Annie of the Undead (7 page)

He picked my fallen cigarette out of the snow
and lit it with a lighter that had appeared suddenly in his hand,
as if by magic. He offered me both cigarette and lighter. At first
I accepted neither. Then I saw that the lighter was Chris’s
Zippo.

He had been watching me. I started thinking
about the implications of that. He had seen that whole Short John
thing –me stabbing a guy, me getting shot at, me running from giant
radioactive doglike mutants, and he hadn’t stepped in to help. Of
course he hadn’t stepped in to help. Did he see me versus the
burger joint? Me standing in the sneet outside Furlough’s, begging
disingenuously for redemption? He’d apparently observed that shit
storm with my mother. What else did he see? And the result of all
this observation was what? That he didn’t want to kill me?

“Yeah, I get it,” I said, “You’re a sick fuck.
You know how I know that? Because I’m a sick fuck. No one should
like me. If you do, that makes you one. Now, tell me, Vampire, why
should I come hang with a sick fuck?”

The vampire extinguished cigarette on the palm
of his hand, then dropped it back in the snow. He offered me the
Zippo again, and I snatched it away.

“I’m not just a, as you say it, sick fuck. I
catch bullets. I walk on wires. I swim for hours without taking a
breath. I’ve been all around this world, and I do just what I
please. I’m a sick fuck with power and freedom. I would share that
freedom with you.”

“If you are telling me that you would up and
make me into a vampire–”

“No. I seek a human companion.”

“Good, because if you’d said so I’d have said
you were full of shit.”

“I have no reason to lie to you. If I wanted to
kill you now, I would do so, but I am offering a different
proposition. I am offering you a change of life, escape. Doesn’t it
sound the least bit appealing?”

“Maybe, until you get bored with me, and I
become lunch.”

“You express a reasonable concern. I will not
attempt to convince you that your safety is guaranteed, not you.
Perhaps one day you will die –all of you do, but in the meantime,
you could live a life most mortals could barely imagine. We will
travel together. You can dine in the finest restaurants, retire in
the most lavish of accommodations–”

“Hey, I don’t need no sugar daddy,” I said,
getting hot, “I’ve seen what that’s about.”

He nodded seriously, “Of course, you fear
emulating your mother. But can you not see how unlike her you are,
how untamable? I would not invite you out to play if I thought you
in danger of becoming that kind of human caricature.”

Humph.

“Doesn’t allying yourself with me sound like
better fun than suffering lifelong incarceration at the hands of
your human system of punishment? Leave prison to the criminals.
Come be something more.”

Yeah, worse. Companion to a vampire. Ingénue to
the dead. I had to imagine I was going to witness some pretty heavy
shit.

“Isn’t there some fainting virginal beauty out
there you should be fawning over?”

“I am not that kind of vampire.”

“Because I’ve banged at least a dozen guys.”

“Never miss an opportunity to enjoy
yourself.”

“And I ain’t never even been knocked out.”

“The delicate ones are aperitif.”

Whatever the hell that meant.

“You gonna tell me what your name is,
Pedro?”

He nodded quickly and removed his hat.

“Miguel.”

That didn’t help.

He replaced his hat.

“You’re considering it,” he said. His eyes
sparked with new intensity.

Maybe.

He stood back, held up a finger.

“I know you do not require any more
demonstrations of my capabilities.”

Yes,
but
.

The vampire put his hands in his pockets. Then,
without further warning, he vaulted straight into the air, rising
some eight feet and coming to rest on the snow-blanketed rail of
the bridge, on his feet, as primly as a ballet dancer on a polished
stage.

Then, he began to dance. He trotted off to one
side, trotted back, hands in pockets, with an air of physical humor
akin to the movements of vaudeville dancer, but with grace akin to
no human that ever lived.

“I know I must seem the least acceptable part of
this night’s unpleasant events,” he said as he danced.

He dropped into a handstand, on one hand. The
other held his hat.

“…but that I am the only person you have
encountered this evening who does not mean you harm is as true as
it is unlikely.”

He pushed off with his hand, springing once more
to his feet.

“In fact, it is delight and not harm that I wish
to bring you…”

He spun on his feet like a top.

“…as harming you would delight me less.”

“Dude,” I admonished. “That is some seriously
tripped-out shit you got goin’ on there.”

“I find your world grim and brutish,” he
continued, “It is only reasonable that you should neither trust me
nor my ability to improve your condition. Perhaps a demonstration
of my potency is in order…”

He flung his hat high into the air, but he did
not wait to catch it. Instead, he jumped, in an incredible display
of ability, fifteen feet straight up to pluck it from the air,
mid-arc. He landed once more on deft feet.

“…to draw distinction between myself and your
numerous antagonists.”

He bowed low before me. Looking up, he grinned
wide and devilish.

“I can kill them for you. Shall we start with
Tim?”

He put the hat back on his head and sat down on
the rail, smiling intensely with only his eyes and waiting for my
reply, waiting for me to give my soul to the Devil.

I didn’t make him wait long.

“All right. I’ll ride your crazy train, Vampire,
but if you try and call me ‘Shorty’ I’ll knock your frigid balls
off.”

Vampire Miguel’s generous offer notwithstanding,
I was the very next thing to a corpse after my little night of
horrors and in no condition to enjoy an invigorating homicidal
romp. My list of ailments was long, with pure exhaustion at the
very top. I needed sleep, and soon.

“I must rest with the dawn,” he concurred. “Let
us go to my car.”

He came toward me with the apparent intention of
offering me an arm, but I jabbed him with the pool skimmer.

“Back off, Don Juan. I’m no wilting flower,” I
warned. “I’ll go on my own steam.”

“Walking was not what I had in mind.”

“You got a car around here?”

“Around, yes. A short distance for me, but for a
human not so short. My transportation is parked thirteen miles from
here.”

Thirteen miles?
I looked around.
In
this?
I looked down at my foot.
With this?

“Let me suggest,” he said carefully, “that you
consider accepting one of the perks of intimate association with my
kind. Let me suggest that you allow me to carry you.”

I just stared at him.

“It will be like nothing else you have ever
experienced. Mortals cannot move as I move.”

“So it’s…athletic?”

“Very.”

“It’s not like being escorted through the
park?”

“Not at all.”

“So no fair damsel in distress BS.”

“None whatsoever.”

I was too tired to argue anymore.

“Fine.”

The vampire reached for the pool skimmer. I gave
it up. He slowly gathered me into his arms.

“Hold tight to that gun.”

He jumped.

If none of the other insane shit he had done had
impressed me, this demonstration did. We rose with such speed that
I felt as though I was strapped to a missile that had just been
launched. Yeehah. My initial impression was that I was going to
fall out of his grasp to my death, but within seconds –seconds that
were ample time for Miguel to make several leaps and landings in
succession, I had no room left in my brain to doubt the surety of
his grip upon me. His arms were like iron, and I was but a
leaf.

He leaped with the grace of a puma, the silence
of a soaring hawk, the speed of, well, a vampire. We passed over
the snow and streets of Detroit like Santa’s reindeer. One moment
we were poised at the edge of a rooftop, his toes barely, but so
adeptly, clinging to the precipice, the next we were flying twenty
feet through the breath-stealing night air and alighting on another
building, a privacy fence, a power pole, with no concern for ice or
snow. His muscles must have been trained so perfectly, he could
organize their functioning into the perfect combination needed to
land on any given surface, to skirt along any narrow width.

He was showing off.

I had to admit, the vampire was magnificent. He
did it all in next to silence. The only sounds I could hear were
the rushing of the air through my ears and the whipping of the
fabric of my tattered clothes. Miguel’s garments, I noticed, made
no sound as they moved. They were apparently chosen well for his
eternal occupation. Not a single soul noticed our passage, not even
the trusty Pit Bulls of inner city fame, ever alert for something
to bark at or, better, tear into. The journey was a far cry from my
crazy flight two hours before. The night was ours alone.

Okay, so even Angry Annie Eastwood wasn’t
entirely immune to the allure of the vampire. The freedom I felt
was that which I had always wanted, the speed of a sports car in
your muscles, the strength of a grizzly in your bones. I wanted to
whoop with enthusiasm. It was a little bit like those last moments
of a great fight, when you’ve got the other bitch just about
shit-canned, and you know you’re invincible. That was as close a
thing as I had ever experienced, at least. It was like parkour on
steroids –supernatural steroids.

That night I looked down upon the sleepy
nighttime world of the mortals, the rooftops blanketed in silver
snow, the darkened yards, some with yellow light spilling forth
from the windows of night owls like butter melting in a black
skillet. So small were they! So unimportant! The whole universe now
was the leaping and the soaring, above their world and beyond their
notice. That night I was given a teeny, mortal glimpse of what it
means to be a vampire: what it means to be free –free from gravity,
humanity, the trivialities and the trauma endemic to the labyrinth
of the mundane. That night I glimpsed what it means to be a god in
a world of ants.

I was hooked.

All too quickly, the joyride was over. The
vampire set me down softly upon my own uncertain feet in an alley I
could not name. Where was this? It had all been so fast, and I had
never seen the city from the air. I, who knew the seedy capillaries
of this concrete monster so well, was lost.

But, as we emerged from the alley onto a
lamp-lit street, I realized where we were. It was all too
familiar.

It was a cold realization following my cathartic
ride through the night. We were just down the street from the jail.
I could see the front door from here.

I looked at the vampire.

“You’re kidding me.”

He did the understated version of biting his
lip.

“You vampire dog!”

He was gonna eat me, when he first saw me here.
That was his plan. He was gonna eat me. I could envision him in the
alley, or up on a rooftop –somewhere dark, lurking, stalking, doing
all those creepy things that everyone pictures vampires doing,
waiting for some poor idiot to walk out that door, for some lowly
skank of society to drink dry. Someone nobody would miss. Someone
people would expect to disappear. Someone like me.

It crossed my mind then that maybe he hadn’t
changed his mind. Maybe this was some sick game he played with his
prey –worse than I had even hypothesized earlier. Being undead
probably did some wretched things to your sense of humor. Take the
dancing, for instance.

“I’m not going to kill you,” he said, smiling
with all those teeth. “Not anymore.”

I still looked at him accusingly.

He offered his arm.

“Come along,” he said, “There is a patrol car
turning the corner down there right now. Now would be a good time
not to look like you’re limping.”

I took his arm.

“I hate you.”

“Good. It’s your most flattering sentiment.”

We walked to his car, which was, of course,
expensive, glossy, and new, if covered with the three inches of
snow that had fallen while its master decided whether to finish or
spare his dinner. Somehow, I hadn’t imagined him driving a
rusted-out 1980 Station Wagon. Vampire Miguel drove a Mercedes Benz
SL600, a hundred-and-thirty-thousand-dollar car.

And he didn’t even wear any bling.

The vampire didn’t try to open the door for me.
Good thing. I might have killed him, vampire or not.

We checked into the ritzy hotel that was
apparently the vampire’s idea of a fine coffin, complete with a big
fountain in the lobby, an escalator, and a bunch of tropical
plants. The receptionist took one look at us and figured me for a
working girl and the vampire for my paying customer. She kept her
mouth shut about it, but her eyes smiled with knowing
condescension. She was lucky I was so tired. Energetic Annie would
have punched her lights out.

There was no more mention between the vampire
and I of the circumstances that had led to our acquaintance, and
there never would be again. I collapsed brainlessly on the massive
bed in the equally massive suite, determined to think only of
pillows and covers and sleep.

“Annie?”

“What now, vampire?” I grumbled, half asleep
before he’d even closed the door.

“I’m going out. There is still an hour before
dawn.”

“Good, go kill some people. Let me sleep.”

I put a massive pillow over my head.

“I will be relying upon you, Annie, when I
return. The sun will kill me. You must keep the draperies closed
all day.”