Now Lazarus sniffed the chill wind coming off the Bay and whimpered, and tossed his head, then looked back at the Emperor, which translated from dog to, “Smells undead, boss.”
The Emperor didn’t understand what his companions were saying to him, but he suspected. He just wasn’t ready to hear it. It had only been a few hours since the two police inspectors had dropped him off at the St. Francis Yacht Club, where the members allowed him and the men the use of the outer showers, and one of the members had purchased this lovely sandwich and presented it to them in thanks for their service to the City. Only an hour since he’d actually managed to straighten his neck out, after spending the better part of a night upside-down in a barrel. And only now, after a walk along the waterfront and a good meal, was the pain in his knees and shoulders starting to subside. He wasn’t ready to go back into battle.
“I am a selfish old man,” he said to the men. “A coward, worried for my own comfort, when my people are threatened. I am afraid.” But even as he said it, he was rising on his creaky knees, pushing himself up on the walking stick he’d retrieved only this morning from the Yacht Club, where he’d left it for safekeeping. The handle was carved out of ivory into the shape of a polar bear, and it fit the Emperor’s hand like it had been made for him, although it had been a gift from a nice young man named Asher, who owned the secondhand store in North Beach, but that’s another story. He wished there had been a blade in it, like the cane young Asher carried. Alas, he would have to face the black ship with only a stick, a sandwich, and his intrepid furry companions.
He puffed himself blowfish style and headed up the dock, Bummer and Lazarus following along behind him, ears lowered, trailing a two-part growling harmony. A few people had gathered along the fence at the breakwater, and were pointing to the great ship. It wasn’t so unusual that one might bring his day to a full halt, but if you were in the middle of a run or a brisk walk and needed a reason for a pause, the black ship would certainly fire the imagination long enough for you to catch your breath.
Once at the ship, the Emperor was unsure of what to do. There was really no reason beyond Bummer’s behavior to justify boarding her. And this ship was not of his city, therefore he could not claim dominion over it. He could hear the attitude jets firing just under the water, sporadically, to keep the ship in place. It was only a step, albeit a long step, and he’d be standing on the deck at her prow. Perhaps, having made the leap, a further course of action would occur to him. He backed up on the dock to take a run at it, or as much of a run as his advanced age and boiler-tank bulk would allow him, but as he announced “two” on his count-down to launch, a tanned face surrounded by a tangle of blond dreadlocks popped up over the rail of the cockpit and a young man called, “Irie, mi crusty uncle, bringing us the jammin’ grinds, yeah? I and I tanks ye colossal, but please to be waiting on the dock.”
And the Emperor stopped. Bummer and Lazarus even stopped growling and sat and turned their heads in the manner of a doggie listening for a “food” word amid a recitation of The Iliad.
The young man vaulted over the black cowling of the cockpit and landed on the lower deck, his bare feet barely making a thump. He was lean and muscular, tanned a café au lait color, with a tattoo of a humpback whale on his right pectoral muscle. He wore board shorts, despite the chill Bay air, a gold ring in his nose, and a series of them chasing down the rim of each ear. His dreadlocks fanned out around his head and shoulders as if they might be sun serpents looking for a way to escape.
He leapt the gap to the dock, dazzled a blindingly white grin, and snatched the remains of the sandwich out of the Emperor’s hand. “Ah, Jah’s love on ye, Uncle, bringing de rippin’ grinds to I’n’I after so long at sea.”
Bummer barked and growled. The Rasta-blond had their sandwich.
“Ah, me doggie, dreadies,” said the Rasta. “Jah’s blessings on ye.” He knelt and scratched Bummer behind the ears.
The stranger smelled of coconut oil, weed, and the undead, and Bummer was going to bite him as soon as he was finished having his ears scratched.
“I’n’I be Pelekekona Keohokalole. Call him Kona, for short. Pirate Captain and lion of the briny science, don’t cha know?”
“I am the Emperor of San Francisco, protector of Alcatraz, Sausalito, and Treasure Island,” said the Emperor, who couldn’t bring himself to be impolite to the smiling stranger, despite the black ship. “Welcome to my city.”
“Ah, many tanks, Bruddah. Much respek on you, yeah? But you can’t be going on that Raven ship, no. She kill you, brah. Automatic-kine kill. Dead, dead, too. Not walkin’ around dead like them below.”
“It goes without saying,” said the Emperor.
FOO DOG
The rats had been up and moving for about an hour when Foo heard the key in the front door. He put the soldering iron he was using in the wire holder and was turning toward the door when she was on him. He felt his vertebrae crack as her legs wrapped around him and he went over backward. Something caught the back of his head and something wet and coppery was shoved into his mouth: tongue.
Panic vibrated through him and he felt he might suffocate, but then the smell: a mix of sandalwood perfume, clove cigarettes, and caffè latte. Amid the panic, he’d sprung a first-rate erection, which he thrust against his attacker in defense.
She pushed away and twisted up a handful of his shirt-front as he gasped for breath.
“Rawr!” she rawred.
“I missed you,” said Foo.
“Your suffering has only begun,” Abby said. She wore a red tartan miniskirt over a black leotard with a low swooping neckline, a spiked dog collar, and her lime-green Converse Chuck Taylors, which she sometimes referred to as her “forbidden love Chucks” for no reason that he could ever figure out.
“You’re kind of crushing my ribs.”
“That is because I am nosssssss-feratu and my powers are legion and stuff! Très cool, huh?”
Foo realized then that she had actually done it-she had somehow managed to change herself into a vampire. Her nose, eyebrow, and lip rings were gone, the piercings healed. The spider tattoo on her neck was gone as well. “How?” he asked, immediately trying to calculate her odds of survival. He’d talked to her yesterday on the phone and he was sure she would have mentioned the transition if she’d made it already, so she was in her first twenty-four hours. She might still be one of the ones who went insane and self-destructed, and even though Abby was short neither on insanity or self-destruction, it didn’t mean he shouldn’t try to save her.
She kissed him again, hard, and as nice as it felt, he was hyper aware of whether she had broken the skin on his lips, or hers. So far, so good. She pushed him back, but then caught the back of his head again so it didn’t bang the floor. She actually seemed a little more considerate now that she was dead, although not that much quieter.
“Be patient, my love ninja, I will use you like the delicious manga-haired man-whore that you are, but first we have to try out my powers. Let some of the rats out of their cages and I will command them with my vampire psychic thoughts. I’ll see if I can get them to clean the kitchen.”
Okay, maybe they weren’t out of the insanity woods quite yet, Foo thought. He said, “Yes, and then we’ll see if we can get bluebirds to tie a ribbon in your hair.”
“Snark not, Foo! You must obey me! I am the Countess Abigail Von Normal, queen bitch of the night, and you are my groveling sex slave!”
“Are you a countess or a queen? You said both.”
“Shut up, grommet, before I suck you dry!”
“Okay,” said Foo. A wise man picks his battles.
“Not that way, Foo. I mean that I will dominate you and you will do my bidding!”
“Which will be different from any other day, how?”
“Cease your banality and nerdardious questions, Foo. You are totally harshing my heady power over the night.”
“It sounds like you bought a flashlight.”
“That’s
it. I am going to beat your ninja ass.” She leapt off of him and made the “crouching tiger, rip your heart out” kung-fu posture that everyone who has seen a martial arts movie knows.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!”
“’Kay,” said Abby, relaxing to the much less dangerous “slouching tiger chillin’ with a bag of Cheetos” stance, which is known by all who have ever snacked.
“You need to feed, get your strength up first,” said Foo. “You’re a vampire noob. You need to grow into your powers.”
“Ha,” said Abby. “You speak like a mortal who can’t possibly grasp the depth of the dark gift. I jumped over a car on the way here. And I totally ran faster than the F train. My Chucks are still warm with residual speediness. Go ahead, feel them. Lick them, if you must. Even now I can see this aura thing around you, which is like bright pink, and doesn’t go with your fly hair and manly bulge.”
Foo looked down. Yes, his bulge was betraying him. He said, “You should take it slow, Abby.”
“Oh yeah, watch this!” In an instant she was across the loft at the kitchen counter, and in another instant she had shot back across the living room and hit the plywood covering the windows.
There was nothing Foo could do. She might have lifted the couch, leapt up fifteen feet, and grabbed the open ceiling beams, or even turned to mist, if she’d figured out how to do that, but what she had decided to do to show her powers was blast through the quarter-inch plywood and land catlike on the street below. And that would have been badass, to be sure.
What Abby didn’t know was that while she’d been gone, the window guy had called, and he wouldn’t be able to come out to fix the windows for two weeks, so Foo had replaced the quarter-inch plywood with three-quarter-inch plywood, and instead of it just being tacked at the corners with small nails, he had screwed it down with stainless-steel screws, so as not to leave any vapor gaps for the rats to make an escape.
Foo cringed and covered his eyes.
She was fast, and preternaturally strong, but ninety pounds of vampire is still only ninety pounds.
Did she hit the plywood Wile E. Coyote style, then slide down? Wah-wah-wah. Oh no.
She hit the plywood, which bent precipitously, then splintered a bit before springing back and rocketing her all the way across the loft to the back wall, and there, she made a petite Goth girl impression in the sheet rock before falling forward, flat on her face, and saying, “Fucksocks,” into the rug.
“You okay?” asked Foo.
“Broken,” said Abby into the rug.
He knelt over her, afraid to turn her head to see what damage she might have done. “What’s broken?”
“Everything.”
“I’ll get you some blood out of the fridge. You should heal pretty fast.”
“’Kay,” said Abby, still face-down, not having moved since the initial impact. “Don’t look at me, okay?”
“No way,” said Foo, already in the kitchen. He took one of the plastic pouches of blood from the fridge and worked it back and forth. “Just a second. Don’t move, Abs, you might have broken bones.” He quick-stepped into the bedroom, grabbed a capped syringe off the cabinet where he kept the chemicals, flipped off the cap, and injected the sedative into the bag.
“Here you go, baby. Just drink this and you’ll be fine.”
Ten minutes later he heard someone coming up the stairs and realized that Abby had forgotten to lock the door.
Jared bounded into the loft, stopped when he saw Foo kneeling over the prostrate Abby, who had a sizable pool of blood around her head, and began screaming.
“Stop screaming!” barked Foo. “It’s not her blood.”
Jared stopped screaming. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing, she’s fine. Would you move the maze off the bed and help me get her in there?”
Sometime during the debacle, Abby’s skirt had flipped up and Jared pointed at an oblong lump that ran across her bottom and partly down her leg under the black leotard.
“What’s that? Did she poop herself?”
“No,” said Foo, wishing he didn’t know what it was, but he had already checked for himself. “It’s a tail.”
“Whoa. Weird.”
“Yeah,” said Foo.
17. Wide Awake in Sucker-Free
Okata scraped the last few drops of blood from the container into the burned-up white girl’s mouth. He’d managed to save two of the eight quart containers, but it wasn’t going to be enough, he could tell, and after the fight at the butcher shop and his escape, he knew he wasn’t strong enough to give her any more of his own blood. She’d need more, and he was going to have to start thinking of her as something besides the “burned-up white girl.” She was starting to resemble a real person now, more than a person-shaped cinder. A very old, very scary dead person, to be sure, but a person nonetheless. Her red hair nearly covered the pillow now, and she’d moved, if only a little, closing her mouth after the last drops of blood went in. No ash had flaked away with the movement. Okata was glad. Her exposed fangs made him a little uneasy, but now she had lips, sort of.
He picked up his sketch pad from the floor, moved to the end of the futon to get a different angle, and began drawing her, as he’d been doing every hour or so since he’d returned from the butcher. He was still covered with the blood that had splashed on him during the fight, but it had long since dried and except for washing his hands so he could work, he’d forgotten it. He finished the sketch, then moved to his workbench, where he transferred a refined version of the drawing to a piece of rice paper so thin it was nearly transparent. He would replicate this drawing four more times, then each would be glued to a woodblock and carved away to make the plate for a different line or color.
He looked over his shoulder at her, and felt a tremor of shame. Yes, she looked like a person now, an old, desiccated grandmother, but he shouldn’t leave her like that. He took a bowl from the shelf above his little kitchen sink, filled it with warm water, and then knelt by the side of the futon and gently sponged the last patina of ash from her body, revealing the blue-white skin underneath. The skin was smooth, like polished rice paper, but pores and hair follicles were forming as he wiped the ash away.
“Sorry,” he said in English. Then in Japanese he said, “I have not been mindful, my burned-up gaijin girl. I will do better.”
He went to the cabinet under his workbench and removed a cedar box that looked like it might have been fashioned to hold a set of silverware. He opened the lid and removed the square of white silk, then stood and let the garment fall open to its full length. Yuriko’s wedding kimono. It smelled of cedar, and perhaps of a bit of incense, but mercifully, it didn’t smell of her.
He laid the kimono out next to the burned-up girl, and ever so slowly, he moved it under her, gently worked her skeletal arms into the sleeves, then closed the robe and tied it loosely with the white obi. He arranged her arms at her sides so they looked comfortable, then picked up a small flake of dried blood that had fallen from his face onto her breast. She looked better now. Still wraithlike and monstrous, but better.
“There you go. Yuriko would be pleased that her kimono helped cover one who had nothing.”
He returned to his workbench and began the drawing for the block that would carry the yellow ink for the futon, when he heard movement behind him and wheeled around.
“Well, don’t you look yummy,” Jody said.
TOMMY
Tommy spent the early evening in the library, reading The Economist and Scientific American. He felt as if all the words were bringing him back from the animal realm to being a human being, and there were plenty of words in those magazines. He wanted his full powers of speech and human thought before he confronted Jody. He also hoped that his memory of what had happened would come back with his words, but that didn’t seem to be working. He remembered a red blur of hunger in his head, being thrown through a window and landing on the street, but between that and the time when his words returned in the basement,
with the Emperor, he could remember very little. It was as if those experiences-hunting, finding shelter of darkness, snaking his way through the City in a cloud of predators gone to mist-were filed in a part of his mind that locked as soon as the ability to put words to senses returned. He suspected that he may have helped Chet kill people, but if that was the case, why had he saved the Emperor?
Fortunately, he hadn’t lost the ability to turn to mist, which was how he’d obtained the outfit he was wearing now. The whole ensemble-khaki slacks, blue Oxford-cloth shirt, leather jacket, and leather boating moccasins-had been on display in a window at a men’s store on Union Square, suspended by monofilament fishing line into the shape of a casual cotton ghost that was haunting other, equally stylish but substanceless marionettes around some deck chairs and artificial sand. Just after the dinner hour, when the store was at its busiest, Tommy streamed in under the door, into the outfit and became solid. With a quick crouch, he snapped all the monofilament line and walked out of the store fully dressed, bits of fishing line curling in his wake. It would, he thought, have been the smoothest, most audaciously cool thing he had ever done, if it hadn’t been for the straight pins that had fastened the shirt to the slacks. But after a minor fit on the sidewalk as he yanked the pins out of his back, hips, and abdomen, while rhythmically chanting, “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch,” he returned to the calm and casual cotton-clad vampire aspect he’d been going for. He waited until he was at the library, in the stacks, before he pulled the piece of cardboard out of his collar and yanked off various tags and threads. Fortunately, there had been no anti-theft tags on the display outfit.
Now he was ready, or as ready as he was going to get. He had to go to Jody now, hold her, tell her he loved her, kiss her, shag her until all the furniture was broken and the neighbors complained (undead predator or not, he was still nineteen and horny), then figure out what they were going to do about their future.
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