Anton Strout - Deader Still

The deck of the boat was thick with the dead. As we picked our way toward the doors to the interior, I had to step with caution. Unfortunately, my eyes settled on those of a lifeless dark-haired woman in a green, swirly-patterned dress and my balance faltered. I grabbed for the railing and steadied myself before I could peel my eyes away from the blank glare of hers. Her sheer stillness creeped me out to the nth degree. It was surreal, like being in some sort of macabre fever-dream. I had never seen so many dead bodies in one place before.

Connor and I pushed through the first set of doors, with Davidson following behind us. The main level of the ship’s interior was a large oval dance floor surrounded by a second-story balcony overlooking it. Bodies were draped haphazardly over the railing, and the faint copper stench of blood was in the air. I fought back the urge to throw up.

“Jesus,” I said.

Connor shook his head. “I don’t think Jesus had jack to do with this, kid.”

I crossed to the one thing left standing along the edge of the dance floor, the spot where a DJ had set up his sound system. A young man in a skewed trucker’s cap, most likely the DJ himself, was slumped over the console, as lifeless as everything else on the ship. I positioned my hands to examine him and then looked to Davidson.

“May I?” I asked.

He nodded. “None of those cops out there could make heads or tails of it. Be my guest.”

Connor stepped up next to me. A dried spot of blood was on the mixing board below, and it lined up with a tear of chewed-up skin at the base of the man’s neck.

“You know,” Connor said, “for the number of bodies at this crime scene, doesn’t the place seem sorta bloodless to you?”

I checked the floor for blood. Connor was right—there was very little. With this many bodies, the place should have been slick with it.

“Vampires?” Connor said, sounding slightly hopeful despite the fact that we were standing in the middle of a slaughterhouse.

Even though the Department had government tedium written all over it, at its heart we were all closet cryptozoological nerds eager to spot any number of oddities. While the motto of the NYPD was “To Serve and Protect,” I had always thought our motto should be “To Gawk and Appreciate.”

“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions,” Connor continued, “but everyone from the Inspectre on down has been chomping at the bit for any sign of vampiric activity.”

I nodded and thought of the dry-erase board mounted high over the bull pen in our office. It read: “It has been 736 days since our last vampire incursion.”

“I don’t want to go all Code Bela over all this,” I said, “but it’s a possibility.” I turned to David Davidson. “Are there any witnesses?”

He shook his head. “Not anyone who survived,” Davidson said. “They even fished a few people out of the water who looked like they had jumped to escape whatever did this. They weren’t bitten, though. They simply drowned.”

“I doubt there’s anything simple about drowning,” Connor said, and his face went dark. I remembered that his own brother had gone missing from a beach when they were kids, and it was likely he had drowned.

Connor squatted next to the DJ’s equipment and examined two women who looked like they had been clutching each other for dear life before they had died. He pulled a vial from one of his pockets and flipped the lid on it, releasing the scent of patchouli into the air.

“What the hell is he doing?” Davidson asked, covering his nose. “Trying to attract hippies?”

“Quiet,” I whispered. “He’s attempting to bait any lingering spirits.”

I waited as long as I could before speaking again.

“You getting anything?”

He shook his head, scanning the roomful of bodies. “Nothing. Not a soul in the room right now. Don’t know how I’m supposed to talk to the dead if they’ve scattered off already . . .”

Davidson stood there watching the two of us, making me self-conscious on top of already being creeped out.

Finally, Connor looked up. “You ready to dig in, kid?”

“Not really,” I said. I pulled out a roll of Life Savers, unwrapped it, and crunched the whole thing down in three bites. “But we owe it to these people to get to the bottom of it, so . . . let’s find out why this whole mess has landed in the hands of Other Division, shall we?”

With my gloves on, I gently lifted the DJ off his array of turntables and lowered him to the floor with care. There were a lot of things that Connor and I had yet to try in my training, but I wasn’t about to start taking psychometric readings off corpses. I couldn’t read clothes, anyway. Objects had always been the trigger for me, so I pulled off my gloves and started with one of the turntables.

I willed my power into action without a problem. The turntable was ripe with fresh information. I could feel it arcing into me as the electric hum of connection to the object hit the center of my mind’s eye. As I popped into the vision, I found myself standing in the exact same spot; the only exception was that, in my vision, all of these dead bodies were still alive and dancing. My heart ached at how full of life, movement, and sound the room was.

I was the DJ in this scenario, feeling whatever he felt last night. At the moment, he was charged with the energy of the deep bass he was pumping out and I found myself caught up in his sensations, his heart rushing in time with the music.

I looked down and caught his reflection off one of the CD cases lying on the edge of his equipment tower. I wore headphones, each the size of a cinnamon bun, giving the DJ a Princess Leia-like quality as he worked his sound equipment. While one song played out over the crowd, he was busy cuing the next with the use of the headphones. His concentration was so fixed on his job that it was no wonder he didn’t notice much of what was happening around him.

Although I was a passive passenger in the DJ’s body, I was able to look around the rest of the room even though his focus was on the turntable. Faster than I could follow, the dance floor was turning into a sea of panic, people screaming and running for their lives. I wanted to scream out for him to lift his goddamned head and see what was going on, but by the time he looked up from his turntable, half the room was writhing around on the floor as the rest of the crowd trampled over them in their attempts to get away. But from what? Looking around, the DJ couldn’t see whatever caused the commotion, which only meant . . .

He spun around in time to catch a flash of glowing red eyes as a humanoid shape lunged at his neck, the sharp tear of fangs puncturing his jugular. Trapped in his body as I was, I could feel him dying as his blood was being drained. His chest tightened, a scream of horror catching in his throat as his heart started to slow. Caught up in the DJ’s fear, I felt helpless to pull myself out of the vision. I’d never been trapped inside someone in the throes of death before, and I wondered if there was any chance that I would die myself if I stayed in that moment long enough. It seemed I was about to find out—I couldn’t pull myself out of it and my world went dark.

I snapped out of the vision only to hear the tail end of my own scream echoing in the now-still room. I was laid out on the floor with Connor standing over me, one fist balled like he had just punched someone—which made a lot of sense because my jaw hurt like a son of a bitch. I sat up, touching my face to assess the damage.

“You okay, kid?” Connor said. “Sorry about decking you. You went all white and you were screaming.”

I stood up on shaking legs, leaning against a nearby column for support.

“I . . . I . . .” I started, but couldn’t finish. My face hurt, and my blood sugar felt abnormally low. How long had I been in the vision and how much energy had it sapped from me? My body shook with the dizziness of hypoglycemia. The faint smell of blood mixed with the overpowering fruitiness of the Life Savers I had eaten minutes ago. I felt my stomach clench. I was going to be sick.