Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2)

by Michael G. Williams

  I went out to meet him every time.

  I got Smiles set up with a bowl of kibble and started turning on lights around the house, checking to see if any bulbs blew. I only turn the power on for a month every time I come up to visit so there are always a few surprises waiting for me. The wrapping on the pipes in the crawl space needed some work – something had gnawed at them over the summer – and the water ran a little dark for the first few seconds after blowing the air out. Old house, old pipes.

  Around midnight I locked the place back up, left on a couple of lights in the living room and climbed back into the car. Smiles would be OK on his own for a bit; it never hurts to let the neighborhood hear and see your huge-ass dog when you're out of town for extended periods. If all the lights were with me, I'd get out to see Clyde by half past and that would be right on time by our usual schedule. The rain was still coming down, and I'd drenched myself peeking into the crawl space and checking the storm windows, but I didn't much care. I turned on the heater in the Firebird and cranked some music and hit US 64 through town.

  Hardisonville had changed a lot over time. New houses everywhere while old houses were torn down and replaced. Whole sections of woods I'd once driven past on this route were gone and McMansion-y boxes had been stacked two inches apart all across the nude slopes left in their places. It reminded me of the Reinholdts back home. Their kids were off in college now and their house was up for sale. I wished I could buy it and finally bulldoze the goddamn thing but the neighborhood association they started probably had a rule against that.

  I scowled and turned the music up higher. There was a Chinese restaurant in Hardisonville now. Nothing wrong with Chinese food, don't get me wrong, but the time was it couldn't support one “home-style” restaurant because people thought eating out was decadent. Everything had changed so much in my absence. Everything had a sign in front of it now that started with the word “Historic.” What they didn't tear down they turned into a museum. The anonymity of one neighborhood compared to another was grating. I used to be able to date the neighborhoods, the developments, the farmhouses, one by one as I drove by. Now they all looked the same. For all the new growth, it felt like a place with the life drained out.

  Hardison County, if you see it on a map, looks like a square that's stood up to stretch. It's higher, mountain-wise, on the western and northwestern ends than it is on the southeastern. In the northwest it's a bunch of dairy farms and a few little commuter enclaves that twenty or thirty or sixty years ago were nothing but a gas station and a couple of churches. In the southeastern corner it's apple trees. In amongst it all, though, are housing developments that weren't there five or ten years ago. Property values are through the roof. The county is growing. Gods only know what people there actually do for a living. Some work in Asheville, some hoof it all the way down to Greenville or Spartanburg, maybe, but most of the people moving in are retirees.

  The dead and dying circle the countryside looking for an empty roost. The number one industry in that part of the world is health care and most of that is “retirement” care: buildings full of people who never get out of bed and a professional staff waiting for them to die. The rest homes all have waitlists. If you don't want to idle your engine at home until a bed opens up then you go to some hole in the wall rank with the last days of hard living. There is nothing good in those places. I’ve only ever been to a couple of them and I could not believe people would do this to themselves, to one another, charge money for it, do the landscaping for it, approve the permits for it. Everything about it made me want to turn and run and never look back. Those places terrify me. The times I’ve been to one, I’ve gone straight out into the night, found someone terrible and drained them while they screamed. I would turn them to the sky and eat the last bit of their life with their eyes staring into the darkness, their feet kicking in protest. I killed fast and mean to wipe away the images of all that slow death creeping up on prepackaged corpses. Better to take a life that fights not to go than to institutionalize the process of dragging death out for years like that.

  US 64 used to be the main artery through Hardison County, running roughly from the northwest to the southeast. I took it for ten or fifteen minutes into the heart of town then turned right along the way and set off back up and down the mountains to the southwestern corner of the county. I couldn't get it out of my head the whole way there that the rest homes had come here to spawn, like flies laying eggs in dead flesh. A part of me believed that if they expanded long enough sooner or later they'd all grow together to encompass the county; that eventually the county itself would be a patient comprising geography and bad luck; that all the people in it would just be there to attend to that one county-sized patient, waiting for it to die.

  Rain gushed down from the sky so hard that finally even I pulled off at a convenience store – twenty four hour gas stations were one of the few advantages I could see of the county growing fat on the blood of the dead – and bought an umbrella. It was a simple, cheap, black number with manual everything. It was funny to note a manual umbrella cost more than one with buttons and spring-loaded doodads. Whatever. I climbed back into the car and started back down the road and up the mountain towards my appointment. I'd be a little late, it looked like, and Clyde certainly wasn't getting any younger. I hoped he didn't think I'd forgotten or abandoned him.

  By 12:40 I'd reached the turn-off for the clearing. I arced around from the main highway on a road now paved - used to be dirt, and I wondered who'd paved it and what newly-minted mansion I'd find if I kept going past the field itself – until I reached the little gap in the trees where I had to pull in and park before walking the rest of the way.

  Clyde's car was still there. It was two inches deep in mud. I'd have to help him get it out; not at all a difficult job for me, but he was going to be damned lucky to have a vampire there to help him. My Firebird, well, I could about carry it out myself on one shoulder if I had to. I still had a winch on the front, the 1970's answer to SUVs before there were SUVs. You never know what you'll get into out in the country. I killed the engine and sat in silence, listening to the rain pound the roof. He was probably half-soaked out there already. I grabbed the umbrella, climbed out and gave my eyes a moment to adjust. I could just barely see ahead of me thanks to the blood gurgling around these old veins. A mortal would have been blind.

  I squelched through the mud and the high grass, brown and bent by the autumn and approaching winter, through the trees. Twenty yards, thirty, forty. The trees used to be thinner here, the brush smaller. Whoever inherited the land didn't take care of it like their predecessor had. The first time Clyde and I had been out here, it had been neatly trimmed, a fence on the far side carefully mended, no rust on the barbed wire, fresh nails in some of the posts. Now the fence had probably fallen down. The undergrowth was thicker; there were briers pushing in over most of the ground. There were a few irregular paths through but they were deer trails, nothing more. This had become a forgotten place.

  I started off through the undergrowth and stopped short a few feet in. I'd have sworn I smelled, for just a moment, blood. Fresh. Well, fairly fresh. Spilled tonight, I'd have wagered, but then, just like that, it was gone. I stood stock still, sniffing the air in silence, but couldn't pick anything up through the rain. Finally I kept going. Maybe Clyde had snagged an arm on one of these brier bushes. Whatever. I'd fed on the way out of Raleigh; I wouldn't be a danger to anyone who smelled of a couple cuts tonight.

  I stepped out of the trees and into the dark field. What little moon there should have been was entirely shut out by the clouds. Even I was having trouble with anything at much of a distance. I reached into my pockets and produced an LED flashlight, bright enough for me to walk confidently and to see that there was something, someone – Clyde, I guessed – out in the middle of the field, more or less where I'd expect him to be. I walked closer and, the closer I got, the less it looked right. He was sitting down on the ground – no, make that laying down on th
e ground. I shoved the flashlight in a pocket and took off running towards him.

  Clyde was white as a sheet and lying facedown on the ground. I didn't need to be a vampire to tell he was dead. Anyone would have looked at that form and known it was a corpse. One thin – no, frail – arm was up over his head, the other under him. He wore a long, heavy coat, galoshes over his shoes, thick corduroy pants, and a flannel shirt. He looked like a retired lumberjack. His hair was thin and patchy. His scalp was splotched with age, and his face was lined.

  His eyes were open wide. He'd died in absolute terror of what killed him.

  My last mortal friend was dead and he looked very, very old.

  I spent a half-minute just standing there over him, staring. It took some time for the vampire instincts to kick in. He'd been dead for a few hours at most. He'd been drained of all blood – I could only catch the faintest of whiffs when the wind was right and there wasn't any spilled on the ground. Even in the rain there'd be some left under him if he'd bled out here. He'd been killed somewhere else, drained and brought here in his own car, then left behind; or he'd been killed by someone who met or followed him here and then drained cleanly before being ditched. A part of me – the part of me that always hunts – started to make me turn around and go back, look for his footprints, smell his car. The part of me that remembered an old friend from high school kept staring at him, though. He must have been – gods, we'd graduated together. He was eighty-three years old.

  Same age as me.

  I reached down and wrapped my right hand in one corner of my coat, then gripped his shoulder and turned him very slowly. The neck had been slit with something sharp. It hadn't happened here. If it had, there'd still be blood no matter how big a barrel the killer had held under him when he made the slice. He probably didn't live long enough to bleed to death; he probably drowned before that. Leaning closer, I could smell the blood when I tilted his head back a little, dead blood, pooled in his lungs. My stomach turned. He didn't even have appeal as food for the very worst part of me. Clyde was just a dead thing now. His mouth was open, the skin stretched tight around his eyes. They were mad, with the whites showing as big as Kennedy half-dollars. His eyebrows were up, stretched high. Water had pooled in the lines and crevices of his face and ran out of his eyes like great tears when I moved him.

  I rolled him back over, putting him as he had been, stood up, turned my back, drew a slow, shaky breath and let out one long, quivering, sudden, strangled sob. Before I could do anything, I dropped the umbrella, raised both hands to my face and bent double to weep openly, angrily, shaking my whole oversized body up and down its length. My back spasmed and my shoulders jerked against and away from themselves. I cried out. I wailed like an animal until the anger underneath the tears sprang up all of a sudden and I stood straight, threw my head back, and cried out high and horrible and piercing. Rain fell in my mouth, up my nose and pattered against the eyelids I'd squeezed shut. All I could hear was rain and wind and myself screaming and in the distance the occasional car on the old country highway I'd taken to get here. I hated everyone in those cars, everything about them, every imagined happy facet of the lives they were on their way to living out there. I hated whatever they were doing that they weren't here weeping with me. I threw my arms out and screamed again, first shrilly then descending into a yell, then a groan, then a serrated sigh as I finally squatted and then sat in the rain and the mud, water soaking the coat under me in an instant.

  I sat beside my dead friend and I cried for long minutes, weeping out all the years I could remember.

  Clyde was dead – murdered – and I already missed him.

  When I looked at my watch, it was past one o'clock in the morning. I'd sat there and shaken and cried out and sobbed for the better part of twenty minutes and I could tell I wasn't done yet. Still, I had to get moving at some point. I had to leave. I had to get out of there before someone found me with him. I had to go home, clean up and get my brain working. I had to find out who had done this to him and why. I had to track them down and put my hands around their neck and make them stare me in the face – my real face, the one with the fangs – and make them wish they'd never been born. The prowling thing in a vampire’s gut never really sleeps and a lot of bad emotions can make it come out. The worst one is anger.

  I was so very, very angry.

  I needed that anger, though, because his throat had been slit but he hadn’t been beheaded and as terrible as it was to see him dead like this, it was worse to consider that he might start moving again of his own accord. Better to tear his head off now than to risk letting him turn into a Steeplechase – the polite new term for the walking dead we’d had crop up once a few years ago. It still happened every now and then, maybe once in a million deaths, and I couldn’t stand the thought of it happening to Clyde. I reached over, turned my head so I wouldn’t watch myself do it, and then tore his head from his body in one move. It was as light as a feather. I barely had to try.

  I stood up, hefting all three hundred fifty pounds of myself back onto my legs, and set off to the car. I got halfway there when I remembered the umbrella, turned around, went back for it. It had blown a few feet away. I kicked myself for leaving footprints all over the area where the body – where Clyde – was. I was fucking up a crime scene in a major way and tomorrow or the next day or sometime there would be cops crawling all over this place. I went back, trying to mangle my own prints, but all I did was make new ones on top of the old ones. I cried out again in anger, started stabbing my old footprints with the butt end of the umbrella to deform them, backtracked all the way to the car like that. I got in, gunned the engine hard, then got back out after a moment and walked over to Clyde's car. I could see the keys in the ignition. I could see a couple of paperbacks on the front seat, a half-full ashtray, a cassette sticking out of a tape player. Clyde was driving the same car he'd had the last dozen times I'd been here: an early '90s sedan of American make. It was a sensible car – a little get up and go, a little space, generous weight, average gas mileage. It was an old man's car.

  The cassette was probably a book. He liked books on tape. I'd meant to bring him one and forgotten.

  I put my hand back in the fold of my coat and tried the door. It was unlocked. There was a scent there besides Clyde's. I didn't recognize it, but I stood there snuffling the air for a long time to make sure I had it down good. I'd know it the next time I smelled it, of that much I was sure. It was a human smell, and I would be able to catch it from the other end of a shopping mall.

  I slammed Clyde's car door shut so hard the window rattled and then climbed back into the old Firebird. I floored it a couple of times to rev the engine, then put it in low and backed very slowly out of the mud and onto the blacktop. I got out and went back through messing up my tire tracks as I'd done with my footprints. The cops would know someone had been here and that they didn't want to be spotted. I hadn't spotted any tracks in the mud – such as those of Clyde's killer – but he'd been dead so long the rain had probably done away with his killer’s tracks already. Maybe mine would be gone by the time someone found him, I thought. Maybe all this is just wasted effort, just something to do with the time I'd have spent talking to him.

  Or maybe I was going to call the cops, against my better judgment.

  I got back into the car, cranked the stereo as hard as it would go and took off into the night to ask myself that last question over and over again while I drove around, hit dirt roads and doubled back again and again.

  By the time I'd gotten fifteen miles away, I was in the southeast of the county, out among the apple farms. Countless years later the gas station was still there. There was still a pay phone. I thought about it, but there were probably also security cameras.

  I kept driving.

  On the way back home, I passed the old Appleton high school. It'd been abandoned at some point. Appleton was a “community”, not a real town. The old school was just a shell of a building, windows boarded, some of the bo
ards missing and any others that were reachable covered in the slightly crude country facsimile of a real city’s graffiti. It was childish: the autographs of a teen population that saw no reason to leave anything standing when they left.

  There were two phone booths on one wall. On a whim I stopped and got out to check them. One was just barely hanging by some wires, but the other produced a dial tone. I stood there with the phone in my hand, then hung it back up, shoved my hands into a coat pockets, wrestled the receiver back off, wiped it down, managed to get it between my face and my shoulder. I dialed 911 with fingers made extra thick by the trench coat and when the operator picked up I spoke in a flat monotone.

  “There's a body. He's dead.” I gave quick directions then paused. The operator asked if I needed medical attention, if I was still there. After long seconds of silence I said, “I didn't do it.”

  I hung up the phone, got back in my car and drove away. It was stupid to attract the cops to where I'd just been, stupid to call them myself, stupid to do anything about it at all other than melt back into the shadows. But... it was Clyde. He wasn't just someone. He was my friend. He'd been a cop, himself. I couldn't leave him out there. I couldn't bed down for the day and pretend I hadn't seen him. I couldn’t know he was dead and do nothing.

  I drove home in silence, listening to the rain and the wiper blades.

  No music.

  No nothing.

  Not even tears.

  Officially, my name is Withrow Surrett III. As I said, there never was a junior, much less III. It's a pain in the ass these days to get the paperwork done, but the fixers love it. It used to be a lot easier: a birth certificate by a country doc who was a drunk; that kind of thing. It has always been easy to find prey in the great wash of humanity, whether needed for blood or for graft. These days everything's in a computer somewhere. You need a fixer to do “records insertion” in all the right places. You spend most of one legal adult life building a trail for the next one, then assume that one and start all over again. I've been Withrow Surrett III for nearly fifteen years and I'm already behind on building a life for Me IV.