  “It’ll make me sick.”

  “I don’t think it will.”

  More food. Slices of ham, big blops of potatoes, both kinds. Heaping scoops of macaroni and potato salad. There’s barely any room on the plate by the time he drops a slice of canned cranberry sauce on the only available spot, along the edge. That’s before he slops gravy on the meat and shoves pats of butter into the potatoes.

  “Come on. Eat. Just a bite.”

  He fills his own plate and sits down, watching me.

  I feel queasy. I think. I cut a piece of turkey with a fork and scoop up a little bit of mashed potatoes with it. Butter leaks out all over the rest of the plate. I raise it slowly to my mouth, part my lips, pull the meat onto my tongue and bite down, sliding the fork between my lips.

  It’s like it explo
des. I jerk in a full body reaction.

  I can taste it.

  I almost drop the fork. It’s more than a taste. For a moment I’m not there anymore.

  Six, maybe seven years old. There’s a piece of turkey quivering on my fork. I’m cranky and hungry and tired, and sitting at this same table. It’s not Mike next to me, it’s my mother. I stare at her like I know something bad is going to happen. She takes my wrist and guides the food to my mouth and pats my head. She says nothing and there’s nothing to be said. My father has left and it’s another Christmas alone. Mom is barely keeping it together. There’s dark circles under her beautiful green eyes, and she looks like she’s been awake for a million years.

  The turkey falls down my throat and the memory is gone, lingering at the back of my mind like the salt on my tongue. Trembling, I lower the fork and pick up a crusty, chewy roll. It’s still warm under my fingers. With the end torn open, I use it as a scoop for the buttery potatoes, equal parts sweet and gold, and raise it to my mouth.

  When I bite down into it and pull the riot of flavors into my mouth, it’s not my hand anymore. It’s his. I can’t see his face but I can see my mother behind him, trying to scowl and fighting back a grin. I’m wearing the sweater he brought me for Christmas. I’m wearing the ring he gave me. Mom has noticed but she hasn’t asked. I take food from his hand like a pet bird and eat it and slide my foot up his calf under the table, playing a dangerous game.

  The slaw dressing on the macaroni salad, heavy with vinegar, stings my tongue and I convulse. As I taste and feel the soft noodle and the firm hard boiled egg squish between my teeth I’m not in the dining room anymore. There’s warm air on my arms and legs, on a small patch of skin on my back where my shirt has ridden up because he won’t stop touching me. A rough bench beneath my legs, food on the table. My uncle is waving his beer to keep the flies away. Sweat clings to the glass, bubbling the Budweiser logo.

  While no one is looking, a kiss is stolen.

  Every bite is the same. Another moment, another memory, like peering through a clean spot in a dirty window, into a room I know by heart but have never seen. The fork falls out of my hand and I push back, my stomach churning. I cover my mouth.