LIFE NEAR THE BONE (3 page)

Jeff failed to answer except to say, "Pull over here. This is where I get out."

Even before the taxi made a U-turn on the infrequently traveled two-lane highway, Jeff was already heading off across the hard packed sands. He moved west toward the lowering sun, Thoreau's book clutched tightly in hand.

Heat mirages blinked on and off in the distance like defective pale blue neon tubes. A lone vulture rode the high currents, a dot in the scalding blue sky. Here was soul. Here was where eternity sat down to shake hands with creatures courageous enough to come unfettered.

Jeff Castain looked back only once to make certain he was losing sight of the long black strip of highway. To make sure he was leaving civilization behind. He thought now it had never belonged to him. That world was under rule of someone else. Someone other. Alien.

He lost all sense of time when day segued into night into day into night. He stumbled and dropped the book; picked it up, surprised to see his hands blistered black, but never mind, never mind.

Finally his tongue swelled in his mouth and hung over his cracked lips like a fat gray slug. His lungs, a fiery bellows, labored to keep him going. His eyes had swollen to slits blocking the blood red disk of the sun. His skin--his clothes at some past time discarded--seeped clear fluid from pustules that he split apart with pinched fingers.

Each passing second he could feel the loosening of the hold the world had on the flesh. He was a dragon whose scales fell clattering at his feet. Each faltering, dragging step he managed to take brought him ever nearer the crux of reality. Ever closer to the bone.

He yearned. He begged. He prayed. In the end, he raged. "Didn't I sacrifice enough?" He yelled across the endless sand. "Didn't I scrape past all the filth?"

He pulled on his sack of skin until he tore off pieces and had ripped an ear from his skull. He went to his knees and screamed soundlessly.

At last he could hear a velvety voice hissing across the still air as it approached. He was
almost home
, it said.

He bowed his head in relief and wept bloody tears.

Come
, it said.
Nearer
, it said.
Where life is simple, life is true. Where no one knows you, no one cares, and nothing can get you back again.

Come now. Where you belong
, it said.

Ever closer.

Come with me.

Where life is sweetest,

Near the bone.

Near the white, white

Bone…

THE END

ANTIDOTE

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman, 1995

First published in 100 VICIOUS LITTLE VAMPIRES, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowiez, and Martin Greenberg, Barnes and Noble Books.

Carmine made it through the long tunnel and halted across from the park in the darkest part of the street to pry a quarter inch of hard bio-metal scab from the knuckle of his right hand. It would grow back, of course. All the small patches growing over the surface of his skin like a creeping cancer would eventually merge until his only opening was the vent for his nose and eyes. Thus encased in his new skin, immobile, he would die of starvation.

Vampire punishment, cruel and unusual, heartless. A strain of insecticide had been developed in the late twentieth century to control moth and butterfly larvae. It effectively encased them in their skins so they starved. This technology had been further enhanced to be used on the undead man. By the age of twenty-one Carmine had been caught in his native Italy and strapped to a gurney and injected. Nothing else killed his kind, not the traditional stake through the heart, that only pissed them off, not burning, for they could walk out of any fire, and not beheading, for they could carry their heads under their arms and have them stitched on again.

The Hosts had won the war in the nick of time and it was through geneticists who had been working to save crops. Or rather, they had won the war. For a half century Vampires and Hosts coexisted, killing and being killed in turn. Now a majority of the vampires had been captured and inoculated with the deadly vaccine. There were few left who were disease-free. When an inoculated beast bit a Host, making him a vampire, that beast too carried the tainted blood that would finally bring him down.

It was rumored, however, that Fondred, the King of the Vampires, had commissioned his brightest people to seek an antidote to the vaccine. It was further rumored that one of their kind working in research in the far reaches of the East Texas wastelands had done just that.

A cure!

But only if Carmine was able to stay alive long enough to arrive at the enclave and be inoculated with the antidote. Only if Fate allowed him time to reach Texas before his nights ran out and his skin turned to a solid case of shiny metal armor with him lying slobbering behind the cold hard mask, his eyes wild and rolling from the suffocation. It was worse than being buried alive. He'd be able to see his enemy, smell his fresh blood, hunger for him with every molecule, and yet not be capable of the pounce, of the rendering and tearing of the carotid, of drinking his fill, of satiation.

A girl's voice broke through Carmine's reverie to ask, "Do you have somewhere to go tonight? Would you like some company?"

He sneered at this approach before he turned and showed his face, his fangs. Even today the Hosts had their women on the streets offering their bodies, never knowing if they would be used for pleasure or for food. It was walking suicide, and he hadn't any remorse in his heart when he took down one of these idiot whores.

He swiveled slowly, his upper lip rising as he did so to show her true terror. When she came into view, his lip froze in place and he blinked and his heart stuttered in his chest.

She was a great old one who had been taken in her youth, she was a queen. From the fiery furnace of her gaze he trembled and shrank back. She hissed, showing him her own fangs. She was far stronger than he, her physical power rippling the muscles beneath the fair skin of her biceps as if they were full of snakes. "I'm not your supper," she said. "You mistake me for another sort of female, one weaker than I."

"Not me! I'm too clever to be caught. And so was my Master who made me. I doubt even now these years later that they've gotten their hands on him. So will we walk together or are you intent on your solitude?"

"Come along," he said, turning and moving through the shadows, staying close to the buildings' walls. "I'm on my way out of this morbid city. You can come with me to the outskirts if you want."

"Leave Mobile? Why would you want to do that? From your accent I can tell you're foreign. Italian, perhaps? We've had an influx of Italians lately. Mobile takes in the foreigner quite nicely. Besides, you're doomed and there's no better place than here beneath the century oaks to die. Then again, perhaps one place is as good as another. We do have a stench of death here, our kind falling so rapidly sometimes you must step over them on the sidewalks and in the gutters come early morning." She shuddered involuntarily.

"I won't die." Carmine straightened his shoulders and walked with more purpose.

"Certainly you will. You've got the metal growing on you even as we speak."

Carmine nodded his head. He picked at an imaginary fleck of the metal he thought might be growing on his left wrist. "Yes, but Fondren made finding an antidote his highest priority and I've heard one of our scientists in Texas has found it. I'll be saved. I've come halfway around the world to reach him."

She laughed, the sound so sudden and unappealing in its derision that Carmine stopped again and glared at her. His lips rose in automatic response and his fingers spread, yearning to find themselves wrapped around her young, tender throat. Strength of fury would cause him to challenge her if it came to that even though he knew she would not be overcome.

"It's a lie!" She laughed no more, seeing his face. She spoke again, more quietly, knowing his dignity ruffled, his hope shattered. "We've all heard the same, but it's not true. It's just moonbeams on a summer's night. It's wispy fog along a swampy bank. It's a child's tale to ward off the nightmare."

"How would you know that?" He knew he was speaking out of turn, that if she chose she might take him prisoner, bind him, and keep him still until the bio-metal did its harsh work, but he must know why she called it a lie.

She lowered her head and black glossing hair hung past her cheeks like a curtain. "I had a friend who believed the rumor and make the trip. He came back just days before his final encasement within the bio-metal. He had searched out the entire southeast portion of the state of Texas looking for this miracle worker and found no one remotely familiar with the legend. It's a scurrilous lie. More horrible because it sends so many like you on a fruitless last march cross country for no reason."

"Your friend might have been wrong He might not have…"

She hissed. Silence settled between them like a heavy dew fall. Finally she said, "There is no cure. There is no antidote. You've wasted your time coming this far if you thought otherwise. Where are you from?"

"Italy," he said. "You guessed correctly." He resumed his walking again though now his steps were no longer purposeful, and hope had fled from his face the way a butterfly races across the sky to flee the sticky petals of a poison bloom.

"A beautiful country, I've heard."

"Disseminated. One in ten dead," he said, thinking of his homeland and the terrible journey he had made on the strength of what his companion now called a deceit. His ship, with him in the hold, had landed in Miami and he'd traveled by night for a week to get as far as Mobile, Alabama.

"As is this country," she said sadly. "Not even many of the Hosts are left to rule. It's all collapsed."

"The world," he said, "will soon be a wilderness, overgrown with weeks, and ruled by the rodent."

She shrugged. "So why waste what precious time you have left to go to Texas? They say the Hosts have cleared out from Houston to the panhandle. The ones left alive are in a fort near Abilene. You could starve to death looking for game or man."

She must have halted for she spoke from his back. "How much do you want saving? I see you would travel on to a desolate empty place even when you're told there is nothing there to help you, but would you kill off the Hosts with a disease worse than the bio-metal, if you could? Even if you knew it meant the end of your human source of blood and you'd be forever dependent on the lower animals?"

He hesitated, his steps slowing. He turned to her again. She was mesmerizing, a Merlin with riddles at her command. "What does this mean? That you can save me, that you have stop magic to stop
this
?" He pushed up the sleeve on his left arm and with long fingernails plucked a metal scab the size of a silver dollar from just above his elbow. The exposed raw skin glowed red a moment and then freely oozed his blood. He pitched the metal bit and heard it jangle as it hit the pavement of the street.

"What if I told you that I am the antidote? That I am this city's liaison to gather vampires who have heard of the cure in Texas and decide which ones I'd like to save and which ones to let wander on toward death? That there are others like us scattered across the states, seeking out the wanderers? That, yes, Fondred ordered an antidote and it was created, and I was injected, and I am it."

"I'd say that was farfetched."

"More impossible than a phantom in Texas waiting with vials to save you?"

He cocked his head and studied her. "Why do you tease me with all these stories? Just to confuse me so that I don't know truth from lie? I have
no time
for games! Even now there are bio-metal spots I can't reach formed on my back, and if I were to pull down my trousers, I'd find patches on my thighs. If I took off my shoes, they'd be there glittering between my toes, and here…" He grabbed one of his ears and pulled the lobe forward from hiding behind shoulder length hair. "Here is one trying to take over my skull!" With a wrenching movement and a groan he tore skin and metal and threw it at her feet. Long damp strands of hair clung to it and blood now poured fresh down his throat.

"Come to me," she instructed in the seductive voice of the hunter. "Let me drink from you and save you all at once. I promise it is not a lie, nothing I have said is an untruth. If you wish for life immortal as was promised in the beginning, come to me now."

Her hushed voice filled and thrilled him. It blinded his eyes, dampened the taste buds on his tongue, stilled the rapid beat of his heart, stole memory and fear and desire from his thoughts. He lumbered clumsily into her embrace, no more in control of his actions or emotions than he had been when he was made by his Master half a decade earlier. She was very powerful. A queen with skill enough to put him on his knees or to bay like a wolf at the stars. She could not be denied; no matter if it meant his admittance to final darkness or redemption into the everlasting ife f the undead with no worry of bio-metal encasement. He had lost all choice and did not even miss it or know the moment it actually deserted him.

She leaned her head near the web, soggy hair that lay across his throat. With her long tongue she licked it aside. His heart slowed and he wrapped his arms around her body, pulling her in close to him, loving her, wishing to be one with her forever. It had been years, a lifetime, since he had felt such peace and serenity. Perhaps she did have the antidote in her bite, coursing in her rich blood, the miracle that would return his immortality.

Just before she bared her teeth she said softly, "Now I will tell you the real truth."