Anno Dracula (46 page)

She knew what Kit meant. ‘Left me with a good feeling inside, Lambchop. He might have been taking up space, but at least his blood was groovy gravy. His taste is all gone now and I miss it. All I got in my mouth is Judd.’

Kit agreed. ‘That Judd was a bitter individual. He had sickness in him, down deep where it didn’t show.’

Holly felt the old man’s gall in her gut. It would pass soon, but she was queasy. They’d drained him to the point of death, then pitched him into his pit to give his slitherers a chance at vengeance. Disappointingly, the fall broke his neck.

Finding no music in the salesman’s box, she tossed tapes out of the window. Kit and Holly didn’t need to learn how to be perfect vampires; that blessing was already theirs.

Tombstone was behind them. Judd was inside, fading fast. The movie in the old man’s head played itself ragged in theirs. As his killers, his executioners, it was their burden. Mostly, Judd’s head had been full of people dying, in the War, in the West or in his pit.

‘What d’you reckon his score was, Lambchop?’

In the thirty years since Dr Porthos bit them, Kit had killed 9,682 people, mostly warm but with some vipers tossed in to make a point. Holly had helped a lot, so they shared his score. It was hard sometimes to say they were separate people. For reference purposes, the score was Kit’s. Killing was his particular special thing just as shifting was Holly’s. Kit was within sniffing distance of his ten thousandth. Holly wanted to make that special, a movie star or a big lawman or a state governor. Someone famous, anyway. Maybe a viper. Special blood for a special man.

‘Judd can’t count the War,’ said Kit. ‘Why, if I’d been in a war, say if they’d caught me for Vietnam draft or took me for the Bat-Soldier Program, I’d have racked kills so fast no one could keep count. A score is only real if you do it close, with your eyes on theirs, and their minds open. You have to taste them, at least. You have to take somethin’ away.’

‘You’re right, Lambchop.’

From everyone they killed, they took something: a trophy or a keepsake. Like this car. Or the big gun Judd tried to load with silver. The Buntline wouldn’t fit in the glove compartment or even the cache under the seat where the salesman kept a little automatic. It slid about on the back seat. Kit wanted to play with it before selling it on.

In 1959, Holly had been fourteen and Kit eighteen. In a way, they weren’t any older now. They’d decided to run off from Fort Dupree together and live on the road. Within nights, they found Dr Porthos. He was from Europe, an elder, but a sorry specimen. A viper hobo. His knees showed through the suit he was buried in. The Good Lord knew how he’d been cast loose in South Dakota. He was in a freight siding, keeping out of the sun in a box-car. He said they should join him on the night-side, become his children-in-darkness, first among his colony of bats. Kit noticed the viper feeling up Holly while lapping her blood and stiffened when Porthos put his mouth on him, but they’d gone through with it. They drank enough elder blood to wake the vampire seeds in their hearts and let themselves bleed empty to drift into the sleep of death. They had woken up together, hand-in-hand, at moonrise. It took a couple of nights to learn what they needed from their maker. Then they’d shown Dr Porthos things wouldn’t be the way he’d figured. Holly stuck him in the eyes with a silver hatpin she’d taken from her mother’s dresser and Kit put a split length of packing crate through his heart. They left him out on the rail-bed where the sun would fall and huddled in a shack to watch him turn to red dust. Everyone else they tasted stayed with them but Porthos was gone forever. He’d lived too far beyond his time.

Kit and Holly hadn’t always got away with it. They’d been in and out of jails, together and apart. Kit had a few heavy convictions. That didn’t matter. It meant there was at least some official recognition of his score. Prison walls couldn’t hold them long. No law short of the Devil Himself could take them down.

As permanent interstate fugitives, they kept on the road, but the nation was wide enough to offer new places to visit and play. By now, they could go back to their earliest haunts and not be recognised - though they were always remembered. Both, if surprised by a question, were as likely to give the other’s name as their own. Both, without quite realising it, spent as much time in the other’s skull as in their own. They sometimes really did swap over and become each other.

They had so many names - invented, borrowed, ascribed - it was difficult at times to recall their true ones. Down through the years, they had called themselves or been called Bonnie and Clyde, Bowie and Keechie, Bart and Laurie, Sailor and Lula, Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry, Robin and Marian, Mickey and Mallory, Butch and Sundance, Sadie and Krug. Really, they weren’t even Kit and Holly - names they hadn’t chosen - but Lambchop and Bloody Holly.

Many stories and songs - even motion pictures, with stars like Goldie Hawn and Peter Fonda - were versions of their night-lives, moments stolen and changed in the retelling, polished or coloured or clouded, as real or fake as the kaleidoscopes in their minds. Dates, names, facts and rulings existed in the files of the FBI and Sheriffs’ departments, but they weren’t the whole story.

This was real, the song she was writing as a surprise for Kit’s ten thousandth score, ‘The Ballad of Holly and Kit’.

Holly and Kit in a stolen ride,

Streaking across the sand,

Leaving the scene of a homicide,

Heading for a happier end.

Holly and Kit would take ’em

Drinking away the red red thirst

The lawmen swear to stake ’em

But the Devil’ll get there first.

When the police found Judd and searched the Tombstone Dime Museum, another story would be born. Kit and Holly would be bigger and better, killer angels who bested the old man of the mountains. Judd’s score would come to light. They’d been down into the pit and come up safe, their faith proven and their love sublime.

‘Bloody Holly,’ said Kit, ‘let’s get married.’

She writhed up against him in pleasure.

‘Of course I’ll marry you, Lambchop.’

Kit whistled in joy and said, ‘Only one place to go, then.’

She knew what he meant.

Vegas.

He shifted the attaché case to his left hand and held his right fist up to the door goon, showing the Dracula ring. A rope lifted and he was admitted to the Viper Room. Envious fury poured from a waiting line of gorgeous creatures.

Alucard had a 54 flashback... another coast, another decade, another person. He was not nostalgic about shed snake skins. He was who he was now. Another lesson from the Father: look forward, not back. That set him apart from others who would claim to be King of the Cats. They wanted the old nights back. He wanted the new nights better.

The Viper Room. The name was deliberate provocation, assimilationists like the columnist Harry Martin carped, especially since the club’s notional owner was a warm movie star, Johnny Depp. Alucard, who had a piece of the establishment, felt a duty to reclaim for vampirekind the terror squandered over the last century. He avoided fey euphemisms: ‘Undead-American’, ‘pale’, ‘haemovore’, ‘type V’, ‘nightbird’. Alucard preferred fear-striking words: ‘vampire’, ‘
nosferatu’
, ‘leech’, ‘viper’.

The warm had to learn to be afraid again. So did vampires who pretended they were no different from the living. He thought of some he had climbed past: Katharine Reed, the foolish Irish woman he’d used in the Old Country; Penelope Churchward, Andy’s Girl of the Year for 1979; and Geneviève Dieudonné, the elder who ruined Gorse. Alucard remembered their walk-ons in his mental biopic, but other images of them - in old-fashioned clothes, by gaslight or the stars of Europe -crowded in. All three had bad history with Him. Alucard had only made a down-payment on their punishment. The Dieudonné chit had crossed them badly, forestalling a conjuring that would have brought the Father back from beyond the veil. Upon her, Dracula’s revenge would be spread over centuries.

He passed through a short corridor hung with string cobwebs and Hallowe’en bats into the small club. A mass of people writhed between the wet bar and the tiny stage. ‘Riders on the Storm’ pounded, by-passing his eardrums to thrum through his body, thrilling Vampi’s blood. Had the management necromanced Jim Morrison back from Père Lachaise? No, it was only Val Kilmer, researching the star part in the expensive film Oliver Stone threatened to make next year or the year after. It would gross forty tops domestic, far short of break-even. A possible rind of future profit from foreign, ancillary and soundtrack.

In this crowd, Alucard couldn’t be anonymous. He was given courteous space at the bar. Dancers didn’t thrust into the bubble around him.

He made eye contact with Kilmer and let the actor go on with his public audition. Alucard had used him in
Bat-21.

Alucard did not order a drink. The Viper Room had stuck piglets in harnesses, squealing behind the bar. The spigot-veined warm waitresses all had resumés and 8” x 10” glossies stashed in case some player showed up in search of a new face. Alucard would sooner cast one of the pigs. In back rooms, the occasional live one, hustled through the line and off the streets, could be had if the buyer was willing to pay clean-up costs.

Thanks to underground republication of
The Most Dangerous Game
(Amok Press), a sixty-year-old memoir by the (frankly cracked) White Russian General Zaroff, Hollywood new-borns had a craze for hunting humans. Dusk-till-dawn sports shops up and down the Strip carried equipment for the night-hunter, though purists disdained even Zaroff’s Tartar war bow and relied on teeth and claws. Every night, a bat-pack of fresh-risen youths got in touch with their wolf-souls by stalking warm prey as they were told their forefathers-in-darkness had done. It appealed to a more ambitious viper than the lost, dim souls who went for Immortology. Alucard had Adrian Lyne and Kathryn Bigelow independently developing projects about the night-stalker scene - he’d greenlight whichever tweaked his fancy and shitcan the other.

The sharper Zaroff kids might make suitable lieutenants in a reformed Carpathian Guard. Once they learned not to leave prey dazed but walking. Those who shut mouths as they opened throats prospered.

Lately, a string of vamps and dhamps had wound up doing jail time for offences against cocktail waitresses and exotic dancers which wouldn’t even be common assault if committed by someone without fangs. Ten years ago, after the conviction of racketeer Salvatore Macelli on a raft of charges which didn’t even include felony vampirism, the government reopened Alcatraz Island, refurbished as a maximum security prison for vampires and other ‘extranormal’ convicts. On the Rock, the Shop’s tame mad scientists poked and probed the inmates, building on a century of fruitless scientific study of vampirism.

Dirk Frost, a new-born, approached him.

The short-ish young man had TV credits in docu-dramas about male prostitution and the dhampire problem. Turning vamp, he lost his photographic image and agency representation. So he sought other employment opportunities.

Alucard put the attaché case on the bar.

Inside were a double-dozen vials of pure red dust, a clean drac high with no soul-residue. Money couldn’t buy the stuff. These vials were paid for with obedience or favour.

Alucard had gone beyond the need for cash. Aside from rolled hundreds, he rarely carried any. A flash of his ring got him everything he needed,
gratis
. His New York broker kept him abreast of the numbers. He’d learned to read the market runes, appreciating the beauty of greenscreen columns. He had passed beyond mere wealth, and become a man of substance. The fortune was just a way of keeping the score.

Frost didn’t open the case, but took it.

The music was too loud for conversation but Alucard had a hook in Frost from an early feeding. He cultivated his tools to keep their selfinterest aligned with his own, and disposed of them if they got rusty. After a session in Alucard’s private tanning parlour, Frost would fill vials as comfortably as the late, unlamented Vampi.

Tonight Frost had to take care of Spinal Tap, an English metal band from the ‘Where Are They Now?’ file who didn’t yet know they’d be the opening act of A Concert for Transylvania. Frost had laid a taste of drac on them last week, but only the bass player was even a dhampire. Once they’d snorted or shot a couple of hits of red dust, they’d be so into the night-life they’d agree to play the Petaluma Polka Festival for a scratch of California Red. First up at a charity supergig was a poisoned chalice: warm early-comers would be pissed off by the seven-hour wait and weighed down with merchandise they’d had nothing else to do but buy, and vampires would only just be getting into their best frocks to make an entrance later. The Tap could be counted on to deliver a short, explosive set and get out of the way for Bruce Springsteen and the Be-Sharps.

‘I’ll want the briefcase back,’ said Alucard, ‘it’s raptor skin, from Maple White Land. You can’t get it any more.’