Death is Only a Theoretical Concept (12 page)

Several emotions
flicker across Abe’s face, but the one that wins out, Steve thinks,
is relief. “Now I—now I know why you don’t mind belaying.” He
shakes his head: he can’t blush, but he chews on his bottom lip
when anxious or embarrassed. “Steve!”

“
You’re supposed to be—well, depending on the angle of the
cliff face, actually, but don’t worry about that today—watching the
climber on belay.” Steve pauses, just for effect. “Unless you want
me standing there texting Johanna while you climb?”

Abe draws
himself up and looks at Steve. “In the interests of, uh, climbing
safety, I suppose I have to give you permission to look at my arse
while I climb. As long as, well … that permission is
returned.”

“
I
grant you unlimited and free arse-staring access, oh boyfriend of
mine. Hang climbing safety.” Steve honks on the horn as he spots
Aggie Skipton’s 1979 Range Rover heading into town; she waves, her
horn being one of the many things in her car that doesn’t work, and
waves harder when she spots Steve and Abe in the Toyota. “And
between Jack, next-door-Greg and Aggie, the whole damn town is now
going to know we’ve changed our relationship status on Facebook. Or
the local equivalent. So. Dancing at Feeders?”

“
Dancing.” Abe smiles, shakes his head and abruptly changes
the topic as if the whole thing is too much for him to deal
with—but that’s okay. He can sit and think about it if he likes,
but it’s not going to change the evident truth. “I read Jorge Louis
Borges’s
Labyrinths
last night. Strange take on realist
fiction. But at least the South American realists don’t pretend the
so-called supernatural doesn’t exist—not like the Western
surrealist tradition. Or the vile classical realist propaganda that
is Le Fanu, Stoker and Shelley.”

It occurs to
Steve that Abe now knows him well enough to realise a comment like
that is a red flag to a bull, certainly flag enough to avoid any
further relationship-type discussion, but that’s not enough to stop
him from answering—or revelling in the joy that he now knows
somebody who can say ‘Le Fanu’ and ‘classical realist propaganda’
in the same sentence. “Better than the post-postmodern realists
like Rice and Meyer with their weird half-worship-half-violence
thing going on. And it’s not like zombies get a look in, ever—well,
except for fucking Brooks. It’s why I only read surrealist fiction,
when I do read fiction. Even if books like
The Secret
History
or whatever feel like a bunch of fucking breathers
trying to pretend the real world doesn’t exist, but
sometimes—”

“
It’s better to be ignored than it is to be included and
vilified, trashed or inaccurately depicted?” Abe nods. “I hear you.
Horrible kind of ‘better’, though. Brooks? Wasn’t that a film? I
haven’t, uh, been to the pictures in a while.”

Nobody to go
with, Steve guesses, and Abe doesn’t seem like the kind of guy
who’d just go alone and not care.

“
Mate, don’t get me started. I mean, my god, there weren’t
enough fucking anti-zombie propaganda films already, so they take
what’s essentially a book-long massacre guide that never bothers to
distinguish between feral and sapient zombies and
film it
?
Because it’s not dangerous enough for sapient zombies, being
attacked by ferals and breathers alike? I wrote an email to the
Classification Board, because if there’s any movie that should be
banned it’s
World War Z
—come on, even the name promotes a
fucking zombie apocalypse—but no dice. Zombies don’t count as human
and we should gun them all down. Arseholes. It’s enough to make me
want to come back as a feral and feast on breather brains, and I
don’t give a fuck if that’s hypocrisy.”

“
They let all seven seasons of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
air,” Abe says with a heat that makes Steve grin. “Before
watershed, too. Fuck Stoker. At least
True Blood
or
Being
Human
—aside from the lifeist name—have an appropriate rating.
So I’m really not surprised anymore. Apparently the inclusion of
two hot good-coded vampires makes it not an anti-vampire propaganda
fest—oh, it depicts pre-modern mythological vampirism! They’re not
slaughtering real vampires! The vampires are a metaphor! What, do
they think queer breather characters make up for that? And a tiny
bit of squint-and-you-miss-it queer subtext with Angel and Spike?
Hardly.
We have souls
. And non-bumpy faces.”

“
I
just watched the bits with David Boreanaz in them,” Steve says. “He
gets his shirt off a lot. Although it’d have been even better if
Sarah Michelle Gellar got hers off, too.”

Abe angles his
head and just looks at Steve. “You’re the
worst
straight man
I’ve ever met.”

Steve grins.
“Which is why Chichi and I were the only ones who didn’t know I’m
not straight. Hey, next time there’s a vampire film out, do you
want to go, throw popcorn at the screen, talk all the way through
about how it’s terrible and give the breather audience a
crash-course in lifeism?”

“
I …
um. Wouldn’t they throw us out?”

The aghast
expression on Abe’s face makes Steve think that Abe is the worst
vampire
he’s ever met, but that’s okay.

Steve’s outgoing
enough for the both of them.

Prequel:
Scheme

They sit on the breakwater while
Jack and Phil fish, Izzy sews and Greg throws chips at the
seagulls, resulting in a terrific chaos of squawking white birds
zooming onto the stretch of basalt rocks running out into the bay.
It’s a pleasant enough day, with a low wind, waves gentle enough to
avoid the usual spray crashing into the rocks, light cloud cover
and a minimum of tourists to gawk at Izzy—most locals hang out on
the breakwater simply because if tourists follow they have to get
past Benjamina Bakersfield, the loud and verbose severed zombie
head fastened to the bollard at the carpark. She’s got a thesis to
be writing, though, so Johanna rolls her eyes for half an hour
while the blokes prattle about irrelevant things before losing her
cool: “Aren’t we fucking here to talk about Steve’s
birthday?”

“
Birthday? Does Steve even have a birthday?” Jack grins and
throws her a punch. He’s still wearing his fish-reeking clothes
from the morning’s work on his old man’s boat, although Johanna and
Greg seem to be the only ones to notice. “Chill, girl. So. As we
all know, Steve’s birthday is next month, and we need to come up
with a dare that knocks his socks right off his feet.” He leans
back and reaches for a handful of chips. “Say, we all know that
Steve is fucking bi, right?”

Johanna has
known Jack, Phil and Steve for seven years, and, in all that time,
she’s never once heard Jack make an idle comment. She blinks,
though, because of course everyone on the breakwater turns to look
at her: as the group lesbian, she supposes, she must therefore be
able to recognise a lack of heterosexuality in anyone else. Izzy is
as queer as she is, but being born in the 1820s and spending most
of her undeath hiding from ferals and humans alike hasn’t exactly
given her the ability to grasp twenty-first-century sexuality: the
things Johanna takes for granted are often all but mystifying to
her.

She’s not
stupid, though. Not even close. Izzy just knows that she’s got
nothing worth the saying about Steve Nakamura—already confounding
with his blazers, hair gel, firearms and lack of boundaries, given
the amount of discussions they’ve had on twenty-first century
fashion and culture—on the matter of modern sexuality. She pushes
back a curling lock of dark hair with one hand and shoots Johanna a
wink while she works on embroidering the edges of the bodice lying
across her knees, one of many mid-1800s-style gowns she wears while
guiding tourists around Port Carmila.

It occurs to
Johanna that she
might
have spent too much time complaining
to Izzy about being the token zombie-hunting lesbian if Izzy’s
giving her pointed winks.

“
I
think it’s homophobic to hope the dyke’s going to answer,” she
says.

Jack just
snorts. “And?”

Well, it’d be
the worst kind of stereotyping to look at Steve’s metrosexual ways
and assume that a man who was devoted to good grooming before he
ever left for Sydney isn’t straight. She thinks, though, about all
the posters of bare-chested men engaged in extreme sports on his
wardrobe door; she thinks about the way Steve flirts with anyone if
they stand still long enough; she thinks about how many offhand
comments he’s made about hot actors and football players of any
gender—before Adam Swanston got on his case, that is. Steve never
relinquished the hair gel or his blazers, but he did make sure he
only spoke about hot women—or the odd drag queen—from then
on.

She’s fairly
sure he started riding at her parents’ property just to crush on
her brother.

“
He’s totally bi,” she says. “Or pan. One of them. He does
like the girls he chases, though.” How many times has she sat
around with the guys while they drooled over actresses and hot
merwomen? Jack and Phil are as straight as they come, but Johanna
never had the sense Steve was making up an attraction to the ladies
to fit in as much as he just left half of it out of the
discussion.

“
Oh,
he was kissing girls in primary school. We know that.” Phil grins.
“And that one vampire boy in Grade Two. Do you remember Mr van
Dreven? He came around the corner and went
off
about blood
diseases.”

“
Is
there a point to this besides memory lane?” Greg pulls his
paper-wrapped chips away from Jack’s reach. “Don’t even think about
touching the flake.”

“
I
was just thinking,” Jack says in a would-be-casual voice, “that it
seems a shame fucking Swanston got him all bothered about it. I
mean, Swanston’s the only person who cares, right? Nobody cares
that you’re getting up to some incredibly sexy things with another
woman, Yo.”

Izzy can’t
blush, if her skin were even light enough to show it, but she can
focus so intently on her sewing the effect is very little
different.

“
Incredibly amazing, sexy things, Jack, that you’re
never
going to see
.” Johanna drawls the words as slowly as she can
and pokes her tongue out at Jack just to punctuate the torment. No,
nobody here really cares that she’s dating a girl: it is, after
all, the twenty-first century, and both vampires and fae tend to be
more relaxed about that sort of thing: vampires, after all, don’t
have the excuse of sex-as-procreation. If the breather population
pretend to be okay just because they don’t want to be more bigoted
than a fae, that’s all to the good as far as Johanna is concerned.
People do care that she’s dating a zombie, especially a quasi-feral
zombie who lived as a recluse for more than a century from the fear
that her own people will kill her, but now that Izzy’s working at
the Historical Society the gossip is winding down: they don’t say
shit to her face, at least.

Then again,
people are generally careful about what they say to Johanna, the
best marksman in Port Carmila for the last four Agricultural Shows
running. She might not have been born here, but she works with the
Port Carmila Police Department as a licenced hunter, and she’s got
a kill count to equal born-and-bred locals like Phil and Jack.
She’s no tourist.

Who she fucks
doesn’t matter when she’s contributed more to the town’s safety
than those who whisper behind her back.

Steve, of all
people, should know that.

Jack snickers.
“We’ll fucking see about that one, Yo.”

“
Try
it and you’ll start shambling.” Johanna smirks at him before
changing the subject: Jack can spend half his life shooting back
insults and think nothing of the waste of time. Time, he says when
called out on it, is an invader invention. “What’s up with
Swanston, anyway? Izzy and I went to Feeders last week, and when we
left, he was on his knees in the alley, right in plain sight, with
Ares’s cock halfway down his throat.”

“
We
would not have seen him if you did not want to put your broken
handbag in the dumpster,” Izzy says with a pointed look at Johanna:
she’s never quite gotten dramatic licence. “And he was just
licking.”

Phil and Jack
look at each other and break out into broad, cheek-splitting
grins.

“
Serve him fucking right.” Phil holds up one palm; Jack
smashes it with his own. “Man! Pot calling the kettle Jack or
what!”

Jack rolls his
eyes and gives Phil the finger. “Ignoring that shocking and
terrible piece of racism from a white fucking invader…”

Izzy raises her
eyebrows at Johanna, but she shakes her head: she knows how these
idiots talk. She’s heard Jack and Steve shoot off exchanges that
begin with ‘suicidal Jap’ and ‘drunk blackfella’ and only become
the horrific inverse of political correctness before they turn
around and insult Phil’s Swedish grandparents—and while there must
be an invisible line for a white guy somewhere, Phil seems to know
just how to stay on the right side of permissible
racism.

It probably
helps that the three have known each other since
kindergarten.

“
Well, well, well.” Jack grins and leans back against a large,
rounded piece of basalt. “So the guy who called Steve a fag queen
is actually—hey, Yo, can a bi dude be a fag?”