You Suck (4 page)

T
wo in the morning. Normally, the Emperor of San Francisco would have been tucked in behind a Dumpster with the royal guard snuggled around him for warmth, snoring like a congested bulldozer, but to night he had been undone by the generosity of a Starbucks froth slave in Union Square who had donated a bucket-sized Holiday Spice Mochaccino to the cause of royal comfort, thus leaving the Emperor and his two companions jangled, wandering the wee hours on a nearly deserted Market Street, waiting for breakfast time to roll around.

“Like crack with cinnamon,” said the Emperor. He was a great, boiler tank of a man, an ambling meat locomotive in a wool overcoat, his face a firebox of intensity, framed with a gray tempest of hair and beard such as are found only on gods and lunatics.

Bummer, the smaller of the troops, a Boston terrier,
snorted and tossed his head. He’d lapped up some of the rich coffee broth himself, and felt ready to tear ass out of any rodent or pastrami sandwich that might cross his path. Lazarus, normally the calmer of the two, a golden retriever, pranced and leapt at the Emperor’s side as if it might start raining ducks any minute—a recurring nightmare among retrievers.

“Steady, gents,” the Emperor chided. “Lets us use this inopportune alertness to inspect a less frantic city than we find in the day, and determine where we might be of service.” The Emperor believed that the first duty of any leader was to serve the weakest of his people, and he made an effort to pay attention to the city around him, lest someone fall through the cracks and be lost. Clearly he was a loon. “Calm, good fellows,” he said.

But calm was not coming. The smell of cat was tall in the air and the men were jacked on java. Lazarus barked once and bolted down the sidewalk, followed closely by his bug-eyed brother-in-arms, the two descending on a dark figure that lay curled up around a cardboard sign on the traffic island at Battery Street, beneath a massive bronze statue that depicted four muscular men working a metal press. It had always looked to the Emperor like four guys molesting a stapler.

Bummer and Lazarus sniffed the man beneath the statue, sure that he had to have a cat concealed among his rags somewhere. When a cold nose hit a hand, the Emperor saw the man move, and breathed a sigh of relief. With a closer look, the Emperor recognized him as William with
the Huge Cat. They knew each other to nod hello, but because of racial tensions between their respective canine and feline companions, the two had never become friends.

The Emperor knelt on the man’s cardboard sign and jostled him. “William, wake up.” William groaned and an empty Johnny Walker Black bottle slid out of his overcoat.

“Dead drunk, perhaps,” said the Emperor, “but fortunately, not dead.”

Bummer whimpered. Where was the cat?

The Emperor propped William up against the concrete base of the statue. William groaned. “He’s gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.”

The Emperor picked up the empty scotch bottle and sniffed it. Yes, it had recently held scotch. “William, was this full?”

William grabbed the cardboard sign off the sidewalk and propped it in his lap. “Gone,” he said. The sign read
I AM POOR AND SOMEONE STOLE MY HUGE CAT
.

“My deepest sympathies,” said the Emperor. He was about to ask William how he had managed to procure a fifth of top-shelf scotch, when he heard a long, feline yowl echo down the street, and looked up to see a huge shaved cat, in a red sweater, heading their way. He managed to catch hold of Bummer and Lazarus’s collars before they darted after the cat, and dragged them away from William. The huge cat leapt into William’s lap and the two commenced a drunken reunion embrace that involved quantities of purring, baby talk, and drool, enough that
the Emperor had to fight down a little nausea at the sight of it.

Even the royal hounds had to look away, the two realizing instinctively that a maudlin and shaved, thirty-five-pound cat in a red sweater was clearly above their pay grade. There was just no doggy protocol for it, and presently they began to turn in circles on the sidewalk, as if looking for a good place to feign a nap.

“William, I believe someone has shaved your cat,” said the Emperor.

“That would be me,” said Tommy Flood as he came around the side of the traffic island, scaring the bejeezus out of everyone there. A pale and delicate hand reached out from behind the island, grabbed the collar of Tommy’s coat, and snatched him back around the corner as if he were a rag doll.

“Tommy?” called the Emperor. The big man stalked around the concrete art bunker. Bummer and Lazarus had headed back down the street toward the waterfront, as if they had just seen a particularly fetching porter house steak hopping around down there that needed to be investigated. The Emperor found his friend C. Thomas Flood, held tight in the clutches of his girlfriend, Jody Stroud, the vampire, who had her hand pressed tightly over Tommy’s mouth and was furiously giving him noogies with the knuckle of her other hand. There was a hollow popping each time she connected, and muted cries from Tommy.

“Jody, I must insist that you unhand the young man,” insisted the Emperor.

And she did. Tommy twisted out of her grasp.

“Ow!” Tommy said, rubbing his head.

“Sorry,” Jody said. “Couldn’t be helped.”

“I thought you were going to leave the city with that fiend,” said the Emperor. He had been there, with the royal hounds and Tommy’s crew from the Safeway, when they’d done battle with the old vampire at the St. Francis Yacht Club.

“Well, yes, of course. He left already and I’m going to join him,” Jody said. “Just like I promised Inspector Rivera. But I wanted to make sure that Tommy was going to be all right before I left.”

The Emperor liked Jody, and had been a little disappointed when he found that she was a bloodsucking fiend, but she was a pleasant girl nonetheless, and had always been generous with treats for the men, despite Bummer’s dropping into yapping fits in her presence. “Well then, I suppose that will have to do,” said the Emperor. “It appears that our young writer does require some adult supervision before being set loose on the City.”

“Hey, I do okay,” Tommy said.

“You shaved the cat,” said the Emperor, raising a wild eyebrow that looked like a gray squirrel with a Mohawk.

“I—uh, we were testing him out, to see if I should get a cat to keep me company after Jody leaves.” He looked at Jody, who nodded enthusiastically while trying to look wide-eyed and sincere.

“And…and,” Tommy continued, “I was chewing some
bubble gum, you know, the kind that you can blow really big bubbles with—well, long story short, before I knew it, Chet had lunged at one of my bubbles and was completely covered with bubble gum.”

Jody quit nodding and just stared at him.

“So you shaved him,” the Emperor added.

Now it was Tommy’s turn to nod and look sincere. “Regrettably.”

Jody was nodding again, too. “Regrettably,” she echoed.

“I see,” said the Emperor. They certainly seemed sincere. “Well, the sweater was considerate.”

“My idea,” Jody said. “You know so he doesn’t get chilled. It’s actually my sweater. Tommy washed it and put it in the dryer, so it’s a little too small for me.”

“And don’t think it was easy getting a cat that size into a sweater,” Tommy said. “It was like trying to dress a ball of razor wire. I’m cut to ribbons.” He pushed his sleeves up to expose his forearms, which were distinctly not cut to ribbons. They were, in fact, unmarked, if a little pale.

“Well, good show, then,” the Emperor said, backing away. “The men and I will be on our way, then.”

“Do you guys need anything, Your Majesty?” Jody asked.

“No, no, we have been most fortunate this evening. Most fortunate indeed.”

“Well, take care, then,” Jody said, even as the Emperor backed around the corner and headed up the street.

She can be deceptively pleasant for a blood-drinking agent of evil,
the Emperor thought.

Bummer and Lazarus were almost out of sight, four blocks ahead. They had known, the rascals. The Emperor was disgusted with himself, leaving William there like that, at the mercy of the fiends. There was no telling what they might do, the two of them, but he felt fear chilling his spine and he couldn’t make himself turn around. Perhaps they wouldn’t hurt poor William. After all, they had been sweet children in life, both of them. And even in her current state, Jody had shown a certain quality of mercy by waiting until now to turn Tommy. Still, he had a city he was responsible for, and he could not shirk that responsibility.

It was a long walk to the Marina Safeway, but he had to reach it before the night crew left. As knavish as they might be, they were the only people in his city who actually had experience hunting vampires.

B
ite him,” Tommy said. He was standing over the huge cat guy, who had passed out again under the statue.

Jody shook her head and shuddered. “He’s filthy. Don’t tell me you can’t smell that.” Since she’d become a vampire, she’d only experienced nausea when she tried to eat real food, but she was nauseated now, despite the hunger grating in her core.

“Here, I’ll clean off a spot.” Tommy fished a tissue out of his coat pocket, licked it, and cleaned a spot on William’s neck. “There. Go for it.”

“Yuck.”

“I bit the cat,” Tommy said. “You said yourself that you were starving.”

“But he’s hammered.” Jody said. She was taking little steps in place like a little kid who has to pee.

“Bite him.”

“Quit saying ‘bite him.’ I don’t think of it like that.”

“How do you think of it?”

“I don’t really think of it. It’s sort of an animal thing.”

“Oh, I see,” Tommy said. “Bite him before some cops come along and take him away and you miss your chance.”

“Ewww,” Jody said, kneeling beside William. Chet the huge cat looked up at her from William’s lap, then put his head down and closed his eyes. (Blood loss had mellowed him.) Jody pushed William’s head aside and reared back with her mouth open wide as her fangs extended. She closed her eyes and bit.

“See how easy that was,” Tommy said.

Jody glared at him without letting go, her breath rasping through her nose as she fed. She thought,
I should have hit him harder when I had the chance
. Finally, when she felt she’d taken enough to sustain her, but not enough to hurt the huge cat guy, she pulled away, sat down, and looked up at Tommy.

“You’ve got a little—” Tommy gestured to the corner of her mouth.

She wiped her mouth with her hand, came away with a little lipstick and a little blood. She looked at William’s neck. It’s was sort of a dirt-gray color, with a white spot
rimmed in lipstick. The punctures from her fangs had already healed, but the lipstick sort of stood out like a target. She reached over and wiped the lipstick off with her palm, then wiped her palm off on the huge cat’s sweater. Chet purred. William snored. Jody climbed to her feet.

“How was it?” Tommy asked.

“How do you think it was? It was necessary.”

“Well, I mean, when you used to bite me it was kind of a sexual thing.”

“Oh, right,” Jody snapped. “I planned all this because I wanted to fuck the huge cat guy.” She was feeling a little light-headed for some reason.

“Sorry. We should get him off of Market Street,” Tommy said, “before he gets robbed or arrested. He’s got to have some of the money left. That much alcohol would have killed him.”

“The hell do you care, writer boy? You shaved and ate his cat. Or was that a sexual thing?” She was definitely feeling light-headed.

“That was a mutual—”

“Oh, bullshit. Bite him. See how sexual it is. Get a taste of that down-home human hemoglobin goodness, Tommy. Don’t be a wuss,” Jody said. Well, he
was
being a wuss.

Tommy stepped back. “You’re drunk.”

“And you’re being a wuss,” Jody said. “Wuss, wuss, wuss.”

“Help me. Take his feet. There’s a sheltered alcove over
by the Federal Reserve building across the street. He can sleep it off there.”

Jody bent to take the guy’s feet, but they seemed to move as she reached for them, and when she corrected, she missed, and fell forward, catching herself so that she was on all fours with her ass in the air.

“Yeah, that worked,” Tommy said. “How about you take Chet and I’ll carry the huge cat guy?”

“Whadever, Mr. Wussyman,” Jody said. Maybe she was a little tipsy. In the old days, prevampire days, she’d tried to stay away from alcohol, because it turned out that she was sort of an obnoxious drunk. Or that’s what her ex-friends had told her.

Tommy picked up Chet the huge cat, who squirmed as he held him out to Jody. “Take him.”

“You are not the head vampire here,” Jody said.

“Fine,” Tommy said. He slung Chet under his arm and, in a single movement, scooped up the huge cat guy and threw him
over his shoulder with the other arm. “Careful crossing the street,” Tommy called back to her as he crossed.

“Ha!” Jody said. “I am a finely tuned predator. I am a superbeing. I—” And at that point she bounced her forehead off a light pole with a dull twang and was suddenly lying on her back looking at the streetlights above her, which kept going out of focus, the bastards.

“I’ll be back to get you,” Tommy called.

He’s so sweet,
Jody thought.

C
lint was the only one of the Animals still left at the Marina Safeway. He was tall, with a wild mop of dark hair and thick, horn-rimmed glasses that were held together with medical tape, and he had a look of deep panic on his face. He’d been trying to keep the store together for nearly a week with only a couple of stock boys from the day crew, and a porter from a temp service (even Gustavo, the Mexican porter with five kids, had taken off with the Animals), but now a huge order had come in on the truck and he knew he needed professionals. He dialed Tommy’s number for the fifth time that night. It was four in the morning, but Tommy was their leader—and perhaps the best frozen-turkey bowler the world had ever known. He knew what it meant to be an Animal; he would be awake.

The machine beeped. Clint said, “Dude, they’re all gone. I need your help. It’s just me, some temps, and the Lord to
night.” Clint had been recently reborn after five years in a drug-induced haze. He swore that the Lord would forever be on his night crew. “The guys took off for Vegas. Call me. No, just bring your box cutter and come to work. I’m buried.”

Once they had been nine strong, the Animals. Nine men, all under the age of twenty-five, left alone in a grocery store for eight hours with only Tommy to supervise them. They’d been given their name by the day manager, who had come in one morning to find them drunk, hanging from the giant Safeway letters on the front of store, pelting one another with marshmallows. Tommy had recruited them to fight the old vampire. They’d found the vampire, sleeping inside a vault on his yacht, and they had also found his art collection. After selling it for ten cents on the dollar, each of them had netted a hundred thousand dollars. Tommy went home with Jody, Clint went home to pray for the vampire’s soul. Simon had been killed. The rest of the Animals headed for Vegas.

Clint hung up the phone, then sat down hard in the manager’s chair. It was too much responsibility. The weight of it would drive him over the edge. Even now he could hear dogs barking in his head.

“Front door,” the temp night porter called over the half wall of the office.

Clint stood up to see the Emperor and his dogs at the double electric doors. He grabbed the keys, disarmed the alarm, and opened the door. The Boston terrier shot by him, heading for the beef-jerky display.

“Your Majesty,” Clint said. “You’re out of breath.”

The big man held his chest as he panted. “Gather the troops, young man. C. Thomas Flood has been turned to a bloodsucking fiend. Gather your weapons, we must charge again into the breach.”

“It’s just me and noobs,” Clint said. “Did you say that Tommy’s a vampire?”

“Indeed. I saw him not two hours ago. As pale as death.”

“Well, that’s not good.”

“Your talent for stating the obvious is unprecedented, young man.”

“Come in.” Clint stepped away from the door. “We are going to need to pray on this.”

“Well, there’s a start,” said the Emperor.

“Then I need to call Tommy and tell him to never mind about coming to work,” Clint said.

“Splendid,” said the Emperor, without a hint of sarcasm. “I believe we’ve achieved a new level of doomed.”

Y
ou’ve always been good to me,” Jody said.

“Well, I try,” Tommy said.

He was going up the narrow stairway to their loft. She was slung over his shoulder, her forehead bounced off his belt with every step. She seemed so light. Tommy was still amazed at his newfound strength. He’d carried her ten blocks already and he wasn’t even feeling it. Well, he was
a little tired of listening to her, but physically he wasn’t fatigued at all.

“I can be such a bitch sometimes.”

“That’s not true,” Tommy said. Yes, it was.

“Yes it is, yes it is. Yes I am. I am a total bitch sometimes.”

Tommy stopped at the top of the steps and dug in his pocket for his keys.

“Well, maybe a little, but—”

“So I am a bitch? You’re saying I’m a bitch?”

“Oh my God, is the sun never going to come up?”

“Listen, you’re lucky to have me, you wuss.”

“Yes I am,” Tommy said.

“You are?”

He swung her over to her feet, then caught her before she went over backwards into the wall. She had a big goofy smile on her face. Sometime during the evening, blood had dripped down the front of her blouse and there was some smeared on her lip. She looked a little like she’d been punched out. Tommy tried to rub away the blood with his thumb. The cloud of alcohol breath she let go on him made him wince.

“I love you, Tommy.” She fell into his arms.

“Right back at you, Jody.”

“I’m sorry I gave you noogies. I’m still learning to harness my powers, you know.”

“That’s okay.”

“And called you a wuss.”

“No problem.”

She licked the side of his neck, nipped at him. “Let’s make love before the sun comes up.”

Tommy looked over her shoulder at the destruction they had wrought on the loft the last time they’d done it, and he said something he never thought he would hear coming out of his own mouth. “I think I’ve had enough for to night. Maybe we should just lock down.”

“You think I’m fat, don’t you?”

“No, you’re perfect.”

“It’s because I’m fat.” She pushed him away and stumbled into the bedroom, then tripped and tumbled face-first into the shredded remains of their bed. “And old,” she added, although it was only through his acute vampire hearing that Tommy understood this, since she was speaking directly into the mattress. “Fat and old,” she said.

“You’re going to get whiplash from those mood swings, Red,” Tommy said quietly as he climbed into bed with his clothes on.

Then he lay there beside her thinking about all that they had to do, about how they were going to have to find a place and move without going out during the day, and beyond that, just exactly how were they going to survive and stay hidden? The Emperor could tell. Tommy could tell he could tell. And as much as he liked the Emperor, it wasn’t a good sign. And so even as he worried, and listened to his girlfriend yell at him, C. Thomas Flood became the first vampire in history to actually pray for the sun to come up.
A few minutes later, his prayers were answered, and the two of them went out.

S
ince becoming a vampire, Jody had always hated the way consciousness came on at dusk like the streetlights coming on. There was no groggy twilight between sleep and wakefulness, just “bam, welcome to the night, here’s your to-do list.” Not to night. To night she got her twilight, her grogginess, and a headache as well. She sat upright in bed so fast she nearly somersaulted off the end, then, when her head didn’t seem to follow her, she lay back down with such force that her pillow exploded, sending out a snowstorm of feathers to whirl around the room. She moaned and Tommy came bounding into the room.

“Hey,” he said.

“Ouch,” Jody said, grabbing her forehead with both hands as if to hold her brains in.

“That’s new, huh? Vampire hangover?” Tommy waved some feathers out of the air in front of him.

“I feel like death warmed over,” Jody said.

“Cute. I’ll bet you’re missing coffee right now.”

“And aspirin. I’ve fed off of you when you’d been drinking. Why did it affect me now?”

“I think maybe the huge cat guy had a little more in his blood than I did. Anyway, I have a theory about that. We can test it later, when you feel better, but right now we have a ton of stuff we have to do. We’ve got to figure out the
move. Clint called me from the store last night. Wanting me to work. Then he called back all freaked out, saying I shouldn’t come in.”

Tommy played the message for her. Twice.

“He knows,” Jody said.

“Yeah, but how does he know?”

“Doesn’t matter. He knows.”

“Fuck!”

“Little bit softer now,” Jody said, holding her hair like it was hurting her.

“Too loud?”

Jody nodded. “You know, for your notebook, Tommy. Vampire senses when you’re hungover? Not so good.”

“Really? That bad?”

“Your breath is nauseating me from across the room.”

“Yeah, we need toothpaste.”

“There’s someone at the door?” Jody covered her ears. She could hear sneakers scraping the sidewalk from all the way downstairs.

“There is?”

The door buzzer sounded.

“Yep,” she said.

Tommy ran to the front windows and looked down to the street.

“There’s a Humvee limo out there that’s about a block long.”

“You’d better answer it,” Jody said.

“Maybe we should just hide. Pretend we’re not home.”

“No, you need to get it,” Jody said. She could hear the shuffling at the door, the rock and roll playing in the limo, the bong bubbling, lines being chopped on a CD case, and a male voice repeating the phrase “sweet blue titties” over and over like a mantra. She grabbed the pillow from Tommy’s side of the bed and pulled it over her head. “Answer it, Tommy. It’s the fucking Animals.”

D
ude,” said Lash Jefferson, a wiry black man with a newly shaved scalp, wearing mirror shades. He pulled Tommy out of his doorway and hugged him furiously—crazed, back-slamming, good-to-see-you guy hugs. “We are so fucked, dude,” Lash continued.

Tommy pushed away, trying to reconcile that he was glad to see his friend with the fact that Lash smelled like a beer-bar urinal filled with mackerel.

“I thought you guys went to Vegas,” Tommy said.

“Yeah. Yeah. We did. Everyone’s in the limo. It’s just that I need to talk to you. Can we go inside?”

“No.” Tommy almost said that Jody was sleeping, which had been his excuse for keeping the Animals out of his loft in the past, but Jody was supposed to have left town. “Step in the stairway, I’ve got something happening upstairs.”

Lash nodded and looked over the top of his shades and bounced his eyebrows. His eyes were bloodshot and glazed over. Tommy could hear his heart racing. Coke or fear, he guessed. Both maybe.

“Look, dude,” Lash said. “First thing, we need to borrow some money.”

“What? You guys have over a hundred grand each from the art we sold.”

“Yeah, we did. We had a big weekend.”

Tommy figured in his head. “You guys blew over six hundred grand in what—four days?”

“No,” Lash said. “No, not all of it. We’re not completely broke.”

“Then why do you need to borrow money?”

“Just twenty grand or so, to get us through to tomorrow,” Lash said. “Luckily I almost have my MBA and have mad business skills. Otherwise we’d have been broke yesterday.”

Tommy nodded. Twenty grand was about six months’ salary for him at the Safeway. He’d been a little intimidated by Lash’s almost-MBA up until now. Now he was just worried that Lash would be able to tell he had changed. He said, “So, like you were saying, you’re fucked.”

“We were doing fine, only down like ten grand each, until we met Blue.” Lash looked at the ceiling wistfully, like it was a distant memory he was trying to conjure, instead of something that had happened a couple of nights ago.

“Blue?”

“You know that group they have in Vegas? The Blue Men?”

“Yeah, the guys who paint themselves blue and pound on pipes and stuff?” Tommy was lost.

“Yeah,” Lash said. “Well, it turns out there are blue women, too. Or at least there’s one. And dude, she’s sucking us dry.”

I
n the back seat of the limo, Blue held Barry’s face between her boobs, snugly enough to keep him under control, but not so snug that he couldn’t breathe. While the other Animals had drunk, smoked, and fucked themselves into a zombielike stupor—and now lay sprawled about the glittery interior of the limo—Barry had opted to do two hits of XTC, a line of coke, and a bong load of sticky skunk weed, which had put his brain into some sort of redundant tribal loop that had him kneeling naked before her, chanting “sweet blue titties” for the last twenty minutes. She just couldn’t take it anymore, so she had grabbed his curl-fringed bald head and pulled his face into her cleavage just to shut him up. Mercifully, he had gone quiet, because she really didn’t want to suffocate him as long as he still had money.

It takes a meandering road of wrong turns to take a girl from being the milky-skinned Cheddar princess of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to a blue-dyed call girl turning tricks at downtown casinos in Vegas, but Blue would be damned if she’d add yet another wrong turn by smothering a golden goose between her proportionally improbable silicon joy orbs. The Animals were her way out, and if she had to stay in character as an Alien pleasure Unit or a blueberry muffin to keep them on the hook, she would.

Blue was a method hooker. Early in her adventures, after she’d left cocktailing due to a propensity for spilling drinks, and before she’d begun stripping, where her lack of balance was mitigated by the presence of a sturdy pole, she had a short career acting in low-budget porn. She befriended a promising actress named Lotta Vulva, who gave her a book on the Stanislavski Method. “If you can find your sense memory,” Lotta said, “it will keep you from barfing on the actors. Directors hate that.” The “Method” had served Blue well since then, as it allowed her to calculate betting odds or figure her checkbook while her character was performing acts that she herself would have found unpleasant or outright disgusting. (How much better to reside in her sense memory of the budding Cheddar princess, coaxing the hearty, whole-milk goodness from the udders of a Holstein, than to face the harshly lit reality of her actions?)

After six months Blue was driven out of the film business by a “defect” one director called “not enough tits to fill a shot glass,” which no amount of Method was able to remedy. She returned to cocktailing, albeit at a strip club, where she seldom had to carry more than one ten-dollar beer at a time, until she saved enough money for breast-augmentation surgery and made her way to the pole. She danced her way through her twenties, before she was driven off the stage by younger, more gravity-resistant girls, and because she had skipped personal typing class in high school and had therefore besmirched her permanent record, she landed in the employ of an outcall escort service.