Dead Surround - The Julia Poe Vampire Chronicles (3 page)

factored in the woman’s explanation, Poe tightened her grip on her guns.

“You’ve helped extricate hundreds of human cattle from blood farms and most significantly, from that bastard, Trench. It also helps that you had a hand in decimating the fascist Vampire Council in L.A.

with your sharpshooter skills.”

Little Penny snarled a warning to the sweet-smelling woman that she was getting too close to Poe.

“Easy there, Penny,” Poe ordered wryly.

“Interesting dog you have there,” the woman remarked. “Likes to eat dog flesh, does she?”

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“Sometimes, I guess,” Poe said distractedly. “I don’t usually let her, but more times than not she scouts ahead of me—” Clearing her throat, she stirred the conversation back on course. “Sounds like I have quite a few neighbors. They must’ve peed on the produce I took.” She shuddered at what they might have used as fertilizer.

“Maybe. But they never forgot that you were off limits, even when you penned their chickens and ate all the eggs.”

“Hmm, the chicken. Nice of them,” Poe said with derision, wiping her bloody arms with the bottom of her t-shirt. The protein from the albumen and yolk kept her well fed. “I guess it didn’t matter that I never ate the chickens.”

“Nope.”

“So who threatened to grind their bones and eat their kidneys if they lay their hands on me?”

“Can’t you guess?”

She could think of only one powerful enough to keep her breathing. He had gray eyes, and he was dead.

“Is the cotton candy machine still inside that store?” Poe asked, evading the answer. She pointed with pursed lips at the dilapidated shack behind the tall stranger.

Once the pulse of the boardwalk, Dino’s, a hot dog and junk food dive, looked weather beaten and diseased with its tagged metal roll-up door. Over a decade after the death clouds had poisoned most of the population, the storefront looked affronted but alive.

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“I’m not sure,” she answered with a shrug. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in there. I keep away from boarded storefronts because of the rats.”

“Can you step aside then?” Poe asked brusquely.

She swallowed her disgust. She had her unwanted share of rats and their droppings. Limping, she studied the door.

With careful aim Poe fired three shots at the medium-size lock corroded with age to bust the lock loose. She couldn’t help it. She peeked at the reaction of the woman in a yellow dress. The lipsticked diva’s smile never floundered.

“I have a craving,” Poe explained, “for cotton candy.”

“Ah. So that’s why you’ve braved spiked fences and a sea of dogs.”

“Can’t fight PMS.”

The lady thinks I’m nuts.

“So I take it you get your menses pretty regularly?” asked the woman bluntly.

Reddening, Poe shook her head. “Um, no,” she stumbled. She never had the opportunity to talk about that stuff with her mother or Sister Ann. “I’m lucky if I get it once a year. I substitute ‘PMS’ for ‘craving’, I guess. Stupid thing to do.”

“Language confusion is common nowadays. The younger ones are switching and substituting meanings of words because no one was there to educate them. Sister Ann had the ‘talk’ with you, right?”

“Huh?” Poe said. She was astounded at the candor of the built woman she’d barely met. Sister Ann had taught Poe how to shoot with precision among other things. She and a giant black man 20

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named Goss had completed her education and more.

The mention of their names cast a gloom in her mood. Following Goss’ sober instruction, Poe had decapitated him when she found him bled to death.

Dear Sister Ann had been stabbed in the eye fighting Trench’s people, and Poe dreamed about exacting revenge on the foppish master vampire every waking hour.

“I mean about your monthlies and other delicate things.”

“Um, I saw the movie
Carrie
when I was ten, and it was pretty much self-explanatory. The rest I learned through trial and error and watching videos and DVDs.”

Instead of continuing with awkward pleasantries, Poe pushed up the metal barrier and limped inside the dark store smelling of rot and staleness. The contact left bright orange rust on the palm of her hands.

From her pack she took out two solar powered lanterns, the kind that needed to be pumped ten times an hour, and placed them in convenient locations to illuminate the store.

“There it is,” she said with relief at spotting the cobwebbed cotton candy machine. The blood on her arm stopped her from touching it. She attacked the wounds on her body first, dousing them with alcohol gel and smearing them with Neosporin. Next she pulled cleaning rags and paper towels from her pack.

Poe took a good hour to clean the Floss Boss, a compact cotton candy machine, as it was crusted with crystallized sugar and rat droppings.

All this time the dog woman hovered over her shoulder, watching with interest and sometimes bringing a fresh bucket of water from her private well 21

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and charcoal filtration system. Occasionally grungy dogs padded up for a petting. Poe wondered if she trusted the woman enough to keep from stabbing her in the back.

“All the sugar seems to have morphed into amber. That’s going to be a problem,” said her curious audience. Passionada inspected the melted chip bags and pebbly slush machines with a frown.

“I have some in my pack,” Poe said, proud at her foresight. “Got some pink and blue food coloring, too.”

When the electricity didn’t spark to life, irking Poe to no end, the woman wheeled in her own mini-generator.

“Thanks.”

“I want a piece of the action, girl. You’ve whet my appetite.”

Lumpy pink clown-hair monstrosities that weighed about a pound were produced to the disappointment of all. Poe finally got the hang of maneuvering the stick clockwise in unhurried circles while hot air blew strands of sugar on the side.

Sparing drops of color and loosened sugar did the trick, and Poe was able to replicate perfectly decent cotton candy.

The fluffy snack put Poe in a sociable mood enough to ask, “So has anyone figured out the gray miasma since I retired?” The poison that had wiped out almost the entire human population had never been solved. It had struck like the hand of death itself, suffocating the nonimmune with their own blood and mucous.

“I don’t know what to tell you, girl,” shrugged Passionada. “No one’s left that’s smart enough to 22

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figure out what happened. The usual germ warfare-slash-hand of God theories still abound. Who knows why so many died and we didn’t? It doesn’t matter now. We’ve got bigger problems, like keeping ourselves from becoming cattle for vamps to feed on with their straw attachments. Downtown vamps now resort to drinking minority blood since all the white blood cattle have been rescued. We’re considered prime rib, Poe.”

“I guess you’re right. More important things to worry about than what killed my mom and dad,” she agreed. “I hate racist vampires who made non-whites into janitors to clean up their shit. I hate them even more now that they want to eat us, too.”

Dimples showing, Poe proudly handed the woman a fluffy cotton candy head the size of a basketball. She bagged about a dozen for later consumption. Poe made extras for herself and for the stranger, but she spared the food coloring. She didn’t like the bitter taste it left on her tongue. The goof-up batches she gave to Penny who already had her fill of dog corpses.

In silence Poe and the woman stuffed their faces with quick dissolving sugar and grunted in satisfaction while sitting on a bench facing the electric blue Pacific. The sun combined with ocean wind had an uncomfortable blow dryer effect on their skin. Poe’s scalp tingled from the heat. Her conductor mass of black hair didn’t help her, either. Their view was obstructed by billboards and rolling dunes and distracted by frolicking, fornicating dogs which didn’t seem phased by them one whit.



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“It’s been bloody, these retaliations,” Passionada Cruz told Poe as she licked her thick but strangely delicate fingers clean without marring her perfectly glossed red lips.

If I had that lip gloss I’d look like I’d just
gnawed on a pile of greasy pork chops
, Poe thought.

Not sexy at all
.

“Like for instance last month thirty cattle were retaken from a rehab farm,” Passionada continued, daintily dabbing the edges of her lips with tissue.

“The ones the master vampires didn’t take, the elderly and the sick, were slaughtered along with Sainvire’s people. They were gutted. Their insides were yanked out and used to spell messages like: A RECKONING AT HAND; STEALING WILL GET

YOU KILLED; SAINVIRE YOU’RE NEXT.”

“Man, that’s so medieval. Imagine how many yards of intestines they needed to spell a long message like that,” Poe contemplated quietly as she watched Passionada bust open another bag of cotton candy, her third. “Really brutal the way they killed the old folks. No respect.”

“They have orders to leave no cattle behind.

What they can’t carry or eat they kill,” the woman said. She shook her head. “It’s all for Sainvire’s benefit, of course. He’s a Judas to them for turning his back on the vampire way of life. They think Sainvire’s a greedy thief, and they’ll do anything to get him back.”

Despite the warm day Poe shivered. Although she was loath to admit it, she still had feelings for the vampire. He was her first, after all, and the best person she’d ever met, vampire or not. The thought 24

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of every vampire in California pledging to tear his flesh into fish bait for stealing their food source frightened her.
All this trouble because Sainvire freed
up hundreds of human cattle from vamp farms
.
Doing
the right thing sucks!

Her large dark eyes followed a miniscule dust devil skipping across the sand as it teased a grungy Penny into chasing it, and she only looked up when Passionada Cruz’ feminine and musical voice spoke once more. Penny still didn’t trust the substantial woman though they’d shared dessert on a bench.

“The new Vampire Council will give whoever destroys him master status and fifty heads of prime cattle. Two hundred if they bring him in alive. For human traitors, a mansion in Beverly Hills, free supplies of human food from Valley farms, and lifetime immunity from predators. Instant royalty,”

Passionada explained. “Sainvire’s followers are to be beheaded, disemboweled, and dried in the sun like jerky for one whole year like the Brits did to Captain Cook when they caught up with him.”

“That’d be you, I guess,” Poe said, trying her hand at comedy.

“And you,” Passionada snorted. “You’re second on the most wanted list. You aided him and killed off a few Council members. Worst of all you marred Trench’s beautiful face when you threw garlic water at him. Plus everyone has a theory that you and Sainvire were…close.”

“Well they’re nuts.”

It was one night
. Saying it was a mistake just wouldn’t cut it. So she shifted the subject slightly off center. She thought about Joseph, Sainvire’s ever ebullient tattooed best friend who shared the same 25

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

name as her brother, and thoroughly felt ill. Sainvire and Joseph did not deserve to be hunted down. If only there was a way of protecting them.

“Is Joseph alive?”

“As alive as a dead man can be, no thanks to the Council.”

“That’s good. He’s an okay guy. He’s Pinoy like a quarter of me. Practically my brother.” Poe sighed.

“You look it with your can’t-put-my-finger-on-it ethnic background,” said Passionada. “What are you again?”

“My dad’s Scot-Irish and Mexican,” said Poe proudly. “And my mom’s Filipino and Japanese.

They were the best sort of people. Really fun parents.

No complaints on that score.” She took out a battered Bad Badtz-Maru Velcro wallet encased in three zip bags and pulled out a picture of her parents flanked by her older sister, Sirena, her brother, Joseph, and Poe. “That’s them.”

“Good looking family you have there.”

“I think so,” she said proudly, tucking the picture away with infinite care and placing the wallet in the Ziploc bags once more. “I guess it’s no surprise the Council went haywire after the mass exodus of their cattle.” She wondered again about the five most powerful undead in the city. She and Sainvire had decimated their ranks.

“They have a new set every few months. Just for show, you know.”

“So who’s the leader now?” Poe scratched her sunburned scalp.

“No one really,” Passionada sighed. “There is no more Council as you knew it. They’re mere decorations of days gone by. It’s just one vampire 26

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now from San Francisco named Peter Newbitt and his lap dog, Quillon Trench. Rumor is you made Trench so ugly he doesn’t leave his lair anymore. The two of them are running the show.”

“His face wasn’t so bad,” said Poe. She remembered his craggy face at a Council meeting two years before.

“Well you know how egotistical he is. And the head cheese is Trench’s Obi-Wan. His objective is to take back the stolen cattle and kill Sainvire.”

“I should’ve killed Trench when I had the chance,” Poe said as she stabbed the sand with her stick. Deep down it gave her goosebumps to think Quillon still harbored a grudge against her. She didn’t think he would easily forget the incident. “I hope he never gets his hands on me ’cause I’m really gonna get it. Vanity’s a top motive for violence.”

“So I take it you don’t know about the bounty on your head.”

“Bounty?” Poe swallowed with an audible gulp.

“You said I was number two? You’re serious?”

“Yes, but never mind,” Passionada waved the business away. “Anyway, last year Sainvire put out an APB on you to his people throughout SoCal and the Central Valley. We’ve been hard at work making sure you don’t get into any trouble.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Poe gave the woman an annoyed glance. “I didn’t even know there were any of you around. And for the record I never got into any trouble.”