Immortality Is the Suck (30 page)

criminal had become progressively vague, but I'd never committed murder.

Sure, I'd harbored murderers, broken bread with them. Colluded,

supported, and protected them. But it was my line. Or, rather, it was Peter's

line.

I didn't want to become Albert.

I followed him, now, into the downtown loft area. Twenty-three years

earlier, artists had rented the old factories and bakery buildings for thirty cents

a square foot. Now, those spaces had been partitioned into one thousand-

square-foot boxes and sold for half a million to well-heeled urban professionals

with pretensions of artistry.

A series of fresh red brick buildings came up on our left. We turned our

bikes into an immaculate narrow parking area with a VISITORS ONLY sign that

had been enthusiastically tagged and an old man with a shopping cart sitting

on the curb in one space. Albert parked near a deck and stairs, designed to

look like a loading dock.

“Wait here,” he said.

Shopping cart guy shambled over. “You got a cigarette?”

I shook one out of my package for him. His fingers were red and yellow

and chapped at the ends. He took a hardcover cigarette pack out of his many

layers of coats and slid my ciggie into it, then sequestered it back among the

folds.

I had a thought. “You see anybody biting people or drinking blood around

here?”

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A. M. Riley

“You kidding me? All the time,” he said.

He was crazy, right? Suddenly I understood the expressions on the faces

of the LAPD and ATF agents I'd spoken to in the past couple of days.

Albert reappeared, followed by a svelte young Asian boy with gorgeous,

salon-cut dark hair, a London Fog duster kicking out from his creased trousers

as he walked. A slim black leather case hung over one shoulder. From the way

he hefted it, I assumed it held some sort of equipment.

Albert placed a hand on the back of the man's neck, which he immediately

shook off. “Drew? This is Snake,” said Albert, grinning.

Drew looked at my hand when I held it out, but instead of taking it he

withdrew the unlit cigarette from his mouth and said, “Whose rod am I riding?”

He wasn't a vampire, yet. I could smell him from three feet away. I glanced

at Albert and surprised a ravenous expression on his face. “Hop on,” I said,

scooting forward on my seat.

Drew clung to me as we roared off. His body was lithe and fitted up tight

against me and gave off the odor of mint. In my ear, he yelled, “I told Albert we

only need to be within twenty yards of the main computer and I can do the

rest.”

* * * * *

Drew appeared to be something of a vampire groupie. “So, have you

noticed a change during full moons? New moons? I have a theory that the

vampiric entity is more affected by the changes in the planetary motion than—”

“Would you
please
shut up,” said Albert, pacing.

Drew's mouth turned down at the corners. I shot Albert a glare. We

needed this guy, right?

“I haven't been this way for long,” I told Drew. “So I don't know.”

“Interesting,” said Drew. He had wire clippers and cable and seemed to be

making some kind of art across the open beams of the room we sat in.

Immortality is the Suck

209

We'd parked our bikes at the bottom of the steep roads leading up to

Ozone's building, threw tarps and then brush over them. I had an alarm on my

bike that would wake the dead, or undead as the case may be, but we were

more concerned about discovery than theft at the moment. We'd scaled the wall

of a house behind Ozone's compound and lifted Drew through the window. We

sat now in an unventilated attic. Drew kept complaining about the lack of air,

but Albert and I were fine.

“You don't need to breathe. I do,” said Drew.

“I breathe,” I protested.

“Wow, you really are a newbie. You don't
need
to breathe. You only do it

out of habit. I bet when you sleep, you stop.”

I figured I'd never sleep again after hearing that.

“Who the fuck cares,” said Albert. “How much longer is this going to

take?”

“I need a tall antenna to use the WiFi at the compound,” said Drew

patiently. He stapled another bit of wire to a beam. “You know, the whole

subject of vampirism is fascinating. I've interviewed quite a few subjects and

I've been thinking of writing a book. I've noticed that the demon, as I call it,

enhances the host's, as I call the undead, former human, natural tendencies.

Violent people become more violent. Angry people become angrier. Gluttonous

people overindulge.”

Albert laughed and leered at me, gaze going to my perpetual bulge.

I ignored him. “So how dangerous is what you're doing here?”

“Those bozos are nothing but tweaked-out users,” said Drew disdainfully.

The keyboard on his laptop sounded like a machine gun as he typed. “I told

them their firewall was inadequate and they had me plug the leaks, but I'll bet

they never changed the password.” A few more clicks as his fingers moved in a

blur and he said, “See? Idiots.” He turned the laptop so that Albert and I could

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A. M. Riley

see the page displayed on the monitor. It looked like a bank account statement.

The bottom line was seven figures long.

Albert swore.

“I have to move quickly or they'll spot me,” said Drew, snapping his fingers

at Albert. “Give me the bank account information you have.”

Albert handed across a deposit slip and Drew's fingers flew across the

keyboard again. “There,” he said. “They have several accounts like this, but I

have to dive in, snatch, and run or they'll notice the breach.”

“Wait,” I said before he could exit from whatever he was doing. “Can you

print out a record of deposits or withdrawals?”

“Um, duhh, no printer,” Drew replied in a weary voice. “I can forward a

PDF to any e-mail address you want, though.”

I gave him Alli's e-mail address. Then, as an afterthought, Peter and

Stan's at the Parker Center. “Put in the subject line 're: Adam,'” I said. Drew

typed like a fiend and then hit a few keys with finality and shut the laptop.

“We should get out of here now,” he said.

“Why? I mean, I thought you could hit all the accounts,” said Albert.

“Listen, I set up the security on this place. We only have a few minutes

and then the computer begins to report a breach. If there is anybody in there

with any knowledge whatsoever, they can trace the breach back to our

location.”

“Fuck, you little shit, you didn't tell me that.”

“Well, the odds of anyone there actually knowing how to do that is pretty

slim. I'm telling you, Ozone hired meth heads who needed the extra cash, not

technically experienced professionals.”

Albert froze and held up a hand. “What was that?”

“Don't be paranoid,” sneered Drew. “There's noth—”

“Shut up,” I said. Sure enough, in the bowels of the house in which we

were hidden, a door slammed and voices rose in alarm.

Immortality is the Suck

211

“Damn,” said Albert, sprinting toward the dormer window and the only

means of escape. But it was too late. Like something from a spy thriller, black-

clothed men swarmed through the opening. Grabbed the three of us and

Drew's laptop just before more of the same popped up through the attic door.

The residents of the house, a man and woman and at least two kids that I

could see, had been herded onto the living room couch where they huddled,

terrified, staring up at the demonic faces. I felt a twinge of regret when the boy

watched me being shepherded by.

Worse, when we were herded through the back yard, I saw another human

on the ground. Too familiar, even on his belly and wearing a dark jacket, for me

not to know on sight.

Fucking hell. I should have known Peter would be following me. His face

pressed into the turf, his eyes rolled up and his gaze caught mine as I was

muscled out of the yard and through the gate.

“Who the hell was that?” I asked one of the lackeys who shoved me up the

stairs to the compound.

“Whoever they are, they'll be food soon enough.”

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Chapter Twenty-two

“'mano, sit down,” said Albert. We had been placed in the same ceramic-

tiled room with the high-powered vampire-torching beams of light imprisoning

us. I had an urge to throw myself at the beams, equal parts desperation and

self-loathing I guess, which I was quelling by pacing up and down the ten-foot

space.

Albert crouched on the floor, head on his arms, bemoaning his fate. “We

will be pinned,” he moaned again.

“We fucking deserve it,” I said. “Why are they taking so long?”

“Probably interrogating the other prisoners,” said Albert. “Or eating them.”

This was exactly what I feared and I almost exploded with impatience,

hitting the wall, hard with both fists. “Fuck!” I yelled.

“Calm down, for Christ's sake,” said a familiar voice. Stan came around

the corner and leaned in the doorway, looking in at us with an amused

expression.

“Oh, thank God, Stan. They have Peter. I—”

“You can take full blame for whatever happens to Peter, Bertoni,” Stan

said. “You fucking idiot.”

To say my heart sank is not to fully express the despair I felt. More like my

heart was torpedoed and all men on board were lost.

“You've got to do something, Stan.”

The oddest expression crossed Stan's face. “You really are that stupid,

aren't you?” he said.

“What?”

Immortality is the Suck

213

A big, ugly biker whom I recognized as Thug One appeared next to Stan,

his inked arm flung over Stan's shoulder, his mouth bloody.

“Hey, man, you sure you don't want a sip? You don't know what you're

missing.”

“No thank you, Charlie.”

There was something wrong here. It only stood on end for a minute,

though, before I saw it all clearly.

“You son of a bitch,” I breathed.

“Oh, please,” said Stan. “You can't talk.”

And then we heard a woman scream.

Stan looked uncomfortable. “I thought you told me that room was

soundproofed,” he said to Charlie.

It was completely unacceptable that the one man in the world that Peter

trusted was dirty. It was even more unacceptable that I was trapped in a

bathroom while just down the hall, people were being murdered. And worse,

these weren't just people on the street, or semiwilling victims. These were

people I knew. A young boy with wide eyes, a snarky computer nerd. Peter.

“You fucking bastards,” I said. “Let me out of here. Let me talk to Ozone.”

Charlie wiped his mouth lazily with the back of his arm. “Ozone isn't in

charge anymore.”

“Ozone lacked the necessary leadership skills,” said Stan. “He's been

replaced.”

“Bastard!” I hit the wall again.

“Settle down,” said Stan. “You're not helping yourself with these theatrics.”

“Fuck you!” I yelled, and I picked up the wooden stool and hurled it across

the wall of lights. Stan and Charlie jumped back.

Charlie seemed to think this very entertaining.

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A. M. Riley

Stan wiggled his eyebrows in a way that I supposed Peter would have been

able to interpret but which only aggravated me further. “He'll calm down when

he gets a little hungrier,” he said to Charlie. “Once a junkie, always a junkie.

He'll do pretty much anything you want for some blood.”

They retreated down the hall again. I found I was breathing hard and

remembered Drew telling me it wasn't necessary. So I stopped. I shut my

mouth and closed my eyes. Felt the hysteria back down a notch. Enough so I

could sort my thoughts out a bit.

As far as I knew, Peter and the other prisoners were still alive. Dead

women can't scream and Stan had referred to Peter in the present tense.

Backup wasn't coming, obviously. But there might still be time for an alternate

plan.

“Fuck, I'm hungry,” said Albert. “Ese was right about doing anything for a

sip, man.”

“You just ate last night.”

“How long can you go without eating?” asked Albert, surprised.

“I had a bad day when I went almost twenty-four hours,” I said. “I almost

ate you.”

He blinked up at me, and I saw the memory of that night at his trailer

coming back to him. “I would have eaten you,” he said.

“I think all this twelve-stepping has taught me how to resist temptation,” I

said. I'd resumed pacing. Wall-to-wall. This side had the source of the lights, a

series of holes that I'd already tried to block with a shoe. Apparently blocking

the lights set off an alarm, because four big guys came into the room shortly