Paranormal Bromance (8 page)

“We aren’t using this, right?” Aaron pointed at a cheap pressboard table in what would have been the dining nook if we ever actually ate dinner at a table. Right now, it was covered with action figures from the eighties.

“I guess?”

He carefully cleared away the action figures, setting them by the wall next to the lunchboxes. Then he tipped over the table and broke off the legs by stomping on them. That gave him four giant spiky pieces of wood that looked like they’d go straight through a vampire’s cold dead heart.

On the other side of the table, the pile of vintage lunch boxes sat there.

“You know,” I said. “The lids of those lunch boxes would make great chest protectors.”

I swore I saw a flash of vampiric anger storm in his eyes. In another minute he’d strike me down with Force lightning or something. “No. I got those as a lot and I can triple my outlay if I market them right. We are not touching those.”

“What’s more important, your profit or keeping us from getting stabbed?”

“If we stab them first, we won’t have to worry about it!”

“Well that sounds very nice in theory, doesn’t it—”

A knock sounded at the door. We froze.

“Is it them? The bad guys?” Aaron whispered.

“Bad guys wouldn’t knock,” I said.

“You don’t know that!”

The knock turned into a pounding, and the handle rattled, someone trying to get in. More pounding, and Jack shouting, “Sam! Aaron! Geez, let us in!”

“This is a trap,” Aaron said.

I grabbed a broken broom handle and peered through the peephole in the door. And there was Jack, looking like he was trying to press himself bodily through the door. Alas, his vampire powers weren’t that strong. Ginny stood beside him, looking worriedly over her shoulder. A sense of relief turned my legs to jelly.

Maybe Aaron was right and this was a trap. Ginny was working for Carter, or Jack was, or both of them were, and this was a ploy to get us to open the door and get rid of us. Thing was, a stake through the heart would kill anyone.

I threw the bolt and swung open the door. Jack and Ginny spilled inside.

“What the hell did you lock the door for!” he yelled.

“Because you said we’re about to get attacked by a bunch of vampires!”

He slammed the door shut, threw the bolt again. “Yes. They’re right behind me.”

I wanted to give Ginny a hug. Instead, I hooked my hands in my jeans pockets. “Are you okay?” I asked her.

“I’m fine,” Jack said.

“Not talking to you,” I answered.

Ginny smiled. Her heart was beating fast; she smelled of sweat and nerves. But her smile was honest. “I’m fine.” She was wearing jeans and a Blue Sun T-shirt, her hair was in a ponytail, and she was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen in my life.

“Sam, what are we going to do?” Jack was stalking around the living room looking like he wanted to break something.

“Well, they can’t get in here unless you invite them, right?” Ginny said.

“I’m not sure that works on a vampire house,” I said. “I think that’s a human thing.”

“Well, I’m here,” she said.

“But you don’t actually live—” I stopped. I had this sudden vision of being normal, having a human girlfriend, and moving into an apartment together, sharing normal stuff. Everything I didn’t get to do before this all happened. How the hell had I gotten into this? And I realized, if I hadn’t been turned into a vampire, if I’d lived my life normally, I’d be forty years old and Ginny would be too young for me. We’d never have met. This was so confusing.

But I smiled, because who cared?

“Wait,” Aaron said, blinking as if he’d just seen Ginny for the first time. “There’s a stranger in our apartment. We talked about this—”

“Aaron, calm down,” I said. “Ginny, this is Aaron, our other roommate.”

“Hi—”

“Aaron, Ginny. There, now you’re not strangers.”

She seemed as nonplussed as the rest of us, which was understandable.

Jack pointed to the door. “Guys? Bad vampires, coming after us.”

Ginny had been carrying a mason jar tucked under her arm. She set it on the counter, and Aaron poked at it. “What’s this?”

“It’s holy water,” she said. “I stopped at a church—”

All three of us scrambled away from her, stumbling over furniture and bumping into walls, as ungracefully as we possibly could.

“What’d you bring something like that for?” I yelled. I had never actually seen in person what holy water did to a vampire, I’d just been told stories. Horrible stories. It wouldn’t kill us. It would just
hurt.
You’d think as a vampire I would be a little better about handling pain.

“I thought it’d be useful.” She was exactly right, of course.

“Wait a minute,” Aaron said. He went back to his pile of Nerf weapons and held up one of the little darts that went with one of the guns. The spongy little darts. Oh, that could work…

He found a pair of ancient rubber dishwashing gloves under the kitchen sink. Must have been left there by the last tenants. Ginny was helping him, searching cupboards for a stray bowl they could use for soaking the darts.

I watched her. She had the look of profound concentration I imagined she wore while gaming.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked out of the blue. “This isn’t your fight.”

She shrugged. “Because I put myself in the middle of it? Because they’re bad guys and it’s the right thing to do? Because I like you?”

“This isn’t going to be pretty,” I said.

“I’m already in this. They know who I am, they were already coming after me.”

I had to smile. I felt gooey. This was so weird. “Um. That thing you said, about being here. You said you wanted to move closer to downtown, right? You want to move in?”

She chuckled. “I’ve known you for like a week. This is only the second time I’ve seen you face-to-face.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll sleep on the sofa,” I said.

“Sam, no!” Aaron said, horrified.

Jack added, “Aaron’s got a point, what
exactly
are you thinking here—”

I found a paper towel in the kitchen and the Sharpie Aaron had been using to label boxes. Sharpie on paper towel—lots of bleed. But I wrote out three lines of a sublet agreement: Ginny can live here if she promises not to mess things up too bad and maybe pays a to-be-agreed-upon rent.

I signed, then shoved the towel at Jack.

“Sign this.”

“No! I don’t want her moving in here—”

“Just for a couple of days, until we’re not being attacked by vampires anymore.” He stormed off. Shit. We all of us had to agree to it.

Jack said, “Someone around here has to be practical. Does someone maybe want to help me rig up a booby trap for the door? Aaron, you have any rope in that hoard of yours?”

“Yeah, I think so—”

He did. Miles of it. I didn’t know where he got all that rope—was rope a desirable commodity on eBay?—but he had a lot of it. Jack found the pieces of broken wooden table, and together they built
something.
Had no idea if it was actually going to
work,
but at this point we had to try everything.

Even the lunchboxes. I dug in a couple of kitchen drawers, the ones where all the junk ended up, until I found a roll of duct tape. The all-powerful duct tape. “I’m really sorry, Aaron.”

“Hey, what—Sam!”

“I won’t tear them up, they probably won’t even get hurt, not unless someone actually stabs at us. But you know, if they actually stab at us, you’ll be glad I’m doing this.”

I held a
Dukes of Hazzard
box against his chest, over his heart. “Hold that.” He held it, baffled. I stretched loose a long length of tape with that comforting ripping sound, and slapped it across the box, his chest, under his arms, around his back. I wrapped it around four or five times, with a couple of loops over his shoulders to stabilize the box so it didn’t fall. A regular duct-tape-and-lunch-box cuirass. I didn’t even have to worry about him being able to breathe.

“Now do me,” I said, handing him the tape and holding a
Dragon’s Lair
lunchbox to my chest. A minute later, I had my own armor.

“This won’t work,” he said, bemused, arms outstretched, staring at the box awkwardly taped to his chest.

“Or maybe it will?”

We looked dumb. We looked like total dorks. But you know what? Wasn’t nobody going to be stabbing any of us through the heart.

“You want one?” I said to Ginny.

“No, that’s okay,” she said. “I figure they won’t kill me, I’m food.”

Sobering thought, there.

Aaron was still looking at himself like he’d been drenched in slime. “I’m never gonna get that sticky tape stuff off these things. I’ll have to list them at ‘fair,’ tops.”

“Two words, my friend: Goo Gone. It’ll be fine.” I turned to Jack. “So, do you want to be taped up with Care Bears or
The A-Team
?”

He looked at me like I was crazy, then said, “
The A-Team
. Duh.”

B
EFORE
I
COULD
try one more time to get Jack and Aaron to sign the sublet towel before handing it to Ginny there was a scratching noise at one of the windows in the living room, behind the TV. Normally, I would have said it was an animal, a rat or raccoon maybe, clawing at the edges, looking for a way in, but the silhouette, shadowed by the streetlights outside, was of a human figure. After tapping at the window a few more times, the figure left, slipping away like smoke. I went to my bedroom, looked at the window on the back wall—again, the tapping came, a concerted scratching, testing access. We’d secured the windows. We’d be okay.

A knock came at the front door, and a voice called. “Jack? Sam? I just want to talk. Can’t we just talk? You don’t even have to open the door.” It was Carter.

“I think we’re just fine where we are, how are you?” Jack answered.

“There’s been some kind of misunderstanding—”

“Oh, like you hiding away your own vampire squad? Did I misunderstand that?”

Silence. Then glass broke. The sound came from Aaron’s room.

“Shit,” Jack muttered and grabbed one of the spear-like table legs.

We all started for the room, but I said, “No, Jack, stay by the door, we can’t let anyone get in.”

So much for the place being defensible. We suddenly had four fronts to cover, and we didn’t know anything about the bad guys except that they were vampires. I could sense them, cold eddies in the atmosphere. Ginny shut the bedroom door and I assumed locked it, but it locked from the inside, it would only slow an invader down a couple of seconds.

Aaron, protected by rubber gloves, and Ginny grabbed Nerf guns and moved in to aim them at the bedroom door, where we expected the swarms to come through. We were screwed.

“I gave you a chance. I was more than happy to give you a chance. You could have helped us. We need people like you. Vampires, young and hungry. Well, young anyway.”

A pounding struck the front door. This wasn’t knocking—this was someone hitting it with something large and heavy. A battering ram. A few seconds later the bang came again, and the door bounced in its frame. The third one, the plywood around the deadbolt splintered. The next one, the door would fly open.

“Everybody stand back,” I murmured. I glanced up at the ceiling, where Jack and Aaron had hastily installed a spiky rake chair thing and rigged it with rope around a couple of makeshift pulleys. We hadn’t had time to test it and I had no idea if it would work. We’d find out now.

“If you guys would just sign the sublet—” I muttered. Make this place Ginny’s, the vampires couldn’t come in—

“Too late for that,” Jack said.

More breaking glass from the back bedroom, and the thud of someone jumping down from the window. I couldn’t worry about Ginny and Aaron because the lock in the front door finally splintered.

The door swung open, yanking on the rope trigger, and the contraption on the ceiling fell.

At first, I thought it didn’t work—it just fell, dropped straight down as if whatever was holding it up had failed. But then, at the last minute, it swung—and three different splintered shards of wood caught the guy coming through the door square in the chest.

The guy, a vampire, fell under the tangle of wood and rope, made a kind of choking noise—and dried out. Turned desiccated, his skin going leathery, eyes sinking back in his skull. In the space of seconds, he turned into a dried-up corpse. No longer undead, just plain dead. He’d been holding a wooden spear in one hand and a hand-held crossbow, wooden bolt loaded, in the other. Yeah, they wanted to kill us. Good to know.

“Ew,” Jack said, lip curling.

“Yes, and if we don’t want that happening to us, we have to
stop them.
”

A second guy came through the doorway. The trap and its victim had the added bonus of gumming up the threshold. The guy had to pick his way over debris and his fallen comrade. The glare that he gave us was full of fury. He bared his teeth and fired his hand crossbow.

The bolt glanced off the lunchbox strapped to Jack’s chest.

“Holy shit, it worked!” he said, his voice filled with awe. He charged forward, his makeshift spear outstretched and impaled the intruder, who just stood there and let him do it, apparently in shock that his bolt had missed. The spear made a wet, cracking sound as it went in, and like the other guy he collapsed, arms splayed out, a look of pain and disbelief on his pale features. His corpse dried out, caved in, like a body left in the grave.