The Vampire Next Door (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

I thanked my lucky stars every day for the wind-up pocket watch that I’d given Cole two years ago. Electricity was hit or miss these days, so an electric alarm clock was just too unreliable, and with my house sealed up like Fort Knox, there was no way to tell if it was daylight outside. I rewound the watch every day, and it never let me down.

I used the corner of my t-shirt to wipe a smudge off the watch’s face, and wound it slowly, remembering when Cole had unwrapped it on Valentine’s Day. The look on his face had been priceless. He’d mentioned it to me in passing just after Christmas, saying that he could use a wind-up watch, since every watch battery that had ever been in close proximity to him seemed to die after a month or two.

I’d always told Cole that those watches kicked the bucket because of the constant negative energy surrounding him. Even a poor watch battery couldn’t take the pressure.

That was one of the nicer insults I’d thrown his way. I regretted it now. You find yourself regretting a lot of stuff when it’s the end of civilization. Stuff like being bitchy to your husband, or not vampire-proofing your house properly before the apocalypse, or never getting that nose job you’d always wanted.

It was nine AM, two hours and nine minutes past sunrise, and The Ex had long gone back to her hidey-hole, wherever that was this week. In un-death, The Ex was a lot like she’d been in life. Arrogant, temperamental, and wildly unpopular with just about everybody. There weren’t many lone vampires- they typically moved in groups. But Kellie had yet to find anyone who could tolerate her for more than a night or two.

The way the ventilation system was set up for my basement allowed me to hear everything Kellie said when she was positioned outside the breezeway that barred her from my front door. She was probably helping by screaming so loud, of course, but the bottom line was that I heard every word she spoke. She must have known it, too, because she returned every night to hurl more insults my way.

Holloway stretched his legs and lazily climbed to his feet, wagging his hind end at me as I climbed the steps to the basement door. I shoved Cole’s old 9mil pistol in the back waistband of my pants. The gun wouldn’t do any good against vamps, but I’d learned that desperate humans often presented a bigger danger during daylight hours.

I flipped the switch beside the door, my hand lingering on it for a moment as I remembered that Eddie had been the one to wire it for me, about a week after he’d arrived. It was the only switch in the house that controlled the UV lights he’d installed in every room. Although we hadn’t had any vamps bust in after he’d secured the weak spots, those lights still felt like a lifeline to me, a guarantee of safety that hadn’t been there before Eddie had shown up.

Well, it wasn’t doing me any good to miss him now. Shaking my head, I propped the crossbow on my hip. “Uneventful night, huh, buddy?” I said to Holloway as I lifted the bar out of its slot on the heavy steel door. The bar swung to the side on its hinges, and I set about unlocking the deadbolts on the door itself.

Holloway stood just behind me as I pulled the door open. I snapped the crossbow up as I stepped out into the hallway and moved into the family room. Quickly checking either side of me, I noted that the family room was empty, and clucked to Holloway to follow as I moved sideways.

True to form, Holloway ignored me, wandering towards the back door instead.

The kitchen and the informal dining room were both clear. The house was huge- “Big enough for your whole family!” Cole had joked when we’d first bought it.

My family lived in Phoenix, about three hours northwest of us, and visited often- or at least they had, before the world went to hell. The last time I’d talked to my dad was a week before the outbreak. We’d had no contact since then. His cell phone went straight to voicemail every time I called, which was still less frustrating than Cole’s phone, which told me that the “customer is out of service range.” It just figured. Cole and I had discussed switching cell phone companies a million times, but had never actually gotten around to it. A vote against procrastination, and another regret to add to the list, along with that evasive nose job.

I did two sweeps of the ground level of our house before I felt safe lowering the crossbow. I was on edge. It had been different with Eddie here. He’d known what he was doing, and when I was with him I felt like I knew what I was doing, too. Without him, not so much. But…well…no use crying over it now.

The body of a man was discarded outside the door of my breezeway. Kellie’s doing, obviously.I strapped the crossbow onto my back and went through the house to the backyard to get the wheelbarrow, Holloway tagging along at my heels.

The sun was hot for March, hotter than usual, and I realized grimly that it would be a miserable summer without the swamp cooler operating consistently. Ugh. Eddie and I never did figure out why the electricity was so erratic, and even though we’d managed to swipe a generator last week, he hadn’t gotten it hooked up yet. The electric company was on the outskirts of town, much farther than we wanted to venture- not that I would have known what to do when we got there anyway.

Fortunately there had only been a handful of occasions where the power was out for longer than a few hours. Once, it was out for three days straight, and I had resigned myself to a lifetime of showering in cold water by candlelight, but then, mysteriously, the lights and water heater came on again.

I often wondered if it was humans getting us back on the grid, or vamps.

I got the wheelbarrow as close as I could to the body without running the poor dead guy over, and pushed him over onto his back with the toe of my boot. His throat was torn out. Didn’t look like he’d be rising again. That wound would have already healed if The Ex had allowed him to drink from her. I bent over, grunting as I hooked my arms under his shoulders and struggled to lift him into the wheelbarrow. I managed to get his head and shoulders over the edge, but couldn’t lift him any higher. When I tried to let his upper body rest against the wheelbarrow so I could pick up his legs, the wheelbarrow threatened to tip forward.

After some consideration, I nudged the wheelbarrow with my hip to edge the right wooden handle underneath the overhanging lip of brick on the outside wall of my house. This time, when I let go of the guy to grab his legs, the brick lip stopped the wheelbarrow handle from coming up and flipping over.

I folded the dead guy’s legs up and shoved him further into the wheelbarrow, thankful I’d gotten to him before rigor mortis set in. Fresh dead bodies were a bitch to deal with, but stiff, bloated dead bodies were an excruciating pain in my ass that I’d rather avoid.

I locked my front door, locked the storm door, and then locked the door on the breezeway, which was secured with wrought iron bars. Satisfied that my house was secure, I wheeled the body down the block, and Holloway went in front of me, criss-crossing back and forth on the street as we walked.

We lived on a cul-de-sac in the middle of town. There were a ton of vamps in the area and a constantly-revolving handful of survivors, but most of them knew better than to try their luck with me in broad daylight, so I felt fairly safe walking around while the sun was out. I always stayed in the middle of the street, just in case.

I glanced down at the body in the wheelbarrow and felt a sudden rush of sorrow. Poor guy. He wasn’t anyone I knew, and yet somehow he’d gotten caught in Kellie’s quest for revenge against me. It just wasn’t right.

One thing I could never figure out was how Kellie became a vampire in the first place. The rule of thumb, as far as I’d figured it out, was that you had to get bitten and then drink blood from a vampire before you turned. It wasn’t any huge, complicated thing- a few drops were enough to make you undead.

But vampires are notoriously egotistical and shallow. They don’t turn ugly people, or annoying people, or really anyone who might taint the overall coolness rating of their exclusive vampire club. Frankly, whatever vamp turned Kellie must have gotten hold of a bad batch of blood beforehand and lost all capacity for logic. No one in their right mind would have considered turning The Ex immortal. What a horrible thing to inflict on the human race. Like having a freaking vampire pandemic wasn’t bad
enough
.

I took a running start to push the wheelbarrow up the curb that led to the park’s entrance, struggling a bit to balance the dead body. How had this become normal, everyday life for me? Sheesh. Kellie had been stalking me since she was turned, right at the start of the pandemic, but she didn’t start leaving bodies until…hmm. About five months ago. There had been six so far, not counting this one.

I’d been horrified when I saw the first one- and of course that had been the one that she’d decided to turn. When Eddie and I wheeled the sleeping vamp out into the sunlight (obviously unaware that he was in the process of turning, or we would have staked him right away), the poor guy started wailing, smoking, and ultimately ended up frying like an egg on a Phoenix sidewalk in summer. All this while I ran in circles, flapping my arms hysterically and screaming. Vamps typically sleep for a couple of days after turning, but he’d had a rude awakening.

That had been grossly unpleasant. It had clued Eddie in to my less-than-composed reaction to emergency situations. And it made me feel a lot less chummy towards Kellie, who up until that point, I’d kind of pitied.

In the beginning, I did try to give her the benefit of the doubt. I made excuses for her. I mean, Cole had left her, and that had to hurt. She met some guy on the internet less than a year after their divorce was final, and moved him in with her and the kids two days later. After four months, they got married. He left eleven days into their marriage and had the nerve to
send her an email
to tell her goodbye.

I’m not making this up. Seriously. It’s like a bad soap opera or something. The lousy just kept piling up for this woman. It wasn’t hard to be sympathetic.

At first, I’d had my reservations about Cole. Although I was very much attracted to him, I wasn’t sure if he took his responsibilities as a dad seriously. I’m generally inclined to feel more supportive for single mothers, in part because I’ve seen a few of my friends struggle to raise their kids without any assistance from their deadbeat exes, so I gave Cole a wide berth in the beginning. I wasn’t sure what to think of him. He didn’t see his daughters much, and that led me to believe that he was one of those awful sperm donor types who couldn’t be bothered with fatherhood.

Eventually though, I realized he genuinely wanted to be an involved dad. No, he definitely wasn’t the perfect husband, but he was a great father and a stable provider. Kellie was just ticked off that he’d had the nerve to leave, and she had two available methods for revenge- money, and the kids. So she took both of them in the divorce.

When I met Cole, he was drowning in debt and was only allowed to see the kids when The Ex needed a free babysitter.

The urge to rescue runs deep in my family. My dad has a major rescuer complex, too. My mom is a total basket case, and his only two serious relationships since their divorce twenty years ago were with equally neurotic women. He just can’t find a nice, sane, stable girl.

Similarly, I am attracted to extremely handsome and severely damaged men.

No joke.

Where was I?

Oh, right. Burying the body.

It feels so weird to say that.

Anyway, southern Arizona has this aggravating ground layer called caliche, which I think is supposed to be some kind of special rock but is actually just the term that we Arizonans use to describe any patch of dirt where we can’t dig more than a few inches deep. When that first vamp burned up, leaving his charred bones behind, I tried my hand at grave-digging and ended up sweating my butt off for four hours, with very little reward. The hole I dug was barely big enough to bury a cat in. So Eddie and I turned the drainage ditch behind the neighborhood park into a mass grave.

I know, I know, it’s gross, but the ditch’s steep concrete walls made it possible for us to simply drop a body into the ditch and walk away.

Carrion-eaters like vultures, crows, and coyotes did their part in disposing of the bodies over time, but even so, the ditch was a place I dreaded visiting. After the first two bodies, I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. Even the sun-bleached bones of the earliest corpses were awful reminders of the total demise of civilization.