Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“It was the quiet one,” Camilla said, drooling while she said it.

“Old Boy,” said Peter, also drooling. They wanted to bite and bite and bite.

“Where is he?” Sammy asked me, barely able to talk for the spit welling up in his mouth, shaking with the desire to twist my head. “You’d better tell.”

“How would I know?” I said. I wanted to say How would I know, stupid? but I left the stupid off. I might as well have said it for the way he reacted.

He bit my nose off. Just bit it right the fuck off, one of his fangs punching a hole in my upper lip while he did it. I screamed, my eyes tearing up, and I punched him in the throat. It would have killed a regular kid, but he just backed up and crouched to spring, spat my nose onto the dead-pile with the beetles. I stood up. Next thing I knew, Peter had one of my arms in a hard grip. Manu was only too happy to grab Sammy.

That was when the can rolled in, a little gray can with a yellow band around it. Peter knew what it was; he let go of me. Duncan didn’t know what it was; he reached for it. Camilla knew what it was; she grabbed Duncan away. Manu knew. He jumped behind the blood barrel. Alfie’s the one who saved them. He threw a fattish, bald dead guy on it. Fast. The “pomegranate” went off just as it was being covered, flared so bright and hot it hurt our eyes; a hissing dragon was loose in the room, a piece of a star landed on my foot, burned through my sock to the bone, I would have that scar for keeps. I yelled. Alfie yelled; he caught some on the foot, too. This all happened in two heartbeats.

And I’ll never forget what I saw when the grenade went off. It scared them, you see. Just for that second. They dropped their charm and I saw them as they were.

Duncan looked paler, not completely different, but clearly dead. Manu was long dead, gray-brown and dry, but still recognizably human. Sammy, too. But what really burned itself into my eyes was the brothers and their sister. Did you ever see a mummy? Not like King Tut all gold in his death mask out in Los Angeles, and not like a guy wrapped in bandages in the movies, but the little blackened, shriveled children they pulled up out of tombs in South America, in the desert, their heads packed with dried mud, little wigs of hair nailed or stitched to their dried-gourd skulls. Peter, Alfie, and Camilla were like that: their lips dried back from their mouths so their awful, outsized fangs showed, their arms no thicker than broomsticks, ending in curled little fists with fingers missing here and there. Their sunken eyes looked dry and blind. Their ribs bore stains from where their stomachs no longer held blood without spilling it. They were decrepit. I would have time to think about what that meant later, what that meant for any vampire, what happened to us when we got older. I would have time to dwell at great length on the cost of the magic or curse or whatever unnatural law kept these little things going centuries after they should have crumbled away. This was why they needed a waterfall of blood gushing through them. They were like jet engines, brutally strong but unimaginably hungry.

I saw these things in a flash. I made a noise, like “Ahh!” And then it was over. They were pale, handsome children again, scared children, reacting to an oversized flare of white flame just yards away from them. Flame was, of course, one of the few things that could actually harm them for good and ever.

They leapt back.

The dead man was on fire; smoke poured out from under him and filled the room, but I had the impression smoke was pouring out of his mouth, the gash in his throat, his ass. It probably stank. My nose was gone.

The Devil. It’s the Devil, here with his angels to collect us all because we’re his.

I ran.

Just outside the door, a hand grabbed a fistful of my hair, the edge of a knife tickled my throat, we spun. Just for a second. Then we both ran, ran hard, ran for our lives.

Old Boy barefoot.

Me in one smoking sock and chewed-up clothes.

A star of pain in my foot.

I snatched up a rusty iron bar with a dab of concrete attached to it.

He used the butt of his knife.

We banged every pipe we could find.

“Do you know where we are?”

Old Boy shook his head no.

Pipes banged somewhere, distant, impossible to figure out where.

We had just concluded a furious sprint, ducking under trains and splashing through sewers, we hoped in the direction of our loops, but even hard-ass Old Boy was panicked. My heart was beating, actually beating. This was the most afraid I’d been since I was first turned. We stood knee-deep in shitty water. A ladder led up to a manhole, trash collected on that ladder streaming like jellyfish in the current of filth.

He pointed up with his knife.

“Go find out,” he said.

“Have I got a whole nose?” I said. It felt like it had grown back, but I didn’t want to pop up in public looking like a leper.

He nodded, let himself smile, barely, at the ridiculousness of the question, and I skinnied up the ladder. I felt better turning away from the darkness of the tunnel knowing he had my back. I popped my head up on 4th Street near one of the newer peep shows; since about, what, 1970, sex shops had been metastasizing east from Times Square with no sign of going into remission. This one was called the Owl and Pussycat, get it? The word Pussy ’s in there.

Anyway, we weren’t too far from the bricked-up window I used as a front door. We ran. He hid the knife, clutched the remaining grenades under his arm. People turned after us or held their noses, enchanted, no doubt, by our bouquet of smoke and human waste. The manhole covers and sidewalk grates steamed, neon signs flashed, a lady in a white coat hid her purse from us, another lady in a hideous plaid pantsuit said to her friend, “Did you see that kid? The teeth he had?” I had let my charm drop; I was too scared to bring it back up, I just kept my mouth closed.

A cop’s German shepherd barked at me like I was a bag of cats. “Hey,” the cop said to us, “slow down!” You could see he half wanted to chase us but knew he’d never catch us; we weren’t slowing down for anybody.

We ducked back underground, started making our way to the loops. As fast as we went, I knew in my bones we were too late. They knew the tunnels better than we did. The hunt was on.

Smoke.

We ran from the unused tracks and leapt through the passageway that led to the common room. DON’T TRUST THE CHILDREN. Right. Got it. Luna’s mattress was on fire; that was where the smoke was coming from. Someone had thrown it from Luna’s high cave, perhaps Luna trying to defend herself. Her movie posters littered the floor everywhere. I saw a pair of shoes sticking out from behind the burned-up table where we used to fold clothes. Edgar. His head lay thirty yards away, near a broken television, holes where his eyes should have been. Sandy, farther off, had been burned, was in fact still on fire, though less furiously so than Luna’s mattress. I only knew her by the platinum blond wig she wore to pretend she was Lana Turner when she worked up the courage to bite people. Farther off, the sounds of fighting.

“CVETKO?” I yelled. “BILLY?”

Old Boy hit me, slashed a finger over his lips.

We moved fast and quiet after that, following those shouts, screams, and bangs. We passed ruined vampires as we went down the tunnel; lanky piano-playing Malachi frozen in a grotesque backbend, the fingers that pounded out his last “Tiger Rag” clutching at his shirt and tie as if he had been trying to get some air, a small, sooty handprint on his sleeve, a shaft of wood sticking out of his chest, his eyes rolled back in his head. Staked. I had never seen a vampire staked. Edgar’s lover, Anthony, lay headless a hundred yards down, the head nowhere to be seen. Then we saw her.