Annie of the Undead (21 page)

Miguel sat very still, unanswering. I was used
to him sitting very still, but the unanswering thing was new and
annoying. I felt his grip on my hand tighten.

“You are clever,” he said, “I will endeavor not
to underestimate you.”

“Good. Answer the damn question.”

“Yes,
Naranja
,” he said with a smile in
the dark, “That is the very first thing I will tell you.”

“Deal.”

I let go his hand and lay down on the bed.

“Now, I’m worn out, and I’m going to sleep, so
if you’re going to sit around in here all night, do it
quietly.”

“Sleep, Naranja. I would not disturb your dreams
for all the blood in China.”

“Now you’re just being silly. Of course you
would.”

But he did let me sleep, and I did not recall my
dreams.

I awoke in the morning to find him gone, his
daytime protector now obsolete with the new blood in his veins. But
he had left on the bedside table an envelope, upon which was
written, “
Mi Naranja de San
g
re
”. Inside it I found a
crystal bound with silver and strung from a leather cord. At its
heart was a single dark blue spot, trapped like an insect in amber.
Such a tiny little thing it was –barely a drop of stolen immortal
blood, and it had caused so much trouble.

What had been stolen from him he had taken back
and now given to me. I clutched the token to my breast, accepting
this trophy of the hunt in the spirit with which it was given.

Perhaps we were both monsters.

About midafternoon, the cell phone Miguel had
gotten me rang. I had already been out, been roughed up and given
some back in kind at the gym, and run seven miles before returning
to the Grove to take a quick break and lay into some crunches. It
was Yoki on the other end of the line. I had forgotten I had given
her my number at the Gay Hippies practice. Why had I done that?

As usual, she was speaking in hyper-drive.

“You want to go out for lupper?”

“What in hell is lupper?”

“Lunch/supper. It’s like brunch in the
afternoon.”

“You miss lunch?”

“No, I just always eat.”

“I get that.”

“Right, well, I was hoping to have a word you.
Can I meet you somewhere?”

“You know you complicate my life, right?”

“What a treat. I usually only complicate men’s
lives.”

“Well congratulations on breaking the mold.”

“Come on now. I need to speak with you. It’s
rather urgent.”

“Is it about last night?”

“Not strictly speaking.”

“Good.”

“Will you come?”

“Aww…sure. I could eat.”

“Capital. Do you know The Chow House?”

“No.”

“It’s an eatery. Have you something to write
with? Here’s the address…”

She ran through it so fast I had to have her
repeat herself three times, but I got it down.

“I’m not familiar with that street.”

She gave me directions. It seemed like it must
be halfway across town.

“Why the hell we eating all the way out
there?”

“They have Po Boys.”

Another inscrutable term from the Brit.

“That anything like a tea cozy?”

“Not remotely. It’s a sandwich the size of your
face.”

“Fine.”

I hit the “end” button before she could prattle
on any more. She could prattle as long as she didn’t do it in my
ear.

I showered and dressed. Then I got in the
spaceship and drove. It is extremely weird driving a spaceship, a
thing that should be hurtling through the atmosphere at supersonic
speeds. You are constantly telling yourself to slow down, that you
do not need police attention, to not be tempted by that next
gear…

Yoki had sent me halfway across town, but she
hadn’t warned me she was sending me into another world. I rolled
over a bridge and suddenly found myself in a place that looked
worse than my old turf in Detroit. This was one of the places that
Lucas had warned me about, one of the places we had all seen on the
news after the storm, and it looked just as bad to me as it had
then, except the water was gone, leaving a telling high-water stain
at the same height on every house. Trees were dead. Abandoned
houses stood dark, empty, and crumbling under the hot sun. Others
had been bulldozed, put out of their misery. Spray-painted search
codes still marked houses with big Xs and the letters and numbers
that signified what horrors had or had not been found inside.
Rusted-out cars still sat in driveways. Blue FEMA tarps lay wadded
in side yards.

In a few places I saw a house and yard that
looked pretty cleaned up, with a working car parked in the
driveway. Those houses had seen their owners return. The rest were
only filled with ghosts. There wasn’t a person or dog or bird or
anything moving in sight. It was like the place had been dusted
with fallout. It was post-apocalyptic.

At least there were fewer people around who
might want to steal a McLaren.

I found The Chow House. It was a little
white-washed, cinderblock hole in the wall. The sign out front
looked new, as did the white paint that covered the stains from the
waterline from those fateful days in August of 2005, when Lake
Pontchartrain and the Mississippi had come for Lupper and turned
into the unwanted guests who just wouldn’t leave. The sign above
the door stated the establishment’s name and depicted a big pink
pig wearing a chef’s hat and an apron and stuffing an enormous
Frankenstein of a sandwich down its face.

The little restaurant stood at the edge of the
neighborhood. I say it was at the edge because on its other side
lay a vast wasteland of dirt surrounded by a chain link fence.
Earth moving machines roamed the empty plain, grading and shoving
and scooping the troubled soil at this end into new and unnatural
topography. Farther out on the field I could see more machines
working little piles of rubble that were the corpses of shotgun
houses that had been bulldozed by man or storm or both. A big sign
on stakes at the edge of the property read, “Ingress Development
Corp”. A smaller sign next to it read, “East End Country Club –
Premier Private Community – Golf Course – Tennis – Pool – Coming
Soon.”

Muttering and cursing to no one in particular, I
pulled into the little parking lot wedged between the Chow House
and the fenced tract that had once been part of this shrinking
neighborhood.

There were four cars pulled up to the place
–probably all the residents for blocks around. I parked the coupe
where I thought I’d be able to see it from inside the
establishment, which happened to be beside a teeny blue Volkswagen
Beetle with about a hundred versions of the British flag stuck all
over it, plus one of those little plastic affiliation fish, this
one with a fang descending from its pointed little face and
“VAMPIRE” written on its belly. I wonder whose car that might
be.

I’d hardly gotten out of the car, when the now
ectoplasmic-green-haired Yoki, Jesus in arm, was suddenly standing
in the front door with the kind of look you’d expect to see on her
face if it started raining men, and she’d died of joy, mouth
hanging open and pupils fixed and dilated.

She gasped. “That is
not
your car.”

“It’s sort of on loan.”

“Who’s car is that?”

There were other people staring through the
windows.

“A friend who owes me.”

“What does he owe you, his life?”

Unlife. “Better.”

I passed her and went inside where the five
customers and two people behind the counter were split equally
between staring at me and staring at the spaceship that I had just
landed in their cracked little parking lot.

“Aha! It is a he! Annie has a boyfriend after
all!”

“What? Like it matters.”

“Well, the Hippies were all certain you were
gay, but I told them that you couldn’t be, because I was in the
shower with you, and in my bedroom, and you never once made a pass
at me, which any self-respecting lesbian would have done –even some
straight girls have. So I knew you must be straight as a ruler. I
bet ten dollars on it.”

“What? When was this?”

We sat down at a cramped booth by the window.
The fortyish woman with a ponytail, who moved like she’d been a
server since about the time she could walk, came out from behind
the counter with two menus. She wore a T-shirt with the pig logo
and all caps that read, “CHOW DOWN.”

“Last night, in the cab.”

“You were making,” I stopped, glared up at the
woman until she retreated, then continued in a low growl, “You were
making bets about my sexual orientation after what you saw last
night?”

Jesus growled back.

“Well, I couldn’t very well let them all go to
bed thinking about corpses in the park, could I?” she said in her
usual loud voice.

“No man loans a car like that to a woman he
isn’t sleeping with. She’s straight all right,” said one of the
diners, a potbellied man in a white T-shirt and ragged overalls
splattered with white paint.

“Ain’t that the truth,” said the even more
potbellied man behind the counter, red handkerchief stuffed into
his shirt pocket, greasy stains on once-white apron, toothpick
hanging out of mouth. There was no air conditioning in here, only
an oscillating fan on the counter and a big floor fan by the door;
the man was covered in beads of sweat.

Yoki threw up her hands in victory.

“Thirty dollars!”

Apparently private conversations included
everybody in earshot in a place like this. I guess it figured,
small as the place was. I could hear the fat guy’s breathing over
there, and the old woman across the way complaining about how her
power bill had tripled in the last four years.

“Can I get some food over here?” I growled.

“Long as you tip good,” said the wide, sweaty
man. He picked up the tip jar and plunked it down on the counter
where I could easily reach it.

I looked at Yoki. She shrugged.

“People here need our business,” she said.
“That’s why I brought us here.”

“I thought you came out for the Po Boys.”

“Oh, you can get those anywhere, but they don’t
need customers the way this neighborhood does. If we don’t come out
here, they’ll have to close.”

I stared at her, contemplating homicide. I
looked at the man in the greasy apron. He chewed his toothpick.

“God damned highway fucking robbery. Lying,
sneaking philanthropic British tart. Regular Robin fucking
Hood…”

I got up, digging into my pocket. I thumped a
five out of the roll of cash Miguel had given me and stuffed it in
the jar. I eyed the man. He eyed me. Then his eyes shifted back to
the jar.

“Last god damned time I eat here. I’d rather eat
at shit-sucking Badd Burger…”

I stuffed a ten into the jar. The man put his
hand over it, slid it back across the counter, then said casually
over his toothpick, “Mind your phraseology.”

“What’ll you have?” asked the waitress back at
our booth.

I stared at the menu, intrigued by the words
“breakfast all day” in the sea of deep-fried this, greasy that,
slathered that other thing, and pure fat bathed in high fructose
corn syrup. Breakfast tends to be safer.

“A double with everything, and heaps of onions,
and chips. And cherry soda.” Said Yoki. Apparently the grease-syrup
sea was her home territory. “A plain hamburger patty for
Jesus.”

The waitress (no name tag) scribbled on her pad,
turned to me.

“Eight eggs –I don’t care how they’re cooked, no
yolks; two slices whole wheat toast, no butter; and a house salad,
no croutons, no dressing; and lotsa cold water…What?” I said due to
Yoki’s look, “Mine’ll be easier to make than yours.”

“Whatever,” the waitress sighed and turned away.
She handed the paper to the big man, who got to work cooking.

“You eat like an alien,” Yoki accused.

“I drive a damned spaceship.”

“Right. Let’s talk about that…”

“Let’s not.”

“So when am I going to meet this filthy rich man
of yours?”

“Not soon.”

“Oh, come now. He must be dying to meet me if
you’ve told him about me –if you’ve told him the truth, that is. I
could take you both on a ghost tour.”

“He’s a pretty busy guy. He’s got an old
business associate in town…”

“Nonsense. You must introduce me. You can’t keep
a catch like that locked away from the world.”

“The hell I can’t.”

“So you don’t want us to meet?”

“You’re the one who said you’re a professional
at stealing people’s boyfriends. ‘Irresistible’, I’m pretty sure
you said…”

“Oh, posh, Annie. That’s not why you’re hiding
him. I can read you better than that.”

“Can you?”

“Of course. I’m Yoki Hayashi. What is it about
this man? Is he a criminal? A drug lord?”

“Hell no. Wasn’t there something else you wanted
to talk about?”

“It can wait. This is much more important. I
cannot go on without knowing what sort of a man could ever bag
you.”

“It didn’t work like that.”

“Ooh!” she squeaked. “Tell me the story!”

At that moment, the chow arrived, and Yoki’s
–not to mention Jesus’s, attention was diverted by the ten pounds
of onion-barbecue-sauce-sauerkraut-meat-pickle-stuffed-white-bun
insanity that was set before her. She lifted the monster and held
it in front of her mouth for a moment in awe before filling her
face with the most enormous bite she could muster. She immediately
started making the kinds of noises women only make in pornos.

Jesus Christ dug into the hamburger patty like
it was the Last Supper –uh, Lupper.

My egg whites were all neatly arranged, my plain
toast and salad in order as I had requested. Nothing spectacular. I
put fork to food and took a bite…

…And, shittin’ kittens, if it wasn’t the very
best egg and toast I had ever, ever tasted. It was flavorful,
succulent, incredible.