Vampires: The Recent Undead (5 page)

“Turn me,” Lydia said. “Turn me, or I’m going to kill him.”

Julian’s eyes were wide. He started to protest or beg or something and Lydia pressed the knife harder, silencing him.

People had stopped dancing nearby, backing away. One girl with red-glazed eyes stared hungrily at the knife.

“Turn me!” Lydia shouted. “I’m tired of waiting! I want my life to begin!”

“You won’t be alive—” Matilda started.

“I’ll be alive—more alive than ever. Just like you are.”

“Okay,” Matilda said softly. “Give me your wrist.”

The crowd seemed to close in tighter, watching as Lydia held out her arm. Matilda crouched low, bending down over it.

“Take the knife away from his throat,” Matilda said.

Lydia, all her attention on Matilda, let Julian go. He stumbled a little and pressed his fingers to his neck.

“I loved you,” Julian shouted.

Matilda looked up to see that he wasn’t speaking to her. She gave him a glittering smile and bit down on Lydia’s wrist.

The girl screamed, but the scream was lost in Matilda’s ears. Lost in the pulse of blood, the tide of gluttonous pleasure and the music throbbing around them like Lydia’s slowing heartbeat.

Matilda sat on the blood-soaked mattress and turned on the video camera to check that the live feed was working.

Julian was gone. She’d given him the pass after stripping him of all his cash and credit cards; there was no point in trying to force Lydia to leave since she’d just come right back in. He’d made stammering apologies that Matilda ignored; then he fled for the gate. She didn’t miss him. Her fantasy of Julian felt as ephemeral as her old life.

“It’s working,” one of the boys—Michael—said from the stairs, a computer cradled on his lap. Even though she’d killed one of them, they welcomed her back, eager enough for eternal life to risk more deaths. “You’re streaming live video.”

Matilda set the camera on the stack of crates, pointed toward her and the wall where she’d tied a gagged Lydia. The girl thrashed and kicked, but Matilda ignored her. She stepped in front of the camera and smiled.

My name is Matilda Green. I was born on April 10, 1997. I died on September 3, 2013. Please tell my mother I’m okay. And Dante, if you’re watching this, I’m sorry.

You’ve probably seen lots of video feeds from inside Coldtown. I saw them too. Pictures of girls and boys grinding together in clubs or bleeding elegantly for their celebrity vampire masters. Here’s what you never see. What I’m going to show you.

For eighty-eight days you are going to watch someone sweat out the infection. You are going to watch her beg and scream and cry. You’re going to watch her throw up food and piss her pants and pass out. You’re going to watch me feed her can after can of creamed corn. It’s not going to be pretty.

You’re going to watch me, too. I’m the kind of vampire that you’d be, one who’s new at this and basically out of control. I’ve already killed someone and I can’t guarantee I’m not going to do it again. I’m the one who infected this girl.

This is the real Coldtown.

I’m the real Coldtown.

You still want in?

This Is Now

Michael Marshall Smith

Michael Marshall Smith proves in “This Is Now” that the cultural archetype is so strong that vampires themselves need not necessarily make a full appearance in order for a story to pivot around them. Of course, a great story is about many things—like life itself, for instance.

Smith is a novelist and screenwriter. As Michael Marshall Smith he has published over seventy short stories and three novels—
Only Forward, Spares,
and
One of Us
—winning the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild,
and
August Derleth awards as well as France’s Prix Bob Morane. He has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author. Writing as Michael Marshall, he has published five best-selling thrillers, including
The Straw Men, The Intruders,
and
Bad Things. The Servants
(2009) was published under the name M.M. Smith. His new Michael Marshall novel,
Killer Move.
will be published in 2011. He lives in North London with his wife, son, and two cats. His website is www.michaelmarshallsmith.com

“Okay,” Henry said. “So now we’re here.”

He was using his “So entertain me” voice, and he was cold but trying not to show it. Pete and I were cold too. We were trying not to show it either. Being cold is not manly. You look at your condensing breath as if it’s a surprise to you, what with it being so balmy and all. Even when you’ve known each other for over thirty years, you do these things. Why? I don’t know.

“Yep,” I agreed. It wasn’t my job to entertain Henry.

Pete walked up to the thick wire fence. He tilted his head back until he was looking at the top, four feet above his head. A ten-foot wall of tautly criss-crossed wire.

“Who’s going to test it?”

“Well, hey, you’re closest.” Like the others, I was speaking quietly, though we were half a mile from the nearest road or house or person.

This side of the fence, anyhow.

“I did it last time.”

“Long while ago.”

“Still,” he said, stepping back. “Your turn, Dave.”

I held up my hands. “These are my tools, man.”

Henry sniggered. “
You’re
a tool, that’s for sure.”

Pete laughed too, I had to smile, and for a moment it was like it was the last time. Hey presto: time travel. You don’t need a machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers.

And so—quickly, before I could think about it—I flipped my hand out and touched the fence. My whole arm jolted, as if every bone in it had been tapped with a hammer. Tapped hard, and in different directions.

“Christ,” I hissed, spinning away, shaking my hand like I was trying to rid myself of it. “Goddamn
Christ,
that hurts.”

Henry nodded sagely. “This stretch got current, then. Also, didn’t we use a stick last time?”

“Always been the brains of the operation, right, Hank?”

Pete snickered again. I was annoyed, but the shock had pushed me over a line. It had brought it all back much more strongly.

I nodded up the line of the fence as it marched off into the trees. “Further,” I said, and pointed at Henry. “And you’re testing the next section, bro.”

It was one of those things you do, one of those stupid, drunken things, that afterwards seem hard to understand. You ask yourself why, confused and sad, like the ghost of a man killed though a careless step in front of a car.

We could have not gone to The Junction, for a start, though it was a Thursday and the Thursday session is a winter tradition with us, a way of making January and February seem less like a living death. The two young guys could have given up the pool table, though, instead of bogarting it all night (by being better than us, and efficiently dismissing each of our challenges in turn): in which case we would have played a dozen slow frames and gone home around eleven, like usual—ready to get up the next morning feeling no more than a little fusty. This time of year it hardly matters if Henry yawns over the gas pump, or Pete zones out behind the counter in the Massaqua Mart, and I can sling a morning’s home fries and sausage in my sleep. We’ve been doing these things so long that we barely have to be present. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s the real problem right there.

By quarter after eight, proven pool-fools, we were sitting at the corner table. We always have, since back when it was Bill’s place and beer tasted strange and metallic in our mouths. We were talking back and forth, laughing once in a while, none of us bothered about the pool but yes, a little bit bothered all the same. It wasn’t some macho thing. I don’t care about being beat by some guys who are passing through. I don’t much care about being beat by anyone. Henry and Pete and I tend to win games about equally. If it weren’t that way then probably we wouldn’t play together. It’s never been about winning. It was more that I just wished I was better. Had
assumed
I’d be better, one day, like I expected to wind up being something other than a short order cook. Don’t get me wrong: you eat one of my breakfasts you’re set up for the day and tomorrow you’ll come back and order the same thing. It just wasn’t what I had in mind when I was young. Not sure what I
did
have in mind—I used to think maybe I’d go over the mountains to Seattle, be in a band or something, but the thought got vague after that—but it certainly wasn’t being first in command at a hot griddle. None of ours are bad jobs, but they’re the kind held by people in the background. People who are getting by. People who don’t play pool that well.

It struck me, as I watched Pete banter with Nicole when she brought round number four or five, that I was still smoking. I had been assuming I would have given it up by now. Tried, once or twice. Didn’t take. Would it happen? Probably not. Would it give me cancer sooner or later? Most likely. Better try again, then. At some point.

Henry watched Nicole’s ass as it accompanied her back to the counter. “Cute as hell,” he said, approvingly, not for the first time.

Pete and I grunted, in the way we would if he’d observed that the moon was smaller than the earth. Henry’s observation was both true and something that had little bearing on our lives. Nicole was twenty-three. We could give her fifteen years each. That’s not the kind of gift that cute girls covet.

So we sat and talked, and smoked, and didn’t listen to the sound of balls being efficiently slotted into pockets by people who weren’t us.

You walk for long enough in the woods at night, you start getting a little jittery. Forests have a way of making civilization seem less inevitable. In sunlight they may make you want to build yourself a cabin and get back to nature, get that whole Davy Crockett vibe going on. In the dark they remind you what a good thing chairs and hot meals and electric light really are, and you thank God you live now instead of then.

Every once in a while we’d test the fence—using a stick now. The current was on each time we tried. So we kept walking. We followed the line of the wire as it cut up the rise, then down into a shallow streambed, then up again steeply on the other side.

If you were seeing the fence for the first time, you’d likely wonder at the straightness of it, the way in which the concrete posts had been planted at ten yard intervals deep into the rock. You might ask yourself if national forests normally went to these lengths, and you’d soon remember they didn’t, that for the most part a cheerful little wooden sign by the side of the road was all that was judged to be required. If you kept on walking deeper, intrigued, sooner or later you’d see a notice attached to one of the posts. The notices are small, designed to convey authority rather than draw attention.

“No Trespassing,” they say. “Military Land.”

That could strike you as a little strange, perhaps, because you might have believed that most of the marked-off areas were down over in the moonscapes of Nevada, rather than up here at the quiet Northeast corner of Washington State. But who knows what the military’s up to, right? Apart from protecting us from foreign aggressors, of course, and The Terrorist Threat, and if that means they need a few acres to themselves then that’s actually kind of comforting. The army moves in mysterious ways, our freedoms to defend. Good for them, you’d think, and you’d likely turn and head back for town, having had enough of tramping through snow for the day. In the evening you’d come into Ruby’s and eat hearty, some of my wings or a burger or the brisket—which, though I say so myself, isn’t half bad. Next morning you’d drive back South.

I remember when the fences went up. Thirty years ago. 1985. Our parents knew what they were for. Hell, we were only eight and
we
knew.

There was a danger, and it was getting worse: the last decade had proved that. Four people had disappeared in the last year alone. One came back and was sick for a week, in an odd and dangerous kind of way, and then died. The others were never seen again. My aunt Jean was one of those.

But there’s a danger to going in abandoned mine shafts, too, or talking to strangers, or juggling knives when you’re drunk. So . . . you don’t do it. You walk the town in pairs at night, and you observe the unspoken curfew. You kept an eye out for men who didn’t blink, for slim women whose strides were too short—or so people said. There was never that much passing trade in town. Massaqua isn’t on the way to anywhere. Massaqua is a single guy who keeps his yard tidy and doesn’t bother anyone. The tourist season up here is short and not exactly intense. There is no ski lodge or health spa and the motel frankly isn’t up to much. The fence seemed to keep the danger contained and out of town, and within a few years its existence was part of life. It wasn’t like it was right there on the doorstep. No big-city reporter heard of it and came up looking to make a sensation—or, if they did, they didn’t make it all the way here.

Life went on. Years passed. Sometimes small signs work better than great big ones.

As we climbed deeper into the forest, Pete was in front, I was more-or-less beside him, and Henry lagged a few steps behind. It had been that way the last time, too, but then we hadn’t had hip flasks to keep us fuelled in our intentions. We hadn’t needed to stop to catch our breath so often either.

“We just going to keep on walking?”

It was Henry asked the question, of course. Pete and I didn’t even answer.

At quarter after ten we were still in the bar. The two guys remained at the pool table. When one leaned down, the other stood silently, judiciously sipping from a bottled beer. They weren’t talking to each other, just slotting the balls away. Looked like they’re having a whale of a time.

We were drinking steadily, and the conversation was often two-way while one or other of us trekked back and forth to empty our bladder. By then we were resigned to sitting around. We were a little too drunk to start playing pool, even when the table became free. There was no news to catch up on. We felt aimless. We already knew that Pete was ten years married, that they had no children and it was likely going to stay that way. His wife is fine, and still pleasant to be with, though her collection of dolls is getting exponentially bigger. We knew that Henry was married once too, had a little boy, and that though the kid and his mother now lived forty miles away, relations between them remained cordial. Neither Pete nor I are much surprised that he has achieved this. Henry can be a royal pain in the ass at times, but he wouldn’t still be our friend if that’s all he was.