Annie of the Undead (2 page)

I spat blood at their feet, then turned and
left.

“Angry Annie,” said Fred, a guard, when he saw
me emerge from the door to the hall. He looked startled.

“Surprised to see me?”

“No,” he lied. “You look like you hit your lip
on something. Did you slip in the shower?”

“I ran into something…ugly.”

“I hope you don’t take it personal,” he said.
“Things happen around here.”

“It’s nothing,” I said after a moment. “As long
as it stays nothing.”

“If you say it’s nothing, it’s nothing,” he
said, sounding relieved. “Why don’t you go get some ice from the
canteen to put on that lip? People might ask questions if you let
it swell up.”

“Never knew you could be so friendly. Guess I
should have run into something sooner.”

Fred was a manipulative bastard and a
troublemaker. He’d had his eye on me from the start. He knew I was
a troublemaker too. We can smell each other –troublemakers, not
bastards. Bastards smell the same as everybody else.

He shrugged at me.

“You better get out of here.”

I obeyed because ice sounded nice right now, not
because he was a guard, was six-foot-two, and had a taser. He let
me pass because he’d satiated his current thirst for trouble, and
because a little more might not be the kind he wanted. He had the
law behind him, making the action seem like generosity rather than
the calculation that it was.

Fuckin’ politics. We had elected sons of bitches
on the outside, and shits like Fred on the inside. Every shithole
has to have its politicians. The only thing I hated more than
preachers was politicians –and Pit Bulls. Hate those too –and the
Insane Clown Posse, and those little paper cups that you’re
supposed to squirt full of ketchup. I couldn’t wait to get out and
have to face those things again. Fuckin’ little things…

I first discovered the world of the bloodthirsty
undead on the day I was released from jail. All the clichés played
out before our eyes on television and on the pages of trashy novels
hold true: it is a world of macabre seduction, decadent revelry,
ancients so beautiful it hurts your eyes to look at them, power in
its oldest form, and of course, egregious night-stalking,
throat-ripping, violence. That is to say, it suited me just
fine.

As you have seen, I wasn’t then the empathetic,
socialized, companionable individual you’d meet today. That Annie
might have more happily exchanged a knife in your kidney for your
wallet than a ‘hello’ for your ‘how do you do’. That Annie, “Angry”
Annie Eastwood, had issues. But I’m much better now, thanks to
vampires, voodoo queens, and assorted other individuals of
supernatural affiliation, as you will see in a bit.

Election Day is the climax of this my first
foray into that crazy world, but the story begins on the earlier
date of October first, the day I decided not to ram a plastic spoon
into someone’s brain and was subsequently spat by the penal system
back onto the dirty streets of Detroit City. If I had not laid down
my spoon, I never would have met my vampire, never would have left
Michigan or moved south, and never would have gotten into all the
bloodsucking nonsense. I never would have swum the Big Muddy with
the gators in the middle of the night, never would have driven a
wooden table leg through anybody’s heart, and I never would have
found myself half naked on a bathroom floor next to a dead Spanish
guy with my shirt wrapped around his head –okay, maybe that last
part might have happened eventually anyway –but, point is, it’s the
little decisions that can change your life.

Now don’t start looking down your nose at me. I
still reserve the right to put that blade in your kidney, or
something worse.

Later that day, I was called for release
processing.

I made kissy faces as I walked passed Diva. She
tried not to look like I had beat the shit out of her a couple
hours before. She had a reputation to maintain. She was going to be
in there a while.

The guards were happy to see me go, even if it
was to freedom and not to do hard time. I had worked to ensure that
this group of jail hawks respected me. I figured the more
strong-arming they had to use on me in the beginning the scarier I
was. Yep, five-foot-five, one-hundred-forty-five-pound Annie
Eastwood: the Big Bad.

The guards didn’t strong-arm me as they led me
out to the room where the wide woman with the hair growing out of
her mole would give me my belongings, the last staging area between
incarceration and the freedom to get incarcerated again. They sort
of kept their distance. I wasn’t worth the trouble that pissing me
off would cause. If there was an altercation, we might just be
stuck with each other for a while longer. Yeah, keep back, you
under-educated, dead-end-career power-trippers.

The wide woman’s big mole was particularly moley
today.

She shoved a familiar triplicate layer cake in
front of me under her protective window. On top of the stack was a
plastic bag containing a black sport bra, a crushed box of
Marlboros, and nothing else. I looked at her.

“Where’s the rest of my stuff?”

She looked at my paperwork, then through her
glasses at me unsympathetically.

“You came in with an unregistered Ruger, half a
box of .40 caliber bullets, and a pair of jean shorts so nasty they
had to be incinerated. You aren’t getting any of that back, Miss
Eastwood.”

“You’re telling me that you would send a girl
out onto the street in the middle of downtown Detroit in this
outfit without a firearm?”

“Take it easy, Eastwood,” said one of the
guards.

“We have some clothes for you to change into,”
said the Mole. “Now go put your bra on.”

I got out of my jailbird orange and into the bra
–the final remnant of my last shift on the outside, and the faded
khakis, Red Wings T-shirt, and nondescript gray hooded sweatshirt
the jail had supplied from their bank of third-or-fourth-hand
clothes from God knows where. They even gave me a pair of junk
tennis shoes that deserved incinerating more than my old shorts
could have. I felt like a concentration camp survivor being clothed
in the raiment of the dead. Nothing fit right. The bra was too
small, a result of not working out and jail food, the pants and
shirt were too big by a couple of sizes, and the shoes were too
narrow for my wide feet, even without socks. It all felt like
scraping into someone else’s skin. Come to think of it, the last
twenty-five years had felt like that.

And now I looked like a damned Red Wings fan.
What a thrill.

Phil, a big guard who looked something like a
red-headed Santa Claus with a snide streak, reached for the door to
the outside. Before opening it he looked at me and asked, “Anyone
here to meet you?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe that son of a bitch whose girlfriend I
knocked the hell out of, or maybe that shit who thought paying for
my training meant I’d be his sex toy, or maybe that Pit Bull that
used to attack me every time I came out my front door down on Birch
Street who I cracked a couple of times with a bat and kind of
walked sideways ever since. Other than that...probably no one.”

Phil shook his head.

“You’re too smart for all that stuff. A girl
like you should be going to college, not squabbling with pimps and
substance abusers.”

“White people always say shit like that.”

“Hating white people won’t do you any good
either.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I hate black people
too.”

Phil tried to ignore what was too confusing for
him to understand.

“Well, just think about it. School’s the way
out, you know.”

“I did my time in school. Wasn’t a good
fit.”

“Well you’d better find something that does fit.
Don’t get yourself thrown in here again, Eastwood. You’re the kind
they burn the book on.”

“What, are you gonna take me in? Rehabilitate me
like I’m some angel in the rough?”

He showed his teeth in a miserly smile.

“No. You’re no angel. Only person who’s going to
take care of a girl like you is you. You’re just rough all over.
I’m just sayin’.”

“Well stop sayin’ and open that damn door.”

He shook his head.

“See what I mean? What good’s that going to do
you, talking like that to someone like me? All your time in here,
and you still haven’t learned to shut your trap long enough to help
yourself. You know, one of these days…”

I didn’t stay to hear the rest. He had opened
the door, and I didn’t hang around one more second to hear an
overweight jail employee’s preachifying. I walked through the
lobby, past the people society labeled good or bad, distinguishable
by their uniforms: the clean-pressed suits of the normative and
socially acceptable people here to do their honest work for the
system and the drab garb of the underprivileged. They all really
looked the same to me.

I stepped outside into the exhaust-perfumed,
harshly-lit streets of nighttime Detroit. I shuddered immediately
against the cold. When they had dragged me into the can, it had
been summer, but there was no sign of summer now. What was it, five
o’clock? Six? The sun was already spent. Rain had dragged all the
leaves from the few trees that sprang from their caged holes in the
sidewalk. And the cruel wind ripping through the flimsy cotton
sweatshirt I was wearing warned that a cold front was moving in.
The front might bring rain, snow, or some devilish combination of
the two. Ma Nature spares Michiganders little of her diabolical
creativity.

Shivering in the cold at the top of the steps
was a transvestite who had been regurgitated from the belly of the
penal beast just before me. He’d rejected the humdrum men’s clothes
they’d offered him on the way out, choosing instead to exit looking
as glamorous as when he came in. He was leaning against the wall,
hiding behind his collar from the chill wind wailing down the
street, waiting for his ride, smoking a cigarette. He was skinny
and his bare legs looked cold in their tight leather skirt and red
high heels.

I fished the box of Marlboros out of my pocket.
There were three cigarettes left inside. I extracted one and
straightened out the ninety-degree bend as well as I could. I
naturally hunted for a lighter. I didn’t have one.

“Need a light?” asked the transvestite by the
wall.

I went over, accepted the light. Sucking in that
good, cancer-invoking smoke for a second almost made me forget
about the biting cold and wind that blew the overgrown bush that I
sometimes called my hair into my face. I held hot smoke in my lungs
for a moment, then exhaled and went for seconds.

After a minute, the transvestite said, “Well you
could say ‘thank you’.”

“For some reason, I’m just not in the mood.”

“Well, I just got out of jail too, and you don’t
see me being a bitch.”

I looked at him, at his tragic over-bleached,
over-ironed hair, his denim jacket and his fuck-me heels, and, for
some reason, I just laughed.

“Well, fuck you, cunt!” he shouted, and
continued to shout, but I was already walking away, down the cold,
gray sidewalk and into the grim world of concrete and overcast,
indifferent skies. That was the second idiot today to think I
needed to hear something he had to say.

So I was out. I had kept myself busy in jail. I
had twiddled my thumbs and watched some shitty movies. I had
briefly considered reading some like I had on previous visits, but
couldn’t work up to it for some reason, and then didn’t consider it
anymore at all. I contemplated life, the universe, and everything.
I counted flowers on the wall, played solitaire ‘til dawn –you
know, all that stuff. But mostly I got out of shape and made other
people’s lives miserable, or at least a little more miserable than
they already were. If you’re in jail, your life probably isn’t
exactly the berries to begin with. I had gotten so good at doing
all that that I now wondered what to do with myself.

One thing I could do was get out of the clothes
the penal system had put me in. I didn’t have any money for new
ones, but I didn’t want new clothes. I wanted Chris’s clothes.
Chris was my brother, or he had been before he’d been killed by an
IED in the desert fighting someone else’s war. His clothes and my
memory were all that was left of him, if indeed any of his clothes
were left. If there were any left, they would be at his
ex-girlfriend’s house halfway across town.

I didn’t have any money for a cab, but I had
never been afraid of hoofing it. I needed the exercise anyway after
eating all that jail slop and lying around like a bloated hog. I
hated being a bloated hog. It wasn’t in my nature to be soft.

The worst thing about hoofing it was the
Michigan wind, ripping through my clothes and into my flesh like
the tongues of banshees and blowing my hair insanely in my face. I
tucked the unruly mop into the hood of the sweatshirt, shoved my
hands into my pockets, and set out through the grim buildings, icy
streets, and alarmingly erratic drivers of Detroit, gritting my
teeth against the air and the city.

It took me three hours to hike to the house. My
pinched feet were threatening murder by the time I limped up onto
the back porch. I used a flower pot to break the window in the back
door to reach the dead bolt. I was glad no one was home. Breaking
in is a hell of a lot easier than dealing with a house’s owner.

I kicked the angry dachshund that came yapping
toward me in the head and let the yellow cat scurry out the door
past my leg. The dog ran into the bathroom and started to pee in
terror. I closed the door to keep it there. I never liked pets.
They have a tendency to yap and scurry and pee. I heard the thing
whining inside. Then I heard the sound of a toilet paper roll being
rolled into infinity. That would be a treat to clean up.

The house was neat and prim for a working class
neighborhood. Chris’s ex had done very well for herself, living in
the little one-bedroom house he’d paid for. Now, as I nosed around
the place, seeing the brand new X-Box game console, the his and
hers toothbrushes on the bathroom sink, and the pair of men’s
cross-trainers by the edge of the bed, I saw that she was doing so
with another man. My big brother, dead for less than a year, and
she already shacked up with…Roger Freidman. His name was printed on
the utility bill on the living room coffee table. So she’d found
somebody else to pay the bills too.