Blood Type: An Anthology of Vampire SF on the Cutting Edge

by Watts, Peter

  Breath leaves me and I gasp and claw for more and stagger back and hit the wall and slide down and stay there and stare. I will stay still. I will stay very very still and I will not touch anything.

  He is wearing what was once a tailored suit. A fancy label, the kind my father wears. His hair is thin as dry grass. His nails are black with filth. At first I think they're long talons, but quickly realize it's just that the skin of his fingers has worn away to the bone.

  He has a long neck. A long white neck with a long red wound.

  He's dead. He's very, very dead and I start to think about all the bacteria he must be leaking into the air, all the germs, Godgrantmetheserenity and I think, Oh God, I have to get him off the ship and Oh God, that means I'm going to have to move him, I'm going to have to put my hands on him and hold him and touch him.

  And then his head turns. And he raises himself. On his arms, his fleshless arms. And he looks at me.

  The eyes are different than I remember. The eyes are like nothing at all. It's the cheekbones I recognize. The cheeks are collapsed hollows but the bones are the same.

  RJ McCaul. Missing, RJ McCaul. Thirty years dead, RJ McCaul.

  He sits there like that, raised on his arms, looking at me. He casts a shadow. His shadow is wrong. Its shape is very wrong.

  I pull myself up, slowly, and I stand there, looking at him looking at me.

  He raises one hand, slaps it down on the floor in front of him. His body shifts. Closer to me. Still looking at me. His eyes. His eyes are eaten away.

  His lips are parted. I can see into his mouth. Pale gums pulled back over gray teeth. Filmed with red. Almost a hundred different kinds of bacteria, I think.

  The lips are peeling back. His hand. His fingers at my leg. The nails, brushing my ankle. He's so cold. So unbelievably cold.

  I get out. I get away.

  I slam the door and I lean on it. I lean on it as hard as I can.

  I listen and I hear nothing. Pad down the hall to the kitchenette. Make myself a cup of coffee. I drink it slowly, unhurriedly, and once my cup is empty I sit holding it in both hands, palms absorbing the fading warmth. I stare out into the black. The black which I now know not to be empty. The black in which I am no longer alone.

  I left Earth because there were dragons there. But there are dragons out here, too.

  I shower. I shower again. I shower over and over again.

  Eventually I go back to bed. I don't think I'll fall asleep but I do, instantaneously.

  ~

  My eyes open and I am out of bed and walking down the hall and standing outside the door.

  I slide into a crouch. Press my ear to the door. Tapping. Rhythmic, patient. Almost soothing. Like a metronome. I think of those dirty nails again.

  “Hello?” I say.

  The tapping stops.

  “Hello,” I say.

  Silence.

  I think about going away. Leaving this door closed forever. In time, I'm sure I would forget.

  I lift a hand, extend a finger, and tap on the door.

  “Hello.”

  That wasn't me.

  It takes me a moment to recognize it as a voice. As a word. I imagine his vocal cords, stringy rotten meat in a gouged-out throat.

  “Can I open the door?” I ask. “Will you hurt me?”

  Silence. Then:

  “I'm hungry.”

  I sit back on my heels. "Is that a yes?"

  Tap. “Open the door.”

  “Answer the question. Will you hurt me?”

  Silence.

  “Listen,” I say. “I have an offer for you. Okay? Can you hear me?”

  Tap.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” I sit down. “Good. Okay. How about this? You can stay here.” My hands twist. Twitch. The thought of having to touch him. The very thought. “You can stay. But we won't go near each other. All right? You stay in whatever part of the ship you've always stayed in, and I'll stay around here, and we won't...we won't be close to each other. It'll be like I don't even exist to you. How does that sound?”

  Silence.

  “That's what you want?”

  “Yes,” I say. “That's what I want.”

  Tap.

  “All right.”

  I hear shuffling. Stumbling feet. Fading away.

  Silence. Real silence. Empty air, unstirred by sound or motion.

  I start to breathe again.

  ~

  No life signs. That's why they never found him.

  I think about this in bed. I can't seem to get to sleep.

  They would've scanned the ship for signs of life. A heartbeat, a heat signature. Maybe they even went in and looked for him. Impossible. The whole point of this ship is that it's someplace to get lost.

  I could ask him why he built it. I'd be the only person alive who knows.

  I turn over and try to sleep.

  He must have spread germs all over the ship. He must be spreading them now.

  The walls whisper all around me.

  ~

  I am sitting on the floor in the kitchen, counting out my meds. I have twenty-four left. That covers me for twelve days, but I don't feel good knowing that's all I have. I'll have to wire Earth to have some more sent up.

  I thought I did have more. I wonder how many I've been taking. More than I should.

  I gulp one down. You're supposed to take them with water but I don't like turning the faucets on and off. RJ McCaul might hear me.

  What is he doing? What has he been doing? Thirty years gone. Thirty years dead. And not.

  Twelve days does not seem a long time at all. I get up and send the wire.

  ~

  All of my books are read. All of my movies watched and re-watched. I am bouncing a tennis ball off one of the bulkheads. Its fuzz has worn away; the hard bald surface cracks when I hit it too hard. The noise it makes is satisfyingly solid.

  I hit the ball and catch it. Hit and catch. Hit and catch. Hit and miss, and it rolls down the corridor and into a pool of shadow.

  I take a step forward.

  The ball rolls back. Hits the side of my foot.

  I stop. Look at it. Look around.

  Everything is dark and still.

  “Thanks,” I call.

  Nothing moves, but I feel something stir.

  I reach down and pick up the ball, toss it from hand to hand.

  “I'd feel better if I could see you,” I say.

  He melts out of the wall. His flesh is so white, I can't believe I didn't see it before. It glows in the dark.

  “You said you didn't want to see me,” he says. “Ever.”

  I drop my arms to my sides. “I might've changed my mind.”

  He nods. The motion is too broad, the muscles in the neck loose and floppy. I think of puppets on strings.

  “I know you,” I say. “You built this place. You're RJ McCaul.”

  The head inclines. “I am. And I'm not.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What's your name?”

  “Angie,” I say. "Angie Yoshida.”

  “Yoshida. The salvage company?”

  “You know us?”

  “RJ did.”

  My head is beginning to hurt. “But you're...Wait. Are you RJ McCaul or not?”

  He smiles. It's horrible. “Yes.”

  I give up. “Are you still hungry?”

  The smile dies. “Always.”

  I gesture at the kitchen. “You like pop tarts?”

  ~

  We sit facing each other at the butcher's block. I place one foot on the floor and angle my hip outward, ready to run. I eat slowly and watch him, and he watches me eating, and doesn't touch the pop tart in front of him. His hands are folded on the tabletop. This close, I can see that the dirt beneath them isn't black, but a very dark, gritty red.

  “Thought you were hungry,” I say.

  “I am.”

  “Then why don't you eat?”

  “RJ's stomach doesn'
t digest food anymore.”

  I take a sip of milk. “You keep saying things like that. Like you're not really RJ McCaul. If you're not him, then who are you?”

  “No. I am RJ McCaul.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” I set down the milk and rest my head in my hands. “This is pointless.”

  “I'm also Sacha Kreznikov,” he continues, “and Lisa Marks, and Henriette Leduc, and Andrew Talbot, and Vincent Tarbuck. Those are just the ones who have names. Names a human tongue can pronounce. But right now, RJ McCaul’s body is the one I'm wearing.” He shakes his head, looking down at his hands. “The body just won't seem to die. Not completely. It's very inconvenient.”

  I stare at him. His nails. His eyes.

  “Your body,” I say, “seems pretty dead to me.”

  “It is and it isn't,” he says. “The lungs don't draw breath. The heart doesn't beat. There isn’t a pulse. But I can't leave it until it either wears out completely or I find another one to replace it. That's why I'm so hungry. There's no food for me here, and I can't go anywhere else.”

  “What do you eat?”

  “It varies. But when I’m human? Oh, it’s blood.”

  I should probably be running. I really, really should probably be running.

  “Why do you have that gash on your throat?” I ask instead.

  He reaches up and strokes it. The tips of his nails probe under the skin, into the meat. “That's how I do it. With humans. The carotid artery, that's the key. That's how I get inside them. They give me their blood and I give them me. I fill them up inside. We...it's hard to describe. We become each other. Eventually the body wears down and we transfer to the next one. And on and on.”

  “How long have you...existed that way?”

  “Millennia. Aeons. As long as there's been time to measure.”

  “There haven't always been people. Hasn't always been blood.”

  “No.” He leans forward. I move back. But he's only resting his head on his palm, staring out the window. “I've worn a lot of bodies. A lot of forms. Stones no hand has ever touched. Plants no tongue has ever named. A speck of dust in a comet's tail. A mote of ultraviolet from a sun gone nova. Acid rain on Titan, lava on Upsilon Andromeda B. Sometimes I had no form, and when I had no form I drained the light from stars. They're still inside me, too. We're all still here.”

  He looks back at me. “Why are you here?”

  “I wanted to be alone,” I say.

  “No one’s ever alone,” he says. “Nothing exists all by itself, not ever. I've been almost everything in the universe, and almost everything's been me. RJ made the same mistake. He came here because he was lonely.”

  “Is he lonely now?”

  “No.” He moves, and I flinch, but he's only reaching out to the window. Dirty nails clink cold glass. He leaves no fingerprint. “I’m not.”

  I watch. I consider.

  “You won't hurt me?”

  “No.”

  “Then,” I say, “I guess we can hang out.”

  ~

  We're approaching a black hole.

  One morning I wake up and it's the first thing I see, right outside my window. It's far enough away not to be an immediate threat. The ship doesn't seem to be drifting toward it. But it's there. It's there and I feel its pull, the gravity of the thing, the weight of it. Solid darkness. Thick and irrefutable. Endless.

  I stare into it for hours. For a whole day. By the end of it my mouth hurts, and I realize I haven't stopped praying once.

  ~

  “It won't harm you,” RJ says. Easier to call him RJ.

  I roll the dice and move my tiny metal shoe up Boardwalk. “It's right out there,” I say. “I can feel it. Everywhere I go. All over the ship. Can't you feel it?”

  “Of course," he says. "But it won't harm you. Its gravitational pull might draw us in, eventually. Suck us down. That's just what black holes do. But it won't harm us.”

  “That's reassuring.”

  “I've won a beauty contest,” RJ says, holding out a card.

  “Good for you. I think I'm going to take my meds now.”

  “I'd like to go through a black hole," he says. "I once had a lover on the other side of a black hole.”

  I pause. “You had a lover?”

  “Yes. We were each other, for a while. Part of the Lover is still in me. I suppose part of me is still in the Lover. We'll find each other again. It's impossible that we wouldn't.”

  “What if the Lover's dead?”

  “Not possible. Nothing ever really dies.”

  I sit back down. “That some sort of religious thing?”

  “No. It's physics. When it comes to energy, there’s no such thing as creation or destruction. No death. No new life either. It's all right there, laid out in front of you. Like this board.” He taps it with a nail. “Everything exists in a permanent state of living and dying. It’s all the same thing, really. Open space is the same as a black hole. A rotting body is the same as a pristine one. You, me. We're not separate, you know.”

  “I'm not you,” I say. My voice grates in my ears. I become aware that I am rubbing my arm.

  “You are,” he says. “Everything inside you. All those cells, those tissues. Webs of nerves; prisms of bone; seas of muscle and fat, oceans of germs and antibodies. A whole universe. So loud I'll bet it gets hard to hear yourself think. And all of it decaying. Decomposing. Your skin cells die and regenerate every single day; you're never the same person you were when you went to sleep as you are when you wake up. Every day you die. Every day you rot. Just like everything else.”

  My arm hurts.

  “So you're saying it's all the same,” I say. “You're saying nothing really matters.”

  “Everything matters,” he says. “Everything is matter, so everything matters. You're bleeding.”

  I look down. My nails have broken the skin of my arm. Three little runnels of blood trail down to my elbow.

  RJ looks away. “You probably shouldn't be near me now.”

  “No,” I say. “Stay. I'll clean myself up. I'll fix it.”

  I get up and go to the bathroom. I wash myself off, bandage my wound. Open the medicine cabinet and take out my pills.

  I look out the window.

  The black hole seems closer now.

  Thinking of nothing, I walk out into the corridor. I find the hatch, the one that opens onto the pearly conch-shell spiral. I kneel down and open the bottle and pour the meds out. They skitter on the white, rattle away into black.

  ~

  I wake up clawing at the sheets, gasping for air. My throat feels wet. RJ, I think, and touch a hand to the side of my neck. It's sweat. My whole body is drenched. The bed is sopping wet.

  I was dreaming. First time in years. I can't remember it: something about RJ's nails and a blotch on an arm and a dragon's open mouth and my father. Something about gravity and decay. Something about germs and blood. Metal angles that make no sense, empty doors and endless spirals.

  I get up. Check the window. The black hole is still there. The black hole has always been, will always be, there.

  Godgrantmethe, I begin, and stop. God will grant me nothing.

  I left Earth to escape decay. To escape blood and sickness and constant, omnipresent death. It made no difference. It follows you. It follows you as far as you could ever possibly run.

  I'm up, and I'm moving. The corridors whirl around me. I follow them wherever they want to go. I travel up staircases that lead to staircases traveling to staircases. I open a door and find a window and climb through the window and open another door and find myself staring down into another spiral, a greater spiral, so white it dazzles.

  I climb into the spiral. I thought it would feel like the inside of a shell, but it doesn't. It's just hard, hard metal.

  I hurtle down into the black. Wind screams in my ears. A song of rusting steel.

  I slam hard onto the floor. Something cracks. White bone, white tile. My nose drips red onto white bathroom tile. Everythin
g is horribly, achingly, beautifully white. My eyes stream salt, and through the salt I see a long white curtain, shielding a long white tub. Nothing else in the bathroom. No toilet, no sink. Not even a mirror.

  Something glints behind the curtain. I crawl to it. My bones move inside me, loose as unhinged doors.

  I grab the curtain and pull it aside.

  The bathtub is full of gleaming razor blades. A thin blanket of dust rests over them, but none seem rusted, none seem dirty. Stainless, I think, and am glad.

  I reach up and pluck the very topmost blade from the pile, hold it to the light. It winks at me, as if we share a private joke.

  This room has never been touched. Never been entered. RJ designed it, but never had the guts to use it. Some instinct. Some sense of self-preservation.

  RJ isn’t me. No matter what he says. I have no instincts left. There is nothing of me that I wish to preserve.

  I lie on my back and stare up at the blade, held high, refracting light. The light slips beneath my eyelids and blinds me, and I don't see myself lowering the blade, don't see how it looks against my flesh. I barely even feel it as I draw it across my throat.

  Gouts of red arc high into the air. Salt, more salt, and thick dark metal, curdling at the back of my throat. Everything is white now. Everything is red.

  I swallow and taste myself. Bitter. Hot and bitter.

  My head lolls to the side and I see myself, pouring out onto the white. A small, still pool. Spirals in the red. The curl of a conch shell, of a neverending loop. The swirl of a galaxy. Stars drowned in space. It's all going. All gone. It was all inside me, and it's gone.

  Tap.

  I sense, not see, the door swing inward. The outstretched hand, the outstretched nails, dirty red claws.

  RJ slumps against the door and pushes forward. Falls to hands and knees. His elbows stab the air. Muscles coil under flaking skin. He is so slow. So slow.

  Black tongue unfurls, scrapes the floor clean. He takes my blood. Takes it all inside him.

  He crawls to me. Lies down beside me. I see nothing in his eyes. I see everything in his eyes.