Death is Only a Theoretical Concept (9 page)

Silence lingers
long enough for Abe to contemplate escape plans, and then he hears
a low, groggy-sounding mumble and Steve’s usual speaking voice.
“Just resting my eyes, Mum. Shut up.”

Debra breaks
into a grin, clearly not believing this for a second; Abe can’t
help a returning smile. “Do you want a visitor?”

“
Tell Jack I’ll ring him tomorrow.”

“
What if it’s your vampire friend?”

“
Abe
?”

“
Go
in,” she says as she gives him a light shove to the lower back. Abe
takes an unwilling step forwards to balance, and then he’s halfway
through the door, Debra walking back down the hallway in all
apparent contentment to leave a vampire with her son.

There’s nothing
for it but to go in, Abe thinks, but he stops just inside the door
and stares, startled despite his nerves. Steve has a small, rather
poky sort of room, but the half-drawn venetian blinds—a relief,
since it means Abe can take off his sunglasses—provide light enough
for a vampire to see the coils of rope on the floor, harnesses
hanging from wardrobe doorknobs and a collection of assorted
clasps, clips and buckles on the bedside table, along with a glass
of water and a paper prescription bag. The walls are plain, but the
wardrobe and the back of the bedroom door are covered with layer
upon layer of yellowing, curling posters—mostly half-naked male
breathers surfing, horse riding, rock climbing, bungee-jumping. Abe
nearly trips over a pair of hiking boots and the dress shoes Steve
wore last night as he takes another cautious step forwards,
bewildered by the amount of things crammed into such a small space.
A riding helmet rests on the floor by the bed. Three handguns rest
on top of wicker hamper possibly intended for laundry. A stack of
newspapers and magazines as tall as the headboard of the bed rest
propped against the far wall, a set of stirrups resting on
top.

Steve lies
curled on top of the bed in a pair of tracksuit pants and an
oversized T-shirt, his head raised, a somewhat-damp paperback—Abe
has never heard of Gideon Haigh—shoved up against his chest.
Somehow, the idea of Steve drooling on a book while pretending not
to be asleep seems adorable, even if he looks nothing close to
adorable at the moment. Much better than last night, of course, but
tired and drawn, his gel-stiffened hair flattened into an array of
odd spikes poking out at ridiculous angles. Abe takes a step
backwards. He was right, after all, and it will be better for
everyone if he leaves Steve to sleep…

“
Abe!” Steve sits up and waves Abe over. “Mum didn’t scare
you, did she?”

“
A
little,” he confesses as he finds a clear place to stand near the
end of the bed. “I think I, well, now understand you a whole lot
better.”

“
Sorry about that.” Steve’s easy grin, too, looks so much like
his mother’s, even if he looks little like her physically. “She
scares everyone, though. Chichi reckons that if we parked her out
the front her smile would ward off the feral zombies. It’s why
she’s so good as a copper.”

Abe can’t help a
laugh at the thought of Debra Nakamura grinning at a starving feral
trying to chew on her arm, and Steve, who possibly possesses much
the same ability, laughs with him.

“
I
was going to look up your number.” Steve yawns and slumps back
against the pillows. “It’s a bit hard to thank you properly from
the back of an ambulance.”

“
You
don’t have to thank me.” Abe bites down on his lower lip. “I just
came here to apologise, really.” He holds out the blazer. “And give
you this.”

“
Toss it on the pile.” Steve shrugs and pats the bed. “Come
sit?”

Why does he want
Abe to get anywhere close to him? “I’m happy standing,” he says as
he tries to find a hook or knob that isn’t already burdened by a
harness, bridle or rope. There’s no such thing, so Abe opens the
wardrobe and slides the blazer onto an empty hanger. Half the
hangers, he notes, bear harnesses and holsters, and the rest hold
either blazers or what looks like hiking clothes—the kinds of
sturdy jackets and T-shirts sold in the windows of outdoor
lifestyle stores. He knows Steve is a bit, well, metrosexual, and
the selection of styling products and hair dye boxes on the
windowsill bears that out, but Abe didn’t expect to find a
mountain-climbing adventurer.

Steve lets out a
long, slow sigh. Even being the next day, it’s a relief to hear him
breathe without that terrifying whistle. “The doctor told me that I
had—or have, rather—anaphylaxis. Like a nut allergy, except that we
don’t think I’m allergic to nuts.” He grins again. “Which is good,
because I’d be a little bit shattered if I couldn’t have cashews. I
can live without peanuts, though.”

Vampirism is
better than the alternative, but it had been years since Abe was
able to enjoy cashew nuts or anything else edible. Great-Aunty
Lizzie expounded at length on just how hard it is to be a vampire
and watch a human partner enjoy the delight of eating, and it’s a
decent argument for avoiding human contact. But how can one do that
at all, when he needs a job, needs to buy blood, needs to spend
time around others? Watching breathers eat is just something he
needs to learn to deal with—in a way, it isn’t too dissimilar to an
allergy as far as avoidance goes. The consequences aren’t good if
he eats, so he doesn’t.

He wishes, he
realises, that Great-Aunty Lizzie was wrong about everything
pertaining to breathers and vampires—just as much as he wishes that
Steve Nakamura, of all the people in the world, was the last person
to be struck by such an illness.

“
Do
they know what triggered it?” he asks, quite sure that he doesn’t
want to hear the answer.

He has to know,
though.

There’s
something in Steve’s raised eyebrow that makes Abe think he knows
why Abe is asking the obvious. “Not for sure. I’ve got to see my GP
on Monday and get a referral to an immunologist, and then they’ll
find out, I hope.” Steve’s eyes meet Abe’s; his lips twist into an
apologetic-seeming grimace. “Since I wasn’t allergic to anything
before, since I wasn’t eating or drinking and didn’t get stung by
anything, they’re liking vampire venom as a cause, since it’s
apparently a common allergen, but I heard you say that last night.”
He grins. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll hold off on kissing you
for a while, just in case. You can actually sit down, though, as
long as you promise to behave and not spit on me. I’d prefer not to
make it a record by ending up in hospital twice in twenty-four
hours, though. Next-door-Greg will fucking kill me. By which I mean
he’ll remind me of the hell for the rest of my life.”

Abe doesn’t
move; he folds his arms and tries to figure out why Steve doesn’t
look the least bit reluctant, but he can’t come up with even the
remotest of sensible answers. “I nearly killed you.”

“
Nearly made me a zombie, you mean.” Steve shakes his head and
slides just a little down the bed so that he can rest the back of
his neck against the top pillow. “I’m a carrier. Didn’t I say I got
bitten? Death is only a theoretical concept for most of us,
here—you’re not the only one.” He shrugs. “Sorry for not sitting
up. In all the chaos I didn’t fucking take my meds until late, and
I’m a bit whacked out.”

Is becoming a
zombie any different from dying, given that there is only a twenty
percent chance one survives death with any kind of mental faculty
intact? Steve might remain Steve, just more likely to lose a limb
here and there, but more likely he will become a walking, mindless
corpse trying to chew on anything with a heartbeat, probably
dismembered and destroyed a short time after death—if he’s lucky
enough to have someone attending his death and doesn’t become a
wild, feral zombie roaming the countryside. If Abe’s family found
it hard knowing that their son had turned into a vampire, after all
the years of being prepared for such a fate, knowing a son became a
zombie and escaped into the bush had to be
heartbreaking.

No wonder Steve
has such strong feelings about ACPIZ.

“
That doesn’t make it any better.”

Steve shrugs.
“None of this makes it your fault, either. I don’t recall you
pinning me to the wall and forcing me to kiss you.” He snickers.
“Actually, more like the reverse.”

“
Aren’t you scared?” The question flies off Abe’s tongue
before he thinks about its stupidity.

Steve, for some
reason, nods. “Yes! Of course I am. I hope like fuck it
is
you because then I’ll know what is, man. What if they never find
out? I’d really rather not go through that again. But speaking to
you from across the room is stupid.”

That hurts more
than it should, even though Abe knows exactly what Steve means:
there’s not much more terrifying in not knowing why one’s body is
set on killing him or what provoked it. Even an unpalatable cause
is better than none at all.

“
C’mon, Abe. Sit down. You saved my life, a bit, so you don’t
get to stand awkwardly at the back of my room.” Steve’s smile
verges on the edge of rueful. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but …
well, I liked kissing you, you know. I liked dancing with you. It’s
not fucking easy finding people who are cool with being a
carrier—who wants to be with someone who might make them a
zombie-to-be if the condom tears? Here just about everybody’s a
carrier, so it doesn’t fucking matter, but in Sydney? I liked being
in a space where I wasn’t a freak—with someone who cares about
things that aren’t fish. Or just thinks I’m hot. Or who—fucking
hell, man—tries to distract a not-breathing guy by talking about
irony
. Johanna was laughing all the way to the hospital over
that one.”

Of course, Steve
has to yell out the back of an ambulance that he thinks it
is
situational irony, so he’s just as bad if not worse—and
that’s why Abe wishes he hadn’t come here at all.

He sits down on
the bed. “If I say that I do, are you going to run for the
door?”

Steve takes
Abe’s hand in his and rolls his eyes. “Mate, I know you think I’m
hot. It was pretty damn obvious.”

Steve might be
shunned by people with only a very small reason to fear him, but
Steve has a significant reason to fear being around Abe, and here
he is, refusing to treat Abe the way he was treated. Abe just
stares at him, smiles, sighs. Abe fell hard in lust over a cute
face, a confident hand and a sexy dance, but Steve the person might
just be worth getting to know, even if there’s no chance in hell of
being anything but friends.

He wants it,
even though he’s a monster.

Abe’s not sure
he has the right to ask, but he needs to know. “If you don’t mind
my asking, what exactly did you tell your mum?”

“
Everything,” Steve says in a voice that sounds more mystified
than annoyed. “Why?”

“
Everything?”

“
It’s not like Greg’s
not
going to tell the parentals
that their son was at a gay vampire club,” he says with all
reasonableness. “Fuck, if I heard him right, he knew more about the
fucking dare than I did! And Johanna was talking to Mum on the
phone, right? And fucking Swanston’s going to be telling everyone
from here to Point Marcus that I’m an actual fucking fag now. It’s
come out or go home at this point, whatever it is I—”

Steve stops,
then, but the missing word is so loud Abe could have heard it if he
screamed it across the room.

His use of the
slur makes Abe wince: there’s too much bitterness in it. “I work
with him, you know—we actually went to Feeders together, before he
ditched me for Ares. Not dating, but so we’re not—we’re not going
to a club alone.” Swanston is an arsehole, yes, but everybody knows
that and nobody takes him seriously, so what does it matter what he
says? Except it’s never that easy, Abe knows, and clearly Swanston
hurt Steve enough for that word to stick. “He runs reception.
Everyone knows he’s gay. Me too, for that matter.” He pauses, for
it all seems obvious to Abe, but then he speaks anyway: “I, well, I
didn’t get the impression that Greg cares who it is you’re kissing,
as long as it’s not, uh, lethal. Those two girls, Johanna and the
zombie, were cheering you on, I think. Your parents seemed
delighted that I am—well,
normal
, they said. Four times. Do
your friends here care?”

Steve doesn’t
say anything for a moment. He just closes the book and slides it
underneath the paper bag on the bedside table before he bursts into
shaking, cackling laughter. “Normal! Oh, fuck, they did?
Man!”

Abe nods.
“They’re not thinking—well, that I met you in my drag queen persona
or something?”

“
Please fucking tell me you have a drag queen persona?” Steve
sighs when Abe gulps and jerks his head: no, he most certainly does
not! “Damn. Maybe I should have a drag queen persona. I’d be
totally hot as a queen.” He yawns. “I told Mum and Chichi, in the
ED last night, that I was probably bi or pan or something like
that, and they could take me at my word or I could tell them in
explicit detail how I kissed a boy and really fucking liked it.
Johanna told Chichi that doesn’t mean the uncontrollable urge to
fuck kitchenware. He was gaping for a bit until Mum elbowed him in
the ribs. She really wasn’t surprised, do you know?”