Christopher Moore - Bite Me

“Lock the door,” the Emperor moaned, pointing through the window. A fog bank was moving across the parking lot, with rather more intent than one usually expects from a fog bank. A high, yowling screech seemed to come out of the fog in a stream, as if it had been sampled, amplified, and duplicated a thousand times.

The Animals moved to the glass.

“Lock the door, Lash,” Clint said. Clint never gave orders.

The edge of the fog bank was boiling with shapes, claws, ears, eyes, teeth, tails-cats formed of fog, rolling in a wave over one another, some materializing partially, only to evaporate and roll back into the cloud, their red eyes moving through the cloud like embers out of a firestorm.

“Whoa,” said Drew.

“Whoa,” repeated the others.

“Okay, that is different,” said Troy Lee.

“My friends all over the City are missing,” the Emperor said. “Street people. They’re gone. Just their clothes and gray dust,” the Emperor said. “The cats are killing everything in their way.”

“That is fucked up,” said Jeff.

“Deeply, deeply fucked up,” said Barry, dragging one of the heavy wooden order dividers off the register and brandishing it like a club.

“Lock the fucking door, Lash!” Clint screamed.

“Jesus hates it when you use the f -word,” said Gustavo, the Mexican porter, who was Catholic and liked to remind Clint when his Jesus was slipping.

The fog washed against the window and claw marks etched the Plexiglas instantly to frost, as if it had all been sanded. The noise was like, well, it was like a thousand vampire cats clawing on Plexiglas-it made their teeth hurt.

“Did anyone bring weapons?” Troy Lee asked.

“I brought some weed,” Drew said.

A cat’s claw of fog crept under the door and raked the toe of Lash’s sneaker. He snapped the lock shut, pulled out the key, and backed away.

“Okay, break time,” he said. “Crew meeting in the walk-in.”

Across town, in the bedroom of a fashionable loft, in the fashionable SOMA neighborhood, aspiring rat-shagger, Jared Whitewolf, looked up from rubbing his sore ankle to see a completely naked redhead walk into the room. Her hair hung to her waist in a great curling cape, framing her figure, which was perfect and as white as a marble statue. She held Jared’s double-edged dagger in her right hand.

Jared backed up onto the bed in a reverse crab walk. “I, I, I, it, it, it-Abby made me-”

“Chill, Scissorhands,” Jody said. “You’d better find some of those blood bags of Steve’s fast, unless you’d like to finish high school as a pile of greasy dust. Countess is thirsty.”

Do the condemned in hell know the suffering that is a whole day of mom-guilt heaped like steaming piles of bat guano upon my spiky magenta coif? (I went with magenta spikes with electric violet tips to express my outrage at being dragged from my home and imprisoned with the cruel Mombot and my crapacious little sister, Ronnie.) Evidently, Mother feels that we were too young to move in together only a week after meeting, and live in a stolen apartment with two of the undead and their stupid amounts of cash. Although she doesn’t really know about the undead or the cash parts, but she made her point.

’Kayso, I had like put on my red tartan wedding gown with the black veil and resolved myself to an all-day power-pout in the corner of the living room, coming up only to text Foo messages of my agony of missing him and change the channel and whatnot, when Jared called from the land-line at the love lair.

So I’m all, “Speak, corpse-fluffer.”

And Jared is all, “OMFG! The Countess is out, and she was naked, but now she’s not, and she totally got blood all over your leather corset, and you have to come right now because the rats are freaking out and we need a hacksaw and a file.”

And I’m all, “Uh-oh.”

And Jared is all, “I know. I know. OMG! OMG!”

And I’m all, “Is she pissed?” Sounding way more chill than I felt.

And Jared pauses for a second like he’s thinking it over, then he’s all, “She’s wearing your clothes and there’s blood running all down the front of her and she’s nodding and showing her fangs and shit.”

So I’m like getting some perspective now-like when you’re a kid and you think it sucks that you have to eat hydrogenated peanut butter on your PBJ, and then you see one of those starving commercial kids with the flies in their eyes, who don’t even have a sandwich-and you’re all, “Well, that sucks.” ’Kayso, I’m thinking that maybe being under restriction in the mother unit’s Fillmore stronghold isn’t so bad when compared to having the Countess busting out her wrath on you for imprisoning her in bronze.

So I’m like, “Sucks to be you, Jared. Byez.” And I offed my phone.

So like five minutes go by, which I spend in my corner going, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” and whatnot, and the land-line rings. And Ronnie is all, “Are you going to get that?” from her room.

And I’m all, “I didn’t even know it was hooked up.”

And she was all, “It’s probably Mom checking up on you, so you might as well get it.”

And I’m all, “Ronnie, answer it or I will murder you in your sleep and dump your body in the Bay.”

And she’s all, “’Kay.”

Then, “It’s for you. It’s some girl named Jody.” And Ronnie is all standing there with her shaved head and her nonexistent hip thrown out, like “So there, ho.”

And I’m all, “Fucksocks!” And I take the phone and I’m like, “Hi, I have amnesia and don’t remember anything for the last two months!” Because what do you say to someone who you had bronzed?

And the Countess is all, “Abby, I’m not angry.”

Which was a total lie, because I could hear that she was angry. She had that “I’m not angry” mom voice, even though she’s only, like, twenty-six in real years.

“So you’re not going to kill me?”

“We’ll talk. Right now I need you to get a power drill and a hacksaw with extra blades and come to the loft.”

And I’m all, “I don’t know where to get stuff like that, and Foo’s at work, and I’m on restriction, and I have to go to school tomorrow. I have a test, so I totally can’t cut class, and besides, what do you need that stuff for?”

And she’s all, “Find the tools and come now. Tommy is stuck in the statue and we need to get him out.”

And I’m thinking, Oops. But I’m chill and I’m like, “Can’t he get out the same way you did?”

And the Countess is all, “Tommy doesn’t know how to turn to mist. That’s how I escaped, but Tommy has been trapped in there for-how long, Abby?”

“Oh, like a couple of days. It’s all so foggy, after the head trauma.”

Then I hear her saying, like, “Jared, come over here. I want Abby to hear your neck snap.”

“Okay, like five weeks. Fuck, Countess, overreact much?”

“Come now, Abby.”

And she just clicks off.

So I text Foo: COUNTESS OUT, NEED HACKSAW PWRDRILL NOW

And he’s all: WTF? WTF? WTF? OUT? WTF? ACE HARDWARE, CASTRO ST

(I know. Four WTFs! Foo has deep intellectual curiosity. Last week he quizzed me for twenty minutes on what it was like to have a clitoris. I just kept saying “nice.” I know, I’m such a tard, I couldn’t think of anything else. I so have to learn French. They have like thirty-seven words for clitoris. They’re like snow to Eskimos, only you know, harder to build an igloo out of.)

’Kayso, I text him: KTXBYE ‹3

And I tell Ronnie to tell Mom that I think I got some anthrax on my toothbrush and I have to go to Walgreens to get a new one so I’ll be right back. Then I put on my jacket with the sun warts, in case of vampyre kitties and whatnot, and I take the F car up to Castro Street and go to Ace Hardware. And I’m totally feeling the animosity coming off the Builder Bob guy in the red apron, and I’m like, “What? You’ve never seen a wedding dress?”