Death is Only a Theoretical Concept (4 page)

Abe laughs. He
has a firm, but not crushing, handshake, and he’s apparently more
than content to let his grip linger.

Shouldn’t this
be a little more difficult?

“
If
you don’t mind my asking, what was it like growing up with a
vampiric great-aunt?”

Abe’s smile, for
all that his lips have that cyanotic, bloodless quality, is quite
appealing; amusement almost negates the fish-like quality of his
dead eyes. “You know all the ‘back in my day things were so much
better because we conveniently forget that people died of chicken
pox and anyone who was not a white cishet man had no rights’
stories? I swear, every time she tells me that life was simpler in
the 1800s, I want to beat her over the head with the collected
works of Oscar Wilde—except my phone isn’t going to hurt her.” His
smile broadens. “One time my cousin Valentine sat down with his
Famous Five
books, read out half-a-dozen passages describing
George, and told Lizzie that if this is how a
white
breather
trans boy is treated in the 1940s, how can she dare say to his face
that life was better way back when? It silenced her for about, oh,
half an hour.”

Oh, he knows
those tales, all right. Sofu pulls one out every time he asks one
of Steve’s aunts to get him on Skype, apparently oblivious to the
fact that the technology he despises is the only thing that enables
him to chat with his son and daughter-in-law in Australia. “When I
was young, it was a time-honoured occupation to look after one’s
grandparents and honour one’s ancestors, and all we ever ate was
rice and seaweed, and we were so much the better for it … compared
to today’s wild, spoilt and disrespectful youth? Who run off to
Australia and shack up with blonde broads?” He grimaces. “My best
mate’s girl lived in a hut in the bush for about a hundred and
fifty years because when she died, it was fucking law to dismember
and burn all zombies on sight. Sure, shit was so civilised
then!”

“
Times a factor of about a hundred for all the extra years
she’s lived, of course.” Abe shrugs, still grinning. “It scares me
stupid to think that one day, I’ll be doing that to my sister’s
great-great-great grandchildren while they sit there, roll their
eyes, and later talk about me to some stranger they meet in a gay
bar ... if they have gay bars, then.”

Along with age,
Steve learnt in prep—before he learnt how to write his own
name—never to ask a vampire how they were turned: it is just good
manners, quite aside from not really being anyone’s business. Steve
can’t help a little curiosity, though: Abe’s assumed age suggests a
recent turning. Perhaps while he was at university? Did his aunt
turn him? At least his family are comfortable around vampires, when
most humans aren’t—which is probably why he chose to be turned in
the first place, come to think of it.

It occurs to him
that there’s something quite racist and lifeist, if not also
homophobic, in the nature of Jack’s dare. One thing to have a bit
of fun with ferals, given that they’ve lost everything that defines
them as human—something Steve never much likes to think about,
given his carrier status—but it’s somewhat another to make vampires
into an object like that, even if the vampires don’t treat the
tourists a whole lot better. Then again, how often has he really
gotten to talk to a vampire? His neighbours are the Johnstons, a
pair of cheerful and utterly-normal zombies, and he’s served plenty
of vampires, fae and zombies at the bookstore, but they don’t
really hang around with breathers. Steve, at least when he’s home
from university, spends his weekends fishing and zombie hunting
with Phil, Jack, Johanna and Izzy, and while he’s had plenty of
discussions with the zombie-head Benjamina Bakersfield and the
vampire surfing-instructor Henry down on the beach, most of his
time is spent with humans. Breathers.

He wouldn’t have
met Izzy if not for Johanna’s dare, two years ago—and would the
town have gossiped so much about Johanna’s zombie girlfriend if
there weren’t that division between the breather tourists obsessed
with the novelty and the breather locals who lived and worked with
vampires, zombies and fae, but still somehow kept to themselves
while laughing at the tourists
and
the vampires?

For Steve,
Jack’s dare isn’t very funny, but it occurs to him that it’s
not-so-hilarious for a whole heap of other reasons as
well.

“
In
a space station somewhere because we’ve blown up the Earth,
probably,” Steve says, an instant too late. What does he do, then?
Go through with it anyway?

“
Or
zombies took over, if the media has anything to say about
it.”

“
You
mean like Brooks?” Steve snorts as Abe nods. “Never going to
happen. There aren’t enough of them. We humans will fuck up the
world long before the fucking zombies get to it. People forget
that, though. It’s the stupid bullshit ACPIZ pulls—which does fuck
all for the hard-working zombies out there who need the basic right
of having their existence legitimised and protected—by pretending
they actually care about sapient zombie welfare, despite protesting
deathside dismemberment by claiming that zombies find it offensive.
They blame everything on the fucking zombies, you see. Then get
everybody trembling in their boots about the hordes of feral
zombies at the same time—fuck, I wonder why sapient zombies get run
out of town, right? Meanwhile your conservatives are too busy being
scared and refuse to pass legislation because they reckon that
means the mindless murderers will be running government and the
zombies will take over the fucking world. Never mind that the only
reason zombies ever want to do that is because breathers treat
zombies and carriers like fucking shit. It’s not like the
difference between ferals and sapients isn’t
obvious
. A test
would do it. Then my mate’s girl and my neighbours can have the
rights we all take for granted, and ferals can still be shot on
sight the way every fucking sapient zombie would prefer because
they
get torn apart by fucking ferals like the rest of
us—”

He stops, only
because he realises a moment too late that Abe has allowed him to
talk for more than five sentences before groaning, rolling his
eyes, slapping Steve with a newspaper or fishing rod, and
interrupting in order to call Steve a Sydney socialist wanker and
change the topic of discussion to snapper.

“
Sorry. Nobody lets me fucking talk, so…”

Abe raises both
eyebrows, but there’s nothing mocking in his smile. “So what do you
do, then?”

“
Journalism with a minor in Political Science—I’m starting my
third year next year. Just back for the summer.” Steve blinks,
surprised. Nobody Steve knows, besides Johanna—as long as Steve
returns the favour with regards Port Carmila’s history—is
interested in listening to him talk about the politics of sentient
awareness. Whether revolvers with big-game shells or semi-automatic
handguns are more useful in terms of efficiency versus practicality
in taking down ferals, yes, but not politics. The Johnsons are
great people despite being dead and the ferals need to be shot,
dismembered and frozen,
duh
, and why are they even
discussing this when it is so fucking obvious? “And I probably just
bored you.”

Abe shakes his
head. “Do you know what most people talk about around
here?”

“
Fishing, footy, water polo, undead soccer, fishing, feral
plagues, fishing and how much the city sucks?” Steve grins. “There
wasn’t a reason why I chose to go to uni as far away as I could
get, no. Not at all.”

“
You
forgot fishing.” Abe’s lips curl up into a broad grin and he jerks
an elbow in Jack’s direction; Steve can’t help a laugh. “Don’t get
me wrong. I love working and living in a place where nobody stares
at me, where I can drink blood in the office and no one complains
to the boss—hell, where I can be employed without someone thinking
up a reason to hire the breather without it sounding like
discrimination—but at times, well.”

He doesn’t
finish the sentence, but Steve understands. It’s nice to be in the
company of someone who doesn’t think you’re an overeducated douche
and listens to what you say, and that realisation makes his stomach
twist in ways that have nothing to do with Adam Swanston and
small-town gossip. He sits there for a moment, glancing towards the
half-full shot glass. Abe’s a nice guy. He deserves to find someone
interesting, but more than that, he deserves to find someone that
isn’t going to use him and lead him on for the matter of a dare. He
deserves someone who is actually interested in him.

He deserves
someone who
isn’t
scared of the thought of what people are
going to say.

He wonders if
gay vampire town planners have it harder or easier than not-so-gay
breathers in high school.

Johanna seems to
deal with the gossip about her and Izzy, enough that they’re out
there tonight, whirling across the floor; it doesn’t seem to be
enough, whatever it is, to keep Swanston away from Feeders, even if
it makes him the most flaming of all flaming hypocrites.

Maybe it
matters, for Johanna, that she and Izzy have always got somewhere
to go where people don’t stare and mutter—her family, her friends,
her job.

He wonders why
it never occurred to him to ask her.

“
Look.” He meets Abe’s fish-like eyes, decided—although that
too feels a little odd. Steve has spent the last few years chatting
up girls, sometimes with the sole intention of getting laid, and
while he doesn’t lie, he has omitted a few things here and there
when he thought he needed to. There’s a good chance a few of those
girls thought or hoped he wanted something more, and sometimes he
knew that for sure—at least until he admitted his carrier status,
anyway. Then, of course, he got to watch it all fall apart:
admitting it straight up only meant he didn’t get to have fun
flirting first, and after enough refusals it became easy not to
care—or throw himself into dating and fucking those few girls who
didn’t. Emma the topless tightrope walker, for one. Emma, who even
got on Steve’s nerves, once the novelty of shocking Chichi wore
off.

“
Yes?” Abe raises his eyebrows and looks at Steve with rather
a confused expression. “Is something wrong?”

Maybe it doesn’t
matter what Swanston thinks, what Port Carmila thinks, what Jack
and Phil think; maybe it really doesn’t matter if he does spend a
night with a pretty-boy vampire who lets him talk politics.
Swanston, clearly, is all kinds of fucked-up—what kind of sad
self-loathing does it take for a gay man to spend a year harassing
another guy for the same perceived crime? The perfect sound-system
is riding on this, after all, and Abe seems a little interested in
him. It should have been easy, and yet Steve can’t help the feeling
that he’s about to treat Abe the same way he himself has been
treated over the past few years. That, in fact, there’s nothing at
all okay about Jack’s dare at all, and Abe is too good a person to
use that way.

“
There’s something I have to tell you,” Steve says, “before
you get any wrong ideas about, well, me.” He grimaces. “You see,
it’s my birthday…”

3: Attraction

Nothing good has
ever started with “There’s something I have to tell you”, in Abe’s
opinion—after all, he heard those words, or something awfully close
to them, far too often in the hospital. Abe winces and nods,
wondering what the problem is. There are a lot of them, after all,
and Great-Aunt Elizabeth-Not-Lizzie-Thank-You-Very-Much spent the
day of his turning listing them all, advising him at the end to
stick to immortals or a life spent single and annoying his sister’s
descendants—something she likes to rehash once every six months or
so. Does he want to spend five hundred years moping after his
flash-in-the-pan mortal lover the way her brother did? Because
throwing one’s self into the blast zone of a nuclear bomb isn’t a
guaranteed suicide!

There are many
ways breathers have dealt with vampires over the years—at least
until Britain started transporting theirs to Australia—and most of
them involve something similar to a immobile, dismembered,
conscious
vampire chained at the bottom of the ocean. It’s
more than the stuff of nightmares, save that Abe does not and
cannot sleep, and it’s easily enough to have him sitting in the
lounge room at 3 AM with Aristophanes’s
The Frogs
in one
hand and a glass in the other, wondering whether or not he chose
right in an immortal, difficult-to-end life over death.

One day, after
all, he’s going to run out of books to read.

He can
understand why a human might want nothing to do with a vampire—the
blood requirement, after all, is no small amount disturbing—or why
Steve might like talking to him, but, at the end of the day, prefer
the company of someone human. Someone attractive, someone with a
heartbeat, someone who won’t stay eternally eighteen. Steve seems
smart enough to be able to think that sort of thing through and
decide it’s better not to deal with it. He’ll be right, and Abe
hasn’t come here to look at humans. He shouldn’t have even looked
at Steve when he made that comment about Ares and Abe’s co-worker,
save that Abe is tired of the snooty, self-absorbed preening going
on at the other end of the bar. He shouldn’t have kept on talking,
save that Steve is interesting and cute—and Abe is tired of sitting
here alone.