"Did you get a tan? It looks awful on you," the round, redheaded woman waddled around Dryden appraisingly. The convenience uniform fit her poorly, mostly made for someone significantly taller to accommodate her heft. Louise was taller than Dryden by at least six inches, but likewise outweighed him by a factor of two. She outlined her brown eyes thickly in lack, less with eyeliner as with a permanent marker.
Dryden couldn't think of any other ghoul that would be awake or at home at this hour. Louise - Weezy, as she liked to be called, but it brought too keenly to mind her asthma - worked the night shift at the 7-11, mostly sitting on a stool and waiting for someone to ask to buy cigarettes. The guy at the gas station was too worried about getting a citation from the cops, but Weezy liked the idea that she was helping to slowly kill stupid children. She'd gone to Annandale with Dryden, though she opted for the arts instead of computer science and so languished on the graveyard shift in Red Hook.
Dryden flinched from her gaze, trying to find shadows in which to hide amongst the florescent glow of the lights. "Yeah, I know," he finally answered, seeing nowhere to hide, "I fell asleep in the sun."
Weezy nodded. "You are a stupid ass like that."
Dryden waited for the follow-up, but none came. Weezy just returned to the black leather book before her, where she was writing the same terrible vampire novel she'd been working on since she was a freshman.
"What do you know about vampires?" he asked as she finished a lengthy paragraph with a flourish.
She looked up, blinking her eyes carefully. "Are you kidding me? What do I know about vampires? What the hell don't I know, bitch?"
Her typical arrogance aside, this was exactly the response he'd prayed for. "How do you kill them?"
"Pshh, bitch, give me a hard one."
"Yeah, well, help me out here. I mean, aside from sunlight and stakes?"
She finally closed the book, leaving her Bic pen as a bookmark, breaking the spine further. "Garlic is supposed to keep them away, because it's so smelly. Holy water or basically anything holy, because they are unholy minions of the devil. Beheading, which will kill most things. Not cockroaches though. They can live for two weeks without a head. They'll finally die of starvation. They really are the masters of this world and we are just shit next to them."
None of this was news to him. Well, aside from the cockroach trivia, but that didn't apply to saving Roselyn. "What about anything else? Any weaknesses?"
She looked very serious, as though reciting, "'Sunlight dusts them; Water is damp; Crosses pain them; And beheadings cause cramps-' I made that poem up, from this poem about suicide my friend wrote. It's so dark."
Dryden slammed his fist into a metal rack of potato chips. "I need to know actual information, Louise, not your stupid poetry! What are vampires scared of? How do you kill them?" He felt woozy for a moment, the anger threatening to consume him and them shuddering backward.
Louise looked at the rack, which was now bent, then at his fist, which was not even bleeding. "Holy shit, Dryden! You taken up jiujutsu or something?"
"No, I… I just got a little angry. I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking."
"No, it's cool. Really." She looked at his unclenched fist again, then at the muscles of the arm that connected to it, then his shoulder and face. His pinkish-pale face with a white fingerprint on the cheek. "I guess it depends on the vampire mythology. Ricean vampires catch fire in sunlight and pretty much can deal with anything else. Not even hunger kills them. Buffy vampires die from beheading, sunlight, stakes, holy water, spells. They can't enter unless invited. Neither can Stoker vamps. They die from… um… a stake through the heart, they don't like garlic or anything holy…"
"What about real vampires? Like, not fiction."
Weezy played at being goth and happily (or moodily happily, at least) pronounced herself one of the Ghouls, but she knew her limits. "Dryden, there aren't really vampires."
He swore and thanked her, then left the light of the store.
As Weezy fixed the shelf to the best of her ability, she contrived a story of how it got broken. Someone had come in, a big guy. He tried to rob the store, threatened to rape her because he wanted her so badly, but she had been too fast for him. He tried swinging a bat at her, but she'd been to fast. She had grabbed it and swung it back at him. She scared him away, but hit the shelf while she was chasing him out. She put the last of the chips back where they belonged, deciding to reward her imagined bravery with a bag of chips that had burst open. As she crunched down on the first handful, she remembered the security cameras.
She panicked long enough to amend the story with the events the camera would portray when the footage was played back. Dryden had come in and begged for her to be with him. When she told him no, that their love couldn't come to fruition until he got rid of his skank of a jailbait girlfriend, so profound was his anguish that he slammed his fist into the chips, breaking every bone. It was foolproof.
Roselyn entered the 7-11 just as Weezy's shift was about to end. Weezy saw her and went about checking and rechecking her drawer totals until Roselyn had been standing at the register for a minute without saying a word.
"Can I help you?" Weezy asked.
"Where is Dryden?"
$451.51. Perfect, as always, but she counted it out again, more slowly. "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I know who you are."
"Louise, you do this every time you see me, it is getting old."
She sighed. "Fine, bitch."
"Where is Dryden?" she repeated.
"I haven't seen him," she said and smiled a huge grin, her black lipstick making her coffee yellowed smile slightly brighter by contrast. "Maybe if you were a better girlfriend, you wouldn't have to always be asking other women where your boyfriend is."
"I don't have time to play your games."
"Does the poor baby have to go jump rope and play hopscotch now?"
"Listen, Dryden is in danger. I think he came to see you. Please, help me out here. No lies, no games," Roselyn begged.
Weezy rolled her eyes, but she could see Roselyn's sincerity. "Yeah, Dryden came in here, he asked a bunch of questions, and he left."
"How long ago?"
"Hours," she replied, eyes locked on Roselyn's, daring her to look away.
Roselyn held her gaze, but could tell she was telling the truth, specifically because her eyes didn't hold their typical pathological mendacity. "If you see him… Just be careful, okay?"
"What's he gonna do?"
Roselyn looked over to the rack of chips. "Who did that?" Roselyn could almost here Weezy formulating her story, which was answer enough. "Just be careful, okay?"
"Whatever," Weezy replied, turning back to her novel in progress.
Eliot had waited in the apartment. He looked around for a clue, something he would recognize as significant but that the cops might overlook. He knew Shane better than anyone else he's ever met and she seemed to know him ever better than that. He picked through the books on the floor, reading their titles and putting them back on the shelves by category. It wasn't helpful to finding Shane, but Roselyn had told him to stay here.
He tried arguing with her. What would he do if the kidnappers came back? Roselyn just shrugged and told him not to worry, to call the cops if e saw anything suspicious and hope they believed him. Why shouldn't he go with her to find Dryden? She just told him that he was safer here, that she would have more luck finding Dryden alone, that they needed someone here in case Shane or Dryden came back.
So he cleaned. He picked up around Shane's room especially, each waft of her scent from dirty laundry or bed sheets weakening his knees and flooding him anew with worry. Shane's bird burbled at him quietly.
"Hey guy. How are you doing? Where is she? Did you see what happened?" Eliot absently asked the bird the way people do of things they do not expect to be able to answer. Hugin hopped from foot to foot and moved his head.
"You do?"
Nod.
"I must be cracking up," he said.
Shake.
"Huh." He had heard that ravens were one of the brighter birds in the animal kingdom, that they could make tools and imitate speech, but he didn't imagine they could understand speech. It was probably just picking up on some nonverbal cue he was giving off and responding as it had been taught. It didn't mean it could actually understand what he was saying, that was responding intelligently, just that it was mimicking.
Eliot found some sunflower seeds and breadcrumbs in the kitchen and put these in a bowl on top of the dresser for Hugin. Hugin looked at it and at Eliot, then bit a few of the seeds and looked to Eliot again as though showing him that it understood what the seeds were for.
"At least you will be fed when Shane comes home," he said, sitting on her bed and giving liberty to fretful tears.
Shane waited until it was nearly dawn, at least as far as she was concerned. If other women could synchronize their menstrual cycles with the moon, she was sure she could somehow tell them the sun was up. Her hands felt aflame with burst blood vessels and shattered bones in her thumb, but both afforded her the ability to slip her hands out of the binds. It had been an hour since Seth had come in to check on her, to harass and nearly molest her in an effort to get more information. Intellectually, he seemed satisfied. She wasn't keen on being the one who satisfied him in any other way.
Once her hands were free, it was simple enough to loosen those on her feat. She focused all her energy on healing the wounds she had inflicted in her escape. Her thumbs restored with a crackling sound she tried to silence between her thighs. She was not certain how strong vampire hearing was and didn't want to find out this way. She slowing opened the door, which creaked and gasped more than it ever had when Seth opened it. However, he had left it unlocked. She walked through dim hallways, past pictures of a typical family, past a living room full of furniture from Ikea and Pottery Barn. Nothing stirred around her, everything was silent, reaffirming her belief that the sun had risen onto the blackened windows of the farm house.
She opened the front door, where dawn was still an hour away. Seth and Ash stood before her, smiling horrifically. "Aw baby, you can't run away," Ash chirped. Before Shane could retort or, more likely, run past them and hope to find safety, Seth punched her in the head and the darkness of the night infiltrated Shane's eyes as well.
Red Hook is a serialized novel being written by Xen, also known as Thomm Quackenbush. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
He is published by Cave Drawing Ink and syndicated throughout the internet.
