Christopher Moore - Bite Me

So I called the suicide hotline.

And I’m all, “I need help.”

And the guy is all, “What’s your name?”

And I’m all, “You don’t have caller ID? What kind of lame hotline is this?”

And he’s all, “It says here that your name is Allison. Are you okay, Allison?”

And I’m all, “No, I’m not okay. I’m calling the suicide hotline.”

And he’s all, “You don’t want to commit suicide, Allison.”

And I’m all, “Exactly, doofasaurus, I need someone to take me out. I need it to be quick, private, painless, and it shouldn’t fuck up my hair too much.”

And he’s like, “But there’s so much to live for.”

So I’m like, “You’re burning my minutes, fuckstick. I need a number for a hit man or one of those Kevorkian doctors.”

And he’s all, “I can’t help you with that.”

So I’m all, “Loser!” And I offed my phone.

I can’t believe it, but it turns out that the Motherbot was right. Sometimes, the only people you can trust are family. (“’Scuse me, I barely suppressed a rainbow yawn when I typed that.) So here I am, waiting for my little sister, Ronnie, to get home from school so she can murder me, then hide my body under the bed until I return as the true Mistress of the Greater Bay Area Dark. This will be my last entry as a mortal. I have to go pick out an ensem for my death.

I wonder how she’ll do it? It better be painless or the first thing on my undead to-do list will be to open a bottle of Whoop-Ass P.M. on little sister.

Katusumi Okata had lived among the gaijin for forty years. An American art dealer, traveling through Hokkaido in search of woodblock prints from the Edo period, had come into Katusumi’s father’s workshop, seen the boy’s prints, and offered to bring Okata to San Francisco to create prints for his gallery on Jackson Street. The printmaker had lived in this same basement apartment since. He’d once had a wife, Yuriko, but she had been killed in front of him on the street when he was twenty-three, so now he lived alone.

The apartment had a concrete floor covered by two grass mats, a table that held his printmaking tools, a two-burner stove, an electric kettle, his swords, a futon, three sets of clothes, an old phonograph, and now, a burned-up white woman. She really didn’t go with anything else, no matter how he arranged her.

He thought he might make a series of prints of her-her blackened, skeletal form posed about the apartment like some demon wraith from a Shinto nightmare, but the composition wasn’t working. He walked up to Chinatown and bought a bouquet of red tulips and put them on the futon beside her, but even with the added color and design element, the picture wasn’t working. And she was making his futon smell like burned hair.

Okata was not used to company, and he wasn’t sure how to keep up his end of the conversation. He had once made friends with two rats who came out of a hole in the brick wall. He had talked to them and fed them on the condition that they not bring any friends, but they hadn’t listened and he was forced to mortar up the hole. He figured they didn’t speak Japanese.

To be fair, however, she wasn’t doing very well holding up her side of the conversation, either-lying there like a bog person dipped in creosote, her mouth open as if in a scream of agony. He sat on a stool next to the futon with his sketch pad and a pencil and began to sketch her for a print. He had very much admired the great cape of red curls that streamed out behind her when he’d seen her on the street, and he was sorry that all but a few strands had burned away in the sun. A shame. Perhaps he could draw the red curls in anyway. Make them swirl around the blackened rictus like one of Hokusai’s waves.

He knew what she was, of course. He was still healing from his encounter with the vampire cats, and it took no little bit of sketching to fill in the details, especially as her fangs were pointing prominently at his ceiling right now and they were far too long and sharp to be those of a normal burned-up white girl. He filled three pages with sketches, experimenting with angles and composition, but on the fourth page he found that a sadness had overcome him that he could not chase away with the moment created in making a drawing.

Katusumi retrieved his wakizashi short sword from the stand on his work table, unsheathed it, and knelt by the futon. He bowed deeply, then put the point of the sword on the pad of his left thumb and cut. He held his thumb over her open mouth and the dark blood dripped over her teeth and lips.

Would she be like the cats? Savage? A monster? He held the razor-edged wakizashi ready in his right hand, should a demon awake. But if he’d been able to raise his beloved Yuriko, even as a demon, wouldn’t he have? All the years that had passed, kendo training, drawing, carving, meditating, walking the streets unafraid, alone, hadn’t they all been about that? About making Yuriko live? Or not living without her?

When the burned-up girl jerked with a great, rasping intake of breath, cinders cracked off her ribs and peppered the yellow futon and water began to flow from the swordsman’s eyes.

Marvin the cadaver dog took them to the Wine Country. There they found Bummer and Lazarus, the Emperor’s dogs, guarding a Dumpster in an alley behind an abandoned building. Marvin pawed the Dumpster, and tried to stay on task while the Boston terrier sniffed his junk and the golden retriever looked around, a little embarrassed.

Nick Cavuto held the lid, ready to lift it. “Maybe we should call the Wong kid and see if our sunlight jackets are done, then open it.”

“It’s daylight,” said Rivera. “Even if there are, uh, creatures in there, they’ll be immobile.” Rivera still had a very difficult time saying the word “vampires” out loud. “Marvin says there’s a body in there, we need to look.”

Cavuto shrugged, lifted the lid of the Dumpster and braced himself for a wave of rotten meat smell, but there was none.

“Empty.”

Bummer barked. Marvin pawed at the side of the Dumpster. Lazarus chuffed, which was dog for, “Duh. Look behind it.”

Rivera looked in. Other than a couple of broken wine bottles and the rice part of a taco combo plate, there was nothing in the Dumpster, yet Marvin still pawed at the steel, which was the signal he had been trained to give when he’d found a corpse.

“Maybe we should give Marvin a biscuit to reset him or something,” said Rivera.

“No corpse, no biscuit, that’s the rule,” said Cavuto. “We all have to live by it.”

At the mention of a biscuit both Bummer and Marvin stopped what they were doing, sat, looked dutiful and contrite, and gave Rivera the “I need and deeply deserve a biscuit” look. Frustrated with what biscuit whores his cohorts were, Lazarus went to the side of the Dumpster and started pawing the space between it and the wall, then tried to stuff his muzzle in behind it.

Cavuto shrugged, pulled on a pair of form-fitting mechanics gloves from his jacket pocket, and pulled the cement blocks from under the Dumpster’s wheels. Rivera watched in horror as the realization hit that he was probably going to get Dumpster schmutz, or worse, on his expensive Italian suit.

“Man up, Rivera,” Cavuto said. “There’s police work to be done.”

“Shouldn’t we call some uniforms in to do it? I mean, we’re detectives.”

Cavuto stood up and looked at his partner. “You really believe the movies when James Bond kills thirty guys hand to hand, blows up the secret lair, gets set on fire, then escapes under water and his tux doesn’t even get wrinkled, don’t you?”