Generation V (20 page)

I was able to stand, despite shrieks of protest from my gut, ribs, and left knee, and I walked over to where Suzume was still crouched beside the body. She’d been busy while I was distracted. First she’d cut away what was left of Phillip’s shirt, and had wrapped it around her hands like cloth mittens. Then she’d carved open Phillip’s chest, and was now cutting out his heart.

“Suzume, what the fuck?” I asked. I didn’t feel outraged at her desecration. Right now, with the knowledge that the girls were dead still seeping into me, everything was dulled, though I doubt I ever would’ve spared much outrage on Phillip’s behalf. Mostly I felt tired.

“To kill an older vampire, you have to destroy the brain and the heart,” Suzume said, sawing away at the last stubborn ventricle that held the organ in place. “Otherwise he can regenerate and come after you. Usually it’s a good idea to torch the body too, just to be sure. Now, our buddy here might not be a vampire, but he stayed up long after we should’ve put him down. He was faster than he should’ve been, and I have some cracked ribs that say that he was also a lot stronger than a scrawny guy should’ve been. So we’re just going to be a little cautious here.” She freed the heart, and dumped it on the ground carelessly, where it lay like discarded meat partially wrapped in the fabric she’d used to help keep her hands clean. “Do me a favor and crush that with your brick.”

“You’re serious?” I asked.

“Do
you
want to just leave it unsmushed?”

Well, when put that way…I grabbed the brick and gave the heart a few good whacks, until now it was a very flattened piece of meat.

“And the brain?” I asked.

“It’s already dribbling out his ears thanks to when you nailed him during the fight. Now help me haul.”

Suzume grabbed his shoulders, I grabbed his feet, and we started moving Phillip from the middle of the alleyway to one of the back corners. While Phillip wasn’t particularly heavy, neither of us was feeling very good after the fight, and we were both grunting and cursing a lot whenever we hit a sore spot, which we both had in spades. At one point Suzume surprised me by calling for a break halfway there. We both crouched down and wheezed a little.

“How do you know how to kill a vampire?” I asked. “I didn’t know any of that.” Not that that was a subject that was likely to come up over dinner, but I couldn’t help feeling slightly miffed at how ignorant I was of our own basic biology. I’d always assumed that we were just like humans, only a bit faster and stronger. I did know that a wooden stake to the heart wasn’t a great idea, but only because Chivalry always muttered a lot whenever he watched
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
reruns with me. I’d asked him once if it took a stake to kill us, and he’d told me that at my age having a wooden stake hammered into my chest would certainly prove fatal, but I could also get the same result with stakes of any other substance. Or by getting shot. Or stabbed. Or run over by a car. Or even eating bad shellfish. I’d assumed at the time that the takeaway on that lesson was meant to be that
we were all fairly vulnerable. In retrospect, it apparently was meant to be that I, personally, was really vulnerable to everything, and the rest of them were just careful to avoid any aggressive movements directed at their chests.

“My grandmother told me.”

“How does
she
know?”

“Oh, she asked around.” For the first time, there was the hint of a smile. “Purely academic curiosity, of course.”

“Of course.”

We finally got Phillip’s corpse to the spot Suzume wanted; then we spent another few minutes fussing around until he was situated the way she wanted. Now he was rolled up on his side, knees pulled up to his chest, with one arm under his head like he was napping.

I looked at our handiwork.

“Oh yeah, this looks like a completely natural death,” I said. “As long as you ignore the gunshot, the smashed head and nose, the empty spot where one eye used to be, and, oh yeah, the
gaping chest wound
.”

“I like the sarcasm. You must be feeling better. Now gimme your shirt.”

I stared at her, slightly confused.

She spread her arms and wiggled her shoulders. “Naked, dude.”

“Oh, shit, sorry.” I found that I was still able to blush as I hauled off my flannel button-down and handed it over to her. Clearly I must’ve incurred some kind of head wound to not only manage to ignore her nudity during the entire heart-smushing and body-moving ordeals, but fail to volunteer my shirt before that. Clearly I was lacking in chivalrous moral fortitude. So to speak.

She took my shirt with a little smirk and a completely
gratuitous wiggle that had a chain reaction on some of her more interesting body parts. To my surprise, she didn’t put the shirt on. Instead she turned it inside out and began to scrub off the blood that was still liberally coating her from the fight and her postmortem activities.

“Did I get everything?” she asked.

“Um, one more spot on your face.”

“Thanks.” She wiped it off, then handed the shirt back to me. I held it away from myself and looked at her, confused. She held her hand out expectantly.

“T-shirt, please.”

“Oh, hell no,” I said. “I gave you a perfectly nice shirt. It wasn’t my fault that you decided to make it a washcloth.”

“Fortitude,” she said in a reasonable tone that set my teeth on edge. “We need to get back to the car without having someone call the police. That means that we can’t be obviously coated in blood, and I really shouldn’t be naked.”

I couldn’t really argue with her reasoning, though I did try as I stripped off my T-shirt and handed it over. She pulled it on, and it completely tented her, falling almost down to her knees. Then she grabbed my flannel and proceeded to mop me off as well. It did get most of Phillip’s blood off, though it revealed more than a few scrapes and cuts, plus my own set of blooming bruises that seemed to completely coat my torso.

“So I have to walk back to the car shirtless?” I asked.

“While that would be lots of fun, no.” Suzume turned the shirt right side out again, and held it out to me. The inside was covered in blood, and only the fact that it had
started the night as navy blue kept it looking even semipassable on the outside.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Very often, but not this time.”

“It’s
wet
.”

“On.” I knew that implacable look on her face. While it usually involved a demand that it was a mealtime, I knew that it again meant that I was going to have to give in.

In a night of increasingly gross occurrences, putting on that bloody shirt was right near the top. Patches of it stuck to my skin, and I shuddered as I buttoned it up. There was also some relief that I’d fed from Madeline so recently. Three nights ago, there would’ve been no way for me to feel anything but hunger when presented with this much blood. I hated to feed, but I had to acknowledge in this moment that putting it off the way I had been doing was more than a little stupid.

Then again, maybe it hadn’t been entirely clever life decisions that led me to stand in an alleyway at night, accompanied only by a fox and a pair of bodies.

“Are we done?” I asked.

“Not quite,” Suzume said. She crouched down again next to the body, and rested her right hand over Phillip’s staring eye. She took a deep breath in, and for a moment it was if my entire body was filled with that pins-and-needles feeling that comes when your foot is just on the edge of falling asleep. Then Suzume breathed out again slowly, and the feeling passed.

She got up slowly, brushing off her knees. Her face was completely colorless, and she shook. “Okay, now we can go.”

“What do you mean? How is that going to keep them from finding Phillip?”

“Phillip where?”

“Right there!” I pointed at where we’d dumped the twisted and ruined body, then stared. Phillip wasn’t there anymore. Instead it was an old man, dressed in rags with a little hat sculpted out of tinfoil. He was curled up on his side, eyes closed peacefully. Flies were converging around him, and the smell of him made me reel backward. I knew without question that the old man must have died here days ago, probably when his heart gave out.

I looked over at Suzume, who had braced herself against the wall. She was still shaking slightly, and her head almost drooped with exhaustion, but there was that familiar smirk on her face.

“What did you do? How could—” I looked back again. The old man still lay there. “You changed him!”

“No,” Suzume said. “I just changed the way you see him.”

“What do you mean?”

Suzume slid a little, and when I reached out a hand she took it gratefully, using it to pull herself back up. “Everyone who looks at him will see an old homeless man who died a few days ago, and everyone will agree that his heart must’ve given out. The coroner is going to see the same thing, even if he opens up the chest. The morticians who keep him in storage while they try to find his family will all see an old man, not Phillip. The people who bury him weeks from now will still see an old man. Every camera will record the old man. People will walk in his blood and never realize it. Someone can
stick their hand inside his chest and never realize that there isn’t a heart left.”

“My God,” I whispered.

“Not quite, but I am pretty awesome,” Suzume said. She started to slide again, and this time I wrapped my arm around her waist. “It’s hard to do,” she said, resting her head against my shoulder. “It has to trick a lot of people for a long time. It has to trick machines too.”

“Are you going to put one on Jessica too?”

“I only had enough in me for one.” Her voice was soft, almost thin.

“Why him?”

Apparently she wasn’t tired enough for sarcasm, because she rolled her eyes at me. “We have two bodies. One is a vampire spawn whose body isn’t quite normal anymore, who both of us have bled on and who has my saliva all over him. The other is a murdered little girl who every police officer in this city is looking for. Which one would you rather have CSI technicians crawling all over?”

“Valid point,” I muttered.

I looked back once as we left. Jessica was shadowed by the Dumpster beside her, but her blond hair and pale skin were bright in the moonlight. I hoped someone would find her soon, and that they would put a blanket over her. She looked so small and vulnerable, lying there in her daisy pajamas.

We made slow progress back to the car. Suzume was so tired she was practically sleepwalking, and I was still bruised and sore from the fight, with one knee that ached sharply with every step. I dumped the trash bags down a storm drain a few blocks away from the alley, and by that time I was practically carrying Suzume.

This should’ve been my opportunity for a display of masculine studliness as I swept the gorgeous woman off her feet and carried her to safety, but unfortunately—

“Christ, you’re heavy,” I bitched to Suzume. We’d finally given up all hope that she could walk back to the car, and now I was carrying her piggyback style. Her head lolled on my shoulder, hair falling down to tickle my nose, and I heard her quiet snicker in my ear.

My rest breaks were getting longer and longer by the time we finally reentered the neighborhood we’d parked in. It was almost midnight now, and there were lines out the door in front of most of the clubs. People were dressed to impress, with short skirts and shiny shirts.

“Oh, come on,” I moaned, staring at the hordes from the shadow of a closed building’s awning. “This was completely deserted a few hours ago.”

“Thursday is ladies’ night,” Suzume muttered in my ear. “Just get to the car.”

“Yeah, fantastic idea. You’re wearing a T-shirt and look like I’ve just roofied your drink. I’m going to get arrested, and then they might start wondering why my shirt is soaked in blood.”

“Idiot,” Suzume whispered. “They’ll see a drunk girl being carried home by her boyfriend. No one will worry, and no one will care.”

I cranked back and looked at her. Her eyes were barely slitted open, and she looked even paler than before. “I thought you didn’t have the energy for any more illusions,” I said.

“I’m showing dumb, mostly intoxicated and hormone-driven twits exactly what they expect to see at this time of night. This is barely a scrap of an illusion that only has
to hold up at a distance. But unless you’d like to test your own bloody date-rape concept, I’d suggest getting us to the car before I lose even this.”

I shut up and hauled us down the street to where I was parked. A few people laughed at us, and one guy yelled some advice about making sure she vomited before I put her in the car, but no one seemed worried, and no one came any closer to investigate. I hurried as fast as I could anyway, the back of my neck creeping at the thought of what we’d look like without Suzume’s illusion. That meant that we were moving at a pace just faster than a crippled giraffe.

The Fiesta had not fared well in our absence. The rear driver’s-side window had been smashed, and my radio had now joined the free market economy. I was too exhausted to even feel pissed, and I practically poured Suzume into the passenger seat. I had just enough awareness to put the gun into the trunk, where Suzume’s duffel bag and my CD collection had managed to survive unscathed. I opened up Suzume’s duffel and after some rooting around managed to unearth a pair of shorts for her. I might’ve been half-dead from exhaustion and pounded to a pulp, but I still knew that I’d feel calmer if she was wearing more clothing.

I shouldn’t have bothered. A black fox was sound asleep on the seat when I got into the car, her head and neck still threaded through the appropriate holes in my T-shirt. She woke up enough to give a few halfhearted grumbles when I pulled it off her, but then her head dropped back down and she was out again. I stripped off my flannel shirt, stuffing it under my seat and shuddering at the way the saturated fabric squished, and pulled the T-shirt over my head.

The drive back to my apartment was awful. My brain felt like it was mired in molasses, and at one point I forgot and tried to turn on the radio to keep myself awake. My already cut knuckles scratched against a few of the ripped-off wires, which did manage to wake me up a little. Night wind howled in from the broken window, and I hoped that it wasn’t supposed to rain. There was no way I was going to tape plastic over that tonight.