Annie of the Undead (28 page)

“You’re up,” said one of the men I’d seen the
night before –not the Brit, the other one, only now he was markedly
more clothed.

He laid down his Manly Health magazine and got
up from his chair, picking up a remote on the table beside him and
hitting a couple of buttons on it. The door through which I had
just come and not completely closed now sealed itself shut with an
audible engaging of locks. Apparently that remote didn’t go with
the stadium-sized plasma screen playing sports center from its
alcove in the wall. I looked at him suspiciously.

“That bother you?” he asked, “Just hit number
twenty-three if you want to get out. Just security, you know.”

He saw me looking around.

“What do you think of it?”

“It could use more color.”

“Ooh, I won’t tell Andy you said that.”

“Because he might rip my throat out?”

“No,” he looked at me strangely, “but he might
lecture you to death about the eternal virtues of Spartan
sensibilities of design. My name’s Mark.”

He reached out a hand. I observed the torsion of
muscles in his thick forearm. I looked at him.

He retracted his hand, scratched the back of his
head with it.

“You’re Annie. We met last night, but I was a
little…” he smacked himself on the head with the flat of his hand,
barely mussing up his strategically disheveled hair. He rolled his
eyes at his own behavior, “…you know. Hey, can I get you anything
for breakfast? The kitchen’s right there. I could throw something
together for you. What do you want? Pancakes, a croissant, an
omelet? We have everything.”

I stared at him.

“Anything you want. I can just whip it up.”

At my failure to reply, he headed for the
kitchen of his own volition.

“You look like you eat healthy. Can I make some
whole-grain Belgian waffles? Fresh blueberries, blackberries, crème
fraiche? Or a truffle omelet?”

Was this guy for real?

“I’ll just throw something together,” he said
and began scrambling around the kitchen doing just that.

I sat down on the living room side of the
bar.

“Have you seen the guy I came with?”

“Oh…
Miguel
,” he almost whispered the
name. “No, I haven’t seen him.”

He began warming up the biggest skillet I had
ever seen. It looked like it would be great for hitting someone
with.

“Do you mind me asking, how do you know
him?”

I mind.

“…I mean, nobody knows Miguel. He’s legendary. I
suppose someone would know him, but it’s hard to imagine. Knowing
him would be like knowing Ziggy Stardust –not Bowie, but really
knowing Ziggy personally. Imagine.”

He poured oil from some snazzy bottle into the
pan. The kitchen was perfectly white too and ultra-modern and cool.
I wondered how all that oil was going to look splattered all over
that shiny white countertop.

“What does Andy say about him?”

“He doesn’t,” he said, slicing up tomatoes,
chives, and various fungi with a deadly-sharp knife, “He’s never
said anything about him to me, but some of the others –Max,
Monty…”

The full Monty? I think I saw him last
night.

“…and the guy who travels with him sometimes,
Alec –they’ve said some things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, just guy talk, really. He’s like the one
who taught Andy everything he knows,” he paused, knife in hand,
staring into space for a moment as in memory. Then he laughed,
“Everything.”

I shifted uneasily on my barstool. I think
Miguel had taught me a little of that everything last night.
Something told me it was just the tip of the iceberg, like
everything with Miguel.

“Oh,” said Mark, misreading my unease, “I didn’t
offer you anything to drink. How silly of me.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Oh, it’s no big deal. Coffee, fresh-squeezed
seven-juice blend?”

“No, really.”

“It’s no trouble,” he said, troubling himself.
“I’ll make you a smoothie. My favorite. Very healthy…”

He threw the vegetables in the pan with a hiss,
wiped his hands on the kitchen towel stuffed in his waistband, and
headed for the fridge. From magical compartments all around the
sleek kitchen, he produced a blender, a cup of yogurt, protein
powder packs, fresh fruit, a carton of soymilk…

“So how long are you staying with us? It’s so
nice to have visitors. Andy doesn’t allow most people in this part
of the house. This is the family area. You must be someone very
special to him.”

I guffawed. It was probably impolite.

“Special?” Especially loathed. “You could say
that.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to insult you,” he said,
halting his work and putting a hand on his chest, “I’m sure I
should know who you are. It’s my fault for being so oblivious. I
have a problem with that. I get lost in my own head sometimes. Andy
says it’s part of my charm, but I think it annoys Max and Marvin
–and Monty gets the most upset about it.”

“Wait a minute. Max and Marvin? Monty? And your
name’s Mark?”

“Yeah. That’s the house,” he said, chopping eggs
with a spatula.

“Son of bitch.”

The son of a bitch coordinates his friend’s
names. Son of a bitch.

“Yeah. They’re all great guys. Max is from
Haiti. He’s in charge when Andy’s not up or around. He’s a dead
shot, and he’s a marauder at the ping pong table. Marvin’s an
animal. Nobody messes with him, and Montgomery was in the secret
service. Killer with a knife.”

Mark made a couple of enthusiastic slashing
motions with the spatula. From what I saw he was probably killer
with a knife too.

Mark folded over the omelet, sealing all the
goodies inside, slid the breakfast confection onto a plate,
garnished it with a nasturtium blossom from a bowl of water by the
sink, scooped up the smoothie, and arranged the whole ensemble
before me in a wink. Three seconds later, there was a tall glass of
crystal-clear ice water, silverware, and a napkin all arranged
neatly around the plate. Was this guy a professional chef?

I stared at the food. I didn’t eat like this. I
never ate like this, even when I was at the top of my game as a
fighter. I celebrated at Badd Burger.

Mark was hovering, eagerly anticipating my first
bite. The agony of watching him do it was great enough to make me
take one.

I held the cumulus on my head out of the way and
sampled the omelet. I tried the smoothie. I ate the nasturtium.

Still, he hovered.

“You ever heard of The Chow House?” I asked.

“No. What’s that?”

“You should work there.”

“But, is the omelet too dry? Sometimes I
overcook them a little. What do you think of the smoothie? It’s my
own recipe, so I don’t know if anybody else will like it. I like
more protein in mine than most people. I’m on something like the
Atkins Diet, so I put double the protein powder in there and less
juice. I find it helps for those really long workouts. Though, some
of the other guys prefer to use those simple sugar packs, and
Marvin goes for ketosis…”

I looked at the food, looked at the rinds of
emptied fruit piled by the blender, looked at the aftermath of
cooking, looked at Mark. He had dark hair, dark eyes –soft eyes. He
might have been part Latino, or part Nepalese, or part Chinese, or
part Polynesian. Part friendly gay man, part bodyguard, part
fighter, part professional chef…

“So is it any good? You can tell me if it
doesn’t taste good. I can take a hit…”

“It’s fine. Food’s fine. Omelet’s fine.
Smoothie’s fine.”

“Oh, it is! That makes me so happy. I can’t tell
you.”

Where did Andy find you? And how does he keep
you? How can someone like you stand someone like him?

Then, he answered the question he hadn’t heard
me ask.

“You are so nice. You know that? Telling me my
omelet’s perfect. I never get an omelet perfect. You should hear
Monty go on about it. Now,
he
knows how to cook an
omelet.”

I finished breakfast, listening to Mark go on
and on about everything and nothing. He reminded me a little
someone else I knew, although Yoki was in a banter-black-belt class
of her own. If Mark had said fifty words in the past minute, Yoki
would have beaten him by about two hundred. She talked at techno
rates.

When I finished shoving food into my maw, I
belched and asked, “You got a place to work out in this hive,
Mark?”

“Do we ever. Come on, I’ll show you. I can clean
this up later.”

I followed my suffocating host through the white
house, past more of the sheik and the expensive, the pristine and
the practical. The ceilings were vaulted, the halls spacious, and
the floor plan reminiscent of the Pentagon’s: rooms connected by
easily-navigated passageways, arranged around some invisible
central axis point, so that every place was within a very short
travelling time of every other place. Everywhere I saw sanity.
Nowhere did I see blood fountains.

And when he opened the door to the workout room,
I saw Heaven.

The place was positively cavernous, vast,
drafty, sixty-five degrees. I looked to the left and saw free
weights, then Nautilus machines, then apparatus. I looked to the
right and saw bags, machines, closets of equipment,
floor-to-ceiling mirrors. And on the opposite end was a boxing
ring, a combat floor, more closets of equipment –everything four
guys who guard a vampire for a living would need to stay fit, stay
deadly, and stay happy. It was also, I was convinced in that
moment, everything I needed to stay happy.

I turned to Mark.

“Busy?” I asked him

“Only with you.”

“You wanna hit that ring?”

“You want to?” he said brightly, “Of course.
Let’s suit up.”

“You got a sweatband around here?”

“Sure do,” he opened a drawer, tossed me one. I
subdued my hair cloud with it.

He led me to the boxing closet where I found
everything I needed. Tape, gloves, mouth guards, head gear –even a
pair of shorts that fit me big but would do when the drawstring was
pulled as tight as it would go. I took off the blood crystal and
then my shirt. I was going to change right there in front of him, a
trick I liked to pull on guys before fighting them, but he turned
away, embarrassed.

I got a show though. Mark got his shirt off and
got a look at his bod in better light. He wasn’t built like a
my-body-is-one-giant-rubber-band boxer. He was ripped, and the
tattoo sprawling down his spine all the way from his hairline to
the-devil-knew-where like some wicked tangle of alien plant life
only accentuated his stellar physique.

“You want music?” he asked, “I find it gets me
going.”

“Sure.”

“Any requests?”

“You got P$C?”

“Uuuh, no. I don’t think we have that.”

“Metallica then.”

“Got that.”

He put it on, had me approve the volume, we
warmed up and got into the ring.

He rolled his head, bounced on his feet. I
invited him in.

After a little dancing, trading a few jabs and a
nice, failed left hook, him hitting me good in the shoulder while I
blocked, and me planting a couple of good ones on his chin, he
actually whooped –like a wild Indian.

“You’re pretty good,” he said

“Foreplay.”

“Oooh.”

I feinted and jabbed my way in until I had my
opponent where I wanted him –close enough to bite, and started
killing his body the way boxers do. We didn’t have a ref to break
us apart, so I finished by planting an uppercut on his chin, then
stepped back, realizing that I had pulled that last punch. I didn’t
pull punches. Annie Eastwood didn’t pull punches.

He looked pretty dazed for a second, then shook
it off and grinned through his mouth guard.

He came back in with a surprisingly adept
combination. I took them. Then I laughed. I answered it, schooled
him –again pulling most of the punches. We moved around each other,
trading pain the way boxers do, trading intimacies.

Somewhere in the middle I realized something
totally weird. I realized I didn’t want to kill Mark. I wanted to
fight him, wanted to plant my padded knuckles in all the painful
places, wanted to know just how to hit him, what he could stand,
what made him hurt, and what made him tick, but I didn’t want to
kill him. I wanted to play. Neither sentiment was Annie Eastwood’s
style. Was this what I had heard other fighters talk about for
years –that business about the Sweet Science being almost a kind of
lover’s dance –and not the kind you have with a cleaver in the
kitchen with your cheatin’ baby daddy? I had always just wanted to
eat my opponents alive and had nearly done so to some of them. This
soft approach wasn’t like me. Like I said, it was totally
weird.

We roughed each other up some. He was a pretty
good beginning boxer –way too strong for me to let him hit me much.
I was an infighter, and he preferred to keep a distance where his
long arms could operate to their best advantage. I was good on my
feet, clearly the superior at the technical aspects, but he clocked
me so good I saw lights. If he’d been as big as Max I might’ve been
killed, but he was little for a guy. We eventually called a draw,
mostly because I was about to keel over.

“That was great,” he said. “You could teach me
some stuff. I’m not so up on my skills in the ring.”

We began de-gearing. I stood gasping for
air.

“You want to try it barehanded? A little on the
floor?”

“You kidding?” I said, still catching my
breath.

“No, but if you’ve had enough…”

“Let’s do it, iron chef.”

“Iron chef!” he laughed.

I wasn’t going to let him outdo me that easily.
I still had stamina left. I’d run a few miles on one of those
treadmills later.

“You want to suit up?” he asked.

“Suit up?”

“Body armor?”

Huh? “No, let’s just see what you got.”