You Suck (6 page)

“Yeah,” Jody said, “because I need to make it more obvious that I’m an undead creature that feeds on the blood of the living.”

“You make it sound so sordid.”

“No, I meant it in a nice way.”

“Oh.”

“Because it’s not like people wouldn’t understand if they found out we were vampires, because we slipped up and, oh, I don’t know, UNSHEATHED OUR FANGS IN THE FUCKING DRUGSTORE!”

Tommy almost dropped his packages. She hadn’t said a word about that all night. He’d hoped she hadn’t noticed. “It was an accident.”

“You called that girl ‘milady.’”

“She was impressed with my Byron.”

“Yeah, well, your Byron was probably sticking out a little, too, wasn’t he?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“You drooled.” Jody paused at their security door and dug into her jacket for her key.

Tommy stepped around her. “I’m still new at this. I think I’m doing pretty well. My ghastly pallor obviously impressed the lady at the needle exchange.” He reached into his bag and fanned out a handful of sterile-wrapped and capped syringes.

“Congratulations, you can now pass as an HIV-positive heroin addict.”

“Très chic.”
He grinned like he imagined a sexy Italian man-whore might.

“Who drools in public,” Jody said.

Damn, she’s immune to my sexy Italian man-whore grin,
Tommy thought. He said, “Be nice, I’m new. My lips don’t fit together right when my fangs are out.”

She turned the key and swung the door open. There,
passed out on the landing, was William the huge cat guy and sleeping on his chest, Chet the huge cat.

“I told you it would work,” Tommy said.

Jody stepped into the stairwell and closed the door behind her. “You go first.”

F
ifteen minutes later, as he placed five syringes full of blood in their refrigerator, Tommy said, “This vampire thing is going to be great.”

He’d had a moment when he’d bitten William—not just getting over the idea of being that close someone who smelled that nasty, but also being close to another man period. But after cleaning William’s neck with an alcohol swab they’d gotten from the drugstore, and consoling himself that most literary vampires seemed sexually ambivalent anyway, the blood hunger pushed him through.

He was feeling more relaxed, now that they had the food problem solved—for a while, anyway. If his friends didn’t kill them in the next couple of days, he might even enjoy life as a vampire. Then he turned to Jody and frowned. “But I can’t help but think that it may be wrong, taking advantage of a homeless alcoholic.”

“We could just hunt and kill people,” Jody said cheerfully. She had a little crust of William’s blood in the corner of her mouth. Tommy licked his thumb and wiped it away.

“We did give him a nice sweater for his huge shaved cat,” Tommy said.

“I loved that sweater,” Jody said. “And we are giving him a warm landing to sleep on,” she added, diving onto Tommy’s rationalization dog pile.

“And if we only take a little bit each day, he’ll actually feel better. I know I did.”

“And we won’t become alcoholics ourselves.”

“How are you feeling, by the way?” Tommy said.

“Better. Hair of the dog. You?”

“Two-beer buzz, max. I’ll be fine. You want to try the experiment?”

Jody checked her watch. “No time. We’ll do it tomorrow night.”

“Right. So, on to the list. Looks like hot monkey love.”

“Tommy, we need to find a daytime person to help us. We have to move out of this place.”

“I’ve been thinking about Alaska.”

“Okay, good for you, but we still need to find a place to live where the Animals and Inspector Rivera can’t find us.”

“No, I’m thinking we should move to Alaska. For one thing, in the winter, it’s dark for like twenty hours a day, so we’d have plenty of time. And I read somewhere that Eskimos put their old people out on the ice when they are ready to die. It would be like people were leaving snacks out for us.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Eskimo Pies?” He grinned.

Jody put her hand on her hip and looked at him, her
mouth hanging open a little, as if she was waiting for something more. When it didn’t come, she said, “Okay then, I’m going to change.”

“Into a wolf?”

“Clothes, cadaver breath.”

“I didn’t know. I thought maybe you’d learned.”

Tommy thought Alaska was a great idea. Just because she was a few years older, she always acted like his ideas were stupid. “The thing with William worked,” he said defensively as he put away the supplies they’d bought at the drugstore.

“That was a good idea,” Jody said from inside the closet.

Now what? “Well, Alaska isn’t a bad idea.”

“Tommy, there’s like nine people in all of Alaska. We’ll stand out, don’t you think?”

“No, everyone is pale there. They don’t have sun for most of the year.”

She came out of the closet wearing her little black cocktail dress and her strappy come-fuck-me pumps. “I’m ready,” she said.

“Wow,” Tommy said. He’d forgotten what they were talking about.

“You think the Ferrari-red lipstick would be too much?”

“No, I love the Ferrari-red lipstick on you.”
Hot, sweet monkey love,
he thought. This was exactly why he loved her. In the midst of all of the pressure, the danger, really—she still took time to think of his feelings.

She lifted her breasts until they threatened to spill out of the plunging neckline of the dress. “Too much?”

“Perfect,” Tommy said, walking toward her with his hands out. “Gimme.”

She breezed past him into the bathroom. “Not for you. I need to get going.”

“No, no, no,” Tommy said. “Hot monkey love.”

While Tommy watched from the doorway, Jody applied the Ferrari-red lipstick, checked it, then frowned and wiped it off, then grabbed a different tube off the vanity. “When I get back.”

“Where?” Tommy said. Sexual frustration had reduced him to single syllables.

She turned to him with the new coat of maroon lipstick. “To get your minion.”

“Not like that, you’re not,” Tommy said.

“This is how it works, Tommy. This is how I got you.”

“Nuh-uh, you weren’t wearing that when I met you.”

“No, but the reason you pursued me is because you were interested in me sexually, wasn’t it?”

“Well, that’s how it started, but it’s more than that now.” And it was more, but that was no reason to leave him here all aroused and stuff.

She walked over to him and put her arms around him. He let his hands slip inside the low back of her dress. His pants were getting tight and he could feel the pressure of his fangs coming out.

“When I get back,” she said. “I promise. You’re my guy, Tommy. I picked you as my guy, forever. I’m going to find someone to help us move and do things for us in the daytime.”

“They’re just going to want to bone you, and when you don’t do them, they’ll turn on you.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Of course they will. Look at you.”

“I’ll figure it out, okay. I don’t know how else to go about it.”

“We could put an ad on Craig’s List.” (Craig’s List was a classified Web site that had started in the Bay Area and was now the first place people checked for jobs, apartments, or nearly everything.)

“We’re not putting an ad on Craig’s List. Look, Tommy, we have more things to do than we have time. You can clean the loft and go get the laundry done and I’ll get us an onion.”

“Minion,” he corrected.

“What ever. I love you,” she said.

Bitch!
He was vanquished.
Unfair
. “I love you, too.”

“I’ll take one of the disposable cell phones you bought. You can call me anytime.”

“They’re not even activated yet.”

“Well, get on that, buddy. The sooner I get out there and find someone, the sooner I can get back here for some hot monkey love.”

She has absolutely no sense of ethics,
he thought.
She’s a monster. And yet, there she is, only a few dress straps from being naked.

“Okay,” he said. “Don’t step on the huge cat on the way out.”

J
ody had only been gone twenty minutes before Tommy decided that cleaning and laundry sucked and that he could find a minion as well as she could, even if he didn’t look as hot in a little black dress. He was careful not to wake Chet and William on his way out.

J
ody moved down Columbus Avenue with long, runway-model strides, feeling the windblown fog brush by her like the chill ghosts of rejected suitors. What she could never teach Tommy, what she could never really share with him, was what it felt like to move from being a victim—afraid of attack, the shadow around the corner, the footsteps behind—to being the hunter. It wasn’t the stalking or the rush of taking down prey—Tommy would understand that. It was walking down a dark street, late at night, knowing that you were the most powerful creature there, that there was absolutely nothing, no one, that could fuck with you. Until she had been changed and had stalked the city as a vampire, she never realized that virtually every moment she had been there as a woman, she had been a little bit afraid. A man would never understand. That was the reason for the dress and the shoes—not to attract a minion, but to throw her sexuality out there on display, dare some underevolved male to make the mistake of seeing her as a victim. Truth be told, although it had come down to confrontation only once, and then she’d been wearing a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, Jody enjoyed kicking ass. She also enjoyed—every bit as much—just knowing that she could. It was her secret.

Without fear, the City was a great sensual carnival. There was no danger in anything she experienced, no anxiety. Red was red, yellow didn’t mean caution, smoke didn’t mean fire, and the mumbling of the four Chinese guys standing by their car just around the corner was just the click and twang of empty swinging dick talk. She could hear their hearts speed up when they saw her, could smell sweat and garlic and gun oil coming off them. She’d learned the smell of fear and imminent violence, too, of sexual arousal and surrender, although she’d have been hard-pressed to describe any of that. It was just there. Like color.

You know…

Try to describe blue.

Without mentioning blue.

See?

There weren’t a lot of people out on the street at this time of night, but there were a few, spread up the length of Columbus: barhoppers, late diners just wrapping it up, college boys heading down to the strip clubs on Broadway, the exodus from Cobb’s Comedy Club up the street, people giddy and so into the rhythm of laughing that they found
one another and everything they saw hilarious—all of them vibrant, wearing auras of healthy pink life, trailing heat and perfume and cigarette smoke and gas held through long dinners. Witnesses.

The Chinese guys weren’t harmless, by any means, but she didn’t think they’d attack her, and she felt a twinge of regret. One of them, the one with the gun, yelled something at her in Cantonese—something sleazy and insulting, she could tell by the tone. She spun as she walked, smiled her biggest red carpet smile, and without breaking stride, said, “Hey, nano-dick, go fuck yourself!”

There was a lot of bluster and shuffle, the smart one, the one with fear coming off him, held his friend Nano-dick back, thus saving his life.
She must be a cop, or just crazy. Something’s wrong.
They clustered around their tricked-out Honda and huffed out great breaths of testosterone and frustration. Jody grinned, and detoured up a side street, away from traffic.

“My night,” she said to herself. “Mine.”

Now off the main drag, she saw only a single old man shuffling ahead of her. His life aura looked like a burned-out bulb, a spot of dark gray around him. He walked stooped over, with a dogged determination, as if he knew that if he stopped, he would never start again. From what she could tell, he never would. He wore baggy, wide-wale corduroys that made the sound of rodents nesting when he walked. A wisp of breeze off the Bay brought Jody the acrid smell of failing organs, of stale tobacco, of
despair, of a deep, rotting sickness, and she felt the elation leave her.

She slipped comfortably into the new slot the night had made for her, like tumblers of a lock slipping into place.

She made sure that she made enough noise so that he could hear her approaching, and when she was beside him, he paused, his feet still moving in tiny steps that turned him to the side, as if his motor was idling.

“Hi,” she said.

He smiled. “My, you are a lovely girl. Would you walk with me?”

“Sure.”

They walked a few steps together before he said, “I’m dying, you know.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured,” Jody said.

“I’m just walking. Thinking, and walking. Mostly walking.”

“Nice night for it.”

“A little cold, but I don’t feel it. I got a whole pocketful of painkillers. You want one?”

“No, I’m good. Thanks.”

“I ran out of things to think about.”

“Just in time.”

“I wondered if I’d get to kiss a pretty girl once before the end. I think that would be all I’d want.”

“What’s your name?”

“James. James O’Mally.”

“James. My name is Jody. I’m pleased to meet you.” She stopped and offered her hand to shake.

“The pleasure is all mine, I assure you,” said James, bowing as best he could.

She took his face in her hands, and steadied him, then kissed him on the lips, softly and for a long time, and when she pulled away they were both smiling.

“That was lovely,” James O’Mally said.

“Yes it was,” Jody said.

“I suppose I’m finished now,” James said. “Thank you.”

“The pleasure was all mine,” Jody said. “I assure you.”

Then she put her arms around his slight frame, and held him, one hand cradling the back of his head like an infant, and he only trembled a little when she drank.

A little later, she bundled his clothes together under her arm, and hooked his old wing tips on two fingers. The dust that had been James O’Mally was spread in a powdery-gray pile on the sidewalk, like a negative shadow, a bleached spot. She brushed it flat with her palm, and wrote,
Nice kiss, James,
with her fingernail.

As she walked away, an hourglass trickle of James trailed out of his clothes behind her and was carried off on the chill bay breeze.

T
he guy working the door of the Glas Kat looked like a raven had exploded on his head, his hair plastered out in
a chaos of black spikes. The music coming from inside sounded like robots fucking. And complaining about it. In rhythmic monotone. European robots.

Tommy was a little intimidated. ’Sploded raven-head guy had better fangs than he did, was paler, and had seventeen silver rings in his lips. (Tommy had counted.)

“Bet it’s hard to whistle with those in, huh?” Tommy asked.

“Ten dollars,” said ’Sploded.

Tommy gave him the money. He checked Tommy’s ID and stamped his wrist with a red slash. Just then a group of Japanese girls dressed like tragic Victorian baby dolls breezed by behind Tommy, waving their wrist slashes like they’d just returned from a joyful suicide party instead of smoking cloves on the street. They, too, looked more like vampires than Tommy did.

He shrugged and entered the club. Everyone, it appeared, looked more like a vampire than he did. He’d bought some black jeans and a black leather jacket at the Levi’s store while Jody was off finding something hideous for her mother for Christmas, but evidently he should have been looking for some black lipstick and something cobalt- or fuchsia-colored to weave into his hair. And in retrospect, the flannel shirt may have been a mistake. He looked like he’d shown up at the sacrificial mass of the damned ready to fix the dishwasher.

The music changed to an ethereal female chorus of
Celtic nonsense. With a techno beat. And robots complaining. Grumpy robots.

He tried to listen around it, the way Jody had taught him. With all the black light, strobes, and black clothing, his newly heightened senses were overloading. He tried to focus on people’s faces, their life auras, look through the haze of heat, hairspray, and patchouli for the girl he’d met at Walgreens.

Tommy had felt alone in a crowd before, even inferior to everyone in a crowd, but now he felt, well, different. It wasn’t just the clothes and the makeup, it was the humanity. He wasn’t part of it. Heightened senses or not, he felt like he had his nose pressed against the window, looking in. The problem was, it was the window of a donut shop.

“Hey!” Someone grabbed his arm and he wheeled around so quickly that the girl nearly tumbled over backwards, startled.

“Fuck! Dude.”

“Hi,” Tommy said. “Wow.” Thinking,
Ah, jelly donut
. It was the girl from Walgreens. She was nearly a foot shorter than he, and a little skinny. To night she’d gone with the waifish look, wearing striped stockings with holes ripped in them and a shiny red PVC mini skirt. She’d traded in her Lord Byron shirt for a tank top, black, of course, with dripping red letters that read
GOT BLOOD?
, and fishnet gloves that went halfway up her biceps. Her makeup was sad-clown marionette: black tears drawn streaming down either side
of her face. She crooked her finger to get him to bend down so she could shout into his ear over the music.

“My name’s Abby Normal.”

Tommy spoke into her ear; she smelled of hairspray and what was that? Raspberry? “My name is Flood,” he said. “C. Thomas Flood.” It was his pen name. The
C
didn’t really stand for anything, he just liked the sound of it. “Call me Flood,” he added. Tommy was a stupid name for a vampire, but Flood—ah, Flood—there was disaster and power there, and a hint of mystery, he thought.

Abby smiled like a cat in a tuna cannery. “Flood,” she said. “Flood.”

She was trying it on, it seemed to Tommy. He imagined that she’d have a black vinyl binder at school and she’d soon be writing
Mrs. Flood
surrounded by a heart with an arrow through it on the cover in her own blood. He’d never seen a girl so obviously attracted to him, and he realized that he had no experience in dealing with it. For a moment he flashed on the three vampire brides of Dracula who try to seduce Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s classic novel. (He’d been studying all the vampire fiction he could get his hands on since meeting Jody, since it didn’t appear that anyone had written a good how-to book on vampirism.) Could he really deal with three luscious vampire brides? Would he have to bring them a kid in a sack the way Dracula does in the book? How many kids a week would it take to keep them happy? And where did you get kid sacks? And although he hadn’t discussed it with Jody, he was pretty sure she was not going to be happy
sharing him with two other luscious vampire brides, even if he brought her sacks and sacks full of kids. They’d need a bigger apartment. One with a washer and dryer in the building, because there’d be a lot of bloodstained lingerie to be washed. Vampire logistics were a nightmare. You should get a castle and a staff when you got your fangs. How was he going to do all of this? “This sucks,” Tommy finally said, overwhelmed by the enormity of his responsibilities.

Abby looked startled, then a little hurt. “Sorry,” she said. “You want to get out of here?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean—I mean, uh, yes. Let us go.”

“Do you still need to get your heroin?”

“What? No, that matter is taken care of.”

“You know, Byron and Shelley did opiates,” Abby said. “Laudanum. It was like cough syrup.”

Then, for no reason that he could think of, Tommy said, “Those scamps, they loved to get wrecked and read ghost stories from the German.”

“That is so fucking cool,” Abby said, grabbing his arm and hugging his biceps like it was her newest, bestest friend. She started pulling him toward the door.

“What about your friend?” Tommy said.

“Oh, someone made a comment about his cape being gray when we first got here, so he went home to redye all of his blacks.”

“Of course,” Tommy said, thinking,
What the fuck?

Out on the sidewalk, Abby said, “I suppose we need to find somewhere private.”

“We do?”

“So you can take me,” Abby said, stretching her neck to the side, looking more like a stringless marionette than ever.

Tommy had no idea what to do. How did she know? Everyone in that club would have scored higher on the “are you a vampire?” test than he would. There needed to be a book, and this sort of thing needed to be in it. Should he deny it? Should he just get on with it? What was he going to tell Jody when she woke up next to the skinny marionette girl? He hadn’t really understood women when he was a normal, human guy, when it seemed that all you had to do was pretend that you didn’t want to have sex with them until they would have sex with you, but being a vampire added a whole new aspect to things. Was he supposed to conceal that he was a vampire
and a dork
? He used to read the articles in
Cosmo
to get some clue to the female psyche, and so he deferred to advice he’d read in an article entitled “Think He’s Just Pretending to Like You So You’ll Have Sex with Him? Try a Coffee Date.”

“How ’bout I buy you a cup of coffee instead,” he said. “We can talk.”

“It’s because I have small boobs, isn’t it?” Abby said, going into a very practiced pout.

“Of course not.” Tommy smiled in a way he thought would be charming, mature, and reassuring. “Coffee won’t help that.”

A
s Jody pushed the bundle of clothes into the storm sewer, a silver cigarette case slid out of the jacket pocket onto the pavement. She reached for it and felt a light shock—no, that wasn’t it. It was a warmth that moved up her arm. She kicked the clothes into the opening and stood under the streetlight, turning the silver case in her hands. It had his name engraved on it. She couldn’t keep it, like she had the folding money from his pockets, but she couldn’t throw it away either. Something wouldn’t let her.

She heard a buzz, like an angry insect, and looked up to see a neon “Open” sign flickering above a shop called Asher’s Secondhand. That was it. That’s where the cigarette case had to go. She owed it to James. After all, he’d given her everything, or at least everything he’d had left. She quickstepped across the street and into the shop.

The owner was working the counter at the back by himself. A thin guy in his early thirties, with a look of pleasant confusion not unlike the one she’d first noticed on Tommy’s face. Normally, this guy would be prime minion material, or at least based on her minion recruitment of the past he would, except apparently, he was dead. Or at least not alive like most people. He had no life aura around him. No healthy pink glow, no crusty brown or gray corona of illness. Nothing. The only time she’d ever seen this before was with Elijah, the old vampire.