Earthfall (40 page)

“Danny Mac sounds off!” Russ cawed, and pitched me another beer.

Danny Mac. It’s been years since anyone called me that, except for my old buddy Jake Conrad—more on him in a bit—who did it occasionally when he was worked up about something. Usually the government. Maybe the nickname was kind of lame, no pun intended, but hell, who
isn’t
lame at that age? No matter how pitiful it sounds now, it was far better than my given name of Daniel Edward Mackenzie. Doesn’t that sound stuffy and pretentious? Even now, as forty looms not too far around the corner, I’ll take being called Danny over Daniel any day, though I prefer Dan. Nice, short, and simple.

But then? Then I was Danny Mac.

I drained the second beer almost as quickly as the first, and by the time we scrambled through the hole in the fence and down to the water’s edge, my third was half empty. I was already starting to feel light-headed. We’d been down at the mall all morning, feeding quarters into games in the arcade and hanging out at Camelot Music, and hadn’t bothered with lunch.

The dirt road we drove in on ended at a chained and padlocked gate, and turned to gravel inside the fence. It was the same one the loaded trucks used back when the quarry was in business, and it led right down into the water. Standing at the lake’s edge, you could see the road continuing under the surface as it descended into the depths. To be honest, it always creeped me out a little to float over it and look down through my mask. It seemed so out of place down there, stretching into the murky darkness. A path to nowhere.

The pulverized gravel at the edge of the lake formed something of a beach, and that’s where we spread out our towels. Trigger tied the remaining six-packs together with a piece of old clothesline from the trunk of the Nova and lowered them into the cool green water. We waded out four abreast, hissing reflexively first when the water touched our balls, then our armpits.

An hour later, snorkeling in the middle of the lake, I was as far from sober as I was from the shore. Through my mask I watched the fish and turtles glide far below me, dim dark shapes against the midnight green. From time to time I drifted over underwater meadows of some tall grass, gently swaying in the convection created by the sun’s rays. Pale lime-colored tendrils reached for me out of the darkness like questing fingers, and I thought of dead things slowly rotting down there, just out of sight.

A scream yanked me from my quiet and morbid reflection, and I looked up in time to see Trigger twisting through the air halfway down the cliff. Though he grinned like a fool, his eyes were wide with terror. At the last second, he pulled his legs up and wrapped his arms around them, hitting the water butt-first in a perfect cannonball. The plume must have shot thirty feet.

Even as the displaced water rained back to the lake Kenny sailed over the edge. He jackknifed and greased in with barely any disturbance at all. Behind me, Russ hooted, and I turned to see him swimming back toward the beach in an awkward stroke somewhere between a dog paddle and a butterfly.

“Wait up!” I called, and started after him.

Trigger surfaced in the distance, sputtering and flailing and bellowing, “My ass! I broke my ass!”

Kenny’s peal of laughter bounced off the vertical walls and doubled, then tripled, until it sounded like a mocking crowd. At the shore, Russ veered over and pulled two beers from the last six-pack, and we drank them as we picked and stumbled our way around the lake to the upper end. From the top of the hill we could see for miles, nothing but verdant green cotton plants against the carmine soil stretching out in every direction. I set my snorkel and mask on a chunk of limestone the size of a suitcase near the precipice. M.C. Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” thundered from the boombox sitting with our towels, the sound surprisingly clear outside the enclosing rock sides. A gentle breeze blew in our faces, cooled by the water below. It carried a slightly metallic, clean smell. I gave Russ a dopey smile that was part indescribable happiness, part cheap beer.

“Last one in is queer,” he shouted, and ran for the edge with me hot on his heels.

He sprung away from the drop, twisting around to look at me as he fell, a look of triumph on his face, an image frozen in my memory as the pure essence of summer and youth. I jumped after him, but just as I pushed off, my foot slid in the loose gravel, kicking out behind me like some kind of satirical ballet move, and I tumbled gracelessly over the edge.

The fall is imprinted in the archives of my mind as a series of snapshots taken as I somersaulted toward the water. White rock, speckled with black, far too close. The sky, impossibly blue. The lake, stretching off in the distance. Russ looking up at me, his mouth opening in a scream, Kenny and Trigger blurry smudges in the water beyond him. White rock. Blue sky.

When the workers carved away the hillside to harvest all that stone, they cut it away into a giant series of steps so that each one made a simple path across the face of the rock for them to use. One of those steps jutted out of the face of the cliff two feet below the waterline, forming a shelf six or seven feet wide. It’s pure luck I didn’t plunge headfirst into it and chum up the water with my fool brain. Instead, I hit the water on my back, part of me over the shelf and part over the abyss. Even through the roar in my ears I heard the brittle
crack!
of my spine as I impacted the edge just below my shoulder blades.

My eyes were open. I could see the disc of the sun through churning water turned cloudy by the lime silt, white and brilliant and uncaring. Even though I must have been going into shock, my mind was preternaturally alert and screamed for me to get to the surface before I drowned. It felt like someone had cinched a nail-studded belt around my midsection and was pulling it ever tighter, but compared to the pain that came later, it was nothing. I had a dim awareness that I no longer felt anything below that fiery circle.

I teetered there on the edge of the shelf for a second, then slipped over, pulled down by the weight of my dead legs. I sank in a dreamy kind of slow motion, desperately trying to use my arms to swim upward, but they didn’t want to obey and merely flapped ineffectually. I grabbed at the rocky wall as it slid by, searching for purchase, but my fingers were twisted into claws and wouldn’t open. I succeeded only in pulling loose a thick rubbery sheet of the pinkish fungal growth we called quarry skin. That stuff seemed to coat
everything
under the water, soft and slick like the sodden flesh of a bloated corpse.

Pressure built in my ears and lungs as I descended. I fell through a deepening green haze, no longer able to see the sun. No longer able to see much of anything but that single color, slowly bleeding away and leaving only blackness behind. I knew I was dying, but despite it all I felt a calming sense of peace build within me. I don’t know if it was the beer, or God, or just my body starting to give up and shut down, but I found that I wasn’t so concerned about making the transition. Even though I was technically still a virgin.

I saw something gliding toward me through the gloom, one of God’s angels coming with open arms to lead me home to heaven. Hot joy rose in my heart. They told me later it was just Russ, swimming down to catch me by the hair and drag me back up to the shelf.

My recollection of what happened next is hazy. I remember bits and pieces, little snippets of memory spliced together like a movie trailer made with only the worst parts. Lying in the cold water on the shelf, cradled in Russ’s arms, shivering and telling him to stop crying like a little girl, then crying myself when the belt of pain twisted a little tighter. The sun as it slipped out of sight over the cliffs. The flat
whupwhupwhup
of the LifeFlight helicopter sent all the way from Jackson to get me after a pell-mell drive back to Starkville by Kenny and Trigger to find help. Dizziness from the rotation of the basket as they winched me up, and the feel of the warm rotor wash on my face, upper chest, and arms. Wonderment over why I couldn’t feel it anywhere else.

The next solid memory is of waking up in a recovery room in Jackson General Hospital with my parents on one side of the bed and a strange man dressed in white on the other. Mom’s eyes were red and watery, and Dad kept clearing his throat. That was the first time they ever looked old to me.

“Welcome back, Danny,” the stranger said. “My name is Dr. Feinbaum. Do you know where you are?”

My throat hurt like hell, dry and scratchy like someone took a steel wool pad to it, so I whispered, “Hospital.”

“That’s right, you’re down in Jackson, in the intensive care unit. Do you remember what happened?”

I nodded.

“Good,” he told me, and looked up at my parents. “
Very
good. Short term memory loss is always a concern in cases like this.”

Reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket, he plucked out a pen and held it in front of my face. “Follow this with your eyes, please.”

I tracked the movement of the pen and wondered why I wasn’t in more pain.

Especially below that spot near my shoulder blades, where I landed.

Maxfield Anderson’s Field Guide to Vampires
Book I: Vampirus

by Jarret Liotta

Available at
Amazon

“It’s gonna be about two minutes,” they told me, and I did not feel ready to go on.

I don’t know how many of you have ever been on television, but there’s a lot of fanfare happening before you even start. There’s literally an army of assistants and producers and people who move you from one room to another, like you’re some kind of prop. They get you all prepped and primed, primped and proper for your appearance—physically, mentally and emotionally—and by the time they’re done you feel like well-groomed Pekinese entering a dog show.

Of course, in this instance, it wasn’t exactly a supportive kind of mental and emotional preparation.

“So, you
really
believe this shit about vampires?” some stagehand asked me as I waited in the last room—the “green” room, they called it, even though it was blue—before my entry.

“Yes. Yes, I do, because I’ve seen them.”

He laughed. “Oh, really,” and he laughed again.

“They’re real, my friend, and you’d be surprised how many there are, and how many different kinds inhabit the United States alone.”

I could tell from his grin he didn’t believe me.

“It’s true,” I commanded like a little kid, (though a voice inside me regretted—for the thousandth time in my life—falling into defense of myself against an idiot).

“And so, like, did you ever
kill
a vampire by putting a stake in his heart?” he tittered more, the fool.

“I’ve killed vampires, yes, but only in self-defense, or to keep someone else from harm. I’m a naturalist. I don’t believe in killing any kind of life form if I don’t have to. Vampires have as much right to live as any of us, provided they don’t present a danger to the population.”

“It’s time!” a slender, hyper woman with a clipboard interrupted us. “You’re on. Come on.”

She led me out to the edge of a brightly lit stage, where the host—Chet Collins—was seated at a big desk, about to introduce me.

“Geez,” that stupid stagehand said, following me to the edge. “You’re gonna be great. Just tell ‘em some of those stories about killing vampires and you’ll bring down the house.”

And so I did … And continue to do so …

The very first time I saw a vampire was in New Mexico.

I’d gone there on a long weekend to study desert iguana. I was still at Princeton University at the time, working on my master’s in evolutionary biology. But this was more of a naturalist’s vacation than official study work. Even then, I’d begun to see the limits of traditional academic research, as opposed to extensive study in the field.

I flew into Tucson and met my friend Paul, who lived there. We drove out on the I-10 toward Las Cruces. Paul, who worked as a counselor in a drug rehab, wasn’t that interested in animal behavior, but he liked to camp and we were looking forward to a couple of beautiful nights in the high desert.

The first night was uneventful, save some great photos I got of a coyote crossing near our camp. Late that second night, however—about 3 a.m., early Sunday morning actually—I saw something I just could not explain.

I probably wouldn’t have been looking in that direction, except the snorting of a javelina—a desert boar—caught my ear.

“Hear that?” I whispered. “Javelina, I think.”

“Wild pig,” Paul reiterated, trying to seem more interested than he was, especially at 3 a.m.

I had my night vision binoculars mounted low on a tripod nearby. I crawled over and trained them toward the scrub, where I figured the javelina was rooting around, perhaps looking for some of the prickly pear cactus they like to eat …

And there he was—a young boar, or collared peccary, as they’re known—a short, stout swine about three feet long, sticking his snout into the scrub, maybe 50 feet away from us.

“Look at that,” I whispered, forgetting Paul had no real view in the dark.

“Cool,” he said after a long pause that told me he was nodding off.

“Look at him foraging.” I spoke softly, knowing I was talking to myself now. “That’s a teenager, I’d say, judging by the size, and a male, of course, judging by that dangling participle.”

I didn’t hear anything else making any sounds, and let me tell you, it was quiet.

The javelina apparently didn’t hear anything either. It didn’t even flinch before, suddenly, that creature was upon it.

I watched the whole thing. It was a small vampire, of the variety I’d later identify as a “bat” because of those extremely wide shoulders and kind of wing-like arms.

At the time, however, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was. At first I thought it might have been a small puma, in part because the bulging muscles on its back and shoulders were formidable. But I’d really never seen anything like it.

I’d been studying animals for many years already at that point—since I was a kid, in fact—but I just couldn’t comfortably wrap my head around what this could be.