Annie of the Undead

Varian Wolf

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Varian Wolf

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your
personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given
away to other people. If you would like to share this book with
another person, please purchase an additional copy for each
recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or
it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your
favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for
respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of
characters to persons living or deceased is purely
coincidental.

This book is dedicated to my
excellent friend Christina and to the people of New
Orleans.

Special thanks to Nicole Tracey
Prestin for her editing prowess, Ashley Taylor for her striking
cover design, Charlie Cummings for his varied technical assistance
and overall adorableness, Heather K. Wilson-Miller for being Annie
for an hour, and Josh Kaufman and family for putting me up in their
home in the heart of New Orleans.

Many thanks to Christina Power,
Nicole Tracey Prestin, and Thomas Prestin for test
reading.

Thanks to the folks at Smashwords for making this
publication possible.

Cover art copyright 2013 Varian
Wolf

Cover art and design by Ashley
Taylor

Thanks and love to Chinook Wolf for
foot warming, cuddles service, and her nearly infinite
patience.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1
– Every Story Starts
Somewhere

Chapter 2 – Never Swoon (or How to Attract a
Vampire)

Chapter 3
– Enter
Vampire

Chapter 4 – Trust

Chapter 5 – Due South

Chapter 6 – Breathing

Chapter 7 – Gay Hippies

Chapter 8 – Shittin’ Kittens

Chapter 9 – Silence is a Virtue

Chapter 10 – Wrecked to Hell

Chapter 11 – Yell Fire

Chapter 12 – Walking Against the Wind

Chapter 13 – Death is the Maiden

About the Author

Connect with Varian
online

“Which way do you want it,
puta
? In the
ass or in the pussy?”

The bitch who called herself Diva held the spoon
she’d smuggled out of the canteen with the smug air of someone
holding a real weapon.

“I’m gonna stick it up you, puta, you two-tone
trash. And what are you gonna do about it? Huh? You all alone now.
Ain’t no bulls around to protect you.”

So Diva had finally gotten me alone –if you call
her and two of her ugliest bitches alone. We’d been inside together
for months and she hadn’t managed to do it –not since that first
night when she and her thugs and I had been discussing the finer
points of raping me, and we were interrupted by a guard. Yes,
folks, that happens in jail. If you’re a sorority girl on a
one-night public-drunkenness-after-the-football-game foray into our
lovely penal system, it’s just as possible that you will get
something stuck where the sun don’t shine as it is for people like
me –I mean, like I was. The guards had broken us up twice since
that first episode, going for each other’s throats, but this
secluded corner was a place where shit could actually go down. I
wondered which one of the guards had helped her to make it happen,
letting her and her lieutenants down the hall to the showers when
they knew I was already down here, getting the jail funk off me
before being released later in the day, when doing so was like
dropping a match into a powder keg –or sending rats down a
rattlesnake hole.

There was some question as to who the guard was
trying to fuck, me or them.

“She wants it in the ass, Diva,” screeched the
skinny bitch beside her, “That’s the way little Hamtramck putas
like her take it.”

I wasn’t actually from Hamtramck, but one
shithole’s as good as another.

“Look around, puta,” Diva spread her flabby
arms. “You see a way out? You see your salvation?”

“Fuckin’ Catholic.”

“What did you say?”

I looked back and forth from the skinny bitch on
the left, the ugly-bat-beat bitch on the right, and the corpulent
one in the middle with six inches of roots showing above a bad dye
job to tell of the twelve-months she’d been inside.

“Fuckin’ religion gives me indigestion. Can we
just get on with this?”

Diva scowled at me, the expression doing the
worst possible things with what gravity and years had made of her
face. She was maybe forty, but the poorly-maintained kind of forty.
She wasn’t street-worn. She had long since given up her years on
the street hustling for some gang, and taken up some of the cushier
occupations of the urban antisocial. She was currently in on a
variety of soft charges including identity theft and fraud.
Business must have been good; I never saw so many chins.

All the droopy flab had to radically reorient
when her scowl turned to a laugh.

“What, you gonna try some of that boxing shit on
me? Let’s see what you got, little puta, before I cut you a bigger
one.”

“You cut the Grand Canyon, and it’ll still be
smaller than your mama’s.”

“Puta!”

With that, Diva lunged at me. The your-mamas can
usually be trusted to elicit that response. I didn’t meet her
head-on. She was a big girl, maybe six feet tall and pushing three
bills, but she was all flab and no finesse. I just let her careen
on past, and I hit the ugly one in the liver a couple of times,
getting that satisfying pain-grunt out of her before turning to
Mina, the skinny one.

Mina was quicker than the other two and a
scrapper, but she didn’t know how to dance. I feinted right and
nailed her with a left hook on the chin. It was no haymaker, but
she went straight to the floor like a wet noodle. Glass jaw.

I was grabbed from behind. Diva had turned on me
quicker than I had anticipated. She took hold of my shirt. The
much-hyped spoon went immediately out of play, falling to the
floor.

I tried to twist out of her grasp, but only
succeeded in nearly throttling myself. She was hanging on like a
bloated tick. I elbowed her hard in what I thought was the gut, but
she was huge, and her fat absorbed the blow.

Then the ugly one was coming for me. Diva
shouted instructions at her, and she tried to grab my legs. I
doubled up and, using the bloated one for leverage, kicked out hard
with both legs. I nearly missed but caught Ugly in the arm with one
foot, sending her staggering backwards.

Now Diva was trying to choke me, which wasn’t
the worst of it. She was cursing indecipherably and spitting in my
hair as she did so, which was. The fro-like entity that lived on my
head may have been a mess already and in need of all kinds of salon
intervention, but you don’t mess with a girl’s bush. You just
don’t.

Choking, I punched at Diva’s head behind me, but
she was too tall for the effort to be effective. Then I just
grabbed for whatever I could and twisted savagely. It only felt
like flab, but she cried out in pain.

Just then Ugly punched me in the face.

It was a square blow, delivered as hard as Ugly
could punch. She was a stocky girl in her twenties, with forearms
as big as those of the average man her height. The blow was
jarring, probably more so under the circumstances than it would
have been on its own –I had this little oxygen problem at the
moment. I tasted blood in my mouth, and my lips stung over my
teeth. Chick could hit.

But I knew how to be hit. While Ugly was doing
the shit-that-hurt-my-hand dance that people do who aren’t used to
meeting bare knuckles with bone, I was doing my damnedest to gouge
Diva’s eyes out. They were buried deep in the fat of her face, but,
with the added freedom of her weakening grip, I had finally located
them. I would blind the bitch. I wouldn’t think twice about it, and
Diva knew it.

Diva let me go, or shoved me away from her,
rather. I went sprawling, gasping for air. As I started to get up,
somebody kicked me in the ribs. I went down again. Someone tried to
kick me again, but I grabbed her by the ankle and pulled as hard as
I could. Diva hurtled down like a tractor-trailer going over an
overpass. Floor met flab with a loud smack, sending waves rolling
over the fat sea, and all the air out of her lungs.

I got to my feet and hit Ugly with a combination
to the midsection and face. Then I kicked Diva twice in the head.
Then I hit Ugly some more. I beat her right down to the ground, and
she stayed there.

Diva was struggling to get up. Her nose was
bleeding. She was breathing hard from exertion. The bigger they
are, the harder it is for them to get up.

I picked up the threatened-with spoon that Diva
had dropped during the fracas. I got down on the floor beside her,
put my arm around her neck, and jabbed the handle end of the spoon
into her ear. I held her there.

She inhaled sharply when she realized the
position she was in.

“Where do you want it, bitch? In the eye or in
the ear?”

“No! No!” she yelled. “You’re loca! Loca!”

Ugly lay dazed on the floor, and, just beyond
her, Mina was moaning herself into wakefulness.

“I’m supposed to get out today. How the fuck am
I supposed to do that now? Today was my release. Do you hear me,
you fuckin’ bitch? My goddamned release.”

“I hear you!” Diva shouted at my shaking her,
“Please, just don’t…don’t…”

“Don’t what? This?”

I jabbed the spoon harder in. Diva squealed.

“I gotta stay in here over this –over you, it
ain’t gonna be for love taps. I want a pound of flesh,” I pushed
the spoon again, “From right here.”

“No! Please!” she wailed, “This didn’t happen! I
swear to you. We won’t say anything.”

“Don’t you fuckin’ lie to me. I’ve got a spoon
in your ear, remember.”

“No! Don’t! Maria, tell her you won’t say
nothing. She has nothing to worry about. Tell her!”

Ugly Maria looked irritated. She wasn’t very
bright, but she was bright enough to know that the person she had
looked at as a leader had been reduced to utter spinelessness and
was now asking the same of her.

“There’s spoon for you too if you ask for it,” I
warned her.

Maria looked at me then, considering.

“I won’t say nothing.”

She wasn’t that stupid after all.

I turned my attention back to Diva.

“You don’t want me in here. If I stay, we finish
this. You want me gone.”

“Gone, yes. You’re already gone. You’re gone
today. Just go away,” Diva affirmed.

But I didn’t move. I crouched there, spoon in
fist, considering. Killing this bitch would make me feel all warm
inside, and what was waiting for me on the outside? The streets of
rotting old Detroit, a parole officer, all the enemies I’d made,
the unemployment of the previously incarcerated, a boxing career
interrupted by half a dozen stints on the inside –it was nothing to
look forward to. And the alternative? State lockup. I’d been there
before. It didn’t have the chaos of jail, the frequently altering
population as people got arrested, sentenced or released, and
arrested again, the sleeping on the floor when overpopulation and
underfunding of the local penal system maxed out the number of
beds, the constantly reevaluating how big you are in an
ever-changing pool of angry little fish. Maybe that was Diva’s
problem. She’d do better in the pen where the rigid social
hierarchy would keep her in check, providing her powers and people
to pick on, as well as people to be afraid of. Diva would do well
in a place like that, in society.

I, on the other hand, wanted no part of it.

I left the spoon in her ear and stood up. Diva
didn’t move. She just laid there looking up at me. Maybe she was
afraid I would change my mind. Maybe I would.

The other two were staring at me, Mina with the
dazed expression of someone who has missed the whole thing, but who
can see from the circumstances that things have gone very
wrong.

“You’d better go wash up,” I said.