Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“Get up,” she said to me, slithering into the nurse’s underthings. I sat up. Lazarus, I thought. This is what it felt like for Lazarus. I always liked that Bible story in Sunday school. I only actually attended Sunday school about ten times spread out over my whole childhood, but I got the story of Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead no fewer than three times. I guess God was giving me a hint. He does that. God or whatever’s sitting where God ought to be. I don’t think it’s what they told us in Sunday school.

I stood up, covering my nakedness as best I could with my hands. When the other boy was naked, she walked over to him and grabbed his chin and the back of his hair. She twisted his head violently, I heard a nauseating crack, and he jerked and went limp. I went to scream again and couldn’t. She piled him into my drawer and shut it. The naked nurse moaned a pathetic, helpless moan and drooled. Her glasses were on crooked.

“Look at me,” Margaret said. I had been staring at my pale, dead, veiny feet. Now I looked at her. Her eyes, which had looked like lamps to me before, looked more like regular eyes. I was shivering with fear. She slapped me. I stopped.

“No screamin’. No yellin’. I’m gonna give you yer breath back now,” she said. And she put her mouth to mine and blew hard. My lungs filled with her lukewarm, stinking air, and I took my first breath as one of the living dead.

“Just so you know, we’re even,” she said. “You took my life away, and I took yours. Now clean the shite offa yerself, put that kid’s clothes on, and let’s get out of here. I’ve got some things to tell you. And more to show you. Smile for me.”

I did.

“Yeah, they’re comin’,” she said. Then she leaned in close and looked at my eyes. “You’re gettin’ the sight now, too.” I made myself breathe in again, then forced the air out past my vocal cords.

“My stomach,” I said. “It…”

“Yeah, it burns, I know. All right, go bite that tart first and then get dressed.”

“What?”

“Don’t act innocent. There’s nothing innocent about you, and hasn’t been for a long time. Put your face near her neck and it’ll come to you.”

I walked over to the woman. She looked at me, mouth-breathing.

“She’s… she’s too tall.”

Margaret laughed a gravelly laugh.

“Look her in the eye and tell her to bend down. She will.”

She did.

Her glasses slipped off her head and broke.

I noticed she was sweating. I licked her. I got an erection. The nurse noticed and reflexively reached for it. Margaret slapped her hand away.

“Get on with it, it’s almost sunrise,” Margaret said. “And if you need to fuck something, you can fuck me. Later. In the dark where I can pretend you’re someone else.”

That sounded weirdly thrilling.

But not as thrilling as what was coursing through the awkwardly bent-over nurse’s neck. I smelled her. Instinct took over. I fed. Salty iron and warm, damp copper rushed into my mouth and I drank hard, grunting with how good it was, arching my back; I came all over myself and the nurse. That’s not unusual your first time. The first time’s great. And the rest aren’t so bad either.

I cleaned up and got dressed.

Just outside the door, Margaret put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me out the front door of Beth Israel and nobody gave us a second glance.

From the New York Daily News , dated February 4, 1978:

A 12-year-old Maryland girl, Renotta Vogel, went missing from a Midtown hotel Thursday afternoon and may have been abducted. The police have no suspects and no motive, but two unidentified children are wanted for questioning.

Mark Vogel, an instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, brought his family to New York to see their first Broadway play, St. Joan . The Vogels report that Renotta befriended a couple of younger children in Central Park and invited them into the lobby of Manhattan’s popular Hotel Seville to play.

“I was right there the whole time,” said the distraught father. “Monica [Mrs. Vogel] went up to shower, I used the phone in the lobby to call our house sitter about the dog, but I never looked away for more than a minute. One second they were there, the next they were gone. Just gone.”

Umberto Pérez, 29, a bellboy at the hotel, remembers seeing the children. “Sweet-faced kids, they both peeked from under a big umbrella. I remember the umbrella because I thought it might snow, but not rain. Too cold for rain.”

Despite the freezing weather, both witnesses recall the children were lightly dressed and wore no shoes. “I wasn’t going to let them in,” said Pérez, “but the older girl [Vogel] said they were friends, and I knew she was a guest. Guest gets what she wants.”

Mr. Vogel at first told police that the children, a dark-haired girl and a blond boy, both between seven and nine years of age, never spoke to him, then changed his story. “I have the impression that she was a little foreign girl, maybe British, but I can’t base that on a specific memory. I can see her opening her mouth to speak, but when I try to remember what she said, there’s no sound there. It’s the strangest thing.”

Mr. Vogel has offered a $20,000 reward for any information leading to his daughter’s safe return. Renotta is five feet tall, has auburn hair, and was last seen wearing a green wool sweater and a white knit cap.

It figures this was one of the few news articles Margaret missed that winter. She was the first generation of her family that could read, so she gobbled up newspapers like she was trying to prove something. She moved her lips, but you wouldn’t want to be the one to tell her.

Anyway, she missed that one. We all did.

I don’t know that it would have changed anything.

But it might have.

1978

LATE FEBRUARY

Margaret was squatting, looking at me. Cvetko was looking at her, rubbing his hands a little like he was washing them in slow motion. Ruth was standing near her, Old Boy working a toothpick around in his mouth where he would have had a cigarette a few years ago. Smoking’s no good for us; all that breathing gives us a headache and the nicotine does nothing because our blood doesn’t run much, it mostly just sits there. Most turned smokers try for a month or two, then get tired of it.

Margaret said, “We’ll need to call a town meeting. Tomorrow night, an hour past sunset. Tell everyone you can find.” And with that, Margaret McMannis strolled off into the tunnel with her escort, the three of them briefly silhouetted by the light of an approaching car. The other two scooted forward into niches for workers, but not Margaret. She kicked her thong sandals off and moved left, fast. By the time the train reached her, she would be up on the roof of the tunnel, hanging over it so the passengers didn’t see her; when it was past, she’d drop like a spider and fetch her sandals, Old Boy and Ruth falling into place on her flanks like Thing One and Thing Two.

Cvetko and I retreated back into the darkness that led to our abandoned service rooms, then made our way upstairs. “I’ll tell Billy. You tell Luna,” I said. Cvetko nodded, said, “Thank you.” Luna would be working close to where his latest rash of letters had gone, and, after he found her, he would have time to go socialize with his bridge-club biddies and drink their moldy old geriatric blood.