Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

I was glad the music was loud, even though I’m not really a punk fan. According to the posters, we had ourselves a double bill—the band was either the Skullpumps or Miss Katonic, depending on what time it was. Probably the former.

The lead singer had white, square-looking shoes with no socks, super-tight jeans and white-blond hair teased up into a sort of hurricane of dye and hair spray. Fake fur half-coat over a T-shirt with the nipples cut out, his own nipples taped over with swatches of black electrician’s tape. Something about his aesthetic made me think I might have found the culprit in the case of the vandalized Gilda Radner poster. The punked-out crowd was really into these guys. A couple of them held up bicycle pumps, confirming my guess about the name, and up toward the front the dancing was pretty thrashy and violent.

I wouldn’t stay here long.

I would just drink my Molson and hopefully the guitars would hammer-wash the image of those creepy children out of my head. I had had a case of the thousand-yard stares since I saw them, had been only marginally aware of the “Happy Valentine’s Day, prick” from the girl I had completely ignored after seeing them, this dropped as she popped a stick of Juicy Fruit gum between her lipsticky lips and exited the train one stop after the others did. She had said some other things to me, but I had turned off like a transistor radio, it’s a very bad habit of mine. If I’m focused on something, I just shut down to everything around me. It’s inexcusably rude, I know it is; she wasn’t entirely off base calling me a prick.

I am kind of a prick.

Take what happened next at the Ammonia.

The thrashy dancing had gotten intense—I don’t know how bouncers are supposed to tell that kind of horseplay from a fight—and pretty soon a guy with bushy black hair got popped in the face with an elbow so hard he started bleeding down the front of his shirt, kind of a button-down zebra print. He dove onto the stage and scrambled to the drum set, upon the face of which he planted a smeary, bloody kiss, like his big Happy Valentine’s Day, pricks! to the world. Oxflanks had already been making his way there, and now he grabbed the bleedy kid by the Chuck Taylors and hauled him belly-down off the stage, rolling up his shirt to expose his greyhoundy ribs. I thought he would kick him out, but he contented himself with jabbing a warning finger in the kid’s face and heading back to the door. Some freckly, overmascaraed redheaded girl materialized and kissed zebra-shirt’s bloody mouth. They frenched for a good five-Mississippi, and she broke away, laughing with her friends, her mouth bloody now. She didn’t even know the guy.

Everybody clapped, even the bassist, but nobody notices when the bassist stops playing.

Before I could even think, I was on my feet and had ducked through the bouncy tangle of the crowd. I grabbed her by the hand, spun her around, and went up on tiptoes. Still laughing, she bent halfway down and kissed me, a beery, bloody, hemoglobin kiss, bitter with cheap cigarettes but salty and elegant and perfect for all that. It was his blood, but I wanted hers.

“Come into the alley with me!” I shouted into her ear.

She just laughed at me and sat down, now watching the band.

“No, really, come into the alley with me!” I said, pouring on the charm. She went glass-eyed and drooly, but she got up. The charmed, it might not surprise you to learn, are not known for their physical grace, and we weren’t Skynyrd’s three steps toward the door before she bumped straight into a mean-mouthed girl, knocking from her hand the three beers she had been finessing back to her table.

An apology would have fixed it, but my new girlfriend was slack-jawed. “Sorry,” I said, moving between them, pulling my new friend toward the cold air coming in the front door. A man with a bandana and dogtags around his neck decided he didn’t like me, I can’t say I blame him, and took a poke at my eye. The Ammonia was kind of a punchy place, if you haven’t already gathered that.

He connected, I saw the proverbial stars, but even so I kicked out at him almost simultaneously, heard him yelp. I kick pretty hard. Now I was separated from the girl, but that was just as well. I wasn’t starving, just being greedy. Now Oxlungs was blocking my way to outside, he had seen the kick, maybe suspected I had been up to no good with the girl, and he grabbed me by the coat, which I slipped out of quick as an eel. The door was more crowded than the toilets, so I ran back into the bar.

Bandana was limping after me, Oxballs too, so into the filthy-but-better-than-CBGB’s little john I went, hoping for a window I thought I remembered. I got one. Painted shut and small. I leapt up on the shoulders of one guy pissing in the trough, but he was high as a kite and just laughed, at least until the counterforce of me wrenching the window open knocked him down. I went with him, paint flakes showering everywhere, but leapt again as soon as I hit concrete.

I don’t know what it looked like to the guys coming in, but I got small. That means my body changed shape a bit, just a bit; shoulders came dislocated, ribs flattened out, you get the idea. “Whoa!” somebody said behind me, probably pissing guy. Next thing I knew, I was long-legging it through a dirty heap of leftover blizzard snow, my pants good and ripped, my boots still in the bathroom, my belt off and in one hand, I don’t have any idea how that happened. But I saw Oxtongue’s oxey head and one arm come out the window behind me. He had that back neck-roll fat tough guys all have. The devil was in me, I guess, because I turned around. Went back up the snow mound. He flailed at me.

“Come here, you little shit!”

“Okay,” I said.

I stood up on the snow heap, one foot propped on a Dumpster. He grabbed my shirt but I pried his hand open; that surprised him! I resisted the urge to break his arm, just shoved it down good and hard. I could see he wanted to go back down now; this wasn’t going the way he planned, but he was wedged in.

I could not help but see his predicament as a gift from the gods, which must never be scorned.

So I fed. Pretty hard. He made a weird sound, like with his tongue jammed up against the roof of his mouth, his eyes rolling up white in his head. He might have creamed himself, that’s not unusual.

Blood and beer, blood and beer, mine was a happy mouth.

I stopped myself at about a pint and a half, he was a big boy, then I delicately plucked his porkpie hat off his head—it seemed a fair trade for my coat—and tramped down the snow heap.

“Come back,” he said, more like a lover than an enraged bouncer.

“Sorry. Past my bedtime.”

A rat in the Dumpster squeaked and moved up to get a look at me, dislodging a bottle. I tipped my new hat at it and made my way down the street, my breath steaming with borrowed warmth, whisper-singing, “I hope I smell real bad, real bad, I hope I smell real BAD!” which was great for a while. Great until I got back down into the subway and found myself looking everywhere for pale, haunty-eyed children.

“And what do you think these children were?” Margaret said, her Irish brogue still porridge-thick after three-quarters of a century in New York. She wasn’t even from Dublin or someplace civilized like that; she was from some turf-cutting wasteland where they pronounce their B s like W s and only speak English in banks, which they never go into because they’re shit broke. She was in her thirties when she was turned, which was not long before I was turned. I’ll get to that.