Wounds, page 19
part #2 of Voice of Blood Series
“What about them?” asked Sybil.
“To be perfectly honest, as you pretend to be, I’m sick of hearing about Sonic Ruth. She’s dead. I want to know about you.”
“I just didn’t exist until after she was dead.” Sybil shrugged.
“Really, or metaphorically? And I know it wasn’t really, because you told me about having to beat people up to get Ruth out of trouble. But did you ever fight for you? Just for pleasure? For Christ’s sake, what were you like before you met her?”
“I was a kid. Without any friends.” She sat there pouting until it became clear that Daniel was waiting for more. “A tall ugly kid who everybody hated. I suppose you were wildly popular as a child and can’t possibly understand what I’m talking about.”
He had been, unfortunately. “I do understand what you mean. I know what it’s like to not have any friends. I don’t really have any friends now. I mean, you haven’t exactly seen me wiping clean my social calendar recently.”
“Who sends you all that stuff in the mail? Who are all those kids who hang around in the studio?”
“Those people,” said Daniel coolly, “are using me. They want my money, or they want to have a good time at someone else’s expense. It’s perfectly natural and I don’t fault them for doing it. But friends? C’mon, Sybil. Are you so alienated from the world of friendship that you can’t tell the difference?”
It was her turn to fall resentfully silent, and Daniel bit his lip, despairing of having gone too far. But no—let her know what it was to test limits of emotional nakedness, so she could decide for herself if she wished to remain that way. “I haven’t had a friend since I left Los Angeles. And when I lived in L.A., I had . . . a lot of friends. I had a couple of good friends, some chums, and some of them were vampires, too. And a lot of subjects.” He caught his breath and blinked away the stinging in his eyes. “I guess I need to live in adoration.”
“It must suck to be you,” she said.
“Since you’re so concerned, yes, it does.” He stared at the road. Brooklyn seemed exceptionally dark. “It means that when I lose even one friend, it’s devastating.”
“So you think I was wrong to get rid of Ruth?” she said.
“I didn’t say that. I just think it’s a shame, that’s all.”
“No it’s not,” she said, and that was the end of the conversation.
Daniel parked about four blocks from the off ramp of the bridge itself, alongside its humming pylons, and they began walking into Brooklyn, breaking through thin crusts of ice on top of slush-pooled gutters. Daniel felt the cold, agitated wind slapping at his cheeks, but it was a sensation of secondary importance. Instead of cursing the wind, he lifted his nose into it, trying to read the scents of the area. With the wind chasing its own tail in small eddies, he could only smell himself and occasionally Sybil, walking along ahead of him and holding out her arms wide for balance. It would have to be eyes and ears tonight. Right then, he didn’t see anyone else on the street—the weather kept most people inside.
They turned onto a typical neighborhood corner—restaurant west, video store north, florist south, grocery east, apartments above all, thin trees choking and frozen. Only the video store was still open, and even they were shutting off the neon sign and flipping the sign on the door. Two men stood out on the sidewalk, sharing a cigarette and dancing to keep warm.
Sybil strode right up to them, gleaming like an oil slick in her dark, skintight velour leggings and giant parka. “Oh, man, is the video store closed?” she wailed.
“It is now,” said the younger of the two men, pointing with the lit end of the cigarette.
“Oh, hell. Well . . .” Sybil swung her arms aimlessly for a moment. “Do you have a cigarette?”
“No,” said the older man with a note of sincerity in his voice. “This was my last one, that’s why we’re sharing it.”
Sybil swung her arms some more. “I was really hoping to get a video.” She sighed. “I was going to rent a porno and watch it with my honey.” She pointed at Daniel, who waved and smiled. “Do you two ever do that?”
“What?” said Younger.
“You two are . . . together, right?” Sybil waggled her hand back and forth.
The men exchanged nervous glances. “No,” said Younger, huffing through his lips. “No way.”
“Oh . . . that’s funny . . .” said Sybil. “Do you know that guy who’s working now?”
“Who, Andrew? Yeah, we’re waiting to pick him up,” said Older.
Sybil stared longingly at the sparkling faces of movie stars on posters, trapped forever in two dimensions. “Could you maybe . . . just talk him into letting me go in and get something? I know exactly which one I want. Or you can send my honey in. He’s got the money anyway.”
Daniel caught her look and nodded. Behind his closed lips, his fangs ached and he felt like they were ready to fly out and embed themselves in someone’s neck. He looked into the eyes of both men and gave them a gentle push in the right direction.
“Oh, yeah, totally.” The younger man all but took Daniel’s arm as he led him to the door. The man knocked cautiously on the glass, and Andrew inside opened the door a crack. “Hey, Andy? Could you let this guy come in and grab a movie? He’ll only be a second.”
“Dude, I’m fucking closing, OK? I need to get home before hell freezes over.” Andrew looked at Daniel’s face peering in through the crack. “What video do you want?”
“I don’t remember what it’s called,” Daniel said, “but I’ve been here before and I know exactly where it is on the shelf. Please. Let me in, Andrew.”
Hey. I’m your buddy.
The door opened just enough to let Daniel in. Andrew stood with his hands on his hips, glaring at him. “Now hurry up and get it so I can turn the computers off,” he snapped.
Daniel sighed. “Go ahead and turn them off. I’m not renting anything.”
“Oh, c’mon!”
“Go tell your buddies that you’re taking a cab home—I’m giving you enough money so you can go in a taxi. Just as a tip. To say thanks.” He circled the video store clerk, who kept the same skeptical expression on his face until Daniel stared full into his eyes and slammed him with his thoughts. Andrew crumpled immediately, catching himself on the counter with one hand, but only barely. Daniel wiped his brow. When he was hungry, it was much harder to be subtle. “Go on. Tell them. And then remember, come out to the alley when you’re done. Remember—you need to get to the alley.”
Andrew staggered to the door, stuck his face out, and relayed the message. Halfway through, Daniel shouldered his way out of the store, turning around with a swirl of his coat and a jaunty, “Thanks. We really appreciate it.”
Younger and Older were staring at Sybil, who grinned at them with all her teeth. Daniel took her arm. “I got it, sweetycakes,” he said. “Now let’s go.”
They walked to the alleyway, enclosed with a gate, and waited. “Sweetycakes?” Sybil demanded.
“Your honey?”
“OK, that was lame. It worked, though,” she said. “And this can be the first demonstration of my art project. Street theater witnessed only by innocent bystanders. Nobody asks to be in any of our pieces—chaos brings them in!”
“Ssh, he’s coming,” said Daniel.
The two friends had gotten into their car and driven away, blasting Abba, and now the gate in the alley rattled and the quarry Andrew yawned his way in, wrapping a long blue acrylic scarf around his neck and muttering “I’ll never get out of here on time as long as I live. . . .”
Sybil stepped in front of him. “Hi!” she sang.
“Who are you?—Oh, shit.” Andrew did a double take of Sybil’s manic grin, Daniel’s gentle and sinister smile.
Sybil closed and latched the gate behind him, stood against it, leering. Andrew tried to scramble over a pile of plastic trash cans, but Sybil grabbed him by the collar of his puffy down coat and swung him down onto his knees. “Oh, Jesus! Oh, shit! Don’t kill me! Please, please don’t kill me,” he begged, gagging for breath as Sybil tightened the blue scarf around his throat. “Take the money—please—”
“What? What? Can’t hear you.”
“Please don’t—I uh—I got a new baby!”
“You beg, you bargain, and you lie,” Sybil snapped.
Somehow he managed to twist and struggle free from the scarf and broke into a run, heading toward the smooth brick facade of the building that bordered the alley on the third side, away from the gate. He slapped his hands and squeaked the toes of his sneakers against the brick, trying to climb.
Sybil bent and rummaged in the trash bins until she found an empty beer bottle, and Andrew whirled to face them, his eyes glassy with panic. Daniel rocked back on his heels and smiled all throughout his soul; watching her was glorious, watching the grandiose curve her arm made as she broke off the end of the bottle against the brick and drew the jagged scythe edge across Andrew’s throat from ear to ear. In motion she seemed smaller, younger, fluid. At the end of her stroke she came back to rest on the balls of her feet, and for a moment, Daniel hardly recognized her.
“Ooh, you’ve made a hell of a mess,” Daniel whispered to her. He held Andrew up and opened his mouth under the spurting carotid. “Never cut the whole throat,” he paused just long enough to say. Andrew, consciousness snapping off in his brain, slumped and fell forward onto the ground when Daniel let him go. “See, look at all this. This is sloppy.”
Click and flash! A whole life! But even Andrew had grasped that last moment of beauty as the girl danced the broken glass toward him. Andrew thought Whoa! So it does happen in real life. Just like in the movies. Nothing about any baby. Not a moment about what he had or hadn’t done with his life. Just awe at the way her down-slashing arm had cut through the steam of his breath.
Sybil delicately stepped out of the way of the slowly spreading pool of blood. “OK, Sybil the Sloppy. But was it all right? Did it look OK?”
“It was gorgeous,” he admitted. “Even he thought so.”
“You are covered in blood,” she said. “It’s on your boots.”
“This is a fucking mess.” Daniel looked up at the sky, a thin strip of starless puce between the buildings, and saw what looked like gray birds circling above. With alarming speed, thick white flakes fell and kept falling. “We’ll have to hope for the best.”
They couldn’t just pitch Andrew’s body into the Dumpster—plastic garbage bags had to be rearranged, spilled beer and rotting fruit forming a soupy ichor at the bottom. “Get his wallet,” Daniel said to Sybil. “You might as well make a living.” He grumbled at the video store clerk’s unseeing, slack face as he covered it with garbage, adding his soaked gloves, his coat. “This is not how I would have done it, my friend. But nobody gets to choose how they go . . . and at least it was pretty, wasn’t it?”
As soon as they had left the alley, Daniel plunged toward the ice in the gutter, crunching and splashing until he was soaked and freezing to the bone, but his boots were clean. “Fresh snowfall, good,” he said. “If we get inside soon, nobody can track us.”
The wind had found new direction and now blew east with a keen determination, bringing smaller, denser, and icier snowflakes with it. “This is shitty,” said Sybil with a note of grim joy. “This happens in Colorado.” She let Andrew’s wallet, divested of thirty-one dollars and five credit cards, slip from her fingers into the slush. “Blizzard conditions. I haven’t ever seen it do this here.”
Two police cruisers bookended Daniel’s car, lights scintillating. An officer bent a black man in a puffy down coat over the hood of Daniel’s car, trying to cuff the struggling, cursing man. The perp wiggled out of the cop’s grasp and scrambled over the hood of the car, and the cop shouted and went for his gun. Sybil snatched for Daniel’s hand; together, they turned the corner onto the next block and headed away from the scene. “Holy shit, what’s up with that?” Sybil muttered.
“I wonder if he was trying to steal it,” Daniel mused.
They heard gunfire echo off the underside of the bridge, more shouting.
“Jesus . . . we have to get inside. Now.” She squinted up at the sky, flakes impaling themselves on her eyelashes. “You’ve got blood on your pretty sweater.”
At times it seemed impossible that the wet knife slicing off the river toward them was only moving air with frozen water suspended in it. An ambulance siren’s wail floated there, too, rising and falling, harmonizing with another of its kind in bent Doppler-effect counterpoint, and then soloing, but never fading completely. The bridge, looming very black against the anemic night sky, hummed along with its subsonic grumble. Daniel paced his footsteps to find a rhythm in it.
“Let’s try one of these warehouses,” she hissed.
Nearly under the bridge, within view of the oily black river, the structures tended toward a roughly cubic shape—huge buildings, a whole block each, as if they had grown out of the broken cobblestones like mushrooms, their ubiquitous Dumpsters clustered around them. Sybil ran to the side of a building, its ground floor windowless, with a garage door made of a single huge sheet of corrugated metal. She examined the lock on the door with a frown of deep concentration. “Nope,” she said. “We’ll have to try a window. How well do you climb?”
Daniel scrambled up onto a Dumpster, found the row of windows upstairs unboarded and already partially broken. He set his teeth and pushed his hand through a pane of glass, tearing the wooden frames between panes with hands slippery with blood. In less than a minute, he opened a hole wide enough to fit his skinny body through. “I’ll see you at the front door,” he stage-whispered to Sybil.
It was a long drop inside to the floor, at least ten feet straight down and onto an inch of filthy water on concrete and broken glass. Daniel, who had landed on his feet, searched around the room with his eyes, making out mostly broken glass but also some large twisted hulks of machinery that might have been paint mixers or restaurant equipment or torture devices. He walked through the devastation to the door, wrestled a rusty dead bolt open, and twisted the lock on the doorknob. Sybil, shaking water and glass off the palms of her cheap gloves, gazed into the dark, immense space. “Shit,” she decided, jingling her keys and flicking on the flashlight attached to them; a thin beam of light picked out the edges of the machinery, gouged and piled along the far wall. “Good thing you didn’t try to come in on that side.”
A tiny sliver of glass had healed inside Daniel’s hand.
“There’s stairs,” said Sybil.
On the second level, the ground was dry, and about three-quarters filled with rotting and filthy office furniture, piled as haphazardly as the machinery downstairs. “Hello, ratsie,” Sybil called fondly to a scurrying form, startled by the light of her flashlight. “Look, Daniel, builtin pets.”
Daniel pulled a chair from the pile and sat on it. The glass would grow out by morning, but in the meantime, it itched like the devil. “Sybil, have you got a knife?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I thought you might.” He smiled at her chasing the rats with the flashlight’s beam. “Let me see it. I got some glass in my hand.”
She came over to him, aiming the flashlight at his feet and then at his outstretched hand. The glass splinter wasn’t visible on the surface, but the purple angry flesh around it, and the niggling pain, told him exactly where it was. “Jesus,” she said, taking a folding knife from her pocket. “Does it hurt?”
The tiny blade of the knife was dull. “Not as much as this does,” Daniel murmured, sliding the point well into the flesh. “This is the mount of Mars,” he continued, “and as you can see, it’s extra meaty . . . which means that I have great warlike passions.” He only cut skin away, but an inch of epidermis, oozing plum-colored blood, looked and felt like acres. Daniel dropped the already dry and crackling skin onto the floor, raising a cloud of microscopic dust.
Sybil looked at it, and poked at it with her toe. The skin crumbled into dark flakes.
“Trust you to run away from civilization,” he grunted to her, licking the raw meat on his palm with just the tip of his tongue. “Nice place you got here.”
She squeezed into the chair with him and curled against his warmth, shivering. “You know what, I’m going to sleep now,” she said.
“Is that so? Don’t you want to try going back to the car?”
“I wouldn’t trust it. Those cops are gonna be there a while. If they shot that guy, expect even more cops.” She gazed adoringly at his wound, sealing itself over with a gleaming film of dark blood. “Can I kiss it better?”
“No,” he said. “You can’t. Don’t ever touch my blood unless you feel like becoming a vampire. Whatever you do, don’t ever let it touch your mouth or your eyes or anything else where there’s no skin. It’ll eat your skin away, too, but it’s not too bad when your skin gets a scar. It’s not so nice when it’s your eye.”
“Good to know,” she said. “I’m glad your sperm isn’t like that.” She put her arms around him and rested her face against the dry place under his arm.
With his good hand, he stroked her crackly bleached hair. “You just killed an innocent man in cold blood,” he whispered.
“Yes, I did,” she said. She snuggled closer to him, breathing down the neck of his coat.
“You realize you’re in it now. There’s no going back. There’s no un-killing. And you’ll probably have to keep doing it.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’ll think about it for the rest of your life.”
“I feel better about Sonic Ruth, though,” she said.
“You do?”
“It doesn’t make me sick to think about it anymore. That was so much at a distance. I didn’t kill her, the train did; I just made it possible for the train to kill her.”
“So are you saying you didn’t kill Andrew? That the bottle killed him?”
“No,” she said with a faint laugh. “No, I killed him. I killed him for you.” She hugged him tighter.
