Annie of the Undead (8 page)

“I’m gonna sleep all day. Don’t worry about
it.”

“I am going to hang the ‘do not disturb’ sign on
the door. Do not allow anyone to enter the room.”

“I’ll shoot anyone who tries.”

“We must trust each other now. That is the only
way this arrangement will function…Annie. Annie.”

“Trust, right. All kinds of trust.”

If he said anything after that, I did not hear
it. The longest day of my life had finally ended.

When I awoke, I almost wished the vampire had
killed me. I had finally caught the motherfucker of a cold that had
been going around the jail for weeks.

The night of frozen hell probably hadn’t helped
any. All the symptoms that typify the nastiest of colds gripped me
then. I made the mistake of swallowing, and my throat raged like
I’d been eating broken glass. My whole head was so stuffed that you
could have strung it up and used it as a piñata, so stuffed that
there was no room in my head for my eyes, for my brain, or for the
buckets of snot streamed forth, threatening to flood the entire
room. My joints felt disconnected from one another, unlubricated,
bone grinding against bone.

I had no idea what time it was, or what day, or
for a moment where I was or anything that had happened in recent
hours. My first impression was that I was in jail, but then I felt
the familiar cold shape of the gun beside me, and after that the
cold shape of a hand.

That got my attention. I opened my eyes, sat up,
and threw back the covers.

And I found a dead guy.

It really took me some time to clear my head of
the idea that I was lying next to some corpse, and I was in some
kind of trouble. After all, it made more sense than the truth.

What led my sluggish mental processes to the
truth was the fact that the dead guy was so dang beautiful. His
skin was vibrant pearl with a gold cast, his lips, eyelids, and
other sensitive areas rosy. He looked very different than I
remembered him from the previous night, when he had seemed almost
the color of the snow falling on his hat. He was lying flat on his
back, eyes closed, one hand on his chest and the other lying, I
realized, where I had been. His hand had been entwined with
mine.

Okay, now that was a weird thing. I rolled
hastily out of bed and away from hand and dead guy, putting weight
on my bad ankle and being painfully reminded just how bad it was.
Drooling like a drunk dog and with about as much coordination, I
limped to the bathroom, poured myself a cup of water, and tried to
douse the demons in my throat. It didn’t work.

Ice
, I thought. When I was a kid, Chris
used to smash up a bag of ice cubes with a hammer and give them to
me with a spoon when I had a sore throat. Hotels have ice machines.
I had to find one.

I limped back into the room, seeing the vampire
once more, lying exactly as I had left him, unmoving, dead. I
realized that it was probably not a good thing that I had left him
uncovered. There was light tracing a bright line around the borders
of the curtains. Was it sunlight or artificial? The clock by the
bed said 5:00pm –still daylight outside. Hot hell, I’d slept all
day. Getting an early start on this whole nightlife thing, I
guess.

I reached for the covers to shield the vampire
once more, but something made me pause. I lingered there, staring
at him, his proud forehead with the depression of a scar stabbing
down toward one eye, his slightly beaked nose, his ebony hair. He
looked like he had been sculpted of stone, not grown of flesh, and
he was beautiful, so beautiful. I touched his cheek –cold, like the
room. I ran my fingers across his forehead, down his nose. I
touched his lips. Slowly, I parted them. His teeth were like
newly-carved ivory. His gums were vivid velvet red.

I moved away, realizing why he looked so
different. He was full of blood –fresh, red blood. That was why his
frosty complexion of the past night was gone. He had stolen a new
one.

But he had not taken it from me. He had spared
me, chosen me, and now he was lying still as death. Was he really
helpless? Was he serious when he said he would be so by daylight?
How could he trust me like this? Was he some kind of undead
idiot?

My head threatened violent retaliation for all
this deep thought. After all, I was suffering from an infestation
of microscopic enemy soldiers, tearing up my insides at the
cellular level, herding impotent white blood cells into tiny
concentration camps. I replaced the covers over the vampire’s head,
took the card-key from the bed stand, and swallowed, which was a
mistake and reminded me how badly I needed ice.

Being the paranoid creature I am, I took the .45
with me on my foray. Maybe it was the memory so fresh of last
night’s heinous experiences. Maybe it was the dead guy in my bed.
Maybe it was the fever. Whatever it was, I stuck it in my waistband
and checked in the mirror to make sure my shirt covered the weapon
sufficiently. You never know who’s going to jump you in a hotel
hallway in Detroit.

Taking the firearm with me would turn out to be
one of the most fateful decisions of my life.

I limped down the hall in a semi-mindless state.
It was pure providence that I found what I sought, around a corner
in a little alcove across from the elevators. A western window told
me that it was almost nightfall. The last of the sun’s orange glow
was fading on the snowy world outside; soon there would be only the
violet of dusk. I wondered if my vampire would wake then or if he
had to wait until all sunlight was gone.

A vending machine taunted me with cool beverages
I had not thought to bring change for. But there beside it, humming
merrily, was my blessed savior, the Great Giver of Ice, the Ice
God. Why do birds suddenly appear…

I lifted the stainless steel lid and shoveled
out a scoopful of ice. I plucked forth a cube, put it in my mouth.
Ooooohhh. I leaned against the machine in a state not of bliss but
of blessed cessation of agony. All too soon, my ice cube melted.
Oh, the gifts of the gods are fleeting! I popped in another. Then I
melted to the floor.

Who knows how long I sat there, trying to melt
into icy oblivion?

I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Several
pairs. My brain slightly rejuvenated by my nearness to God, the
approach of other humans made me suddenly realize how unusual was
my appearance. I was still dressed in the battered camo that had
been through so much hell. I had given the hotel receptionist
something to stare at. Thus dressed and sucking cubes on the floor,
I would probably look like a person on drugs or crazy or something.
It probably wouldn’t do good to draw that kind of attention to
myself.

But the footsteps did not continue into my nook.
I turned and peeked around the snack vender with habitual nosiness
–You can call it alertness if you want to be gracious. Two men and
a woman passed with purpose in their stride. They were wearing
bland business wear: dark suits and hansom leather shoes, even the
woman, who was also carrying a large leather bag. They looked and
acted like the heat to me. Their presence immediately set me on
edge.

I watched the trio gather in front of a room
door down the hall. The woman withdrew a strange long object, like
a pointed stick, from her coat, which didn’t set off any alarms in
my brain, but what the men drew out did. The two men drew pistols.
The bigger man of the two raised his leg, and, in very professional
style, he kicked the door in. It was then that my fevered brain
realized whose door they were kicking in.

Then the adrenaline hit. I was still dizzy and
hurting, but my awareness sharpened up in an instant. My thoughts
raced. They were going after the vampire, and they knew he was a
vampire.

But they didn’t know that he was my vampire.

I remembered the gun in my waistband and drew
it. There was no one else in the hall. No one had been drawn by the
noise of the door breaking in –smart people avoid moving toward
violent noises. I guess I wasn’t smart. I limped fast to the door,
leaned against the wall, clutching the pistol. They had turned the
light on in the room. I would be able to see them just fine coming
in from the bright hall. I took a breath and moved. I swung around
that threshold with one mean thought in my head:
my
vampire
.

None too soon. They had the covers off my
vampire, two-foot stakes in hand. He wasn’t moving, still daylight.
The woman, a cool brunette, doused him with water from a flask,
murmuring something in another language. Then, to my horror, she
plunged her stake deep into his stomach. Miguel moved a little,
like a man too drunk or stoned to respond to pain. He was
helpless.

The shorter man raised his stake.

I aimed my gun at the biggest man’s back and
fired twice.

Everything else happened in the space of a
minuscule number of seconds. I turned my gun to the other man’s
midsection even as the big man was falling. The surviving man
ducked and turned and the woman dove out of the way as I fired. And
fired. I did not see where I had struck the second man right away.
I kept firing. He dropped his gun, surprise and pain in his eyes,
and collapsed, blood oozing from several places.

I turned my attention to the woman as she dove
for cover behind the bed. I pulled the trigger. Empty. Shit. I went
to the floor both for cover and for the other man’s gun. Neither of
them were moving. There was blood everywhere.

I knew in the action that there was a
possibility that the woman had not heard where I had gone. I’d been
in my share of tight situations. I knew how easy it was for the
sounds of your adversary to be muffled by your own heavy breathing,
your own movements. I hoped, and I froze. I held my breath.

Miguel was making a little sound, like a bear
coming out of hibernation after having one long, awful dream. His
hand twitched lethargically over my head. I heard the woman’s
breathing. Ah ha. She wasn’t loud; she was a pro, but I was an
animal. She was still behind Miguel’s bed, near the floor.

I guessed the best trajectory and fired under
the bed –a whole bunch of times. She fired too. I heard bullets
whizzing past my shoulder and head before I heard her cry out. I
stopped firing, hoping to save my bullets if there were any left. I
could still go for the first man’s gun if I had to, but that would
be a risk. I listened. The woman began to cough, first normally,
then wetly.

I reached for the other gun. Nothing happened.
She didn’t try to kill me. I grabbed it in my left hand and slowly
stood up. I could hear her rasping breaths coming from the floor
beyond the still helpless Miguel. He was looking at me with eyes
that do not see. I stepped around the foot of the bed, gun at
ready.

She was lying on the floor in a slump, her legs
twisted and her knees bent as though she’d been in a crouch before
she fell over. There was blood oozing from her abdomen and her
right breast, spreading over her fine suit and into an expanding
puddle on the floor. She stared up at me. Blood was coming from her
nostrils and mouth. She was bleeding to death, and her lung was
collapsed, and yet her fingers edged for the gun that lay but
inches from them.

She grasped the gun, started to raise it. I
fired. And fired. Then I was out of rounds. It was point blank
range. Her head blew apart. Wow, there was nothing left. I looked
at the splattered blood, the hunks of cerebral matter and scraps of
skull and wondered that this wreckage had been a human being only a
moment before.

Then there was a hand on my shoulder. I swung
the empty gun like a club, but it was removed from my grasp. A cold
hand took hold of my arm. It was Vampire Miguel, eyes alight with
green fire, sans stake. Nightfall had come.

“We must go,” he said, “
Pronto
.”

“No shit.”

There were shouts down the hall, general
commotion, people running.

Miguel moved quickly, too much so for me to make
sense of all his movements. He moved the bodies, moved the guns.
Before I knew it he had set fire to the bedclothes and come back to
me. He handed me his briefcase.

“We run. I’ll carry you.”

He scooped me up, and we went straight out the
window.

We descended like a cannonball to the little
strip of lawn that flanked the parking lot below, but Miguel landed
like a cat. With his exquisitely trained muscles he designed our
landing so that little of the shock would be transferred to me.
Without a pause he swept up the body of the man that he had tossed
so casually a moment ago and we were off.

He set me down beside an unfamiliar black
Lincoln Town Car, unlocked it for me with an electronic opener he’d
procured from some unknown place, said “Get in” and vanished with
the dead guy still over his shoulder. I did what he said. When he
reappeared seconds later, the body was gone.

Miguel got in and started the car. Then, in an
astounding change of pace, he pulled the car around in the most
leisurely manner possible, so slow I thought it glacial compared to
the racing of my heart, and guided it out the hotel driveway.

I turned back to watch the hotel as it receded
from view. Smoke was going up into the street lamp-lighted night.
People were fleeing through the front doors in various states of
undress.

I turned to face Miguel as he casually drove
down the road. There was blood on his silk pajamas where that stake
had been driven into his gut.

“You all right to drive?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I fed well last night. I
will heal
rapidemente
. Watch the blood; you will see
something interesting.”

I did, and watched in amazement as the stains
lost their wet luster and eventually dehydrated completely, leaving
behind on his clothes a substance not unlike ash, which I felt
beneath my fingers. Ashes which, I suddenly knew with cold clarity,
my old life would have to be. I had killed this night. I had pulled
my trigger and put holes into vital, breathing folks –a whole bunch
of times. I hadn’t done it to keep from being raped by my mom’s
boyfriend, mugged by some rat bastard in the street, or killed by
my own no-good father. I had killed for a vampire.