Bloodsucking fiends (14 page)

"I've frightened you," the Emperor said.

"No – no, I'm fine. It's just… Your Majesty, there are no such things as vampires."

"As you wish," the Emperor said. "But I think it would be prudent for you to wait until daylight to do your business."

"I need to do my laundry or I won't have any clean clothes for tomorrow."

"Then allow us to escort you."

"No, really, Your Majesty, I'll be fine. By the way, where is the nearest Laundromat?"

"There is one not far from here, but it's in the Tenderloin. Even during the day you wouldn't be safe alone. I really must insist that you wait, my dear. Perhaps by then we will have exterminated the fiend."

"Well," Jody said, "if you insist. This is my apartment, right here." She dug the key out of her jeans and opened the door. She turned back to the Emperor. "Thank you."

"Safety first," the Emperor said. "Sleep well." The little dog growled in his pocket.

Jody went inside and closed the door, then waited until she heard the Emperor walk away. She waited another five minutes and went back onto the street.

She shouldered the laundry and headed toward the Tenderloin, thinking, This is great. How long before the police actually listen to the Emperor? Tommy and I are going to have to move and we haven't even decorated yet. And I hate doing laundry. I hate it. I'm sending our laundry out if Tommy won't do it. And we're going to have a cleaning lady – some nice, dependable woman who will come in after dark. And I'm not buying toilet paper. I don't use it and I'm not going to buy it. And something has to be done about this asshole vampire. God, I hate doing laundry.

She had gone two blocks when a man stepped out of a doorway in front of her. "Hey momma, you need some help."

She jumped in his face and shouted, "Fuck off, horndog!" with such viciousness that he screamed and leaped back into the doorway, then meekly called "Sorry" after her as she passed.

She thought, I'm not sorting. It all goes in warm. I don't care if the whites do go gray; I'm not sorting. And how do I know how to get out bloodstains? Who am I? Miss Household Hints? God, I hate laundry.

The clothes jumped and played and dived over each other like fabric dolphins. Jody sat on a folding table across from the dryer watching the show and thinking about the Emperor's warning. He'd said, "I don't think it's safe for a young woman to be out on the street at night." Jody agreed. Not long ago she would have been terrified if she'd found herself in the Tenderloin at night. She couldn't even remember coming down here during the day. Where had that fear gone? What had happened to her that she could face off with a vampire, bite off his fingers, and carry a dead body up a flight of stairs and shove it under the bed without even a flinch? Where was the fear and loathing? She didn't miss it, she just wondered what had happened to it.

It wasn't as if she were without fear. She was afraid of daylight, afraid of the police discovering her, and of Tommy rejecting her and leaving her alone. New fears and familiar fears, but there was nothing in the dark that frightened her, not the future, not even the old vampire – and she knew now, having tasted his blood, that he was old, very old. She saw him as an enemy, and her mind casted for strategies to defeat him, but she was not really afraid of him anymore: curious, but not afraid.

The dryer stopped-fabric dolphins dropped and died as if caught in tuna nets. Jody jumped off the table, opened the dryer, and was feeling the clothes for dampness when she heard footsteps on the sidewalk outside the Laundromat. She turned to see the tall black man she had chased into the doorway coming into the Laundromat, followed by two shorter men. All three wore silver L.A. Raiders jackets, high-top shoes, and evil grins.

Jody turned back to the dryer and started stuffing her clothes into the trash bag. She thought, I should be folding these.

"Yo, bitch," the tall man said.

Jody looked to the back of the Laundromat. The only door was in the front, behind the three men. She turned and looked up at them. "How about those Raiders?" she said with a smile. She felt a pressure in the roof of her mouth: the fangs extending.

The three men split up and moved around the folding table to surround her. In another life, this had been her worst nightmare. In this life she just smiled as two of them grabbed her arms from behind.

She saw a bead of sweat on the tall man's temple as he approached her and reached out to tear the front of her shirt. She ripped her right arm loose and caught the tall man's wrist as the sweat bead began to drip. She snapped his forearm and bones splintered though skin and muscle as she swung him, headfirst, through the glass door of the dryer. She reached over her shoulder and grabbed one of the Raider fans by the hair and smashed his face into the floor, then wheeled on her last attacker and shoved him back into the edge of the folding table, snapping his spine just above the hips and sending him spinning backward over a deck of washing machines. The bead of sweat hit the floor near the man with the smashed face.

Amid the hum of fluorescent lights and the moans of the man with the broken back, Jody loaded the rest of her laundry into the trash bag. She thought, This stuff is going to be nothing but wrinkles by the time I get home. Tommy's doing the laundry next time.

As she reached the door she ran her tongue over her teeth and was relieved to find her fangs had retracted. She looked over her shoulder at the carnage and shouted, "Forty-fucking-Niners!"

The man with the broken back moaned.

Chapter 19 – Judy's Delicate

Condition

For the first few weeks Tommy was uncomfortable having a dead guy in the freezer, but after a while the dead guy became a fixture, a familiar frosty face with every TV dinner. Tommy named him Peary after another arctic explorer.

During the day, after he came home from work and before he crawled into bed with Jody, Tommy puttered around the loft talking first to himself, then, when he became comfortable with the idea, to Peary.

"You know, Peary," Tommy said one morning after he had pounded out two pages of a short story on his typewriter, "I am having a little trouble finding my voice in this story. When I write about the little farm girl in Georgia walking barefoot to school on the dirt road, I sound like Harper Lee, but when I write about her poor father, unjustly sentenced to a chain gang for stealing bread for his family, I start to sound a little like Mark Twain. But when the little girl grows up to become a Mafia don, I'm falling into more of a Sydney Collins Krantz style. What should I do?"

Peary, safe with his lid closed and his light off, did not answer.

"And how am I supposed to concentrate on literature when I'm reading all these vampire books for Jody? She doesn't understand that a writer is a special creature – that I'm different from everyone else. I'm not saying I'm superior to other people, just more sensitive, I guess. And did you notice that she never does any of the shopping? What does she do all night while I'm at work?"

Tommy was making an effort to understand Jody's situation, and had even devised a series of experiments from his reading to try and discover the limitations of her new situation. In the evening when they woke, after they shared a shower and a tumble or two, the scientific process would begin.

"Go ahead, honey, give it a try," Tommy said, shortly after he'd read
Dracula
.

"I am trying," Jody said. "I don't know what I'm supposed to try to do."

"Concentrate," Tommy said. "Push."

"What do you mean, push? I'm not giving birth, Tommy. What am I supposed to push on?"

"Try to grow fur. Try to make your arms change into wings."

Jody closed her eyes and concentrated – strained, even – and Tommy thought a little color came into her face.

Finally she said, "This is ridiculous." And it was determined that Jody could not turn into a bat.

"Mist," Tommy said. "Try to turn into mist. If you forget your key sometime, you can just ooze under the door to get in."

"It's not working."

"Keep trying. You know how your hair gathers in the shower drain? Well, if it gets clogged, you can just flow down there and dig out the clog."

"There's some motivation."

"Give it a try."

She tried and failed and the next day Tommy brought some Drano home from the store instead.

"But I could take you to the park and throw a Frisbee for you."

"I know, but I can't."

"I'll buy you all kinds of chew toys – a squeaky duck if you want."

"I'm sorry, Tommy, but I can't turn into a wolf."

"In the book, Dracula climbs down the castle wall face down."

"Good for him."

"You could try it on our building. It's only three stories."

"That's still a long way to fall."

"You won't fall. He doesn't fall in the book."

"And he levitates in the book, doesn't he?"

"Yeah."

"And we tried that, didn't we?"

"Well, yeah."

"Then I'd say that the book is fiction, wouldn't you?"

"Let's try something else; I'll get the list."

"Mind reading. Project your thoughts into my mind."

"Okay, I'm projecting. What am I thinking?"

"I can tell by the look on your face."

"You might be wrong, what am I thinking?"

"You'd like me to stop badgering you with these experiments."

"And?"

"You want me to take our clothes to the Laundromat."

"And?"

"That's all I'm getting."

"I want you to stop rubbing garlic on me while I'm sleeping."

"You can read thoughts!"

"No, Tommy, but I woke up this evening smelling like a pizza joint. Stop it with the garlic."

"So you don't know about the crucifix?"

"You touched me with a crucifix?"

"You weren't in any danger. I had a fire extinguisher right there in case you burst into flames."

"I don't think it's very nice of you to experiment on me while I'm sleeping. How would you feel if I rubbed stuff on you while you were sleeping?"

"Well, it depends. What are we talking about?"

"Just don't touch me while I'm sleeping, okay? A relationship is based on mutual trust and respect."

"So I guess the mallet and the stake are out of the question?"

"Tommy!"

"Kmart had a sale on mallets. You were wondering if you were immortal. I wasn't going to try it without asking you."

"How long do you think it will take for you to forget what sex feels like?"

"I'm sorry, Jody. Really, I am."

The question of immortality did, indeed, bother Jody. The old vampire had said that she could be killed, but it was not the sort of thing that you could easily test. It was Tommy, of course, after a long talk with Peary while trying to avoid working on his little Southern-girl story one morning, who came up with the test.

Jody awoke one evening to find him in the bathroom emptying ice cubes out of a tray into the big claw-foot tub.

He said, "I was a lifeguard one summer in high school."

"So?"

"I had to learn CPR. I spent half the summer pumping pissy pool water out of exhausted nine-year-olds."

"So?"

"Drowning."

"Drowning?"

"Yeah, we drown you. If you're immortal, you'll be fine. If not, the cold water will keep you fresh and I can revive you. There's about thirty more trays of ice stacked up on Peary. Could you grab some?"

"Tommy, I'm not sure about this."

"You want to know, don't you?"

"But a tub of ice water?"

"I've run all the possibilities down – guns, knives, an injection of potassium nitrate – this is the only one that can fail and not really kill you. I know you want to know, but I don't want to lose you to find out."

Jody, in spite of herself, was touched. "That's the sweetest thing anyone ever said to me."

"Well, you wouldn't want to kill me, would you?" Tommy was a little concerned about the fact that Jody had been feeding on him every four days. Not that he felt sick or weak; on the contrary, he found that each time she bit him he was energized, stronger, it seemed. He was throwing twice as much stock at the store and his mind seemed sharper, more alert. He was making good progress on his story. He was starting to look forward to being bitten.

"Come on then," he said. "In the tub."

Jody was wearing a silk nighty that she let drop to the floor. "You're sure if this doesn't work…"

"You'll be fine."

She took his hand. "I'm trusting you."

"I know. Get in."

Jody stepped into the cold water. "Brisk," she said.

"I didn't think you could feel it."

"I can feel temperature changes, but they don't bother me."

"We'll experiment on that next. Under you go."

Jody lay down in the tub, her hair spread across the water like crimson kelp.

Tommy checked his watch. "After you go under, don't hold your breath. It's going to be hard, but suck the water into your lungs. I'll leave you under for four minutes, then pull you out."

Jody took deep breaths and looked at him, a glint of panic in her eyes. He bent and kissed her. "I love you," he said.

"You do?"

"Of course." He pushed her head under the water.

She bobbed back up. "Me too," she said. Then she went under.

She tried to make herself take in the water but her lungs wouldn't let her and she held her breath. Four minutes later Tommy reached under her arms and pulled her up.

"I didn't do it," she said.

"Christ, Jody, I can't keep doing this."

"I held my breath."

"For four minutes?"

"I think I could have gone hours."

"Try again. You've got to inhale the water or you'll never die."

"Thanks, coach."

"Please."

She slipped under the water and sucked in a breath of water before she could think about it. She listened to the ice cubes tinkling on the surface, watched the bathroom light refracting through the water, occasionally interrupted by Tommy's face as he looked down on her. There was no panic, no choking – she didn't even feel the claustrophobia that she had expected. Actually, it was kind of pleasant.

Tommy pulled her up and she expelled a great cough of water, then began breathing normally.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine."

"You really did drown."

"It wasn't that bad."

"Try it again."

This time Tommy left her under for ten minutes before pulling her up.

After the cough, she said, "I guess that's it."

"Did you see the long tunnel with the light at the end? All your dead relatives waiting? The fiery gates of hell?"

"Nope, just ice cubes."

Tommy turned around and sat down hard on the bathroom rug with his back to the tub. "I feel like I was the one that got drowned."

"I feel great."

"That's it, you know. You are immortal."

"I guess so. As far as we can test it. Can I get out of the tub now?"

"Sure." He handed her a towel over his shoulder. "Jody, are you going to leave me when I get old?"

"You're nineteen years old."

"Yeah, but next year I'll be twenty, then twenty-one; then I'll be eating strained green beans and drooling all over myself and asking you what your name is every five seconds and you'll be twenty-six and perky and you'll resent me every time you have to change my incontinence pants."

"That's a cheery thought."

"Well, you will resent it, won't you?"

"Aren't you jumping the gun a little? You have great bladder control; I've seen you drink six beers without going to the bathroom."

"Sure, now, but…"

"Look, Tommy, could you look at this from my point of view? This is the first time I've had to really think about this as well. Do you realize that I'll never have blue hair and walk with tiny little steps? I'll never drive really slow all the time and spend hours complaining about my ailments. I'll never go to Denny's and steal all the extra jelly packets and squirrel them away in a giant handbag."

Tommy looked up at her. "You were looking forward to those things?"

"That's not the point, Tommy. I might be immortal, but I've lost a big part of my life. Like French fries. I miss eating French fries. I'm Irish, you know. Ever since the Great Potato Famine my people get nervous if they don't eat French fries every few days. Did you ever think about that?"

"No, I guess I didn't."

"I don't even know what I am. I don't know why I'm here. I was made by some mystery creature and I don't have the slightest idea why, or what he wants from me, or what I am supposed to be doing. Only that he's messing with my life in ways I can't understand. Do you have any idea what that is like?"