Death is Only a Theoretical Concept (8 page)

Steve jerks his
hand and points his right middle finger at Greg, and while that
should have been a beautiful, wonderful relief, Abe feels anything
but.

“
Deb, I think—”

“
Give me the phone, Yo.”

Abe looks up
just in time to see Johanna pass the phone to the
paramedic.

“
Hey, Deb. How you doing? He’s giving me rude gestures,
now—Nakamura, that is not how you flip off the dude that just saved
your skin. Don’t come—ring Akihiko and have him meet you at the ED.
I mean, assuming you’re about to run out on your job and all—funny.
I’ll remember that. Anyway, bring a pen because the hospital pens
are
shit
…”

Abe turns away.
He can go now, he realises: there’s no reason in the world for him
to stay. Steve is alive and looked after, surrounded by people he
knows a whole lot better than just some random vampire he met at a
bar. What can he do but watch like some gawking, morbid onlooker as
the paramedics—Greg with the phone wedged under his ear, putting
paid to everything people ever say about men not multi-tasking as
he chatters away to both this Deb and Steve himself—get Steve onto
a gurney, now half-wrapped in a blanket with his hair sticking up
weirdly at the back?

“
Here.” The zombie taps him on the arm and hands over Abe’s
trenchcoat. “You should not—”

“
Izzy? You right to go home?” Johanna ducks around Greg and
grabs the zombie by the shoulders, kisses her on the cheek. She
holds Steve’s handgun in one hand and her shirt in the other. “I’m
going in with him. Moral support. Sensei’s probably going to be
weird.”

“
Fine.” The zombie turns, grins—a strange smile given the
fluidity of undead skin and tendons—and waves. “I can ring Jack and
ask him to pick you up, yes?”

Abe drapes the
trenchcoat over his arm and walks down in the street in slow,
creaking steps. Pain lances down his shins and ankles: it’s going
to take most of the blood in his fridge to restore that kind of
damage, not to mention a few hours spent in bed or on the couch
patiently waiting for the blood to take effect. A few hours spent
watching terrible TV or finishing Fagles’s translation of
the
Odyssey
, no different to every other night Abe spends at home!
What right does he have to complain about any of it?

“
Abe!” The rasping voice doesn’t sound quite like the Steve
that spoke to him at the bar, but the whistle has faded enough that
he can speak. Abe jerks his head to look: Steve sits up on his
gurney, for some reason paying the ambulance and the paramedics
very little mind as they load him into it: he waves his left hand
with frantic energy. “Situational irony is … a reversal of
ex—expectations, so … I think—”

There’s no
answer to that: what can a killer say to his near-victim beyond
apologies? Abe almost killed Steve—worse, there’s a part of him
that wants to turn him, wants to taste him at the most horrific,
inopportune moment, so it’s something well beyond a forgivable
accident. Abe, for all that he tries so very hard to be as close to
the human he would have been, is a blood-sucking monster, the kind
of monster that thinks about biting a dying man for the joy of
turning him. What apology erases that? Abe just looks down at his
feet and keeps on walking down a street washed with the bright
yellow street lights, the green and red traffic lights and the blue
and red lights of the ambulance, a street alive with the heartbeats
of curious breathers, a street indifferent to the tragedy that
almost occurred. Do the watchers not realise how crass it is to
gawk?

“
Nakamura, you will sit back, lie still, put this mask on and
shut the fuck up, or I will let Johanna shoot you.” The scarcity of
professionalism in Greg’s voice should have been shocking, but now
it tells Abe that Steve is looked after by people that care about
him, even if they show it in their own unique way, and that’s all
that matters. “And I will
enjoy
it.”

“
Abe? Hey, Abe!”

The slamming of
ambulance doors cuts off anything else Steve might have said. Abe
keeps walking, one aching step after another, until he makes it
around the corner; he doesn’t look up as the ambulances passes him
on its way down Main. He keeps going down the street to the carpark
opposite the supermarket, deserted except for a pair of giggling
heterosexual breathers making out in the back of a small sedan and
a white woman wearing the bright yellow safety vest of a registered
hunter on patrol lingering by the parking metre—a standard fixture
of Port Carmila come tourist season.

He pulls out his
keys, unlocks his hatchback, gets in and tosses his trenchcoat onto
the passenger seat.

Steve’s blazer
slides out from underneath and lands in the footwell.

Abe sits there,
staring at the black fabric, and wishes he could still
cry.

5: Surrender

The advantage to
living in a small municipality—compared to Melbourne, anyway—is
that Abe doesn’t expect S. Nakamura to be listed two dozen times in
the phone book, and he’s not wrong. There is, in fact, only one
listing for Port Carmila (a D. and A. Nakamura) and the address is
easy to find: Abe doesn’t have to bother with a map search to know
that 23 Wakeland Drive is close to Port Carmila’s new cemetery. It
couldn’t have been easier to chase Steve up, but once he has both
the number and the address, he dithers even though he has the
absolutely-valid excuse of returning Steve’s blazer. The
receptionist at the hospital told him that Steve had been released
early that morning, and while Abe takes that as an indication that
he must be okay, it gives him another reason to do nothing. After
spending all night—the night of his birthday, and just the thought
makes Abe cringe—in the ED, he must be asleep. Steve won’t want to
be disturbed. Abe can ring tomorrow, or the day after. Possibly
never, except for the blazer—but he can take that back to Feeders.
They’ll hold it until Steve comes to collect it, especially if Abe
asks Louis to do him a favour.

It’s not as
though there’s any logical reason to chase him up. The bet is over,
Abe feels reasonably certain that Steve isn’t going to go around
kissing vampires in a hurry if ever, and Steve is straight, so
what’s the point? Steve could be wrong about his heterosexuality,
but even if he is, he’s still unlikely to want a boyfriend, or even
just a friend, who can kill him with a single kiss.

What he owes
Steve, perhaps sooner rather than later, is an apology.

A night of
sitting on the couch, not-reading, while his feet and legs healed
was more than enough to leave Abe feeling thoroughly shit about not
doing so the night before. It doesn’t matter that it won’t change
anything. If he’s not a monster, he has to apologise.

The memory of
wanting to taste Steve’s epinephrine-touched blood almost inspires
nausea—he needs to leave Steve the fuck alone for Steve’s safety
and Abe’s sanity—but he knows what Mum and Dad will say if he dares
ask them … or, at least, he knows what they’d say if he asked them
before he turned, before they began to handball their opinions to
Great-Aunty Lizzie. He knows what Lizzie will say, too, but how can
that be right when everything Abe knows about being a decent
person—vampire, human breather, zombie, whatever—demands an
apology?

It’s a
ten-minute drive from Abe’s flat to Steve’s parents’ house, one
that he can only stretch out to fifteen minutes by driving at
school-district speeds. The house, a single-storey red-brick
California bungalow, is situated directly across the road from the
new cemetery, something that strikes Abe as a trifle morbid and a
failure of town planning besides: residential street on one side,
cemetery on the other. Who thought that, in
Port Carmila
, a
good idea?

Three cars fill
the driveway: one small sedan, one four-door Land Cruiser, one
rusting Toyota ute covered with peeling bumper stickers. Abe drives
past the house twice before getting up the courage to pull over.
Meeting new people, he tells himself, is a much less daunting task
here than it was at home. Sure, Steve’s family aren’t like to
welcome him in, but he just has to hand over the blazer, say sorry
and leave. He wrote out a card and tucked it in the blazer pocket
just in case Steve’s parents run him off their doorstep. Not even
the truth that these people can’t actually hurt him helps ease the
frantic rattling of his thoughts, so he sits in his car for a few
minutes more, staring over at the front windows of the house.
Perhaps he should just leave. Perhaps he should get someone else to
return Steve’s blazer. Perhaps…

The repeated
twitching of the lace curtains at the left-hand window suggests
that someone, at least, knows he is there, and when Abe can see a
face staring at his hatchback, he guesses it’s well past time to
grab the blazer and get out of the car.

The front door
opens before he has a chance to knock: a middle-aged blonde woman,
clad in an oversized polo shirt, jeans and bare feet, stares at him
with raised eyebrows and a too-amused smile. A military-type combat
knife rests in a sheath strapped to her left leg; a cloth reeking
of metal polish hangs in her left hand. That smile isn’t what Abe
expected to see, but he’s not sure that amusement is much better a
response. What did Steve tell his family, anyway? Nothing?
Everything? Enough that if Abe gives his name, they’ll know he’s
not a random stranger off the street? Enough that if he does, Abe
will be legging it for the hatchback?

“
Uh,
hi,” he says, unable to help the feeling that he’s spent far too
long just staring at the woman in the doorway. “Um. My name’s
A—Abraham—Abe—Browning. I ... um...” He holds out the blazer. “I
wanted to, well, just return—I didn’t mean to take it, it was an
accident, but—”

She furrows her
brow, her eyes drifting from Abe’s pinstriped shirt to his polished
shoes. “
You’re
the vampire Steve picked up?”

Abe doesn’t know
what else to do but nod.

“
You
look so normal,” she says. “Oi, Akihiko! Doesn’t he look
normal?”

A second figure
joins the woman on the other side of the screen door: a man short
enough to duck underneath his wife’s outstretched arm, wearing
jeans, ugg boots and an open dressing gown. Steve clearly got his
looks from him—the man looks like an older-but-still-rather-boyish
version of Steve, albeit with much shorter, less interesting hair.
He says something Abe doesn’t understand—he never figured that
there’d come a day when he’d regret learning high school Italian
over Japanese—and stares with what looks to be shock before finally
speaking in slightly-accented English: “He does look normal.
Normal!”

Abe stares in
shock as he pushes the screen door open and holds one hand
outstretched; Abe takes it and Akihiko pumps it up and down with an
enthusiasm that surely can’t be warranted.

“
Please, come in. I’m Akihiko Nakamura, and this is my wife,
Debra.”

“
Sergeant Nakamura,” she says with another broad smile.
“Please, come in. We don’t have any blood on hand, but if you would
like water, or anything else, don’t hesitate to ask. Steve’s in his
bedroom. He says he can’t sleep during the day, but I bet you
anything he’s out of it right now. Do you have long? I don’t think
he’ll mind if we disturb him.”

Before Abe quite
knows what he’s doing, he’s stepping into the hallway; Akihiko
closes and locks the doors behind him. Abe stops and stares,
dumbstruck for the second time in as many minutes: the hallway is
decorated with a row of dusty, crooked photo frames and a shining,
spotless weapons rack bearing several short swords, staffs with
long blades, hooks and axeheads attached to the shaft, ammunition
belts and five different assault rifles.

The little
handgun holstered at Steve’s back quite suddenly seems like nothing
worth the noticing.

Debra darts in
and wraps her arms, her warm, living arms, around Abe’s still
chest; Abe, positively stunned by the affection of strange
breathers, just stands there.

“
Thank you so much, Abe. Greg says someone ringing for help so
quickly made all the difference, and Steve said something about you
talking to him, and, well, you know it’s going to happen someday,
living here, but there’s no guarantee a zombie will make it through
sapient...”

Zombie? Steve?
Abe swallows and stares at her. Does she not realise it happened
because of Abe? “It’s nothing,” he says, feeling rather more like
he wants to throw himself off the edge of a cliff. “I just wanted
to make sure that he’s okay. And, um. Blazer?”

“
This way. Aki, how about you get our guest a glass of water?”
She tugs at Abe’s wrist and leads him down the hallway, not giving
Abe the chance to demur or refuse. “We’ll see if he’s awake, will
we?”

He now knows,
Abe realises, just why it is Steve can not only talk the hind leg
off a donkey but also be so demonstrative with his kisses. He’s not
flirting at all, in fact; he’s just used to being around people who
touch each other and strangers without thinking about it, so much
so that a hand on the thigh probably doesn’t mean anything at
all.

Not that, now,
any of that matters.

Debra pushes
open the second door, revealing the dimness that comes from drawn
shutters and a pile of abandoned clothes. Abe recognises the
T-shirt and jeans from the night before. “Steve?” Her voice is just
low enough not to waken someone deeply asleep. “You
awake?”