Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

There were fourteen vampires in our group, all sleeping in little clusters or alone but nobody more than a ten-minute walk. Cvetko and I were in workrooms next to each other; most were in proper rooms a little bigger than mine, quarters for the construction crew when they were building all this.

Margaret, of course, got the sweet spot. The mayor’s apartment. Like the governor’s mansion or the White House or Buckingham Palace, only under New York City and fitted out for a vampire. Really beautiful place, the cream of nineteenth-century engineering and architecture. Back in the day, they tried out all different kinds of subway cars and tracks before they figured out the system they got now. But instead of getting together and talking it out, all these fat cats just started digging their own tunnels. This one failed experiment was supposed to be high-end, and Margaret’s vault was where they were planning to entertain the press and eat caviar with the mayor and all that, only they ran out of money. Of course they ran out of money, tiles from Spain and that green velvet couch and all, a mahogany bar and little statues of angels, I mean Margaret’s digs were sweet. Her box was behind the bar, nice and snug, she had it lined with fur. Just on the other side was a fancy door leading to a station platform that never got used except for one demo run by a car that now sat abandoned off its rails (that was where Old Boy lived), and then there was this half mile of tracks before a hole in the wall that opened on a big, deep pit that collected groundwater and stank. We called that Purgatory. That was where we put what was left of people we peeled. There was a rolling cart on the tracks that worked just fine for body dumping.

All of this was on the far side of our little colony, about ten minutes away at a stroll, though I could get there much quicker if I had to. Much quicker.

Ruth had been friends with Margaret since about 1945, but Ruth was old. Not Clayton or Hessian old, but suffragette old. Born about when Cvetko was (1890?), fifty-five-ish when her clock stopped, square, grim head like a monument, like the Statue of Liberty or Blind Frowning Fucking Justice. Everything on her is square, mannish, solid. Even her fangs are less sharp than most; she has to tear more when she bites, like a dog with a sock. If you think Cvetko’s a drag, this woman could have killed the mood on V-J Day. Which was right about the time she got turned—some bughouse-crazy black woman vampire bit her up in Harlem, had the idea she was Margaret Sanger (different Margaret), the woman who opened a colored women’s clinic up there fifteen years before. Point of fact, the woman had seen Ruth running messages to the clinic, Ruth did work for Sanger. Just not real recently. She had been in Harlem that day to visit a woman who used to work there but now had leukemia. The vampire who jumped Ruth told her it was for coming up where she didn’t belong trying to get rid of all the black babies. Only Ruth’s disappearance made the paper, complete with “her colored assailant seeming to embrace her intimately,” and, like I said, our Margaret reads the paper. Scours it for vampire stuff, and this was a bull’s-eye. She went up there looking, asking questions, found Ruth. Taught her. Tore the head off the one who turned her. That was the first time she used her shovel, and adopting Ruth was one of the smartest things she ever did. Nobody loves Margaret like Ruth. Ruth doesn’t talk much, but she’s determined and strong and if Dr. Van Helsing himself were coming for Margaret McMannis, he’d have to get through Ruth first.

Another thing about Ruth. She looks dead, even when she just fed. Clayton said older vampires use a constant, automatic low-grade charm that even works on other vampires, even works on themselves, to look the way they did when they were turned. It’s the same kind of charm that hides our fangs, only even more automatic; the only thing it doesn’t hide so well is the way our eyes shine like cat’s eyes when light hits them in the dark. He said it only drops when a vampire is frightened or dying, or when he wants it dropped. He said that he had seen himself and didn’t want to again—Clayton was really old. But Ruth, she had learned to relax that. Her skin was greenish-gray and her irises were too light all the time. Except when she hunted. She would charm herself warm-looking like the rest of us to hunt. The thing about Ruth was she hated a liar, which I could understand.

I hate a liar, too.

Old Boy, now here was another beast entirely. Like Baldy, we’ll get to Baldy later, Old Boy’s name is deceptive. He actually had a boyish face, only got turned in 1972 or so. Wouldn’t say who did it, but we all know it was Margaret, she told me. Only Margaret was allowed to turn people whenever she wanted. If one of us wanted to, we could ask, but she almost always said no. She didn’t want anybody else having divided loyalties, and a lot of loyalty comes with being turned, even if it’s a hostile act. Very conflicting stuff, take my word for it. I hated Margaret when she stopped my clock, but I loved her a little bit, too. I couldn’t imagine hurting her, and not just because she could kick my ass for twenty years before I got a lick in. There’s something instinctual about it. Anyway, Old Boy was a good choice; he was young, but dangerous. He’d been in Vietnam. “Old Boy” was what they called him in his Marine recon unit, and he was really out in the shit, where people took ears and dicks and fingers as trophies. He was good with a knife and stealthy as a mother even before he got turned. Now? Now he was like a breeze you couldn’t even feel. He was like a nothing that would kill you before you knew you were in trouble. Big fangs on him, but he used his knife, cut and suck. He watched out for Margaret, sometimes close, sometimes at a distance, and if Ruth would take a bullet for her, figuratively speaking, everybody knew it would be Old Boy who’d get revenge if somebody had two bullets.

He had been working as a security guard at the port. He hated it. He was close to killing himself because he didn’t understand life back in the States, preferred moving in the darkness out where you had to machete your way through the mosquitoes and the only friendlies were Hmong and beardy Green Berets who’d half gone native. No, America didn’t fit him anymore. Where most guys had nightmares about Nam, he had nightmares about the United States. One of the rare times he talked to me for more than five minutes, he told me he dreamed about having to walk across open places with a tight suit on and everybody looking at him from every window and he couldn’t hide anywhere. He’d wake up in a cold sweat dreaming about being drunk in a house full of children, reeling from room to room with tiny children in his way, knowing it was only a matter of time before he hurt one of them and then he’d go to the electric chair. He had Nam dreams, too, but they didn’t bother him like that. He woke up from dreams about burning hootches and covering himself in mud to wait in ambush and then he’d wake up and get sad when he realized he was just in his shitty apartment and he had to go out and talk to people he wasn’t allowed to punch. He actually spotted Margaret while she was hunting, followed her, kept up with her. That she was able to climb on the sides of buildings didn’t surprise him much after the shit he had seen. She didn’t even know she had grown a tail. For a while. When she realized a warm body had actually gotten the drop on her, she was intrigued. They sat by the water and talked. She gave him a choice. He took the one that sounded the most like being back in-country.

Luna was our closest neighbor. Luna was a prostitute, which, as you can imagine, is a profession that lends itself to vampirism. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that as many vampires become prostitutes as prostitutes become vampires, but of course I have only my own bullshit to back this up. Think about it, though. Darkness, privacy, secrecy. It’s perfect. They probably start off pretending to be hookers to hunt, but soon they’re going through with it because sex and feeding go so well together.