Annie of the Undead (10 page)

Another interesting detail from the report was
that the man had checked in under the name Raymond Sanchez. It had
to be a false name. I wondered how many false names he had used in
his unlife, what his false name was now that Sanchez was dead, and
if Miguel was a false name too.

How much of this vampire’s life had to be false
in order for him to survive, not only as humans do, on the run for
a few short years, a few decades, but for an unlife? How long had
he been hiding, faking it, skirting society, handling humans with
kid gloves? How long had he been what he was?

I couldn’t resist taking another peek at him in
his incapacitated state. I got down on the dirty motel carpet and
shimmied under the bed, folding back the blanket just a little from
his face, careful to shield him from the modest glow of sunlight
filtering through the cheap curtains and the blanket he had
stripped from the spare bed to hang over them. I put my hand on his
chest and felt the lack of motion, of breath, of heartbeat, of
life. I touched his jasper skin with one finger. So much power, and
yet he was so vulnerable in this moment. So powerful, and yet he
had treated me with such deference, such respect, when so many less
able men had felt the compulsion to force themselves on me, to take
what they wanted, to take and take. Yet, this one –this rare one, I
could trust. I could trust him as he trusted me.

Moved by a compulsion of my own, I leaned in and
pressed my lips to his. They were soft and cool and tasted nothing
at all like death. They tasted…clean.

He did not move, and I pulled back, feeling
naughty. It was a little like molestation, taking advantage of him
in his helpless state. But, as he had said the night we’d met,
“never miss an opportunity to enjoy yourself”.

I covered him back up and crawled back into bed,
cozy with my shotgun in my lap, and the vampire who had given it to
me under my bed.

The next evening, Miguel dropped me off in the
parking lot of a shopping mall. He reached into his pocket and
withdrew a clip full of cash. He handed it to me.

“I will return in three hours. Buy whatever you
need.”

I eyed the money suspiciously.

“You still don’t get to call me ‘Shorty’.”

“What does that mean?”
“Never mind. I like you better not even having heard of it.”

“Three hours.”

“What, you think I can’t get what I need in that
time?”

He shrugged and pulled away. He was going to
ditch the stolen car, the car that had belonged to the dead people,
and to buy a new one. We were cleaning up what was left of the
trail that could lead the authorities to us. Miguel’s magic trail
of blood on the other hand? That would take a while.

I eyed the mall. I didn’t want to go in there. I
was feeling much better after a full day of lounging around, but I
wasn’t quite well enough recovered to want to face all the pretty
little girls and the preppy little shops and the trendy little
clothes. Then I looked across the street and my mood brightened. On
the other side was a Jaeger’s Sporting Goods, the place where all
fun things (sports equipment, workout clothes, firearms) were sold,
and where I had spent many a hard-earned dollar. Just seeing it
made me feel at home.

I headed for the crosswalk.

A little later I did return to the mall. There
was one service that I could obtain there –one that I desperately
needed.

I walked into the salon to be greeted by many
horrified faces. My bush had that effect on people.

A woman with too much makeup and traditionally
over-ironed, over-dyed, over-styled salon-stylist’s hair regarded
me through her pink-rimmed bifocals.

“Girl, what did you do to your hair?”
“Cornrows,” I replied, “I need cornrows.”

Pushing a less tragic girl out of the way and
herding me directly to a chair, she said, “Honey, you need
somethin’.”

Glorying in the freedom of my new do, I waited
on the curb, snarfing down a BLT that had happily not come from
Badd Burger. After precisely three hours from the time of our
divergence, a shiny new car pulled up before me in the parking lot.
I said ‘car’, but what I should have said was ‘spaceship’.

“You’ve gotta be shittin’ me.”

It was another Mercedes, the SLR coup, otherwise
known as the McLaren. You go look up what those things cost. It was
all metal and testosterone (I didn’t know about the carbon fiber
body –I just play like I know everything), and my vampire was
driving it.

He rolled down the window to show me he it was
him, as if I hadn’t guessed. No one else who drives a car like that
would stop to say ‘hey’ to a thug like me.

“Inconspicuous ride,” I said, leaning in through
the window. I didn’t know they sold these in Chatnadooga.”

“Chattanooga. It is gently used. Are you getting
in?”

“Beam me up.”

The door opened up and closed down.

He took in my new appearance.

“Jungle camouflage?”

“Warm weather clothes.”

“You did not purchase those at the shopping
center.”

“There’s a Jeager’s across the road.”

He touched my hair, ran his fingers lightly over
the nice, neat rows. A little smile came to his eyes, then infected
his mouth.

Then we pulled away. He didn’t even complain
about the burger being in his new spaceship.

We spent one more day in a hotel in Mississippi,
this time a respectable one, which maybe I didn’t feel as at home
in, but the SLR sure did. I sat guard again, this time with only
the .40 Sig Sauer. The shotgun was too conspicuous to bring inside.
I didn’t see any suspicious pussies, I watched a good bit of a
Rocky Balboa marathon on cable, and I didn’t feel guilty when I
stole a kiss from my inert vampire.

We hit the highway for the final leg of the trip
to New Orleans. I didn’t sleep in the car this time. The landscape
had gone from the dramatic inclines and declines, red rock faces,
and curvy roadways of the mountains, to low, rolling, and then
finally smooth bottomlands. Trees had gotten long and gangly in the
limbs, grass had gotten high, and everything was lush and green and
wet. I smelled the foreign aromas of pollen, marsh, and earth. I
was truly amazed when I had to turn on the air conditioning to
stave off the seeping balm of the South.

About ten o’clock, a smooth roar took over where
the growl of asphalt had once been. We were on a bridge. A vast,
dark expanse stretched out to either side of us, and ahead of us,
nearing slowly, was a line of lights that stretched almost the
breadth of our view. The glow of a great city was in the sky, with
none of the urban sprawl characteristic of cities like Detroit to
block our view.

“New Orleans?”

“Yes.”

“Is this the ocean?”

“It is Lake Pontchartrain.”

I watched the line of lights as it increased in
brilliance as we drew near, reflecting in the water at its
feet.

“This is a damn long bridge.”

Well it was.

“An open city,” I mused as the leviathan of
lights drew nearer and I could begin to make out individual
man-made structures.

“An open city,” Miguel echoed in agreement.

“Kind of like a vampire vacation spot.”

“If you will.”

“Vampire Disneyland.”

“Not as much.”

“I wonder, can you buy deep fried blood here?
This is the south.”

Miguel did not answer. He had apparently decided
not to grace this line of thinking with any further response.

After several minutes, longer than I had ever
spent on a bridge in my life –cumulative, we reached the
terrestrial –rather, asphaltum, boundaries of fair New Orleans, the
gem of the South, whose sprawl loomed huge beyond the lake.

To my callow eyes, she didn’t look all that
different than that other city on the water from which I had just
fled. She was big and dark like Detroit, with a million twinkling
eyes and big jets roaring over her and a lake lapping at her
flanks. It was natural for me to look upon her and see only what I
already knew, but I hadn’t yet strolled her nostalgic streets. I
hadn’t healed beneath the shade of her moss-draped live oaks,
paddled in her reptile-laden bayous, or heard her wise voice in the
music of her gregarious people.

I had not yet seen her gaping wounds either, but
I would.

The McLaren drew towards her, sleek and certain,
drawn to her as immutably as the rest of the highway traffic, until
at last we passed over the last of august Lake Pontchartrain and
New Orleans’ arms gathered to embrace us.

It was past midnight, but, even as we abandoned
the busy interstate that coiled through the city like a python, the
traffic was substantial. People drove fast, as they tend to in
congested areas where the chances of collision are already at their
highest.

We passed many hotels in our progression through
the city’s concrete and steel flesh. I wondered where Miguel was
taking us.

“Somewhere particular in mind?” I asked.

“We go to the old city. It is the best place to
be if you are a vampire.”

We turned and turned and turned again, winding
deeper in, and the city enfolded us in its arms. New Orleans
started to look like New Orleans you hear about. Pavement gave way
to brick in places. The buildings shrank from the sterile, imposing
structures of this century to two and three-story edifices of a
time gone. We passed an impressive cathedral-style church made of
stone, a manicured park guarded by the arching branches of live
oaks and glowing beneath the street lamps, and other imposing stone
and brick buildings. Elaborate wrought ironwork-graced facades of
elegant townhouses, with many-paned windows and porches dripping
with potted tropical plants.

Every detail of every building proclaimed its
varied heritage, screamed its rootstock in a time long departed.
The city did not look American. Maybe it was European, or like some
other place I had never been. I did not know it then, but I was
seeing layers upon layers of history. The architecture was a
schizophrenic conglomeration of the souls of those who had built
it, along the way, piece by piece, the Spanish, French, Haitian,
German, and Swiss. Later I would learn of how they built and
rebuilt, upon virgin ground, inhospitable swampland, rubble, ashes,
and upon the insatiable perseverance of a port society, fed by the
riches of the Mississippi and the souls of her people. Here, buried
deep beneath the coils of the leviathan of the industrial
twenty-first century, was a jewel of the past, a place that still
echoed the song of the city that used to be. Her charm was
bewitching, and even I, jaded as I was, embittered and itinerant of
spirit as I was, was destined to fall under her spell.

I don’t know if Miguel had a particular place in
mind to stay, or if he just drove around until he found an
appealing location, but within an hour of entering the city, we had
parallel parked across the street from a large, elegant house on
Royal Street. It was three stories with white siding, wine-red
shutters, an inviting front porch bound by columns and a wooden
railing, and an open second-story balcony. It was on a corner
property, with a tall wall separating it from the perpendicular
street. A lush stand of tropical-looking growth and banana trees
peaked over the fence, hinting of an exclusive courtyard garden
within.

Miguel opened his window halfway.

The Banana Grove
, I read from the sign at
its front. A larger number of cars were parked on the street in
front of this house than any of the others on the street, and it
was the best-maintained, excluding the big blue tarp, emblazoned
with “FEMA”, draped over part of the roof. Some of the other houses
looked pretty rough around the edges, with beat-up paint, tired
roofs, and sinking stoops. Some of them looked uninhabited.

“That a motel?”

“A bed and breakfast.”

“Sounds fishy.”

“It’s charming.”

“Hey, check out the creepy guy sweeping the
sidewalk.”

I pointed. He was rail-thin and ashen in both
hair and face. He wore overalls with the suspenders hanging down to
his knees, shoes about as old as the city, and a ball cap that read
“Tulane.” He looked like a scarecrow come only very slightly to
life. He was sweeping the sidewalk at a glacial pace, an inch at a
time, with an ancient broom worn practically to the handle like
he’d been using the same one for twenty years.
Back…forth…back…forth…The activity seemed to occupy all of his
attention.

“Is that an urn he’s holding? Like a dead person
urn?”

Miguel sat ignoring me and observing the house,
the quiet street, and the mostly darkened nearby houses.

“Anyone gonna be awake in there?” I asked,
looking at the dashboard clock.

“There are people moving about on the first
floor,” he answered.

“Is that a vampire thing? Knowing that?”

He nodded.

“Looks like there’s only one way in. Could be
reasonably defensible.”

“It is not a poor choice for the purpose, but
the residents are a greater boon than their domicile.”

“How so?”

“They will protect us against minimal hazards,
suspicious activity and so forth.”

“How do you know that?”

“It is wise to befriend the locals proximate to
one’s place of rest, for if one does, they will often afford one
favor beyond courtesy.”

“Kinda like you did with me.”

“Erudite, no?”

“How you gonna slither into their trust?”

“The opportunity will present itself.”

We headed for the steps. The humid air swam
around us like a hot, thick soup. Some unidentified sweet scent
filled my newly cleared sinuses. I didn’t know it was the smell of
the South.

Miguel raised his hand to knock.

“Peaceful little street,” I yawned, looking
about.

At that moment, Miguel turned to face that
peaceful street in a state of alertness that I only noticed because
I was getting used to him. The peace and quiet of the night were
shattered by the sudden emergence of a very large, very rotund, and
very naked man from the house across the street from the Banana
Grove, nearest our car.