The Hunter Chronicles

Index

2011-08-03T20:20:00.000-05:00

1. Welcome to My World
2. Tearless
3. Changeless Since the Day She Died
4. The Pretender
5. Secondhand Blood
6. Black-Eyed Susan

Black-Eyed Susan

2011-08-03T20:09:00.007-05:00

The Doomed—regard the Sunrise
With different Delight—
Because—when next
it burns abroad
They doubt to witness it—

--Emily Dickinson

I had trailed my prey to an old abandoned warehouse near the tracks, not more than a half hour before sunrise, as darkly purple clouds hung low in the paling eastern sky. I've seen the inside of too many old abandoned warehouses near the tracks. I expected this one to be no different from any of the others, and like many of the others, somewhere inside it was a thing I would have to kill, if it didn't kill me first. There were times when I didn't really care which happened. This time, though, I hoped I would live a little longer.

The old roof was falling in and weak moonlight slatted though a multitude of ragged rectangles where there had once been sheets of tin. Dry, faded weeds had somehow cracked through the concrete floor and stood drooping and scattered confusedly in the dim light, as if wondering how they had ever managed to grow there. Here was an empty shelf that might have once held lunch boxes, there a worn set of tracks leading to a large cargo door, permanently closed with a rusted chain. An open can, half filled with congealed paint. A radio with a broken antenna. A flattened soccer ball with a crushed face gaping up toward the moon. There was a conspicuous absence of graffiti. This was a place even taggers feared. I pulled the big pistol from its shoulder holster under my vest and stood, sniffing the air, looking for signs, listening for movement.

I found her hiding behind a makeshift shelter made of a stack of rotted wooden pallets and a few sacks of some kind of foodstuffs--flour or grain or something. The ancient, moldy sacks still lay scattered around like bloated dead bodies that refused to decay. Small noises rustled and skittered in the shadowy corners and a gray shaft of twilight fell across her eyes--her dead eyes. Eyes animated by something that was not life; eyes darkened with something that was not a soul. Eyes that told only of fear and hunger and terrible experience. She wore a filthy knee-length dress that must have once been the soft color of the morning sky, decorated with daisies. A tattered red ribbon was tied around her waist and I took a guess that she had once been less than ten years old.

"I won't do it anymore," she said plainly. For an instant I thought she was going to begin bargaining with me; I was sure she saw death in my eyes. I saw only grim resignation in hers. "I can't do it anymore," she spoke again.

Her once-blond hair was matted and filthy with dirt and blood and probably hadn't felt the comforting tug of a brush in decades. She had once been young--so young. Something broke inside of me. I put the gun away and asked her for her name.

"Susan," she said slowly, after a long pause. "I think it was Susan."

I was surprised into silence, and had no reply. She had referred to herself in the past tense. I had never heard one of her kind do that before.

"What's your name?"

I did something I rarely do. I told her my first name. "Paul," I said.

"Oh..." she began, and paused again. Then: "Like the one from the Bible."

"Yes."

"I remember going to Sunday school a long time ago."

"So do I." I said it without thinking.

"I miss the sunshine," she said suddenly. She fixed her dark eyes on mine. "You know that song, 'Walking On Sunshine'? That's my favorite song."

"I remember it," I answered. "But I haven't heard it in a long time."

"Really?" She seemed confused. "They've been playing it on the radio a lot." She looked away into the darkness again. "But maybe that...was a long time ago. It's hard to remember."

I couldn't think of anything to say. Just a girl, hiding in the dark, covered with filth and smelling of blood. I had never met such a child before. I don't know why some people become blood-eaters and others don't, but I had never seen one so young before. She must have become undead at least thirty years before.

"I want to see the sunshine again."

My throat closed and I gulped. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.

"Sunshine will kill you," I said frankly.

"I know."

Silence closed in on us again, silence and the wet heat of the summer twilight. Sweat built up on my forehead and I wiped it off with my sleeve. A rat crept timidly out of the darkness and she sat up and glared at it with a moment of ferocious intent, then collapsed and said again, "I won't do it anymore."

Of all her kind that I had seen and brought to a final and full death, I had never seen one that refused their own hunger. My throat clenched again and I coughed to avoid sobbing.

"Do you know any stories?" she asked.

"Stories?" It seemed such an incongruous question.

"I'd like to hear a story about sunshine."

"I...sunshine...?" I couldn't think. "I don't know any stories."

"I wish you did."

"Well..." And then from somewhere there came a story. Maybe I had heard it as a child. I don't know.

"A long time ago, when the earth was young and things weren't quite sorted out all the way yet, the sun shone white."

I thought I saw the ghost of a questioning smile play through the hungry pain around her lips.

"White," I repeated. "Because the sun thought that white light would be the best thing to drive away the darkness of night. But it was a harsh light. It was too clear, too bright. It made hard shadows and hurt the eyes of the young things that played on the earth back then. The trees and the flowers tried to huddle away from it, because it hurt them."

I thought her smile had begun to fade.

"So the sun decided to change it's color," I continued. "So it turned blue. But this somehow seemed worse. It made the sky a sad, dark color that looked like it was always going to rain. The bluebonnets and the bluebells liked it, for a little while, until they realized that if everything was blue, they lost some of their beauty."

Her smile came back. A little. I thought.

"So then the sun turned red. It thought maybe the roses would like that, and roses are some of the most beautiful flowers there are. But the roses didn't care. They were always so somber and morose, and seemed to like the moonlight better anyway. The sky turned a strange color that frightened the other flowers and the people were afraid of the dark reddish shadows that followed them everywhere."

Her smile faded again. I thought my story was going to fail.

"But then the sun changed to yellow. The fields full of wild yellow flowers suddenly stood up straight and looked at the sun. They kept their faces turned toward it all day long and when the sun finally set, they drooped sadly until the next morning when the sun rose again. Then the wild yellow flowers turned their faces toward it again and kept looking at it all day as it traveled across the sky. The shadows were just the right kind of warm, friendly darkness, and the sky turned blue which pleased the bluebonnets and the bluebells. The trees stretched their leaves up toward the warm yellow light, and the sun knew that it had turned just the right color." I paused. "That's why sunflowers are called sunflowers, and that's why the sun shines yellow."

"That's a nice story." She smiled. Through all the pain and sadness and hunger and decades of living death, she smiled.

"I want to see the sunshine one more time," she continued weakly. I reminded her that it would mean her death. "Can you help me see it?" she went on as if I hadn't said anything. "I'm too weak to walk."

"Sure." And I lifted her in my arms. I think saying I was wary would be a gross understatement. I lifted a blood-eater in my arms. But I sensed no malice in her, only helplessness and sorrow.

Her frail body was well past the edge of starvation and so light and thin that she seemed to be made of paper. I carried her outside just a few minutes before sunrise and placed her on the ground gently--I was half-afraid she would crumple or tear if I didn't handle her carefully. She said nothing more, but grimaced once as the sunlight touched her and then smiled--a smile somehow full of the life that she had been cheated of. The smile of a little girl. No more hunger, no more fear, no more years of terrifying immortality. Just a smile. A few minutes after that, there was nothing left of her but a smear of dust on the ground.

I gathered up what was left of her and drove a few miles outside town where I scattered the dust of her body in a field of wild sunflowers. On the way home the sun seemed to shine a little brighter, but maybe that was only because I was thinking of her smile.

Secondhand Blood

2009-06-09T20:17:00.007-05:00

A spirit haunts the year's last hours,
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers:
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
--Tennyson

Her voice was smokier than the air inside. She was singing "The Man I Love," and the timbre of desperation in her voice could've made Billie Holiday sound like a paragon of joy and optimism.

The place had a two-drink minimum, so I paid for my drinks and was still nursing the first one. I didn't plan on finishing it. It was a little jazz club on the edge of downtown that must have been a speakeasy back in the thirties and probably hadn't been redecorated since before the war. The atmosphere was thick with the smoke of cigarettes and other herbs, greasy with the musk of several decades worth of anonymous patrons and heavy with years of resignation and irony. The waiters worked their way through the labyrinth of tables completely by memory, I guess, because it was so dark I could barely see how much whiskey was left in my glass. But I had ordered two fingers, and I was pretty sure I still had at least one and a half fingers left.

Lily was her name, and everyone came here to see her. She sang like she had been there, and was somehow still there, somehow still surviving in spite of all the loss, all the heartbreak, all the years that should have stomped her into oblivion long before and left her dead from sorrow and drug overdose.

She stood tall and dark, hair that must have once been black as midnight dancing in serpent-curls around her ears, dark green eyes glowing from the bleak and cavernous hollows of their sockets. When she sang, some people quietly wept, or sat quietly and tried not to. Some people merely became silent and contemplative. No one spoke. No one threw a beer bottle at the stage. And when she finished and it was time to leave, they all went outside and took a deep breath of the stale city air and knew, somewhere inside, that no matter how bad their lives were, someone else's had been worse. Lily was that kind of a singer.

She had a figure that must have turned a lot of heads when she was younger, but how long ago was that? Twenty years? Forty? Sixty? It was impossible to tell. She was old before her time, or young despite her years. Her voice was as worn and tough as old, soft leather.

The song ended with a faltering ripple of piano, like the last weak sob before you wipe your nose and start over again. The room broke into muted applause and Lily faded from the stage with a ghost of a smile that twisted up one corner of her mouth and a faint gesture of open palms turned toward the audience. Someone in the corner stood abruptly and swept out the door, navigating between the tables as if he could see clearly in the dark. He was the one I was here for.

I knew he was the one because he stood out like no one else in the room. My eyes saw him as just another person, ignoring his drink in a shadowy jazz club. But another part of me, something indefinable in my mind, saw him as a blot nothingness surrounded by a faint, flickering aura of deepest red. The undead stand out to me as clearly as if they are on fire. Or rather, as if everyone else is on fire and the undead is not. A combination of smell, sight and some other sense: a sense of what is correct and what is out of place, or what is alive and what is not alive. It is something I have come to know and rely on, but not something that I care to analyze too closely. It is simply what I am—or what I have been since I awakened from that week spent near death when I was a kid.

There was something about this one that bothered me, however. I was puzzled and troubled that I thought I could see thin, spidery skeins of faint reddish-blackness stretching across the room between him and Lily. I had never seen anything like it before. I gave him two seconds and followed him out the door.

My instinct led me around the corner into the alley, just in time to see him vanish into a side door. This was where things could get very hairy very fast. I waited a few seconds before carefully trying the door, prepared to put on my lost drunk act, one hand under my jacket already covering the big pistol slung in a shoulder holster.

He wasn’t there. A sliver of yellow light leaked through a slightly opened door. I heard his voice.

“Lily…”

I heard Lily’s sharp gasp, and as I peeked through the crack in the door her reflection in the mirror showed a timid, fearful excuse of a smile.

“I have come, Lily…” The words were odd, forced and breathy, like air being blown by a bellows across guitar strings. Every syllable was like a coffin nail being scratched across the back of my neck.

Through the crack in the door I watched as he offered his bare arm to Lily, and she took it, her face twisted by want and repulsion, gasping with the effort of what she was forcing herself—and what she needed—to do. She looked up at him once, a look of lust and hate, sorrow and gratitude. She bit and sucked hungrily.

I faded back into the darkness of the empty hallway, fighting the impulse to vomit. I had seen them feed before, but this was a first: a living human feeding on one of the undead. It was another bit of knowledge to add to my little black notebook, a few more points knocked off the top of my sanity. I left that crevice of evil and death behind, needing the fresh air of the stinking alley before I simply passed out from nausea and disbelief. I crouched behind a dumpster and waited, trying to get a grip on myself.

Several minutes later he came back out the door and hurried toward the black end of the alley. I knew he would need to feed again, and soon. I forced myself to follow him. His flickering red-black aura made him easy to follow in the darkness. I didn’t hurry, and was careful to walk as quietly as possible. This was the part I knew, the part I had done many times before. There was no need to hurry, because he would have to stop soon, as soon as he found easy prey, and then I would catch him.

*****

I was back in the club again the next night. I took my first drink and wended my way through the maze of tables to the tiny stage in the corner, only big enough for an upright piano, a singer and a couple of horns if they didn’t mind getting each other’s sweat on their elbows. I stuck a twenty-dollar-bill in the brandy snifter on the piano and said it had been a long time since I’d heard “Funny Thing.” The piano player smiled and nodded, effortlessly shifting into the song with a sprinkling of silver music sparkling through the room as I took a seat near the stage.

Lily didn’t disappoint. She sang the whimsical little love song with a hundred years’ worth of helpless love and unremitting grief packed into three minutes.

Funny thing how the raindrops
All remind me of tears
Funny thing how your laughter
Is all that my heart ever hears…

Lily had seen me make the request with the piano player, and now she looked at me and I looked right back at her, staring into those eyes that were as dark and hollow as a cave of dead emeralds. I couldn’t look away, and neither could she. I knew that what I had done would ultimately result in her own death. I had killed two people this time, one of them not entirely innocent, but not entirely culpable either. In my particular and peculiar line of work, I still learned new things all the time, and I had only a vague idea about how her drinking secondhand blood had affected her. It was entirely possible that she could see some kind of psychic residue about me that somehow connected me with her undead…lover, or whatever he was. That was another line of thought that I didn’t want to concentrate on too closely.

Funny thing how I still love you
As though you said goodbye
Funny thing but who’s laughing
Not I…

Not me either, Lily.

When it came time for her break, I left the club and went around the corner to the side door, into the darkened hallway and slipped into her tiny dressing room.

When she saw my reflection in the mirror, she stiffened but said nothing.

“Lily,” I said quietly. “He’s not coming back.”

Her eyes met mine in the mirror and for one split second I thought she was going to scream. Then she collapsed in on herself, going from a proud, tall and striking woman of indeterminate years to a frail old lady in half a second.

“He only wanted me to sing,” she said, chocking back a sob. “It was all I could ever do.”

I wanted to say I was sorry, but how could I be sorry for stopping a murderer? Still, it was true that I was sorry. Sorry for her. My throat was too tight to speak again.

“He always loved to hear me sing,” she went on. “He said he wanted me to sing forever. I wasn’t ever good at anything else. I never had a regular job—he…died before we could have kids. All I could ever do was sing for him. All I could ever do was love him. I know it was wrong, but…but I couldn’t do nothin’ else.”

She brushed reflexively and unconsciously at her hair for a few seconds. A single sob escaped her and she wiped her face before I could see her tears.

She turned and looked up at me, now nothing but a very old woman who knew she was helpless, a woman who had no choice but to trust the kindness of a stranger. The revolting monster who I had seen sucking someone else’s blood from the arm of an undead only twenty-four hours before was gone. I had seen it, and it was hard for me to believe I was looking at the same person. She attempted a weak smile, but succeeded only in seeming more pathetic. “You know, I…I never even learned how to drive. Could you…could you take me home? I can’t go back out there again.”

“Of course,” I told her. “I’ll get you home.”

*****

She lived a few blocks out from downtown in an old neighborhood, where the houses were thin and peaked and packed together with only the barest pretense of a yard in between. Her small house was neatly cluttered with odd knick-knacks collected over a long, tedious lifetime and smelled vaguely of mold, moth balls and rose water. I left her sitting in the darkness of her tiny living room, just big enough for two rocking chairs, an antique record player in the corner and a tall bookshelf crammed with old records. She was sitting in her rocking chair, the crackly sounds of an old Dinah Washington album coming from the record player, but not before she gave me something.

“You take this,” she had said suddenly. She handed me an old record, a photograph of herself on the cover, from when she had been younger—and tall, proud, buxomly middle-aged and gorgeous. “It was the only record I ever cut, back in the fifties. Someone should have it. Someone should remember me.”

I promised her that I would always remember her, and it was the absolute truth. I asked her if I could do anything else for her, but she said no, just to put some music on before I left if I would. I picked the Dinah Washington album from the shelf and she smiled as it began playing.

“Thank you,” she said, and smiled a smile of genuine relief but not a little wistfulness. I didn’t feel that she owed me any gratitude at all.

So I left her there, rocking in the dark and listening to the music, and I never saw her again. Her obituary was in the paper two days later.

And I will always remember Lily. I still play her record sometimes, when the night is long and the air is melancholy. And through all the pops and clicks of fifty-plus years comes the sound of a voice filled with the sorrow and loneliness of too many decades, and the voice of a soul who could do nothing but sing.

The Pretender

2009-05-07T19:38:00.004-05:00

I smelled urine and I tasted sweat. The sweat was mine. The urine was his, and I only hoped he wouldn't get it on my shoes. Or on anything else. The night had started with a glimmer of hope--a hope that I wouldn't have to kill anyone. My hope was still holding.

The night was muggy and hot, the sky as blue as a gun barrel and pressing down on me like a headache. Even breathing was a chore, every breath like a gasp through a hot, wet towel. I could have been somewhere much nicer. I could have been home, lounging in cool, conditioned air, eating junk food, drinking cold beer and watching some stupid sitcom rerun on TV. But if you're here...then that means...oh no...

But I wasn't there. I was here, and I still had hope that we would both leave this alley alive.

I was the bait. Crouched in a side alley next to a club that I knew was frequented by a certain type. A type who liked to wear dark clothes, a type who liked to cut his hair in a false widow's peak and wear white makeup on his face. A type who liked to pose as something he was not.

Sometimes it was all in good clean fun, pretending to be a predator who fed on human lives. The trouble was, these pretenders had a bad habit of attracting the attention of the real thing. Their habits made them easy targets. They went out at night, they lurked in lonely places with a few others who also liked to pretend. They had loose morals and would go with almost anyone. Sometimes they drank a little blood from each other so they could feel important, evil and dangerous. The blood was the real problem. The real ones can smell fresh blood from miles away, it seems, and that was the kind of thing that would bring them all crawling out of the sewer.

He had taken the bait. He thought I lived on the street; most likely he thought that I was desperate and not mentally competent. He believed that for twenty dollars I would let him drink a little blood and have his way with me, the sick punk. When he finally turned and went for my throat, I shoved a little silver-plated crucifix into his face. He leaped backwards, hissing ridiculously. I almost laughed. The fakes were always so predictable. He bared his teeth and came at me again, trying to avoid the cross.

It made a good fist load. I laid it up against the side of his head, good and solid, and he sagged like a sack of wet sand. I worked him over pretty good while he was stunned. When he came back around, I wanted him to be hurting and fully conscious of who was in charge.

I pinned him to the wall with my fist tangled in his shirt and my forearm across his throat. When he came to his senses enough to realize what had happened, he tried to scream. I leaned into him and my arm cut off the scream. Nothing came out but an airless croak.

I almost lost him when I started cutting. I leaned into him once more and he almost passed out again when I cut off his air. But I wasn't going to cut him enough to hurt him. I just needed to make him bleed.

A thin curtain of blood seeped down from the line I had etched into his forehead and ran into his eyes. He blinked heavily, trying to clear his vision. I blinked just as hard, with sweat running into my eyes. Damn I hate getting sweat in my eyes. I wished I had another hand to wipe my face, but I was far too busy for that.

"Do you feel that?" I asked him. I was close, hissing the words straight into his ear. "That's good, healthy, clean human blood on your face." I felt his larynx bob under my arm, and relaxed just a little so he could swallow without gagging.

"If you were real," I continued, "you wouldn't have that good, clean, healthy human blood running down your face. Do you understand?" He choked on a curse. I let him choke and curse. He was going to have to do a lot more than that to get rid of me. "The real ones don't bleed, get it?" I traced another thin line of blood from his forehead to the tip of his nose. "This knife wouldn't mean anything to you. Not if it was steel, not if it was silver, gold, or anything else. That stupid little cross wouldn't have meant a damn thing to you, either."

He became silent as his eyes tried to focus on mine, but I was too close for him to get a clear look. He was beginning to realize that I was deadly serious. Or maybe he thought I was crazy. Maybe I was. Maybe I am. Most sane people wouldn't spend the night in some alley so they could cut up a poseur just to prove a point. His breath smelled like nachos and whiskey. His breath did not smell like a hemorragic rat had crawled into his mouth, bled out and died, which was a nice change of pace. At that moment, I decided I loved the smell of nachos and whiskey.

"I'll tell you what's going to happen now. I'm going to let you go. You are going to go home and call your mom just to hear her voice. You are going to let your hair grow and wash that white crap off your face. And you are never going to drink blood again. Understand?"

I let him go. He slouched down against the wall until his butt splashed in the puddle of urine that had pooled around his feet. He inhaled, long ragged gasps of the wet, hot night air.

"Do you have a home to go to?" I asked, a little more gently. But just a little. He nodded. "Then get the hell out of here, and don't let me catch you doing this again, because next time I might have to kill you."

He staggered to his feet and walked unsteadily away, cursing and wiping his sleeve across his bloody face. I stood where I was, hoping he wouldn't turn on me again. There were worse things I could have done to him if I had to, but sometimes I would rather die myself than let that monster out.

He disappeared into the darkness. Maybe it had worked. Maybe he would live a long, healthy life and die old and full of years, surrounded by his grandchildren. Maybe he wouldn't. But I had done all I could. I was going home. I was going to turn the air conditioner on, eat some nachos and drink some whiskey and watch some stupid sitcom reruns on TV and pretend for just a little while that my biggest problems were making the rent and convincing the landlord that I was gay.

I came about as close to smiling as I ever get, these days. It looked like I wouldn't have to kill anyone tonight, after all.

Changeless since the day she died

2009-04-28T20:13:00.009-05:00

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
--Longfellow

Hi sis, remember me? Sometimes I wonder if you still have any memories from the short side of eternity--or if it has all become irrelevant.

This is where it happened. This is where it all started.

The nearest interstate was miles behind me as I turned right at the flashing yellow light and slowly cruised down Main Street. There's the corner where the Gulf station was--it's a vacant lot now. The old newspaper--it's a flower shop. The grocery store--an insurance company. The Western Auto--a cafe. Everything is different, but my eyes still see it the way it was, all changeless, changeless since the day she died.

I know it's been a long time, Shan. But you are always in my thoughts. Your blue eyes, your brown hair that always seemed tangled and impossible to comb. The gap between your teeth--you were supposed to get braces that summer, remember that? And I know you aren't really here anyway. This earth holds nothing--when it was all over there was nothing left to bury here. Just a stone. Only a granite memory that will stand long after we are all gone--all of of us who knew you. A monument that strangers will someday see and wonder who you were, and why you died so young.

And there it is. Between the old Post Office and an auto parts shop, the old theater. The torn and broken screen inside hasn't seen a movie in half a century, but still it stands. This is why I'm here.

A small wrecking crane had just backed down from a big flatbed trailer and was manuvering into position. Today the old theater was coming down. It should have been torn down decades before. If it had been, she might still be alive. She might have children, children with blue eyes and tangled brown hair and gaps in their teeth. Even I might have children. My parents may have never divorced. We all might still live in this same small town, changeless.

They tore down the old theater today. I know that must not be any consolation. Have you forgiven me? Is there anything to forgive? Does it even matter anymore?

Two kids, one night. Double dares. The theater was haunted, they said. Let's go see. The back door was broken, it was easy to get inside. Rows of empty seats, filled with the emptiness of a place that was once filled with people. Saturday matinees, 3-D glasses, popcorn and Coca-Cola. Happy, happy ghosts.

There were no real ghosts, only the ghosts of our imagination. But there was something else. Something not a ghost. Something much worse, hiding and hungry in the empty darkness.

The guy working the wrecking crane knew what he was doing. Twisting the tracks a little to the left, a pause, then a little more. The ball smacked into a corner and a shower of bricks rattled down. I took out the pipe with which I was sometimes wont to amuse myself and stood, leaning against my car on the opposite side of the street. The ball swung. Bricks tumbled and fractured. I went inside the café and bought a large iced tea in a "to go" cup, came back outside, placed it on the roof of the car and resumed my position, pipe in hand, smoke swirling away and vanishing in the breeze, my eyes on the demolition across the street. I half-expected a maniacal, blood-encrusted shape to rise from the rubble, screaming in terror and pain at the mid-morning sun, collapsing into ash among the bricks and mortar, the mildewed seats and the rotted stage.

But nothing happened. In less than 90 minutes there was nothing but a pile of dirty, broken bricks and dusty, shattered memories.

I have to tell you one thing, Shan. I think he's still out there. I would say you couldn't imagine what my life is like now, but who am I to say what you can imagine, now that you are part of the infinite? Are you even part of this earth anymore? Do you watch sometimes, and weep for what I have chosen and must do?

I've learned a lot, Shan. He wasn't like most of them. He had...human foresight. He wasn't just a hungry animal like most of them. I'm still trying to find him.

I don't know why I survived and you didn't. I think about this day after day and I just don't know why. But I'm sorry. Sometimes I wish it had been me and not you. But if it had been me, would you have had the will to do what I do? I can't imagine it. I can't bring myself to imagine your beautiful smile forever erased by night after night of blood, madness and death. It's selfish of me, I know. But I want to remember you forever the way you were: your tangled hair and your flashing eyes and your crooked teeth and the way you shrieked when we had tickle-fights. Changeless.

I almost died, Shan. I wanted to. I really did. It took me a long time to recover. I had to start fifth grade all over again, but not here. By then we had moved away. Mom and Dad couldn't live here anymore. It wasn't long before they couldn't live with each other. But it wasn't your fault, Shan. It was all mine. All mine. I was the one who lived.

I and a few squirrels were the only living things in the cemetery. Halfway up the hill amidst a scattering of bluebonnets was the small stone with her name, birth and death dates. Into this peaceful silence came a strange sound, a sound a of grief and horror, and I realized that wracking sobs were tearing from me and there was nothing I could do to stop them. I wept for a little girl who never grew up, I wept for the children that were never born, I wept for a husband and wife whose sorrow drove them apart.

But I didn't weep for myself. I was the one who had lived, and for that I could never atone.

Tearless

2009-04-24T21:46:00.010-05:00

I was shocked with the sudden certainty which could not be mistaken--his countenance in a few minutes became nearly black. I should have attributed so rapid a change to poison, had I not been aware that he had no opportunity of receiving it unperceived. The day was declining, the body was rapidly altering, and nothing remained but to fulfill his request...

Between astonishment and grief, I was tearless.
--Byron

This was the place. No doubt about it.

A long, low drainage ditch that tunneled under a little-traveled street on the south side of town. A cave with two open ends, darkness in the middle, and no way out.

He was trapped by sunlight.

He had left a trail of two dead bodies, blood, burglarized convenience stores and Cheetos bags across the town. The cops were still investigating the two dead bodies. I had followed the trail they couldn't see.

Skills, you see.

Cheetos. My g-d, Cheetos. Sometimes I see things that are impossible to relate without sounding like some sophomoric horror film. "Cheetos?" you're thinking, "what the hell?"

Sometimes...many times the transition to a reanimated dead body is not accepted by the tiny human part of the brain that still remains. The insanity that results is manifested in many ways. The undead entity is, above all else, hungry. Feeding itself and afterward hiding from danger are the only two real motivations for a it. It exists for nothing else. One form of undead insanity is a fixation on a specific food, most likely something that the human enjoyed when he was alive. Unfortunately for the undead, what's left of its digestive system can process only blood, and nothing else. So when its favorite food has had the time to fester in its stomach for a while, it vomits it back up. Then it gets hungry again, so it eats more. Vomits. Sometimes it can take a while before it realizes it really needs blood.

This one must have really loved Cheetos.

The tunnel reeked of an animal stench of vomit, blood, death and cheese puffs. I stood still and listened. The breeze soughed through the grass. Somewhere a bird sang. A thin stream of water trickled through the ditch. And somewhere inside there something was breathing, an irregular, catching breath that was desperate with fear and the need to survive. He knew I was out here.

The sunlight extended several feet into the tunnel before it was eclipsed by the street above. I dried my palms on my shirt and went in. A small but bright beam of light lanced into the gloom from my flashlight, and I stopped and shied back involuntarily from revulsion and fear. He was there, all right.

Almost naked but for the tattered remains of pants, pants that were soiled with the horrendous black semi-liquid excrement which is the price of eternal life. He was covered with a maroon slime that I could only imagine--damn my imagination!--was an unspeakable mix of vomit, blood and Cheetos dust.

Good g-d, I wanted to scream. I wanted to laugh. I wanted not to be there, but the only way out was to leave final death behind. The tunnel would muffle the sound of a gun shot. He lunged toward me but stopped, frustrated and screaming with rage and fear at the edge of the sunlight.

It was a very old gun, loaded from the muzzle with black powder and a heavy, .75-caliber lozenge-shaped slug. A small hole had been drilled in the tip of the slug, filled with silver chloride, and capped with a light seal of wax.

The slug blew most of the top of his head off, the soft lead expanding, the wax tearing away, silver chloride sprinkling the tissues of his brain with swift and certain death. The concussion of the shot, pent inside the tunnel, was painful and disorienting. Next time use ear plugs, I told myself.

I put on the gloves and dragged his body into the sunlight. He was dead, as in fully and completely, but it would take a long time for his body to decay in the darkness. The sunlight would take care of it in a few minutes.

Sometimes I had the urge to know who this person had been--if there was any way to let someone know the person was dead. Someone who might miss him, might remember him the way he had been, or the way he should have been. So I walked back through the tunnel.

The floor was strewn a foot deep in Cheetos bags, and slippery with vomit. I couldn't bring myself to search through it, even with gloves on. It was all I could do not to throw up myself. As I began to walk toward the opening, my flashlight played on a bit of paper wedged into a crack in the wall.

A photo. It was him. When he was still alive, and smiling. He was sitting, posed on a bale of hay, with a little girl on his knee. She was wearing blue gingham and a white cowboy hat. He was wearing western clothes as well. And a bolo tie.

I stood there in the tunnel, up to my knees in empty foil bags and orange vomit. I should not have been surprised, but I was. The almost mindless animal I had just killed had been a father...a daddy. Somewhere, it was likely that a little girl was missing him, possibly a wife who missed him as well. But I had nothing else, nothing that might tell me who they were.

I tucked the photo into my shirt pocket. Someday I might see her, might discover who she was and how she had lived her life, might know if she still wore a blue gingham dress. Not likely, but sometimes you have to cling to a slim hope to keep from screaming.

I walked out of that place of death and insanity with the man's last memory in my pocket. Like Byron, between astonishment and grief, I was tearless.

Welcome to my world

2009-04-17T20:46:00.001-05:00

She smelled like bubblegum. She had dark hair, cut in a bob that would have been all the rage eighty years ago, and still looked pretty good. It was almost black, and naturally that way, not dyed. Her eyes were the same, with hints of hazel around the edges. She looked sweet and innocent, and ready to pluck, almost popping out of her low-slung tank top. She might have made some teenage boy very happy.

For a few minutes. And then he would have been very afraid, and then he would have been very dead.

"What's your name?" she asked me.

"Does it matter?" I asked back. "You can call me Hunter."

"Okay, Hunter, I'm Roxi. Come on, I gotta place near here."

We walked. It was one of those nights when a velvety rain hissed down on the city, blanketing the chaos of a city night with soft silence and the kind of slight chill that made you glad you wore a trench coat. It was the kind of night you see in movies, a saxophone wailing somewhere in the distance, golden notes echoing from the buildings, wrapping around your head with the promise of mystery and excitement, illegal pleasures and possibly even sex. But this was no movie, and there was no saxophone. Only the hiss of the cold rain and cars flashing past, and occasional eyes staring from windows, half in disgust and half in envy at the sight of a dark man in a trench coat following a hot young thing into a dilapidated flop house.

Her room was bare, nothing but a bed and a floor lamp, a few extra clothes piled in the corner. A rectangle of plywood had been nailed over the single window. No boy band posters, no stuffed animals, not even a TV or a radio. I expected as much. Her kind didn't have much use for such trivialities. She peeled out of her shirt and tossed it at me. I dropped the trench coat and came at her fast. I wouldn't have a second chance, and hesitation was out of the question if I wanted to see sunrise.

She fought, hard, and she was strong. But she was still young, she hadn't been expecting it, and I had had a lot of practice. I choked down the nausea as the knife slid into her chest just inside of her left breast. It was a special knife--created by modern technology and far superior to wood. She shuddered a few times as blood welled out around the blade and immediately congealed. The knife had found her heart, a heart that was now choked with congealed blood. She stopped moving.

It didn't kill her. The best that knife could do was immobilize her for a while. I pried the plywood away from the window with a multi-tool, dragged her closer to it, and waited. I had a bone saw hooked under the coat but I didn't want to use it because it was messy and using it was a lot of hard work. So I waited and prayed for sunrise. I prayed for forgiveness, I prayed for wisdom, I prayed for a new fish hook and a piece of licorice and I didn't expect to receive any of it.

The night seemed to last forever. I realize that sounds like a cliché, but try staying all night in an empty room with a girl you had just killed, nothing to do but count your own sins, and see if it isn't true. Worst of all, her eyes stayed open. She wasn't dead yet, but she couldn't do anything about it but stare at the ceiling with her beautiful, dark eyes. Eyes that should have been studying homework. Eyes that should have been teasing a boy, snapping in laughter or crying from heartache--all the things she should have been doing but couldn't and never would.

A small eternity of hours plodded past and finally a weak excuse of a sunbeam leaked through what was left of the window. I moved her a little more, so the sunlight would touch her. It usually didn't take much for the young ones.

She began to fall apart. This was the part that I just couldn't watch. I turned away as she gave one last weak, futile lurch and I waited as the sunlight crawled inexorably up her arm and at last touched her chest.

No, she didn't burst into flame and vanish. They never do. That's a movie trick that saves the hero the trouble of thinking about what he had just done. A puff of flame, and you move on. No blood, no body, no sorrow, no beautiful flashing eyes going dim as death finally claimed its long-overdue debt. No nausea, no remorse, no conscience. When the sunlight had done its job, there was only a vague mound of syrupy, sticky ash left that didn't look anything like a pretty young girl.

I slipped on a latex glove, fished the knife out of the muck, peeled the glove inside out over the knife and sealed them both in a plastic bag. I would clean the knife later. I sprinkled the pile of black mucus with silver chloride and turned off the lamp. The door closed softly behind me as I left the steaming pile of rapidly disappearing muck and walked out into the morning sunlight. The city was winding up with traffic and the noise of a busy morning while I was going home to get some sleep. That was the theory, anyway. I doubted if I could swing it.

Roxi was gone. She had died a long time ago, and now she was gone. Somewhere, I hoped, there would be a mom and a dad who would finally realize their baby was gone, and mourn for her. She deserved that much. Somewhere in another time she should have been making her parents proud by making all the grades, or disappointing them for running around with the wrong crowd. She should have been doing lots of things, but she wouldn't. Because now there was no trace that she had ever been.

And she didn't smell like bubblegum anymore.