Midnight Bites (14 page)

Another free-on-the-Web story under the Captain Obvious hidden content, I wrote this story to give a little shading and understanding to Richard Morrell, Monica's (exasperated) older brother. We first met him in
Glass Houses
, and I took a liking to him immediately—it's not easy being the son of the most corrupt human in Morganville while also being the brother of the most outrageous, selfish bully. Add to that a real desire to do some good in the world and help protect his fellow Morganville residents, and you've got a man who has a hard day ahead of him.

But one thing's for certain: Richard does love his sister. He knows her flaws, but that doesn't mean he won't go to the wall for her—and even compromise his ethics from time to time.

This is about to be a very bad day to be a criminal in Morganville.

R
ichard Morrell looked at the man sitting across from him—shaking, pale, covered in blood that the ambulance attendants had sworn wasn't his own—and said, “Let's start at the beginning. Tell me your name.” He kept his tone neutral, because he wasn't sure yet which approach to take. The guy looked too shaky to push really hard, and too paranoid to take well to friendliness.

Businesslike was apparently the right course, because the man blinked at him, ran a blood-smeared hand across his sweaty forehead, and said, “They're dead. They're dead, right? My friends?”

“Lets talk about you,” Richard said, very steadily. “What's your name?”

“Brian. Brian Maitland.”

“Where are you from, Brian?” Richard smiled slightly. “I know you're not from around here.”

“Dallas,” Maitland said. “We were, y'know, just passing through. We thought,
Jeez, it looks like such an easy score
, y'know? No big deal. We weren't going to hurt anybody. We just wanted the money.”

“One thing at a time, Brian. What are your friends' names?”

“Joe. Joe Grady. And Lavelle Harvey. Lavelle—Lavelle's Joe's girl.
I swear, Officer, we were just passing through. We thought—we saw the bank open after dark, we thought—we figured—”

“You figured it would be an easy score,” Richard said. “You said. So what happened?”

“I, uh—” Maitland seemed to vapor-lock. Richard motioned over one of the two cops standing in the corner of the room—the human one—and asked for coffee in a low voice. He waited until the steaming Styrofoam cup was in Maitland's big, bloody hands before prodding him again.

“You're safe now,” Richard said, which really wasn't the truth. “Tell me what happened at the bank.”

Maitland sipped at the coffee, then gulped convulsively, not seeming to care that it was hot enough to raise blisters. His eyes had that terrible distance to them, something Richard was way too familiar with.

“There was this girl,” he said. “Pretty little thing, cashing a check at the teller window. Joe took the guard, Lavelle covered the couple of people in the lobby, and I grabbed the girl.”

“Describe her,” Richard said.

“I don't know, pretty. Brunette. Had a mouth on her—I'll tell ya that.” He shook his head slowly. “She kept telling me we were in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong damn town. Pissed me off. But she was right.”

He gulped more coffee, eyes darting nervously from Richard to the night visible in the barred window of the room. He hadn't once looked at the cops standing behind him. Richard figured he was blocking it out, the knowledge that one of them might not be entirely human.

“This girl,” Richard said softly. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” Maitland said, and then corrected himself. “Okay, I hit her. Just to shut her up. And then Joe shot that guard, and
somebody triggered the security alarms. These bars came down at the door. We couldn't get out. Why the hell would they want to keep us inside the bank, with the customers? Ain't the whole point to get us outside? Don't you people know nothing about security?”

“You said Joe shot the guard. What happened then?”

“The guard—” Maitland's voice went tight, and then silent. He shook his head. There were tears standing in his damp eyes. “It ain't possible, man. I saw him go down. Joe put four bullets right in his chest, and he wasn't wearing no vest. I saw the blood.” Maitland choked down his fear. “And then he got up. I never seen anybody do that. Sure, you see guys on drugs or something who just don't really know they've been shot—they can go for a while before they fall down, but it ain't like they're normal, y'know? This was just some working guy. He shouldn't just—get up like that.”

Maitland started to shiver again, and gulped more coffee. When he put the cup down, it was empty. Richard motioned for a refill, and waited. Maitland didn't seem to need prodding now. He wanted to get it out.

“Joe, he emptied the gun, but the guard just kept coming. I was watching them, so I didn't see what happened to Lavelle, but I heard her start yelling. And then she just—stopped. Joe—that guard, there was something wrong with him, man—I don't know—it was like he was possessed or something, like, call-the-exorcist wrong. His eyes got all red, and he—he . . .” Maitland looked down. “You wouldn't believe me.”

Richard sat back in the straight-backed chair, eyes half-closed, and said, “The guard bit your friend in the throat and drank his blood.”

“Um . . .” Maitland seemed surprised. “Yeah. Just like that. And then he, uh . . .”

“Broke his neck.”

“Yeah.”

“Same thing happened to Lavelle, right?”

“Yeah. One of those bank people, the teller I guess, she was . . . like the guard. Y'know, wrong. And then the girl—”

“The one you hit.”

“Yeah, that one. She said I was going to die, and she laughed. I was gonna shoot her, but the guard, the one that had Joe's blood all over him, he . . . he grabbed me from behind and threw me across the room. I landed on Lavelle.” Maitland hid his face in shaking hands. “I thought I was next.”

There was a knock on the door. Richard nodded his permission, and the vampire cop stationed next to it turned the knob. In walked Richard's sister, Monica Morrell.

Richard tried hard not to react, but his heart kick-started to a much faster beat, and fury pounded hot in his temples. She looked awful—and he knew how much that meant to her. She'd been treated at the hospital, but she'd never forgive them for letting her out in public with bloody, matted hair and an unflattering bandage over the whack in her skull. Her skin was pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes. No makeup. The blouse was designer, and it was destroyed—ripped and stained.

One of her arms was in a sling.

Richard kept his seat, kept his expression blank, and said, “Monica, is this the man who hurt you?”

Monica came around to Richard's side of the table, close enough to touch. Not that they touched. “Yeah,” she said. “That's the son of a—”

“See? She's okay. You're okay, right, lady?” Maitland interrupted her, almost manic in his desire to get her on his side.

Monica hissed like a cat, and her eyes burned with pure fury.
Richard reached out and put a hand on her uninjured wrist—just a light hold, nothing that would set her off. He knew his sister well enough to know how much force he could get away with.

“You're going to die,” Monica said. “Just like your friends. Sucker.”

“Take her outside,” Richard said to the vampire cop. “I'll talk to her later. Put her in my office.”

Once Monica was gone, the air seemed still and far too warm. Maitland felt it, too, and kept wiping sweat from his forehead.

“Look,” he blurted. “I screwed up, okay? But it wasn't my idea. I was just . . . It was Joe. Joe said it would be an easy score, and look what happened—Joe's dead. Lavelle's dead. You want to lock me up, fine. Just . . . don't lock me up here. Not in this town, okay? There's something wrong here. I want to go back to Dallas. Hell, send me to Huntsville, anywhere but here, okay?”

Richard shrugged. “Your lawyer is here,” he said. “I think you'd better talk to him before you say anything else.”

“But . . . I don't want a lawyer! Look, I just want to confess. Send me off to prison, please, just not—”

Richard stood up. He leaned over the desk, hands flat on the warm surface, and stared right into Maitland's face. “You hurt my sister,” he said. “And that blows your one chance for ever leaving this town alive.”

Maitland's mouth opened, and he tried to speak, but nothing came out. Richard pushed back, walked out of the interrogation room, and joined Oliver on the other side of the glass. The vampire was standing silently, arms folded, watching Maitland through the one-way window. His eyes were glowing a very faint red in the darkness.

“Does he really have a lawyer?” Oliver asked.

Idle curiosity, Richard thought. It wouldn't matter a hill of beans to him.

“Sure. Jessie Pottsdam.”

Oliver laughed, and Richard saw the flash of fangs in the dim light. “You really should never be underestimated, my boy,” he said. “One day, you're going to make this town a very fine mayor.”

Richard, still expressionless, stared through the glass at Maitland. The two cops had followed him out, and now Jessie Pottsdam was going into the room, looking every inch the lawyer he was. Crisp black suit, white shirt, carefully knotted red tie. Expensive shoes and leather briefcase.

Jessie smiled down at his client, and his eyes glowed bright red.

Maitland screamed. Oliver reached over and switched off the speaker. “I don't believe we need to observe the rest,” he said. “Justice is swift.”

Richard watched anyway, sickness twisting at his stomach.
It has to be done.
The man was a liar; he would have killed everyone in that bank, including Monica.

It's justice.

It didn't really feel that way.

This story was first published in the BenBella Books anthology
Immortal
, edited by none other than P. C. Cast, so if you want to read some other killer YA vampire tales, go in search of it! You won't be disappointed.

I decided to do an action-oriented story from Shane's point of view. There was a running joke at the time that I should throw some zombies into Morganville, and while I didn't succumb to the temptation in the books, I veered into it here . . . in a way. We get to visit some great Morganville locations, fight some zombies, and find out where Michael has disappeared to—and what Shane's father has been doing just beyond the town's borders that might change everything.

This story is set sometime after Michael's transformation to full vampire, but not long after; Shane's still getting used to the idea that his best not-a-vamp friend has switched sides. There's a little bromance, and a lot of Frank Collins.

I
might
have been thinking just a little bit about the iconic
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
episode “The Zeppo” . . . but only in the undead football player sense. And yes, I quoted the eighties movie
Buckaroo Banzai
. Guilty as charged.

L
iving in West Texas is sort of like living in hell, but without the favorable climate and charming people. Living in Morganville, Texas, is all that and a take-out bag of worse. I should know. My name is Shane Collins, and I was born here, left here, came back here—none of which I had much choice about.

So, for you fortunate ones who've never set foot in this place, here's the walking tour of Morganville: It's home to a couple of thousand folks who breathe, and some crazy-ass number of people who don't. Vampires. Can't live with 'em, and in Morganville, you definitely can't live without 'em, because they run the town. Other than that, Morganville's a normal, dusty collection of buildings—the kind the oil boom of the sixties and seventies rolled by without dropping a dime in the banks. The university in the center of town acts like its own little city, complete with walls and gates.

Oh, and there's a secluded, tightly guarded vampire section of town, too. I've been there, in chains. It's nice, if you're not looking forward to a horrible public execution.

I used to want to see this town burned to the ground, and then I had one of those things—what are they called, epiphanies? My epiphany was that one day I woke up and realized that if I lost Morganville
and everybody in it . . . I'd have nothing at all. Everything I still cared about was here. Love it or hate it.

Epiphanies suck.

I was having another one of them on this particular day. I was sitting at a table inside Marjo's Diner, watching a dead man walk by the windows outside. Seeing dead men wasn't exactly unusual in Morganville; hell, one of my best friends is dead now, and he still gripes at me about doing the dishes. But there's vampire-dead, which Michael is, and then there's dead-dead, which was Jerome Fielder.

Except Jerome, dead or not, was walking by the window outside Marjo's.

“Order up,” Marjo snapped, and slung my plate at me like a ground ball to third base; I stopped it from slamming into the wall by putting up my hand as a backstop. The bun of my hamburger slid over and onto the table—mustard side up, for a change.

“There goes your tip,” I said. Marjo, already heading off to the next victim, flipped me off.

“Like you'd ever leave one, you cheap-ass punk.”

I returned the gesture. “Don't you need to get to your second job?”

That made her pause, just for a second. “What second job?”

“I don't know, grief counselor? You being so sensitive and all.”

That earned me another bird, ruder than the first one. Marjo had known me since I was a baby puking up formula. She didn't like me any better now than she had then, but that wasn't personal. Marjo didn't like anybody. Yeah, go figure on her entering the service industry.

“Hey,” I said, and leaned over to look at her retreating bubble butt. “Did you just see who walked by outside?”

She turned to glare at me, round tray clutched in sharp red talons.
“Screw you, Collins—I'm running a business here. I don't have time to stare out windows. You want something else or not?”

“Yeah. Ketchup.”

“Go squeeze a tomato.” She hustled off to wait another table—or not, as the mood took her.

I put veggies on my burger, still watching the parking lot outside the window. There were exactly six cars out there; one of them was my housemate Eve's, which I'd borrowed. The gigantic thing was really less a car than an ocean liner, and some days I called it the
Queen Mary
, and some days I called it
Titanic
, depending on how it was running. It stood out. Most of the other vehicles in the lot were crappy, sun-faded pickups and decrepit, half-wrecked sedans.

There was no sign of Jerome, or any other definitely dead guy, walking around out there now. I had one of those moments, those
Did I really see that?
moments, but I'm not the delusional type. I had zero reason to imagine the guy. I didn't even like him, and he'd been dead for at least a year, maybe longer. Killed in a car wreck at the edge of town, which was code for shot while trying to escape, or the nearest Morganville equivalent. Maybe he'd pissed off his vampire Protector. Who knew?

Also, who cared? Zombies, vampires, whatever. When you live in Morganville, you learn to roll with the supernatural punches.

I bit into the burger and chewed. This was why I came to Marjo's—not the spectacular service, but the best hamburgers I'd ever eaten. Tender, juicy, spicy. Fresh, crisp lettuce and juicy tomato, a little red onion. The only thing missing was . . .

“Here's your damn ketchup,” Marjo said, and slid the bottle toward me like a bartender in an old Western saloon. I fielded it and saluted with it, but she was already moving on.

As I drizzled red on my burger, I continued to stare out the
window. Jerome. That was a puzzle. Not enough to make me stop eating lunch, though.

Which shows you just how weird life in Morganville is, generally.

•   •   •

I was prepared to forget all about Jerome, postlunch, because not even Marjo's sour attitude could undo the endorphin high of her burger, and besides, I had to get home. It was five o'clock. The bottling plant was letting out, and pretty soon the diner would be crowded with adults tired from a hard day's labor, and not many of them liked me any better than Marjo did. Most of them were older than me; at eighteen, I was starting to get the
Get a job, you punk
stares. I like a good ass-kicking, but the Good Book is right: it's better to give than to receive.

I was unlocking the door to Eve's car when I saw a reflection behind me on the window glass, blocking the blazing westerly sun. It was smeared and indistinct, but in the ripples I made out some of the features.

Jerome Fielder. What do you know, I really had seen him.

I had exactly enough time to think,
Dude, say something witty,
before Jerome grabbed a handful of my hair and rammed me forehead-first into hot metal and glass. My knees went rubbery, and there was a weird high-pitched whine in my ears. The world went white, then pulsed red, then faded into darkness when he slammed me down again.

Why me?
I had time to wonder, as it all went away.

•   •   •

I woke up sometime later, riding in the backseat of Eve's car and dripping blood all over the upholstery.
Oh, crap, she's gonna kill me for that,
I thought, which was maybe not the biggest problem I had. My wrists were tied behind my back, and Jerome had done some work on my
ankles, too. The bonds were so tight I'd lost feeling in both hands and feet, except for a slow, cold throb. I had a gash in my forehead, somewhere near the hairline, I thought, and probably some kind of concussion thing, because I felt sick and dizzy.

Jerome was driving Eve's car, and I saw him watching me in the rearview mirror as we rattled along. Wherever we were, it was a rough road, and I bounced like a rag doll as the big tank of a car charged over bumps.

“Hey,” I said. “So. Dead much, Jerome?”

He didn't say anything. That might have been because he liked me about as much as Marjo, but I didn't think so; he didn't look exactly right. Jerome had been a big guy, back in high school—big in the broad-shouldered sense. He'd been a gym worshipper, a football player, and the winner of the biggest-neck contest hands down.

Even though he still had all the muscles, it was like the air had been let out of them and now they were ropy and strangely stringy. His face had hollows, and his skin looked old and grainy.

Yep: dead guy. Zombified, which would have been a real mindfreak anywhere but Morganville; even in Morganville, though, it was weird. Vampires? Sure. Zombies? Not so you'd notice.

Jerome decided it was time to prove he still had a working voice box. “Not dead,” he said. Just two words, and it didn't exactly prove his case because it sounded hollow and rusty. If I'd had to imagine a dead guy's voice, that would have been it.

“Great,” I said. “Good for you. So, this car theft thing is new as a career move, right? And the kidnapping? How's that going for you?”

“Shut up.”

He was absolutely right—I needed to do that. I was talking because, hey, dead guy driving. It made me just a bit uncomfortable. “Eve's going to hunt you down and dismember you if you ding the car. Remember Eve?”

“Bitch,” Jerome said, which meant he did remember. Of course he did. Jerome had been the president of the Jock Club and Eve had been the founder and nearly the only member of the Order of the Goth, Morganville Edition. Those two groups never got along, especially in the hothouse world of high school.

“Remind me to wash your mouth with soap later,” I said, and shut my eyes as a particularly brutal bump bounced my head around. Red flashed through my brain, and I thought about things like aneurysms, and death. “Not nice to talk about people behind their backs.”

“Go screw yourself.”

“Hey, three words! You go, boy. Next thing you know, you'll be up to real sentences. . . . Where are we going?”

Jerome's eyes glared at me in the mirror some more. The car smelled like dirt, and something else. Something rotten. Skanky homeless unwashed clothes brewed in a vat of old meat.

I tried not to think about it, because between the smell and the lurching of the car and my aching head, well, you know. Luckily, I didn't have to not-think-about-it for long, because Jerome made a few turns and then hit the brakes with a little too much force.

I rolled off the bench seat and into the spacious legroom, and, ow. “Ow,” I said, to make it official. “You learn that in Dead Guy Driver's Ed?”

“Shut up.”

“You know, I think being dead might have actually given you a bigger vocabulary. You ought to think of suggesting that to the U. Put in an extension course or something.”

The car shifted as Jerome got out of the front seat, and then the back door opened as he reached in to grab me under the arms and haul. Dead he might be; skanky, definitely. But still: strong.

Jerome dumped me on the caliche white road, which was graded and graveled, but not recently, and walked off around the hood of the
car. I squirmed and looked around. There was an old house about twenty feet away—the end of the pale road—and it looked weathered and defeated and sagging. Could have been a hundred years old, or five without maintenance. Hard to tell. Two stories, old-fashioned and square. Had one of those wraparound porches people used to build to catch the cool breezes, although cool out here was relative.

I didn't recognize the place, which was a weird feeling. I'd grown up in Morganville, and I knew every nook and hiding place—survival skills necessary to making it to adulthood. That meant I wasn't in Morganville proper anymore. I knew there were some farmhouses outside the town limits, but those who lived in them didn't come to town much, and nobody left the city without express vampire permission, unless they were desperate or looking for an easy suicide. So I had no idea who lived here. If anyone but Jerome did, these days.

Maybe he'd eaten all the former residents' brains, and I was his version of takeout. Yeah, that was comforting.

I worked on the ropes, but zombie or not, Jerome tied a damn good knot and my numbed fingers weren't exactly up to the task.

It had been quitting time at the plants when I'd gone out to the parking lot and ended up roadkill, but now the big western sun was brushing the edge of the dusty horizon. Sunset was coming, in bands of color layered on top of one another, from red straight up to indigo. I squirmed and tried to dislocate an elbow in order to get to my front pocket, where my cell phone waited patiently for me to text 911. No luck, and I ran out of time anyway.

Jerome came back around the car, grabbed me by the collar of my T-shirt, and pulled. I grunted and kicked and struggled like a fish on the line, but all that accomplished was to leave a wider drag path in the dirt. I couldn't see where we were going. The backs of Jerome's fingers felt chilly and dry against my sweaty neck.

Bumpity-bump-bump up a set of steps that felt splinter-sharp
even through my shirt, and the sunset got sliced off by a slanting dark roof. The porch was flatter, but no less uncomfortably splintered. I tried struggling again, this time really putting everything into it, but Jerome dropped me and smacked the back of my head into the wood floor. More red and white flashes, like my own personal emergency signal. When I blinked them away, I was being dragged across a threshold, into the dark.

Shit.

I wasn't up for bravado anymore. I was seriously scared, and I wanted out. My heart was pounding, and I was thinking of a thousand horrible ways I could die here in this stinking, hot, closed-up room. The carpet underneath my back felt stiff and moldy. What furniture there was looked abandoned and dusty, at least the stuff that wasn't in pieces.

Weirdly, there was the sound of a television coming from upstairs. Local news. The vampires' official mouthpieces were reporting safe little stories, world events, nothing too controversial. Talk about morphine for the masses.

The sound clicked off, and Jerome let go of me. I flopped over onto my side, then my face, and inchwormed my way up to my knees while trying not to get a mouthful of dusty carpet. I heard a dry rattle from behind me.

Jerome was laughing.

“Laugh while you can, monkey boy,” I muttered, and spat dust. Not likely he'd ever seen
Buckaroo Banzai
, but it was worth a shot.

Footsteps creaked on the stairs from the second floor. I reoriented myself, because I wanted to be looking at whatever evil bastard was coming to the afternoon matinee of my probably gruesome death. . . .

Oh. Oh, dammit.

“Hello, son,” my dad, Frank Collins, said. “Sorry about this, but I knew you wouldn't just come on your own.”

•   •   •

The ropes came off, once I promised to be a good boy and not rabbit for the car the second I had the chance. My father looked about the same as I'd expected, which meant not good but strong. He'd started out a random pathetic alcoholic; after my sister had died—accident or murder, you take your pick—he'd gone off the deep end. So had my mom. So had I, for that matter.