Soft Apocalypses (14 page)

I have known the Baron Stierherzov since before he turned to the night. He was a warrior lord, fierce in battle, merciless to the peoples he vanquished in the Old Country. Dracula himself gave him the eternal kiss as reward. Such a pedigree you do not find! I knew him when he was just a young boy eager for my visits. So full of delicious salty life! I could milk him over and over until his testicles bled, and still he would rise to please me.

So, it is only fair that I let him take my neck sometimes, now that we are equals. It is only necessary when he cannot hunt, after all; if he is housebound, then likely so am I. I miss the olden days of the plagues; you could take anyone you wanted, and unless someone glimpsed you winging away into darkness, who was the wiser? But now, every alleyway corpse is put under a microscope, put in the newspapers. So the Baron adapted, tries to live “green” as they say, and only takes a little here and there. It is frustrating to him, I know. And accidents happen, and then we all must stop feeding for a while.

The sun? No, of course it won’t harm me. But it is not my ally, either. My glamour cannot hold under full light; there is not enough Estée Lauder in the world to fully conceal the 600 years in my skin. Oh, that is so kind of you to say, darling! But really ... for best hunting, the Baron and I need the same thing: darkness, and drunkards.

So, it was rotten luck for us all when Dansky’s was torn down. Some conglomerate bought the whole block for a stupid mall, and they put an enormous Starbucks where the bar had been, can you believe it? Not so much as a drop of vodka to be found, so goodbye to all our drunkards. And all those dreadful windows and skylights! So much sun, and so many reflections—I made do, as a lady must, but poor Baron could not stand it, even after sundown.

There was only one reliable hunting ground left to him in the whole city: the Iron Pit Athletic Club. Open all night long, and no windows. He went in one evening, and I did not see him again for a whole nine months.

But when I did ... oh, what a sight he was.

It was noon; the sun burned high in the sky. Miserable cloudless day. But I sat there in the coffee house with my black tea, watching the people come and go. I had just spotted young man, shy, ordering a mocha latte, and I could smell the miasma of stifled lust on him. I stood up to go work my wiles on him when it happened.

“I FUCK YOUR SUNSHINE!”

It was an inhuman shout, loud as a war cannon. We all turned toward the noise, turned to stare out at the street, and I saw an absolute monster out there. A man-shaped thing, hulking, massive, muscle piled upon muscle, flesh wormed with thick veins. It strode down the street, naked, skin aflame in the relentless sunlight.

“I FUCK YOUR SUNSHINE!” the thing bellowed again. The purple flames devouring its flesh were rising higher and higher, skin blackening, curling like paper and ashing away, revealing gray-red muscle and yellow tendons beneath.

“I FUCK YOUR SUNSHINE!”

I recognized the voice ... it was the Baron! In an instant, I realized that for those nine months he’d been hiding behind concrete walls, he’d been lifting weights and drinking blood from the thick, brutish necks of hundreds of sweaty steroid junkies. His diet had made him huge, and the unnatural chemicals had inflamed his frustrations with the modern world until it drove him mad as a Spanish arena bull.

His eyeballs were burning in his skull like furnace coals as he strode up to the Starbucks; the glass in the door shattered from the heat of his burning flesh. The smoke pouring off him smelled like the corpse pyres of the old battlefields.

“I FUCK YOUR SUNSHINE!” he roared at all the suburbanites shrieking and scrambling to get away from him.

He stood there amid the chaos, burning in the sunlight streaming down from those hateful skylights, proud as he had ever been as the victor of countless duels, and my cold heart broke at the dire beauty of him.

He took another deep breath to bellow his war cry, and I heard a loud
pop!

And he exploded, shattering all the windows, piercing the fleeing humans with the flaming shrapnel of his bones. Cutting glass rained down on me, slicing my flesh to ribbons, but I did not care—I could see his heart there in the wreckage of his blown-apart body. It glowed and smoked, but still it pulsed with power.

So I snatched it up and hid it beneath my blood-soaked blouse. I carried it to the safety of my dark apartment, and kept it beating in a jar of my own blood. Later, when I realized what I must do, I broke into the morgue at night and pulled the bits of his bones from the bodies of the dead. It was not much, but it was a start.

What? You do not understand? Come down the hall with me to the guest bath … come see.

There. Do you see how the blood moves in the middle of the tub? That’s the throbbing of his heart. Already you can see his skull growing back together, and the tendons of his ribs. I am sure the organs and muscles should be next, and then his skin.

Oh, darling ... no. Don’t struggle. It is already done, see? You’ll just waste your own blood. Let it flow. The Baron needs fresh every day, now. Soon he shall be awake, and he and I will hide no more. We shall treat this city and its people the way we should have treated them all along. We will be crow and wolf, eagle and lion.

We will fuck everybody’s sunshine.

Carnal Harvest

Tonight was the night.

Gordon felt an electric tingle in his chest and belly. His cock had been awake since morning, rising and twitching like a hungry fish every time he thought of Judy McLarren. He’d sped to work that morning, cursing the Friday-morning traffic, and had attacked the pile of writs and briefs in his office with savage disdain until, at last, he’d shoveled the papery snowfall away like a good little junior partner and could leave the office early without raising too many eyebrows.

He’d been rock-hard when he stalked out of the office, and it had given him an extra measure of pleasure that the old dried-up clockwatching prune of a secretary on the first floor had noticed his condition, her eyes widening. When he’d smiled and winked at her, she’d blanched, her hand twitching upward as if she wanted to cross herself.

Gordon chuckled to himself as he toweled off his hair and stepped out of the bathroom. Oh, how he wished he could show that old crone exactly how much fun he was going to be having that evening. If a simple hard-on got her goat, he could only imagine the priceless look she’d wear if she could see what he had planned for sweet Judy. She’d piss her lavender polyester slacks and keel right over in a dead faint. Perhaps someday ... no. He shook his head. Why bother with a prune when there were so many cherries left to pick?

He carefully hung his towel on the drying rack by the radiator and stepped naked into his living room. The cool air felt good on his naked skin. His erection bobbed before him like a divining rod.

“Hungry boy,” he cooed at it. “But you’ve got to cool it, or else you’ll scare poor Judy. She’ll take one look at you and know you’ll burn her like the fire that made her a new virgin.”

All Gordon’s girls were new virgins: women who had been scarred so badly that they no longer had the company of men. Sometimes, the scars were physical, and men simply passed them over in favor of unblemished flesh. Often, the scars were in the women’s heads—they thought themselves too ugly to have a man, or they had grown too afraid of love’s agonies and kept themselves locked away. But Gordon knew that scarred fruit was still beautiful and luscious. And the challenge of wooing such women made them even sweeter.

He paused at the wet bar to pour himself three fingers of cherry kirsch. He swirled the clear liquor in his glass, then breathed in the heady aroma appreciatively. Judy was a real challenge. He still didn’t know much about the fire that had killed her husband and turned the skin of her left hand and arm into a crepe-delicate lacework of scars. But he did know that she had no family or friends to care for her or check up on her; she’d almost completely withdrawn from the world. Even her job as a night auditor at a small hotel preserved her isolation.

But ever since the afternoon he spotted her at the grocery store, he had pursued her gently. First with flowers and love notes, then phone calls, then Sunday brunches after she got off work. And slowly, he had drawn her out of her shell. Tonight was their first true formal date. She’d taken a night off to be with him, and he would complete his seduction. She would tell him her secrets and open herself to him, body and soul. Tonight, Judy would be his and his alone. His to pluck and enjoy.

Still swirling his drink, Gordon walked to his trophy case and unlocked the black steel doors. He ran his fingertips over the smooth glass jelly jars inside. Each bore a carefully-penned label bearing his girl’s names and the dates of their harvest.

“Ah, ladies,” Gordon whispered. “Did you miss me? You’ll have a new sister to keep you company after tonight. She’s a beauty, and I’m going to enjoy her a great deal.”

He lifted the first jar and held it up to the light, admiring the severed clitoris, inner labia, and nipples bobbing in the plum eau de vie within. “Sweet Belinda. You had the prettiest cunt. And your nipples were the most perfect pink. No one else ever imagined you had them, not with that face of yours.” He slowly twirled the jar in the light, smiling as he remembered his date with Belinda. A neighbor’s dog had attacked her when she was three, and had gnawed off her ear and most of her right cheek. Her family had been too poor for plastic surgery. Most people could scarcely look at her, but she had the kind of curves most women could only dream about. He’d been the happy recipient of years of pent-up sexual energy. She was a real virgin, and she couldn’t seem to get enough of his cock. He’d had her screaming even before he brought out his harvesting tools. “Judy has your coloring. I wonder if her tits are as pink and perfect as yours? Pity your flesh has grown so pale and gray over the years.”

He put Belinda’s jar back on the shelf and glanced at the clock on the wall. He was supposed to meet Judy at the Tremont Cinema in forty minutes.

“Sorry, ladies, I’ve got to run.” He opened the drawer beneath the display cabinet and began to sort through his tools.

“Who wants to come with me tonight?” he asked the denizens of the drawer. He selected a roll of duct tape, his skinning knife, scalpel, dental forceps, chloroform bottle, and a fresh coil of nylon rope.

“Now, behave yourselves tonight,” he said as he wrapped the tools up in a piece of plastic tarp. “We mustn’t scare the girl before the time is right.”

He blew the jars a kiss as he closed up the cabinet. “Be ready to welcome Judy when I get back.”

The Tremont was in the Old City, nestled in the quaint little maze of shops and restaurants at the base of the hills of Memorial Park. The 200-acre city cemetery took up most of the park; some of the graves in the inner cemetery dated back to the late 1700s. As a boy, he’d enjoyed wandering amongst the old headstones, looking for the graves of women who’d died young. He liked to imagine how they had met death. As he got older, he liked to imagine that he was the one who had killed them.

Judy was waiting for him outside the theater. Her honey-blond hair was done up in a tidy French braid. She was wearing a flowered- print dress, pink silk cardigan, and Birkenstock sandals.

He smiled. She’d be able to walk in those sandals; that would make things easier. Of course, it had been most convenient that she had suggested the Tremont in the first place. With the deserted park nearby, he’d be able to enjoy her in the woods at his leisure.

As he approached her, he pulled a tissue-papered bouquet of a half-dozen red roses out of his leather shoulder bag.

“You look lovely,” he said, presenting the roses to her with a gallant flourish.

Judy giggled nervously and ducked her head. “Oh, wow, you didn’t have to … but they’re great. I love roses.” She took the bouquet, gave the roses a sniff, then stood there, crinkling his gift to her breast and rocking back and forth on her heels like a shy little girl.

She smiled at him, showing white, straight teeth. Her teeth really were quite good; should he collect them when he was done? Or perhaps her ears? Her ears curved delicately, perfectly; he didn’t think he’d ever seen a better pair on a woman. Certainly not on Belinda. She had so many excellent features, and he hadn’t even seen what she kept hidden under her clothes. It would be very hard to choose. He might have to find an extra-large jar for Judy.

“I … I was thinking maybe we could see that new Ryan Gosling movie?” she said. “But maybe that’s too much of a chick flick for you. That new thriller is playing here, we could see it, instead, if you want?”

“Whichever you’d like is fine,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter what we watch, as long as I can see it with you beside me.”

She decided on the romantic comedy. He paid for their tickets, and they walked into the darkened theater and settled themselves in seats on the back row.

Gordon scarcely paid any attention to the trifling film. His tools, which he’d carefully stowed in the bottom of his shoulder bag, were whispering to him, begging him to use them. Their voices were low and slithery.