Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“Stay there,” I said. “Unlock your door, sit down, and don’t move again till I come over.”

He didn’t say anything. I started to repeat myself, but he interrupted me.

“Stay there, unlock—”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “But it doesn’t work on me anymore because I’m like you now.”

My heart beat twice.

I wanted to run but knew I couldn’t just leave a mess like this. Not unless I ran and kept running, ran to the Ozarks, ran to wherever that long-ago dog was sitting on the trunk of the car.

“I’m hungry,” he said. And hung up.

That broke the spell. I looked at Ms. Kemp. “Stay here, lock it behind me, don’t let anyone in!”

I heard the Bakers’ door unlatch, swing open. I leapt for Ms. Kemp’s door, opened that. We met in the hallway.

He looked bad. He stank. Blood bibbed the front of his yellow Izod polo shirt. He looked dead. He showed me his fangs like he was proud of them, little nubby new fangs in his very red mouth. He was about to say something. I heard the door across the hall start to unlatch. I grabbed his chin, shut his mouth, and shoved him back in his doorway, shutting his door just as the one across the hall was starting to open.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

“Don’t push me,” he said, pushing me back, hard. I rolled with it, rolled back to the television, which I turned up all the way, though momentum made me break the volume knob off when I did it.

“Hey, you want to keep it down over there?” a deep voice said from the hall. I clobbered the Baker kid so hard I broke his jaw; he squealed and sat down. I opened the door, looked at the big dago-looking guy standing there, told him and his huge mustache, “Mind your own business! Turn your TV on,” saw his eyes go blank, and then I shut the door. Heard him shut his. I turned around just in time to see the coffee table coming at my head, ducked in time so it was a glancing blow, but it still sent me tumbling. Only now did I notice what a wreck the rest of the place was: broken glass everywhere, the refrigerator standing open, one shelf collapsed so the food was on the kitchen floor, the Miracle Whip jar broken with Miracle Whip blobbed out everywhere.

I turned around; here came the coffee table again. I got under the table, slid like I was sliding into third, kicked his legs out from under him. He fell hard. On top of me. The table hit a shelf full of tchotchkes, made an awful noise.

Now he grabbed my neck, choking me. Lot of good that would do, I don’t breathe much, but it did hurt. He saw that wasn’t working, fishhooked a thumb into my mouth, tore my mouth open all the way to the cheek, and that hurt like blazing hell. It wasn’t fair he got to be so strong so young! I remembered a move I saw in a karate magazine, snaked my left arm over his right arm, under the elbow of his left, and slapped up under his elbow, hard. It rolled him, but then he just rolled me over again, straight on top of the Miracle Whip jar and all the other broken glass, I was cut to shit .

“OW, fuck!” I said, but his knee slid in the mess on the linoleum and he was off-balance enough for me to roll him the rest of the way over. He flopped on his stomach and said, “Mom!”

The telephone rang.

I pulled the open refrigerator over on top of him; the milk broke, tomatoes rolled everywhere, then I slipped in gravy or maybe it was blood. There was an awful lot of blood in this place.

“Mom!” he said again.

The telephone kept ringing.

I had never peeled a vampire before, I didn’t want to. But what else? Take him with me? No time to think.

He started wriggling out from under the fridge, so I stomped on his neck and broke it.

Somebody knocked on the door.

Somebody across the room said, “MO-om!” and I realized it was Gonzalo exactly imitating the way the kid sounded when he was watching TV. Poor bird had no idea, he was running back and forth on his little wooden bar.

“Mr. Baker?” a woman said, her voice muffled through the wood, but I could tell it wasn’t my new friend next door.

The kid’s neck righted itself with a sound like tearing off a cold turkey wing; it was even worse than the sound it had made breaking. He started doing a push-up, trying to get the fridge off.

I had to peel him.

I saw a block of knives, pulled out the big one, the one for turkeys.

I jumped on top of the fridge and stomped, flattening him out again under it.

The phone rang, the door knocked.

“No, don’t! No, don’t!” the bird said. I thought it was talking to me, then realized it was repeating somebody else’s words. Probably their last words.

Now the little chunk was pushing me and the fridge up; a jar of pickles slipped out and went rolling.

“Whatever is going on in there, I want you to know I’ve called the police,” the woman at the door said.

The phone stopped ringing.

I struck, jamming the knife down as far as I could into the kid’s skull, which was pretty much all the way to my fist, then pulled out halfway and stirred the point. He went flat, but it wouldn’t last. There was only one way.

I pulled the knife out.

“No, don’t! MO-om!” Gonzalo said.

I put the knife, edge up, under the kid’s neck.

“Sorry, Mikey. I’m so sorry.”

Hey, Mikey! He likes it!

Then I did it.

It’s not an easy thing. I don’t know what you’ve seen in the movies, but it’s not like that. It’s awful.

His brain started working again before I got through the bone and he tried to fight, jerking himself back and forth like a giant windshield wiper in all the mess beneath him, wheezing air through his cut pipes, bucking the refrigerator and spilling out more little bottles and fruit.

But I held on and did it.

I got it off.

Just as the police arrived.

This is how it looked on the cover of the New York Post :

I won’t force their whole shitty article on you, but the short version is this: Police responded to calls about a disturbance at a fifth-floor apartment in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville. Several commands to open up were ignored, forcing officers to bust in. Officers on the scene claimed to have seen someone holding, and I quote, “a kitchen knife and a head”; they recalled firing on this individual. None of them could supply a description except to say that he or she “wasn’t very tall” and “moved with surprising speed.” The suspect is believed to have escaped out the living room window despite the lack of a fire escape from that balcony. The headless body of twelve-year-old Michael Baker was found in the kitchen. The brutally stabbed bodies of his parents were found in the bathtub, along with child-sized hand and foot marks, though no readable fingerprints were discovered. Disturbing satanic messages and images had been painted on the wall in blood, including references to the punk band the Ramones and the notorious club CBGB. While the NYPD officially expressed confidence about catching the perpetrators, one unnamed source reported that evidence had been tampered with and that the crime scene had been “heinously mistreated.” The family pet, believed to be a parrot, also appeared to have been stolen.

Here’s how it looked from my end:

“OPEN UP!” he said. “POLICE!”

I was standing on the back of a refrigerator, holding poor Mikey’s head. I knew they couldn’t catch me, but they were going to find bodies. I just had to make sure they wouldn’t find anything vampirey. Luckily, the bar was low because people generally didn’t believe in us, but some of this evidence would be tough to ignore.