Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“Mapache, please, he doesn’t mean it,” I said.

Gua Gua walked over, said something in Spanish, put his huge, white hand on Mapache’s shoulder. Mapache relaxed a little, started to turn around, then fucking face-touching, fucking autistic Cvetko had to burp out some more wisdom, eyes still closed, one hand held halfway up as if to stop a smack.

“We have to work together, we have to try to agree on common governance…”

Mapache, quick as hell, and I mean this guy moved more like a panther than a raccoon, grabbed the machete off his brother’s belt and came at Cvets. I stood in his way but he pushed me aside, grabbing Cvetko’s hand with his free one and then swinging the machete down. He lopped Cvetko’s hand off, lopped it right the fuck off . Tossed it in the water.

Cvetko and me just stood there.

“It’ll grow back, man,” Mapache said, a scrawny olive branch if ever I heard one, and the four of them walked away. I wanted to kill that fucker but knew I couldn’t, not him. Not now.

Cvets just stood there bleeding, his hand already re-forming off the bone, the severed one down in the river doubtless dissolving, unmaking itself. A regular hand, crabs would already be fighting over that, but not one of ours. Animals don’t eat us. I used to cut my fingers off and throw them at track-rabbits to see if they’d eat them; they never did, the fingers just bubbled away like butter in a hot pan at the same rate the new ones grew in.

Cvetko was already wriggling the new hand, touching his thumb to the new fingers.

What kind of bully do you have to be to hurt a guy like Cvetko? But some vampires were like that, hated weakness. Hell, a lot of people were like that, too.

“You okay?” I said, a stupid question but I couldn’t think of anything else.

“As they say, nothing hurt but my pride,” he said, trying to smile, but it was so pathetic I was almost glad when he gave up and let himself look real sad.

“My ring,” he said.

I never noticed one on him. I mean, I knew he had one, on his pinky, gold, but I never really looked at it.

I guess I wasn’t much of a friend.

“My wife gave it to me.”

When we got back to our tunnels, Margaret was waiting for us. She perched up in a brick niche like a gargoyle, holding her shovel. Her head-taking-off shovel.

“Did… Did you want to speak to us?” Cvetko asked. She just squatted up there in her shitty bathrobe with her fangs showing, her shovel idly scraping the wall, staring at us. I opened my mouth to speak but then shut it again. That was the thing with Margaret, you always felt she was looking right through you.

“Just get into your boxes and shut them real tight,” she said. “There’s a meeting tomorrow night, Eighteenth Street station, early, and then we’re going on a little walk in the park. All of us.”

She watched us go to our cells. She waited. It was a while before I slept, knowing she was out there, but I dead-dreamed her sitting there in her niche until she turned into an actual gargoyle, opening her mouth so blood came out of it, and out of her eyes, like rainwater, filling the tracks until they flooded and I knew she was going to flood the city that way.

There’s a boulder in Central Park, I’m not telling you where, but it’s a boulder that a pack of vampires can lift. Barely. So they did lift it. This pack of vampires rolled a shopping cart up and the weakest of them, that would be me, dumped the cart while the rest of them grunted, holding up the boulder, and then they let it down so heavy the earth moved under their feet. There’s three stiffs under that boulder, but nobody’s ever going to find them. They’re as flat as stingrays now. They’re part of the park and that’s all they are.

I’ll back up a bit.

Turns out not all of us went to Belvedere Castle, but most of us. Ten. We approached the building from all sides, probably nine o’clock or so, didn’t bother going up to the top windows, just peeled the boards off one big window and walked into the first floor like we owned the place.

“Fuckin’ animals,” Baldy said.

The elementary class of night school had been busy.

A bigger woman, bag lady type, lay spread-eagled like the X on a landing pad for a helicopter, all chewed up, dead about a day, her raw-sausage-looking ankles stuffed into too-small sneakers with the backs cut off. She was staring at the ceiling with her lips pursed together, like her last out-breath had been a horsy noise. Less fresh than her was Mr. Combs, crumpled in a corner starting to look black, his eyes dusty and sunken. He had worms.

Want to groove on Miles?

How had nobody smelled this place? Were people so used to how rotten the park was that they didn’t even care anymore? Had no cops come by? The flies were thick in here.

I led the way up the stairs, knowing as I went the kids wouldn’t be there. They had cleared out. But I smelled something familiar, something that filled me with dread. I knew what it was even as I poked my head around and looked.

The Negro cop. Handcuffed to the chair, his head twisted all the way around, his sad-bastard, uneven mustache an upside-down horseshoe that caught no luck. He was missing teeth. This was bad. This was going to bring SCREW-TIN-KNEE. I felt his cheek. Warm as hell.

They saw us coming, popped his neck, got out without us seeing. The cop’s mouth was still drooling bloody drool.

“Well,” Margaret said, addressing mostly Billy Bang and myself. We were the two loudest ones arguing not to hurt the small fry. She said it again.

“Just, well.”

After we cleaned up the mess, we all fanned out across the park in twos. Cvetko and me headed southeast; I picked the direction.

“You seem to have a hunch, Joseph,” Cvets said.

“Yeah,” I said.

We were supposed to get one of them, any one of them, and bring it back to our loops so Margaret could talk to it and find out where it came from, besides England. Did I mention Margaret didn’t like England much? Cvetko had objected, pointing out that they might all be together, that it might be dangerous. “If two of youse can’t handle a pack of little children who don’t know nothing yet besides peelin’ bums, then you deserve what you get.” Me and Cvets felt dubious about this, but we saluted and marched like good soldiers.

Really, we all but sprinted because of my hunch, and then I caught their scent. I was right.

“Brilliant,” he whispered when he saw where I was taking us. He patted my shoulder.

The children’s zoo.

Whatever else they were, they were children, and children love a zoo.

“You have come to play, you have!” Peter squealed, smiling so I got another good look in his mouth; something I haven’t mentioned yet is that Peter had been about eight when his clock stopped, so now he was stuck with this cluster of gaps and mismatched teeth around the very sharp, yellowy fangs in his mouth. Now he was smiling this mess at me in pure, innocent joy, sitting huddled with the others. Five others, just as he said. Six dead children in the belly of Whaley the whale, who served as the entrance to the children’s zoo they put in like ten or fifteen years before. There used to be aquariums and all in the whale’s mouth, but these were empty now and the place was graffitied and trashed like most of the rest of the city.

“Gimme that,” I said, scared of them, but not too scared to snatch the cop’s hat off Peter’s head.

He made a pouty face and grabbed my nose, hard. Like he was going to rip it off for me. I twisted out of it and he laughed, grabbed the little girl’s nose instead.