Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“Have a care!” Manu said, suddenly animated. “You’ll ruin the radio!”

“It’s a cassette player,” Alfie corrected, now splashing Manu.

“Anyway, stupid to ruin it.”

My other eye fuzzed in.

Sammy said, “Manu’s just mad because in India a radio costs a prick. I read it in the Mirror . There were too many golliwogs, so Gandhi-girl was giving golliwogs little radios just to snip their pricks off.”

“Shut your hole,” Manu said.

“What do you fancy they do with all them pricks? The wogs, I mean? Woglet-woglings wear them for earrings? Kali got a girdle of them, Kali-wolly-oxenfree!”

“Goolies for your golliwogs,” Manu said, grabbing Sammy’s hair and kicking him between the legs so hard he lifted him off the ground; it looked like he dislocated his foot doing it. Sammy retched and went down, but sprang up grimacing, hitting Manu in the jaw, clearly breaking it. Manu, now sporting an unhealthy underbite, scrambled to the stack of dead, picked up a head that had been sitting loose, and flung it, missing Sammy but clipping Duncan, who blinked and held up a soft little hand, Please don’t . Then he went on all fours to a fresh puddle of blood and lapped at it like a tame little lapdog at a table spill.

Sammy balled up his fists.

Manu’s jaw reset itself and he crouched, preparing for a spring.

Both of them were smiling.

“Stop it,” Camilla whispered.

“Stop it!” Peter said, more loudly.

Then Camilla spoke again.

“You’ll wear yourselves out for the hunt.”

She slipped under again. My hip settled back into place, more like wrenched itself back into place.

The hunt.

I didn’t have to think too hard to figure out what that was going to mean. Cvetko, Margaret, Luna. I wanted out, but I had no idea where I was, or how to get past these little fuckers. Sammy was strong, so very strong, though he just looked like an eight-year-old kid with skinny arms. Camilla could probably kick my ass. Maybe even Duncan. Old Boy could maybe handle these little things, but Cvets?

I looked at the dead-pile. The lower ones weren’t so new, had bloated bellies, were starting to juice and get sticky. Slow, fat flies circled like jets in a holding pattern over La Guardia. There were baby flies, too. There’s another word for them, but you might be overdosing on the filth and carnage of this room, so let’s stick with baby flies .

“Look, he’s whole again!” Duncan said, pointing at me. I sat up; the spray can I had stashed in my pants was uncomfortable, so I took it out, rolled it against the wall. I cut my eyes at Sammy, ready to scrap if the little fucker reached for a brick. He didn’t. They were all looking at me now. Camilla whispered in Peter’s ear.

“Joey,” Peter said, “I just want you to know… we want you to know, that you are one of us. If you want to be.”

“You’re young!” Duncan said. “Say your name like a little boy. He said you could.”

That struck me funny.

“ He who?” I said.

They all laughed. I didn’t like that laugh.

“Now say your name like you’re little,” Peter said, meaning it.

“Joey Peacock,” I said in my falsetto. Peter’s brow unknit itself and he smiled again like the moon coming from behind a cloud.

“Good enough for me. There’s still boy in you, so you’re in.”

Camilla said something that sounded a lot like that German-ish thing Gonzalo had said. Now I said it, too, just like Gonzalo had.

Lext Un-Fayger , the x like L’chaim .

“Yea!” Camilla said, more loudly, excited, “Leoht Unfaeger!”

She said more words like that. Peter and Alfie both answered her; Peter looked at me, shook his head.

“He doesn’t speak it,” Peter said to his brother and sister, “only we do.” Then, to me, he said, “Horrid light. You’ve got a horrid light in your eyes like us.”

“What is that, German?” I said.

Camilla laughed.

“No, silly,” she said. “It’s English.”

“Bullshit,” I said, “I speak English.”

“Before it changed,” said Alfie.

Manu chimed in. “I hate it when they speak all that.”

“That’s because it’s not for wogs!” said Sammy. Manu pushed his face openhanded, something less than a slap but a little less than friendly, and Sammy did it back.

“You don’t speak it either,” Manu said.

“I know! And who says I want to?”

“Be quiet, both of you!” Peter said, and they obeyed. “Of course, you’d be bottom of the chain. It goes by how old you are.”

“And how old are you?”

“Old.”

“Yeah, but how old?”

“Second oldest.”

“After me,” Camilla said, getting out of her gruesome bath now, walking over to a second barrel, and pouring a bucket of water over herself. Duncan retreated from the little wave on the concrete like a kid at the beach. A bunch of roaches retreated, too. Camilla emptied the bucket over her head again, now using a sponge, then dried herself off as best she could with a pair of filthy blue jeans.

“But you’re… smaller,” I said. “Aren’t you brothers and sisters?”

“She got the Leoht Unfaeger first,” Alfie said. “We were babies then.”

“ You were a baby,” said Peter. “I was a little boy already. She was older-sister-gone-three-winters.”

Camilla held up three fingers.

“But she came back for us.”

He didn’t actually say she , he said her real name, and it wasn’t Camilla. Elf-something. I’ll just keep calling her Camilla.

Whatever her name was, she sat down cross-legged and Manu, without being told to, found a comb and started combing out her wet hair. He got snagged up in a tangle, pulled at the comb; she grimaced and hit him hard in the leg.

“Ow,” he said mildly, not worried about it, combing away.

Where the hell were we, anyway? This brick-and-concrete space was new to me. Something about it made me think of movies I had seen with kings and queens, how they would receive hoity-toities while they sat up on their thrones. That’s what this place was like, a throne room, with the royal family bobbing around in a plastic trash bin.

I didn’t know when I’d get the chance to ask again, so I asked.

“What’s with the blood? In the barrel, I mean. I understand drinking it, I do that, we all do that, but why… swim in it?”

A snatch of DJ blather played from the cassette deck; somebody must have been taping off the radio. Did someone make this tape for them or was it just lifted off one of the dead? I felt paralyzed, like I was standing in front of this canyon of how little I knew about them.

“Feeding’s not enough now,” Alfie said.

“Our stomachs are smaller than they were,” said Peter.

“It happens when you’re old.”

“And they leak,” Peter said, making a face.

Camilla said, “Don’t tell him everything.”

“I’ll tell him if I want, he fed us,” Peter said. “Baths help us move again. When we don’t have enough blood, we get slow with arms and legs like sticks. Baths help us save up. The more we soak, the longer we can go.”

“It’s like batteries,” Alfie said. “You know what batteries are?”

“Course he does,” Camilla peeped. “He’s new and lives in a city. Now shut up.”

“Easy when you’re new,” Manu said. “You can last for nights without eating. You can sleep in the woods, sleep near little villages or in a temple, come in from time to time like a tiger, at your ease. But these geezers? They need a city. Lots of poppets. Every four hours or so they got to swig or they stiff up. Sometimes they stiff up anyway, but after a bath year, they got a few years. Like they soaked their bones new again.”