Richard Kadrey: Kill the dead

I hit her a millisecond later. I can't see anything, but I know it's her because she's the only thing in the store light enough to fly like that. My vision clears, but even I don't want to see this. When she pulled the trigger to hose me down, all the liquor on her clothes and the floor went up. Eleanor is an epileptic shadow puppet pirouetting around in a lake of whiskey fire.

Vampires don't scream like regular humans. I don't know how they scream at all without lungs, but when they let loose, it's like a runaway train meets the screech of a million fighting cats. You feel it in your kidneys and bones. Tourists pee and puke at the sound. Fuck 'em. Eleanor still isn't going down. And the fire is starting to spread. Grease on the grills of nearby food stalls starts going up. A propane tank blows, setting off the sprinkler system. When I look back, Eleanor is sprinting out of the market back onto Broadway, still covered in flames.

Chasing a burning girl down a city street is a lot harder than it sounds. Civilians tend to stop and stare and this turns them into human bowling pins. Slow, whiny bowling pins. You'd think that on some basic animal level they'd want to get the hell out of the way of a burning schoolgirl screaming loud enough to crack store windows and the stupid son of a bitch chasing her. Not that I'm doing this for them. I'm doing it for the money, but they still stand to benefit from it.

When Eleanor runs across Fifth Street she isn't burning anymore. She's a black beef-jerky Barbie doll running on charred stick insect legs.

Up ahead, there's an abandoned wreck of a movie theater called the Roxie. The lobby and marquee areas have been converted into an open-air market. Eleanor blows past the racks of knockoff T-shirts and toxic rubber sandals. Slams straight through the inch-thick plywood screwed over the theater doors where the glass used to be. I follow her inside, but hang back by the smashed door, letting my eyes adjust to the dark.

The na'at would be a smart weapon in a place like this, but I feel like shooting something. Besides, Eleanor won't know what a na'at is, so it won't scare her the way I want. I retired Wild Bill's Navy Colt pistol a while back and replaced it with a Smith amp; Wesson.460 hunting pistol. The thing is so big and mean it doesn't even need bullets. I could beat Godzilla to death with it if I stood on a chair. The gun is loaded alternately with massive.460 rounds and shortened.410 shotgun shells, all coated in my special Spiritus Dei, silver, garlic, holy water, and red mercury dipping sauce. It only holds five shots, but it does its job well enough that I've never had to reload.

When you're going in someplace blind, don't know the layout or what's waiting inside, a place you know a Lurker likes to hang out, a smart guy will hang back, circle the perimeter, and look for traps and weak points. I'm hot, annoyed, and in a rush, so that's exactly what I don't do. Besides, I'm just chasing one dumb little Kentucky fried blonde. She can't be much trouble now that she's cornered. Yeah. That's probably what all those G-men said about Bonnie Parker before they saw the tommy gun.

Inside the theater, it's a sauna. Burst water pipes in a sealed-up building. I haven't moved and I'm sweating like a lawyer at the pearly gates. It smells like they invented mildew in here. How the hell did suburban Valley girl Eleanor end up day-squatting here? She didn't run into the theater by accident. She knew where she was going. By the sound of all the broken beer and wine bottles under my feet, so do a lot of other people. Make that "did," past tense. The winos are probably what attracted her to the place. Who doesn't love a free lunch? I have a feeling that there aren't too many random squatters in here anymore.

Turns out I'm half right.

The squatters aren't random. They're vampires. Friends of hers. A guy and a girl.

They jump from the balcony and the guy slams a piece of two-by-four between my shoulders. I go down on my knees in the crunchy glass, but I roll with the blow and come up with the.460 cocked. That's when Eleanor's other friends hit me. Two more guys from beneath the seats on either side of the aisle. I grab the smaller one by the throat and toss him into the second. The girl vampire pair hits me from behind and jams a broken bottle into my arm. I drop the gun and it's too dark to see where it went. I throw an elbow back and feel the side of the girl's skull crack. She jumps up like a gazelle and stumbles over two rows of seats, screaming. That gives me a second to sprint down the aisle toward the screen and put some distance between Eleanor's dead friends and me.

That's where Eleanor has been waiting. Not only is she smart, but she has titanium balls. Even when she was on fire and running through the boarded-up front doors, she never let go of the flamethrower. The other bloodsuckers fall back as she opens up.

The shot back at the market was her just introducing herself. This one is a "fuck you very much and good night" just for me. Eleanor pulls the trigger and doesn't let up until the gun is empty.

Stabbed and cold-cocked, I'm still not dumb enough to just stand there. I dive to the right, behind a row of seats. Fire wraps around them like it's reaching for me. I'm getting burned from above and below, steaming like a pork bun in my leather jacket. Even when the flamethrower is empty, the burning seats keep right on cooking me, and the two-by-four shot left me too dizzy to move very fast. I stagger over to the wall and try to run up the aisle, but I'm tripping on the garbage snowdrifts and land face-first in candy wrappers, needles, and malt liquor bottles.

I've turned into Buster Keaton and Eleanor and her friends are getting a real kick out of me gimping along on all fours. She's burned beyond any human recognition, but she's a juicer and they get over pain pretty quick. I do, too, but I'm not there yet. Not even in the same time zone. I give up and lie down on the sticky-sweet carpet to do what I should have done in the first place.

I press my right hand down into the broken glass and put my weight on it. The jagged bottle shards slice deep into my palm and I keep pushing until I feel glass hit bone. Most hexes don't need blood to work, but a little of the red stuff is like a nitrous afterburner when you want a hex to come on hard and fast.

Eleanor takes the two-by-four from the boy bloodsucker and thumps it on each seat as she strolls over to me.

"Hey, Speedy Gonzales. You like chasing things? Why don't I knock your head across the street and you can chase that?"

"Get him, Nellie. Look at that scarred piece of shit. He's too ugly to drink. Waste that faggot."

It's one of the boys talking. The one who got me with the chunk of wood. He has a southern accent. Somewhere deep, old, and hot. You can almost hear the kudzu wrapped around his words.

Eleanor says, "Shut up, Jed Clampett. Jethro is waiting for you to blow him in the parking lot."

Everyone laughs but Jed.

While Eleanor does an "Evening at the Improv" thing for her dead friends, I do a Hellion chant over and over, keeping my hand in the glass and letting the blood flow. For once, Hellion's guttural grunts work in my favor. The Lost Boys think I'm moaning.

"Why were you following me, asshole? Did Mutti send you? Mom, I mean? Does Daddy know? All she has to do is put on her knee pads and she can get him to do anything."

The wind starts as a breeze from the back of the theater, sweeping from the balcony and ripping down the rotten curtains that flank the dead movie screen. Eleanor drops the comedy act and the others go silent as the wind picks up force. Now they're the ones unsteady on their feet.

Even though I can't read the dead like the living, vampires still have minds and I feel around for Eleanor's. I can't tell you her lottery numbers or her kitten's name, but I can pick up images and impressions. She's gone from pissed to nervous and is steering into the skid, heading for scared. She hasn't been a Lurker long enough to run into anybody with real hoodoo power and she can't figure out what's happening.