Walk Among Us, page 19
“I don’t know. How about that? I don’t know what I was going to do.”
“Why did you want to leave?”
“There are people here who want to hurt me, I guess?” said Duke, an elbow braced against the cold window. “I just didn’t want to be stuck here.”
“We’d protect you,” said Eva, her own hurt palpable.
He laughed. He hadn’t intended to do so, hadn’t wanted to injure her, not with what he’d done, with her friend dead, with everything building to catastrophe. Though it was all chemical, Eva remained the closest thing he could name as an ally.
Nonetheless, her presumptuousness had caught him off guard and he’d laughed, a lunatic noise, shrill and tortured.
“Like fuck you could,” snarled Duke, buoyed along by momentum. “Who do you think you are? You’re just a couple of mortals who drank my blood. And seriously, who the fuck do you think you are? You’re nobody. You’d die if she showed up at your door. You would be nothing, you fucking idiot. She’d just turn you into pulp. Just like I did to—”
Your friend.
He choked down the denouement of his rant.
Eva said nothing.
“If you leave . . .” said Eva after another few miles, voice careful, a cup on the brink of shattering. “Will you make sure we can still have your blood? There were the bags in the fridge. We could empty those out.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Please.”
Duke squeezed his nose bridge in a hand. “No. Just no. Seriously, whatever you think it is, it’s basically just the drugs talking—”
“Did you spike—”
“Did I spike my blood? I don’t know, Eva. Is that something people can do? Because I don’t know. I don’t fucking know anything, okay? Just. I don’t know.”
“Okay,” said Eva. And then again, in a softer voice: “Okay.”
The lights of Reykjavík sloped into view, a string of pearls along the black throat of the sea. Exhaustion settled, heavy as regret, and Duke thought he could feel the dawn veer closer. His eyelids faltered.
“For what it’s worth,” said Duke, “I’m sorry.”
Eva did not answer until they’d closed on the city limits.
“Do you even know what you’re sorry about?”
Duke thought about her question.
“No.”
“I thought so.”
For most of Duke’s life, the subject of waking had rarely merited comment. He knew he slept hard, had had it commented upon several times by previous girlfriends, who’d marveled at his obliviousness to a midnight earthquake, and he knew he woke with verve, which was why his first night as the undead had startled him as much as it had. But never in his existence had awareness come with such sudden violence.
He screamed.
His larynx recognized his circumstances before his consciousness could catch up. Duke screamed a high, dry noise that went on even after he’d run out of breath, the sound razoring from his spent lungs. It hurt. He felt flayed, cut open, pinioned and ribboned into delicate strips of flesh, and it was not until another minute had passed that it dawned upon him that it was precisely what had happened.
“What are you doing?”
A face and a corona of wild blond hair crept into sight.
“What we need to do,” said Eva, very seriously, her mouth pursed in focus.
Duke tugged at his restraints. He lay splayed in his coffin, legs and arms draped over the edges, tied to something he couldn’t quite see. His neck, too, was bound, a thick wreath of rope pressing on the esophagus, and his skin felt cool, dead, waxen.
He was bleeding.
Someone had sliced him open from wrist to elbow, knee to ankle, and there was the sound of his blood impacting plastic. He twitched a foot and banged the side of it against the mouth of a bucket.
“The fuck is this?”
“You were going to leave,” said Eva, her frown deepening. “You were just going to walk away.”
“Get out.”
His fear surged in him, tidal, rose and suppurated through the pores of his skin. Duke wanted his so-called lushes to leave, but more than that, he wanted them to share in the fear black-blooming in the pith of him. He wanted them to go, to leave, to free him from his imprisonment. Mostly, though, he wanted the pain to stop. He wanted the terror to end, to let go, so he could breathe and that animal part of him, screaming and incoherent, would shut up and let him breathe. There was not enough air in the room, not enough in the world.
But Eva only shuddered, a delicate frisson, and lowered herself out of view.
Duke heard a splash in the bucket, the ecstatic sound of someone drinking deep, and a sigh by the end of that endless swallow, hoarse yet pleased.
Another face entered his vision, its hair immaculate, its expression calm.
“I told you that you would know if you were a prisoner,” said that rich, low voice with its familiar mildness, its lack of interest.
He knew then there was no leaving now.
Nor would there ever be.
It went on for days.
It went on until Duke forgot how to number the hours, the transition of the seconds, hunger evolving into his solitary concern. At first it had felt like an unexpected ally, come reluctantly to support him against a shared adversary. But hunger, like greed, like any human vice, was loyal to nothing but itself. His appetite became cavernous, became the whole of him, and very quickly, Duke lost interest in anything but the now-omnipresent awareness of the fact that he was starving.
Had circumstances been even slightly different, this status might have precipitated an escape. But Duke, already hungry from the start, bound and bled so many times, could only lie there, nearly catatonic from the paired horror of his exsanguination and the advent of an endless golden summer.
They freed him, eventually, although Duke couldn’t be sure as to when. To his inexplicable embarrassment, his captors took care to make him comfortable. Blankets were found. Rags. Cushions. Things to improve the ergonomics of his enforced bed rest. At some point through his delirium, he thought he heard a conversation.
Eva: “He’s going to die if this keeps up. And so are we.”
“You won’t,” said his staff’s spokeswoman, purring and warm. “It’d just be unpleasant to be weaned off his blood.”
“But I don’t want to be. None of us do. How can we fix this?” said Eva.
“I appreciate an honest woman.” A brief silence. “And to answer your question: very easily. It looks like Mr. Guillo there asked for some old friends to visit. Intercontinental food delivery service. Who’d have guessed that was a thing?”
Duke longed to protest, to say something, anything, or just make, if he couldn’t muster eloquence, a nonsense sound. Anything so long as it could be construed as an objection.
His frat brothers were coming.
The knowledge engorged in him and he could not tell if it was hunger or fear that he felt as consciousness waned again.
The doors banged open and artificial light cut a steeple across the murk of the floor, tiles sticky, still crusted with Duke’s blood. Bodies crowded the door, shoving for entrance out of the cold. On instinct, Duke shrank away, pressing into the wall, torn between wanting to lurch forward and to hide. His Renfields would always find him, he knew that. There was only finite space in the house.
Despite his knowledge that resistance was pointless, even destructive, some vestigial corner of him still kicked at the thought of being pinned down, weaned on. For a while he had fought, but eventually that seemed too much trouble, was too much trouble for Duke. Besides, they came occasionally with blood he could consume and Duke, at that point, had no shame about whoring his veins out for a drink. So he let them bleed him and did what he could to master the way his mind screamed at the violation. In this fashion, he could retain some ghost of control. In this manner, he could say he had autonomy still.
But it wasn’t his retainers who walked through the door.
The scent that wafted into the house was delicious, was nothing like he’d tasted on the root of his tongue. It was joy, it was light, an olfactory hallelujah, life condensed into an aroma so appealing, he surged from his hiding spot before he could think about what he’d done.
“Duke?” said a voice.
Recognition flicked a switch in his starved psyche, deadened the magnetism of that smell long enough for Duke to whimper, “Get out.”
“Dude. What the hell? We flew out here for you, remember?”
“Please get out.” He skirted the borders of the light, still keeping to the walls. The bodies at the door had moved inside, their frames in silhouette. Here and there, however, the light found the profile of a nose, a familiar tense smile. Fred stood at the forefront, bigger than Duke remembered, an out-of-season Santa hat jauntily astride his head.
“Get out,” repeated Duke, desperation fissuring his voice. “Please.”
“Duke! The hell is going on here? This place stinks. I always knew you were a piece of crap when it came to taking care of yourself—”
The door bolted shut behind the men.
Duke lunged.
The monitors flickered on. It was the old woman again, her face in close-up, every fold, every wrinkle in stunningly high resolution, replicated across every screen in the house. She wore red lipstick like a gashed throat, the only daub of color in a regal monochrome ensemble. Diamonds frothed beneath her chin.
“Marmalade,” she purred.
Duke jerked his head up, a startled animal or a guilty child.
“Please,” he said. It was the only word he could shape. Please. Someone else had said please, had screamed the word, had held on to the syllable as Duke dug down, through a haze of capillaries and red veins, until the noise shrank to a gurgle. Please. They’d all said please, had begged. Please. Please stop this. “Please.”
“You know, I really have to thank you. Louis spent years trying to figure out how to discreetly make your other frat brothers disappear. He tried everything. Shell companies, hostile takeovers, relocation efforts. I told him to kill them. But he actually liked you people. Then you showed up and well, that all became so much easier.”
“Please.”
“It’s so much better to love what you eat, isn’t it? That personal connection makes everything so sweet.”
“Please.”
“Please? This is what you wanted, wasn’t it? If I remember correctly, this is exactly what you asked for. Money, life eternal. Power.”
“I don’t want to kill the people I care about.”
“Well, you don’t have to. And I’m not going to judge the fact that you did. There is always collateral damage. Besides, it’s not like you killed all of your fraternity brothers. Just some of them. The remainder are safe and here with me. Docile, happy as newborn calves.”
“Help me.” Whatever dignity he might have once claimed ownership over was forfeit now, auctioned away by circumstances, and there was a version of Duke who would have shot himself for what followed: him skidding over the blood-soaked tiling, tripping, then crawling on hands and knees through the gore to the screens. “I don’t . . . I was so hungry.”
And he still was.
The last tatters of his self-restraint held just enough to keep Duke from laving his tongue over the floor, anything to sponge up one last sip of blood. But he wanted to, nonetheless, craved the idea like an addict.
“I didn’t mean any of it.” Duke fisted a hand in his hair, face wedged in his elbow. Despite himself, despite the vestiges of his pride, he curled fetally by the electronics, spare arm constricted around his knees. “I didn’t want to kill them.”
“If only want could be harnessed, we’d have free energy forever,” said the old woman, her humor incandescent. “You were so hungry, Marmalade. Of course you meant what you did.”
He did not want to look. He did not want to turn. He could smell them, smell the bitter reek of bile, the organ tissue, the piss, the bowels slackening, no longer obligated to withhold their contents. Under all of that, the mentholated, vaguely antiseptic scent of shaving cream. It was the last that broke Duke, the foreign tincturing of normalcy, made him weep in convulsive gasps.
There were his friends. These were people he knew, frat brothers, coworkers, peers, his network, sustained over fifteen years of turbulent friendship. Not always the most palatable companions and certainly not always the most sterling of human beings. But they’d always been there for him, nonetheless, a bond better than blood.
Now?
They were meat.
“Please.”
“Don’t worry, Marmalade. No one in the world will need to know it was your fault. We, as a clan, are very good at dealing with regrettable accidents. After all, life is short and deeply brutal and things sometimes just happen, don’t they?”
To Duke’s shame, it was not horror but relief he felt, a wretched gratitude at the revelation he would not be exposed, incriminated in the slaughter of these men he had called friends. So he bobbed his head and said nothing.
“Thank you. I—”
“Why are you thanking me? I haven’t done anything for you yet. I was merely discussing the joys of being what and who we are. Or, rather, of who I am. I never said those services would be offered to you.”
“The contract—”
“Was in breach practically the moment you signed it. Your little fail-safes . . .” She shook her head. Her voice sweetened then. “But if you say my name, Marmalade, I’ll make it all go away for you.”
“I don’t remember. . . . Please, please help.” The begging wore down to a hitching, nerveless whimper, incoherent save for the word please.
“Say. My. Name.”
Duke could not.
“Please,” said Duke, though he knew the word had no weight.
The old woman sighed and her expression, unseen by Duke, his face caged in bloodied hands, gentled, became something almost human. Regret warmed in her eyes, fleeting and astonishingly tender. “That’s the thing about power, you know? It’s in the little things, the small details, the people you ignore. The clauses you don’t read. You should have known better. Look at the world you left behind. Humans sanctify youth and beauty, but who holds the power, Marmalade? It’s those behind the curtain, the ones who go unseen. The things you’d like to forget ever mattered.”
“Please.”
“If only you had been a little less you, this all would have gone so much better.”
“Please help me.”
“What’s my name, Marmalade?”
Duke said nothing, only wept.
“You disgust me, Marmalade. But you still have uses. Clean yourself up and finish the job you were given. In a few months we will have another performance-review meeting.” The old woman clucked to herself as she examined her nails, their surface red gold from some angles, rot black from others. “You’ll want to do better at that one.”
“I’m hungry. . . .”
“Of course you are. But don’t expect your Renfields to drop by anytime soon. Mara has taken care of that. You need to focus on what you promised me. You need to focus on remembering who you are to me. On who I am and what you are to this clan.
“Because, I hate to say this, but you’re definitely living from paycheck to paycheck these days.”
The monitors went dead. The silence became as oppressive as his hunger. But he could do nothing about either.
Sobbing, Duke crawled forward to do the only thing left to him.
He began his work.
The Land of Milk and Honey
Caitlin Starling
November
Night Manager
It’s November in Portland, which means the sun sets around 4:45 p.m. and rises just after 7:00. A lot of people hate this time of year—it’s gray and bleak and dark—but it’s always been my favorite. It gives me a lot of time to myself before and after my work shifts, with the farm sleepy and silent. I work the seven-hour overnight shift, from 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m., which doesn’t sound like much, but this job is seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, handling emergencies between the residents, human and animal alike. It’s amazing how much happens once the sun’s set, and so little of it is happy.
I’ll confess to occasionally doing some work in my office before my shift officially starts, when I’m bored enough and the spinning wheel or dye vats aren’t calling my name. The quiet stuff only, though, with the door locked and the lights down, so nobody can tell I’m in. I’d honestly rather be out in the fields, gardening, but there’s not much to be done at this point in the season. All our raised beds are wrapped up for the winter, there’s enough water (and then some) for everybody, and the only things growing are grass, weeds, and garlic. Even the bees are hunkered down, despite the relatively mild weather, and I don’t blame them.
But it’s a terrible irony that in the summer, when there’s the most work to do, I don’t have the time to do it.
Tonight, instead of paperwork, I take some time with the sheep, sitting on one of the newly hewn fences, admiring. They’re beautiful animals, and I have a knack for reading them, for making them comfortable with me. In Portland, especially these days, you don’t need to bring the sheep in for most of the season, though they do stay damp and smell of wet lanolin funk, so you have to keep an eye out for fungal infections. The earth beneath their hooves is mostly mud, but there’s still forage for them, so we leave them out, let the lambs get a few extra months on them. It’s easier to sell them when people don’t think of them as cute babies anymore, but before they get that mutton flavor.
We originally intended to keep goats. Portland loves goats, especially after they were evicted so developers could build the nostalgia-themed Goat Block Apartments back in 2015. But while cashmere is lovely to work with, we can’t farm it as much as we’d need to turn a profit. Sheep it is, then, a small herd of Merinos, some Bluefaced Leicesters, and mostly Dorsets for the meat market. They’ll be lambing in the early spring, and then the commune—the farming side of it, anyway—will be focused on birthing, feeding, weighing.
