Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

He nodded, his eyes tearing up. He couldn’t see us in the dark and his little gang’s flashlight was smashed.

“Did nobody upstairs warn you not to come down here?”

He shook his head no and started crying.

“Stop yer blubbin’,” she said. He did. I glanced over at one of his friends who had died so fast he fell back on his own legs like a contortionist, his face baggy-looking from the busted skull, one eye bugged, brain in his hair.

“Are you going to kill me?” he asked.

“Course I am. Where did you fine fellas come from?”

“The Bowery,” he said in a sleepy voice.

“Anybody else know you’re here?”

“No.”

“Anybody gonna come lookin’ for you?”

“No.”

“All right,” she said, nodding. And she rolled him over and fed while he moaned. And then I fed, and he died while I did it, his body seeming to deflate. Ridiculously, I thought of a basketball that would never bounce again, but it wasn’t funny. He had been full of pot but not smack, so my head just got a little achy. Smack makes me throw up.

I thought about Butterbean and his burned Frisbee in the park, the older one saying, You don’t want us, we dirty .

I thought about Gary Combs’s head dropping like a setting moon as he died.

It’s what they’re for.

No, it’s not.

Margaret sat on the couch, her legs crossed, looking at me.

“What was it you wanted to see me about, Joey?”

I told her.

Me and Cvetko in my room.

This was after the three of us pulled the four Hunchers out of Margaret’s apartment and then dragged them down the tracks to Purgatory, a sick rat following us in a woozy S-pattern.

Rats didn’t last long in our tunnels because we kept them covered in rat poison. It didn’t bother us.

Cvetko had his fingers steepled under his chin, waiting for me to say whatever I had come to tell him.

“Margaret says she’s taking the Latins and going to the castle,” I said.

He looked bothered, broke the steeple of his hands and touched his face like he does. He hated killing anyone, but the thought of setting that grim bunch of Puerto Rican killers loose on teeny little kid vampires clearly ate him up. Those guys were killers before they got turned, which wasn’t long ago.

No, Cvetko hated this and I wasn’t in love with it myself.

“We should talk to them,” he said.

“What, the kids? I already talked to them. They just don’t get it.”

“The Latins.”

“Are you kidding? Margaret will flip her shit if we go around her like that.”

He looked at me over his glasses, clearly scared but determined.

“They were still people ten years ago, all of them. Their communities live with three generations under one roof; as brutal as they are, they won’t like the idea of destroying children any more than you or I do.”

“I don’t know, Cvets.”

“Why do you think, Joseph Peacock, that Margaret decided not to call a town meeting?”

I put my hands behind my head. I was lying on top of my fridge like Snoopy on his doghouse.

“I dunno. Just to get it done.”

“Have you been watching television?”

“No,” I lied. “Why?”

“Because you are exhibiting signs of mental atrophy.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

He took his glasses off and polished them, still looking at me.

“It means you are giving me a lazy answer instead of thinking. Now, why does Margaret choose not to bring this up for discussion?”

“Because nobody’ll like it.”

“Precisely. If we talk to her Puerto Rican friends and harden their hearts against her plan, she will, of necessity, call a meeting in order to gather enough strength to deal with the little ones decisively. But the meeting will not go her way because she is not a diplomat. She will have to bend to the will of the group. Let me ask you another question.”

I nodded.

“Rather, why don’t you tell me what my next question is and then answer it yourself?”

I rolled off the fridge and paced. I think better when I’m moving. Not that I could pace far in that cell with Cvetko in it.

It hit me and I stopped cold.

“Why did she tell me? What she was going to do, I mean.”

He smiled at me in that happy-professor, Joey-isn’t-a-retard-after-all way.

“And?”

“And it’s because she doesn’t really want to do it, either. She wants me to stop it.”

He pretended to applaud.

“I would not go so far as to say she actively wants you to stop it. But she does, I believe, want you to share in her guilt by assenting, and she will not retaliate against you even if she reasons out that you betrayed her confidence.”

“Why not? She doesn’t like me.”

“Never forget that you alone remember her when she was a living woman. She has known you longer than any of us. You are no incidental traveler, no Jonah she can cast into the sea for the whale to swallow. Except perhaps for Ruth, you are the closest thing she has to family.”

I guess I never thought of it that way.

“ S he know you’re here?”

He met us in an unused subbasement below a tienda on Avenue B that sold brooms and mops and cheap cookware, but also candles for different saints. The shopkeepers didn’t know it was there, let alone that it was connected by crawl spaces to active subway lines, and abandoned loops to the west, and to wherever these guys lived. I had never been past this sort of cobwebby parlor. It was about the size of the inside of a McDonald’s. You called these guys by tapping a pipe with a wrench three times, then counting to five and tapping three more. If it was early evening, before they went out, or early morning before they tucked in, one of them would show up within five or ten minutes.

“No, she does not,” Cvetko said.

The other squatted down on his heels, thinking about this. To look at him, he was just a very pale Puerto Rican kid with torn-up jeans and Bruce Lee–looking kung fu shoes, a hooded sweatshirt, navy blue. But his eyes were too dark and small, and he never liked to look at you. If you looked closely at his jeans, you saw that they had been bled on. Plenty. He wasn’t much older than me. A mustache had just been coming in when his clock stopped. He wasn’t the leader, but he was the little brother. What he thought mattered. I didn’t know his name.

He nodded, glanced up at us for a second, then looked at our feet. We should talk now. We did. We wanted to meet with Mapache. His dark eyes went back and forth a couple of times while he thought about it, and I thought maybe Cvetko had been wrong, maybe whatever embers of humanity were left in this kid had just gone cold, we might have missed it by a month. I could only too easily picture him hacking the head off the little British boy or his maybe-sister; he looked closed-off and bitter. I wonder how much choice he had in whether to join his brother underground.

He moved over to the pipe and banged it twice, real gentle. Then once harder. And then he sat really still with his head down like he wasn’t even there; I’m sure this kid could disappear like that, just squat in an alley, cold to the touch and motionless so you never knew he was there till you felt his hand over your mouth.

When the kid heard his brother approach, he lit a candle in the corner, a saint candle from the tienda but with the saint’s face and name spray-painted over. Nobody needed a candle to see, but newer vampires still need a little boost to see well.

Mapache was less creepy than the kid, liked to smile, would actually look at you. The one creepy thing he did was to stand kind of close to you while talking, but I think that was a Hispanic thing in general. He would touch you, too, and vampires don’t touch each other much. Mapache had a big fucking mustache and I know he was Puerto Rickie, not Mexican, but I thought Pancho Villa must have been like this. Big mustache, easy to like, but still a killer. And this guy killed vampires, which isn’t easy.