Vamp-Hire (7 page)

“I already got the winda out, I can’t haul
that thing around n’more.” He gestured toward the floor where some
kind of electric saw was next to him. “The hole is all dug out,
just need you ta do the honors. Cut along the lines and it should
come free and we can walk right out. Try not ta use your arms.” The
old man made and up and down motion with his arms. “Hold it steady
and move with your body nice and slow.”

Nick grabbed the saw and held it up to
inspect the blade. The muscles in his skinny forearms flexed with
each movement. He took a step toward the wall, not wanting to do
what he was about to do. This was a good change to the house, but
one more step away from the house he had known.

The handle was comfortable in his hands. He
planted one foot behind the other, put his thumb on the button to
turn it on, reared back the saw back to chest high and stepped up
to the wall.

Cutting was easy and relatively fast. After
he’d made shallow cuts along all the lines, the old man had him go
over them again, sawing deeper the second go around. Nick put the
saw on the floor where he’d gotten it and he and the man pulled the
cut pieces out, carefully avoiding the sharp edges.

Nick climbed into the well and stood up. The
soil in front of him came up to about chest level and he looked
around. There was a small construction vehicle with a forked shovel
attached to it. That had to have been what they'd used to make that
big pile of dirt a few feet away from the vehicle. Nick climbed
out.

“A little help here?” He turned to see the
old man reach a hand up like a zombie crawling from a grave. Nick
knelt and grasped his hand, pulling gently so as not to hurt the
old timer.

“Much obliged,” the old man said. He looked
around, then at Nick. “That’s pretty decent work you did back
there. You been on the job long?”

“No, it’s my first day,” Nick said. Despite
not liking what was happening to his house and the old man’s part
in it, Nick found himself liking him.

“Why, look at you. Speaking the King’s
English and everything.” The man looked genuinely surprised as if
he hadn’t considered that Nick had understood a word he had said
until that moment. He extended a hand. “They call me Snoop, on
account of me having a beagle when I was a boy and that damned
comic strip.”

“I’m Nick,” he said and they shook. Nick
realized something was wrong before he saw Snoop’s eyes bulge and
his hands go to his neck. About two dozen feet away near the street
a wood chipper was going and a man was constantly feeding branches
into it.

Nick’s senses were sharp, zooming in on the
wound on Snoop’s neck. The air was flooded with the aroma of hot
copper and it smelled wonderful.

He grabbed the old man by the throat and
pushed him to the ground, peeling his hands away from the gash.

Nick felt deep temptation to drink from the
red spray coming from the old man’s neck, barely managing to hold
himself back. Feeding from him seemed so right, the smell
saturating his brain.

“Hey, what the hell are you doin’ to Snoop?”
someone shouted. The voice had sounded like it had come from a long
distance away, but it was enough to bring him back to his
senses.

“He’s hurt!” Nick said, not looking away from
the gash. He felt footsteps and then someone was standing over
him.

Snoop’s eyes began to roll and Nick realized
he must have been cutting off his air; his hand was the only thing
keeping the old man from bleeding to death, though.

Someone knelt next to him, sliding a hand
beneath Nick’s. It was rougher, older, and by the way he took hold
of Snoop’s neck, more experienced. Snoop was slapping at Nick’s arm
when a new hand pushed his out of the way. Snoop began gasping for
air and fighting feebly at the muscular arms holding him down. Nick
looked at the third man and realized he was looking at Pop-Pop. He
had his shirt off, exposing a muscular upper frame, the doffed
shirt wrapped tightly around his other hand.

“You’re going to be okay, old guy.”

Nick thought that was a little funny. The two
of them looked like they couldn’t have been more than five years
apart and he wasn’t entirely sure who was younger.

“Somebody oughta call an ambulance.”
Pop-Pop’s voice was calm, reassuring. He had taken command of the
situation without raising his voice at all. Nick wasn’t surprised
to learn later he was military.

The man who had ordered Nick into the
basement, the foreman Nick supposed, pulled out a cell phone and
called.

He stepped as far back as he could from the
crowd, from Snoop especially. His blood was still pungent in Nick’s
nose. He felt a pull that he wasn’t certain he could resist again
if he got too close. For a moment, he considered turning and
running away, leaving his paltry few things behind. Then the
ambulance came and his curiosity got the better of him. He watched
the two EMTs come with one of those beds on wheels.

They got Snoop loaded onto it and let the
wheels out, although it was impossible to roll it on the lumpy
lawn. The muscular old guy who had shouldered Nick aside insisted
on walking right with him and quieted some of the other workers who
wanted to carry Snoop.

No sooner had the ambulance pulled off when
something big hit Nick in the back. He went down hard and before he
could flip over someone’s knee pressed between his shoulder
blades.

“If Snoop dies, you die first,” a deep voice
said.

“I didn’t—it wasn’t me.” One of Nick’s lungs
felt on the verge of bursting and he could hardly breathe from the
pressure.

Then something cold and jagged pressed
against his cheek. Nick smelled metal and when the serrated blade
bit into his cheek he recognized it was a knife. He smelled his
blood too, which wasn’t hot and sweet like Snoop’s.

“Hold it, son!” someone said. Probably the
man who had helped Snoop. His voice was a mix between calm and
alarm. Like he’d already seen everything that was going to happen
over the next few minutes and he knew exactly what to do.

The person holding Nick down didn’t move.

At least he doesn’t have the knife to my
throat, Nick thought.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,
but you’re not going to kill him by slicing his cheek off. Put it
to his throat.”

What the hell?

“Lift his chin up first so you can put the
blade right on his Adam’s apple.” Nick’s hair was short so the man
had to palm the top of his head and pull back. Nick cooperated,
hoping—praying—this was going some way other than how it looked.
The man’s weight shifted and he quickly moved the knife to Nick’s
throat.

“Good,” the other man said. Nick was pretty
certain it was the muscular old guy. He knew Nick hadn’t hurt
Snoop, hadn’t he? Could he have known what Nick was? Had he seen
the look of hunger or something in his eyes?

He had to do something right now. He couldn’t
just lie on the ground while his murderer was tutored through
slitting his throat. Nick focused his eyes. There were at least a
half dozen people standing about ten feet away, watching, the
muscly old man, now with his shirt back on, at the center of them.
He had an all-white high top and a dour look on his face.

“Now I’m not going to tell you killing this
man isn’t worth the cost, you’ve already calculated that for
yourself.” Nick began to slide one hand toward the knife arm of the
man on top of him. If the guy kept talking long enough maybe he
could do something. What, exactly, Nick had no idea.

For starters, getting the man off him before
he cut was just the beginning. One of Nick’s legs was going numb
from the constant pressure on his back. He was certain he couldn’t
take any one of these guys in a fight and if they grabbed him, he
was done for. It might be better to let the one who started the
work to finish it.

“Snoop’s dying because of this one!” the man
on top of him said. He regripped Nick’s head.

“No. Dammit, no,” Nick mumbled. He looked
again at the group of men surrounding him. Actually, only the old
guy looked like he couldn’t care less about what was happening. The
others looked afraid. Maybe they didn’t like what was happening. He
looked at the old man again.

The old man was looking back. Really looking,
like he was trying to tell Nick something with his eyes.

“You hold all the cards here. Whether he goes
sideways or stops right there. When you grab a hold of him the
choice is all on you.”

“What?” the man on top of Nick said. Nick was
thinking the same thing.

The man nodded and then it clicked. He was
talking to Nick.

Grab a hold of him… goes sideways…

Nick put his hand on the ground, slowly
sliding it under his attacker’s elbow. He reached up as high as he
could, snatched a handful of shirt and yanked. The man let out a
yelp of surprise and fell over easily.

Nick pushed up onto his knees, not in any
shape for a fight, especially with a knife-wielding hothead. He saw
the man he’d been eating lunch with on the porch a short while ago,
teeth bared in fury, half a second away from leaping at him.

Then came a blur of motion as the old man
smashed his knee into the other man’s face. He must have come off
his feet to do it because Nick saw both boots plant when he landed.
The man with the knife lay motionless and the old man sauntered
over and kicked the weapon out of his half open hand.

“Emilio is a little quick to jump to the
wrong conclusion. I’ll have him taken back to the room.” Nick
turned to see the foreman ushering a couple of men forward. They
picked him up by the arms and dragged him off.

The old man turned and held a hand out to
him. “I’m sorry about all this. You okay?”

“Yeah. Fine.” Nick took the hand and was
yanked onto his feet.

“You speak English?” the old man asked.

“Well, yeah. Don’t you?”

The old man eyed him, then turned and began
to walk away. “Come inside. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Nick wasn’t sure if his legs were working
yet. He chanced a step; so far, so good. He took another, then
another and he was on his way.

At first, the only physical signs of the old
man’s age were his hair and some minor lines at the corners of his
eyes and mouth. Then he slid on a pair of bifocals and Nick would
have placed him closer to seventy than sixty.

“Nothing’s too bad,” he said, dabbing at
Nick’s neck with a cotton ball doused with alcohol. “You are going
to need a stitch or two on your cheek. Either I can do it for you
or you can go to a hospital where they’ll ask for identification
and once your name pops up in the registry you get a phone call and
have to explain what you were doing here.”

A chill ran through Nick. Obviously, Pop-Pop
knew what he was.

“What are you, looking for work?”

“Yeah,” Nick said honestly. He left out the
part about him actually living here.

“You said your name is Nick, right?”

He nodded and winced when the man poked too
hard into his neck.

“I’m Colonel Adolph Stone, retired. The way
you acquitted yourself out there, you have earned the right to call
me Dolph.”

“Okay. Dolph. Sir.” Dolph smiled with one
corner of his mouth and Nick got the hint. “Okay, Dolph.” He didn’t
know exactly what he’d done to ‘acquit himself’. Dolph had done
almost all the work, coaching Emilio into putting himself in a
vulnerable position and then knocking him unconscious. If that was
the way the man wanted to see it, Nick wasn’t about to correct
him.

Dolph had sterilized his hands and was
wearing latex gloves that looked like he couldn’t have had much
feeling left. At first Nick had assumed it was to prevent the risk
of his cuts getting infected but then he realized Dolph had known
what he was. There was a great deal he couldn’t recall from his
time in the Center, although he did remember his condition wasn’t
contagious. Scientists didn’t know exactly how one percent of the
world had gotten infected; fluid exchange of any kind wasn’t it,
though.

That didn’t stop people from taking
precautions.

He pushed the thought away. Not all people
were that way.

Dolph picked up the needle and thread off the
plate he had on the table. It was an actual sewing needle and an
actual dinner plate. He steeled himself for what was coming.

“You’re gonna feel a little pinch. Try your
best not to flinch.” It hurt more than a little pinch. He felt the
needle sliding through his cheek and it also felt like he was being
poked in the eye. Maybe it was a sympathetic nerve thing, he didn’t
know if there were such a thing. Dolph moved unhurriedly. He tied
off the stitches and snipped them with the pair of scissors on the
paper towel.

“Those will stay in for a week and then you
can cut them out. Maybe you can get a friend to do it for you if
you’re too squeamish. I made them as tight together as I could so
you have as small a scar as possible.”

“How many stitches?”

“Four.” Dolph was already packing things
away. He threw the cotton ball, gloves, needle and remaining thread
all in the trash and took out the bag. He walked it out to the bin
in the garage, came back in, and washed his hands.

“It’s getting too late. I’ll drive you.
First, you need some chow. You hungry?”

“No.” Nick shook his head.

“Sure you are. Your stomach and your brain
just aren’t on talking terms. How long you been out?”

“Three months,” Nick said uncomfortably.

“Where are you staying?”

“With a friend. Only until I can find work
and move into my own space.”

Dolph nodded. He had put a pot of something
on the stove before he’d stitched Nick up and the smell was
permeating the air.

“I learned to cook in the Marines,” he said.
The words military and culinary didn’t seem as if they belonged in
the same sentence, so Nick had held out hope the food was going to
be any good. As it warmed it actually smelled okay. “I made it this
morning after my granddaughter left for work.” He poured Nick a
glass of water, set it down, and placed a piece of chocolate
wrapped in blue tinfoil next to it.