Annie of the Undead (17 page)

“You told me how he was going to hate me. You
forgot to mention,” I lingered, watching the temptation my nearness
brought him stab him like knives, “that I was
absolutely…going…to…abhor…him.”

I let my hand drift across his shoulder as I
walked away. I did not look back.

Andy put up a very nasty front, but he was going
to help Miguel. That was why he was here. He was using the
opportunity to be nasty, using that fleeting moment when he
possessed some power over Miguel to wreak small vengeance, like a
child having a temper tantrum in public. But there was no doubt who
still wielded the most power, both physically and emotionally.

He could take cheap shots at me. I didn’t care.
But I knew how to hit as well as I knew how to take hits, and as my
opponents had discovered over the years, when I hit I hit hard.

I’m Miguel’s honey now, big boy, and I know
you won’t dare touch me. And now you know that I know. How ‘bout
them apples?

I marched off into the crowd with my most
flagrantly gender-confused Gestapo strut.

I didn’t let all the things that Andy had
mentioned trouble me. The “fugue,” that thirst business –I figured
I’d know soon enough. So my vampire hadn’t told every single thing
there was to know about vampires and covens and what-have-you. He
was getting around to it, and he’d told me a hell of a lot
already…or so I thought.

One thing he’d strategically neglected to tell
me was that sharing blood was the closest thing vampires had to
having sex, or at least sex is the closest thing to the
excruciating ecstasy of immortal blood-drinking, and he and Andy
were going off not just to save his unlife but to have ex-sex that
night. He’d also neglected to tell me that covens and cultists
meant
witches
, copious amounts of magic, and power struggles
as old as the last Ice Age. And I trusted the romantic undead
bastard. Me. Tough kid from Detroit.

Holy hell, I was an idiot.

Finding that I didn’t really have better things
to do and having already worked out for four hours that evening, I
went for a walkabout –a nice stretch of the legs to get vampires
out of my head for a while. I didn’t really keep track of where I
was going –I didn’t care. I just walked, and walked, and eventually
found myself in an area that seemed disproportionately populated by
twenty-something-year-olds, on foot and in cars, and sitting around
having useless twenty-something-year-old conversations about hair
and pimples and politics in the wet southern air. I was on the
campus of Tulane University.

As I walked across a green lawn beside a brick
building, labeled Minster Club, that looked to be a trendy
apartment building, I heard a terrible noise –the worst noise, in
fact, that I think I have ever heard, before or since –a noise so
appalling that my eardrums curled up into little tortillas and
slunk deep into the recesses of my brain in terror, which explains
my propensity ever after to fail to heed sound warnings given me by
people who know better…or maybe I had that before. Anyway, the
sound was horrible.

It was bagpipes. But at the time I was certain
it was the sound made by a sheep’s bladder ripped from the abdomen
of a sheep, pumped full of air, and then squeezed in an act of slow
torture…oh, wait that’s EXACTLY what it was.

I stood there, when I should have been running
for my life, mesmerized by the horror of it all. A bearded college
boy was puffing away on the thing on the stone walk before the
front door of the building. He seemed immune to the auditory toxin
his sheep’s bladder emitted.

But there was someone else who apparently felt
as strongly as I did that the sound was from Satan, or maybe even
more strongly. She flung open her window on the third floor over
the bagpiper’s head and began hurling curses down upon it with a
slatternly British brogue.

Her name was Yoki Hayashi.

The bagpiper, apparently rendered mercifully
deaf by his prolonged exposure to the noise, did not notice her.
She disappeared from the window, and for a second I thought she had
given up, but a moment later she reappeared, reached out of the
window, and dropped what appeared to be an entire bottle of Scotch
like a bomb from above.

The bottle smashed on the walk behind the
bagpiper, ineffectually spreading its contents over the bricks. I
watched as Yoki produced every imaginable item from her room –a
pair of shoes, a lamp, a stack of textbooks, half a dozen DVDs and
their player, a bunch of bananas, a bag of bagels, a dildo, and
hurled them down on our tormentor. But it was all to no avail. Yoki
Hayashi was not only the world’s worst boxer, she was the world’s
worst aim. A stuffed toy bear to his left, an oscillating fan to
his right, a feather boa landed somewhere off in the bushes, and a
bright pink bra hung from one of the pipes, but the piper himself
sustained no damage, and the torment went on. It seemed that she
had lost her battle with the horrible Scottish instrument of
terror.

But Yoki Hayashi still had one big gun left. She
disappeared from the window again, then reappeared, an expression
of maniacal glee on her face, up-lit by the street lamps below. In
her hands she held the Beast, Jesus Christ, and tied to its tiny
hood-dog studded harness was a yellow nylon rope.

Hand over hand, she lowered the crazed Christ.
The creature thrashed in its fury, itself driven mad by the sound,
spinning at the end of the rope like the top of death. I watched
with morbid fascination as the hairy black spider descended, inch
by inch toward the unsuspecting piper, never once feeling the urge
to yell warning.

Jesus did not disappoint. When he reached his
prey, there was a horrible sound as of some deformed thing dying,
the noise abruptly ceased, and a phenomenon that looked like the
blur of that cartoon Tasmanian Devil occurred. When it was over,
the piper was lying dazed on the ground, and the bagpipes, or what
was left of them, lay strewn over an eight-foot radius. Yoki began
hoisting her emissary of doom back up again, a look of insane
satisfaction on his hairy face, and a scrap of green plaid in his
jaws.

When she got him to the top, she gathered Jesus
into her arms and closed the window. Mission accomplished.

I suddenly wondered how I had ever hated this
girl.

Driven by some impulse I didn’t understand –a,
shall we say, curiosity about another human being (what, me?), I
walked past the bewildered former bagpiper and the rubble that
surrounded him and went into Minster Club. The name is easy to
remember, because Yoki lived in it. I started up the stairs.

I didn’t make it to the top of the stairs, for
halfway up, I was nearly bowled over by none other than the girl
and her beast, flying down the stairs as though they were on a
toboggan. I dodged out of the way, and she ran half a dozen steps
past me before she screeched to a perilous halt at the edge of a
step and turned around. Her face brightened into a ridiculous
caricature of joy when she recognized me.

“Gollygosh! Gollygosh! Annie!”

Yoki danced back up the stairs, her little
ballet toes barely touching the ground. The hoodlum chains on her
pants rattled like Ebenezer’s ghost. The little black hairball came
flying behind her, nipping at her heels and snarling like a
sheepdog.

“I knew you would come, once you got over
despising me.”

“That’s interesting logic.”

“You will find me filled with that. I’m
British.”

I looked over this new, non-gym-ninja Yoki. She
was like a little goth jewel, tumbled and polished to a high sheen.
Her skin was perfect pale yellow. Her eyes shined beneath
mascara-thickened black lashes, and deep violet eye shadow. The
earphones sprouting from the mp3 player on her hip still hung
around her neck, blaring techno music at 120 beats per minute. She
was wearing a pair of jeans so wide they made her legs look like
those of an elephant, torn at the hems to accommodate her petite
stature and dripping with chains meant for people twice her size
(good exercise, lugging all that metal). A teeny, tiny black halter
top revealed her shiny navel ring and the yin yang tattoo that
encircled her bellybutton. And there was that thing on her head,
the thing I had seen from all the way down on the lawn, the thing
that made her look like Sonic the Hedgehog.

“It’s jolly good to see you. You’ve decided to
come to the concert then?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Well, we go as far as we can.”

She was still speaking a mile a minute.
Apparently that wasn’t just something she did when she was being
threatened by big, mean boxers on ego trips –Yeah, yeah, I’m
including myself in that.

“Why don’t you come up to my abode and I’ll make
you a drink. I’ve got lots to choose from. Ve is loaded here.”

She held out her hand to me and begged, “Come!
Come! I have a gift for you.”

“A…gift?”

“Oh, yes. I hope you’ll like it. It was sort of
impromptu, really, but…”

She grabbed my hand, and I yielded to her
forward motion. She waltzed up the two more flights of stairs with
me in tow. She had gotten over halfway down in the space of a few
seconds while I was heading up. Amazing. She was like the Flash.
She was Flashette.

Jesus Christ snapped furiously at my pant legs
as we went. I gave him a gentle shove with my foot, only enough to
send him tumbling four or five stairs, and he laid off.

Yoki talked all the way up the stairs. She never
took a breath. I would tell you what she said, but it was all
drivel. You don’t want to hear it. Trust me on this.

We reached the door to her apartment. Through it
issued into the hall like a flesh-eating cloud the awful smell of
ylang ylang incense.

She dragged me through the door. Jesus Christ
proceeded to rampage around the room in a continuous circuit that
took him over the top of every single piece of furniture. Was there
an Iron Man for dogs? This guy would win it.

Yoki’s room was like a gothic fairyland, filled
with fairies, masquerade masks, stuffed animals, vampires
(coincidence?), cemeteries, gargoyles, ghosts –everything you’d
find at one of those goth/emo stores at the mall. In fact, her room
looked like an amalgamation of the two stores. The cute and the
macabre. The whole room was decorated in black fabric strung with
Christmas lights. Mardi Gras beads dangled from the posts of her
four-poster, telling of much partying had, which was also draped
with black fabric and a big wine-red comforter and populated by
Hello Kitty pillows. A collection of footwear made of shag
populated the space beneath the bed. There was a little candle and
rum bottle shrine on the table in front of her mirror that
showcased pictures of Johnny Depp and some other broody-looking
actor.

But, unlike so many goths I’d met in my junior
high days, Yoki’s room was absolutely neat and tidy. Even her forty
cans of Spam, plethora of tea boxes, and other weird British foods
were stacked with military precision on a bowing cinderblock and
one-by-four next to a cubical refrigerator covered with badly
hatched magnetic poetry.

She swept up a few strands of Mardi Gras beads
from the doorknob and put them over my head. Then she sat me
squarely on the bed. Jesus Christ set about tearing up one of his
numerous toys, a battered Beanie Baby mouse with beans coming out
everywhere. His snarls were so small but so fierce that he sounded
like a recording of an angry bear sped up to chipmunkize it.

“Welcome to my flat.” She aped a gracious
hostess. “It’s a small place, but it’ll do for now. I have to share
a toilet with three other girls and they are in there FOREVER in
the mornings, but that’s the worst of it. It’s brilliant to be
living in an historic structure in this town. You know, there are
ghosts living here. Amy, the girl down the hall, saw a Confederate
soldier on the stair. You know, there’s a house in the Quarter
where a slave girl leaps to her death every night? –I do ghost
tours.”

She opened the cubicle fridge to reveal her
trove of alcohol. She began removing bottles. Grey Goose, Bacardi,
Coca Cola, Medori Melon…

“So, what can I pour you to drink? A rum and
Coke? A Whiskey Sour?”

…Dark rum, light rum, Crown Royale, piña colada
mixer…

“Uh, just a…” I really shouldn’t drink in
training mode… Oh, what the hell. “You got Hennessey?”

“Ooh, you like it strong. I should have
guessed.”

She dug deeper. Brandy…red wine…Triple Sec… I
leaned closer. How much alcohol did she have in there? The amount
she was extracting didn’t seem reasonable for the space available.
Was the fridge like a doorway to another dimension or something?
One where alcohol flowed free in rivers of delight?

“So,” she said, vigorously assembling my drink,
“what on earth brought you here? Was it my irresistible
personality?”

“I was just in the neighborhood…”

“Oh, pish posh. That is a flimsy explanation.
Come up with something better.”

“I saw how you dealt with that bagpiper, and let
me say, that was a mighty fine piece of work.”

“Oh, the sadist thing! You think I’m one too.
Well, I’ll have you know that had nothing to do with my
entertainment. That was purely self-defense.”

“I would never have mistaken it for anything
else.”

She handed me the drink. Then she swept a
package from her dresser and presented it to me.

It was one of those glitzy gift bags, covered
with My Little Ponies with pink tissue paper sticking out the
top.

“It’s your gift, Annie. You can stop staring at
it now.”

She wasn’t joking about that?

“Oh, go on.”

I wasn’t certain I wanted to touch it, but my
hands acted against my will and accepted it. I stared at the thing
sitting in my hands, stunned.