Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

Margaret pretended not to hear him, talked over him like he wasn’t even playing.

“All right. Until we get some answers out of them, they don’t come live with us. They stay right here. And someone stays with them to teach them.”

“I’ll do it,” Luna said.

“Someone older, and more than one, in case this Mr. Varney shows up.”

“We’ll do it,” Baldy said. Dominic gave him a look like Oh, will we?

“Thank you for your team spirit, Mr. Balducci, but I think not. Mr. Peacock and Mr. Štukelj, are you up for it?”

“Oh shit,” I said.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

A few words might be in order concerning the 18th Street station, which was going to be my temporary home while we sorted out the kids. Just like Old City Hall, they decommissioned it in 1948 because the trains got longer; it was either shut it down or make it bigger, and after the war there weren’t exactly bathtubs full of money floating around for public works. We were too busy paying to rebuild German towns we just paid to knock down; I never get politics. I don’t vote. Anyway, I’m glad they shut so many stations down. This is prime real estate for vampires, what with no sun, easy transportation, an endless sea of humanity to hide among. Notice I didn’t say feed on ; we aren’t supposed to feed down here just so we don’t get anybody wise to us. Commuters, I mean. Hunchers are fair game, if you can stand the drugs and booze in their blood. They don’t exist.

Oh, but the station. It’s small, typical. We had to chase a few Hunchers out when we annexed it—that’s a Cvetko word, by the way, annexed . I like it. Makes it sound official, more like a real estate deal and less like we just took it. Here’s how we do it. Say you’re a bum—or “homeless person” if you’re all sweet about it—and you’re hunching down here with eleven others, an even dozen. One morning, this voice comes out of the blackness of the tunnel saying, “Get out of this station. This is your only warning. If twelve of you sleep here tonight, eleven will wake up tomorrow.” And that’s it. What do you do? If you’re new to the loops, you might tough up and decide to post watches, dig your heels in. But that’s not you, You actually have been around, living underground, going to soup kitchens, scoring smack or drinking yourself slobbery, but you’ve heard about the “tunnel talker.” He always keeps his promises. You heard about a group of seven that got the same rap at the Worth Street station, some voice in the tunnel told the seven of them to pack up or they’d wake up with six, but they sat tough. Or tried to. The guy they posted to watch fell asleep, and in the morning, they woke up to squealing brakes and sparks and feathers all over the place because a train popped the guy and dragged him, goose down vest and all, halfway to the next station. Then the transit police came and moved them all out anyway, and they didn’t come back. And you, do you really want to stay now that the tunnel talker has paid you a visit? Hell. No. Not even in the winter, And this was spring. Better to take your chances in a cardboard condo.

So it’s just that easy.

Cvetko and I stole a set of lockers out of a shitty gym on 14th Street, moved them through the tunnels wearing our stolen transit authority uniforms, set the kids up in those. Vampires don’t actually need coffins, we just like them. It’s instinct. Plus, it’s good hygiene, what with bugs and all crawling all over the place. I mean, you could get perfectly used to sleeping on the floor, but why would you? Beds are nicer. Same thing.

Before we left to get the lockers, we had a chat with the kids.

I did the talking; I related better to them.

“It’s like this,” I said. “You need to learn some things about being what you are now.”

“Dead!” Duncan offered, smiling.

“Yeah, dead. Undead. But you need to learn how to keep from peeling people. Otherwise you’re going to blow it for all of us, get it?”

They said they got it. I wasn’t sure they got it.

“Let me put this another way. You have to stay here while we’re gone, okay? If you leave, Margaret…”

“The scary lady,” Camilla whispered.

“Yes. The very scary lady will come get you. But if you stay here, she’ll be your friend. Like me and Cvetko.”

“Friends,” Peter said. “I like having lots of friends.”

“Right. You’re going to learn a lot of neato things from me and Cvets, and we’re all going to be fwiends.” I said that last bit like Elmer Fudd.

The kids giggled at that. And they did stay put. Or at least I thought they did.

When we got the lockers in, I went back to our loops under Chelsea and got some clothes for me and Cvets, as well as my numchuks and a bunch of his travel magazines. That was a fun trip, carrying all that shit alone. But the alternative was for both of us to go again, or for me to trust Cvets to get the clothes I told him I wanted, and that wasn’t going to happen.

The sun hadn’t been down too long, so I went up to a corner market I knew that had a rack of six coin-operated toy dispensers. I traded a shiny new bicentennial quarter for a little plastic bubble containing a brand-new superball and stuck that in my pocket before hefting my box of stuff again. I thought about getting a Spaldeen, but those weren’t fast enough. Not for vampires.

Before we started playing games, I had to establish rule number one, what Captain Kirk would call the Prime Directive. I caught a rat and threw it against the third rail. Pop-ka-BANG!

They got the message. Now the fun could start, and what fun! A superball in the subway is a riot. The kids loved it, and I loved watching them chase it. Fast little bastards, so fast, and I’m no slouch. I chased it, they chased it, they threw it at me so I could swat it with my numchuks like a baseball. We practiced getting small between the running rails and letting the trains go by over us, getting small behind posts, climbing sideways and upside down. They were naturals.

Cvetko sat on his ass with a Time magazine and read about Kampuchea or somewhere.

Then they dropped the bomb. It never ceases to amaze me how kids can just forget to tell you something important, even something you asked them about before.

I said, “Varney’ll never catch you guys now. Or are all English vampires this fast?”

“Oh, Varney’s not English,” Peter said.

“No? Is he a Yankee-Doodle Dandy like me?”

“No.”

“What is he?”

“A henchman!” Duncan said.

“Whose henchman?” I asked.

Cvetko was paying attention now, to hell with Kampuchea.

“No,” Camilla said. “Not a henchman.”

My heart turned over and scraped out a beat. I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

“A Hessian .”

Wilhelm Ulrich Messer, I wasn’t allowed to call him Willy, was, as far as I know, the oldest New Yorker, maybe the oldest American, which was kind of ironic because he spent a few months trying to kick Americans out of New York. He came over from Germany when it wasn’t Germany yet and fought for the British in the war of 1776, in a couple of places your war buff types would know, but the only one I remember is Saratoga because he claims he shot Benedict Arnold’s horse there, and I don’t care for horses. Or Benedict Arnold. Traitors chafe my ass. So Wilhelm Messer was all right in my book, even if he was mental, but maybe that’s not his fault. He was old-ass-old. Got turned in his forties, after he had settled down and married, like 1800 or so.

First thing I want to say about old vampires is that they all get weird. I don’t know how he was back when he was wearing a pigtail under that pointy brass hat he showed me and shooting traitors in the horse, but now? Like an old dragon sitting on money. They say Jews are stingy, but this guy wouldn’t accept a collect call from Jesus on Easter morning. He was friends with John Valentine, which might have been the last time he was friends with anybody. His relationship with my old mentor was the only reason I ever saw inside his tall, narrow brick house in Greenwich Village, and that was in 1940 or so. He’s still in the same house, which is only maybe four blocks from my old house, how’s that for creepy? Moldy old vampire in the neighborhood where I grew up, I probably sang Christmas carols outside his door. Big shade trees in front of that house, servants upstairs, nobody on the ground floor, and he had the coolest basement you ever saw. Had a basement under the basement nobody got to see and that’s where he coffined up and kept his treasure. I think he had tunnels going out under the village.