Lust for Life (16 page)

“
I
know it. Jim broke my wrist. He tore out half my throat. He was faster, stronger,
and more ruthless than you.” I wrap my arms around Shane’s waist and press my face
to his chest. “I don’t care what they say. I’ll always know you saved me.”

“That’s all that matters.” He kisses the top of my head, in total violation of the
no-PDA-in-uniform rule. “And I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

•  •  •

We prepare the station for battle, without looking like we’re preparing the station
for battle.

When Shane and I arrive Friday night, David and Franklin have just finished installing
hinged doors in the two boarded-up windows of the main office.

“Check this out.” David swings open the square door in the window behind Lori’s desk.
Then he rests the nozzle of a holy-water pistol in a little notch at the bottom. “For
greater shooting stability.”

Shane strides forward. “Close that thing, it’s after dark! Someone might see it.”
He slams it shut. “I mean, it’s great. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” David points to the window. “You couldn’t see them from outside
when they’re closed, could you?”

“No, they’re completely seamless.” It’s a little weird, I admit, being in the office
with Shane and David after having been sandwiched between them. But I’ll get used
to it. I run my fingers over the wrought-iron handle of the other “turret door.” “Nice
style, too.”

“Got the handles on sale at Lowe’s.” Franklin unplugs the electric drill and starts
to wrap the cord around the grip.

I notice they’ve moved our coatrack, which is currently a heavy cardboard cutout of
Eric Clapton. I put it back in place. “So, Franklin, big date tonight. Will it be
Hair
today, gone tomorrow?”

The others cover their ears, too late to escape my bad pun. Franklin turns to me,
drill poised as if to shoot me with it. “Excuse me?”

“You’re going to see a musical. Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m great. No, wait.” He sets down the drill and makes exaggerated jazz hands. “I’m
faaaaabulous! Is that better?”

“If by ‘better’ you mean scarier than
Saw
and its four hundred sequels put together, then yes.”

David and Shane go into David’s office for another tactical meeting. Just because
David is retired and Shane is suspended doesn’t mean they can stop being Enforcement
agents when our lives are on the line.

“So this thing with Adrian . . .” I begin.

“This thing with Adrian,” Franklin says, “will either kill me or complete me. Or completely
kill me.”

I take a moment to absorb Franklin’s combination of sanguinity and cynicism. Sanguinicism.

How long before I think of nothing but words? How long before I can’t relate to humans
at all, and then finally not even other vampires? How long before I retreat into my
own head?

How many more years do I have?

I follow Franklin into his office and watch him sift through his drawers. He’s still
got Aaron’s picture on his desk, off to the left of his desktop computer.

They probably thought they had years left to them, but Aaron was stolen away. At least
I came back, so I could spend whatever time I have left with Shane. It’s better than
nothing.

“Why are you staring at me?” he says.

I lean against his doorjamb. “Did you ever know anyone with Alzheimer’s?”

“Why?” He looks up, concerned. “Not your mom.”

“Nah, she’s sharper than your stash of pencil stakes. You’ll see when you meet her
next month at our wedding. Plus she’s too young for Alzheimer’s.”

“People can get it younger. I had an aunt who wasn’t even sixty when she died of it.”
He shakes his head. “It was horrible. She disappeared little by little. You know when
your DVR is on the fritz and the picture gets all pixilated and sometimes it even
freezes? And then it’s normal again?”

“Yeah?”

“It was like that. At the beginning, anyway. Then the pixilation would last longer
and longer, until one
day there was no normal picture anymore. It was all frozen.”

I feel that way right now, staring at him, thinking of those moments when everything
stops and my mind seizes on some little thing. I was never an absentminded human.
In fact, I was present-minded. My mind was always—oh, crap, I’m doing it right now.

“That’s terrible,” I say, because I have a vague recollection that what Franklin said
was, in fact, terrible.

He gives me a strange look. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s my turn to pick the charity for next year’s Rockathon.” It’s like a telethon,
but with rock. “I thought of Alzheimer’s, and it’d be great if one of us had a personal
connection to it.” That sounds bad. “Not ‘great’ like ‘fortunate,’ but ‘great’ like . . .
‘useful.’ ”

Franklin gives a gruff chuckle. “Every one of those DJs seems like highly functioning
Alzheimer’s patients some days, the way their minds are all going.” He looks up suddenly.
“I don’t mean you or Shane. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m young. I’ve got years and years and years of fun before the decay
starts.” I imitate his bad jazz hands, then turn away so he doesn’t see how fast my
smile disappears.

“This place is a glorified shack,” Shane is telling David in his office. “Only two
windows, and they face the same direction.”

“Right, north. It cuts down on the sunlight.”

“It also makes it really hard to defend. We can’t see anyone coming from other directions.”

I walk over to David’s office as he says, “We could station someone outside.”

“They could be killed or taken hostage.” Shane
points to the ceiling. “I’m telling you, we need the attic. Cut holes to make windows.”

The door at the bottom of the stairs opens, and Jeremy saunters up.

“It’s not a real attic,” David tells Shane. “That floor wouldn’t hold a chipmunk,
much less a pair of Enforcement agents.”

I imagine a chipmunk dressed from head to toe in black and wielding a crossbow. It
doesn’t cheer me up as much as one would think.

“Besides,” David says, “it’ll cause flooding.”

“What are they talking about?” Jeremy asks me.

“How to see and shoot our approaching enemy from on high without them seeing and shooting
us.”

“I don’t know about the shooting, but a security camera’ll take care of the seeing.”

“That’s an idea,” David says. “We should’ve had some installed years ago.”

“When people started trying to kill us,” I add, then ask Jeremy, “How much do one
of those things cost?”

“For the whole system? It depends. Anywhere from several hundred to several thousand.”

“Can you install one in a single day, oh, A/V god supreme of ours?”

He blushes a little and adjusts his glasses. “Sure. I can try to get the really small
cameras that no one’ll see. Otherwise these vampires can just knock them out with
a rock or their fists.”

I hadn’t thought about how high a vampire can jump. I fold my arms over my chest,
more to hug myself than anything. “We’re sitting ducks here.”

“But we’re making preparations,” Shane protests.
“We’re stockpiling weapons, setting a perimeter, gathering personnel. We’ll have at
least two Control Enforcement agents here at all times, not including me.”

“Against eight vengeful vampires. Maybe more. It’s not enough, and you know it.”

“What else can we do?”

“I don’t know.” I shove my hands in my pockets. My middle finger scrapes against a
small, hard plastic object. I pull it out and almost laugh.

It’s the
T
from the sign outside Shane’s tribunal hearing room. I never found a place for it
on the sign when I turned
2:15 AM, MCALLISTER TRIBUNAL
into . . . what was it again?
I’LL SCAM A BURNER TIL 2:15 AM
?

That sentence makes a weird sort of sense. I was, after all, a scam artist in my younger
years. “Burner” could be short for “burnout,” what Regina would call a “waste-oid.”
Or it could just mean “one who burns.” But “burns” as in “They burn other things,”
or do they themselves burn up? Heh, like a vampire.

I’m peripherally aware of the conversation continuing around me: how to fight off
the horde of Jim’s progeny who’ll soon be coming for us. How to solve the uncertainty
of when they’ll attack, and the problem of their greater numbers.

I’LL SCAM BURNERS
 . . .

But how?

My con artist’s brain says, soothingly,
Start with their weakness. Start with something they love, something they want more
than anything in the world.

Jim.

I can’t give them Jim. He’s dead. They felt him die, so I can’t pretend he’s still
alive.

What’s the next best thing to having someone you love back in your arms? I imagine
Shane dying—no, that’s too painful. I imagine my father dying without my ever seeing
him again. What would I want most, other than to go back in time and tell him I loved
him? (I really need to write myself a note to do that.)

I’d want to honor his memory. Pay my respects. Share my grief with both my mom’s and
his families. I’d want a—

“Funeral.”

David, Jeremy, and Shane stop talking and stare at me.

Shane comes to me. “What’d you say?”

“Jim needs a funeral. Or at least, a memorial service or a wake. For all his fans
and friends, and for his progeny.”

“Why would we want his progeny to—oh.” Shane breaks into a grin. “You want to flush
them out.”

“I want to know when and where they’ll appear. If they really love Jim—and based on
the stuff he kept, they do, very much—they’ll jump at the chance to pay tribute.”

“What if paying tribute means killing everyone in the building?” David’s face is full
of dread (dreadful? No, not really). “You’d be endangering the public. At the very
least, you’d risk exposing the truth about vampires.”

“Then we don’t tell the public.” Jeremy pats the sleeve covering his inner forearm,
something he does when a new tattoo itches but he can’t scratch it. “We could put
the word out through vampire channels only.”

David contemplates this for a moment. “With enough Control presence, no one would
get hurt.”

“This is perfect.” I pull out my phone. “The Control
can’t dispatch enough agents to the station every day to keep us safe, but I bet they
can do it for one night.”

Jeremy goes to Lori’s desk and wakes up her computer. “I’ll write the invitation now.”

“Send me the draft when you’re done. I’ll approve final wording once I get the go-ahead
from the Control. This is brilliant.” I dial Colonel Lanham, not caring that it’s
my own idea I just praised.

I reach Lanham’s voice mail and ask him to call me, with no specifics. His line is
supposedly secure, but I don’t know who checks his messages.

As I hang up, I realize that’s not all I don’t know about Lieutenant Colonel Winston
Lanham. I don’t know if he’s married or has kids, whether he loves or hates his job,
or even where he lives when he’s not at work. For all I know, he sleeps on the couch
in his office.

Shane picks up the holy-water pistol from Lori’s desk. They’re made from top-of-the-line
children’s toys, the summer yellows and pinks painted over with a dull black lacquer
for nighttime camouflage. But in Shane’s careful, expert hands, it becomes as sexy
as a Glock.

I can’t believe I’m getting turned on by weapons. What’s happening to me? Am I so
desperate to survive that I’m reverting to cavewoman mode?

“Shane, can I bring my laptop into the studio tonight and hang out with you?”

“Sure.” He sets down the pistol and gives me a smile. “You know you’re welcome anytime.”

“I also know it’s crowded in there with two people, and sometimes I distract you.”

He takes a step forward, bringing his body close and
sliding his fingers between mine. “I like when you distract me.”

“Get a room!” Franklin yells from his office. “And I don’t mean the studio. We could
hear you guys the last time.”

Shane looks toward Franklin. “Did I leave the mic on?”

“Yes,” say Jeremy, David, and Franklin in unison. Then Franklin adds, “I can’t wait
until you’re a boring old married couple like Lori and David.”

“Hey,” David says. “We’re not old.”

“You will be.” Jeremy talks while typing. “Babies make people age faster.”

Once it was obvious that the older vampires could detect Lori’s pregnancy, she decided
to let Jeremy and Franklin in on the not-so-secret secret.

“I thought kids are supposed to keep you young.” David looks among us. “Right?”

I shake my head. “Stress, lack of sleep, Chuck E. Cheese’s–induced malnutrition. Not
to mention brain rot from children’s music.”

Jeremy starts singing a Teletubbies song (I assume that’s what it is, based on the
high-pitched baby voice and bad British accent).

“Our kids won’t be listening to that crap,” David tells Jeremy.

“No, they’ll be listening to They Might Be Giants’ children’s albums, so you and Lori
can pretend you’re still cool while you drive around in your beige minivan with the
DVD player and four million cup holders.”

“Don’t forget stain-resistant seats,” Franklin adds.

David raises his voice. “We won’t have a minivan, and for the record, They Might Be
Giants are very cool.”

“They
were
very cool,” Jeremy says, “until they started making minivan music.” Without looking
at me, he casually holds up his hand for a high-five, which I dispense posthaste.

Then I notice that Shane hasn’t joined the jocularity. He’s leaning over my desk,
going over our weapons inventory for the fortieth time.

“No point in obsessing over that list now,” I tell him. “The Control will give us
more once they approve our new plan.”

“After my suspension, I can’t touch a Control-issued weapon, so I need to see what’s
ours.”

I’ve been putting his tribunal out of my mind as much as possible. Since we left Control
headquarters the other night, he’s spoken very little about his sentencing. When Shane
clams up, it usually means he’s upset.