Fat Vampire (20 page)

H
E WASN'T
the nearest student to Abby's car, not by a long shot, but he was the first on the scene. Her face was lost in the white pillow of the airbag, tassels of curly hair splayed like creeper all around. She wasn't buckled in. He wrenched the door open and was already pulling her from her seat as Troy came running up yelling, “Don't move her! Don't move her!”

There was a right thing to do in a situation like this, and a wrong thing. The right thing was to call 911 and wait by Abby's side, maybe even initiate CPR until the paramedics arrived. The wrong thing was to load Abby into another car and move her yourself to the closest hospital. A distant third might have been to lift Abby into your arms and run thirteen blocks to St. Mary's Emergency in Pennwood, despite shouts
of protest from the mob of kids that had gathered at the school gates.

I just acted without thinking,
Doug explained to an imaginary jury of his peers after he'd been running for a mile and his mind had cleared.
In emergencies a person can sometimes demonstrate astounding feats of strength.

He didn't notice the wood-paneled station wagon that followed him all the way to the hospital. He was in another world.

The hospital waiting room was filmy and crowded with people. One man had a piece of rebar in his foot, but apparently not enough of a piece of rebar in his foot to leave the waiting room. CNN silently played on a television bolted to the ceiling.

After handing Abby off to the ER nurses Doug had been unable to answer, for various reasons, the following questions about her:

What kind of insurance she had

Whether she had a middle name

How her last name was spelled

If she was allergic to any medications

How, exactly, she'd come to have only three liters of blood in her body

Abby's parents had been called. He'd have to face them soon. No one had actually asked him to stay, but leaving now would feel like fleeing a crime scene. He got up and sat down, got up again, walked to the hospital gift shop and stared at Mylar balloons and fist-sized teddy bears, then returned to the waiting room to find all the seats taken.

A lot of people had come to the ER in sweatpants. A thin, well-groomed woman in a tailored skirt and hose shivered in her seat while the sweatpants crowd seemed to look askance at her and wonder:
Did she change clothes before coming? Did she freshen up?
Doug wondered if his own clothes communicated the right amount of human concern and went to the restroom to check.

It wasn't getting any easier, looking in mirrors. Most days he could focus below the neck, examine his clothes, all but ignore his hair now that it never seemed to get mussed up anymore. Tonight was no different, except that it was completely different. Putting aside for a moment that he was actually trying to muss himself up a bit, he also sensed the insistent stare of a pair of eyes in the mirror.

His eyes,
nominally. They were set in his face, or in a kind of counterfeit of his face. There was something wrong with the expression. Something wrong with the eyes.

They looked old, inevitable. Like they'd always been here in this hospital, waiting for Doug to arrive. He didn't like their air of blunt satisfaction. He wanted to give them something to look surprised about.

Exiting the bathroom he took this hospital scene in again and wondered, suddenly, if Abby was going to die. The white floors, white walls, cold white light that robbed everything of shadow and substance, the flimsy gowns and white coats and pajamas—were they trying to make it all look like some cheap heaven? Were they trying to prepare you for what came next?

“Doug?”

Jay's sister, Pamela, was down the hall, looking a little
fragile, unsteady. Doug tried to recall—Was she friends with Abby?

“Hey, Pamela.”

“How did you find out?”

Doug didn't know how to answer this question, didn't understand it, really, but then Pamela was just hugging him so he hugged back.

“Have you seen my mom?” asked Pamela.

“No.”

“Okay. I'll take you up. They moved him upstairs.”

Him? Jay?

“God, what the fuck? Who would do this?” said Pamela, suddenly a fury, as she let Doug go and turned back to the elevators. “Do you have any idea who would do this to a person? A person like Jay? Anyone at school?”

“No. Look,” said Doug, “I don't really know much. I just heard he was here because…because Abby my girlfriend is here, too. What happened to him?”

The elevator opened, and Pamela tucked herself into a cold corner of it. Another woman got in with them (a young and Indian-looking doctor, Doug noted), so Pamela whispered, “He's lost a lot of blood. He was unconscious. Someone or…something bit his neck. Actually bit his neck. And Chewbacca's dead.”

Doug would have liked a chance to explain a few of those details to the doctor, but the opinions of strangers didn't seem like the right thing to be concerned about right now, and besides—the woman just exited on the third floor like she hadn't been listening.

All the fire had gone out of Pamela and she hugged her shoulders. “There was blood everywhere at home. You could smell…and now Dad's being all stupid and telling the police all about how Jay dyed his hair black and started dressing better,” she said, and with a target for her anger she rallied a little. “He told them to talk to Cat. He thinks they're doing drugs. Jay and Cat, I mean. Not the police.”

The elevator doors opened, and the hallway they stepped out into was indistinguishable from the one they'd left: white walls, white ceiling, polished white floor. The same odd sensation of floating.

Through the third door Jay lay asleep in a bed with his arm strapped to the side. A clear tube connected the inside of his elbow to a plastic bag on a metal stand, a plastic bag that looked like those Doug had once stolen from the Red Cross, though the liquid inside this one was colorless.

Jay's dad rose from his bedside chair and crossed the room to meet Doug. “There he is. There he is. How are you, Doug?” He seemed to consider and then quickly reconsider hugging Doug, and instead gave him a firm, vigorous handshake, like he was trying to sell Doug a shiny new optimism. “It's so good of you to come. Thank you.” He looked over at Pamela. “You didn't find your mother?”

“I'll try her cell again.”

Pamela left the room, and Doug and Mr. Rouse stood at the foot of the bed, watching Jay. He didn't look like he was sleeping. Doug could see the place on Jay's neck where the blood had been taken. Even through a patch of gauze he could see it was big, obvious, surrounded by a scribble of broken
blood vessels just beneath the skin. It didn't look anything like the evidence Doug left (or didn't leave) on Abby. This was like graffiti. This was sending a message.

“How…” Mr. Rouse began, “how did you know to come, Doug? Did Pamela call you?”

“No, actually…I was already here for this girl I know. Abby. She…passed out while driving.”

“Abby…Abby. I've met her, haven't I? She dresses just like that Cat!”

That wasn't really true. Cat dressed more punk, Abby more romantic, but they both wore a lot of black. Dark makeup. That was probably enough for Mr. Rouse. Doug knew it didn't take much for some parents to see Satanists and death worshippers. His mom had once described his cousin Kristi as “pretty goth” for wearing plum-colored lipstick. Which matched her plum-colored polo shirt and the embroidery on her cutoffs. Mrs. Lee insisted she only wore it for “shock value.”

Doug looked at Jay. He looked at the boy who was ostensibly his best friend and willed himself to have a feeling. Any feeling, but it should be fierce, and raw. Nothing came. There was nothing in him anymore that was fierce or raw except his lust. And even as he thought this, he knew it wasn't true. Increasingly, his vampirism wasn't a lust, it was an itch. An itch that needed a lot of scratching, sure, but…just an itch. A constant irritation; a rash; a chicken pox on his soul.

“You kids are falling in with a dangerous group of people, Doug. You have to see that. Before it's too late. It was almost too late for my boy.” His voice cracked, and he pressed a red fist against his mouth while Pamela reentered the room.
“There are some bad, bad kids at that school.”

That was true. There were some very bad kids at that school. Monsters. Pamela had wanted to know if any one of them might have done this to Jay, and the answer was of course.

Of course.

D
OUG COULD SCARCELY
believe his luck. No sooner had he vowed to hunt Victor down and destroy him, than a pale wolf charged at him through the trees.

He'd left the Rouses abruptly, left the hospital before meeting Abby's parents, and it
did
feel like fleeing a crime scene. He walked swiftly through the first doors he could find marked
EXIT
, corkscrewed down the ramps of a parking garage, and emerged into the night air.

He had no car here. He'd have to walk home. Or fly home as a bat? No, he liked this shirt.

He was picking his way through the shared woods between the hospital and the seminary when the wolf appeared, upwind,
and it smelled like Victor. It slowed and made a wide circle before him and bared its teeth, but stopped short of growling. Doug wondered how best to fight a wolf. He'd have to snap Victor's neck, he decided. Maybe sacrifice his own arm. He was walking through trees—why hadn't he picked up a stick?

But there was no attack. Wolf Victor reared back on his hind legs and in that instant Doug realized he was turning human again. Despite himself, Doug looked away. It seemed like a private moment. There came a squeak, the sound of a million discrete hairs pulling back into the skin.

Doug was seeing altogether too much of naked Victor.

He would try to get Victor circling again, he thought, try to get close enough to a tree to snap off a branch, then drive it into Victor's chest. There was a sternum in the middle of the chest, wasn't there? And ribs. He'd break the ribs.

“Who were you talking to at school?” Victor snarled, his chest heaving. “Who was that?”

It wasn't the question Doug was expecting. “Who was who? I talk to a lot of peo—”

“Today! In the parking lot, just as the sun went down.”

Doug narrowed his eyes. “Are you spying on me or something?”

“I was coming off the field after practice. You were standing right there in the open with…some guy.”

“It was just Stephin David. My so-called mentor? You know.”

“
That's
Stephin David?”

“Sure. What?”

Victor just looked away, into the ether, and Doug sidestepped gingerly to a tree with a low-hanging branch. He could just make out Victor's mutterings, despite the wind: “That's Stephin David…I know where he lives.”

“So you were at school, at practice,” said Doug. “What'd you do before practice?”

Victor looked at Doug, but his mind might have been racing through the trees. “What?”

“Let me lay out your schedule today as I see it. You had school, lunch, school, a quick errand to kill my best friend, then back to school to spy on me. Did I leave anything out?”

“I killed your best friend?”

Better to let him go on thinking he did
, thought Doug.
If he hears Jay survived, he'll just try to finish the job
. “You know what you did,” he said, his hand closing over the branch. It was thick enough to be strong and already snapped by wind or lightning. If he could wrench it free from the trunk, it would be just over a foot long. Perfect. “Did Borisov tell you to do it? To protect everyone's precious secret identities?”

“Where are you getting this shit? Jay's dead? I didn't do anything to Jay. And I haven't been talking about him and I never told you anything about wanting to kill the vampire who made me, either. Yeah, I know you've been spreading that around. What the hell?”

“I didn't say that. The signora misunderstood me. But that's no reason to go try and kill Jay—”

“I told you, I didn't kill Jay. But you're gonna get
me
killed, you know that? I'm in a shitstorm of trouble now with
the old vampires. I thought we were friends.”

Doug caught his breath. He swallowed away some of the dry crust in his throat. “You…we were.” In an instant Doug saw that what he'd assumed was a monster was actually a boy his age, a boy he used to play with on summer vacations. He lost his grip on the tree and his arm sank. Victor did not currently look like a killer. He looked sickly and naked.

“You're always asking about Jay,” said Doug. “And that day behind the gym when he walked up to us…it almost seemed like you were afraid.”

“I was afraid. I am afraid. For Jay, for us, about everything being different,” Victor mumbled. “Aren't you afraid?”

“Why are you so pale?” asked Doug.

“Being a wolf…it makes you burn through blood kind of fast.”

“Then why do it?”

“I just…feel like I'm in my right skin when I'm a wolf. I'm not real good at being people lately. I've been…scary, I guess. I scared my
mom
.”

Maybe he felt exposed then. He stretched to cover his crotch, his arms stiff as a clock's. Six-thirty, Naked Standard Time.

“Does it work,” he asked, “killing the vampire that made you? Does it make you human?”

“Oh, so now you want to do it?”

“I just want to know if it works.”

Doug frowned as a new possibility occurred to him. “Asa says it does. So…do you remember everything you do when you're a wolf? Afterward?”

Victor bit at his thumbnail. “You can't really trust that Asa,” he said. “Who knows what he's up to—you know?”

“Do you remember your time as a wolf?” Doug asked again. “Are you in control? Or do you just go on autopilot, like when you're driving?”

“I don't know. I gotta go.”

Victor became a wolf again and disappeared into the darkness.

Doug couldn't follow. He wasn't that fast on foot, or as a bat, and he didn't know how to turn into a wolf. He considered trying, thinking wolfish thoughts, confident that getting stuck halfway this time wouldn't be as big a problem as it had been that night at the farm. Why, he might even turn into some sort of man-wolf. That didn't sound so bad.

Then, in a moment of honesty, he imagined what sort of animal might really fall halfway between a wolf and himself, and the image that came to mind was purebred American hairless terrier.

Chewbacca had been an American hairless. Small, spotty skinned, a face like a butcher-shop window. Doug allowed himself to think of Chewbacca then, pictured the dog's final moments: probably so happy to be meeting another vampire; confused to find he was, in a moment, small game in his own house.

Doug felt the chill suddenly. Something noxious rattled up in him, and he crumpled into a pile of leaves and sobbed. Thinking about a dog he'd never liked, he cried like he hadn't cried in years—retching, convulsive tears. A dog. A boy and
his dog. Jay and Chewbacca, like Batman and Robin, like Han Solo and…Chewbacca. Jay, his friend, nearly dead in an indifferent room in a building behind him. He cried until his tears ran red and he had to staunch the flow with his palms.

Okay,
he thought when he could stand again.
Okay,
and he snapped that tree limb free of its trunk and cleaned it of smaller branches.
Right,
and he ran toward the lights of the city.

Even if he hadn't had a pretty good idea where Victor lived, Doug could have followed him home. He was arguably the only vampire wolf who'd trespassed through the seminary grounds in a while, probably the only one who had crossed Lancaster Avenue that evening. Certainly the only one who'd threaded the Taco Exchange drive-thru so recently that the paper-hatted attendant was still pressing his clotted, dumb-struck face against the cashier's window.

Victor lived on a narrow street lined with the sort of smallish, vertical houses that were all stairs and U-turns. Doug stood panting at the bottom of Victor's driveway, the tree branch in his hand. He'd lost an opportunity, sure, and that was stupid of him. He'd let Victor talk his way out of a staking. It wouldn't happen again. Victor had obviously acted while in wolf form, and he couldn't remember the details anymore. Each time doubt reached in with its wet fingers, Doug banished it with thoughts of Jay. Jay in the hospital room. The largely theoretical tableau of Jay bloody and helpless in his own living room, kitchen, or backyard.

He crept up the driveway, tasting the air. The concrete
under his feet was cracked into puzzle pieces and stained with faded, continental shapes. Grass grew optimistically through the cracks.

He couldn't really expect to be able to sneak up on another vampire, Doug realized. He would just have to stay on guard. He ignored the front door—nobody ever entered through their own front door—and stepped up a small, steep flight of stairs to the side door. But, no—the trail cooled here. Where was Victor?

The driveway ended at an open carport. It was a good place to hide, a good place to wait for someone who was following you.

“I'm coming, Victor,” he said in a soft voice that he trusted would be heard by wolf ears. “I don't care. Get the drop on me if you want, I know how low on blood you are.”

The carport was crowded with the detritus of modern life—paint cans and mulch and cracked flowerpots formed a car-shaped bunker around a dull gray Accord. It sort of
wasn't
a good place for an ambush, after all. Doug could barely move. A bright white square on the windshield of the car caught his eye. He prized it free of the wiper blade and it unfolded in his hand.

Doug folded the note again and put it in his pocket and thought for a long time.
All right
, he sighed.
I'm going to Clark Park
. It seemed so far away, and he'd been running all evening. If he wanted to be prepared, he needed blood.

That was okay. He knew a couple places he could try on the way.