Annie of the Undead (19 page)

She hauled on my arm, which did not cause me to
budge. She was like a tick trying to haul the dog to which it was
stuck.

I hesitated. I wasn’t sure about this. It felt
all wrong somehow, like anal sex. It wasn’t Yoki. It was just
that…What was I doing here? I was in New Orleans. I’d just gotten
out of jail. I’d killed some people, whose homedogs were still
chasing us, and up until about two hours ago I had been in the
company of
vampires
–the real thing, not the cute ones
tucked safely behind the TV screen where you could hit pause when
things started to get hairy. I had been living,
sleeping
,
with a vampire, a dead guy, and now here was this cute little girl
talking to me about them like they were some kind of fairy tale,
like they weren’t
really
real, like I was back in the…real
world.

Was that it? Was I uncomfortable back there,
back in the real? Back in the real, I never would have been talking
to this Yoki Hayashi from Great Britain –I would have punched a kid
like her in the nose just for looking at me. She sure as hell never
would have given me a gift. I never would have been in New Orleans
in the first place. I would have been stuck back in Michigan,
freezing my ass off, sticking spoons in people’s ears, and going
out of my head. There would have been no such things as covens or
vampires or road trips in a SLR-series coupe, packing heat in
defense of a hot homicidal dead guy who’d promised me immortality.
There would only have been Angry Annie and her demons. There would
only have been pain.

But none of that was real. Michigan wasn’t real.
All those years up there…all that… It could just freeze in the
glacial hell I’d left it in.

I yielded to Yoki’s pull, and we went down the
stairs together.

Yoki was right. I made her friends very, very
uncomfortable, but I wasn’t alone, because they all made each other
uncomfortable. More than any other social group I had ever met, the
five people who comprised the Gay Hippies –that’s right, Yoki
sprang her band on me after all, seemed mismatched. They were like
a square, a triangle, a parallelogram, a tetrahedron, and a
Buckminsterfullerene all jammed into that proverbial round hole
together.

First, there was Trevor, the much-railed-upon
drummer with whom Yoki got into a shouting match within a minute of
walking into the practice room in an old multiuse hall on campus.
He was a skinny, Black-T-shirt-Posse kid with hair spiky enough to
pop a beach ball. Then there was Dru, a pothead who dressed,
looked, and smelled like a pothead, and who had a tendency to fall
over like a pothead. When dragged into a sitting position, Dru
could be relied upon to sit relatively erect and pat playfully, if
arhythmically, on the bongo drums with a brainless smile on his or
her face (it really could be argued either way), until he or she
fell over again and needed to be propped up. On the keyboard was
little Bobby White, called “The Quail”, a shrimp with a faux-hawk
and birth control glasses, who maybe only didn’t have a pocket
protector because it’d been busted when some jock stuffed him in a
locker.

Finally, there was Jeanne, who was tall and
slender with sumptuous red hair and clothes that screamed money.
She was from some small town where she’d been crowned Tomato Queen
(was that slang for tits?), and she got paid to ride horses. When I
was completely confused by that concept, she explained that right
now she was riding a local celebrity, a big black horse named
Warren who was bred in Louisiana and supposedly worth way up in the
six figures. On top of it all, she was far too pretty to be hanging
out with these freaks and geeks. About the only person I had ever
met who I could picture hanging out with her was…Andy. They would
look nice together. They could enjoy ridiculing all the little
people together.

But, contrary to what my instincts would have
had me believe about her, when Jeanne opened her mouth, she was
actually extremely pleasant. Though her background gave her
absolutely no training in how to deal with a person like me in a
social setting, she never said or did one thing that I could
satisfactorily label as rude, which maybe annoyed me more than if
she had been rude, because my background gave me absolutely no
training on how to deal with someone like her in a social setting
either –except to call her a spoiled, snobby, bitch-whore. That
would’ve been easier.

The Hippies seemed likelier to rip each other’s
throats out than to make melodious music. Bobby White had a
desperate, excruciatingly apparent crush on Jeanne, and Jeanne was
excruciatingly aware of it. Dru was repeatedly the cause of
tripping the others or knocking over a microphone or colliding with
an amp, and Yoki and Trevor simply wanted to rip each other’s
throats out. They’d make great vampires.

The Gay Hippies, none of whom were either gay or
hippies, incidentally, seemed the poster children for potential
genocide, that is, until they began to play. Then, they didn’t make
melodious music, didn’t make the planets come into alignment –oh
no, the planets were running for their lives. What they made could
not be called music –unless it’s the kind played in Hell as part of
the eternal torment business, but they seemed to be happy at it.
Jeanne ripped on that two-thousand-dollar electric guitar like she
was a tall, hot, redheaded, female Eddie Van Halen. Dru patted
blissfully on those bongos. Little Bobby White’s fingers tripped
over that keyboard like a pack of four-year-olds on a cracked
sidewalk. Yoki screamed into her crappy microphone like the
reincarnation of Janis Joplin without any of her talent. Like the
ill-fated bagpiper who had been smitten by the Lord Jesus Christ,
the Gay Hippies wailed with no concept of how amazingly bad they
really were.

Except Trevor. The poor son of a bitch was not
only the only one who knew how sickeningly bad they were, he was
the only one who could play. I could see why Yoki hated him.

I cringed in a corner while they hashed out such
original (and tuneless) tunes as “Oops, I upchucked again” and “God
is great (in bed)”. I only knew what they were called because they
told me. Yoki’s indecipherable caterwauling could not possibly have
been mistaken by any sane person for real words. Between songs
sometimes Dru would mumble something, but nobody listened.

Fortunately for my hammer, anvil, auditory
hairs, and eardrums, practice did not last long. It took only a
half hour for the chronic Yoki-Trevor argument to escalate to the
point where he threw his sticks at her and stormed out.

“Does that happen often?” I asked Jeanne, as we
watched Yoki snatch up a drumstick and fly down the stairs after
him with blood in her eyes.

“Oh,” said Jeanne, “that’s how practice always
ends.”

She lifted her guitar strap over her head and
headed for her guitar case, the others similarly packing up.

Well no wonder the Hippies were shit.

“So you fellows want to hit the Quarter?” Yoki
asked, hands in pockets, swinging her hips to and fro so that her
chains set up a lethal perimeter around her.

“Sure,” I said. I lived there.

“I don’t have to get up early,” said Jeanne.

Dru mumbled something.

“I don’t know,” said Bobby, “I got a paper to
research, and this history project, and trig homework, and my
ankle’s been bothering me, and it’s the second Saturday of the
month, so I just know you’re gonna want to run a…”

“Aw, come on, Quail. You don’t want to be a
pussy,” said Jeanne. I couldn’t believe those words had come out of
her.

“Yeah, come on,” said Yoki. “This is the sort of
lunacy that smart people do in college between research and
projects and homework.”

“And how long have you been in school without
graduating?” I asked her.

“My parents promised to support me as long as I
stay in school.”

“Oh, you are smart.”

“Come on, Quail. Come on, come on, come on…”
Jeanne egged.

“You sound like you want him, Jeegee,” Yoki
said.

“I do if he can run a Grand Prix –all the way
through without ducking out and without falling. I’ll give him a
kiss.”

Bobby White’s face lit up like a Christmas tree
behind his glasses. It was clear we were headed for the French
Quarter.

“So what’s a Grand Prix?” I asked as we wandered
down to the river, my familiar stomping grounds. The area was
busier for this time of night than I had yet seen it.

“Only the most thrilling experience a person can
have –after vampire sex, of course.”

“Second Saturday of the month,” said Bobby,
“They have an all-night festival at the flea market…”

“Dancing, music, libation…” helped Yoki.

“…We run the market from end to end…”

“No slowing down and no cutting out until you
reach the street,” said Jeanne.

“…And we try not to kill anybody or get caught
before we make it out the other side.”

“And how often do you make it?”

“Well,” said Yoki, “I usually make it, and
Jeanne’s made it a couple of times. It’s easier being big.”

“It’s easier being small,” Jeanne amended.

“And Bobby hasn’t made it yet, but he’s going to
tonight because he has a kiss from the sweet lips of a French
damsel waiting for him, right Jeanne?”

“The offer is for one night only,” said she.

“Plus if anyone gets caught this time, he might
find himself tucked neatly away in jail for the remainder of the
evening.”

“Part of the new crackdown,” said Bobby. “They
watch the place like hawks now,” he pushed his glasses up on his
nose nervously.

“Any of you kids ever been to jail?” I
asked.

“Not yet,” said Yoki, “But we haven’t tried it
yet this semester. Things weren’t as rough last spring. Oh, and
stop calling me a kid.”

“Stop looking like one. So who goes first?”

“Well, it’s harder to get through after someone
else has already run it. People are watching. So we send people in
reverse order to who made it through first last time. So last time,
I made was first, so I’ll go last,” said Yoki, “And Jeanne was
second, so she’s before me.”

“So it’s the Quail in the lead,” said Jeanne,
tapping him in the shoulder with her fist.

“What about Dru?”

“Oh, Dru we just prop up against something until
we’re done.”

“What about Annie?” asked Jeanne.

“I’ll take up the rear,” I said, “Give me a
chance to watch how the pros do it.”

“You’ll be asking for heat,” warned Yoki.

I shrugged.

“Suit yourself.”

We propped Dru up against something, set Yoki’s
gift to me in his/her lap for safe keeping, and headed for the
starting line. We all lined up at one end of the enclosed market
space and peered into the mouth of doom. The French Market was a
pair of long buildings aligned end to end. A narrow walkway ran
their length flanked by vendor stalls on either side. The tables
were piled high with trinkets and wares of every sort, from
collectible toys to Christmas ornaments to tools to tie-dyed
clothing. The smell of hot food issued forth, telling that
somewhere down that chute, as everywhere else in New Orleans,
something savory was being offered for sale. Everywhere there were
people, browsing the tables, clogging the doorway as those going in
got in the way of those coming out. We were about to willingly go
in against those currents, and I didn’t even have Short John on my
tail.

“I don’t see any security,” said Jeanne, looking
around from her vantage above all our heads.

Yoki stood with her hands on Bob White’s
shoulders.

“It’s not too busy,” she encouraged like a
squeaky hamster ready to bolt herself, “Not like daytime. Go on,
lad. Down the rabbit hole.”

Bobby White took a deep breath and ran for
it.

Then, one by one, but fast upon each other’s
heels, Jeanne, Yoki, and I went after him.

A few people immediately scooted for cover, but
most people didn’t see the stampede headed straight for them. They
were a barrier of flesh, the biggest impediment to our progress.
Once I got inside behind Yoki, I couldn’t see how this could even
be possible in the daytime crowds. I was dodging limbs and torsos
like I was ducking punches. I caught glimpses of surprised faces
and flashes of color, but I kept my eye on that ever-shifting mass
in front of me, searching for that one fissure that I could wedge
myself into.

Yoki was gone from view almost immediately. A
compact package, she slipped into the tiniest crack, ducked under
elbows and purses and vanished. I was like a charging bull,
hurtling down a Spanish street, hurling people out of my way with
my horns. I stepped on a hundred feet, swept a hundred doodads off
tables, took a hundred elbows in the side. I bounced off glass
cases filled with antique jewelry, jumped over the arms of a couple
holding hands, dodged a man pushing a double baby stroller with its
double-screaming contents, and hot-footed it across a table covered
with Avon curios. I heard a dozen different kinds of music and
smelled sugary baked goods, Indian spices, and good fried stuff as
I bulled past the counters where they were sold. I heard shouts of,
“It’s the runners!” cries of, “If you break that, you bought it!”
and just cries in general, some in languages I didn’t understand. I
did not slow to heed them. I had been given a challenge, and if
there was ever one thing that heated my blood, it was a
challenge.

We bolted out of the covered flea market,
weaving between the columns flanking the Gazebo and Market Cafes,
jumping iron chairs and tripping over the feet of seated patrons. I
nearly collided with the extended trombone slide of one of the live
band members, and I caused the total loss of someone’s iced
café-au-lait.

I never thought this marathon tour of the Small
World would end, but all of a sudden, the crowd opened up, and I
collided headlong into the gaggle of my coconspirators. Yoki,
Bobby, and Jeanne all went down in a heap with me on top of
them.