Death is Only a Theoretical Concept (7 page)

Whether he means
he’s forgotten or he doesn’t own anything of the sort is a moot
point.

Abe plucks the
phone out of Steve’s right hand and dials.

“
Port Carmila Emergency—oh, hi, Steve. What is it, where are
you and were you hunting it?” A warm, grandmotherly voice speaks on
the other end of the line. “I thought you were supposed to be
celebrating your birthday? I gave Jack fifty dollars, you
know.”

Abe is so taken
aback he checks to make sure he dialled the correct number, but,
yes, Port Carmila’s Emergency Services switchboard apparently not
only recognise Steve’s phone number but are used enough to him
calling that they can treat it like a casual fucking conversation!
Hunting it
? “Um. No. I’m Abe Browning, we’re at Feeders on
the corner of Bay Road and Main, and we need an
ambulance—”

“
Can
you tell me about the zombies, dear? Are they temporarily secured?
Do you need reinforcements?”

Steve, Steve
with his spikes and his blazer and his politics and his flirting,
is a zombie hunter? Abe thought Port Carmila’s zombie hunters
looked like—well, like Steve’s friends, maybe, or the armed,
vodka-shot-swilling cargo-pant-clad locals who hang out at the
Serif’s Shotgun.

“
No
zombies,” Abe says, and he draws a breath in a ridiculous attempt
to calm himself, but Steve can hardly breathe at all and stares at
him with eyes that are somehow both wide and swollen all at once.
“None. Anaphylaxis, I think. Steve is struggling to
breathe—whistling—and hives, but I can’t find a—”

“
Steve?
Steve
?” The butch girl tears down the street,
Steve’s blazer over her arm; her zombie girlfriend follows at a
much slower pace. “What the hell did you do to him?”

The terrible
switchboard operator says something Abe doesn’t catch.

Steve makes a
desperate, gasping grunt, but he can’t seem to get enough breath to
speak.

“
We
need an ambulance to the corner of Bay and Main,” Abe says again to
the phone, hoping that’s enough to get her to stop talking and
start doing, just as the breather girl reaches behind her back and
unholsters a small black handgun of her own. Abe’s dead heart leaps
into his throat—he fancies it even beats, once or twice—as soon as
he realises what this must look like. A vampire on his knees; a
breather in shock. He drops Steve’s phone and curses fucking Stoker
and every fucking author of every fucking bullshit vampire novel
ever written. “
No
! I didn’t—this is an allergy! I didn’t
bite him! See?
Don’t shoot
!” He jerks his hand at Steve’s
neck—although, really, why would he want to bite anyone’s
neck
as opposed to a discrete place easily covered by
clothing?—and then at the blazer. “Does he have anything in
there—inhaler, meds, EpiPen?”

The girl, thank
heavens, doesn’t waste time on questions. She slips the safety and
slides the handgun into the waistband of her jeans. “He’s not
allergic. I’d know. The only meds he takes is his antidepressant.
Did you ring Emergency?”

Steve jerks his
chin, which Abe guesses is confirmation.

He picks up the
phone and shoves it up at the girl. “Make sure they’re sending
someone,” he says, trying to think this through. How far away is
the fire and ambulance depot from Bay Road? Yesterday Abe could
have told anyone where all the main facilities of Port Carmila are
located; today he can’t think. How long can Steve wait? Is there
anything here that will help him? There’s cars, the bouncers, the
club— “The club will have a first-aid kit. Get it.” He snaps his
fingers at the zombie as she shambles up and stares down at Steve.
“And get the bouncers, or maybe the bartender—someone there must
have done a first-aid course.” He should have thought of that
first, he realises, but who knew the switchboard operator would be
an absolute idiot? “Can you do that?”

“
Aggie! There are no fucking ferals—are you or are you not
sending a fucking ambulance?” The girl rolls her eyes and sits down
on the footpath. “No, Steve was kissing a vampire, which—yes, at
Feeders.
Yes
. Aggie—no! What do we do now?”

The zombie jerks
her head, hitches up her skirts and runs—a fast shuffle, which Abe
knows is a zombie in full sprint—back towards the steps, only to
meet Louis halfway down the block. Good. Abe looks away and back
down at Steve as he pulls off his trenchcoat; he snaps his fingers
and the girl hands him the blazer before hitting the end-call
button on the screen and putting down the phone. He can’t remember,
now, if anaphylactic shock should be treated in the same way as
hypovolemic shock, but better to play it on the safe side given
that Steve is shivering: elevate feet, keep him warm.

“
No
point in staying on the line,” the girl says as she unbuttons her
shirt and vest, revealing a plain singlet top underneath. “She just
kept asking if I knew that meant Steve was kissing a vampire at a
gay bar. Anyway, Greg’s coming, Steve. He’ll give you hell because
we’ve called him out for the one dare that’s supposed to be safe,
but he’s coming. Here.”

Steve’s lips,
strange in a distorted, misshapen face, creep ever so slightly
upwards.

“
We’re just going to cover you up a bit, okay?” Abe glances at
the girl. “Put his feet up on your lap, maybe.” He arranges the
trenchcoat and blazer over Steve’s legs and torso, the shirt and
vest under his head, while she arranges his feet. “Hey. Steve.
You’re going to be okay, right? Someone’s going to be here in,
like, two minutes. That’s not long. Even if you stop breathing
right now, you can survive about four minutes without breathing, so
we’ve got ages. I’m just going to cover you up a bit, okay? Keep
you warm.” He takes hold of Steve’s hand and rubs gentle circles on
his palm with his thumb. “We’ve got ages and ages, so don’t
worry.”

It occurs to Abe
that, all things given, Steve is giving calm a valiant shot: he’s
not trying to speak and his breath is becoming more congested and
ragged with every moment, but he’s lying still and letting the girl
and Abe do the work, even if there’s nothing relaxed in the rigid
set of his limbs or the panic in his half-swollen eyes.

“
This isn’t worse than when the feral did you on the hip,” the
girl says, although she gives Abe a brow-furrowed look. “I mean, at
least we’re on the main drag, right?” She pats Steve’s
trenchcoat-covered leg. “Steve, I’m going to ring Deb, although if
she’s in at the cop shop she might’ve heard already—”

Steve’s phone
vibrates in the girl’s hand as it sounds the chorus from a
shockingly-feminine pop song Abe only knows because of the time he
spent hovering around the iPod dock, in lieu of talking to the
people he didn’t know or the family members he
did
, at
Valentine’s 90s-themed 30
^th
birthday bash: “Under the
Water”.

Merril
Bainbridge, journalism and a handgun.

He’d want to get
to know this contradiction of impressions if Abe were not the cause
of that whistling breath.

The girl doesn’t
even blink as she snatches up the phone. “Deb. It’s Johanna. Aggie
says Greg’s on his way.” She pauses, frowns. “No, not like that—he
kissed a vampire. The vampire says—yeah.” She angles her head and
looks at Abe. “Venom?”

The only thing
Abe can do is nod. How can it be anything else?
Like a bee
sting
, Abe said, and that’s the absolute truth in all respects:
annoying for most, potentially lethal for some. Why didn’t he
finish warning Steve? He said he kissed a vampire
once
,
which is worse than never kissing one at all, so why didn’t Abe
stop to think about that instead of stupid bullshit about the
gender of said vampire? Didn’t Great-Aunty Lizzie include this in
her tirade as one of the reasons vampires should, despite the
allure of blood and breath, not indulge the desire for intimacy
with breathers?

“
Is
this irony?” he asks, not sure what to say but the first thing that
comes to mind, something to give Steve to hold onto—Lizzie did that
for him, when Abe lay dying from the venom sending his body into
shock, the venom that left him gasping in the same way Steve does
now, the venom that damaged and changed every organ in his body. He
died in that bed, his own breaths becoming quick and desperate as
his organs shut down—but it didn’t end there, of course, thanks to
a process medical science still can’t quite explain to any
reasonable satisfaction. He stopped breathing but kept living—in a
way, and Lizzie, his sire, talked him through it, even though Abe
can’t remember what she even said. “I mean, not in a conversational
sense—”

“
No,
we walked in. I don’t have anything with me.” The girl, Johanna,
sighs. “Too many fucking tourists taking the parking
spaces—”

“
Breathers, your warmth, your breath—it’s why we want you, and
now that want has you not breathing. I figure if I caused this lack
of breath in pursuit of breath, that’s more than just an
unfortunate event—” He stops only when Johanna, stares at him, her
lips apart, the phone apparently forgotten. “Oh, god, I—shit,
ignore that, ignore that. Steve—it’s your birthday, right? Right.
Did your family in Japan—Soba, you said?—ring you? Do they always
ring you—mine don’t stop. My family, I mean. Or is it like normal
families, where they only ring on birthdays and when somebody’s
dy—”

It occurs to
Abe, with that awful word half-spoken, there is in fact something
he can do. Bite.

He hears another
sound then, just as Louis and Sophie, trailed by the zombie in
hoopskirts, skid to a halt in front of them. A blessed, wonderful
sound. Sirens.

“
Greg’s here,” Johanna says to the phone, just as the
ambulance comes to a halt just shy of hitting the traffic light,
either a skilful feat of perfectly-controlled driving or great good
luck. She squeezes Steve on the ankle. “Greg’s here,
Deb.”

“
I
think anaphylaxis,” Abe says as the doors open, not sure anyone can
trust this Aggie to pass that kind of information on. He doesn’t
recognise the paramedics—it occurs to Abe, for all that this is not
the time at all, that he knows remarkably few people even though
he’s lived here a bit over a year—but they seem to recognise Steve
and Johanna: Johanna even waves. “Probably vampire venom. And the
girl, Johanna, said something about—”

“
Do
not worry. He knows,” the zombie says. She—smelling faintly of
formaldehyde—takes Abe by the shoulders and pulls him up and aside,
well out of the way, leaving space for a curly-haired paramedic to
scoot in on his knees beside Steve. “It will be—”

“
You
were supposed to not get yourself hurt, Nakamura!” The paramedic’s
voice—probably that of the oft-mentioned Greg, given the femininity
of his partner, although Abe knows that’s still not enough on which
to make a faultless assumption—is somehow booming, commanding and
utterly relaxed all at the same time. He knows that easy prattle,
talk for the sake of talk; the most ridiculous conversations in
Abe’s life have happened when he was on the wrong end of a needle.
“This will hurt. Don’t wimp out. So, you were supposed to kiss some
boy vampire and have a good fucking time without nearly dying.
Can’t you even get that right?”

He pauses only
when Steve makes a sound somewhere between a low grunt and a
breathless shriek, but Abe can’t see what he’s doing, just the
paramedic’s shoulders and Steve’s face—and, oddly enough, for the
first time in Abe’s life he’s glad of it. Ridiculous, truly: the
only benefit of cancer is that Abe developed a strange and
horrifying passivity towards a great deal of things that made his
friends and family flinch, and after death—well, after death those
sorts of things matter even less, save as something with which to
while away the long night-time hours. Academic curiosity: as
theoretical as death itself.

He can see it as
if it truly happened, overlaid over blue uniforms and the crowd:
Abe’s own fangs piercing denim, sinking into Steve’s thigh,
injecting venom in that euphoric rush that is said to take a
vampire in full bite. Not epinephrine—venom, venom that will kill
him, still him, turn him, make him safe. Abe stumbles backwards
until he hits the brown brick wall—inside, he supposes, people are
still dancing as if nothing at all has changed—and shivers as he
stares at the traffic lights, the people clustered on the other
side of the street, the people hanging around Feeders’ steps. Safe.
How can he even think that?

“
You’re a fucking wimp, Nakamura. I’m telling Jack. So, you
can’t even fucking just seduce a dude without turning it into a
near-death experience, can you? Have you ever thought about telling
this to your shrink? Now, just relax; you’re going to feel—well,
you should fucking know, actually, but instead of bouncing around
because you just hit the bottom of the cliff and you feel fucking
awesome, lie still. Try and breathe slowly.”

He feels the
rapid beat of Steve’s heart, notable even in a crowd of
mildly-anxious breathers, and Abe wonders what blood tinged with
epinephrine tastes like. Would the presence or lack of the other
chemicals released during—fuck, no,
what the fuck
is he
thinking? He’s the fucking vampire who almost killed the man he
danced with, and here he is fucking wondering what epinephrine
tastes like! What, if not that, makes him ever more truly a
vampire—a monster?