Dead Surround - The Julia Poe Vampire Chronicles (12 page)

“No chance of that,” he sighed tiredly, looking into Poe’s dark-lashed brown eyes. He enjoyed the feel of the girl’s toughened palm against his cheek.

Her concern touched him more than he could articulate. “Ever wonder why I have so many bite marks on my body?”

“’Cause you were the champagne fountain at vampire functions?”

“You’re astonishing,” Maclemar declared with a lazy smile. He reached out to pluck leaves from her hair. “Right you are then. I was their cocktail drink that never turned vamp or cattle however many bites.”

“Lucky you.”

“Not when I was in their service for eight years,”

he said, caressing her face with his eyes. “I’d rather 100

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

have been asleep forever with an ass goiter than go through that business.”

Poe nodded and studied the fresh bite on his neck. She couldn’t take the way his gaze suddenly made her feel.

“Can you get up?”

“I think so.”

She helped him to his feet, glad when she no longer touched him. His sweat stayed in her nostrils like mint after brushing.

“Really, how did you do that?” he asked. He nodded to the vampire body.

“It’s in the wrist, I guess,” Poe shrugged, picking up her knives and wiping them on the dead vampire’s shirt.



“Did you replace your clip with a full one?” Poe peevishly asked Maclemar. The sporadic gunfire where Maple was drawing fire reminded her to get her shit together. Drinking slimy Gatorade and lollygagging over their bruises and bites was excessive to say the least.

“No,” he answered, discomfited. “Not yet.”

“If you want to die so badly, don’t replace the clip,” she said meanly. Instantly feeling guilty about her stern tone, Poe touched his arm. “Sorry. Replace the clip so we can join the others. They can use our help.”

Awkwardly Maclemar fumbled with the release and fueled Poe’s ire further when he tossed away the empty clip.

101

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

“Hey. You don’t throw out magazines like used tissue,” she lectured, moving Chops out of the way with her foot. “Give it back to me.”

Emasculated, Maclemar bent down to pick it up and narrowly missed an arrow aimed at his heart.

“Shit! Get down! ” Poe bellowed. She tackled Maclemar behind a tree. Another arrow skimmed low on the ground, piercing the little pig cleanly in the rear flank. Chops squealed like she was getting the hack. The dog, traumatized by the murderous cries of her new friend, emitted a low whine. Being a sharper-than-average dog, Penny clamped her teeth into the pig’s fatty neck and dragged her to Poe’s feet.

Tears stung Poe’s eyes, and her jaw worked in anger. Chops was her pig now.

“Hold her down, Maclemar,” she said with haste.

With a steady hand Poe unsheathed the knife in her left wrist and cut the arrow to the quick. Wincing at the cutting screams of the piglet, Poe pulled the arrow out. She resheathed her knife and looked into Maclemar’s pained eyes.

“Lemme borrow this,” Poe said as she slid the rifle from his shoulder. “Do me a favor and stick out a body part. Then yank it back quick.” She’d once asked Morales to do the same thing when trying to pinpoint a sharp shooter at Trench’s Bonaventure Hotel.

Maclemar exposed his right arm and quickly snatched it back. No arrows came. He looked down at Poe kneeling on one knee with the rifle cocked and ready, her eyes squinting into the scope. Furious determination etched her face.
Such a small person
for such a large, messy world
, thought the Welshman who resigned himself to undertake the ultimate 102

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

sacrifice.
It’s for a girl and a pig
.
What else could be
more chivalrous?
He thought right before leaping to the next tree cover.

Thwack!

A whoosh of air grazed his neck, inches from skin. Before he could finish saying, “Bloody hell,”

Poe’s index finger pulled the trigger, and she dropped the rifle.

“Penny, stay here with Chops!” she instructed.

And she was off running in a half-crouch with a gun in each hand. Maclemar, once reoriented and on his feet, followed without delay. His courage was so dented by the near miss, he could hardly keep up.

Chops’ shrill cries penetrated his spine like a shot of extra concentrated Liquid-Plumr clog remover. The furious gunshots in the background proved the saboteurs hadn’t been subdued.

Maclemar cursed the lightheadedness that kept him lagging behind Poe who had shorter limbs.

Blood loss or not, he needed to catch up with the girl.

But he ran on, keeping low on the ground and making himself small.

“She’s heading for the damn awful wailing to finish the job,” he said under his breath and shuddered at the thought.
What if the injured vamp
had more than one friend hiding in the bushes?

The shooter was alone, and he wasn’t a vampire.

He was human.
A leech!

Maclemar wasn’t fast enough. With one knee pinning his arm and shoulder, the girl clonked the human stooge on the forehead with the rounded grip of the Walther PPK. These leeches, willing servants of vampires, pissed off Poe as much as skinhead vamps.

103

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

“Oh does this hurt?” Poe asked with false concern as she inserted two fingers into the bleeding hole in his stomach.

“Stop! Please! Jes – jes kill me,” cried the man whose flesh looked and felt like the clammy insides of carp. His balding head, slick with sweat, shimmered like the surface of a pond in the moonlight. “It hurts so much.”

“Oh yeah. You should’ve thought of that before trying to kill your fellow humans and their pets,” she said. Her teeth grated together like a knife sharpener on rock. “What did they promise you?”

She slapped his face with hands wet from his stomach juices. “Answer the question.”

“Some respect,” he gasped. “So I wouldn’t be no lackey no more.”

“You sniff glue, lick vampire assholes to keep your neck bite-free, rape and impregnate cattle? And you want respect?”

If she could smell gastric juices and foulness emanating from his wound, in most probability so could he. She had read somewhere that dying people’s sense of smell sharpened the nearer they were to death. Blinded by a sadistic streak that hadn’t surfaced in years, Poe proceeded to yank out his intestines foot by foot like ingredients for menudo.

She was completely unfazed by the man’s terrible screams even when the little voice in her head chanted for her to stop.

All your hard work to try to Zen yourself into a
decent human being amidst all this dankness is gone.

Wasted.

“Get off of him, girl!” yelled Maclemar who looked suddenly pasty even with his fisherman tan.

104

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

“He shot my pig,” she accused, justifying the torture with a voice deep in umbrage. Poe stared the dying man in the eye. “I’m going to leave you out here with your sausage casings on display.

Something gourmet for the animals tonight!”

“Please. Please, no!” the man begged, searching an iota of compassion. He found none in Poe and mere disgust in Maclemar.

Before Poe could properly savor the look of horror in the dying man, she was roughly pushed down to the dirt by a weak and sick Maclemar.

“You’re fucking mental, you are,” he cried.

“This is wrong,” he told himself. “
1984
meets
Lord
of the Flies
!” He pointed the Beretta to the man’s head. With his eyes closed Maclemar shot the leech until he couldn’t hear the sickening screams any longer. One. Two. Three.

Her stained hands smelled putrid. The little lapse of morality shook whatever foundations she’d cemented the past twenty years. It left craggy, seismic veins in the concrete. She felt cracked and shaken.

She only had to look at Maclemar’s tortured face to know that she had appalled him.

I compelled him to murder
.

He refused to look at her as they walked the edge of the clearing to reach an exchange of gunshots.

All his tough words about hating human traitors
and vampires were just words.

The scholar was a romantic, after all, who ultimately believed in the effervescent soul and its ability to transcend filth and injustice. He had never lost faith in the Joads, the Prynnes, or the Huckleberrys of the world. But with three shots of 105

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

the Beretta, Maclemar’s humanity was suddenly compromised.

106

“DOES ANYBODY KNOW HOW to drive stick?” asked Maple as she set a groggy Jorge in the middle row of the roomy van.

“I can drive a Vespa,” Poe said. She cringed for voicing her unhelpful thoughts out loud.

“That’s nice, Poe, but we need a driver. I can’t do it. I have to attend to Jorge.”

“I know how,” answered the bike enthusiast, his speech slurred from the anesthetic he’d been injected with earlier.

“Anyone else besides Jorge here?” Maple asked urgently.

“Aye, me,” volunteered Maclemar who cradled the injured piglet in his arms. He set the shivering pig on the floor of the vehicle nearest the front where she was joined by a concerned Penny who immediately began licking Chops’ wound. “Cars with automatic transmissions are scoffed at where I come from.”

“Good. You better get started, Maclemar. I hear coyote baying out there,” Maple nodded distractedly, tearing off Jorge’s No. 94 cycling jersey. “Romulo will guide you to the safe route. And this might help.” She handed Poe night vision goggles to pass on to Maclemar.

107

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

“You’ll have to drive with those things on, I’m afraid. We don’t want headlights to attract any hostiles this evening.”

“Right,” Maclemar said as if stunned. “This is a new driving experience for me, I guess. At least I can drive the British side of the road if I want. Traffic willing, of course.”

“Poe, kneel here with me. You’re going to clean Jorge’s shoulder wound, and I’ll handle the stomach.

Let me know if bullet fragments are in there.”

“But my hands are filthy,” protested Poe.

Patching up another human after torturing another didn’t feel right.

“Then use gloves, dammit!” Maple burst her façade of calm. “Listen, just do the best you can.”

“Alright, Maple,” Poe said. She scrubbed her hands with rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide and put on latex gloves from the emergency kit.

Placing a tiny flashlight between her teeth, Poe cleaned the wound as best she could. She inspected the hole. A probe with tweezers located the bullet lodged near the solar plexus. The copper bullet containing no lead expanded upon impact into four petals with sharp edges. With much difficulty as it was dark and the road bumpy, Poe succeeded in extracting the bullet. Poe swabbed and dressed the wound for the last time, and she shined her light at the cavernous wound Maple labored to patch up.

Poe’s back was damp. Little beads of sweat appeared on the tip of her nose like clear glue.

Breathing deeply, she tried her hardest not to throw up. Maclemar’s driving was making her carsick.

Maple, still looking for the missing bullet that stretched into a flower with lethal edges, kept on 108

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

delving with unstinting focus. Poe averted her eyes from the surgery happening right under her nose. She breathed through her mouth.

When Poe and Maclemar had reached the others, everyone was still standing. Maple and Romulo had flushed and destroyed the mercenaries that had fired on them in hope of claiming a reward. It was Jorge who shot the last of the vampire snipers in the head.

No one could have expected that the undead would raise himself up and retaliate because he had merely been grazed in the head.

The scummy vampire whizzed Romulo in the temple from where he lay dying and hit Maple’s powerful forearm which spit out the bullet seconds later. He fired a few more shots before Poe shot him in the heart. She thought Jorge was simply resting on a log. The junkyard smell of blood alerted her differently.

“Jorge’s a goner,” said Romulo sitting shotgun with Maclemar and swigging cheap whiskey in a flask. He didn’t bother lowering his voice. “It’s that damn faggoty outfit of his that did him in. No. 94, my ass!”

“He said it was his lucky number,” Maclemar said defensively. He hadn’t even met Jorge before that day, but he felt compelled to defend the quirky man fighting for his life. “I know the world’s wasted and fucked, but we should really try to keep homophobic slurs to a minimum.”

“Sure, it’s his lucky number alright,” Romulo snorted. He took a swig of whiskey from a small container. “And what are you about with this PC

crap? Wake up, man. This is the Apocalypse.

109

Rono/DEAD SURROUND

Anything goes. What’re ya anyway, an English fruit?” He corked his flask.

“No, I’m not a poof. Nor am I English,”

Maclemar corrected, squinting at the indelibly black road ahead of him. It was like driving through the insides of a Ding Dong. “But my dad was.”

“Was what?’

“Gay,” Maclemar said matter-of-factly. “He came out when I was in primary school.”

“So that’s why you’re so bleeding heart about that fashion disaster fender bender back there?”

“Jorge is not homosexual,” Maple interjected.

“He had a wife and two children before all this Armageddon madness happened.”

“When does being married ever stop a queer from getting it from behind? C’mon,” Romulo laughed with derision. “I mean look at this for chrissake,” he said. He tapped a cassette into the tape player and the lively “Oh L'amour” rang out.

“Fucking Erasure! I rest my case.”

“This is Megan’s van, Romulo,” Maple said testily, meticulously feeling for projectiles in Jorge’s stomach with only the light held by Poe and by the overhead light of the van. “That’s her music.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Romulo said insolently.

“Either way, that bootie pirate’s outfit speaks for itself.”

“Oh fuck off, you alcoholic son of a bitch,”

Maple carped, startling Poe who’d never seen the gracious and normally tranquil woman unravel. “I’m trying to concentrate here. If you want to insult anyone for their sexual orientation, pick on me.”