Annie of the Undead (20 page)

“I made it!” gasped Bobby. “I made it!”

“We all made it,” Jeanne said breathlessly.

She smiled at Bobby White, whose face was right
by hers where they had been pinned. Then she kissed him.

Yoki was remarkably silent.

“Yoki?” I said.

There came a small voice from somewhere beneath
the pile.

“Please…get…off…of…me…you…huge…American.”

“Oh,” I said, and rolled off, “That’s what you
get for finishing first.”

“You’re a pretty good kisser,” said Jeanne.

“I am?” he said.

She laughed. “No.”

“Annie, I do believe it is time to christen you
an honorary Gay Hippie,” said Yoki.

“Is that a good thing?” I asked.

“Of course it is, dear.”

“Yeah, ‘cause we ROCK!” said Jeanne.

We didn’t get a chance to revel in our victory.
I felt a hard hand on my arm, and a second later a judo move had me
pinned face-down on the pavement.

“Fun’s over,” said a man’s voice behind my head,
“You kids shouldn’t have tried this again.”

“You’re going in this time,” said his
backup.

“God damn it!” I shouted, “Piece of shit fuckin’
shakedown again! Stinkin’, cocksuckin’, crooked arm of the
shit-suckin’ law…”

“You better behave yourself, ma’am. You
better…”

“Derek, man,” said the other cop, “Hey, man, you
gotta look at this...Man, you gotta.”

“What, Mike? What…Sweet Jesus.”

Suddenly, the police officer let me go. I rolled
to the side and looked back at them, wondering what had happened
and ready to fight. But nobody was looking at me or the Gay
Hippies. I looked where everyone else was looking, and found out
why they had suddenly decided I wasn’t worth arresting. Something
had happened across the street that made our little stunt as
forgettable as the name of the fat Baldwin brother.

It was something horrible.

“What? What’s going on?” asked Yoki, using my
arm to help herself stand up.

Then, she saw too.

“Shittin’ kittens,” was all she said.

We all headed toward the crowd that was
gathering to get a better look. What we saw was something none of
us would ever forget, though most of us would want to.

Across the street in the Place de France,
sprawled across the withers of the Maid of Orleans’ gilded horse,
was the body of a woman. She lay, or rather drooped, with arms
hanging down like overcooked linguini above her head, with hair
hanging down in a stringy, wet mass like seaweed. Her skin was
colorless, ashen, and she was completely naked, pale breasts laid
bare, nipples with no color. Her eyes stared glassily, so clear, so
fresh. She must have died less than an hour ago, I thought, though
I knew nothing of the progression of decomposition of flesh. But
the oddest thing, the thing most difficult for the brain to make
sense of, was the wrongness of her head position, the way it fell
back and twisted as the head of no living person could do, for her
throat had been cut nearly to her spine. She was two inches from
having been beheaded.

I had seen corpses before. I had witnessed a
gang hit, where one kid shot another kid because he was wearing the
wrong colors on the wrong street corner. I had watched that kid
gasp for air and bleed out until he stopped moving. I had seen the
corpse of a homeless man, frozen by the cruel winter, or maybe
poisoned to death by one too many swigs on the bottle still in his
hand. But there was something different about this one. Those
corpses had still been people. They had still been clothed, still
in the trappings of life. They had still looked whole. But this
corpse looked like just that: a corpse, a hunk of debris, a rag
hung loosely over a statue more lifelike than it was. It looked
like the bodies thrown into the mass graves of the German death
camps, rendered in black and white, floppy, falling into any
tangled position; like the bodies of Africans massacred by machete
and left by the roadside; or like a thousand other images of
humanity rendered to nothing, rendered to meat, like sides of beef
hung on hooks in a slaughterhouse, like the impala dragged into the
tree by the leopard and wedged in a crook of the branches. This was
not a person. This was leftovers.

“Shittin’ kittens,” said Yoki, “What…What is
that…”

I felt her small hands clinging tightly to my
arm.

“How did she get here?” I heard someone ask, as
if anybody knew, “I walked right past here just a couple minutes
ago…”

“Oh, god, oh, god, oh god…”

“Somebody, get her down from there!”

“No, we better not do that, Ma’am. This is a
crime scene. I need everyone to keep their distance…”

Jeanne was vomiting. Bobby stood stricken. A man
beside me covered his eyes and averted his gaze, his hand clutching
at some reassuring object on a chain about his neck as he retreated
from the grisly scene. The cops were starting to push people back,
waving their arms and saying words no one could hear. Beside me a
camera flashed, and when I turned to see what kind of sick person
would want to take a picture of this, I saw others with camera
phones, all aglow as their owners worked quickly to capture the
image before the authorities shooed them away. Sirens were
approaching, and a blue-and-white rolled up on the sidewalk, lights
flashing. The officer got out and immediately went to work on
herding us all away.

“Come on. Let’s go,” I said to the others,
taking hold of Jeanne’s arm and hauling her up.

They didn’t argue. I moved away from the crowd,
Yoki still firmly attached to my arm.

More emergency people were showing up. A fire
truck rolled in through the crowd, lights flashing in a blinding
show of urgency. I had never been so close to so many emergency
vehicles all at once, and being this close to the growing number of
cops made me extremely uncomfortable.

We found Dru and hurried out of the trouble
area, cut through a side street to the next main thoroughfare as
fast as we could go. I flagged down a cab and helped them all pile
inside, Jeanne in the front seat, the others in the back.

“Annie!” said Yoki, starting to get back out of
the car. “What about you?”

I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed her
back inside.

“I live here,” I said. “Don’t worry about
me.”

“Oh, god,” Jeanne was sobbing, “It’s so
horrible. Horrible…”

“Come on!” Bobby said, “Let’s get out of
here.”

“There somethin’ funny going on around here?”
asked the cabbie.

Yoki’s eyes were huge with fear, her skin pale,
but she still clung to my hand.

“Go,” I told her. I disentangled my hand and
shut the door on her. Then I looked at the cabbie, “Drive.”

I stepped away, and the cab pulled off into the
traffic. As soon as it was out of sight, I turned and ran as fast
as I could go.

The Banana Boys were up when I charged through
the front door, drenched with sweat. They’d been having a midnight
cap or two or six or however many it took them to wear out their
conversation. Hector and Lucas started up out of their chairs at
the sight of me, concern instantly on their faces.

“Are you all right?” asked Lucas, drink still in
hand.

“Somebody chasing you?” asked Hector, looking
out the door after me for someone to beat up.

“No,” I said. “I’m fine. Just been running.”

“You haven’t been running, honey. You’ve been
tearing up the pavement. What’s bothering you?”

“Is it anything a martini will fix?” asked
Jonathon from the living room, holding up his glass and swishing
the olive around.

“There isn’t a thing a martini won’t fix, dear,”
said the old southern lady guest who spent most of her vacation
hanging with the boys.

“No, it’s –I’m fine. Just working the cardio.
Building wind…No martini, please.”

“How about a margarita?”

“A Bloody Mary?”

“No –no. Just –I need to take a shower. Right
now.”

I pushed past all the concerned faces and
helping hands offering alcohol. I took the creaky old wooden stairs
two at a time to the second floor, passed another guest, a sixtyish
woman from Raleigh, on her way to the bathroom in her nightgown,
without a word, and got out the door into the courtyard as fast as
I could. There was no one in the Jacuzzi in the garden, so there
was no one else to waylay me on the way to the room. I slipped
inside and shut the door behind me.

But there was someone to waylay me inside.

A cool hand seized my arm, and a voice said,
“Drink.”

“Goddamn it, Miguel. Now is not the fuckin’
time.”

He immediately released me –smart of him.

“We’ve got problems.”

“Not any longer.”

“What do you mean?”

“The exchange is done. The spell is broken, with
happy timing. They will not try for me again. I sent them a message
they will not be able to ignore.”

“Sent them a message –what are you talking
about?”

Before he said a word, I realized.

“That was you.”

That was why she was so pale, why her throat was
cut, but there was not a drop of blood on her. She had been drained
dry. I had guessed as much before, but I had thought the killer the
Louisiana Werewolf, someone else, some monster…and so it was.

I suddenly felt deeply, profoundly uncomfortable
in a tiny room in the dark with a vampire.

“Annie…”

“Miguel, don’t.”

“I will explain.”

“Oh, you’ll explain, will you? You’ll explain
why you stripped her naked? Why you nearly cut her head off? Why
you hung her up there. It looked like something one of those shits
I ran with up north would do. Why?”

“You already know why.”

He was right, of course. I wanted to hit him. I
wanted to run. I wanted to –I don’t know what, but he was right. I
had been there when they broke into his hotel room –three of them,
when they tried to kill him in his sleep, or worse. I had been the
one to stop them. I had killed them instead. How was what Miguel
had done so different?

But somehow, it was.

“I killed her the way I did to warn them that
the game is finished. I left her where I did to ridicule her power.
I cut her throat with a blade to disguise the entry of my fangs
from the human authorities. I cut deep to tell my hunters how
deeply I would wound them should they dare to try again, and I left
her naked because that was how I felt while they hunted me, when
they could take me lying in state at any time, and I could not lift
a finger to stop them. They must be made to feel as I felt. They
must remember what kind of being they hunt. They must be made to
fear.”

Miguel’s voice was cold, as often it was. But I
could feel a fierce tenacity in it, a monumental strength, and a
pokerfaced rationality. If it was the voice of a monster, it was
that of a brilliant one.

“Annie, violence is part of my world, as it was
of yours. What is this change in you? Have you forgotten
yourself?”

I sat down on the bed and invited my vampire to
sit beside me. I sought his hand with mine.

“I could never forget. I was scared tonight
–scared for you, and I was scared for us. I thought there was some
monster out there, maybe those witches. They are witches,
right?”

“Yes.”

“I know. You don’t have to tell me. But all
these things you don’t tell me add up, and I know there’s a lot
going on I know nothing about except that they’re really dangerous.
I get freaked out, all psyched up that there’s some seriously bad
shit going down, and then I find out it was actually you…Miguel, I
was with people tonight when I saw that body.
People.
I saw
what they saw.”

“Ah.”

“It really freaked them out.”

“Of all the rotten luck.”

“Yeah. Does that piss you off –that I was with
people?”

“Friends.”

“Okay, friends.”

“No. Enjoy them.”

“I’m not saying that I will –they’re nuts –they
almost got me arrested, but thanks. Now, I want to know –I won’t
ask you much, but I want to know a couple of things.”

“Ask.”

“I hate people right now. You know that. They
piss me off, but right now they’re not special to me. Being with
you has been like vacation. I’ve been pretending they don’t matter.
They’re almost fun. But if I become a vampire…”

“If?”

“If. They’re suddenly going to matter. They’ll
be everything, won’t they?”

“Not everything, but the biggest thing. Imagine
not having eaten in a long time, and everyone around you is made of
fried chicken.”

“I’m made of fried chicken to you? Freakin’
hell. I would have killed me already.”

“Alas, the matter is not simple. Each immortal
views mortals in his own way. Andy does not kill…”

“He doesn’t?”

“Rarely. He keeps an escort, companions from
whom he feeds. That is how I remember him. I do not suspect he has
changed.”

“That lying ass!”

“He does maintain a severe façade.”

“I know you don’t do that.”

“No.”

“No… So, you have a choice.”

“I will not delude you,” he said very seriously.
“Your hunger for blood will be greedy –at times overwhelming, but I
can teach you how to manage it. Whether or not you choose to
emulate me will be your own choice.”

“Okay, one more question. All this stuff that
you’re not telling me, like about witches, for instance –all this
insane
stuff
that I can feel, but you’re not telling me,
will you tell me about it after?”

“The disparity in our knowledge is no small
measure, but I will share mine with you over time.”

“Great, and you’re going to start with what Andy
was about to say at the café –you know, when he was testing you to
see if you would let me hear the big bad secret –the M-word? So he
could see how much you cared about me, but you bit his head off,
and he got his answer?”