Blood Groove (3 page)

She pushed her hair from her eyes, disturbing something small and crawly that had taken up residence in the strands; she ignored its panicky flight down her back. She hadn’t
bathed in maybe a year, and her hair was slimy with accumulated grease, dirt, and pollen. Dust and soil coated her skin, and she idly brushed a string of ants from the curve of one breast. She spent most of her time naked—dressing a walking corpse seemed ridiculous—and lately she seldom left the dry-rotted confines of her coffin. Only when the hunger grew too loud, too insistent, did she venture forth.

Was it the hunger this night, she wondered, or the uncharacteristic chill in the air that woke her? She was awash in memories of her death, of the autumn night she’d been killed in the Kentucky hill country. She’d worn her best Sunday dress to the revival meeting, hoping to catch the eye of handsome Junior Caldwell. It had not worked; Junior had been seized by the spirit and carried off by his brothers as he filled the air with God-given gibberish. He never even knew Fauvette was there.

Heartbroken as only a teenage girl could be, she took the shortcut home through the woods, usually a safe path between the church and her family’s farm. The vampire had been old, and looked feeble, but his hand at her throat had been like steel, and her struggles for her life did no more than annoy him. He took her quickly, efficiently, and thoroughly, draining her blood in less than five burning minutes and tossing her aside like an empty soda can. Her last living memory was of his wet, satisfied belch.

But the worst thing was afterward, when her body—still warm and supple, even though her soul was gone—had been found and violated by the kind of backwoods thugs who would rape a dead girl. Hovering invisibly above the scene, she’d watched them rip away the beautiful dress made by her mother and aunts, and attack her body in ways she could barely comprehend at the time. The full moon had watched her that night as well.

Fauvette felt suddenly conspicuous under the moon’s gaze,
and slid out of the light. The undead, the damned, did not deserve to be seen, only feared and whispered of around hearths guarded by garlic, crosses, and the sanctity of belief. They dwelled in shadow; the light frightened them, like supernatural cockroaches. The bravest of vampires could prowl the streets in a semblance of life, but if anyone looked too closely, they could not maintain the illusion. Fauvette was not a brave vampire.

As with any building left untenanted and untended, the warehouse was a disaster. Glass, metal shards, nails, wire, and pipes littered the big open floor. Rats, birds, and snakes lived in the available crevices. Fauvette never considered cleaning the place; it was dead, she was dead. At least the building had the luxury of falling apart with time.

The warehouse had been abandoned for a decade, forgotten as the city grew north away from the river, around the new bridge that led to Arkansas. The land ownership was tied up in court, and the location wasn’t very valuable anyway, so no one came around much except for local kids who liked to get high on the crumbling shipping dock out back. Fauvette found the place already hidden by weeds and trees in 1970, moved her coffin into the basement boiler room, and then allowed the others to occupy it as well. Actually, “allowed” wasn’t the right word; she didn’t care one way or the other. She’d
apathied
them in.

Her eyes scanned the enormous empty room. Vampire vision saw everything despite the darkness, saw the debris, the roaches, the rats, the dead bum decomposing in the corner. She felt silverfish scurry down her legs from their temporary home inside her, and it sent a little tickle through her. She almost smiled; she was still ticklish.

She walked over to the hobo’s body, ignoring the sharp-edged detritus that punctured her bare feet; she didn’t feel them, and after a good day’s slumber in her coffin, any damage
would be gone. Toddy had put a stolen fiddle in the corpse’s hands as a joke—“he’s de-composing, y’all, geddit?” Toddy was always doing things like that.

She stared down at the body, observing the changes since the last time she’d examined it. She wondered what it felt like to rot, to decay, to feel your body dissolve into its components. If she were to die now—if she strayed into the sun, or was caught and burned in her coffin, or staked through the heart—it would be sudden, the effect of half a century in an instant. No slow dissolution, no dignified breaking down of complex chemicals into simpler ones. None of the slack, empty peace she saw in the bum’s receding features. She was forever kept from this peacefulness, by no choice of her own.

The junkie’s eyeballs were long gone, his skull a home to thousands of larval insects, but his empty sockets seemed to regard her with pity. Emotions she’d tried valiantly to kill stirred in her chest, in her cold unbeating heart.

“Ah, damn,” she breathed.

“Thinkin’ them Joni Mitchell thoughts again?” Toddy said.

Fauvette shook her head, long strands of matted hair slapping her bare shoulders. “No,” she replied, her voice dry and raspy, the tissue desperate for blood. He hadn’t surprised her; nothing moved within thirty yards that she didn’t sense. But the last thing she wanted was Toddy’s half-assed amateur psychotherapy.

Toddy moved out of the darkness, his tread so light glass did not crunch under his feet. He wore an open dark green trench coat and nothing else; his body gleamed white and clean, like new ivory. “Beginning to think you weren’t never coming outta your box again,” he drawled.

She turned and smiled, letting her inner vampiric power reach out to Toddy. She understood the survival necessity for vampires to sexually excite their victims—why else would someone come willingly into the embrace of a walking
corpse?—but she was surprised at how easily it worked on some other vampires. Not all, of course, but definitely Toddy. She almost laughed out loud at the pop-the-weasel suddenness of his erection.

“Sweetie pie, you’re raising my crankshaft,” he said, his voice husky. Toddy was a baby even by vampire standards, with only ten years since his death at age seventeen; a white country boy who came looking for sex with sophisticated city girls and instead met doom in Fauvette’s embrace down the alleys behind Beale Street. He had a crew cut, soulful eyes, and full lips that covered his fangs unless he laughed.

“I know, Toddy,” Fauvette said wearily. She had not created him on purpose that night; she’d simply forgotten to take her usual precautions. And she felt nothing much about him one way or the other now, but she knew he’d keep pestering her, so at least this way he’d shut up. “Come on.”

He took her on the floor in front of the corpse, his trench coat forming a dark tent over them. She spread her thighs and he plunged into her without preliminaries, ignoring her initial cry of pain. His weight drove shards of glass and nails into her soft buttocks, and when she arched her back to get off a particularly annoying piece of rusted metal, he moaned as if he’d drawn the motion as a response. She almost laughed.

After the first few moments, once the sharp jolt of agony faded into the standard vampire numbness, she felt nothing. When he finally climaxed, ejaculating the cold jellied substance that passed for vampire semen into her, she shoved him off contemptuously and rolled onto her side, thighs clamped against the loss of blood.

“Wow,” she heard him gasp, “that was
intense
. It’s always great with you, hon, you know that?”

She gritted her teeth against the pain, and her eyes against the tears. As he had every time before, as every man would until the end of time, he’d taken her virginity. Since she’d died a virgin, been raped in death and reborn as a vampire, her
maidenhead (her mother’s quaint, blush-inducing term for it) reappeared intact the next night after it was taken. Most vampires who were virgins at the time of their creation were immune to any sexual arousal, and thus never felt it; but she was denied that. She felt lust as much as any of them, only in her case, giving into it was agony.

She wondered why only that wound hurt, only that wound
bled
; once, out of boredom, she’d sliced open her own stomach and studied her entrails without either pain or bleeding.

“Wow,” Toddy repeated. Then he noticed her whimpering in pain. “Hey, Fauvette, y’all all right?”

“Go away,” Fauvette said.

“No, wait, I wanna ask you something.” He knelt beside her and touched her shoulder. “You planning to go out and hunt tonight?”

Dark, sticky liquid oozed out as she shifted her legs. “Reckon I have to now.” Which, she realized, was why she’d turned him on, because without this immediate need she might not have hunted, and wasted away even more. Apparently even the sub-dead had a subconscious.

“Well, wait, before you go, I, uh . . . got something for you.”

“
No
, Toddy, not again. Not right now.”

“No, no, not that. Something that’ll make you feel
good
.”

She looked up in surprise, for a moment astounded that he’d gained some genuine insight into what she felt. But instead he held up a small plastic bag filled with gray powder.

“What is that?” she asked.

“Takes away the hunger,” he said with a slight smile.

She sat up straighter. “What hunger?’

“
The
hunger.”

She got to her knees and studied the bag in his hands. “What is it?” she repeated.

He opened the bag, licked his finger, stuck it into the
powder, then extended it toward her. “Here, baby doll, take a lick for yourself. See if ol’ Toddy ain’t telling you true.”

Her lips closed around his fingertip. Somewhere in the building a telephone rang.

R
UDOLFO
Z
GINSKI, CLAD
in the loose-fitting green garments and white coat he assumed delineated a physician, peered from the morgue doorway into the empty hall. He had been animate for less than twenty minutes, but he had already killed once and knew he had to get far away as quickly as possible.

Since the moment Francis Colby drove the crucifix into his heart, he’d been trapped in a timeless, blank limbo. When the woman removed it, physical agony greater than anything he’d ever known consumed him. He
felt
his dry, brittle flesh crack and split, his muscles snap free from their tendons and great chunks fall away as he tried to move. Each sensation roared through his newly roused consciousness with the ferocity of a dull saw scraping living bone. If his lungs had worked he would’ve screamed.

Then he sensed blood.

With no idea where he was or whose blood called to him, he lunged toward it with every bit of pitiful energy his corpse form possessed. He felt soft skin and tight, curly hair, and buried his fangs deep in the heated jugular. The victim’s choked scream rattled in what was left of his ears. The human
struggled, but even in this skeletal body he possessed vampiric strength. Blood gushed forth into him with each heartbeat, reconstituting him like water poured on powdered milk. The victim’s struggles gradually faded as his body absorbed her life.

As his other senses returned and the pain subsided, he realized he held a Negro woman in his arms. Already her body was almost thoroughly drained, and by the time he gained the strength to stand upright she was dead. He let her drop, and fell awkwardly from his coffin. He dislodged a tray of surgical instruments, and the horrible clanging sound terrified him.

Naked, he twitched and convulsed on the cold tile floor while his body soaked up the woman’s entire blood supply. After what felt like an eternity (and he was qualified to make that analogy), he was able to control his limbs enough to move around, although at first all he did was hug his knees and weep. But like his physical self, his emotions gradually fell under his control. He had no idea where he was, or how long he’d been “dead,” but he would learn nothing crying like a huntsman’s lost child. And waiting here beside the dead woman was a very stupid thing to do.

He stood, luxuriating in the movement of his limbs. He ran his hands over his body and found everything where it needed to be; he even had an erection. He started for the door, then stopped and smiled at his own obliviousness; however long it had been, he doubted that people paraded around the streets naked.

Zginski’s original clothing had long since crumbled to dust and rags. He sized up his victim, who appeared to be of African descent, about thirty-five, heavyset, and tall. Her name tag identified her as “Dr. Patricia Johnson.” He scowled at this; a woman, let along a Negro woman, should never be allowed to practice something as complex as medicine. Catch one in the wrong mood, and she’d be as deadly as any nosferatu. As always, things had changed for the worse.

Her clothing appeared androgynous. At the very least, the trousers would suit a man as well as a woman. He stripped her down to her shamelessly scanty undergarments and placed her body in his own coffin. He took a knife from the fallen instrument tray and sliced into her breast over her heart; naturally no blood came forth. He proceeded to efficiently remove her heart and place it beside her in the coffin. He’d never created another vampire, and didn’t intend to start by conferring immortality on this total stranger. Following Serbian custom, he then cut off her toes and looked around for a nail to drive through her neck. Among the surgical tools he found something long and thin, like an ice pick, and pushed it crossways from jugular to jugular. Since he did this before her resurrection, she would never return as a vampire, even if someone removed the pick and restored all the missing parts. Wherever her soul had gone at death, it would be grateful.

The woman outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. Her clothes were baggy on his slender form, but the drawstring cinched tightly at his waist and held them in place. He put on the white coat, astounded that, in his desperation, he hadn’t marred it with a single drop of the woman’s blood. The shoes were more difficult, until he figured out the elaborate strings that held the canvas tops closed. He wondered what the word “Converse” stitched on the side signified; were there shoes that were “inverse”?