Death is Only a Theoretical Concept (2 page)

“
What’s that fucking crap on your hair, Steve?” Phil turns his
head and grins. “I thought you said you didn’t need to try and
impress the chicks? Happy birthday.”

Steve just
shoots him the finger and clips his seatbelt.

“
You’ll have to try hard where we’re going, Akira-san.” Jack
pauses to chortle and pull out of the driveway. “There’s a new bar
in town, not that you Sydney wankers would know. Apparently it’s
the hottest vamp hang-out, so we’re taking you there.”

Shit, this was
going to be easy. True, Steve had always thought himself closer to
Jack than everyone else after the year they spent helping each
other out with Jack’s depression and Steve’s agoraphobia, but how
had he lucked out to get such an easy dare? Johanna spent a night
in the old cemetery listening to feral settler zombies from the
1820s wail and moan about their untimely deaths, asking questions
for her history thesis, and shooting them every time they tried to
gnaw on her limbs. Of course, she tricked them into offering her
that dare in the first place, but that didn’t make it easy. This
little dare is nothing at all.

“
No
worries. Piece of fucking cake.”

Phil and Jack
exchange glances and break into broad grins—one tanned under blond
hair, one dark brown under wiry curls.

“
Yep.” Jack turns into the main drag, the streets dotted with
clusters of vampires, tourists, the odd green-glowing fae and a few
locals headed towards the hunter pub Serif’s Shotgun. “We take you
to a bar or club, you hook up with a vampire there, and you have
twelve hours to get laid and back to us. Then the money, Akira-san,
is yours.”

Steve’s feeling
too good to give Jack the shit he deserves for that horrific
nickname—not that it makes any kind of difference. “Too fucking
easy, man.”

Jack pulls the
ute over down the beach end of Bay Road. The club is new—before
Steve left for university it was a sewing-goods emporium—with the
walls and windows now painted black.
Feeders
is printed on
the door in a plain san-serif type, the door itself flanked by two
muscular breather bouncers and one suit-clad vampire checking ID.
Steve slams the ute door shut, strolls over and flashes his
licence; the greyskin bouncer nods at the three of them as Jack and
Phil follow suit.

“
Are
you sure you’ve got the right place?” He shakes his head and
stares, not at Steve, to whom he pays no attention at all, but at
Phil, clad in worn jeans and a plain T-shirt, and Jack, who forgot
to detach several hooks from the bottom of his flanno shirt. Steve
can’t blame him for asking, since while they’re not wearing thongs
or singlets, they’re only about one tier up the rung of what
constitutes an appropriate dress code. They’d have been laughed out
of any club, and most bars, in Sydney.

Then again, this
is Port Carmila, a town that only has a club because of the
tourists and the fae’s expectation of culture: should a town of
fishermen, farmers and hunters not look like fishermen when they go
out? Can he really expect Jack to give a fuck about how
inner-Sydney white-bread invader journalism students dress up when
they head off after class for vodka shots? Steve, dressed as he is,
would be laughed straight out of the Shotgun.

“
We’re just here to support him.” Jack grins and gestures
towards Steve. “Friends can’t let him go out on his own, can they?
It wouldn’t be right.”

“
You’ve got good friends,” the vampire says as he pulls out
his stamp; it blurs as it hits the back of Steve’s palm. He has the
most magnificent fangs Steve has ever seen, almost large enough to
make speaking, kissing and any other jaw-related movements awkward.
His eyes—dead and glassy, somewhat reminiscent of fishes and the
Mer—take in Steve for the first time. “Not everyone here would be
so confident in themselves. Good luck.”

Fuck, does he
think Steve one of those desperate wanna-be-fae leeches? Like a
fucking breather tourist, desperate for a taste of the dark side?
He grimaces, nods, follows Jack through the doors and down a flight
of narrow, black-painted stairs into the building’s basement level.
On first glance it looks like any ordinary club, if small: dance
floor, gyrating bodies, pounding and ethereal EBM beats, one guy
splashing something over the bar as he downs his drink. The rainbow
strobe lighting makes the packed-in mass of grey complexions seem,
for a moment, almost alive. The air reeks of sweat and alcohol.
Steve lets out a breath, relaxes: he knows this shit, and nobody
ever accused him of being unable to talk the leg off complete
strangers.

“
Well?” Phil grins and shouts to be heard above the music.
“Go, mate! Find a girl!”

A girl. Right.
Steve glances across the crowd—and blinks. There are girls in the
room, but they’re in pairs, grinding up against each other in a way
that’d be so fucking hot if he weren’t otherwise distracted. He
spots a single girl at the bar, but then a tall vampire in a
miniskirt and a black faux-leather corset sways over and tugs her
off the stool. They vanish among the dancers, and he scans them
again, hoping against hope that he was somehow mistaken. Vampires
form the majority, but there are a reasonable amount of humans—he
hopes they’re mostly tourists—swaying and writhing amongst the
undead, while two ghosts cause sudden screams as they float through
a small cluster of head-bobbing zombies. An aloof faerie prince,
glowing pale green, holds court by the bar, surrounded by a gaggle
of adoring, desperate-looking, thoroughly-entranced men. Women and
men for sure, and some people whose gender Steve can’t begin to
guess, but most of them are paired off in combinations that defy
current marriage laws. No matter how hard he looks, Steve can’t
find a single woman that isn’t watching other women dance—not
except for Sophie Williams, pouring something red and viscous into
shot glasses behind the bar. Men and women of all shapes, ages,
sizes and varying degrees of dead and alive ... but not a single,
solitary, heterosexual-seeming female vampire.

On the contrary,
there are plenty of single, solitary, gay-seeming male
vampires.

A few of them
are even looking Steve’s way.

What the
fuck
is Port Carmila doing with a gay vampire club? He knows
Johanna and Izzy aren’t the only queers in town, but surely there
aren’t enough to merit even a small club?

Fag
queen
, whispers the spectre of Adam Swanston and his fucking
footy-team cronies, the memory loud even though the halls of Port
Carmila High School are three years past. Steve swallows and wipes
his now-sweating hands on his jeans, not sure what to say. He got
away from all that shit! University, in
Sydney
, means he’s
well cut of all the goons that, unlike zombies, can’t be silenced
with a few well-placed bullets, an axe, kerosene and a lighter. He
spends his holidays with his mates who know he can master hair
product and take down the feral undead. He got away, but how can he
do this and not have all that shit start up again? Who the fuck is
everyone going to remember, the gay vampire he fucked here or the
girls he dated back in Sydney?
Does your girlfriend know you’re
really a fucking fag?

It’s
one thing to have flashbacks of the feral zombie biting at his hip;
it’s another to hear the words of a fucking bully in the same
visceral way.

Across the room,
two girls—a butch short-haired white girl in jeans and a waistcoat,
a black zombie with corkscrew curls in blue lawn hoopskirts and a
denim jacket—dart out from the crowd and wave with a frightening
amount of enthusiasm. Johanna and Izzy, he thinks as his stomach
knots. If Izzy’s feeling confident enough to dance in public with
her girlfriend, this place isn’t a vamp hangout. It’s a gay
bar.

“
Well, Akira-san?” Jack yells in his ear just as the music
switches to an operatic trance track; he grins so hard Steve wants
nothing more than to punch his face in. “What are you waiting for?
Isn’t this going to be too fucking easy?”

He has a sound
system, he tells himself, with his name on it.

He’s also not
going to be the first person to wimp out on a dare, is he? Phil
looked like an idiot with his snorkel, but he still tried, even
though someone’s going to engrave that episode on his tombstone.
Johanna risked boredom and limbs in the graveyard, and she never
looked like backing out, not even once it started raining hard
enough to risk hypothermia. What is a night spent with a vampire of
the not-female persuasion compared to feral zombies,
really?

Only a thousand
times harder, and Jack, who fucking
noticed
when Steve
started hiding in the school library at lunch to avoid open spaces
and the feral zombies they might contain, who fucking went straight
to Steve’s parents and told them just why they needed to take their
son to a psychologist, bloody well fucking knows it is!

Do
you want to blow my cock, Steve? I bet you do. I bet you want
it.

If this shit is
irrelevant, so irrelevant he didn’t mention it to Mum or his
psychologist, should it stop him from doing this dare?

“
Only you country bogans think this is a challenge,” Steve
says as he surveys the room. His voice doesn’t shake too much. He
should be proud of that. “I’m just trying to see who’ll be the best
target. Couples ... nah, couples will blow your tiny redneck
minds.” He glances at the back of a lone vampire, wearing a neat
striped shirt and dark jeans, sitting at the end of the bar. “Might
try him first. Right. Uh. Going in.”

His two best
friends break out into snickers as Steve takes a slow, reluctant
step towards the vampire.

As long as
Chichi and Greg and fucking Adam Swanston never hear about this,
it’s all good.

It has to be,
right?

2: Vampire

He lingers
longer than he should with Johanna and Izzy, who wish him a happy
birthday and admire his new watch, but the grins both women wear
tell Steve that they too know just why he’s here, and there’s only
so much of the grinning he can take—especially when Johanna’s grin
softens into something resembling concern, and why the fuck should
she be worried about him? They don’t try and stop him as he heads
to the bar—Izzy pulls Johanna back onto the floor and tries to
waltz to a trance beat—and Steve sighs as he sits down and waves
Sophie over. The presence of non-vampiric immortals as well as
human leeches means that Sophie has non-bloody offerings behind the
bar; her broad smile suggests that Jack has planned this little
dare for some time. Surely he’s not already the laughing stock of
half the town?

“
Neat Smirnoff?” he says, knowing that Sophie will understand
the long-standing Port Carmila zombie-hunter code: water poured
into a shot glass from an old Smirnoff bottle, just for those times
when one doesn’t want to look like one is avoiding alcohol because
of one’s antidepressant prescription or an unwillingness to be
jumped while tipsy.

Of course,
everyone in Port Carmila knows that the vast majority of people
drinking vodka shots are stone-cold sober, but there are times when
it’s inconvenient, awkward or annoying to explain why he’s not
drinking—like when he wants to hook up with a stranger and clearly
isn’t the designated driver.

It’s also nice
to pretend to be normal, even if everyone who also isn’t normal is
fully aware of just how abnormal they all are.

Sophie slides a
shot glass—a cheap plastic cup, probably to avoid injury in a room
of vampires—across the bar and laughs at the complaints from a
breather three seats down when Steve pays her a dollar. “Hunters’
discount,” she says. “How many zombies you killed, Kel?”

The breather
grumbles but doesn’t answer; Sophie ignores him.

Steve takes a
sip. One thing easier than Sydney, at least, where he had to resort
to name-dropping his medication and his psychiatrist to get people
to stop dragging him to the bar and insisting he’ll have more fun
if he drinks. One thing, but that doesn’t come close to outweighing
the rest of it: how the hell is he supposed to pull this off? If
everyone knows about this, how can he live failure down? Worse, how
can he live success down? In Sydney it’ll be easy to brush off as
an experiment, but here? Here, in Port Carmila, the town where
nobody ever forgets
anything
?

In Sydney nobody
much cares who one fucks, as long as one has something meaningful
to say on the ethics involved in journalism or why tabloid
headlines are inevitably awful. In Sydney nobody would have ever
thought him gay just because he has an affinity for hair
gel.

It’s not as
though he doesn’t plan on moving to Melbourne or Sydney once he’s
finished his degree. He’ll save petrol money by not coming home
between semesters, if he can get a job. It’s totally workable, and
nobody will think he’s avoiding Port Carmila, everyone who lives
there and the guy he’ll screw tonight, if he makes it sound
reasonable enough. It’s not as though there are huge opportunities
for journalists here, unless he wants to report on zombie escapes,
feral killings and the exorcism failure at Council Hall for the
umpteenth time. Hard news, like wars and international trade
relations, are less important than Aggie Skipton’s infamous pigs,
and even the locals moan over the local rag. Why shouldn’t he
leave?