Vampires: The Recent Undead (24 page)

Holliday holsters his gun. “Sorry for the mess,” he says.

He looks around at the crowd. “I reckon someone should get Marshal Kelly. And call whoever you have in town who serves as a medical man to tend to Allen here. I’ll be at the bar.”

He holds out his arm and I take it. “You know you’re going to pay for the damage to the floor.”

Holliday grins. “You are no ordinary whore. That’s a fact.”

Sunny Tom is directing the music man back to his playing and the girls back to their hustling. He herds players toward the gaming tables to resume their interrupted poker game. I signal the bartender to give everyone a drink on the house. Soon Billy Allen is nothing more than a mewling distraction to be stepped around until the town’s doctor arrives to cart him off.

Holliday and I sip whiskey at the bar.

“What’s going to happen?” I ask. It’s a stupid question. I know the answer.

Holliday’s smile acknowledges that we both do. “I’ll be arrested. If I’m lucky, they’ll let me out on bail. If not, I’ll be in jail until the trial.”

“It’s self-defense, though, pure and simple. Sunny Tom said Allen was gunning for you. You have a right to protect yourself.”

Holliday laughs. “I’ll be sure you’re called as a defense witness.”

“It will be my pleasure.”

We lapse into silence. I can’t quantify what it is about this man, this stranger, that has touched me. I only know that I want him to stay with me, if not forever, than at least as long as human life allows.

“You better come right back here the minute you’re released, y’hear?”

Another rumbling laugh. “You sure like to give orders.”

“I do. And I’m used to those orders being followed. Don’t make me come after you.”

He puts his hand over mine on the bar and squeezes. “I’ll do my best.”

I lean toward him, resting my head on his shoulder, wondering again if I told him what I was and offered him eternal life what he might say. Would he believe me?

No. Worse, he might think me mad. Better to wait until he comes back. Until I have time to explain the gift I have to offer. What it means to me. What it can mean to him.

My heart is pounding so hard, I’m sure he must hear it. Maybe if I remind him of what we shared upstairs. Give him a hint of what could be. What
will
be when he returns.

I move closer, my lips at his ear.

He bends his head. “Yes, Rose?”

I don’t get the chance. Marshal Kelly and two deputies appear at the door to the saloon and Holliday pushes himself away from the bar to meet him. He lets them take his gun and cuff his hands behind his back. He doesn’t look my way. Not once. He carries himself straight and tall and with quiet dignity as they lead him away.

Sunny Tom comes to stand beside me at the bar. “Damn girl. Are you crying?”

I swipe at tears and snot with the back of my hand. “Of course not.” I look around. “The excitement doesn’t seem to have hurt business.”

“Nope.” He leans his elbows back on the bar and rests a foot on the copper rail. “Think we’ll see Holliday again?”

“Of course. I told him he’d better come back the minute he’s out of jail.”

“And nobody disobeys one of your orders, do they?”

“Not if they’re smart. I figure between all the legal wrangling and the trial, he should be walking through that door in six months at the outside.”

Sunny Tom shakes his head. “Hope you’re right. I’d hate to see you get your heart broke.”

“What heart?”

One of the girls calls for Tom and he leaves me with a pat on the arm.

But I know.

Holliday will be acquitted and he’ll come back.

He has to.

Turns out I am right and I am wrong.

Doc Holliday is acquitted. A jury agrees that Billy Allen spent the morning he was shot walking up and down Main Street telling everyone that he was out for Holliday’s blood. They reasoned it would have been foolish on Holliday’s part not to be prepared to counter force with force.

But I am wrong about something else. I am wrong about the most important part. I am wrong that Holliday will come back to me.

He never does.

For some weeks, I follow his story in the newspaper. How during the trial, Holliday’s health deteriorated. How when it was over, he headed south for Glenwood Springs, to partake of medicinal waters found there that are said to relieve the suffering of consumptives. How somewhere along the way, he picked up a traveling companion.

At that point, I stop reading the stories. Stop waiting for him to appear. Stop making plans for when he does. It is finally clear that whatever we shared those brief hours six months before meant far more to me than it did to him.

Sunny Tom and I continue to run our saloon. We know it won’t be long before we have to move on. The silver veins are petering out and prices are falling. In preparation we begin hoarding more and more of our take.

On November 14, 1887, I come downstairs to find Sunny Tom having breakfast at his usual table, the
Leadville Carbonate Chronicle
spread out in front of him. His hand stills and his eyes grow round as he reads.

I pour myself a cup of coffee and came round to join him.
What’s wrong?

He looks up at me, pity reflected in his expression. It’s an emotion quite alien to his usually gruff nature. I raise an eyebrow in surprise.

He turns the paper around so that I see what sparked the reaction.

It is Doc Holliday’s obituary.

I thrust it away.
I don’t want to know
.

Sunny Tom takes the paper back. “You should at least hear this, “ he says aloud. He settles the paper on the table and begins to read:

“There is scarcely one in the country who had acquired a greater notoriety than Doc Holliday, who enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most fearless men on the frontier, and whose devotion to his friends in the climax of the fiercest ordeal was inextinguishable. It was this, more than any other faculty, that secured for him the reverence of a large circle who were prepared on the shortest notice to rally to his relief.”

He meets my gaze across the table. “He was a good man. It’s all right to grieve.”

No. I won’t grieve any human. It’s pointless. They die. We do not.

I push myself away from the table, turning to flee back upstairs when a man from the stage office appears at the saloon doors.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

He has a small package in his hand. “I’m looking for Rose Sullivan.”

“I am she.”

He holds the package out to me. “This came for you on the morning stage.”

I fish a coin from my pocket and press it into his palm as I accept the package.

Sunny Tom asks from his table, “Sir, would you like a drink?”

I don’t wait for the answer, but seat myself at a table in the far corner to examine the package. It’s wrapped in plain brown paper, my name and Hyman’s Saloon, Leadville, printed in block letters on the top. There is no indication of who it’s from.

But something inside me knows. My hands tremble as I tear at the paper, fumble the top off the tiny box inside.

A diamond winks up at me.

Under it, a note. “For Rose. To remember me by. John Holliday.”

Leadville

Present Day

A chiming tone from my computer brings me back with a start. I have an instant message coming in from my friends at the museum in New York. They tell me they miss me and ask how I’m doing and when I’m coming back.

We know you won’t last in bumfuckville six months
, one of them writes.
Rose Sullivan living in a ghost town? Never gonna work
.

My fingers play with the small diamond pendant I’ve worn around my neck for over a hundred years. Holliday was the first and only man I ever considered offering immortality. If he’d come back after his trial, maybe he’d be seated beside me right now, adding his own words to mine.

My face is wet with tears I haven’t shed in as long. I am surprised how the memory of a man I knew only a few hours has power still to touch me. Or is it this place? Was coming back here a mistake?

Deep inside, I know it’s not.

My fingers begin to move over the keyboard. Doc Holliday is here with me. I hear his voice, see his face and the words flow.

This will be more than a novel.

This will be the way it could have been. This will be our story.

Author’s Note:
I’ve telescoped time and circumstances to fit this story. Doc Holliday spent most of the last years of his life in Leadville, Colorado before dying in Glenwood Springs in 1887. The shooting of Billy Allen, the opening of Tabor Opera House, Hyman’s Saloon are all part of the Leadville Holliday would have known during his stay. I’ve taken the liberty to reorder time so that what actually took place over years, takes place in one.

Holliday always wore a diamond stickpin given him by his mother. When he died, the pin was found in his effects. The diamond was not.

WASTE LAND

Stephen Dedman

As we know, those who hunt vampires do not always meet with success and Stephen Dedman provides a frightening first-person narrative that puts the reader uncomfortably into a very tight place indeed. At least one has the “comfort” of poetry.

Dedman is the author of four novels, a nonfiction book, and more than one hundred and twenty published short stories (some of which are gathered on his two collections). He teaches creative writing at the University of Western Australia and is co-owner of the Fantastic Planet bookshop in Perth. His website is www.stephendedman.com.

The trunk is small, but so am I, and small places have never scared me all that badly. And dark, of course, but darkness is bearable. At least it isn’t airtight. I hope. Maybe it only feels as though I can’t breathe. Rats, rats I’m scared of, but there’s no way a rat could squeeze in. My nerves are bad, but if the darkness gets too bad, there’s a light in my watch—not a bright light, but at least it lets me know what time it is. I’ve set the alarm for seven; the sun should be well and truly up by then, and I’ll be safe.

I wish I knew what sort of vampires they all are. You can’t trust the movies to get these things right. Russian vampires have purple faces. Mexican vampires have fleshless skulls. Albanian vampires are supposed to wear high-heeled shoes. Bulgarian vampires have one nostril, and they’ve been eaten inside by some sort of fungus, so they’re solid but squishy the whole way through, and they don’t cast shadows. German vampires, nosferatu, control rats and so bring the Black Death, as though I don’t have enough to worry about already. But they all drink blood, and most of them sleep through the day. Bavarian vampires are supposed to sleep with their thumbs crossed and one eye open, though I’ve never found any like that.

Hammering a stake through the heart isn’t always enough to kill one, and different books have different ideas about what sort of wood you’re supposed to use, or whether iron works. Romanians recommend driving iron forks through the heart and eyes, then re-burying the body face downwards—and there’s always a body, none of the ones we’ve killed ever disintegrated into a handful of dust. Decapitation always seems to work, and burning them is good, if you can get a fire hot enough to cremate them. The Bulgarian vampires burn beautifully, like marshmallows, though they smell more like car tires.

The Poles say that if you impale or decapitate a vampire, they scream horribly and blood gushes out until it fills the grave, all of which is true; even the Bulgarians bleed. The Poles also say that if you mix flour with this blood and bake it into bread and eat it, vampires will never persecute you again. We drew lots and three of us tried it, two didn’t, as a control, but the myth seems to have been garbled, as myths often are. Vampires weren’t able to touch those of us who’d eaten the bread, but Clark was ripped apart by dogs, and someone with a crossbow killed Marie. Of course, that might not have been a vampire, the sun was up and there may be other humans left alive, hunters like us who mistook her for a vampire, or Quislings, Renfields . . . but if there are, they’re doing a good job of hiding from us, even during the day. That’s really why I’m staying here in Amsterdam, even after a Bulgarian got Jack, the faint hope of finding other humans. Going on alone is . . .

I hear sounds of movement from outside the trunk, and keep my breathing as quiet as possible. I don’t know how well vampires hear.

We were in Moscow, eight of us, when it began. Or ended. Four of us made it across Germany; we’d hoped that the NATO bases might have been well enough fortified to hold out, that maybe there’d be an airlift to somewhere safe. It was probably only bloody-mindedness that kept us walking into the sunset (they’ve blocked most of the roads) after that. With Marie dead and Jack probably turned, maybe I’ll stay here. When there were three of us, or even two, one could sleep while the other kept watch, and we kept each other sane by talking about our dissertations, poetry, folklore, things that had mattered to us once. Jack was doing his thesis on Eliot’s poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land,” “Portrait of a Lady,” he was fanatical about them and quoted them as though they were a prayer to keep the vampires away, keeping himself sane and driving the rest of us crazy. Now he’s out there somewhere, probably looking for me, like the rest of them, it’s as though they can smell me, the only fresh blood for miles . . . unless that’s how the bread works, making me smell like a vampire, I’ve never seen any sign of them harming each other, they may be even more civilised than we were in that way, but I don’t even know whether they’ve kept any of their memories, as some of the legends say, or whether they’re just smart animals, I’ve never heard one

Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.

“The Waste Land.” Jesus, he’s got me doing it now. But it’s true, I’ve never heard them speak. Maybe they don’t need to speak to each other, maybe they use telepathy or something to communicate with each other, sounds that living humans can’t hear, heat vision, or pheromones, they must have a strong sense of smell. I press the button on my watch. Only nine twenty-one. I should sleep, but I can’t. Not since the Bulgarian took Jack; if I’d managed to wake him, we might have both gotten away . . .