Bite Me (10 page)

She was up on her toes now, running, limping toward Jackson Square, the oldest neighborhood in San Francisco that had survived the great quake and fire of 1906. There were all kinds of little cubbyholes and basement shops in the old brick buildings down there. One building even had the ribs of a sailing ship in its basement, a remnant built over when the Gold Rush left so many ships abandoned at the waterfront that the City literally expanded over them.

One minute. The shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid was lying long across the neighborhood ahead like the needle of a deadly sundial. Jody did a final kick-sprint, snapping off her other boot heel as she did. She scanned the streets ahead for windows, doors, trying to sense movement inside, looking for stillness, privacy.

There! On the left, a door below street level, the stair-
case hidden by a wrought-iron railing covered in jasmine.
Ten more steps and I’m there,
she thought. She saw herself jumping the rail, shouldering through the door, and diving under the first thing that would shelter her from the light.

She took the final three steps and leapt just as the sun broke the horizon. She went limp in the air, fell to the sidewalk, short of the stairwell, and skidded on her shoulder and face. As her eyes fluttered, the last thing she saw were a pair of orange socks right in front of her, then she went out and began to smolder in the sunlight.

T
he Chinese herb shop smelled like licorice and dried monkey butt. The Animals were piled into the narrow aisle between counters, trying to hide behind Troy Lee’s grandmother and failing spectacularly. Behind a glass case, the shopkeeper looked older and more spooky than Grandma Lee, which none of them thought possible until now. It was like he’d been carved from an apple, then left on the windowsill to dry for a hundred years.

The walls of the shop were lined, floor to ceiling, with little drawers of dark wood, each with a small bronze frame and a white card with Chinese characters written on it. The old man stood behind glass cases that held all manner of desiccated plant and animal bits, from whole sea horses and tiny birds, to shark parts and scorpion tails, to odd spiky bits that looked like they’d been flown in from another planet.

“What’s that?” Drew asked Troy Lee from under a veil of stringy blond hair. He pointed to a wrinkled black thing.

Troy Lee said something in Cantonese to Grandma, who said something to the shopkeeper, who barked something back.

“Bear penis,” said Troy Lee.

“Should we score some?” asked Drew.

“For what?” asked Troy.

“An emergency,” said Drew.

“Sure, okay,” said Troy Lee, then he said something to Grandma in Cantonese. There was an exchange with the shopkeeper, after which Troy said, “How much do you want? It’s fifty bucks a gram.”

“Whoa,” said Barry. “That’s expensive.”

“He says it’s the best dried bear penis you can buy,” said Troy Lee.

“Okay,” said Drew. “A gram.”

Troy passed the order through Grandma to the shopkeeper. He snipped a tip off a bear penis, weighed it, and placed it on the pile of herbs in the sheet of paper he had laid on the counter for Drew. Grandma’s paper was much larger, and the shopkeeper had been tottering around the shop for half an hour gathering the ingredients. At one point when the old man was up on the top of the ladder at the far back corner of the shop, the Animals had leapt the counter and laced their arms together as a human rescue net, which served only to scare the bejeezus out of the shopkeeper and
set Grandma off in a tirade of Cantonese scolding, to which they all responded like dogs, paying her rapt attention and tilting their heads as if they actually had some idea of what the fuck she was talking about.

Lately the Animals had been all about saving lives. Most of the time, guys their age would be fairly convinced of their immortality, or at least oblivious of their mortality, but since being murdered by a blue hooker turned vampire, then resurrected as vampires, then restored to living by Foo Dog’s genetic alchemy, they had been feeling what they could only describe as Jesusy.

“I’m feeling extra Jesusy,” said Jeff, the tall jock.

“I always feel extra Jesusy,” said Clint, who always did.

“Yeah, extra Jesusy, bitches! Let’s go save some mother-fuckers!” Lash had shouted, which had sort of embarrassed everyone a little, since they had been sitting around a table in Starbucks at the time, discussing the attack of the cat cloud and the information they’d exchanged with the two homicide cops. “It’s up to us,” Lash added softly, sort of slinking into his hoody and putting on his shades.

Now they watched as the old shopkeeper folded up Grandma Lee’s bundle of ingredients and tucked in the paper so it was as tight as a toothpick spliff, then flipped the package over and wrote some Chinese characters on the back with a carpenter’s pencil.

“What’s it say?” Barry asked Troy Lee.

“It says, ‘vampire cat remedy.’”

“No shit?”

“Yeah. Then there’s a bunch of warnings about side effects.”

An hour later they were sitting around the Lee kitchen table, waiting for the big twenty-quart soup pot on the stove to come to a boil.

Grandma Lee rose from her chair and tottered over to the stove with her package of herbs. Troy Lee joined her, helped her unwrap the package, and held the paper away from the burner as she scooped handfuls of herbs and animal parts into the boiling water. Foul and magical fumes bubbled out of the kettle, like the flatulence of dragons on a demon-only diet.

“This really going to work, Grandma?” Troy Lee asked in Cantonese.

“Oh yeah. We used it when I was a girl in China and some vampire cats invaded the city.”

“And they still have the recipe in a shop down on Stockton Street?”

“It’s a good recipe.” She scooped the last of the package into the water.

“How do you use this stuff, anyway?”

“With firecrackers.”

“It’s wet, how are you going to use firecrackers?”

“I don’t know how, I just like firecrackers.”

The Animals covered their noses and started filing out of the kitchen. “That smells like fermented skunk ass,” said Jeff.

Grandma said something in Cantonese, followed by
“My bitches,” pronounced in frighteningly accentless English.

“What? What’d she say?” asked Jeff.

“She says, ‘That’s how you know it’s a good recipe, gents,’” said Troy Lee.

THE EMPEROR

A dark basement. A thousand sleeping vampire cats. One formerly human vampire. One huge, shaved vampire-cat hybrid. Five matches left. No way out. A half hour, maybe less, until sundown.

The Emperor was not a man to use profanity, but after he assessed his situation and burned his fingers with his fourth to last match, he said, “Well, this blows.”

There was no helping it, sometimes a man, even a brave and noble man, must speak the harsh truth, and his situation, did, indeed, blow.

He’d tried everything he could think of to escape the basement, from building a stairway to the window with empty fifty-five-gallon drums, to screaming for help like a man on fire, but even on a platform of oil drums he couldn’t find the leverage or the strength to move the Dumpster away from the window.

He could hear Bummer and Lazarus whimpering outside in the alley.

All the other windows had been bricked up, all the steel fire doors were bolted, and, of course, the elevators and
cables were long gone from the shafts (which he’d discovered after an hour prying the doors open with a metal support bar he’d taken off one of the shelves where Tommy Flood lay curled up with the Chet-thing). A dusty spray of twilight filtered down the elevator shaft from somewhere above, and it was by this that the Emperor ascertained that there was no way to climb the shaft, and that now it was dangerously close to sundown, as the light had turned a dim orange color.

He would fight, oh yes, he would not go down without a battle, but even the magnificently agile little swordsman had gone down to the attacking pounce of cats. What chance did he stand in the dark with only a metal bar? He’d already checked the empty oil drums for accelerants, hoping he might burn his enemies before they awakened, but he’d had no luck. The barrels had had dry goods or something solid in them, and even so, he wasn’t sure how he’d avoid being suffocated by burning cat fumes.

Then, in thinking about how he might escape the flames, it occurred to him how he might escape. He made his way back to the storeroom where Chet and Tommy lay, and lit one of his precious matches to get his bearings. Yes, there was still a bolt on the door, and in addition there were enough barrels and shelves to construct a barricade beyond that. The match went out and he felt his way across the room until he touched Tommy’s back—cold flesh. He took his ex-friend under the armpits and dragged him off the shelf and across the room, bumping through the door-
way as he went. He shoved the body to the side and cringed with the crunch it made, falling onto the immobile bodies of dead cats.

Back through dark, feeling around until he found Chet’s fur. He felt for what he thought were the front paws, then backed across the room again, the huge shaved vampire cat in tow. Chet was lighter than Tommy had been, but not by much, and the Emperor was winded. He couldn’t afford to sit. The ray of light in the elevator shaft had gone deep red.

He heard Bummer let out a ruff beyond the window.

“Run, men, away! Go away from this place. I’ll find you in the morning. Go!”

He never raised his voice to the men, even when they were in peril, and he heard Lazarus whimper at his command, but then the sound of Bummer growling while being dragged away by the scruff of his neck. He would get the message after a block or so. The men were safe.

He pulled the metal door shut, then yanked on it until he heard a click. Then spent the second to the last of his matches looking at the simple bolt, and taking a last look around the room, trying to memorize the layout of the barrels and shelves that he would have to move in the dark.

As the match burned out, he heard stirring in the room outside. There was a rack of metal shelves to the right of the door. He grabbed them and overturned them in the doorway. Yes, the door opened out, but what could it hurt. The more he put between himself and the vampire cats, the better. He scooped up armloads of the clothing at his feet
and tossed them over the shelves, then backed across the room, throwing everything he touched in front of him, as if he were tunneling out the other side. Finally, he crawled up in the heavy shelf where Tommy and Chet had been and crouched, facing the door. He felt for the handle of the kitchen knife that he’d tucked in his belt at the small of his back, drew it, and held it before him.

There were distinct cat noises—yowls, hisses, and meows, coming from the room outside. They were awake, up, and moving. There was a tentative scratch at the door, then a whirr of scratching, like someone had turned a power sander on outside, then it stopped as quickly as it had started and all he could hear was his own breathing.

No. There was movement. The slight rustle of cloth, then a low, trilling purr. And it was coming from inside the door, he was sure of it. The Emperor clamped the knife in his teeth and lit his last match. The room was as he thought it would be, a pile of debris and barrels, but swirling out from under shelving in front of the door was a layer of mist, moving across the floor toward him, undulating in tiny waves that approximated the sound of a purr.

H
ow could I have known that my own tragic failure karma would reach out its slimy tentacles and engeeken my heroic Foo beyond the limits of our white-hot romance?

’Kayso, I was major freaked about the cops almost getting the Countess and I needed to unburden on Foo, which I didn’t have a chance, ’cause, as soon as I returned to the love lair, I ran into the comfort of Foo’s arms, and rode him gently to the floor where I French-kissed him until he kinda gagged in ecstasy. Then he just threw me off him, like I was a gob of
Bubblicious
with all the
licious
chewed out of it.

So he’s like, “Not now, Abby. We have a crisis.”

“You ’bout to have a crisis, nerdslice”—I go in my most authentic hip-hop ’hood-ho accent—“crisis of my boot heel in your man marbles.”

And he totally ignores my hurt feelings and is like, “Jared, get the door! She left the door open!”

So Jared goes all stumbling across the loft to the door, and I’m all, “You’re stretching out my boots.”

And Jared is all, “Rat fog! Rat fog! Rat fog!”

And I’m all, “Don’t call me rat fog, bitch. Who held your hair when you drank that whole bottle of crème de menthe and hurled green for an hour?”

And Foo’s like, “Abby, look.” All pointing to the little plastic cages on the coffee table, which are kind of empty, then at this steam that’s running around the outside of the room and blowing out from under the fridge in the kitchen and whatnot.

And I’m, “’Splain,
s’il vous plaît
.”

And Foo’s all, “The rats came awake as vampyres at dusk. And Jared and I were feeding them with the blood that Jody left, by filling their little water bottles. But then when we turned around, the ones we were about to feed were out of their cages. And then we saw some of the cages were still streaming fog out, and the fog was going for the blood bags.”

“And they bite,” goes Jared.

“Yeah, they bite,” goes Foo. And he pulls up his pant leg and shows me where he’s been bitten like a dozen times.

And I’m like, “You can’t go vamp without me.”

And he’s all, “No, I’d have to have some of their blood in me, and I was careful not to even get any on me.”

Then all of a sudden there’s a stream of mist coming
up my boot (I was wearing my red Docs) and a little head starts to appear out of it.

Then Foo snags a tennis racket from, like, out of nowhere and smacks the rat head, which goes flying across the room and hits the wall, trailing like a comet tail of mist.

I know! A tennis racket. WTF?

So I’m all, “Where did you get a tennis racket? Is that a secret thing with you?”

“Missing the point,” sings Jared, like I’m totally missing the point. “Hello? We need to be freaked out that they’re going to eat us, Nurse Oblivious.”

And right then the mist starts taking form again and coming at me, and Foo bats another half-mist rat across the room.

So I’m all, “Okay, good point. What are we going to do?” And I, like, gesture at the button on my sun jacket, because Foo has replaced the battery, which is out of a laptop, and I’m ready to toast some rodents.

And Foo’s all, “No, not yet. We have to figure out a way to study them. I need to turn them back to rats. And I have to figure out how this mist is manifesting. I mean, technically, it’s not possible.”

And I’m like, “You mean it’s magic?”

“I mean I’ve never even heard of anything like it in nature.”

“Like magic.”

He’s like, “There’s no such thing as magic.”

I’m like, “The Countess said it was magic.”

He’s like, “My grandmother thinks the microwave is magic.”

So I’m all, “It’s not?”

And Foo’s all, “Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.”

So I’m all, “Told you.”

And he like sighs all heavy and does his exasperated science face at me, and he’s like, “We have to get them back in their cages. They can’t feed when they are in mist form, so we just need to get them feeding and then we can catch them and put them in the cages.”

And I’m like, “Can you believe that Tommy couldn’t learn to turn to mist in five weeks and your rats did it, like, overnight? He must be a total tard.”

“Or we have genius rats,” goes Jared, just as Foo is tennis racketing another rat head off his leg.

So I’m all, “Nope, I don’t think that’s it. Why don’t you just put out a little dish of blood and when they turn solid to drink it you can just tennis racket them into a box?”

“We tried that. They figured it out,” goes Foo.

And Jared’s all, “See. Genius rats.”

Then, to Foo, I’m all, “He has a thing for rats.”

Foo’s like, “Yeah. I got that. They turn back to solid when exposed to UV light, too, but then they start burning.”

Then Jared’s like, “Once, when Lucifer 2 got stuck in a drain pipe in our garage, we sucked him out with my dad’s Shop Vac.”

And Foo’s like, “That’s it. We can suck them up with a Shop Vac.”

So I’m like, “That will just blow the mist out the other side?”

“I can put a really weak UV LED in the barrel of the Shop Vac. Maybe that will be enough to turn them solid without burning them. I’ll experiment a little while you’re gone.”

And I’m all, “Foo, you know it makes me hot when you talk all nerdy, but what do you mean, while I’m gone?”

And he’s all, “To get the Shop Vac. We don’t have a Shop Vac.”

So I look at Jared, all wobbly-assed on my Skankenstein
^®
boots, so he’s useless, and I’m like, “Well, I’m not dragging a Shop Vac back on the bus or the F car. Give me your car keys.”

And Foo’s, like, big “OH NOEZ” mouth and anime eyes, like, “Whaaaaa?”

And I’m like, “Unless you really do love your car more than me.”

And he’s like, “’Kay.” And hands them over. Which, as it turns out, was really poor judgment on his part.

More L8z. Gotta jet. The tow truck is here.

’Kayso, it turns out that driving an actual car is way harder than it is in Grand Theft Auto: Zombie Hooker Smackdown. Even though there was only, like, minor damage, it could have been totally avoided if you didn’t have to shift so much. Everything was good going to get the Shop
Vac, because I only used first and second gear. It was coming home, when I started feeling confident and decided to see if there was a third gear, that it went kind of wrong. Still, all the screaming and crying on Foo’s part was kind of over-emo, considering that after the tow truck lowered the Honda, you couldn’t even see any damage if you didn’t crawl under and look at where the fire hydrant had sort of rearranged a couple of wiry-looking things. And Hondas are totally waterproof for the most part, so no biggie, right?

So, it was like this—

I drive totally ninja all the way to the Ace Hardware in the Castro, but I didn’t park because it involves backing up, which is not in my skill set. So I’m, like, double-parked, and I run in and this crusty guy behind the counter is all, “You can’t park there.”

And I’m like, “Fuck off, butt-munch, I have a guy.”

’Kayso, I find my gay Builder Bob guy, and he’s all, “Darling, how are you? Fab boots!”

And I’m like, “Thanks, I like your apron. I need a Shop Vac.”

And he’s all, “What size?”

And I’m like, “It needs to hold about a hundred rats.”

And he’s all, “Girlfriend, we need to party or go shopping and dish.”

And I’m, like, totally flattered, because shopping is a sacred thing to gay guys, but I stay on mission, and I’m all, “In red, if you have it.” Because red is the new black and because it will match my Docs.

And so we’re going to the Shop Vac section, Bob is like, “So, how’s the dark lord?”

And I’m all, “Oh, he’s gone. He tried to tear out my jugular vein, so the Countess threw him out the window and it hurt his feelings.”

So Bob pats my shoulder and goes, “Men. What are you gonna do? He’ll be back. The drill worked okay, though?”

And I’m like, “Oh yeah. We got him out, but he broke both his legs because he was kind of eager.”

Then Bob gets all protective Daddy-voice on me and is like, “Safety word, sweetheart. Everyone needs a safety word.”

So I’m all, “’Kay.”

Then Builder Bob helps me get my Shop Vac into the car, because it turns out that it takes a vacuum big enough to sleep inside to suck up a hundred rats.

’Kayso, then I drove and that thing happened with the car and the cops came and they were all, “You don’t have a license and you’re not allowed to drive on the sidewalk, blah, blah, oh my God my insipid cop life is so boring I should just eat my gun, bluster, blah, blah.”

And I’m all, “Chill, cops. Call my cop minions Rivera and Cavuto,
s’il vous plaît
. They will confirm that I am on a secret cop mission and should not be fucked with by pathetic day dwellers like yourselves.” Then I presented them with Rivera’s card, which I whipped out of my messenger bag like it was my badge of badassness.

So cop one, who is in charge because he has the car keys,
is all, “I’ll check this out, wait here while I go make radio noises in the car like a humongous loser while my wife is home boning some huge stud-muffin.”

I’m paraphrasing.

And in like two minutes, up pulls Rivera and Cavuto, and they have a dog now. His name is Marvin, and he’s
très
cute. He’s all red, and like a Doberman or something badass, but he totally likes me and his little stubby tail was wagging and I let him drink some of the hydrant water out of my hand, and he did, even though there was plenty of water everywhere, but I guess it tasted like street and whatnot.

So I’m like, “Hey, Rivera, tell these douche waffles that you and the ass bear are my bitches.”

And Rivera is all concerned quiet cop voice, “She has mental problems.”

“Head injury caused Tourette’s syndrome,” goes Cavuto.

“We’ll handle this from here,” goes Rivera.

So I got to ride in the back of the cop car with Marvin and the Shop Vac. It was really crowded and Marvin was all doggie licky love face, so my makeup was
très
fucked up by the time we got to the loft.

So I’m all, “Marvin loves me good long time, cops.”

And Cavuto’s all, “Figures, he’s a cadaver dog.”

And I’m all, “Sure, just make up things to make yourself sound cooler.”

And Rivera’s like, “Out. Tell your boyfriend we need
our jackets ASAP. And after you deliver the message, go home. You’re supposed to be at your mother’s house.”

’Kayso, they abandoned me on the sidewalk with my Shop Vac and drove off. I could see little tears of doggie despair in Marvin’s eyes.

So I text Foo that I need help getting the Shop Vac up the stairs and he comes down just as the tow truck pulls up, so all the crying and the screaming happens, and Foo is totally inconsolable, even when I offered him a hand job, which is really the best I could do on the sidewalk with people going by and whatnot, but I was rejected, proving, I think, that he really does love his car more than me.

So it’s like,
Oh noez!
And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.

I needed to mope and grieve for my lost innocence, but no. We had to fix the vacuum so it would suck vampy rat fog and turn it into vampy rat chunks. So while Foo wired science stuff into the Shop Vac, I had to get Jared down off the kitchen counter, where he had decided to stand and chuck a major spaz because he hit his rat fog tolerance level.

And Jared’s all, “Get them off me! Get them off me!” And he’s swinging the tennis racket around like a friggin’ windmill, when the rat fog isn’t anywhere near him, but running around the edges of the room like a steamy baseboard.

And I’m all, “You must chill, Spunk Monkey, my boots are scratching the counters.”

Which Jared takes as his cue to start screaming like a little girl. (When Lily and I were going through our Gothic Lolita fashion phase, which we both abandoned later, me because I’d just gotten my lip ring and I kept dribbling lattes on my lacy parts, and Lily because ruffles made her ass look huge, we used to go to Washington Square Park and practice our horrified little-girl screams, but even without practice, Jared was way better than either of us ever was. I think maybe it’s his asthma. Me and Lily could pown him at creepy staring, though.)

Anyway, I was just glad that Jody took his dagger away from him, because someone could have lost an eye if he was still holding on to it when I swept his feet out from under him with the same stainless-steel torchiere lamp that the Countess had used on Tommy. (Although it was kind of bent now.)

And he’s all, “Ow, ow, ow.”

And I’m all, “Your cross-dressing sissy-man kung-fu is no match for my superior household lighting kung-fu.”

And he whines like, “I’m going home. You hurt me. You suck. This sucks. I have to go have family dinner—with my family—and I’m going to school tomorrow so you can just fuck off and die, Abby Normal.”

And I’m like, “Fine, give me my boots.”

And he’s like, “Fine.”

And I’m like, “Fine.”

And it would have been way better if he could have just stormed out right then, but it took us about a half hour to
get my boots off of him, with me sitting in the sink and him on the counter, guarding me with the tennis racket, because it turned out that I have a pretty low tolerance for rat fog trying to bite me, too.

’Kayso, we got my boots off of Jared and he decided to stay and help because it turns out that even a stream of biting rat fog is more fun than family dinner. So Foo had the Shop Vac all scienced up with sunlight LEDs and whatnot and he turns it on and starts sucking in the mist with most awesome suckage. (Gay Builder Bob rocks hardware!) And it’s so cool, because we can see the fog go in—then we can hear the thump as the sun LED turns the rats to solid again and they hit the inside of the plastic drum.

And Foo is all yelling over the motor, “We may have to unload and put them in their boxes before we get too many. We don’t want to open this and try to deal with a hundred rats.”

And I’m all, “Why don’t we just leave them in there until sunup and then they’ll all be asleep?”